Together We See Jesus

Proper 22 (27), Year B, Season after Pentecost
6 October 2024

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
Psalm 26 or Psalm 8
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

 

On occasion I have shared that my childhood wasn’t very happy.

That, however, does not mean that there were no happy moments in my childhood. While my mother’s illness prevented her from being able to show empathy, my father, when present, was able to relate beautifully, a demonstration of which we saw the two times he came to see us in Winnipeg. Even though our children did not speak German and his English was only OK, they played together marvellously.

Then there was the church which, together with my maternal grandfather constituted my alternate family. A place where I belonged, was loved and valued, and where I was drawn into relationship with God.

When I was twelve I began to kayak. I joined a club that owned a boat house on one of the rivers that run through my hometown. From then on I would ride my bicycle to the wetlands where the boat house was located and go paddling. I was part of the generations of children who were able to roam freely. All we had to do was to be home at the agreed-upon time.

And so it is perhaps not a surprise that Psalm eight (paired with the alternate reading and referenced in our reading from Hebrews) spoke to me, for it speaks of the glory of God’s creation and of our place in it.

¹O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
²Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger.
³When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
⁴what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
⁵Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour.
⁶You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
⁷all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
⁸the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
⁹O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

The Psalm speaks of God’s handiwork and of God’s grace:
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
⁵Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour.

Then it continues,
⁶You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet …

Here the Psalm echoes the creation stories of the book of Genesis: humans are given dominion (Genesis 1:28ff) and being placed in the garden, commanded to till it and to keep it. (Genesis 2:15)

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews knows Psalm eight as well. He references it in today’s reading. (We will again hear the King James Version because the NRSV’s avoidance of gender-specific language in this passage is misplaced as it fails to show how the author of Hebrews understands the psalm as relating not to humans in general but to Christ, the first born of a new humanity):

⁶But one in a certain place testified, saying, What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man that thou visitest him?
⁷Thou madest him (for a little while) lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands:
⁸Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.

And the last sentence, But now we see not yet all things put under him, that is where the author is the pastor of his people. He knows their pain. He knows they long for the world to be restored, healed, and made whole. And this is where we suddenly realize how relevant this ancient piece of writing is to our own lives. The world seems a less stable place, at least in my living memory.

Not long ago many of us looked south and thought that somehow we were better and that the kind of politics that were playing out south of the border could not come here. Yet they have. May God forgive our smugness and apathy.

And our political discourse is diminished in other ways as well. Economic growth and money in my pocket remain the dominant thread, even though our current economic paradigm is responsible for the degradation of creation or nature (which we call the “environment” because we no longer see ourselves as part of it). Wendell Berry writes just this week that “The different manifestations of our destructiveness are all parts of one thing: a global corporate economy concentrated upon the effort to turn to profit everything that can be subdued to its methods.”¹

This then is also responsible for our mental health crisis, because our society values only those whose productivity is valuable to the economy and those who can act as consumers of goods. It is therefore no wonder that we suffer an epidemic of loneliness, or that in 2022 86% of the 13,241 people who chose to die through MAID gave as reason for their decision “the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities.”² It is no wonder because belonging is no longer a value while productivity and consumption are.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews did not know the challenges humanity faces today. But he knew the suffering of his people and he knew the human heart. And as he re-interprets Psalm eight to be not about us but about Christ, and asserts that all things have been put in subjection to Christ, he acknowledges that now we see not yet all things put under him. He acknowledges the pain we experience, sign that while the world has been redeemed by Christ’s death on the cross, it has yet to be restored.

That in the author’s reading Psalm eight has become a psalm about Christ and not about human beings at first glance seems a corrective to the mess human beings have made of creation, and yet this re-designation is not a demotion for humanity but entails a promise.

Having conceded that we do not yet see all things under him, under the feet of Jesus, the author continues and says, “But we do see Jesus.”

In this he undoubtedly alludes to the experience of faith that Jesus meets us and is visible in Word and Sacrament, he acknowledges that it is in fact believing that enables us to see and not the other way around.

But he also reminds us that Jesus’ lordship over all things came about through the inversion of power. He became human. He took on our suffering and he suffered death on the cross. It is in suffering that Jesus becomes exalted (Philippians 2). But moreover, Jesus becomes the new Adam, the first born of the new creation, he becomes human that we may become divine.

We see Jesus.

Believing is seeing and not the other way around. Seeing Jesus renews our imagination. It allows us to see the world as God sees the world, and that lifts us beyond the assumption that we really don’t have a choice, and that because we don’t have a choice we will never live up to our vocation to be tillers and keepers of the earth.³

In Jesus we see the new humanity. When we see Jesus we see how we shall be, and that once again we may read Psalm eight as a description of our election and call. For Jesus is the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. (Romans 8)

We see Jesus. Together we see Jesus.

Amen.