Blasphemy Day

There is this really wonderful story about a mother teaching her daughter how to cook a roast beef.  The mother patiently shows the daughter how to tenderize the meat and how to prepare it for roasting.  She shows her to take the roast and cut off the two ends before putting it in the roasting pan.  The daughter asked her mother why the two ends of the roast should be cut off.  Mother answered that she didn’t know, but that was how HER mother had taught her to do it.

Sometime later, at a family gathering, the daughter, still curious, asked her grandmother, “Grandma, why do you cut off the ends of the roast before putting it in the pan?”

Grandma smiled at her granddaughter and replied, “Oh, that’s because the roasting pan I had was too small.  The roast never fit.  You had to cut off the ends to make it fit the pan.”

This is how traditions start, isn’t it?  Given a few more generations, it might be that cutting the ends off the roast could become some kind of honor.  “Betty, this year YOU get to cut the ends off the roast!”  Perhaps it might even come to be considered the ONLY way to prepare a roast, and anybody who cooked a roast differently was just plain wrong.  Clearly, just because something is a tradition, doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea.

Wednesday of this week was Blasphemy Day.  This holiday was created by a former Roman Catholic priest to celebrate all things irreverent.  It falls on the anniversary of the publication of the cartoon that depicted the prophet Mohammed, the cartoon that prompted riots all over the world.  Don’t mess with people’s religion, man.  They’ll kill you.  Well, it does seem a little crazy to kill people because they say bad things about God.  I’m pretty sure God can take care of him/herself.  I’m sure S/He doesn’t need our help.

Naturally, you can expect people to get upset when you say things about their God.  I mean, we don’t like it when people say bad things about our friends or family either.  Of course, people have the right to say whatever they want.  That is only right.  But other people have the right to be offended also.  They just don’t have the right to kill you over it.  Still, it’s a little rude to say rude things about anybody and then shove those rude things in people’s faces.  It hurts them.  It makes them angry.  Making people angry deliberately never leads to peace and harmony.  Jesus, of course, was a blasphemer, as far as the Jewish authorities were concerned.

The Pharisees approached Jesus and asked,
“Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?”
They were testing him.

He said to them in reply, “What did Moses command you?”
They replied,
“Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce
and dismiss her.”
But Jesus told them,
“Because of the hardness of your hearts
he wrote you this commandment.
But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
So they are no longer two but one flesh.
Therefore what God has joined together,
no human being must separate.”
In the house the disciples again questioned Jesus about this.
He said to them,
“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another
commits adultery against her;
and if she divorces her husband and marries another,
she commits adultery.”

And people were bringing children to him that he might touch them,
but the disciples rebuked them.
When Jesus saw this he became indignant and said to them,
“Let the children come to me;
do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to
such as these.
In truth, I say to you,
whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child
will not enter it.”
Then he embraced them and blessed them,
placing his hands on them. (Mark, Chapter Ten)

The Pharisees saw Jesus as a blasphemer because he broke with many long standing traditions.  Jesus, on the other hands, turns the whole matter back on the Pharisees, pointing out that there is nothing more sacred than marriage, and allowing those bonds to be broken is more of a blasphemy than any things Jesus was doing or saying.  This is just another jab at the hypocrisy of religious leaders.

Many traditional religious leaders take this story as a condemnation of divorce. But they miss the point.  Women in the first century were about as exploited as women could get.  They had no rights.  And a single woman was really in trouble.  With no man to take care of her, she would be reduced to begging.  There was no such thing as alimony or child support.   What Jesus is condemning is the common practice of marrying a woman and then dumping her as soon as the man gets tired of her.  This story illustrates Jesus’ support for the rights of women, something many early Christian church fathers preferred to ignore.

Indeed, the story continues with Jesus scolding his pals for trying to keep the little children from coming to him.  If women had little worth in that society, children had even less standing.  The disciples were trying to keep the children from Jesus because they were not worth seeing.  But Jesus points out that nobody is to be kept from him.  In fact, he goes so far as to say that those children, those “worthless” people, were closer to God than any of them.  Let’s face it, children trust the adults in their lives to take care of them.  They seem to have no doubts that we will feed them and take care of them.  They may not always like what we do, they may even think we’re dead wrong, but they usually trust that we have their best interests at heart.  Children trust us, until we show them what wankers we are.

Jesus is pointing out that nobody is to be excluded.  Who are the children in our society?  Is it the gays, or the homeless?  Who are the children in your own life, the unimportant people?  Is it the liberals, the conservatives, the fat, the ugly, the country-western singers?  Nobody should be excluded.  Well, maybe the country-western singers, but probably not.

As far as divorce is concerned, I would suggest that two people who end up falling apart, probably weren’t married for the right reasons, or in the proper frame of mind anyway.  Just because a guy with a funny collar says a few words over a couple doesn’t make them married before God.  It may make them married in our society, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing to God.  I think Jesus manages to point out a few times that God doesn’t much give a shit about our laws and traditions.  So I suspect that when God DOES join two people together, we shouldn’t try to split them apart.

A family is a sacred thing.  You don’t have to be a genius to see that.  When two people love each other and join together to create a family, well, that’s pretty special.  It doesn’t get any more special than that.  We pay attention to following a lot of rules and practicing a lot of rituals, and not one of them is more holy than the love shared between people in a family.  That bond is not easily broken.  It is sacred.  As a matter fact, each person is sacred.  You are sacred.  The idiot in the blue Toyota that cut you off on the freeway is sacred.

Look at us, as a culture.  We let people go without medical care.  We punish addicts.  Our streets are filled with the homeless when we have the resources to feed and shelter everybody.  We punish people for the sake of the law with no thought of compassion.  We use one another, to get ahead, or as sexual objects.  And at the same time, we (as a culture) go off to church on Sundays, or to temple on the Sabbath, and dare to make prayers to God above, feeling righteous about ourselves.  Now THAT is blasphemy!

And, as I always say, it doesn’t matter if this story really happened this way.  It doesn’t matter if it’s true.  It teaches the same lesson.  Everybody matters.  You don’t get to use people, then discard them.  You don’t get to consider anybody to be unimportant.  The love of God is inclusive.  Saint Paul said we make void the word of God by our traditions. Having faith is accepting the love of God as a child would, with trust. Having a belief in God doesn’t make you better than anybody else.  Everybody else is just as sacred as you are, no matter who they are (with the possible exception of Glenn Beck).

Some people like to make the claim that the bible is contradictory, but I say it isn’t at all.  It’s the same message throughout.  Love one another.  Serve one another.  Take care of one another.  Have faith.  Everything is going work out just the way it’s supposed to.  You are important.  Each one of us has tremendous value (again, with the possible exception of Glenn Beck).  And for this teaching, Jesus was labeled a blasphemer.  Maybe there’s something to Blasphemy Day after all.