shake the dust

Jul 01, 2024

Welcome, this morning, to another bunch of new subscribers! You’ll find me in your inbox with lectionary scripture reflections on Mondays and whatever else I feel like writing on Fridays (I’m chewing on another reflection on AI this week; we’ll see if it makes its way into words). I’m glad you’re here.

We’re marching through Mark’s gospel this summer, the gospel that would surely have been reviewed by book critics as “a propulsive page-turner!” Mark is here to tell you what happened, as quickly as possible. And this week, what had happened was…

Jesus goes home. Like, to his hometown. Nazareth. And he starts doing his thing, preaching in the synagogue, just like he’s done everywhere else, preparing to do some healings and exorcisms, next. Except these people, who know him as Mary’s kid, the carpenter, get very angry and offended. They are astounded, and refuse to believe that this knobby-kneed kid could have possibly grown up to be doing all this stuff. Too big for his britches, that one.

Which means there are no exorcisms in Nazareth, and only a few sick people get healed, because Jesus is “amazed” at their refusal and leaves to teach and heal and exorcise the demons in other villages. Prophets are never without honor, except in their hometown, he shrugs.

And then, because Mark is a genius of storytelling, we hear, immediately, Jesus commission his disciples to do the work on their own. “Grab a partner. Pack lightly. Stay with whoever welcomes you first. If people don’t listen, well, shake the dust off your feet and move on.”

This is Petty Jesus. My childhood neighbors don’t believe anything I say? Well, then I guess they don’t get healed. They won’t let me hang out with them anymore? Well, then I will encode in the holy record that people will be reading thousands of years from now that the proper response to that kind of dismissal is to SHAKE THE DUST OFF YOUR FEET as a REBUKE, and move on.

A few years ago, when my denomination was in the midst of a big split, I commented somewhere publicly that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe we could think of it like a divorce, I said, amicable or not, but a necessary uncoupling. Maybe everybody would find some freedom on the other side.

It turned out that the people who had initiated the split and were choosing to leave got real upset about that comment, not because they didn’t think breaking up was right but because they were, at that moment, trying to decide amongst themselves if divorced people could be leaders in their new church. Divorce was WRONG, they thought, and no one who did it could possibly be entrusted with leadership.

Ha! That one makes me giggle every time I think about it.

I wonder a lot about Jesus’ instruction to shake the dust from our feet. Like, was that an actual command from the Lord and Savior, or was it Petty Jesus working out the hurt he’d just felt when his hometown rejected him? Because shaking off the dust is HARD. Rejection is not easy to receive or process, no matter how self-aware and well-adjusted we are.

We don’t get a lot of Jesus’ interior monologue in the gospels, especially not in the plot-centric version from Mark. Character development is not the priority, here. Which leaves us to fill in an awful lot of Jesus’ particular experience of being human. To be honest, I don’t know that “shake the dust from your feet as a testimony against them” is a great, healthy, humane response to being rejected by the people who raised you.

At least, I don’t think it’s a full response. Maybe it IS the best course of action, in the end, but it sure does seem to me that rejection of that magnitude necessitates some prayer and reflection. You know, instead of being embarrassed when someone points out that we’re actually doing the exact thing we are railing against, divorcing an entire institution and then making divorced people ineligible for leadership in our second marriage. Or instructing our followers to reject anyone who rejects us first.

I’m sure there is good news and freedom in Jesus’ instruction, here. I would very much - VERY MUCH - like to be capable of living as someone who blithely shakes the dust of rejection from my feet. But I’m not. Maybe I need to become more like Jesus. Or maybe, in this particular instance, Jesus was just being petty. He was fully human, after all, and humans are PETTY.

Who can say?