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Sunday
One of my favorite websites is Journey to Jesus, which each week features a sermon on one of the Sunday readings by Dan Clendenin, usually with a poem attached. This week he turns to a Wendell Berry poem in response to the moment in Mark where Jesus’s family thinks he is crazy.
The passage is the following:
The crowd came together again, so that Jesus and his disciples could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”
Jesus smartly replies with a passage that was treasured by Abraham Lincoln–“How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand”—but Clendenin is more interested in the insanity diagnosis. He argues,
It is the world that has gone mad, not Jesus, and he is rightly angered and aggrieved at this — the religious sanctimony, economic exploitation, political oppression, social exclusion, and the like. And when Jesus disrupts this cultural status quo, he is scapegoated as insane.
In other words, if the world is insane, then maybe the insane are sane, a reversal that is at the heart of the 1966 Alan Bates film King of Hearts. It is also the basis of Wendell Berry’s sixteen Mad Farmer poems, in one of which he writes,
To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart. The world
is a holy vision, had we clarity
to see it—a clarity that men
depend on men to make.
My favorite of the Mad Farmer poems is also the one that Clendenin features. Like Jesus, the Mad Farmer first shows us how we have lost our way and then presents us with a different way to live. “So friends,” he says in “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” “every day do something that won’t compute.” His list of suggestions includes everything from loving someone “who does not deserve it” to planting sequoias to, in the final line, practicing resurrection.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
By Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
If you find echoes of Jesus in the Mad Farmer’s manifesto, you’re not seeing things.
