Respectable Trouble
Mark 11:15-19
One of my seminary professors told our class recently of a greeting she received from a colleague in ministry. He asked her, “Are you getting into any respectable trouble? If not, why not?”
Respectable trouble. How can trouble be respectable? We’ve all gotten into trouble in our lives. As kids we almost couldn’t help it. I remember a boy who played hockey with my son saying one day, “I’m always in trouble!”—and he was. He wasn’t a bad kid—in fact he was a pretty good kid. Trouble just seemed to lie in wait for him. We’ve all known kids like that. Maybe we’ve even been that kid ourselves.
But that’s not “respectable trouble.” That’s just ordinary trouble. What is respectable trouble and why should we want to get into it?
For the whole of Jesus’ ministry he was in respectable trouble. Early on he crossed the scribes and Pharisees. He insisted on following God’s commandments—the Mosaic Law as it was given in the Torah—as God intended them to be followed, and not as the religious leaders wanted to interpret them. This got him into trouble of the respectable kind. As we should be, Jesus would rather be in trouble with a group of human beings than with God.
In this reading from Mark we see Jesus getting into serious respectable trouble. He enters the Temple—God’s dwelling place on earth—and sees the religious leaders—God’s religious leaders—cheating the people by selling sacrificial animals at too high a cost, and exchanging foreign currency for Temple money at a high rate of usury. He let them know exactly what he thinks of them. “Robbers,” he calls them; “Thieves.”
We know what happened to Jesus as a result of respectable trouble. We read about it in the eighteenth verse. The chief priests and the scribes begin to look for a way to destroy him—and they did. They killed him, but they didn’t stop him. And look what happened next! Peter got into respectable trouble. Paul got into respectable trouble. Many of the other disciples got into respectable trouble. So did the early martyrs. So did Martin Luther. So did John Calvin. And Martin Luther King, Jr. And…—but where would the list end?
What about us? How might we get into respectable trouble?
We get into respectable trouble whenever we set high moral standards for ourselves at work or at home, and refuse to compromise them—even if it costs us family, or friends, or jobs.
We get into respectable trouble whenever we take an unpopular stand—even if we have to stand alone.
We get into respectable trouble when we welcome into our churches someone who we know the congregation doesn’t approve of—even if it costs us our church family.
We get into respectable trouble when we insist on equal rights for everyone, regardless of race, gender, economic status, sexual orientation, or any other barrier—even when we know doing so will turn people against us.
You know I’ve only scratched the surface here. The important thing is this: if respectable trouble was good enough for Jesus, for Peter, for Paul, and for so many other Christians down through the ages, then it ought to be good enough for us.
So…have you gotten into any respectable trouble lately? If not, why not?
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