18th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B: Texts for When the Choices Facing Us are Increasingly Stark

Written By Ched Myers

Ched Myers

At first glance, this Sunday’s texts seem to offer relatively little illumination of the themes centered in this Wild Lectionary, much less during the Season of Creation. In particular, Proverbs 31’s portrait of womanhood appears to articulate quite the opposite of ecofeminism, and is widely so interpreted. Still, an earth-centered hermeneutic (interpretive strategy) can unlock deep wisdom carried by these old scriptures. All four resonate in their parenetic orientation (the rhetoric of moral and ethical instruction). While ancient “two ways” style paraenesis may seem too dualistic for our modern sensibilities around complexity and ambiguity, they do speak to stark historical ultimatums we face under multiple interlocking social and ecological crises. When applied to our own selves and society (as opposed to the Other), they can help animate the radical personal and political choices facing communities of faith.

Commentary

  • This text has been enthusiastically appropriated in many conservative church circles as the idealized model of a “Proverbs 31” woman (as an internet search will confirm)—filtered of course through a decidedly patriarchal lens. But some literary and historical context can help disarm this text of terror. First, we should recognize that this portrait of a female householder follows a string of warnings to men about bad behavior (31:1-9 and in the preceding chapter), such that this contrasting portrait could imply a polemical critique of male presumption. This oracle—allegedly taught to King Lemuel (Prov 31:1; aka Solomon) by his mother Bathsheba—would have been deployed for training and education in the royal court. (Such “lesson-plans” typically counseled submission to the king, as in 23:1-3.) 

    Second, our reading, referred to in Jewish circles as Eshet Ḥayil (“woman of valor”), is one of thirteen acrostic poems in the Hebrew Bible (see e.g. Psalms 9, 10, 25, 34, 111, 112, 145, and especially 119). In this highly stylized literary genre, each line begins with one of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, in order. This made for easy memorization, yet also delighted in word play (see more here). Yet though this pedagogy was obviously set in, and directed toward, powerful classes, it is not impossible to see in this notorious passage certain “hidden transcripts.” 

    Here are examples of verses that might be read as “flipping the script” to suggest how this woman’s actions subverted the “life of idle rich men”:

    • V. 10: Valuing a wise and resourceful woman as “more than precious jewels” undermines the objectifying commodification of women typical of patriarchal elites. 

    • Vv. 11, 20: She can be trusted not to meddle with her husband’s “gain.” The Hebrew word means “plunder.” (The same is true of the Septuagint Greek (skûlon), which interestingly appears in N.T. only in Luke 11:22—the Third Gospel’s intensified version of Mark’s “binding the strong man” parable about liberating the stolen wealth of plutocrats!) An assurance that she will not “plunder his plunder” contrasts her non-possessiveness with his anxious greediness. After all, v. 20 suggests that she still practices the village economic ethos of mutual aid and generalized reciprocity.

    • Vv. 13-19: Instead, she does honest work, spinning and weaving to provide for her family's clothing and textile needs, harvesting fibers from her own flocks, fields or trades. Her diligent, long hours of household labor and management echo in refrain, reflecting her economic agency (16) and physical fitness (17). 

    • V. 23: In contrast, her husband sits among the ruling elite, basking in public praise!

    It is worth wondering whether the final stanza (v.31) might not be a demand for this woman to have a rightful share in the material legacy she curates!

  • The lectionary takes us from the very last verses in Proverbs to the very first verses in the Psalter. Psalm 1 appears several times over the three-year cycle. It is widely understood as an introduction to the whole collection. Its observational (but not petitionary) rhetoric praises those whose “delight is in Torah” (v. 2), and underlines the struggle between the just and the “ungodly” (used four times). 

    Its analogy of the just as “a tree planted by the waters, bearing fruit in season” (v. 3) provides an opening for agrarian and ecojustice readings. This central metaphor revisions the moral conflict as the difference between watered, rooted depth and dry, ephemeral fruitlessness (v. 4). The same contrast appears in Jeremiah 17:6-8, and both testify to how nature observation informed the moral imaginary of biblical Israel. A simple concordance search shows how frequently trees symbolize noble individual or community character (e.g. Ps 92:12). Conversely, the wicked (Job 21:17-18), enemies (Is 29:5) or the apostate (Jer 13:24) will be scattered like chaff in the wind—an image appropriated by the wilderness prophet John the Baptist (Mt 3:12). 

    Fig, pomegranate, olive, date, Arabian Jujube, pistachio, carob, quince and mulberry were all cultivated in ancient Israel. A 2022 archeological study claims “the first domestication of fruit trees in the world took place in the Jordan Valley about 7,000 years ago.” Yet arborculture was challenging in such an arid ecology, so the image of domesticated trees proximate to flowing waters was more desert dream than common observation. Jerome Creach associates this image with the Temple as a symbol of paradise, full of abundant life. This resonates with Ezekiel’s vision of trees planted by streams that flow from the eschatological temple (Ez 47:12). For more on “redemption as rehydration” in the prophetic imaginary, including John the Revelator’s vision of fruiting Trees of Life beside restored waters (Rev 22:1-2), see here. 

  • The sharp parenetic dualism of our Psalm and Proverbs readings continues in the lectionary epistle, the fourth in a string of five weeks featuring James. The contest is articulated as a struggle between “wisdom” (sophia) and the “demonic” (3:15; daimoniōdēs, an adjective found only here in the N.T.). His warnings are directed not toward the “world,” but to the church, acknowledging that “envy and ambition” incubates among Christians as well (v. 16). 

    The description of the contradiction among people of faith in 3:18-4:3 is one of the most poignant in all of scripture: 

    The fruit of justice is sown in peace by those who make peace.
    But what causes wars, and what causes fighting among you?
    Is it not your hedonism that is at war in your very bones (melos)?
    You desire and do not have; so you kill.
    You covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. 

    The vocabulary here is both personal and political, internal and social. Our discipleship vocation to “sow peace and harvest justice”—an agrarian image—is singularly subverted by a “desire for more.” This inevitably leads to “wars”: internal, social and state-sponsored (James uses three different military images). 

    Our socialization into desire undermines our consciousness of the divine economy of grace:

    You do not have, because you do not ask.
    You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly,
    in order to spend freely (or wastefully, dapanaō) on your hedonism. (Jam 4:c-3)

    Economic and military strife is counter-seeded among us by the toxic power of hēdonōn (from whence our word hedonism), used for a second time in this passage, and always in the N.T. signifying exploitive pleasures.  

    After reiterating the enmity between the divine vision of grace and the ways of the world (vv 4-6, omitted in the lection), this exhortation concludes with a double imperative: “Subordinate yourselves to the Creator, and resist the Devil” (v. 7). Insofar as we seek intimacy with God, divine reciprocity will be re-animated (v. 8a).   

Mark 9:30-37


Last week’s gospel reading represented the midpoint of Mark's narrative. The Second Gospel begins heralding a “Way” (1:2), and closes with a question addressed to the disciples and the reader: “Do you not yet understand?” (8:21). The second half of the story opens “on the Way” (8:27) with yet another query: “Who do you say that I am?” (8:29a). The “confessional crisis” that follows issues in a second call to discipleship (8:34), deepening the first (1:16-20).  

This scene launches Mark's “catechism of the Cross,” in which the Way will be illustrated through positive and negative object lessons. It consists of three cycles, a “school of the road” that correlates with Jesus’ journey southward from the north of Galilee to the outskirts of Jerusalem. Each cycle commences with a “portent” in which Jesus speaks of his impending arrest, trial and execution by the authorities; followed by a portrait of how the disciples are failing to comprehend Jesus’ call; and concluding with his pedagogic response:

  • Each of Jesus’ three teachings revolves around a rhetorical antithesis, and his appeal to “whosoever” can embrace this Way. This “indeterminate subject” functions as a blank space, which we are challenged to fill in with our name. This is an interactive story about praxis, not dogma. 

    This morning’s text begins the second of these cycles, which interprets the cross in a less heroic, yet perhaps more difficult, practice of the Way in daily life. Our nonviolent resistance to the Powers (cycle one) must be grounded in our ongoing struggles against patterns of domination in interpersonal and social relationships. This longest of the three cycles is framed by the famous refrain: the “first will be last”—and vice versa (9:35, 10:31). This is not a zen paradox, but a concrete ethic that centers the “least,” following Jesus' Jubilary conviction that society can only be transformed from the bottom up. 

    Both second and third cycles address a variety of status issues: greatest and least (9:36f), outsiders and insiders (9:38-41), aggressors and victims (9:42-50), male and female (10:2-12), children and adults (10:13-16), and rich and poor (10:17-31). Each of these vignettes will appear in the next five Sundays in the lectionary, offering our congregations a chance to go deep.

    Following Jesus’ second portent (9:30-32), Mark exposes how his companions’ discipleship journey (“on the Way” is repeated twice) has degenerated into an internal power struggle (9:33). Mark indicts their denial just as he did the synagogue crowd in the first half of the narrative: “But they were silent” (9:34a=3:4b). Jesus thus abruptly halts his march to Jerusalem and sits down (as one would do to deliver a drash in synagogue; 9:35a). 

    His teaching subverts the logic of ambition by the vocation of diakonia (service, 35b). In order to make this socially concrete, he invokes the example of radical solidarity with children (9:36). He concludes with a syllogism that moves from the social to the theological: to receive a child is to receive Jesus is to receive the Creator. This is a powerful fourfold repetition of dexomai, the hospitality verb throughout the N.T. (9:37; reiterated in 10:17). 

    Preachers too often offer quaint, idealizing homilies about children as symbols of "innocence and trust."  In fact, the young in first century Palestine were the "least of the least" in the social order, with neither status nor rights. Today they remain the most vulnerable class: the first victims of poverty, disease, displacement, war, family dysfunction and social disintegration. This is why children are square one in the journey to solidarity and servanthood. The church is not called to be a power base for ladder-climbing members (including presidential candidates!), but a community that redistributes power to the excluded. 

Preaching and Teaching Ideas


Mother Nature as Righteous Householder

With ecofeminism having long emphasized the gendered nature of our ecological crisis, we can approach parts of the Eshet Ḥayil (woman of valor, righteous householder) by substituting Mother Nature as the subject of this paean. After all, Creation is always at work, functioning as “the Great Economy” (see this interview with Wendell Berry), which resources all those natural systems and beings who depend on her. Nature indeed “looks well after the ways of her household” (Prov 31:27). Like the woman, the diligent yet gift-oriented economy of nature contrasts with the presumptions of male elites who rule and plunder! Might 31:31 invite us to advocate for the “rights of nature”?


Creation as Torah

Psalm 1 summons us similarly to consider Creation also as torah. The conflict is thus between our commitment to live by the laws and limits of nature’s gift economy and our penchant toward “ungodliness” (which is to say, defiance and denial), a way of life that is “doomed” indeed (Ps 1:6). This surely sums up the moral crisis revealed by our historical prospects in the “Capitalocene.” In this vein, I rather like the poetic rendition of Andy Patton that depicts the Psalmist’s “desire for torah that growls day and night.” It “brings in a rounder sense of hagah from the Hebrew,” he comments, as well as “how much conflict and wrestling is often involved” in reading the Bible.     


The Moral Urgency of the Carbon Economy

James offers not only a concise analysis of conflict, but also a profound indictment of the culture of capitalism and empire, which indeed inhabits our bodies, spirits and societies (on this, see the important work of Guy Debord). While the epistle’s strident and oppositional rhetoric may not sit comfortably with polite or sophisticated church audiences, it is frankly profoundly relevant to the wider cultural struggle today around climate crisis and the carbon economy. We cannot overstate the stark choices we face, nor their moral urgency, nor our responsibility to engage them personally and politically.


Christian Cluelessness or Ecological Vocations of Solidarity

The gospel scenario is archetypal of our Christian cluelessness: In the face of a dire prediction of disaster (Jesus’ execution, or in our case climate catastrophe), we disciples reflexively turn inward to our selfish ambitions. And when called out, we remain silent about our deepest contradictions. When our churches ride shotgun with empire, the Way of the Cross or cost of discipleship become incomprehensible to us. “Who is the greatest?” is a competitive question born of hierarchical and supremacist cosmologies. Jesus points us to the lowest rung of this ladder to begin our recovery from addiction to domination.

This includes dominion theology, of course. Jesus’ invitation to a discipleship of diakonia must center our primal relationship with Creation. Capitalist modernity has long used and abused the Genesis trope of “dominion over” nature (Gen 1:28). But the true human vocation is articulated in Genesis 2:15: 'abad and shamar, which I’ve elsewhere argued is better translated “to serve and preserve” Creation. 

And as Jesus insisted, reconstructing personal and political ecological vocations of solidarity and service means receiving, rather than extracting, the gifts of Creation. This, too, will require that we center children—the empty chair at the table, in the parlance of this Wild Lectionary—who will inherit a future shaped by our actions and inactions.   

Sources and Resources


Contributor Bio

Ched Myers is a fifth generation Californian living and working with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries on unceded and untreatied Chumash land in the Ventura River watershed. He is an activist theologian who has worked in social change and radical discipleship movements for almost 50 years. See more here.

Image Proverbs 31 as acrostic: Image from Bible Odyssey.

Ched Myers
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17th Sunday After Pentecost, Year B: Wisdom Cries Out in Many Voices