Sermon 6.29.25 The Lion that Consumes

Sermon Begins @ 19:44

“Blessed is the lion which a man consumes, for the lion has become man. But cursed is the man which the lion consumes, because the man has become lion.” Gospel of Thomas Saying 7

I’m moved to preach to you this morning, “Take care that you are not consumed by one another.”

This line comes from the middle of our Epistle reading from St. Paul to the Galatians.

It is a remarkable piece of advice within a letter that was written to a community that were at the forefront of discussions of what it meant to be Christian in the early days of the Jesus Movement.

Of all of the communities that Paul wrote to and visited, the Galatians seem to have had the most questions about identity issues.

For instance, in the part of Galatians 5 that we didn’t read today, Paul answers a question about whether people need to be circumcised in order to be Christians.

The question behind that is whether Christians ought to tie their identity closer to Jesus’ Jewish heritage, which requires circumcision, or whether it’s okay that they remain culturally Greek and avoid the proverbial Mohel’s knife.

That identity issue seems pretty straight forward to see, if you have the background information.

What may be less obvious is the influence of Greek philosophy and identity on the piece we actually read from Galatians.

We know that the world of Jesus was dominated by Rome.

Time and money are stamped by various Caesars, “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken.” Luke 2:1 and “in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was Governor.” Luke 3:1

“whose face is on the coin?... then render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Matthew 22:20-21

And we know that before Jesus’ crucifixion in the gospel according to John that Jesus’ kingship is seen as a direct threat to Roman imperial power, “if you let this man go, you are no friend to Caesar. Anyone who claims to be king is opposed to Caesar.”

Along with the myriad other examples of Roman occupation, it is clear that Roman hegemony was THE power during Jesus’ time.

But the Romans weren’t the first non-levantine super power to hold sway in Israel and Judah.

Before them, the Greeks brought their influence around the whole Mediterranean sea basin and as far East as India under the leadership of Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BCE.

Along with conquering armies, the Greeks brought their philosophy, with Alexander himself being the student of the famed philosopher Aristotle.

“Be careful that you are not consumed by one another,” is piece of advice that is deeply rooted within that Greek/hellenistic philosophical worldview and identity,

And it is related to the quote that I began my sermon with this morning.

Does anyone have any idea, who that quote is attributed to, or where it comes from?

Here’s a hint, he lived during the time of Jesus.

Our kids are in Sunday School right now, and so let me give you another hint.

Who do you always guess first, when your Sunday School asks you a question?

“Jesus?!?”

“Correct!”

“Blessed is the lion which the man eats, for the lion has become man. But cursed is the man whom the lion eats, for the man has become lion.”

Now, there are translation issues with this passage, but most scholars agree that this is the correct translation. (we don’t need to go into the semantics)

This is from the Gospel of Thomas.  Anyone heard of it?

The Gospel of Thomas is not what you would expect from a gospel, and by that I mean it doesn’t really tell a story.

The Gospel of Thomas is a sayings source, it is a collection of sayings that were attributed to Jesus by the document’s editor.

It’s like goodreads.com, where you can type in a person’s name and it just lists all of the sayings that were attributed to them, and then let’s you pop a picture behind them and post them to facebook, (or copy and paste to put them into a sermon) so you look really smart.

(Digression) “I knew that Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘you are who you pretend to be, so be very careful about who you pretend to be,’ off the top of my head, because I’m so smart, I in no way simply typed “smart quote about faking it ‘til you make it,” in google and got lucky.”

(Digression over)

So the Gospel of Thomas simply collects Jesus sayings in one place, and this strange saying about the lion and the man is one of them.

Interestingly, many of the Jesus quotes in the Gospel of Thomas are almost the same as what our canonical gospels say.

One example is the parable of the sower, complete with seeds being scattered on the pathway, the rocks, the thorns and the good soil. Gospel of Thomas Saying 9

Another, you may recognize, “The foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head and rest.” Gospel of Thomas Saying 86.

Most scholars over the past two centuries have accepted that our gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were narratives based on common a sayings source similar to - but not the same as - what we find in the Gospel of Thomas.

The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas in the mid 20th century in the Nag Hammadi collection of Gnostic texts simply confirmed what many scholars had already believed;

That gospel sources with sayings, but no narrative were part of the way that early Christians documented the life of Jesus with the narratives coming later.

This is why some gospels have Jesus saying certain things at one time in his ministry and another may have him say it at a different time and place.

For instance, Matthew has Jesus giving the beatitudes on a mountain, while Luke has him say them on a plain.

This makes sense if the earliest writings about Jesus were compendia of his sayings and accounts of his passion and resurrection.

But what does this saying, “blessed is the lion… etc…,” Paul’s bidding that we not consume one another, and identity issues within the early church have to do with one another?

I’m glad you asked.

Another text that was found in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic collection was one particular section of Plato’s Republic: Section 588.

This section of Plato’s magnum opus on the ordering of the individual human life within the political, common life of Greek citizenship also touches on consumption and lions.

For Plato, the individual human soul is a three-part entity; it contains the human/rational part of each person, the lion/emotional part of each person, and the many-headed beast, or desires and passions of each human person.

The cliff’s notes version of Section 588 is this: whichever part of your nature (human, lion, or many-headed beast) you feed the most is the one that you become.

If you feed your rational self, then you become your rational self and the polis (the city/state, your country) is made better by your citizenship.

If you feed the lion-self, then you become your emotional self.  This is good for soldiers and athletes, but you can’t run a society solely on emotions; especially if those emotions (such as anger, resentment, or envy) take over the citizenry.

If you feed the many-headed beast, you become a slave to your desires, which are insatiable and like the hydra of Greek mythology multiplies exponentially. 

In the end, for Plato, a society that has too many people being consumed by their base desires or by their unregulated emotions will fall under the weight of their irrationality, as will individual humans.

What we see in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, then, is his a further melding of Greek identity into Christian identity.

He warns the people about being consumed by one another, he also takes the idea of the rational spirit and the more human emotions and desires and says do not fall back into slavery.

All of the things that he lists of things to avoid - things of the flesh - are things that fit under the category of emotion or desire;

The things he lists under those fruits of the spirit are the things of a well-regulated Greek rationality.

Ultimately, the Gospel of Thomas didn’t make it into our biblical canon; which is to say it didn’t become a part of the Bible as we have it.

And yet, we can see that the admonishon not to let the lion consume us still comes through in Paul’s plea that we not consume one another based on our unruly flesh.

We are citizens of one another, citizens of a kingdom that is not from this place, just as Jesus’ kingdom is not of this place.

My friends, Christians in this nation have a choice to make.

We are at an inflection point that has been building for more than a decade.

Are we a people who consume one another, or are we a people who can live in harmony with one another?

Are we a people who consume the flesh of the ravening and roaring lion, who are becoming our basest emotions and desires? Laughing with glee as people suffer, because they are our political enemies, or the “not US;”

Raining down fire from heaven to consume our adversaries as James and John suggested in our gospel lesson.

Or are we a people who will consume the flesh of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and so become more and more like Him: abounding in mercy, loving our neighbor, following the one who rebuked his own disciples for their callousness toward the lives of the Samaritans.

Jesus didn’t rebuke the Samaritans, but he did say to his own people,  you better not put your hand to the plow of my redemptive work only to turn back to the ways of destruction when it suits your emotions or desires for self-righteous vengeance.

My friends, the church today, just as during the time of St. Paul has an identity issue.

Are we a people who accept new ways of being, new cultural expressions, better understandings of the human person, or are we a people who sit in our US groups and make a mockery of Jesus?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the beginning of the Stonewall Riot of 1969, where police dressed in unmarked plain clothes raided a gay bar in Manhattan, and used the force of unjust laws to persecute a community with a particular identity that did not match the US.

People were clubbed, arrested, and dragged away.

In our own day, now, we are seeing more assaults on the LGBTQ+ community, against our neighbors who have immigrated here, against the poor, and against communities of color like ours.

If ever there was a time to see that we are all in this together it is on a week, where the Supreme Court and congress mostly ratified the base desires of a political class that wants to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, severely diminish medicaid, and threaten our citizenship laws among many other aims.

We have to ask is this really who we have become?

Meanwhile, every day we have kids out here shooting one another and consuming one another out of anger, and fear.

We have built a consumer society and its consuming us.

We have elected too many political cannibals to eat up our enemies rather than good-hearted people who will work for the common good.

We have listened to too many pundits, who have become the chefs of our indelicate gluttony for bad news.

We need Good News, we need people who are willing to turn away from the flesh of lions and many-headed beasts.

We need American humans to become human again.

My message for you today is simply this: pay attention to what you consume, or else you will be consumed.

Make room for the spirit to allow new things to expand US.

On this week that we celebrate our freedom as a new US almost 250 years ago.

Hold true to that freedom, don’t fall back into a spirit of slavery, don’t use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence and insatiable consumption of things that you don’t want to become.

I pray for our nation, I pray for our people, I pray that we stop consuming one another, and the flesh of lions rather than the flesh of Jesus.