Domesticating the Tongue
The capacity of the tongue to trip up and to cause harm resides with each of us because we all have words at our disposal. Each word, improperly placed, can be an IED to a relationship and inflict serious injury to others, and bring dishonor to our Lord. This entire second take on the tongue (Jas. 3:1-12) is couched in the negative. James casts it as an incendiary device, a deadly poison, a restless evil, a world of unrighteousness.
No human being can tame the tongue. (James 3:8, ESV)
James has already touched on the topic of the tongue. In chapter one of his letter he urged us to be “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (1:19). There we saw that our words are the weapon of choice in the hand of anger.
At the close of chapter one, James describes true religion in terms of bridling the tongue. The religious tongue is not one of lip-service that talks a good talk but the expression of true faith consecrated to Jesus Christ.
Now in chapter three James returns to the tongue, where he gives us a fuller picture of its power and potential. With this fuller picture comes a dire word of caution. It’s like those triangular warning signs on the back of tanker trucks: “DANGER! Highly Flammable.”
It’s curious how James broaches the subject: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.
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Vending Machine Jesus
This little story makes a wreck of my theological assumptions. Now, don’t get me wrong. They aren’t entirely wrong. Jesus’ having sought her out is significant. It shows us that He’s more concerned with relationship than a transactional healing. He’s not a distant and detached Savior. As James Edwards as said, “Discipleship is not simply getting our needs met; it is being in the presence of Jesus, being known by him, and following him.” (Edwards, Mark, 165).
God isn’t a genie. He’s not some passive deity who responds to our every whim—dispensing answers to our deepest wishes. He’s not a cosmic vending machine where we put in our quarters, hit the correct button, and then enjoy the soda or candy bar we purchased.
I carry that theology with me into Mark 5.
Jairus, he’s my dude. He does it correctly. He has a desperate need, he makes a passionate request, falling at his needs and imploring Jesus to act. That’s not treating Jesus like a vending machine. It’s treating Him like the sovereign He is.
And Jesus, no doubt impressed by this dude’s faith and respect, goes along with Jairus to provide healing for his daughter. But he’s interrupted by this great crowd.
Mark stops his story about Jairus to tell us about one of those in the crowd. It’s a woman who is as desperate as Jairus. But that’s about all they have in common. They are on different ends of the social, religious, and economic ladder. Jairus is a powerful dude. She’s simply “a woman”…a woman that is ritually unclean, filled with shame, slinking in the shadows, and flat broke with a massive pile of medical bills.
The Bleeding Woman’s Theology
What she does next shows how sharply her theology diverges from mine. Mark tells us that she comes up behind him (a sneak attack) and touched his garment. And then Mark exposes her horrible theology, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.”
That’s magical and superstitious thinking. Vending machine theology. She has Jesus in an entirely passive role. She doesn’t care about relationship. She isn’t even acknowledging him. Her love of Jesus seems about as profound as my love for the outlet I found when my phone’s batter is at 1%. It’s entirely transactional.
But it works. I’m not sure why Mark tells us this.
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Is God Moody?
God’s actions are always perfectly proportionate to his character. God’s character never changes. When it looks like God has changed in the Bible, we should explore those passages for changes in the situation: people’s attitudes, behaviors, and decisions—not changes with God’s character or being.
Have you ever seen someone so moved by emotion that you could tell their brain had kind of checked out? Maybe you’ve been there yourself. Sadly, I know I have. Whether it’s the result of anger, frustration, confusion, or despair, there’s a certain look in a person’s eyes when they’re operating on pure emotion. God never experiences this.
Changing Character?
The doctrine of impassibility describes how God isn’t controlled by passions. While I hope you have control over your emotions, at least most of the time, you can certainly relate to experiencing emotions that don’t match reality.
Think of a surprise birthday party. You walk into a dark room, and all of a sudden, a lot of people jump out at you. Your immediate response might be shock or fear, but in your rational mind you’d be elated or happy. God never experiences anything like this. There’s never a time when God’s emotions dictate his attitude toward a situation. God is never out of control.
Now, to be clear, there are plenty of passages in the Bible that talk about God having feelings. Again, this is anthropomorphic language. Passions or emotions don’t affect God the way emotions affect us. We can’t read our experience into God.
So whatever it means in such descriptive passages about God, we must keep the prescriptive passages in mind. For example, Malachi 3:6 that tells us God never changes, and Hebrews 13:8 says Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. When we see a change in God’s mood, we need to ask how this change fits with passages that say God doesn’t change. How can we make sense of the two realities — passages that say God doesn’t change and passages that describe God changing from anger to delight?
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The Temptations of the Intellectual
The physiophobe [one who hates that which exists] knows very well, to take one area of currently willed madness, that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, but he hates it, and he would burn the world to a cinder to compel people to lie, to join him in the reality-hating pretense that it is not so.
I’m not the first to have said that there are some ideas so stupid only an intellectual can believe them. I can think of three reasons why.
The first, the most fundamental, is the intellectual’s propensity to mistake words for things. Sometime in the next few days, I will be climbing over rocks in a field exposed to the sea-winds to gather lingonberries. Rocks, winds, berries, weeds, the occasional bear that likes the berries too, the waxwings that make sure they are around just when the berries are best—these are realities, not just words.
Perhaps ten years from now I will be too old to engage in this pastime. Old age is not just a word. At one of the spots, reachable when the tide is out, some man has attached a thick rope to a tree trunk, so you can climb down the escarpment with one hand free to carry the bucket of what you’ve gathered. Ropes and buckets are not just words.
My wife and daughter will save the berries—they freeze well, and they don’t soon go bad—or they will turn them into jam, the richest you’ll ever taste. I suppose you could call this division of labor—which makes sense when you are thinking about good, firm, physical objects with their healthy resistance to human manipulation—an example of “sexual stereotyping,” or “subconscious patriarchy,” or “oppressive binarism,” or whatever le mot du jour happens to be.
I call it getting a job done with the most success and the least fuss, and in a way that makes me grateful for my wife and daughter and makes them grateful for me. The closer we remain to what Fr. Aidan Nichols has happily called “the warmth and wonder of created things,” including the most splendid wonder of the sexes, the more likely we are to retain our sanity in a mad and unhealthy time.
But many an abstract word is like a cobra, dancing before the eyes of the little bird with its bird brain, until, flash!—the bird is no more. “Democracy,” “equality,” “economic development,” “self-affirmation,” and (used without qualification) “science” are cobras that fascinate by attraction; while “sexism,” “racism,” “marginalization,” “fascism,” and “religious extremism” are cobras that fascinate by repulsion. All are vague in their common use, or worse than vague; they obscure reality and obstruct thought.
Before a sensible person talks about “equality,” he’d like to know in what respect the two items in question are to be considered equal. Before a sensible person talks about “fascism,” he would like to know what kind of political program it describes and exactly how it is akin to what Mussolini, who coined the term, defined as fascism’s essence: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
But words dazzle the second-rate mind. I saw it at work in graduate school. The best students did not gape at the impenetrable prose of Judith Butler, or Jacques Derrida and his heaping one negation atop another in his virulent hatred of common-sense Thomism.
The best students believed in and loved literature first—the rocks and trees, you may say; and they valued literary theory only insofar as it helped to illuminate that literature, or insofar as the literature itself confirmed the theory. The theory, they thought, was at best a tool for seeing, like a flashlight, or a plan for organizing what you have seen. The lesser students, who were not that good at interpreting the literature to begin with, turned instead to the theory, and that provided them with a good stock of abstractions to go job hunting withal.
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