Second Sunday of LENT (Written on February 27, 2009)

For the Lectionary (what's a lectionary?) of March 8, 2009: Mark 8:31-38

 

But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

 

S-A-T-I-N by Larry Patten

I don’t remember how my grandmother misspelled the nasty, angry word that Jesus yelled at Peter in Mark’s Gospel.

Did she say, “s-a-t-i-n?” Or, “s-a-t-o-n?”

Maybe, letter-by-letter, it was even, “s-a-t-u-n.”

But you get the point. She muddled the second vowel. The word Grandmother had spelled rather than spoken aloud was incorrect. And yet I knew why she’d chosen to speak the individual letters.

First, my normally kind grandmother was angry. We were visiting my grandparents at their magical-in-the-eyes-of-a-ten-year-old-kid farm for a weekend and Grandmother was telling my mother about someone’s selfish or hurtful actions. Standing in her living room, between one chore and the next, she loudly vented to her attentive daughter. Voice rising, face reddening, she grumbled, “As far as I’m concerned he can go to _ _ _ _ _.”

Second, she suddenly noticed her cute, innocent grandson. (A part played by yours truly.) Aware of tender ears, her harsh, critical sentence concluded with spelling s-a-t-NOT A-n.

I was no slouch at elementary school-level spelling bees. And as a ten-year old I was a veteran of hundreds of Sunday school classes and had suffered through additional hundreds of never-ending sermons. Satan showed up frequently in both. Yup, when I grew up, attending church was akin to eating, drinking, and sleeping. So I knew grandmother was, vowel-wise, wrong.

But I didn’t correct her. Mom was nearby. She might have given me one of her looks if I had informed Grandmother of her error. So, shockingly, I kept my mouth shut.

Then or now, I don’t think Satan’s such a bad word. It certainly didn’t make comedian George Carlin’s famous list of the seven words you can’t say on television. And it’s never treated like this in my family-friendly local newspaper: “Then the police chief told the mayor she reminded him of S----.” Satan’s not bleeped out on the nightly news. It doesn’t earn a film an “R” rating.

I’m not sure why “Satan” ranked high (low?) on my grandmother’s list of bad words. But I can make a reasonable guess. It was because of the passage from Mark’s Gospel when Jesus rebuked Peter as Satan-like. Regardless of whether you are a Biblical scholar or a first-time reader of scripture, theologically conservative or liberal, Mark 8:31-38 obviously and uniquely depicted an angry Jesus. In Matthew’s Gospel, according to the NRSV, Jesus merely said Satan to Peter. With Luke, there’s not even a conversation, let alone a confrontation.

I prefer Mark.

As I thought about Jesus rebuking Peter in Mark’s version, I decided to do a little experiment. I Googled images for “laughing Jesus” and “angry Jesus.” The “angry” images were mostly cutsie Sunday school-style illustrations or stained glass windows. Usually they showed Jesus tossing out the temple moneychangers. (All four Gospels agreed that Jesus was a bad dude on that day.) The “laughing” images, by comparison, were modern. And they were not based on scriptural events. Is there any place in any of the Gospels where the Nazarene chuckled or guffawed or whooped with joy? I don’t think so. Though I hope he did. I like to think he did.

And I like to think he got angry.

Anger is tough for me. Correction. Anger is an easy emotion for me. Except that my anger is trivial. I’m tired and I get angry. A car swerves in front of me, the driver not using his or her blinker, and I momentarily boil with indignation. Or, my anger is throttled. How many times have I heard a church member belittle another member at a committee meeting? Too often. And how often was I silent? Too often. How often, in or out of church, have I heard racist, sexist, or homophobic insults? And, again, there have been countless times when I chose silence.

I understand why Grandmother, correct or not, spelled out Satan. Watch out! Tender ears nearby. And I understand my own silence sometimes. After all Benjamin Franklin cautioned, “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.”

But I will remember Jesus’ anger. Matthew scrubbed the anger away. Luke ignored it. Mark got it right. There are, with apologies to Franklin, good reasons for anger. Theologian Joan Chittister reminds us, “Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.”

For this season of Lent, maybe I’ll give up some of my silence and claim anger. Christ-like anger. Humble anger. Anger as a part of a personal and passionate struggle that never accepts evil.

in Peace,

Larry