All Were Filled With Rage
Reflections on the Lectionary for February 2nd
When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.
It’s surprising, how powerful words can be. In the United States, this is a season when we are focused on how power resides in offices, legislatures, courts, or bank accounts. We are very aware, as a new president takes office and begins to enact his agenda, how much power money can buy, and how one powerful person’s control over institutions can shape the lives of millions of ordinary folks. We are noticing, and not for the first time, how beholden we are to forces beyond our control, how our lives are constrained and conditioned by the whims of the people who occupy seats in congress or the Supreme Court or statehouses or command posts or police precincts or the White House. We see their power—sometimes with a new sense of urgency—and often we fear it.
And yet words also have power. Words also have a force and a reach, when powerful people can be compelled to hear them. Words can slip under the skin of even the world’s most powerful person, troubling his unexamined certainties and filling him with a rage that wells up from his fragmented sense of self. Well-chosen words, asking for mercy and pleading for a leader to lead all of the people in his nation, can puncture the glib self-righteousness of even the most mighty of persons.
I’m speaking, of course, of the sermon delivered last week by Bishop Mariann E. Budde during the inaugural prayer service. You’ve probably seen the sermon by now, or at least its closing words, in which Bishop Budde offered her plea for mercy for vulnerable people. You might have seen the way Vice President JD Vance glanced over to his neighbor as she spoke, an air of condescending irritation on his face. You probably saw how President Donald Trump sat slack-faced and expressionless, the way he does when he is finally cornered into hearing something he never planned to hear. Perhaps you even saw Bishop Budde’s comments during the rest of the week, as news outlets scrambled to understand how a religious leader might be so audacious, as she refused to apologize for advocating mercy. It has been a surprisingly symbolic bit of pageantry in a week full of ceremony, and for many people, it has been an unexpected reminder of the capacity of religion and religious leaders to speak truth to power, if those religious leaders are willing to follow their calling.
Not everyone will agree with me that religious leaders are called to speak truth to power. President Trump seems to disagree, to name just one person. He called the Bishop a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” and “not very good at her job.” “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way,” Trump wrote with his characteristically idiosyncratic capitalization, saying that “she was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” Notice the way Trump draws the lines there: the church ought to always be on the outside of the “World of politics,” and the job description of any church leader ought to include keeping one’s words pleasing in tone. But Trump’s ecclesiology is telling. He’s imagining that in the “World of politics,” religion ought to have no say, and that the church should speak its nothingness with politeness and decorum. But nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s an old debate—whether preachers should keep politics out of the pulpit. But that debate would have surprised Jesus, not to mention the prophets he so often quoted. In the lectionary this week, in the gospel reading from Luke 4, we encounter the aftermath of last week’s inaugural moment. As he stood in front of his hometown synagogue in last week’s reading, Jesus announced that God had anointed him “to bring good news to the poor…proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” In this week’s reading, we learn that Jesus’ proclamation did not go very well. “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage,” the passage tells us, and “they got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” That’s quite a reaction! (To be fair, Jesus seemed to be goading the people a bit in verses 23-27, when he questioned the tight connection between people, place, and God’s mercy—a combination almost guaranteed to make people angry. To also be fair, Nazareth was not built near a cliff, so the good people of Nazareth probably have been unfairly accused of trying to throw Jesus off of it). Jesus brought politics into the pulpit, and it made everyone want to kill him.
That might be a familiar feeling to many readers. There are red churches and there are blue churches, but most churches are a shade of purple, with people from both the right and the left gathering to worship together. That makes for a vibrant and engaging community, and it offers us opportunities to learn from people who hold different beliefs than the ones we hold. But when people gather across political differences, it can provide opportunities for conflict, especially when the broader political environment is electrified as it is right now. Preachers, in particular, feel intuitively how dangerous it can be to “preach politics” to a politically diverse congregation, either from the right or from the left. Say too much, and one side accuses you of partisanship; say too little, and the other side accuses you of fecklessness and cowardice.
Part of the problem is the slipperiness of what counts as “politics.” Some churches and ministers will stand up and endorse candidates from the pulpit, but for most churches and communities, it’s a lot more subtle. A message advocating mercy for vulnerable people, as Bishop Budde preached, can be heard as political by some people, because right now a president and a major political party are operating on a platform of mercilessness. But whatever the President decides to do, mercy is still a core Christian value. So does preaching mercy count as “preaching politics?” What about preaching generosity in the face of neoliberal free-market orthodoxy (which is a world-view shared by most politicians on both the left and the right)? What about preaching nonviolence and peacemaking, when our nation is the world’s largest and most successful purveyor of violence, no matter who sits in the Oval Office? Is that “politics?” If we preach about the dignity of all people, is that “politics” in a time when the wheels of government turn against human dignity? What about preaching welcome, preaching resistance to evil, preaching repentance and forgiveness, preaching humility? Politics, politics, politics?
President Donald Trump certainly thought so. He wrote that Bishop Budde “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way” after all, drawing his own kind of theological line to mark what kinds of things are legitimate subjects for religious reflection and proclamation. If mercy is outside the line of acceptable topics for a sermon, it’s hard to imagine what might be inside. Are preachers simply expected to endorse whatever policies whoever is in office happens to support, either by their speech or by their silence? Are Christians supposed to adjust their theology every four years to serve the political expedience of whoever wins the most electoral votes?
There are some very good critiques of “the prophetic” and the ways Christianity (especially liberal Christianity) has lionized it. (This book, for example, is a good place to start). But I remain convinced by Walter Brueggemann’s classic book The Prophetic Imagination and its observation that Hebrew prophets were oriented against the political power structures of their day. Prophets like Isaiah (whose words Jesus was reading in the Nazareth synagogue that day) understood their calling to be acting as a check on the power of rulers, and on those rulers’ tendency to place their own interests above the interests of the people. They sometimes framed this as a theological transgression, arguing that the rulers had strayed from God and had followed after foreign deities. And sometimes the prophets framed the rulers’ behavior as a departure from shared inherited tradition and good common decency, arguing that the rulers’ exploitation of common folks was an affront to history and to God. Either way, powerful kings and emperors never really wanted to hear their names in prophets’ mouths, because the prophets rarely had something nice to say. For the prophets, “preaching politics” seemed not only to be permissible but obligatory. To be a prophet was to speak truth to power, and to speak truth to power—as Jesus points out in this story from Luke—often meant being rejected in one’s very own hometown.
Jesus, in this story from Luke 4, is taking up the prophet’s mantle. He’s claiming the justice-oriented proclamation that Isaiah made before him, a proclamation of good news to the poor and release to the captives and freedom for the oppressed. (One might summarize Isaiah’s point, and Jesus’ point, in the words of Bishop Budde: “have mercy”). Jesus in this passage is placing himself in the lineage of the prophets, claiming their message, and speaking it anew to the powers of his day.
And so those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus today are left with an inconvenient ministry: we are called to speak truth to power and to criticize the abuses of power when we see them. We are called to join in this prophetic witness that Isaiah began and Jesus continued. We are called to speak out against injustice and to advocate for the powerless, even when it means speaking up against our leaders, our heroes, or ourselves. Donald Trump is the President today, but our obligation to speak and bear witness against powerful leaders is still binding, no matter who is in the White House. Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and all the others before them may not have exhibited the craven callousness of Trump, but they nevertheless presided over plenty of the kind of death-dealing and destruction and marginalization that we are called to oppose. The prophets spoke against both foreign leaders and domestic ones, but they often reserved their harshest comments for the Israelite kings, because the Israelites should have known better. Sometimes it’s the ones closest to us, who are most similar to us, who disappoint us most sharply and should earn our rebuke most fully.
On social media this week, I have seen some people criticizing the widespread praise for Bishop Budde, arguing that she was only doing what any good leader should do and she was only calling out what any Christian ought to call out. This is true, as far as it goes: Bishop Budde showed no great insight by noting that the Christian tradition calls out for mercy. But courage is rare even if it ought to be common, and prophetic imagination is found seldom enough these days that we should celebrate it where it appears. No other member of the clergy criticized the President to his face that day, and even if they had done so, the Bishop still did the right thing by speaking out. Even if there were already a thousand voices calling for mercy—and there were not—Bishop Budde responded to her calling by adding her voice.
Because it’s surprising, how powerful words can be. When they heard this, all in the cathedral were filled with rage. No one would have been enraged if the Bishop’s words hadn’t mattered; the powerful would not have quaked with anger if the truth hadn’t been floating in the air. No one denounces a Bishop on their proprietary social media platform because she’s “not very good at her job.” She was denounced because she was doing her job, and doing it well. President Trump denounced her because he had expected propriety and acquiescence and he received a rebuke. He had expected God to rubber stamp his programs of dehumanization, and instead he was reminded that God desires mercy. The President had expected silence and instead he heard a prophetic word. And that word is a reminder, to the rest of us, of powerful words can be. But only if we speak.
Preach on!!!
AMEN!