Robert Sapolsky is a neurobiologist who has worked in primate and human behavioural research at Stanford University. One of his areas of research has to do with studying “us versus them,” behaviour that Sapolsky says is actually biochemically hardwired into all social species. The “us” group - anyone like us - receives more leniency, more favouritism, and more charity from us for the exact same behaviour as anyone from the “them” group.
We can see this very theme addressed by God in today’s readings from Scripture. In our reading from Numbers, Moses says to God: God, these people are not satisfied with your provision of Manna. They desire meat to eat and I cannot give this to them. I cannot bear their anger, their quarrelling, their disappointment, their frustration at not getting what they want, when they want it. Kill me now, Moses says, for I know you you commissioned me to lead them and I cannot bear their grumbling against you, and against me, and against one another.
So the Lord tells Moses to gather 70 elders in the tent of meeting on whom he will bestow his Holy Spirit to enable them to prophecy concerning God’s provision for them just once. But something odd happens. While Moses brought the 70 elders out to the tent of meeting with him and presumably, it was only those elders who would receive God’s Holy Spirit, two men who had been left behind in the camp, Eldad and Medad, began to prophesy as well. Sure enough, one young man runs to tell on them and Joshua, on hearing this, says, “God, Moses, someone stop them from doing this. They are not one of us. Moses rebukes this statement: “are you jealous for me? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and could speak the Word of God.”
Moses’s wisdom in responding this way comes from God himself, revealed in Jesus’s own response to the same situation we hear about in the Book of Numbers. John, one of the disciples, runs to Jesus and says, “Jesus, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us.” Jesus replies: “Do not stop him, for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.”
The essential point in both stories here is that no one - not God’s chosen, like Moses, or the Elders, or even the seemingly non-chosen like Eldad and Medad - has the capacity to reveal let alone fulfill God’s desire to reconcile people to him. Moses affirms what we all must recognize: I cannot carry the burden of all these people. I cannot save them. I can’t even show them the fullness of what you have in store for them to provide them with something that will end their frustration and lament. You need to give me something Lord. And in fact, Moses is right.
The capacity to do this is fulfilled and fully revealed only in Jesus’s actions, in his words, by the way he engages in his life of faithfulness to God by bearing the failures of others, by bearing their frustrations, their anger, their disappointment, their betrayals, their wrong thinking, by bearing it and not walking away from them; not abandoning them or any of the other billions of people whom he has created.
This is what we’ve been building up to in our Gospel lesson the last few weeks. And yet, and yet, Jesus’s way of fulfilling God’s will - his strange charity, his compassion, his gentle, mature self control in speaking the truth, his remaining with those whom he sees waver, get things wrong and abandon, his turning the other cheek rather than seeking to retaliate, his healing rather than cutting down or killing - places a deeply unsettling and deeply challenging obligation on those who wish to follow him: if you are going to follow me, if you are going to be a catalyst through which God’s judgment and mercy might be seen, you will need to learn to abide, that is, to stay put with people whom you don’t think have it right, whom you don’t think should have any light of grace to provide to others. You need to learn to stay with the Eldad’s and the Medad’s; the “thems” the “others.” Why? Because every person, every little person whom God created is made in the image of God. Every person opens a small window into God’s own life. Every person has the capacity, in some way, to reveal to you God’s will for transforming you more and more into his own likeness.
This DOES NOT mean that you have to agree with a person. But it does mean that you need to learn how to bear through disagreements, for this is the very place - in the bearing of challenging relationships - that you are most open to God’s work of changing and growing you into his likeness and so into a witness to him. It is the place of being salt in this world. To be salt is to mature out of seeking your own comfort and your own way as a child does, and into the adult life of learning to persevere in acts of relating to others that allow for others to grow in Christ too. When Christ warns that people ought to cut off hands or feet or eyes that cause us to sin, this is sandwiched between commands to act in ways that do not cause others to sin.
To be salt then, is to allow God’s assurance of gathering us to him to overcome our basic biological responses that reduce us to animal capacity. It is to use our reason, wedded to God’s law, shaped by God’s act of love in Christ, to get beyond ourselves; beyond our own comfort; beyond our immature inclinations; and to think about whether what we say and do is aimed at building another’s capacity, our community’s capacity, our future children or grand children’s capacity to see the fullness of God’s gracious love. If God is for us, who can be against us ultimately? If this is so, then let us allow his grace to gird us in the courage to be for others, a place where God is found. AMEN
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