Homily for Pentecost 16 - September 20, 2009
“A Capable Wife, Perhaps. A Capable Christ, that’s Something Else.”
Andrew, who can’t be here today, glanced at today’s readings and announced that he would have loved for his inaugural read as lay reader to begin with that odd first line from our Proverbs reading: “A capable wife who can find?!” To which I say, it’s a good thing I have complete control over who reads and what they read!
But speaking of Proverbs, and speaking of Andrew, this reading reminded me of something he and I found in his mother’s possessions a few months ago. As many of you know, Andrew’s mom died about ten years ago, and his dad one year ago. So, sometime last winter we were going through his parents’ stuff to decide what to keep and what to throw away, when we came across a card his dad had given his mom early in their marriage. It was one of those cards you don’t see much anymore, with a lot of pages, each of which had a vintage sixties illustration of a curvy June-Cleaver-ish woman in different guises, and it said something like:
“To my wife – also known as (turn page): my cook, my maid, my nurse, my laundress, my love kitten (that’s the censored version), my barmaid, my psychotherapist, and my masseuse …” And the worst part of all: there was no punch line!
Proverbs 31 is a passage you rarely heard read in church (the Episcopal Church, anyway) - and I can’t say I regret that, seeing as how it seems to set forth this impossible standard for women. People over the years have tried to get around that criticism of it by claiming that it’s meant to be understood allegorically – that is, this isn’t really a woman at all, but an allegory for Israel (or, if you’re Christian, an allegory for the Church), with the husband here being a metaphor for God. Or, another way around that criticism has been to say that, for its time, this was a fairly progressive view on what women could do. After all, this woman owns land, she works outside the home, and, for a woman in 400 BC, has quite a bit of control over her life.
But, important as those issues are, what really interested me about this passage was the way it and our reading from the Gospel of Mark play against each other, offering two very different visions for a life well lived.
Proverbs is one of three books that is supposed to have been written by King Solomon – again, David’s son and the third king of Israel in about 900 BC. In fact, it probably wasn’t written by Solomon, but had a variety of authors and only came into its present form much later - like in maybe 400 BC. But the tradition attributes it to Solomon, and in the Jewish tradition, you’ll sometimes hear that the three books of the Bible that Solomon is supposed to have written embody the three different phases of his life.
First there’s the Song of Solomon, which is a book of love poems, written in his youth, when he was full of passion and vigor and quite the ladies man. (Remember, Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines!) Then there’s Proverbs, a book of sayings on how to live your life prudently and wisely, which he wrote in his more responsible adult years. Finally, there’s the book of Ecclesiastes, which is a book of sayings about the futility of life and the mirage of our control over things (perhaps the best-known verses from that book coming from chapter 3: “There is a time for every season, a time to be born a time to die a time to plant a time to pluck up”). And that book one was written in his old age when he was perhaps a little more realistic about his ambitions and power over things.
Anyway, Proverbs is the work of the a man who is on top of things professionally and personally, and you can see how its can-do spirit is reflected in our passage today. Here’s this industrious woman of Proverbs 31 in perfect control of her life, and who makes everyone – her husband, her kids, her community, and herself – happy by all her hard effort, thus generally putting forth this idea that there’s nothing in life you can’t fix by working hard and exerting a little control.
In the meantime, in the Gospel reading for today, we get a very different view of things. Mark’s Gospel is structured so that the first half, which we’ve been reading from until about last week, is the “successful” half – Jesus and the disciples perform miracles, win arguments against the religious authorities, they gather a huge following of people, and everything just seems to get better and better - until it doesn’t. And starting with last week’s text, about midway through the Gospel, there’s this abrupt transition where things begin to fall apart.
Jesus starts off the second half of the Gospel with three predictions of his death – we read the first last week and the second this week - and in each one the disciples ignore or argue with him in response. From there, the Gospel just continues its descent. The disciples continue to bicker with Jesus, and with each other. They try to perform miracles and it doesn’t work (that came just before our reading for today). People who had been following them start to fall away. The religious authorities begin to gain the upper hand. And it eventually winds up with Jesus’ death and burial. In fact, it’s important to point out that Mark’s Gospel doesn’t have a resurrection account; it ends with the women at the tomb.
I guess the upshot here is that, much as everyone around him and especially his disciples might have liked him to be, not even Jesus could pull off being the Proverbs 31 woman. It’s as if he wants to show us that no human being can exert that kind of control over circumstances, nor should they even want to - because (as he’ll show in his own life) the good life leads down the path of failure, vulnerability and imperfection.
What a nice message to start off the fall, a time when committments increase - along with the pressure to be the perfect mother or father, husband or wife, daughter or son, teacher, student, contractor, priest, or - what did it say on that card? - a cook, nurse, laundress, barmaid, psychotherapist, or masseuse. Whatever roles you play out in the world, the message from Mark’s Gospel is: you don’t have to do it like the woman in Proverbs 31. And to that I say a hearty Amen!
