Liberal Christian Commentary 2

POWER IN THE BLOOD DENIED!

2012-02-01T07:47:00.000-08:00

Mark 5:24-34
Mark 11:15-17

Today’s New York Times reports that the Southern Baptist Convention has scored another victory in the war against women waged by fundamentalist “christians.”

        In a decision that is inflaming passions on both sides of the abortion debate, the world’s largest breast cancer organization, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is cutting off its financing of breast cancer screening and education programs run by Planned Parenthood affiliates.

        . . . Anti-abortion advocates and Web sites have criticized the Komen foundation’s financing of Planned Parenthood for years. And in December, LifeWay Christian Resources, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, said it was recalling a pink Bible it was selling at Walmart and other stores because a dollar per copy was going to the Komen foundation and the foundation supported Planned Parenthood.

When was the last time any of these people who claim to follow Jesus read the story about the woman with “a chronic flow of blood for twelve years,” who had the audacity to touch Jesus’ clothes because she believed it would cure her illness? Did Jesus snatch his robes away from her dirty fingers and call her a child murderer? No – he called her “daughter” and said “your trust has cured you, go in peace.”

The SBC is so incensed at uppity women who want affordable health care, they won’t even give them the Bibles they insist were written by God Himself! Instead, they SELL them to the poor who shop at Walmart, but only so long as those women don’t attempt to get their mammograms at Planned Parenthood! Ever wondered what Jesus was protesting when he wrecked the tables of the money-changers in the Temple? He wasn’t protesting the exchange of money. He was protesting the corruption of the religious authorities.

FREDDIE, FANNY, AND THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS

2012-01-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

Matthew 25:14-30

The parable of the talents has nothing to do with pretending you can’t dance, or not following your bliss into your true calling. It’s a parable about money in trust, and applies directly to today’s breaking news: Freddie Mac Bets Against American Homeowners. Matthew turns the parable into a judgment against people who don’t have enough faith to wait for Jesus to come again. But Jesus’ over-the-top joke is actually a blueprint for Occupy Wall Street action.

“You know,” Jesus says in the Scholars translation, “It’s like a man going on a trip who called his slaves and turned his valuables over to them.” The master leaves the first slave 30,000 silver coins. Assuming each coin is an ounce, that’s about $100 million, according to today’s New York spot price. It’s also not a great deal of money for the 21st Century, given the rate at which the Adelson’s are pouring money into the Gingrich campaign, not to mention Citizens United. But in the 1st Century of the common era, the first two slaves received a fortune, and the third received what amounts to about 20 years of wages.

By this time the disciples – who had been with Jesus long enough to know what’s coming – must have been listening closely for the punch line. Unfortunately we don’t really know what the punch line may have been. The story certainly reflects the unjust economics of Empire, but as it stands – whether in Luke’s version (Luke 19:12-27) or Matthew’s – the disciples must have just shrugged. So what? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Matthew resorts to stating the obvious, then adds insult to injury by having the master throw the slave – who was afraid to invest in the stock market on his behalf – into the utter darkness where, as the NRSV puts it, “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Somehow “faith” or “belief” in Jesus acquires some means of being measured, and those who have more will get more, and those who have less will be thrown under the bus by a vengeful God.

But suppose the slave was not acting out of fear, but was refusing to participate in a clear violation of Mosaic law (Leviticus 25:35-37)? Suppose – in an action prescient of Occupy Wall Street – he pulled off the ultimate insult? The real story Jesus told as he and his band camped beside the Sea of Galliee, not far from Tiberias probably went like this:

“There was a rich man who was planning an extended marketing trip to the Roman colonies in Syria. Before he left, he turned over his business operations to three slaves.”

One of the women is cleaning fish poached from the lake and throwing them into a cauldron steaming in the fire. She pauses a moment and says, “I heard something about this from Mary’s uncle Mordecai not two hours ago.”

Jesus looks around at the company. They have seen that look before. “To the first he gave 30,000 silver coins . . .”

Several snickers are heard as several more fish find their way into the soup. The woman starts shaking her head. A child runs into the group, screaming about some outrage his brother has perpetrated. Another woman catches him, and quiets him down to listen.

“He gave 12,000 silver coins to the second, and to the third, 6,000 silver coins. The first slave immediately used his master’s name to buy the most lucrative farm within miles, and sure enough, when the crops were harvested he had increased his investment ten-fold.”

“Sounds like that thief Jered,” grumbles one of the men. “Put my whole family off the land and here we are.”

“The second tripled his money by seizing all the land bordering the lake and charging the fishermen for access, and requiring that they buy back the fish they caught before selling them in the market.”

Nothing is heard now but the bubbling stew. This is too close for joking. They wouldn’t be throwing contraband fish into a pot liberated from someone too rich to miss it if not for the recent edict handed down by Herod Antipas.

“The third slave took his 6,000 pieces of silver and buried them in the master’s kitchen garden.”

Jesus smiles a private smile, reaches for a loaf of bread, breaks off a hunk, chews, and waits.

First Amendment: Lose the “Prayer” Breakfasts

2012-01-26T08:23:00.000-08:00

Ocean City Mayor's Special Guest Says “No Mosques in America,” Invokes Hitler Against Obama, Etc.
It’s likely too late to block the Mayor’s choice of prayer breakfast keynoters – but why do government officials have “prayer breakfasts” anyway? Jesus is reported to have said that when you pray, “don’t act like phonies. They love to stand up and pray in houses of worship and on street corners, so they can show off in public. I swear to you, their prayers have been answered! When you pray, to into a room by yourself and shut the door behind you. Then pray to your Father, the hidden one. . . . And when you pray, you should not babble on as the pagans do” (Matthew 6:5-8, Scholars Version).

Who ARE These People?

2012-01-25T12:53:00.000-08:00

In the latest issue of Westar Institute’s periodical The Fourth R (for “religion”), long-time editor and member Tom Hall argues with Vanderbilt Divinity School Visiting Scholar Gerd Lüdemann about who can claim the name of “Christian” in today’s post-modern, post-Christian context. Hall demands, “Who says we must ‘save’ the doctrine of the risen Christ? Who says we may not disavow clearly obsolete elements of ‘the faith of most early Christians’?” Professor Lüdemann fires back: “After the bodily resurrection and other supernatural propositions are recognized as fictions, the heritage that remains is simply Judaism. So why shouldn’t Christians join the local synagogue and become Jews?”

Unfortunately, The Fourth R is not yet published online, and I can’t quote much of it (“fair use,” and all that). But the question raised is at the heart of Christian identity crises today. People who have joined the 21st century in terms of cosmology and want to distinguish ourselves from biblical literalists (fundamentalists) can choose between “liberal” and “progressive.” But what about theologically conservative Christians who staunchly support all of the social justice positions of the political left? Should they give up the designation “evangelical”? Is it fair that they get lumped in with the rest of the libertarian right?

My favorite quote from the online discussion at Sojourners God’s Politics is: “With a glass of champagne in one hand and a smile on his face, Rob Bell, former pastor of Mars Hill church in Michigan, answered, “An evangelical is someone who, when they leave the room, you have more hope than when they entered.”

Biblical Literacy: Who Cares?

2012-01-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

Atheists care. Mormons care. “Evangelical” “born again” Christians don’t care. “Spiritual not religious” refugees from organized Christian churches don’t care. Unitarians don’t care (unless they are atheists). Keli Goff ranted on Dylan Ratigan and the Huffington Post that:

        . . . an overwhelming majority of those who believe in God are ignorant of basic Biblical facts, and facts about other religions. A 2010 Pew study found only 2% of those surveyed could answer 29 of the 32 questions asked correctly. Most could answer about half. This means that people who aren’t well-versed in their own religious beliefs, or anyone else’s, are making decisions in the voting booth fueled by prejudice that isn't even well-informed prejudice.

        . . . Atheists were among the top scoring groups on Pew’s religion pop quiz. Mormons also scored well. . . . So . . . If most of us are not knowledgeable enough of our own faiths to truly know if another faith is at odds with our own, then how can a vote based in part on someone else’s designated religion be rooted in anything other than prejudice?

More important than voting based on religious prejudice is indifference to Christian fundamentalist Zionism, and the fervent desire on the part of Christian fundamentalists to establish a theocracy in the United States. Christian Zionism poses a direct threat to world peace because of its belief in the literal return of Jesus to establish a “new Jerusalem” and usher in the "Kingdom of God." Christian Zionism is at the root of right-wing Christian foreign policy espoused by all three Republican candidates still in the race for the nomination.

Liberal and progressive Christians need to bone up on Revelation, the Revised Common Lectionary, and the Gospel of John (see John Shuck’s sermons, and my Liberal Christian Commentary Archive), and then join the Westar Institute in its continuing, paradigm-shifting work on the historical Jesus, the development of early Christianity, and – most recently – the Bible itself. Want more help? ProgressiveChristianity.org provides resources, guiding ideas, and spiritual networking opportunities for progressive individuals, churches, and organizations.

This Blog is Back!

2012-01-24T07:45:00.000-08:00

For in depth Biblical commentary, click here. For current progressive Christian commentary, stay tuned.

What Would Jesus Do?

2012-01-24T07:41:00.000-08:00

This blog will comment on current events, politics, social, and environmental issues from a liberal (progressive) Christian point of view. The underlying question is, what would the [historical] Jesus do?

For continuing commentary on New Testament and Biblical literacy, please visit the Gaia Rising website and click on Liberal Christian Commentary.

This Blog Will Be Moving

2010-10-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

For future blogs, and a revamped Gaia Rising website, please visit
http://gaiarising.org/

Communion to Renew the Covenant: A Sermon for World Wide Communion Sunday

2010-09-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

Luke 17:5-10; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Lamentations 1:1-6; Lamentations 3:19-26; Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Psalm 37:1-9; Psalm 137

In the Christian church year, we are in the season that leads up to Advent. In the Christian liturgical tradition, some portions of Lamentations that are also read during Holy Week are included in the readings for today.

Both Jewish and Christian interpretations of these passages deal with a spiritual world that is transformed into an alien place overnight. Psalm 137 tells the story of the Babylonian exile of the 6th century, bce. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” The ancient Hebrew people who experienced the original exile were physically uprooted and marched away into captivity in the 6th century, bce. The commemoration of that day happens on the 9th of Av in the Jewish calendar, which this year was July 19.

The 9th of Av also memorializes the day when the Romans destroyed the Temple in about the year 70. The foundation of the Jewish community was obliterated. From then on, the Jewish religion changed from one focused on the Temple in Jerusalem to an itinerant religion in permanent exile until the founding of the nation of Israel in 1949. As another historical aside, that day – the 9th of Av – was deliberately chosen for the day when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.

These are powerful texts in the history of the struggle by the Jewish people for justice. We should use them with respect. With that in mind, as Christians get ready for the season of Advent, we remember that everything Jesus’ followers had come to trust was destroyed by his death. Because they were devout Jews, who lived their tradition, they would have turned to these scriptures for solace. So with this week’s reading we remember our own exile from God’s kingdom, and we claim the promise of deliverance by the Messiah to come.

Even in the midst of his unspeakable grief over the loss of Jerusalem, the writer of Lamentations trusts that God will make things right in the end. Lamentations 3:19-26 says: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases . . . the Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” God will restore the covenant with the people. Remember that when the people were forced out of Jerusalem, Jeremiah stayed behind in the occupied city. Jeremiah knew the people would return from exile. He trusted in God so much that he bought a field that had been abandoned by one of the exiles, and agreed to hold it until the proper owners returned.

The lectionary reading from Luke for this Sunday sends us to a scene in which Jesus’ disciples ask him to increase their faith. But Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” Then Jesus goes on to make the point that no one invites a servant to eat dinner with them. Instead, the boss commands the servant to make dinner for the boss, and eat later alone. Jesus tells the disciples they are more like the servants who do only what they are ordered or obliged to do. Jesus is reminding his disciples that anyone with faith as small as a mustard seed has the power of faith that can propel mulberry trees to throw themselves into the ocean, but service to others is what really matters. And service to others is far more difficult. The passage from Luke reminds us about the power of even the least amount of faith in Jesus. And the writer of the second letter to Timothy urges continued courage in the struggle to spread that faith – the gospel of the Christ.

The disciples did not understand what Jesus was talking about when they asked him to increase their faith. Jesus did not mean that faith as tiny as a mustard seed could literally cause a mulberry tree to throw itself into the sea. What Jesus meant was a radical abandonment of self-interest. That means a willingness to give up our own well-being and act as servants or slaves who only do the master’s bidding.

Luke’s Gospel is full of examples of fairly well-to-do folks who are concerned only with their own personal welfare. There is the man who has harvested a bumper crop, and has built huge barns to store all of his wealth in, but that very night he dies. There are the Pharisees who insist on the front row seats in the synagogues, and demand proper greetings in the streets. There is the prodigal son, who takes his inheritance and squanders it. Luke’s Jesus says on several occasions that the last shall be first, and the first shall be last; that the servant is greater than the master. His point is that whenever we are more interested in the etiquette of seating and service, dinner and entertainment, and how to safeguard our own wealth, we lose touch with the power of God to transform the world in which we live. The mulberry tree stays firmly planted in the yard.

The problem is that when we do follow Jesus into a life as a servant or slave we very easily find ourselves in a kind of exile. When we align with the fringes of the communities in which we live – such as the immigrant community, or gays in the military – we are doing something counter-cultural. Our ministry becomes contrary to what the rest of society thinks is proper or good. We might get threatening phone calls; our neighbors may stop talking to us. We may get crosses burned in our front yards.

To paraphrase the desolation of the exiles in Babylon in Psalm 137, sometimes we feel like leaning our guitars against the wall, and throwing ourselves down on the banks of the Potomac River at the Watergate amphitheater across from the Pentagon, and weeping. How can we possibly sing the Lord’s song of justice-compassion in a land where highly qualified men and women are denied their calling as warriors because of their sexual orientation? How can we possibly sing the Lord’s song of liberation in a land where immigrants have no right to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care? How can we sing the Lord’s song of love in a land where hatred and fear holds sway?

The kind of faith Jesus actually taught is trust in the power of choosing to participate in God’s Kingdom of justice-compassion, which changes the very contours of the world – or, in 21st century language, shifts the paradigm. The paradigm shift Jesus spoke of most often is the radical abandonment of self-interest individually, collectively, socially, politically, globally. Prophets – such as Habakkuk and the writer of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and Jeremiah himself – not only believed, they knew that God would act in real time to return the people to their land, and restore God’s covenant.

But how does God act? Psalm 37 tells us we should rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him. The expectation seems to be that we don’t have to do anything. Somehow a bolt of lightning will strike, and the world will be transformed: Slaves will be free; poverty will end; racism and bigotry against immigrants and other outcasts will be a thing of the past. The wolf will eat grass like the cow, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child will play in the snake pit without fear. Many Christians believe that will happen in the twinkling of an eye when Jesus comes back, riding in the clouds.

But the early Christian leaders – including the Apostle Paul, and the ones who wrote the Gospel stories – realized very soon that when Jesus did not reappear, the people began to lose heart. When we believe in a God that resides only in the Temple, which we listen to only on Sunday, and which we expect to intervene on our behalf, the result is alienation – exile from God’s love – powerlessness, hopelessness, and fear. The same thing happened during the long years of Babylonian exile in the 6th Century bce. So what did the prophets tell the people?

“How long . . . shall I cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” the prophet complains – and God answers: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time . . . .” Habakkuk 2:2-3.

“Covenant” does not mean passively waiting for God to do something spectacular. “Covenant” means active partnership in God’s work to restore God’s rule. And God’s rule has always been justice-compassion. When we trust the spirit of covenant with justice-compassion in our hearts, we can transform the way we live life on this planet. The writer of 2 Timothy says, “. . . for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love . . .” (2 Tim. 1:7). That’s what it means to cause mulberry trees to transport themselves into the sea.

“Covenant” means a never-ending reclaiming of spirit from the ease of complicity with the powers that seem to be. Covenant is counter-cultural. This is why we most need to wait for the Lord and to trust – to have the kind of faith that does shift the paradigm. Psalm 37 says, “Trust in the Lord and do good; so you will live in the land, and enjoy security. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act. He will make your vindication shine like the light, and the justice of your cause like the noonday.” God will act by giving us the courage to begin and to continue the struggle, no matter how long it takes.

We know that Jesus died in the service of God’s covenant for justice-compassion. If he had not been engaged in that work, none of the Roman leadership would have cared. But what did he do? He invited the marginalized to eat with him. He included the poor and the sick and the outcasts in his entourage. He even invited himself to dinner with one of the collaborators with Rome – Zacchaeus – who was properly hated by everyone in Jesus’ group.

“Covenant” does not mean passively waiting for Godot. “Covenant” means active partnership in God’s work to restore God’s rule. And God’s rule is justice-compassion. Whenever we do that kind of work – such as making sure immigrants have a chance at being treated fairly in work, housing, and health care, or standing for truth and justice against lies and gross unfairness wherever and whenever we encounter them – we are participating with God in the great work. We are living the incarnation of the Christ.

COMMUNION TO RENEW THE COVENANT

INVITATION
On this Sunday, all over the world, the Body of Christ – the Church – and all those who would follow Jesus’ teachings, are celebrating the one Sacrament that separates Christians from all other spiritual practices. We know that Jesus died in the service of God’s covenant of justice-compassion. If he had not been engaged in that work, none of the Roman leadership would have cared, and we would not be here today. We know that whenever we engage in that same work, we embody the Christ, and bring the realization of God’s kingdom to a closer reality.

INSTITUTION
On the last night with his disciples, as they lounged at their dinner, Jesus decided to try one last time to make them really understand what he was doing, and what it really meant to follow him He picked up a loaf of bread, and spoke into the hubbub of their conversation: Listen! – he said – This bread is like God’s justice in this world. Then he tore the loaf into two pieces.
[Break Bread]

This is God’s justice in the hands of the Romans and the Temple authorities who collaborate with them. Believe me, one of you is going to turn me in to them soon. If not tonight, then as soon as the Passover is finished. Whenever you eat together after this night, remember that, and remember me. For this is my body, broken for you.

Then Jesus picked up the jug of wine. This wine is also like the Kingdom of God – it is the blood of the paschal lamb, painted on the lintels and doorposts of our people as a sign that they belong to God and not to Pharaoh’s Empire. But this cup that I drink is a new cup. It is a libation of my blood poured out for justice for all those who choose to share it.
[Pour Wine]

Drink it. All of you who are willing to engage in the work and participate in God’s covenant of justice-compassion, and remember.

DISTRIBUTION
One: The gifts of God for the People of God
All: Thanks be to God

THANKSGIVING [Based on The New Century Hymnal Prayer of Thanksgiving, p. 20]

All: Eternal God, you have called your people from east and west and north and south to feast at the table of Jesus the Christ. We thank you for the spiritual food of bread and wine, body and blood. By the power of your Holy Spirit, go with us to the streets, to our homes, and to our places of work and play, so that whether we are gathered or scattered, we may be the servant church of the servant Christ, in whose name we rejoice to pray. Amen.

Hymn: God Reigns O'er All the Earth NCH #21

BLESSING [Based on the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith]

Go now in peace, secure in the knowledge that all who trust God’s promise will find forgiveness of sins and fullness of grace, courage in the struggle for justice and peace, the presence of the spirit in trial and rejoicing, and eternal life in God’s realm, which has no end.

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Figs, Fires, and Fate

2010-09-22T12:16:00.001-07:00

Luke 13:6-8; Judges 9:7-15

Luke seems to borrow from Mark when he suggests that the fig tree the owner wants to cut down has been barren for years. But Luke does not take Mark’s metaphor. In Mark’s gospel, the story of the fig tree cursed by Jesus brackets Jesus’ demonstration in the Temple (Mark 11:11-21). Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan argue in The Last Week that Jesus’ unreasonable curse of the fig tree that is without fruit in the off-season calls attention to the condition of the Temple under Roman rule. The Temple cannot properly serve the people (produce good fruit) under the corrupting influence of the Roman occupation. Unlike Mark’s Jesus, Luke’s vinekeeper suggests giving the fig tree a second chance. “Let it stand, sir, one more year . . . Maybe it will produce . . . but if it doesn’t, we can go ahead and cut it down.” Later, in Luke 21:29-30, he has Jesus use the fig tree’s leafing out in the spring as a metaphor for the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God.

Mark considered that the kingdom of God had already arrived with Jesus. For Luke, writing 30 to 50 years after Mark, the kingdom of God has not yet arrived, but should arrive soon. So, Luke’s Jesus first says, “repent or perish.” Then – perhaps to soften the blow – he assures with the parable of the barren fig tree that God is working to cultivate and enrich the soil in order to give sinners one more chance.

Luke’s parable appears only in his Gospel. It is highly likely that he invented it; although the Jesus Seminar Scholars were apparently reluctant to consign it to the realm of sayings not original with Jesus. Whether Jesus used the metaphor or not, the fig tree has been reprieved for a year. Prudent gardening practice has become the first century equivalent of “tough love.” Three strikes and you’re out. One more chance, then it’s compost for you, Sinner.

Luke’s “parable” of the barren tree is included in the Revised Common Lectionary for the third Sunday in Lent, Year C. In the context of the other readings for that day, which include the preceding verses in 13:1-5, “. . . Luke’s Jesus is clearly the son of a violent god: '[U]nless you repent, you will all perish . . .,' he says – twice. Apparently Jesus’ God is inclined to give Luke’s hearers one more chance before cutting them down, but that hardly translates into compassion.” On its own, without the dogmatic gloss supplied by its combination with the other readings, Luke’s vignette is merely a metaphor that softens the judgment that went before. We can speculate that Luke is once again making following Jesus a safe occupation for Roman citizens. The radicality of the free gift of grace is not there.

Biblical scholars – liberal or conservative – agree that fig trees in the Bible are metaphors for the people and leadership of ancient Israel. The condition of the fig tree was a metaphor of Israel’s spiritual condition. In Matthew’s version of the fig tree legend, a frustrated and hungry Jesus curses the barren fig tree, then tells the disciples that if they trust and do not doubt, they also can kill fig trees with a curse. In fact, they can move mountains into the sea with a word. But beware the temptation to follow Matthew and Luke into anti-Semitism and black magic. Luke’s fig tree might represent the members of Luke’s community who were reluctant to buy into the Christian version of Judaism that was rising toward the end of the first century. The implication is, with some careful nurturing, they might produce fruit for the kingdom after all and join the Christian faction. If they don’t, then leave them out of the community.

Matthew wanted to replace Torah with his story of Jesus because he considered that Jesus was the fulfillment of Israel’s deepest hope and desire. Matthew’s contribution to the meaning of fig trees is to declare them incapable of ever bearing fruit again – an unfortunate anti-Semitic trap for the unwary. Further, the followers of Jesus who “have faith” (NRSV translation) and do not doubt will posess the same power Jesus does to not only render fig trees permanently barren, but to move mountains into the sea. Whether the phrase is translated “to trust” (Five Gospels) or to “have faith,” it is difficult to read the passage as a metaphor that calls for radical transformation of all human life. Anti-Jewish sentiment underlies it like a watermark.

Perhaps for the above reasons, the Elves who put together the RCL consider neither Mark’s nor Matthew’s radical fig tree metaphors. Sunday morning hearers of the Word are left with Luke’s gentle conventionality.

However, the parable of the trees in the Jewish book of Judges 9:7-15 may hold a clue to both Mark’s and Matthew’s evangelical conviction that Jesus had indeed restored the kingdom of God to earth. The parable of the trees is never encountered in the normal years of readings from the RCL. It is part of the 400-year legendary history of the Hebrew people, after their escape from Egypt, and the death of Joshua – the successor to Moses. During this time, the tribes of Israel experienced nearly constant wars with their neighbors, and internecine squabbles among themselves, as local leaders attempted to set themselves up as kings or rulers over all the tribes. The parable of the trees is a sarcastic allegory, challenging the legitimacy of Abimelech’s claim to be king. It is part of the argument the leaders of the Hebrew tribes had before the advent of King Saul about the dangers of forming a monarchy. (As an interesting aside, given my use of this parable, “Abimelech” means “My father (God) is king.”)

The fig tree, the olive tree, and the grapevine all represented survival, abundance, and riches for the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. In the parable, all are invited in turn to be crowned king of the trees, and one by one they all decline. They are content to continue to provide their own life-giving fruits to the people. The bramble is the only one that agrees to rule. But the bramble is only used for starting fires – a somewhat ambiguous usefulness. Fires are essential for life, but – in careless or evil hands – fire is the supreme destroyer of life. The bramble warns that if the people are not acting in good faith – if Abimelech is not who he claims to be – destruction by fire will be their fate.

In the ancient parable, when the one who is considered the least valuable is the only one willing to rule, the result will be disastrous unless the people act in good faith, and in alignment with God’s purposes. Bringing the metaphor into the first century, Jesus becomes the itinerant bramble, who is worthless in the eyes of imperial Rome. Mark’s gospel points out that the corruption in the Temple had reached apocalyptic levels. The fig tree is cursed and dies. Matthew’s gospel leaves no doubt that the paradigm has changed. Jesus cursed the fig tree and it died, and his followers can do the same. Luke has apparently forgotten that Jesus came to set the earth on fire (Luke 12:49). Has Luke missed the power and the point once again? Or is Luke the master of subversion who has deliberately obscured a dangerous proposition?

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The Times They Are A-Changin’

2010-09-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

Luke 12:54-13:5

Who knows why Luke strung together the sayings that he did, why he chose them, and why he put them in the order he decided? The verses from 12:54-13:5 seem to form a progression. Luke’s Jesus starts with another example of his frustration with his followers. “You phonies!” he yells, “You know the lay of the land and can read the face of the sky, so why don’t you know how to interpret the present time?” He follows that with what seems to be a clarification: “Why can’t you decide for yourselves what is right?” He finishes with a warning that is pure Luke: “. . . If you don’t have a change of heart, you’ll all meet your doom in the same way [as those Galilean sinners who had their own blood mixed with the Roman sacrifices, or the Siloamians who had the tower fall on them]. In other words, “Repent or Perish!” Luke made up both the incident of apparent cannibalism perpetrated by Pilate, and the accident that killed 18 workers in Siloam.

The Elves fudge the non sequiturs by dividing this portion between Proper 15 and the third Sunday in Lent, Year C. (We will deal with Luke’s version of the parable of the fig tree next week.)

Christian tradition has interpreted these passages as apocalyptic warnings. If they were – if Luke intended them to be – then the parable of the fig tree could arguably be included. The Jesus Seminar scholars generally agree that the advice to settle matters out of court and the parable of the fig tree may go back to the historical Jesus. But they were not necessarily associated with one another. Luke (and the other evangelists) and his community were apocalyptic thinkers. They expected a final judgment, with rewards and punishments, before Jesus would return again to establish God’s kingdom. Present-day scholars argue among themselves about whether or not Jesus himself was apocalyptic. Nor would they agree that the sayings have anything to do with one another.

This blog is taking the liberty of reading another meaning into these passages. That is the only way they can even begin to be useful to 21st century followers who do not believe in a coming non-environmental apocalypse, nor in an afterlife of punishment/reward, nor in the return of Jesus literally from the sky to establish any kind of permanent kingdom on earth. Taking the readings at face value, and from a 21st century point of view, is of course anathema to scholars. But if Luke could do it in the 1st century, we can do it now.

Despite right-wing largely Christian denial, scientists are reaching consensus on the fact of global climate change. It is happening now, and it is irreversible. The task for humanity is to learn how to cope with the inevitable. But what do we hear from self-described “progressive” Christianity? A Google search brings up arguments from the right against global warming, but very little from the left in main stream, presumably “liberal” Christian denominations on how to deal with it. Indeed the silence is deafening regarding so-called “clean coal” technology, cap and trade legislation, mountaintop removal mining, off-shore oil drilling, support for alternative energy resources . . . in short, the Christian “main stream” has nothing to say. The 21st century equivalent to the fictional Siloamians whose tower fell on them might be the 29 miners who died in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine back in April. What mainline Christian church is going to preach against the continued use of coal and the continued rape of the mountains of Appalachia?

Jesus’ words echo down the canyons of the millennia: “You phonies! You know the lay of the land and can read the face of the sky, so why don’t you know how to interpret the present time?” But who is listening? Bob Dylan screamed a warning in the 1960s that the political times were changing. But now the very web of life that sustains humanity is changing, and the churches are saying and doing nothing.

Repent or perish! Luke’s Jesus says. That means, Change or die. But the change that Christian tradition has insisted upon is accepting as provable fact that Jesus was crucified to save us from “sin”; that he walked out of the tomb and vanished in the general direction of Antares, with the promise that he would return; and unless we turn away from personal petty sin, when Jesus comes back, we won’t be part of the kingdom.

Luke may have shrouded the radicality of Jesus’ message with his emphasis on the wealthy, but the opposition to the normalcy of Roman imperial theology is clear for those with eyes to see. From Mary’s Song (Luke 1:46-56) to the resurrection and appearances of Jesus, the Roman empire (and all empires, whether governmental or corporate) has been put on notice. Repent or perish. Establish systems of justice or face the consequences.

Today, the establishment of systems of justice must be economic, social, political, and ecological. Otherwise, as Isaiah said of old, “. . . the Lord comes out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no longer cover its slain” (Is. 26:20-21). Sure enough, the oceans are rising, the glaciers are melting, whole species are disappearing daily, and human babies are born already alergic to the Planet. No lightening bolts are required from some grandfather almighty in the sky. There are definite consequences for polluting the waters with oil, destroying the mountains for gold and coal, and hiding government malfeasance behind a screen called “national security.”

Repent or perish.

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Riches and Readiness

2010-09-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

Luke 12:13-53

This portion of Luke is routinely divided by the Revised Common Lectionary among Propers 13, 14, and 15, in Year C. Verses 21-32 are skipped, in favor of the version in Matthew 6:25-34 (Propers 10 and 11, Year B). The result, as these commentaries continue to complain, is that Christian dogma is preserved at the expense of biblical integrity. Like other portions of Luke, this sequence has its own theme: Don’t be greedy; don’t worry about how you will live, and be ready for the kingdom when it finally comes. The Jesus Seminar Scholars point out what might be a thematic progression from wealth and possessions to watchfulness and alertness, and ultimately judgment against those who get tired of waiting. All of it was put together for Luke’s early Christian community. Brief portions are believed by the Jesus Seminar to reliably be attributable to the historical Jesus (12:16-20, 22-25, 27-28).

It is easy to accuse Luke of conventionality. After all, he always adds his own pious commentary at the end of the sayings from Jesus that were part of the oral tradition. It is impossible to know why he did this. One theory is that his editorial additions deliberately took the edge off Jesus’ radicality so that the Way could be practiced under Roman imperial noses. For example, in 12:16-21, Luke uses a saying lifted from Thomas 63:1-3 (see The Five Gospels p. 508). In Luke’s hands, the concern is what will happen to the stuff the rich man has collected. Luke implies that God will demand the rich man’s life because he has saved up for himself, and therefore is really not rich in God’s terms.

Luke then has Jesus go on to explain, “That’s why I tell you: don’t fret about life – what you’re going to eat – or about your body – what you’re going to wear. . . .” He lifts this nearly verbatim from Matthew’s great sermon on the mount. But he intersperses this discourse with his own comments. Regarding Jesus’ question, “Can any of you add an hour to life by fretting about it?” Luke’s Jesus says, sarcastically, “If you can’t do a little thing like that, why worry about the rest?” Luke ends this part with his own heavily veiled challenge to imperial society: “These are all things the world’s pagans seek, and your Father is aware that you need them. Instead, you are to seek God’s domain, and these things will come to you as a bonus.”

But Luke has not yet finished his sermon. He goes on to reassure his readers: “Don’t be afraid, little flock, for it has delighted your Father to give you his domain,” yet he means no challenge to Rome. He tells the people to sell their belongings, donate to charity, and pile up wealth in heaven where it cannot be stolen or destroyed. He further diverts attention from radical, distributive, kingdom-realizing justice by delivering a warning about what happens to faithless slaves who are not prepared for the master’s return.

Then Luke summarizes four other well-known parables: the parable of the leased vineyard (Mark 12:1-13 [skipped by the RCL]); the parable of the shrewd manager (Luke 16:1-8a); the money in trust (Luke 19:12-27 [skipped by the RCL – stay tuned]); and the unforgiving slave (Matthew 18:23-35). He misses or softens the point of all of them, including the parable of the shrewd manager, which is the one that he alone reports. The concluding warning that Jesus came to stir up conflict appears to apply to internecine squabbles either between traditional Jews and fledgling Christians, or within Luke’s community of believers.

Roman spies would have slipped out the door, to report that these Christians pose no threat at all to the status quo.

But in the saying from the Thomas collection, which is probably closer to the original than Luke’s expanded version, the existential and subversive joke is clear. We can imagine Jesus’ company around the campfire one night, perhaps griping yet again about how unfair it is that the rich have everthing and they (the itinerant poor) have nothing. Jesus says, There was a rich person who had a great deal of money. He said, “I shall invest my money so that I may sow, reap, plant, and fill my storehouses with produce that I may lack nothing.” These were the things he was thinking in his heart, but that very night he died! In the blink of an eye, Jesus has leveled the playing field. No matter how much anyone has, everyone dies.

In Luke’s hands, Jesus’ defiant joke has been bastardized: “You can’t take it with you.” New age psychologists, self-help gurus, yoga instructors and interior decorators advise that spiritual health includes getting rid of the clutter. It’s good feng shui. Jesus’ discourse on trusting God to provide food, clothing, and shelter has become the foundation for the “prosperity gospel,” which is nothing more than a new name for a very ancient attitude: God intends for believers to be prosperous. The corollary is, prosperity is a sign of God’s favor. The secular form is, if you give, you will get. The social assumption that governs conservative politics is, people are poor because they are guilty of sin: sloth, gluttony, pride, wrath, greed, lust, and envy. In the midst of the worst global economy since the Great Depression, the hapless unemployed are told to get off your duff and get a job. And if you want unemployment benefits, we’re going to test you for drugs first.

Luke has Jesus continue speaking without transition until 12:54, making the paragraph on fire and conflict really part of the preceding sermon. Luke’s Jesus expresses some frustration with the progress of establishing the kingdom. “I came to set the earth on fire,” he says, “and how I wish it were already ablaze!” He voices the complaint of every leader advocating change: “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and what pressure I’m under until it’s over!” Then he warns that did not come to bring peace, but conflict.

The entire speech reflects upheaval among the followers of Jesus as they began to organize themselves. They were often in conflict with Jewish communities who did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and were unwilling to replace Torah with the story and teachings of Jesus. Luke’s Jesus expresses impatience with the difficulty of finally establishing the kingdom of God on earth.

A major theme in Luke’s gospel is the unfolding of the divine plan, beginning with Jesus, and continuing in Acts with the early church. Civilizations since Rome have been highly suspicious of language that implies a divine plan other than the one put forth by whatever powers that exist at the time, so Luke is careful to put the prophecy in ambiguous terms. When has there not been conflict among members of families? But Jesus’ words as reported in Thomas are much more provocative: “I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I’m guarding it until it blazes.”

For 21st Century followers of the Way, this part of Luke’s gospel is testmony to the continuing struggle for distributive justice-compassion. Despite the claims of the prosperity gospel and the Tea Party faction of the current “conservative” movement, being rich is not a guarantee of a place in the Kingdom. Having said that, however, “a great deal is required of everyone to whom much is given; and even more will be demanded from the one to whom a great deal has been entrusted” (The Five Gospels, p. 341). In today’s economic conditions, those with the means to redistribute wealth have the moral obligation to do so, whether it is recognized or not. Perhaps this is how to read 12:42-48, about slaves who know what their masters want and don’t do it, and slaves who don’t know what their masters want, but at least make an attempt to act properly. This seems to be a non-sequitur in the 21st century. But when financial corporations and the top 1% of the population continue to stockpile their wealth in treasury bonds and gold instead of investing in viable business, they have only themselves to blame when the system crashes.

Are you ready?

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I Have a Scream

2010-08-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

Luke 11:27-12:12

The Revised Common Lectionary skips everything Luke wrote between the ask-seek-find scorpion-for-an-egg hypothetical and the parable of the rich farmer. Much of what is skipped in Luke is also skipped in Mark and Matthew. Of course, much of what is skipped is actually repeated nearly verbatim elsewhere in all three synoptic gospels. Luke repeats himself in 11:33. For a discussion of the original in 8:16, see To Have and Have Not.

To give the Elves their due, very little of what Luke describes in those intervening verses is particularly edifying. He has a woman exclaim how privileged his mother must have been to have nursed him as a baby. Apparently she was quite enamored of Jesus (think: I don’t know how to love him from Jesus Christ Superstar). Luke’s Jesus piously brushes her off: “Rather, privileged are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” Then Luke takes off on a tirade about how evil “this generation” is, and tries to make a point about Jonah and Ninevah, and how Jesus is a sign that at judgment time “the citizens of Ninevah will come back to life” and condemn them. After referring to “the queen of the south,” who apparently listened to Solomon’s wisdom, and will also reappear like the ghost of Christmas future, Luke seems to have written himself into a corner. At that point, he repeats Jesus’ one-liner about the lamp under the bushel basket.

But then, Luke regains his own light of inspiration, and launches into a full court press against Pharisees and lawyers. Ignoring this part of Luke’s gospel allows church leaders to pretend that Jesus never lost his temper, or used the kind of language for which your mother used to threaten to wash out your mouth with soap. Luke’s Jesus says “damn you!” no fewer than six times, three each for Pharisees and “legal experts.” Needless to say, “By the time [Jesus] left there, the scholars and Pharisees began to resent him bitterly . . .”

After the rant, Luke’s Jesus warns against the “leaven of the Pharisees, which is to say their hypocrisy.” He seems to be advising his followers to say the same things in public that they would say in private, and to say them without fear of retaliation or even death. “Don’t be so timid,” Luke’s Jesus admonishes: “You’re worth more than a flock of sparrows.” The whole sequence ends first with the warning that those who disown Jesus in public “will be disowned in the presence of God’s messengers.” Luke seems to be confused about the difference between the man Jesus (“son of Adam”) and the holy spirit. But he ends with the assurance that when faced with persecution, “the holy spirit will teach you at that very moment what you ought to say.”

Instead of ignoring Luke’s series of damnations frothing from the mouth of Jesus, 21st century followers of the Way might want to consider what Luke was trying to do. Present-day scholars are fairly certain that Luke’s audience was highly likely to have been among the better educated and privileged members of Roman society, probably in Syria, 30 to 50 years after the destruction of Jerusalem. Pharisees and legal experts (scholars) would have been fair game for a rant against corruption and hypocrisy amid the culture wars between those who were trying to preserve Judaism, and those who wanted to update it, and proclaim that Jesus was the long hoped-for Messiah. Today’s culture wars are analogous to the culture wars in Luke’s first century community. Who and what is a Christian, and what is meant when that name is claimed, are in debate. Fundamentalist and conservative Christians are clamoring for their own brand of Christianity to be enshrined in government policy, in direct contradiction to the first amendment establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. Hatred of the sojourner, the foreigner, indeed anyone outside the white male normalcy of U.S. civilization, is justified on religious grounds.

In what may be a perfect contemporary illustration of who Jesus was condemning in 11:47-50, self-appointed Christian Pharisee Glenn Beck has organized a Tea Party rally on Washington’s Mall on the same date as Martin Luther King’s 1963 rally for civil rights. King’s words from that day reflect Luke’s concluding advice: “But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

If the public face of Christianity today is supposed to be love of neighbor and enemy, then where is all the greed and violence coming from? Luke’s Jesus has no time for those who “neglect justice and the love of God.” Jesus himself may well have condemned those who are more interested in prominent seats in the halls of power and being treated with respect in the marketplace. Luke’s Jesus says, be on your guard against hypocrisy so that you don’t fall into the same traps the religious and political leaders and lawyers do. Everything will become clear sooner or later, so be sure that whatever you say in the darkness and behind closed doors can be said and done openly. Take courage. Speak truth to power. Above all, don’t worry about how you will defend yourself or what you should say when they bring charges against you. If you are aligned with God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, you will know what to do and say.

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Devils and Demons

2010-08-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

Luke 11:14-26

These verses constitute Luke’s version of the “Beelzebul controversy.” Both Matthew and Luke lifted this series of sayings from Q. Mark’s version includes some Q material, but not what appears in Matthew and Luke (Mark 3:20-35; Matt. 12:25-32). The Jesus Seminar scholars suggest that “the similarities and differences in these clusters demonstrate that the same stories and sayings could be put together in different ways” (The Five Gospels, p.51). Apparently in order to settle potential arguments, the Elves eliminate both Matthew’s and Luke’s renditions from the Revised Common Lectionary. Because of the vagaries of the Western, moon-based, movable feast called Easter, Mark’s “controversy” can also be preempted by the reading from John’s gospel for Trinity Sunday. This was the case in Year B, 2009.

Scholars are clear that these series of sayings and stories were put together in their various forms well after Jesus’ death. However, the Jesus Seminar scholars are fairly certain that the sayings in large part probably go back to the historical Jesus. If, as scholars propose, Jesus was an itinerant cynic, engaging the local religious leaders in debate and aphorism, he might very well have come up with the following argument: “Every government divided against itself is devastated, and a house divided against a house falls. [So] if Satan is divided against himself – since you claim I drive out demons in Beelzebul’s name – how will his domain endure? If I drive out demons in Beelzebul’s name, in whose name do your own people drive them out? (In that case, they [your people] will be your judges.) But if by God’s finger I drive out demons, then for you, God’s imperial rule has arrived” (The Five Gospels, p. 329, emphasis and brackets added).

Jesus would seem to have his challengers where he wants them. Satan’s domain cannot possibly endure if Jesus is dividing it by driving out the demons, and if Jesus is driving out demons by the power of God, then God’s realm has indeed arrived. The arrival of the kingdom, here and now, and how to participate in it was the whole point of Mark’s Gospel. Luke confirms that arrival. But then he goes on to obscure the radical change in paradigm that God’s imperial rule brings with it.

Luke puts Jesus’ illustration about the strong man who is attacked and overwhelmed by an even stronger one in his continuing context of exorcism. He follows this with a common aphorism, not original with Jesus: “The one who isn’t with me is against me.” Finally, Luke finishes his series on exorcism with the curious saying about unclean spirits which, upon finding no resting place, come back to the original host along with seven additional ones. The person who was supposedly exorcized and free of demons is worse off than before. Scholars have no idea what the context was for this saying, which came from the Q tradition. Luke’s placement seems to call into question the efficacy of exorcism that is not based on God’s power. But in Rome, Cesar was God. So long as there is the possibility that the transformation that is not caused by God’s [Cesar’s] power will not take hold, the Romans can continue to consider Christians to be irrelevant, and no threat to Rome’s imperial rule.

So what does it all mean? In a 1st century context, where neither physical nor mental illness was understood as they are in the 21st century, exorcisms were a sign of spiritual power. Jesus’ success as an exorcist would have called into question the authority and legitimacy of religious leadership – both Roman and Jewish. But pre-modern people were just as capable of understanding metaphor as are post-enlightenment sophisticates. Earlier in his gospel Luke picks up Mark’s story about the man healed of a demon named “Legion.” This is not a miracle story about medical cures, demon possession, and the mis-use of livestock. It is a parable about subverting political and spiritual oppression; it shows how trust in God’s reality transforms life under occupation by the imperial Roman legion into freedom and justice. In Luke’s context, this is what Jesus’s real “mother and brothers” are supposed to be doing.

So now, when Luke’s Jesus retorts that, “if by God’s finger I drive out demons, then for you God’s imperial rule has arrived,” he is putting local collaborators with Roman injustice on notice. After sparring with his opponents about driving out demons in God’s name, Jesus compares the arrival of the kingdom of God to a robber who overpowers a fully-armed man, who is guarding his possessions in his impregnable courtyard. This joke successfully sailed over the heads of Jesus’s opponents, and apparently right past Luke as well. He has Jesus say, “the one who isn’t with me is against me, and the one who doesn’t gather with me scatters.” But the point is not who is with or against the church of Christ. The point is that participation in the realm of God can overthrow the strongest of oppressive empires. The weapons upon which the oppressor relied are taken away, and justice is restored.

Jesus changes the paradigm from imperial, retributive justice (an eye for an eye) to non-violent covenant with God’s kingdom where distributive justice-compassion rules. In fact, Jesus is saying, those same collaborators might be the most pious in town, but the moment they abandon God’s covenant for Roman retributive justice, seven other spirits more vile than the one that led them astray in the first place will move in and take over, and the collaborator will be worse off than before.

On the eve of the 9th Anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, the people of the United States are embroiled in a fight over whether a local mosque should be allowed to build a community center two blocks from “ground zero.” Some believe that allowing this to be done is a betrayal of the surviving families of the 9/11 victims. They claim to honor the first amendment guarantee of freedom of religion, while demanding that Muslims give up theirs. It seems reasonable, on the level of not hurting the feelings of the victims. But the religion called Islam did not bomb the Twin Towers. In attempting to prohibit a community center that would benefit the entire neighborhood, the spirit of perhaps the most profoundly transforming principle of government in the history of governments has been swept out. Finding no place to rest elsewhere in the unwelcoming 21st Century zeitgeist, that spirit will likely return, bringing with it multiple spirits of fear, hatred, intolerance, retribution, and – ultimately – oppression of all religion.

The kingdom comes like a thief in the night, says Paul (1 Thessalonians 5:2). As for you, be as sly as snakes and as simple as doves, says Jesus (Matthew 10:16). Unless and until we get Jesus’ subversive joke, the house will be effectively divided. The terrorists will have won.

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Summer Hiatus

2010-06-02T11:07:00.001-07:00

I am taking a 10-week break to complete Clinical Pastoral Education training at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

If you are visiting this Blog for the first time (or are a regular) please visit the Gaia Rising website for the complete 2010 Archive, and for highlights from Commentary on the Revised Common Lectionary, Years A, B, and C.

This blog will resume with commentary on Luke/Acts in August.

In the Zone

2010-05-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Luke 11:9-13

“So I tell you, ask – it’ll be given to you; seek – you’ll find; knock – it’ll be opened for you. Rest assured: everyone who asks receives; everyone who seeks finds; and for the one who knocks it is opened.”

This series of aphorisms is among the best known and – along with the Beattitudes – most basic of Christian affirmations. It comes at the end of Luke’s series on prayer. However, as we have seen, this particular selection of sayings and the interpretation was purely Luke’s. Scholars theorize that rather than being a promise of God’s answer to persistent prayer, Jesus’s directive to ask, seek, and knock was an assurance that those who take up the same kind of itinerant life Jesus led can expect hospitality wherever they look for it, or ask for it. Even a knock on the door at midnight would not be ignored.

Luke’s point was that God will provide whatever is asked, will reveal whatever is sought, and will open the way to whomever knocks on God’s door. He has Jesus expand on this by comparing God’s answer to prayer with giving good gifts to one’s own children. But Luke’s Jesus here abandons the prayer for daily provision of bread, which he started with. Instead of food, “the heavenly Father will give holy spirit to those who ask him.” Later, in the Gospel of John, the emphasis shifted from God to Jesus. John’s Jesus says “whatever you ask in my name will be granted to you” (John 14:13-14; 15:7, 16; 16:23). Ultimately, the saying morphed into the icon from Revelation 3:20, in which the Christ declares to the Church in Laodicea: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.”

The 1st Century transformation in the meaning of Jesus’s words is like the viral transmutation of political speech in the 21st Century news cycle. In less than a week in May 2010, the meaning of the reported words of a candidate for the United States Senate evolved from idealistic, libertarian theory to racist bigotry. In less than 100 years from Jesus’s death, the expectation of hospitable acceptance for wandering wisdom teachers became justification for holy war.

Jesus’s original words to ask, seek, knock, and trust in the custom of hospitality have become a magic spell. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, found that 60% pray daily, although the content of the prayers was not broken down. While no one has done a survey of the percentage of people in the general population who routinely pray for parking spaces and find them, the efficacy of intercessory prayer has been studied frequently. Unfortunately, the results are inclusive at best. One study that looked at complications arising after coronary surgery for patients receiving intercessory prayer versus patients who were not prayed for found a slight advantage in terms of fewer complications for those who did NOT receive intercessory prayer.

With such murky findings, the fact that belief in the magic power of prayer persists must be attributed to the mysterious way human consciousness has developed. Perhaps we are hard-wired for hope in hopeless situations. Or perhaps something else is going on.

Jesus was not originally talking about the answer to prayer, as Luke and the tradition like to think. Jesus was invoking the ancient rule of hospitality for itinerant travelers. Scholars are fairly certain that Jesus depended on that rule for his and his disciples’ support as they traveled from village to village throughout the region of Galilee. He had an expectation, based on complete trust in God’s imperial rule, that he would find a hospitable response. However, his followers did modify their own expectations in the interest of practicality. As all three synoptic writers report, if the disciples Jesus sent out did not find a welcome, the solution was to “shake the dust from your feet” (Mark 6:11; Matthew 10:14; Luke 9:5). Matthew’s Jesus adds, “I swear to you, the land of Sodom and Gomorrah will be better off at the judgment than that city [which does not welcome you].” Sodom and Gomorrah, you may recall, was the Old Testament poster child for the total breakdown of hospitality.

Jesus himself seems to have experienced a level of trust in God’s realm that most humans find difficult or impossible except in rare instances. If we take the words attributed to him in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount as his own, Jesus was able to live within the same kind of seamless realm experienced by the birds and the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:26). In that realm, there is no boundary between creator and creation, God and humanity, or between the worlds of life and death, spirit and flesh. For most of us, this experience manifests as a quality of life where everything works without effort. It’s a string of lucky circumstances; serendipity; everything falls into place. Miraculous healing can happen there. I call it “being in the zone.”

The difficulty of describing that kind of experience – in any language – is clearly illustrated by what has happened to Jesus’s original teachings over time. It is not a matter of simply saying the name of Jesus, or petitioning God to intervene and change the physical laws of the universe, even in company with two or three others. The key, prosaic as it may be, seems to be the willingness to ride the horse in the direction it is going. In other words, to ask, seek, and knock with the expectation of receiving, finding, and opening the way means to align oneself with the way things are. In Buddhist terms, surrender. That does not mean giving up. It means total acceptance of whatever is happening now, with no concern about what any particular outcome may be. While clear intent about the desired result may important, the key is not to care.

The idea of “not caring” drives most of us crazy. How can we “not care” about our mother dying, or our friend with terminal cancer, or physical pain of any kind, or about torture victims, or the poor, or any of the other kinds of suffering produced by disaster, whether from natural or human causes? Those are the tough questions. Entire books have been written about the answers. Tough or not, the key to the end of suffering, the power that drives healing, is to accept what is, right now. That means a radical indifference to the nature of the ultimate resolution. Mother may die; the cancer may win; the pain may only be alleviated with heavy doses of morphine; the torture may not end; poverty may continue to condemn the rich; disasters – of natural or human cause – may happen.

Jesus calls us into that radical indifference through trust. It is a latter-day itinerancy, in which we let go of conventional ideas, unnecessary possessions, market demands, and even life itself. We cannot answer that call so long as we see ourselves as the victim of our life circumstances, trapped in the normalcy of economic and political systems, or determined by the lottery of our biological heredity. Nor can we answer that call if we resist or resent what happens to us, or if we ignore the realities of the world in which we live. Tradition tells us that Jesus himself fell out of the zone at the horrifying end of his life.

Even so, the message of Christianity is that even death on a cross does not negate the truth of living in the zone – the realm of God – where we ask, seek, knock and find whatever we need for abundant life. But you can’t just point your magic wand and scream “Aguamenti!” Before the water comes from the rock, or the door opens to your knock, you have to trust the process.

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Hospitality 2010

2010-05-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

Luke 11:5-8

The NRSV follows Luke’s apparent intention and puts under the heading of “The Lord’s Prayer” Luke’s anecdote of the friend at midnight along with the “Ask, seek, knock” and “Good gifts” aphorisms. Conventionally, these passages have been considered to be a treatise on prayer. If you pray as Jesus did, God will provide, just as you would if your next-door neighbor came to you to borrow a cup of sugar at some inconvenient time. You might resent the timing, but you would nevertheless provide the sugar out of pious duty. If you pray as Jesus did, God will answer, just as you would if your own child asked for an egg. You would not substitute a scorpion.

But suppose this series of sayings was not a related sequence at all? Taken as an independent quotation, out of Luke’s context, we can readily see that the “friend at midnight” was not about how God answers prayer; it was about hospitality. The 21st Century world has largely forgotten that “hospitality” was a matter of life and death to 1st Century people. Welcoming the stranger into your tribal enclave for a night, or until the stand storm ended was a matter of honor on both sides. The host asked no questions about whether the stranger was an innocent traveler or a fugitive from law. The guest did not rob or otherwise violate the sanctity of the host. This code assured some degree of safety for everyone in a dangerous world.

In addition, 1st Century Palestine was an “honor/shame” culture. In Luke’s story, the host taken by surprise by unexpected guests may have run the risk of “shame” for not being able to properly care for them, but far more likely is the “shame” the sleepy neighbor would have experienced if he had not responded. He and his family would have been socially ostracized. The Jesus Seminar scholars point out that the original Greek that Luke used in the last sentence of the story can be translated either as “you will get up and give the other whatever is needed because you’d be ashamed not to;” or “because the other is not ashamed to ask.” (The Five Gospels, p. 327-328). The surprised neighbor is not ashamed to ask for help in supplying hospitality to the unexpected guests.

We cannot know why Luke did what he did with this snippet of oral tradition. It seems to fit better with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke interprets the parable in terms of the law that says “love your neighbor as yourself.” A discussion about the unexpected need to help a neighbor seems to be a further illustration of the reliance of neighbors upon one another. The Good Samaritan unexpectedly extends hospitality beyond what a reluctant neighbor might be shamed into offering.

Citizens of these United States pride ourselves on the fact that we can rely on our neighbors for help in time of need. In fact, we are so proud of that fact that 20% of us think the government should have nothing to do with providing disaster relief , health care, education, or social security. But as the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast learned after Hurricane Katrina, relying on our neighbors is nothing more than a romantic notion. The hurricane happened in 2005. Assistance in recovery was not forthcoming from the federal government. Five years later, volunteer efforts on the part of corporations and non-profits have not been able to complete the task.

But what best illustrates the 21st Century failure to live up to Jesus’s 1st Century expectation of hospitality in Luke 11:5-9 is our treatment of immigrants – specifically, people who risk their lives to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. Our friends on the Christian Right insist that we are a Christian nation, yet we offer travelers nothing and lock our doors against them. We refuse to allow them food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical care. Even when the worst of humanitarian violations force the disintegration of “undocumented” immigrant families, we are unashamed.

The Elves who put together the Revised Common Lectionary do not get to Luke’s series on prayer until late July this year (Proper 12, Year C). The tradition has followed Luke’s lead and ignored the more likely (and troublesome) subject of hospitality. The accompanying Old Testament RCL readings are Hosea 1:2-10 and Genesis 18:20-32. The prophet Hosea is condemning the land and people of Israel for forsaking God. The story in Genesis is the preamble to the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both readings support the idea of God’s judgment and God’s answer to persistent prayer. When God threatens to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham convinces God to spare the cities for the sake of 10 righteous men. What is never read if the Revised Common Lectionary is followed is Genesis 19:1-29. But it is the full story of what happened to Lot in Sodom that goes to the heart of Jesus’s teaching about the friend at midnight.

The two angels sent by God to search out 10 righteous men arrive in Sodom in the evening. Lot sees them, and greets them with respect, and invites them into his house to wash their feet and spend the night. The angels decline, saying they will be fine spending the night in the village square. But Lot insists. They come into his house, and Lot prepares a feast. But then, before they retire for the night, the men of the city surround Lot’s house and demand that he throw the guests out so that the men can “know them.” The intent of the village men is clear. When Lot reminds them that the visitors have “come under the shelter of my roof” and offers them his daughters instead, the men of the village are outraged. But they are not outraged because of the offer of the daughters. That is a historical-cultural artifact that turns the story into a feminist “text of terror,” and can easily distract 21st century minds from the point. The men of Sodom are outraged because “this fellow came here as an alien, and he would play the judge!” In other words, the immigrant has the nerve to shame the citizens for their failure to offer safe haven to the strangers. (If this were an academic paper, the next comment would be in a footnote: One has to wonder how the story of the destruction of Sodom became so well known, given that the Elves have skipped it altogether for purposes of Sunday morning preaching at least as long as the Common Lectionary has been in use. Surely such a story of violence and unexplained custom is hardly suitable for children's Sunday School lessons.)

The ancient rule of hospitality was broken at the risk not only of shame, but of one’s own future security. In a world dependent upon the most primitive of communications, once the word was out that your tribal lands or your household did not honor the rule, you could find yourself denied assistance or shelter. The angels warn Lot that because of this sin – this failure of the men of Sodom to follow the most basic rule for human survival – God is going to destroy the city. Lot had better leave with the angels and bring along sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or anyone else that belongs to him.

Post-modern minds have drifted away from hospitality as an expression of distributive justice-compassion, where the stranger is given shelter – even feasted and entertained – for a night, with no questions asked. The post-modern form of the failure to honor the rule of hospitality plays out on a daily basis along the United States/Mexico border. It can also be clearly seen in the wall the Israelis constructed along the West Bank of the Jordan.

The ancient rule of hospitality still stands. God’s judgment – or the consequences for acting unjustly – does not apply only to people perceived as enemies. Throughout the Bible, God is just as likely to favor the enemy and condemn God’s own people because God cares only about justice-compassion. See, e.g., The Healing of Naaman, 2 Kings 5. We rightly reject the idea that God’s judgment for violating hospitality or ignoring God’s demand for justice takes the form of volcanos, hurricanes, or plagues. But we are mistaken if we think there is no judgment. God’s judgment in a post-modern world is expressed in political and environmental consequences. Politically, we now have the so-called Arizona “papers” law, which requires that Hispanics in Arizona now must carry proof of U.S. citizenship at all times or run the risk of arrest and deportation. Some may think that is no problem for citizens with blue eyes and blond hair. The implications of such naivety for human rights should be clear.

Environmentally, adding insult to injury in the Gulf of Mexico, now comes the mother of all oil leaks whose magnitude defies description. Again, government assistance is nowhere to be found; corporations are pointing fingers at one another; and class-action trial lawyers are on the prowl as BP offers pre-emptive $5,000 settlements to devastated families and businesses. Apparently all we can muster for our neighbors are internet campaigns to collect used pantyhose and dog hair.

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Bread and Debt

2010-05-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

Luke 11:1-4

The version of “the Lord’s prayer” in Luke is the one that is included in the Revised Common Lectionary. Matthew’s version is skipped. Perhaps it is skipped because Matthew’s version is closest to the “Our Father” that is prayed in nearly all Christian denominations. The Elves include Luke’s version in a series of readings for Proper 12 of Year C that appear to relate to how God answers prayer (Luke 11:5-13). As we shall see over the next two weeks, Luke’s parable about “the friend at midnight,” the “ask, seek, knock” aphorism, and the “bread/stone fish/snake” dichotomies have little if anything to do with Jesus’s original prayers about bread, debt, and adversity.

The NRSV translation of Luke’s form is:

Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.

The Jesus Seminar Scholars suggest that when verses from both Matthew and Luke are combined, the prayer that probably appeared in Q was:

Abba [Daddy], your name be revered. Impose your imperial rule. Provide us with the bread we need for the day; Forgive our debts to the extent we have forgiven those in debt to us. And please don’t subject us to test after test. The Five Gospels, p. 327.

What has been known as “the Lord’s prayer” for nearly two millennia was probably never prayed by Jesus in any form that appears, whether in Q, Matthew or Luke. Instead, the prayer consists of a collection of individual prayer fragments that may have been public prayers, or prayer-like aphorisms that Jesus said, on the order of “God forbid!” or “God only knows!” or “God’ll get you for that!” The intent was to nudge listeners into changing their attitudes, joining the Way, and ushering in the realm of God. In a 1998 essay published in The Fourth R, Jesus Seminar Fellow Hal Taussig discussed Jesus’s prayer in detail (“Behind and Before the Lord’s Prayer,” May-June 1998). One of Taussig’s more provocative statements is, “[T]hese prayers . . . were wise-cracking prayers which pushed those who said them to re-examine themselves.” I would also suggest that Jesus’s prayers were the opposite of petitions (desperate or trivial) to an interventionist god, and far removed from the pious mantra used to open 21st century church committee meetings or finish off the Sunday pastoral prayer.

The first phrase, “Daddy, your name be revered,” sounds shocking to 21st Century notions of holy propriety; for 1st Century Jews who were prohibited from speaking the name of God, it must have bordered on blasphemy. Next comes the request to “Impose your imperial rule.” That means God’s imperial rule, not Cesar’s. The next two phrases were seriously modified by Luke. First, Luke’s version asks for God to provide bread each day. The Q version – closer to what Jesus probably would have said – asks only for the bread needed for the day: today; now. But the kicker in the Q version is eliminated by Luke. The Q people prayed, “forgive our debts to the extent we forgive those in debt to us.” Luke says, “forgive us our sins because [for] we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” Luke’s pious community is off the hook. Finally, the last prayer fragment whines: “And please don’t subject us to test after test.”

To address deity as “Abba” – “Daddy” – presumes a partnership, not a hierarchical order of power. To then ask for forgiveness of debt to the extent that the one praying forgives debt owed presumes active participation, not passive acceptance of whatever “God’s will” might turn out to be. In other words, Jesus’s prayers are an illustration of the Covenant relationship demonstrated in the stories of the Jewish people throughout the Old Testament.

In the most recent edition of The Fourth R (Vol 23, No. 5, May-June 2010), Jack A. Hill explores the relationship of contemporary American culture with what he calls “the Divine Domain.” He lays out three aspects of a “culture of fear” in the United States: 1) fear of personal non-existence; 2) fear of diversity; and 3) fear of transformative innovation. He speaks of “evolutionary amnesia,” which is the root for a prevailing fear of death, and cuts us off from a realization of our commonality and profound relationship with the natural world. He relates two stories of people who survived shipwreck in the open sea because dolphins came to their rescue. He says, “we have forgotten what it feels like to greet the morning breeze as a friend, to be kept safe in the womb of the ocean, to be warmly regarded by the birds . . . .” These are experiences of what might be called “enchantment.” For a few years before the turn of the 21st Century, there was some discussion of the need for “re-enchantment” of corporate life. Perhaps even a reclaiming of the root meaning of the word “religion”: the realignment of human spirit with the divine realms, i.e., a return to Covenant. We must assume that is the kind of relationship Jesus had with God’s realm – God’s world. This relationship is reflected in his prayers.

This is not misty-eyed, romantic, “spirituality.” Jesus’s prayer suggests a non-violent alternative to oppression under the Roman empire. If one lives in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, then there is no reason to be worried about having bread for the day. Forgiving debt means declining to participate in the normal economic systems. Finally, God does not need to test people who are already participating in the Kingdom. Mark’s story about Jesus and the Devil comes to mind (Mark 1:12-13).

Eckhart Tolle is a popular, contemporary “spiritual teacher.” He has written two books that are categorized by Amazon.com under “Health, Body, and Mind.” They combine a variety of western “Zen” or “Buddhism” and generalized Christian traditionalism. But the basic message both in The Power of Now and A New Earth is the quest for what Tich Nat Han calls mindfulness, and what these commentaries would call “Covenant,” and what Jack A. Hill described above as “Divine Domain.” Tolle writes:

The mind is more comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been planned through thought: it has not grown organically. There is an order here that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don’t try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest. As soon as you sense the hidden harmony, that sacredness, you realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life. A New Earth (Penguin, 2006) p. 196.

This experience leaves no room or role for an interventionist “god” who is outside of ourselves and the world in which we live. The relationship is more intimate than even a concept like “Daddy” can reach. “Mama” may come closer. A petition for food or debt relief or forgiveness becomes meaningless in such a context, where there is no boundary between me and the divine. If there is no boundary, then there is no greater or lesser transformational power than my own. But while this hidden harmony, this sacred space, is a place to gather strength, it is not a place where I can hide. To live in that divine domain (as Hill describes it) requires mindful action. The struggle is always to find our way into that divine domain, or as Jesus put it, to find the treasure that is hidden in the field, or mixed like leaven into the flour. The joke is that we are already there – all we have to do is open our eyes and look and listen.

Jesus’s prayer makes that clear: God’s sacred space is holy, and that holy realm rules. We have what we need for now – indeed there is no other time than now. And there is no debt, so long as we do not hold debt ourselves. Finally, there is no demand for perfection, no trial, no test, unless – to stretch Tolle’s metaphor – we fail to see the forest because of the trees.

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Mary, Martha, and Zen

2010-05-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

Luke 10:38-42; Amos 8:1-12; Genesis 18:1-10; Psalm 52; Psalm 15; Colossians 1:15-28

As with last week’s commentary on the parable of the good Samaritan, the Revised Common Lectionary does not get to Luke’s story of Mary and Martha until mid-July of this current Year C. However, the RCL does follow Luke’s sequence. It may be that Luke’s back-to-back scenes illustrate the grounding laws of Judaism: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength” (Deuteronomy 6 :4-5) and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). The parable of the Samaritan – according to Luke – is about loving your neighbor; the vignette with Mary and Martha – again according to Luke – is about loving God.

Because Luke made up the story of Mary and Martha out of whole cloth, we can do with it whatever we wish. Jesus never had this encounter, never hinted that women disciples are better (or worse) than women supporters or servants of his ministry. We might wonder, briefly, if Luke created this story in order to address an issue in his community. As John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg are fond of reminding us, prohibitions on or sermons about particular behaviors never arise unless there is a problem. For example, posting a sign on the church door saying that nudity is not acceptable would only be necessary if someone had walked in naked. Perhaps a debate had developed in Luke’s community about the proper role of women as disciples vs. caretakers. It is impossible to know. But in any event, this story is not about women’s liberation from patriarchy. It is not about the proper role for women in 21st Century church and society. It’s about choosing to follow Jesus’ Way into God’s Kingdom.

The Common Lectionary readings that accompany Luke’s story offer metaphors of fruitfulness and spiritual maturity. The prophet Amos talks about the basket of summer fruit that will become famine because the people turn away from God’s great work of justice-compassion. Sarah and Abraham– in their spiritual maturity and trust in God’s word – will bear the fruit of a son, and be the ancestors of many nations. Psalm 52 warns that evil doers will not succeed; Psalm 15 says that those who will dwell on God’s holy hill will be “those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right.” The only piece that is a clanging gong in the ensemble is the Colossians rant about “Christ” being “the head of the body the church,” and the theology of substitutionary atonement, which the real Paul had no time for. Perhaps it’s a way out for orthodox preachers who don’t want to consider unconventional interpretations of Luke’s Mary/Martha drama. Contrary to much contemporary preaching, the story is not about sibling rivalry and woman’s real place in the home.

In the 14th Century, Meister Eckhart may have had the same accompanying scriptures in mind. In 1980, Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox published a collection of Eckhart’s sermons titled “Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation.” In commentaries on each of 37 sermons, Fox spells out the Catholic mystic justification for his theology of Creation Spirituality. Two sermons are on the subject of Mary and Martha, using the metaphor of fruitfulness as a sign of spiritual maturity. Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 20 talks about how Martha represents the mature person – the “wife” who bears fruit, who serves the master. Mary is the “virgin,” the young sycophant, enamored of the guru, naive, and trapped in ego-involvement. Mary Magdalene’s aria, “I don’t know how to love him,” from Jesus Christ Superstar comes to mind. But “wife” and “virgin” are metaphors for Eckhart, and gender is irrelevant to this discussion. In Sermon 34, Eckhart continues with the metaphor of a spiritually mature person (Martha) living in depth with God, not – as is Mary – enamored with the idea of being a disciple. For Eckhart, contemplation is not better than action, nor are ideas more valuable than work.

Eckhart writes, “I call it obedience when the will is sufficient for what our insight commands” (Sermon 34p. 485). Mary cannot yet imagine what action her devotion to Jesus’s teaching might demand. But Martha has already integrated the desire to follow Jesus’s teachings with the work required to do so. Eckhart imagines that Martha’s complaint that Mary isn’t helping is really a bit of gentle ribbing to get Mary to let go and let be – to get out of her mind and into the fruitfulness of service. Mary’s “better part” is that she is learning to live in God’s kingdom and to join in the ongoing work of distributive justice-compassion, but is not there yet. Fox suggests that this Mary is the Magdalene, who only later . . . learned how to . . . do works of compassion. . . .”

To be spiritually mature is to participate in the great work of distributive justice-compassion, in order to bring about the transformation of human society from greed to sharing, from violent retribution and payback to the non-violent, radical abandonment of self-interest. Fox writes, “Eckhart believes that contemplation is not better than, nor in the mature person even different from, work. . . . Compassion and the works born of compassion are themselves acts of contemplation. This is the fulness of spiritual maturity: to be in the world, active in the world, and yet not hindered by these actions from being always in God.” Fox commentary on Sermon 34, p. 489.

Fox says that our work is an enchantment. That means, we live, breathe, move and have our being in that ocean of compassion that is God. We are possessed by and obsessed with that spirit. At the same time, the Zen of following Jesus’ Way and doing the great work of God’s Kingdom of Justice Compassion means letting go and letting be. Let go of the mind chatter about being a disciple, activist, whatever, and just do it.

Progressing from naivety to maturity is not a linear journey, but a continuum of experience. Luke’s story is a snapshot of a moment in time, not an allegory about women’s role in the early church.

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Samaritans in the Ditch

2010-04-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

Luke 10:25-37

The Revised Common Lectionary will not get to Luke’s retelling of Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan until mid-summer. But this blog is discussing Luke/Acts in the sequence in which it was written. By unfortunate yet serendipitous chance, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is especially timely.

The story of the good Samaritan is probably one of the most loved and misunderstood parables that Jesus told. Nearly all of us identify with the Samaritan who stops to help a man who had been robbed and left for dead by the side of the road. There are probably hundreds of homeless shelters, feeding programs, and free clinics world-wide with the name “Samaritan” in them, but they miss the original point of the parable. See The Five Gospels, (Harper SanFrancisco, 1993) p. 324. For a couple thousand years, probably starting with Luke’s community, people who heard this story heard it as changing the idea of a neighbor from one who receives love (the man in the ditch) to one who gives love (the Samaritan).

Luke throws the parable off point when he uses the story to answer a legal expert who tries to test Jesus by asking, “what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers with his own question: “How do you read what is written in the Law?” The lawyer quotes the founding rule of Jewish covenantal life: “You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your energy, and with all your mind; and [you are to love] your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus tells him he’s right. “Do this, and you will have life.” But the lawyer isn’t satisfied. He wants Jesus to tell him who his neighbor is. So Jesus tells the parable about the Samaritan. At the end of the story, Luke’s Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of these three, in your opinion, acted like a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” The lawyer answers, “the one who showed him compassion.” Jesus says, “Then go and do the same yourself.”

Luke was writing for Roman citizens – Gentiles, who accepted the Jewish God but not Jewish customs. If Luke’s readers were also among the educated and rich, the story would have been perfect for challenging the conscience without challenging Roman authority. Gentile readers, with no real idea about what Jewish custom or history was, would have been glad to blame the priest and the Levite for passing by callously on the other side because of “purity laws.” Like 21st Century Christians, who have heard the story since childhood, Luke’s 1st Century community would have had no idea what it would have meant to the Jewish man in the ditch to be saved by an enemy Samaritan. But Jesus’ original audience would have immediately seen the improbability of an enemy Samaritan helping a Jew. In 21st Century terms, receiving such assistance would be like accepting donations from Hammas to the fund for 9/11 victims. In Jesus’s original parable, roles are reversed, expectations exploded, and the playing field has been radically leveled.

Jesus’ contemporaries may have heard him tell the story at a banquet. After the main course has been cleared and the wine and fruit brought out, the political discussions begin, interspersed with jokes and aphorisms about the occupying Romans, godless Greek pagans, Arab traders, and local riff-raff such as the tax collectors, dishonest merchants, and of course, those dirty, shifty-eyed Samaritans, who live in the hills and probably worship the old Canaanite gods and goddesses in contravention of God’s law.

Into the raucous profanity Jesus tosses this gem: “Have you heard the one about the man who was going from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell into the hands of robbers? They stripped him and beat him up and left him for dead.”

“So what else is new?” the listeners gripe. “The Romans refuse to secure the road. We’re all at the mercy of bandits and murderers!”

“Well it just so happens,” Jesus goes on, “That a priest was going down that road. When he saw the man, he went out of his way to avoid him. In the same way, a Levite came to the place, took one look at him, and crossed the road to avoid him.”

“Probably thought he was dead. Unclean. Can’t touch him. It’s the law.”

“But this Samaritan who was traveling that way came to where he was and –”

“Hah! Picked what was left of his pockets, right?”

“– was moved to pity at the sight of him.”

Jesus has everyone’s full attention at this point, and escalates the preposterousness of the scene with every following phrase: “He went up to him and bandaged his wounds–”

[“huh?”]

“–poured olive oil and wine on them. Then he hoisted him up on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and looked after him.”

“Get out!”

“The next day, he took out two silver coins, which he gave to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Look after him, and on my way back, I’ll reimburse you for any extra expense you have had.”

The entire room falls out laughing.

It would be fun to remain a fly on the wall at this point and listen to the discussion among the listeners, who identified with the victim in the ditch, not with the people passing by. The question was not to whom am I a neighbor, but from whom can I expect help?

The following chilling, contemporary example reflects the parable from both points of view. First, a homeless man (Hugo Tale-Yax) came to the assistance of a woman being attacked. Assistance came to her from a very unexpected quarter of the human terrain. The rescuer was then stabbed by the woman’s attacker. Both the woman and the attacker fled in different directions. The homeless man lay in a pool of blood on the pavement for an hour and-a-half, while people passed by, looked at him, took cell phone photos of him, and turned him over to see if he was dead. No one came to his assistance. By the time somebody got around to calling 911, he was dead at the scene.

Taking the traditional reading of the parable, how much longer can we pass by on the other side? Taking the more disturbing meaning, what happens to us when we are tossed into the margins? From whom can we expect help? Apparently our fellow human beings are no more likely to come to our aid than are the institutions we thought we had created to help us. Law enforcement, FEMA, the U.S. Congress – all fail us. Even our 21st century equivalents of the priest and the Levite in Jesus’s parable – our institutional churches – look the other way when confronted with inhumane workplace conditions, unfair immigration laws, and war disguised as “preemptive strikes” against “enemies,” whom we are supposed to love.

Perhaps it has been more convenient for Christians to understand this parable as requiring selflessness on our part. We are to be as compassionate as the Samaritan, and therefore worthy of “salvation” from Hell in the next life. When the rich and socially-connected take care of charity cases, the need for expensive government safety nets is much less. And when the “less fortunate” are convinced that it is their duty as well to care for their own, even better.

Oppressed people often side with their oppressors as a matter of survival. The man in the ditch had to accept help from his enemy or die. On that very personal level, it is easy to see that refusing assistance would have been stupid But the stupidity is not so obvious when the choice for those in the ditch is to work for Walmart for minimum wage versus working overtime for unsafe mine operators while taking home upwards of $70,000 a year. Accusations of collaborating with injustice are easy to make. After all, we might be thinking, that "contemporary" incident mentioned above was nothing more than a criminal street fight.

But something else more radical than any of these scenarios is going on in this parable. The playing field has been leveled. The despised Samaritan is saving the equally despised victim of Roman oppression. In the contemporary example, the whole altercation happened in Queens, New York, among people of questionable reputation at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday.
Deeper yet, in the parable, both parties have surrendered to the reality of their individual humanity, and have acted from that common ground. The Samaritan has treated his enemy as a friend; the Jew has experienced his enemy as a savior.

Do we no longer recognize humanity in 21st Century America? How long must we lie in the ditch?

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Call For Progressive Christian Evangelism

2010-04-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

Luke 10:1-24

Luke’s Jesus sends out 72 disciples to teach and heal. He provides instructions for the road; he also rails against cities that don’t accept his teachings – despite the fact that elsewhere he has said to love your enemies. When the disciples come back exulting that “Lord, even the demons submit to us when we invoke your name!” Jesus says (as though he had magically seen the evidence) “I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” He says that the truth about him has been hidden from the wise and intelligent, but revealed to the “untutored.” Everything has been turned over to him, but no one knows who Jesus is unless he wishes to reveal himself. “Many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, and didn’t see it, and to hear what you hear, and didn’t hear it.”

Luke likes to contrast insiders with outsiders. Jesus’s teachings are secrets to be passed on only to those privileged few in the inner circle to whom Jesus chooses to reveal them. The Jesus Seminar Scholars have suggested that Luke was making Jesus’s message safe for Roman society. However, that does not mean “safe” as in “safe from persecution.” There was little to no persecution of Jews or Christians during the time when Luke was probably creating his two-part epic. “Safe for Roman society” more likely means, watered down (or coded) so it would not present too great a challenge for non-Jewish newcomers to the Way, or offend the imperial theology. If followers of Jesus’s Way proclaimed Jesus as Lord, and not the Emperor, they would be guilty of disloyalty if not treason. But that was a matter of law, not a policy of deliberate persecution on the part of the Roman government.

These passages are easily read as a call to conservative evangelicals to step out in faith and proclaim Jesus as savior from death, hell and sin. Satan, as conservatives like to say, is roaring around like a hungry lion, looking for sinners to snatch and consume. But belief in Jesus can defeat the powers of evil today, just like they did in Jesus’s time.

The idea of “progressive” or “liberal Christian evangelism” may seem at first to be an oxymoron. But consider the state of Biblical literacy in the 21st Century. Most people have little to no knowledge of what the New or the Old Testament actually says. Indeed, outside of Christian churches few consider the Bible to be relevant to any discussion about the tough issues such as human rights for women (i.e., the right to choose what happens to our bodies); climate change; corporate malfeasance; poverty; or war. As for church-going Christians (whether liberal or fundamentalist) most turn out to be “untutored” in the Bible beyond the few short verses required to be memorized in Sunday School. Among these, of course is “Jesus wept.” The writer of Luke’s gospel was trying to make a point that the “wise and intelligent” were less able to recognize the Kingdom of God all around them. The “untutored” were children, the poor, and the less privileged, whose only hope was the Kingdom of God. Given the state of Biblical literacy in the church today, the truth about Jesus is still hidden from “the wise and intelligent.”

The possibility that Jesus’s message was one of radical fairness, and that following Jesus means creating and living in a world based on non-violent covenant instead of desperate selfishness, has certainly been hidden from view since before Luke decided to tell the story. It’s time to give the presidents and prime ministers of today the chance to see and hear the alternatives to imperial, retributive, business-as-usual. It’s time to offer viable alternatives to the feel-good, prosperity-based, exclusive, self-righteousness that passes for evangelism on the right. As liberal pundit Keith Olbermann has suggested, it’s time for some non-violent democratic action.

Taking Luke’s version of Jesus’s marching orders as a model, what would liberal or progressive Christian evangelism look like?

To start with, there are two sets of instructions for the road in Luke. The first set is in 9:1-6, and applies to the 12 members of Jesus’s inner circle. The second set is for the advance team that Luke’s Jesus sends out in pairs ahead of him to the villages he intends to visit. Unlike the 12, the72 are not supposed to wear sandals; not to greet anyone on the road; they are to extend the peace greeting to each house; and eat and drink whatever is provided. But really, all this shows is that as Christ communities formed and re-formed in the earliest days, ideas evolved. One of the ideas that did not survive on a large scale is that followers of the Way were (must be?) itinerant travelers, trusting the culture of hospitality, and the providence of God’s realm.

If 21st Century liberals are to reclaim Jesus’s teachings as a way of life, we may want to take a page from Paul’s mission to the Gentiles outside of Jerusalem. Paul’s original intent was not to form a new separate church, but to transform Judaism from within. But the controversy over whether new Gentile converts to the Way were required to follow Jewish laws (specifically circumcision) led to a rift between Paul and the Jerusalem faction. Paul’s increasingly universal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection resulted in the eventual separation of Judaism from Christianity. If an analogy may be made between this historical series of events and current Christian debates, then Paul’s letter to the Galatians is particularly relevant. (As an aside, note that Luke’s version of the encounter between Peter and Paul in Jerusalem differs significantly from what Paul writes. Compare Acts 15 with Galatians 2.)

Instead of demanding belief in a story about a resuscitated corpse that somehow is still walking the city streets today, scaring people into proper behavior, progressive Christians can witness to what scholars are telling us was Jesus’s original message. Instead of hellfire and damnation (such as Luke’s Jesus lets loose in 10:13-15) the good news from liberals is that the realm of God – where distributive justice-compassion rules – is here now (See Luke 10:9). Don’t worry about stepping on scorpions or handling snakes or subduing demons. The writer of Luke’s gospel may not have meant that to be taken literally, even at the end of the 1st Century. Once people start living from non-violent distributive justice-compassion, demonic evil begins to retreat.

Today, the controversy is between those who would insist that belief in the story of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead is necessary for salvation in the next life versus the reclamation of Jesus’s original message, which says nothing about the dead, except that the dead should be left to bury their own (Luke 9:62). According to Jesus (in all four Gospels) the realm of God is here and now. This version of Christianity means living in radical abandonment of self-interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion in this life. Signing onto this way of life is a choice that anyone can make, without declaring belief or non-belief in anyone coming back from the dead. Much like Jewish law in Paul’s arguments, the metaphors of incarnation and resurrection – powerful as they are for those who understand them – are irrelevant. What matters is the result. Do we have a world where distributive justice-compassion holds sway? Or do we have a world where greed, retribution, and getting even are the norm? Liberal, progressive Christian evangelism is nothing less than changing the paradigm.

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Miners, Massey, and Montcoal

2010-04-15T08:36:00.000-07:00

The Choice for Progressives II: Jesus – Magician or Liberator?

Luke 9:7-62

The first part of this section of Luke’s Gospel deals with Luke’s version of the Feeding of the 5,000. These particular verses from Luke are never read in any of the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary. Mark’s original story of the Feeding of the 5,000 is also never read; the developers of the RCL prefer Matthew’s version. But neither Matthew nor Luke (and certainly not John – whose version is substituted for Mark’s in Year B) lay out the sequence like Mark does (see: Losing the Way Parts I-III and Bread of Life Parts I-IV).

Mark’s story (6:34-8:21) is an extended parable about the fair distribution of food, interspersed with hints from an increasingly exasperated Jesus about who he is and what he is trying to do. While the idea that this was a demonstration of radical sharing is there in Luke’s short vignette, Luke’s emphasis is on Jesus as the Anointed one, “the son of Adam [who] is destined to suffer a great deal, be rejected by the elders and ranking priests and scholars, and be killed and, on the third day, be raised.” The Transfiguration scene is of course read on the last Sunday of Epiphany and the second Sunday of Lent in Year C. Luke does not include Jesus walking on the water, or the discussion about food purity laws that Mark presents and Matthew copies into his gospel. Instead, Luke concentrates on what Jesus’s followers will, should, and must do after Jesus’s death.

What is Luke suggesting?

1.   Deny yourselves, take up your cross EVERY DAY and follow me.
2.   Lose your life FOR MY SAKE and find it
3.   Whoever is ashamed of ME AND MY MESSAGE the Son of Adam will be ashamed of in return
4.   Anyone who looks back from the plow is not qualified for God’s imperial rule.

None of these phrases is considered to be traceable to the historical Jesus. Instead, they are aphorisms for the community for which Luke was writing, 50 to 75 years after Jesus’s death. The Jesus Seminar scholars suggest that these admonitions are softened, or “domesticated.” They do not reflect Jesus’s original radical abandonment of self-interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion. Instead, the Scholars argue, Luke has turned the cross into an “everyday,” ordinary piety. The sayings encourage belief about Jesus himself, not participation in the way of life that he taught. The idea that “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (NRSV) reflects the story of Lot’s wife, who looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah and turned into a pillar of salt. Once you have accepted the Kingdom of God, Luke seems to be saying, you can’t have second thoughts. To follow the agricultural metaphor (which the JS Scholars do not pursue in their notes) anyone who looks back at the row he’s been plowing will veer off and the row will not be straight. Christian piety abounds.

The JS scholars argue that Luke made Christianity safe for Roman society, and Luke may well have succeeded in describing the message so that only insiders would realize what it meant. But I would suggest that Luke’s list can be read as radically as anything Jesus may have actually taught. Let’s consider Luke’s sequence in 9:7-62 in the light of the April 5, 2010 Massey Energy Company mining disaster in Montcoal, West Virginia.

Interestingly, the story begins with Herod, the oppressor and representative of imperial Rome, who wonders who this Jesus is. “He was curious to see him,” Luke reports. Then Luke briefly sketches the legend of the feeding of the 5,000. We might think this has only to do with food. But what Mark (and Luke) emphasize is the necessity for the followers of Jesus to trust the way of life in the realm of God and share what they have. This sharing does not begin and end with food, nor – applied to the 21st century – does this sharing end with comfort or charity provided to the survivors of preventable accidents. This sharing is in stark contrast to the greed represented by the deliberate decision to enjoy profit and productivity at the expense of the health and safety of workers. The disciples missed the point in all the gospel accounts. It’s not about magic and miracle. It’s about transforming the world from greed to giving.

Next, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah (God’s anointed one). Jesus warns his followers that the anointed one will suffer, be rejected by the elders and ranking priests and scholars, and be killed and on the third day be raised. Here the consequences of kenosis the radical abandonment of self-interest, and the intention to create a share-world instead of a greed-world are clear: rejection by the authorities and death. Vindication or resurrection are a hope, not a certainty. Luke’s Jesus says, “Those who want to come after me should deny themselves, pick up their cross every day, and follow me.”

This does not mean follow Jesus like sheep into the mines to be sacrificed to the god of greed and international commerce, in the vain hope that a miracle will bring us out safely. Nor does it mean that once dead, we will live again in some heavenly realm beyond Antares. It means somehow finding the courage to blow the whistle on the safety violations; to refuse to work in illegal conditions; to organize collective bargaining associations in the face of company rules prohibiting unions. These are the crosses mineworkers are asked to bear. The consequences can be dire: losing jobs through firing or because the mine is at last shut down; falling into poverty; and death. Death can come at the hands of corporate collaborators, or friends who – like Judas – see no other way to survive than to sell out. If the mines can be shut down because of safety violations, the temptation is high for inspectors to ignore unsafe conditions, and for miners themselves to decline to complain.

Luke’s Jesus asks, “what good does it do a person to acquire the whole world and lose or forfeit oneself?” The writer of Mark’s Gospel adds a correlative: “Or what would a person give in exchange for life?” These are disturbing and dangerous questions to ask, especially if those questions are asked about the victims who died, and put to their surviving families. The point is not to blame the victims. The point is that the people West Virginia coal country (and throughout Appalachia) have no choice about where and how they earn a living. If they are to have the level of wealth that middle class white collar or unionized blue collar workers have elsewhere, then they have to work in the mines.

However, in the context of 21st Century corporate malfeasance, these are very valid questions with which to confront the boss. What would the corporation give in exchange for the lives of the mine workers? $70,000 a year, including required overtime pay? $4.2 million in corporate penalties and fines in one year, which amount to one hour of profit? Luke’s Jesus suggests a judgment against those who are “ashamed of me and my message.” Jesus’s message is, “deny yourself, pick up your cross every day, and follow me.” In 21st Century words, Jesus demands the radical abandonment of self-interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion here and now. Otherwise, “when the Son of Adam comes again to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, he will in turn be ashamed of that person.” Again, in 21st Century language, the judgment is not some time in the future when the world ends. The judgment is now in the consequences that result in death.

About a week after delivering these sayings, Luke says, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain to pray. Jesus is transfigured to a being of dazzling white light. Moses and Elijah – the greatest of prophets up to that point in Jewish spiritual history – appear to walk beside him. Then a cloud moves in, and God says, “This is my son, my chosen one. Listen to him!” But the disciples apparently don’t listen. The following day a man brings his son to Jesus because the disciples are unable to exorcise the evil spirit that is possessing the child. Jesus has had enough. “You distrustful and perverted lot,” he yells, “How long must I associate with you and put up with you?” And he heals the boy himself. Luke follows this with another warning from Jesus about his impending death, but the disciples not only don’t understand. “They always dreaded to ask him about this remark.” Worse, Luke chooses this point to talk about the argument that broke out among them about who is the greatest.

Who is listening today? Corporations that are now considered to be people by the U.S. Supreme Court are certainly not listening. They are too busy determining who will be the greatest, the richest, the most politically powerful. The workers are not listening either, but at ths point cannot be blamed for choosing what appears to be the only path. They are oppressed and victimized by corporations that win awards for stated policies regarding safety, but whose daily behavior nullifies what’s on paper. Neither the political parties on the right who claim Jesus as their Lord, nor the political parties on the left who claim justice and equity for all, are listening.

Nor is the Church, the purported “body of Christ,” listening.

Jesus said, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the son of Adam has nowhere to rest his head.” Scholars argue that this may have actually been a call to the earliest of Jesus’s followers to live a life of itinerancy. But the literal meaning of those words is evident today: The Son of Adam is nowhere to be found in the economics of mining nor in other economic systems on the planet. Further, if the government of the State of West Virginia continues its policy that assures that mining trumps everything, then the foxes and the birds will soon join Jesus in the homeless population.

Jesus also said, “Leave it to the dead to bury their own dead; but you go out and announce God’s imperial rule.” These are shocking words. Luke tries to soften and explain them when he has Jesus say, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is qualified for God’s imperial rule.” We cannot know the context that produced Jesus’s original words, handed down by oral tradition, and captured in this sequence by the writer of Luke’s gospel. But in terms of justice-compassion, and applied specifically to the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, Luke’s qualifier is just as radical as Jesus’s seemingly heartless demand.

So far, what the coal companies have done is assure that regulations and changes are only brought about with the blood of the people in the mines. Let those who are dead to the possibility of justice-compassion bury the dead. For those who would assure the future health, safety, and justice for the mining industry, don’t look back. The workers must organize and stand together for fair wages and working conditions; the regulators must ignore threats from corporations and close down unsafe operations; state legislators must stop worrying about being elected, and start passing laws that assure federal regulations will be enforced; and the rest of the people in West Virginia must demand world-class education, retraining, health care, sustainable, meaningful work, and affordable housing for everyone. Higher taxes and lower profits are far less expensive than 29 lives.

Luke’s sequence begins with Herod, the oppressor and representative of imperial Rome, who wondered who this Jesus was, and wanted to meet him. Perhaps, as the story of the Upper Big Branch Mine continues to unfold, the supporters of business as usual in West Virginia will have that chance.

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Good Friday and Holy Saturday

2010-04-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

Holy Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis
copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.

Friday

John 18:1-19:37; Isaiah 52:13-53:12

John’s detailed story of the arrest, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus is intricately interwoven with the third Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. John is especially interested in showing that Jesus died in fulfillment of scripture. Two millennia of tradition, visual art, musical art, and film confirm the basic belief of all Christianity. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. . . he was wounded for our transgressions . . . and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” There isn’t a choir member on the Planet who has not sung these choruses from Handel’s great Messiah.

As should be evident from this past week of commentary, this Christology cannot be reclaimed; it must be replaced. Neither guilt nor self-loathing are emotions that empower people to love others, or spur people to take action with justice as radical fairness, or to give up systems that demand retribution and payback. Jesus was not executed by the representatives of the Roman Empire because God needed a scapegoat to carry away the sins of the world. Jesus was executed because the way of life that he taught challenged and contradicted the conventional order. Jesus’s Way overturns the normal systems of piety, war, and victory, and restores God’s Covenant: non-violence, distributive justice, and true peace.

The question for 21st Century Christians is not whether you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, but whether your Jesus – your Christ – your Lord – your God – is violent, demanding retributive justice, or non-violent, expecting and desiring distributive justice-compassion. The choice we make regarding the nature of our God determines the quality of life for all sentient beings on the Planet. The non-violent, non-interventionist, kenotic God, without ego, without being, is the context within which and from which the earth and all its creatures realize wholeness. The crucifixion and death of Jesus – indeed the violent death of anyone working for the cause of justice-compassion – signals the absence of that kenotic god whose presence is justice and life.

Kenosis, in this series of essays, means the radical abandonment of self-interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion. When we make that choice, as John’s Jesus showed and taught us, we suffer because that choice can mean going against family, friends, church, society, government. What is most difficult to deal with is that seldom do we see any confirmation that our choice has made any difference. The versions of Jesus’s death in Mark and Matthew graphically describe Jesus’s certainty that he had been abandoned by God. If injustice and death indicate the absence of the kenotic god, then Jesus was not only betrayed and abandoned by his friends; he was indeed betrayed and abandoned by his God.

Saturday

John 19:38-42; Job 14:1-14

"As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep . . . If mortals die, will they live again? All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come." So the writer of Job – taken out of the context the writer intended – plunges us into the stark reality of the death of the Servant, who dies in the service of God’s justice, and waits for God’s vindication. Holy Saturday is the via negativa: the journey into darkness, despair, hopelessness, death. (See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Bear & Co., Santa Fe, 1983).)

The developers of the Revised Common Lectionary, of course, have cherry-picked the passages from Job, ending with the Servant’s anticipated release. If the entire chapter is read, the mourning for loss is profound: If my release should come, the servant Job says, “[God] would call, and I would answer; [God] would long for the work of [God’s] hands. . . [God] would not keep watch over my sin . . . But the mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place . . . so you [God] destroy the hope of mortals . . . their children come to honor and they do not know it; they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed. . . .” By stopping with verse 14, the possibility is left open for the theological argument about how Jesus descended into Hell to release the souls of the martyrs. But as far as Jesus’ community of followers was concerned, as of the Sabbath, the powers and principalities had won. It is important to realize how possible such an outcome is in the 21st Century.

The powers and principalities, the normalcy of civilization, the seemingly inevitable domination of empire and systems of retribution have brought us to the brink of human if not planetary extinction. To quote Borg and Crossan yet again, “ . . . we can do it already in about five different ways – atomically, biologically, chemically, demographically, ecologically – and we are only up to e” (p. 171). Politically, the United States is the first among equals of violent empire, following the drumbeat of military and economic power in pursuit of world domination. U.S. foreign, domestic, and economic policies are grounded in violent ideology that is deaf to reality, even provable, measurable, physical realities such as global warming, mortal poverty, and ignorance. We should sit in dust and ashes for a moment, and not skip blithely into Easter’s happy ending. Without experiencing via negativa, without traveling to the middle of the labyrinth, past the demons, we can never arrive at the fire at the center where the creative response is generated, and the key to the way out into transformation is found.

Without death, there is no life. This is the law of the Universe.

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Thursday

2010-04-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

Holy Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis
copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.

Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19; John 13:1-17; 31b-35; 1st Cor. 11:23-26

Holy Week began with Jesus’s demonstration countering the pomp and circumstance of imperial force; Monday was a foreshadowing of the consequences of taking such a stance against the powers and principalities of normal human systems, as Mary anoints Jesus, preparing his body in advance for death. Tuesday provided the theological context. God’s wisdom raises the slave above all others who would pretend to be the rulers of the universe. Wednesday suggested Jesus as the model of that kenotic Servant. This is not a power-over others, but a power-with the seamless matrix of Being in the Universe. On Thursday those who would follow that model receive the mandate.

When the Church conflates John’s pre-Passover footwashing with the imagery of the Paschal Lamb and the stories of the “last supper” in the synoptic gospels, the result is a mixed metaphor: Forgiveness of “sin” is confused with deliverance from injustice, and the radically inclusive equality of the Kingdom of God is lost.

In John’s version of Jesus’ story, Jesus “loved his own, who were in the world, [and] he loved them to the end.” As a demonstration of that self-less love, Jesus takes off his outer robe, wraps a towel around himself, and proceeds to wash his disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel. In the normal course, as the master teacher, Jesus would be justified in expecting that his disciples wash his feet. But Jesus never does what would be expected in the normal course. His kenotic action is a demonstration of how his followers are to treat one another. After he has washed their feet he says, “I have set you an example that you also should do as I have done to you . . . I tell you, servants are not greater than their masters, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.” In other words, John’s Jesus says, if you understand the conventional social arrangement (servants are not greater than their masters), Congratulations. But look at what I have just done. The master has become the servant; the order of normal human interaction is reversed. When Peter objects, Jesus says, “Unless I wash you, you have no share [i.e., nothing in common] with me.” Taken at face value, these words seem contradictory or exclusionary; instead, they illustrate the profound equality of power in the Kingdom of God.

The inclusion of Exodus 12:1-14 in the list of readings for Maundy Thursday seems to confirm John’s theology that Jesus is the new Paschal Lamb. Twice John refers to the day and time of Jesus's death being the "day of preparation" for the Passover, when the Passover lambs were ritually slaughtered in the temple (see John 19:14; 19:31). But the synoptic tradition does not make that connection. The blood of the Paschal Lamb was smeared above the doors of the ancient Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, so that God’s angel of death would pass over them. The Paschal Lamb is a symbol of deliverance, both from God’s judgment for injustice, and from the people’s enemies. It is not a symbol of forgiveness of sin. As John’s high priest Caiphas says (albeit without a clue what he was saying at the time), “. . . it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50-52) Jesus is the willing sacrifice – the one who willingly chooses to give up his life in the process of restoring God’s justice-compassion to God’s world. Borg and Crossan say it best:

"Recall, however, the challenge of Jesus in [Mark] 8:34-35: “. . . those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake . . . will save it.” Recall also [that] . . . Peter wanted no part of that fate, the Twelve debated their relative worth, and James and John wanted first seats afterward. But Jesus had explained to them quite clearly that his and their life was a flat contradiction to the normalcy of civilization’s domination systems. In other words it was by participation with Jesus and, even more, in Jesus that his followers were to pass through death to resurrection, from the domination life of human normalcy to the servant life of human transcendence."

The Last Week, pp. 119-120.

There is no “institution of the Lord’s Supper” in John, and so the Revised Common Lectionary offers what is thought to be the original from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul’s Jesus declares, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” Paul explains, “for as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” But these words have become identified with substitutionary atonement and apocalyptic second-coming imagery. The Eucharist has become the commemoration of Jesus’s betrayal and death, and the confession of sin as complicity on the part of his followers (then and now) in that action. The celebrant proclaims “The blood of the new covenant poured out . . . for the forgiveness of sins.” But that is not what Paul intended.

The purpose of the shared meal that became the defining ritual of early Christianity was to renew the Covenant with God for radical, distributive justice, and to pledge to keep the Covenant until the Christ would come again. Like the foot-washing ritual in John’s story, the usual social order was reversed. Instead of a public sacrifice and banquet intended to maintain the proper relationships between the social elements of clients and patrons, extending to the emperor and ultimately to the gods (and to the god Cesar), the bread and cup were a symbol of the absence of hierarchy among the members of the communities founded by Paul (the body of Christ). In the Corinthians passage, which is of course lifted out of context, Paul explains that if the ritual meal maintains the usual social hierarchy, then it is not “the Lord’s supper” (1 Cor. 11:17-22).

The Maundy Thursday Tenebrae ritual, whether it includes footwashing, or simply the re-enactment of Jesus’ last supper, sends us out of the church in silence and darkness to contemplate our complicity in Judas’ betrayal. The betrayal is understood to be the sin that Jesus forgives. But traditional commemorations of the last night Jesus spent with his disciples risk empty if not dangerous piety. Piety is empty when it relies on the certainty of forgiveness without accountability and unaccompanied by transformation; piety is dangerous when it is aligned with imperial injustice.

Followers of Jesus’s Way are complicit with Judas, not because of personal wrongdoing, or some kind of “original sin” dating back to Adam and Eve, and certainly not because of vicarious responsibility for Jesus’s death. Followers of Jesus’s way are complicit with Judas because it is so much easier to settle for survival. If we try to organize a union where we work in our local grocery store chain, we will be fired. If we preach a 21st Century faith, based on scholarship and the realities of 21st Century life, we will be ignored at best or fired and defrocked. If we defend terrorists, our homes may be fire-bombed. If we come out as gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered humans, we will be drummed out of the military. If we provide legal abortions to poor women, we risk being murdered.

It gets worse. Whether we claim to be followers of Jesus’s Way or not, if we invest our money in the companies that give us the best return, we will be supporting companies that exploit workers, intimidate whistle-blowers, and disrupt the balance of the Earth’s eco-systems. If we move to the country to escape the stress of the city, we end up with a much less sustainable life-style, unless we grow our own food. The “interdependent web of which we are a part,” celebrated by Unitarian Universalists, is nearly totally compromised by the normalcy of human social systems.

Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, may be a time of profound ritual of remembrance but what is more important is that it is a time for recommitment to the great work of distributive justice-compassion, in the face of the overwhelming strength of conventional, normal, social and political systems. Maundy Thursday, when the mandate to love one another as Jesus loved his disciples is powerfully demonstrated by Jesus, is actually the heart of Holy Week. The execution of Jesus at the hands of Rome is not the point. The belief in the resurrection of Jesus as a verifiable fact is also not the point, no matter how many reinterpretations of the metaphor of the empty tomb. The point is kenosis: the radical abandonment of self-interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion, with the expectation that living such a life leads to death on a cross, and the willingness to take that risk.

Tenebrae Eucharist

One:       On the last night with his disciples, as they lounged at their dinner, Jesus decided to try one last time to make them really understand what he was doing, and what it really meant to follow him.

Another:   He picked up a loaf of bread, and spoke into the hubbub of their conversation: Listen! – he said – This bread is like God’s justice in this world. Then he tore the loaf into two pieces. This is God’s justice in the hands of the Romans and the Temple authorities who collaborate with them. Believe me, one of you is going to turn me in to them soon. If not tonight, then as soon as the Passover is finished.   Whenever you eat together after this night, remember that, and remember me.

One:       Then Jesus picked up the jug of wine.

Another:   This wine is also like the Kingdom of God – it is the blood of the paschal lamb, painted on the lintels and doorposts of our people as a sign that they belong to God and not to Pharoah’s Empire. But now the collaborators have made this wine into a corruption – a libation poured out in honor of the Empire of Rome. – a repudiation of God’s protection and deliverance.

One:       And he poured the wine into a cup and held it up to them.

Another:   He said, “Let the one who has chosen this cup take his possessions and do what he must.” And he dumped the contents into a bowl for disposal.

One:       Several of the company began to leave quietly, and he let them go. Then he poured a second cup of wine and said, “But this cup that I drink is a new cup. It is a libation of my blood poured out for justice for all those who chose to share it. Drink it. All of you who are willing to commit to establish God’s justice-compassion, and remember.

Another:   He passed the cup to them, and they passed it among themselves as a pledge. And while they were doing this, one of the women – perhaps it was Mary of Magdala – the one who Jesus loved – left the room and returned with a tiny jar of essential oil of lavender. And she came up to Jesus’ couch and said, “You will die for what you have done this week – perhaps tonight – and I know I will never have the chance to prepare your body for burial. If they take you, there will be nothing left.”

One:       Then she broke open the vial and anointed his face and hands. And he took it from her and went to the one next to him and said, “She has done what she could. She has prepared my body for death. Do the same for one another in remembrance of her.” And he anointed that one, and that one went to the next until all in the company had been so ordained.

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Wednesday

2010-03-31T10:49:00.000-07:00

Holy Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis
copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.

John 13:21-32; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Hebrews 12:1-3; Psalm 70

For those who chose not to do the Passion readings on Palm Sunday, Isaiah 50:4-9a is revisited now, but not in the context of Paul’s letter to the Philippians (“at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”). Now the emphasis is on the willingness of the servant to submit to the will of God: “I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward. . . I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.” John’s Jesus knows who will betray him, and clearly indicates who it is by handing Judas the bread after it has been dipped in the bowl – yet the disciples fail to realize what is right in front of their faces: The hour for Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension has arrived.

If the readings suggested by The Revised Common Lectionary are simply read in the context of traditional Christian belief, the story of the servant depicted in Isaiah easily becomes a prequel to the suffering and death of Jesus, the Messiah. The Psalm then is a plea on the part of listeners to be saved from such a death: “Be pleased, O God, to deliver me . . . Let those be put to shame and confusion who seek my life . . .” The verses cherry-picked from the pastoral letter called “Hebrews” reassures that “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . .” we can indeed “run with perseverance the race that is set before us . . .”

That portion of the sermon by the writer of Hebrews has been used by would-be preachers and genuine prophets of Christianity for nearly two millennia. In his last speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made reference to those who did not receive what was promised in their lifetimes, but who, like Moses and King himself, had been to the mountain top and had been privileged to see the promised land. The “cloud of witnesses” refers to a litany of the Judeo-Christian journey (Heb 11:29-40), and the promise of the power of the Christ coming again. But if read beyond the portion selected by the RCL, the metaphor soon breaks down into a thinly-veiled antisemitism along with the usual threats of hell-fire and damnation: “. . . for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven! . . . for indeed our God is a consuming fire” (12:25-29)

Because we already know the story from Mark, Matthew, and Luke, we assume that John’s Judas has already conspired with the high priest Caiaphas to hand Jesus over to the religious authorities for 30 pieces of silver. We assume that the reason the “chief priests and the Pharisees” in John’s story wanted to kill Jesus was because of Jesus’s demonstration against the money-changers in the Temple. We never read John 11:45-57, in which the religious authorities plot to kill Jesus. We never learn that Jesus’s raising of his friend Lazarus from the dead was the last straw for the high priest Caiaphas. “This man is performing many signs,” Caiaphas tells the meeting of the council. “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” (The Romans did indeed destroy Jerusalem, well before John wrote his gospel, but not because Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, or performed any other “signs.”) John then says, “Jesus therefore no longer walked about openly among the Jews, but went from there to a town called Ephraim in the region near the wilderness; and he remained there with the disciples” until the time came for him to return to Jerusalem for the final Passover. “Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who knew where Jesus was should let them know, so that they might arrest him.” The stage is set for Judas leading both Roman soldiers and Temple police to arrest Jesus in the garden, not for the exchange of silver or Judas’s eventual remorseful suicide.

Judas’s motives have been the subject of speculation since the story was first told. Jesus hands the bread to Judas and tells him to “Do quickly what you are going to do,” and Judas goes out into the night. John’s version of the story says that “Some thought that because Judas had the common purse,” Jesus was telling him to buy supplies for their Passover festivities, or make a donation to the poor – acts of easy piety. The writer of John’s gospel concludes that Judas was taken over by Satan. In The Last Week, Borg and Crossan write that “. . . it is possible to gain control of the earth by demonic collaboration. It is possible to fall prey to the ancient (and modern) delusion of religious power backed by imperial violence.” (p. 206) Quite probably, Judas did what he thought was right. He abandoned what had to look like a lost cause in occupied Jerusalem in order to save himself from the consequences of being associated with a man the authorities wanted to arrest. Caiphas did what he thought he needed to do in order to survive and preserve what he perceived to be the Jewish way of life. Indeed, John has him say that “it is better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50). Ultimately, Pontius Pilate was absolutely correct in sentencing Jesus to death for the sake of preserving law and order and his own position as the Roman ruler of Palestine.

There is nothing supernatural about Jesus’ conviction that he would be turned over to the religious authorities, and likely ultimately executed by the Roman occupiers. Jesus maintains his integrity in the service of justice-compassion, against the normalcy of civilization, relying upon the same kind of faith as Isaiah’s Servant. But the kenosis illustrated by the third servant song of Isaiah is not submission to the will of an interventionist God who wants a sacrifice in payment for sin, or who “disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts” (Heb. 12:5-6 ref Proverbs 3:11-12). Instead this kenosis means actively listening to the desire of a relational spirit for an exiled people to live in justice-compassion. The servant says, “Morning by morning he wakens my ear to listen as those [do] who are taught.” The servant listens and continues to teach reconciliation with that spirit and distributive justice among the people. The servant does this despite persecution, torture, failure, and insult. He empowers the people to maintain their covenant with God against the demonic forces that impel the people to collaborate with the empire that has carried them off into exile.

The disciples could not hear what John’s Jesus was trying to tell them. The others around the table that night apparently had no clue of the danger that he (and they) were in because of the threat that he (and they) presented to law and order under Roman occupation. Judas was not the only follower of Jesus to be caught up in the mind-set that reduces teachings of non-violent justice-compassion to empty piety. To live and practice non-violent justice-compassion is to actively counter the imperial forces that seduce us into going shopping, hiring illegal aliens as slave labor, and joining the military because we have been convinced that it is the only way to “be all we can be.”

The creators of the Revised Common Lectionary leave out verses 10 and 11 of Isaiah 50, and they should not because the Servant addresses those very conditions that produce empty piety instead of an active counter to imperial retributive systems. The Servant wonders “who [among you] walks in darkness and has no light, yet trusts in the name of the Lord and relies upon his God?” The conclusion is, few if any. But in a post-modern world, where the interventionist god died long ago, the Servant’s challenge to faith has meaning only if we accept the invitation to participate in the ongoing great work of justice-compassion. Then we become partners with the kenotic servant God in restoring God’s justice-compassion to the world – which belongs to that kenotic servant God. And the life and death of the servant-teacher Jesus is the model.

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Tuesday

2010-03-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

Holy Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis
copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.

John 12:20-36; Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Light versus darkness, revelation versus secrecy, wisdom versus foolishness are the motifs that are interwoven in the readings for this day. Christian tradition has so intertwined and literalized these metaphors that it is nearly impossible for post-modern exiles to glean any other meaning than what has come to be “orthodox” (correct) belief. The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) does not follow the sequence of John’s narrative. Knowing that John’s Gospel was written 70 to 90 years after the death of Jesus, and 30 to 50 years after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple hardly helps. As presented by the RCL, John’s Gospel bears little if any connection to participation in God’s justice-compassion on earth, here and now. Instead, it dazzles and distracts us with promises of becoming “children of light” if we will only believe. The story is not important; conveying the theology and proving the supremacy of Christianity is what matters.

The “servant’s songs” in Isaiah are attributed to an unknown prophet who lived in Babylon during the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people during the 6th Century, BCE. The servant is often interpreted to be the nation of Israel, not an individual, and in this second song (Is. 49:1-7) God declares to the entire earth (bounded by the “coastlands”) that the nation of Israel has been called to serve God’s justice-compassion. The servant Israel has been hidden away, and even though it looks as though that great work of justice-compassion has gone unnoticed, it has not. God will restore the Servant people to power and kings and emperors will stand up and take notice. God says, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” “Salvation” in this context does not mean “going to heaven at death.” “Salvation” in terms of the Isaiah of the Babylonian exile means liberation from enemies. In the wider sense of Isaiah 55, it means living in God’s kingdom of distributive justice and peace for all of the days allotted to life, whether of the community, or the individual members.

The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels may have pointed to these prophecies as encouragement to his followers, struggling to love justice and live in non-violent resistance to Rome. He is highly unlikely to have claimed that he himself was the fore-ordained embodiment of Isaiah 49, which Christian tradition continues to do.

The readings for holy week from John’s gospel do follow their own logic. On Monday, Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha, anoints Jesus’s body in advance for burial. On Tuesday, John’s Jesus delivers his last public dialogue, in which he claims the metaphor of seed and grain, life and light, and God Himself speaks from heaven in response to Jesus’ pious invocation: “Father, glorify your name.” God thunders that “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” And we understand that to mean the glorification of the once and future Christ Jesus. Jesus proclaims that the ruler of this world (Satan) will be driven out, and that Jesus the Christ will be lifted up and “will draw all people to myself. . . While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.”

After this, Jesus (the Servant) goes into hiding. This is not the first time in John that Jesus has disappeared for some period of time (see 7:1,10; 8:59). Most recently (12:36) after the raising of Lazarus, Caiaphas, the high priest, declares “. . . it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” From that time on, John says, “they planned to put Jesus to death.” So Jesus “no longer walked about openly among the Jews, but went from there to a town called Ephraim in the region near the wilderness; and he remained there with the disciples.”

Jesus does a lot of hiding out in John, and swears everyone to secrecy in Mark. But that is no reason to think that when the prophet says in Isaiah 49:2b “in the shadow of his hand he hid me,” the prophet is talking about Jesus. When the prophet says “I will give you as a light to the nations,” he is not talking about John’s Jesus, who says, when the people ask him who is the Son of Man who will be lifted up, “The light is with you for a little longer. . . While you have the light believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” That is John’s insightful metaphor, which may be said to claim that Jesus is the fulfillment of the servant song. But in order to fulfill that prophecy, the servant must suffer the consequences of countering the political powers that be.

The portion from 1st Corinthians is apparently pivotal to Christian orthodoxy because it is required reading in all three lectionary years: twice in years B and C and three times in year A: Holy Cross (all three years; September 14); Lent 3 (year B); Tuesday of Holy Week (all three years); and 4 Epiphany (year A). But 1st Corinthians 1:18 cannot be taken at face value: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Taken out of its context, and put together with the other readings understood in the traditional way, this verse is arrogant, exclusive, and – given its association with verse 23b – antisemitic.

Paul’s opening salvo needs to be studied in its whole context, from 1:10 through 2:17. Two points made by Crossan and Reed in In Search of Paul need to be kept in mind. First, Paul’s theology sets the realm/kingdom of God in opposition to the empire of Rome. Second, Paul’s theology contrasts the self-serving normalcy of civilized life with the radical denial of self-interest (kenosis) of those who are committed to the great work of restoring God’s distributive justice-compassion. When these two points are understood, antisemitism disappears, along with Christian spiritual exclusivity and Christian political hegemony.

So, Paul is blasting his friends in Corinth for fighting about which baptism carries the most weight. Paul says he wishes he hadn’t baptized anyone, because Christ did not send him to baptize people but to proclaim the power of the cross of Christ. That power, says Paul, makes no sense to those who are “perishing” by living according to the unjust systems of Roman imperial society. But those who get the point of the crucifixion of Jesus are liberated from injustice, and empowered to join and continue the work. Paul calls for the Corinthians to consider who they were when they joined the group. “Not many of you” were powerful or of noble birth – which implies that some indeed were. But those who were of high rank or social status don’t get to brag about that, and claim power over others in the community. “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord,” Paul says.

21st Century Christian leaders must repudiate the emphasis on Paul’s phrase, “we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Clearly, this phrase has been used in the service of antisemitism from the beginning of the organized Christian Church. Further, “Gentiles” has often meant non-Christians other than Jews who do not believe the Christian myth. Both interpretations have been and continue to be anachronisms because the phrase has been lifted out of its context. Paul goes on to say that “to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God.” In other words, to those who agree to participate in the restoration of God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, regardless of who they may be, the crucified Christ symbolizes the power and the wisdom of God’s kenotic action in the world.

Because Paul was a devout Jew, and a Pharisee, he uses Jewish theology to powerful effect. One aspect of Jewish theological tradition is the concept of the Wisdom of God. Wisdom is personified as the feminine spirit who was with God from the beginning, who pitched her tents among the people, who calls from the heights beside the way. When Paul says that “Christ [is] the power and the wisdom of God,” he is drawing on ancient and revered Jewish tradition. In 1 Corinthians 2:8, he says “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom . . . But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” “Lay aside immaturity,” Wisdom says, “and live and walk in the way of insight” (Proverbs 9:6; see, especially, Proverbs 8).

God’s wisdom is revealed through God’s kenotic, radically self-denying spirit, which was embodied in Jesus. When Jesus died, that same spirit was then extended to those who can accept it. This is craziness to people caught up in the normalcy of social hierarchy and control. It is liberation to those who are able to discern that it is spiritual truth. They (we) “have the mind of Christ” – as we were inspired to do by the readings for Palm Sunday.

What is revolutionary in these readings is not the magic of believing a story about Jesus. What is revolutionary is that the very nature of power as humanity generally understands it is reversed. The servant is the cornerstone. Relinquishing one’s very well-being to the point of death carries more power than any earthly ruler who relies on retributive systems to maintain his or her position. Faith is knowing the truth of that assertion regardless of all evidence to the contrary.

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Holy Monday

2010-03-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

Holy Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis
copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.

John 12:1-11; Isaiah 42:1-9; Hebrews 9:11-15

The reading from John’s Gospel for Monday of Holy Week revisits the story of the woman with the alabaster jar. The story is so powerful that it appears in all the gospels, and is considered twice by the lectionary readings in Year C. For that reason, some form of this incident may very well have actually happened. The question is when, and under what circumstances. She must have been an important member – even a leader – in Jesus’ entourage, even though she is unnamed in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Mark, Matthew, and John place the story in Jesus’ last days as he journeys toward Jerusalem, death, and resurrection. In Luke’s version this demonstration was not associated with Jesus’s last days. It was an intrusion on a symposium, or banquet, for men only. The woman was a penitent prostitute (by legend, Mary Magdalene), and the story is treated as a scandal.

John assumes she was Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, close friends of Jesus. In John’s version of the story, “six days before the Passover,” there is a dinner for Jesus at the home of Lazarus, whom Jesus has raised from the dead. At this dinner, Lazarus is one of those at table with him, and Martha serves. Mary takes a pound of expensive perfume and anoints Jesus’ feet with it, then wipes his feet with her hair.

The Revised Common Lectionary includes Hebrews 9:11-15 with the readings for Monday of Holy Week. The writer of Hebrews argues that the Christ came as a high priest from the mysterious order of Melchizedek. This high priest overthrew the old ways of purification through animal sacrifice. “How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!” Heb. 9:14. The writer is talking about purity and redemption (buy-back) for transgressions committed under Moses’s old covenant. It is because of Jesus’s pure blood sacrifice that “those who are called” can “received the promised eternal inheritance.” These passages – lifted from the context of the full argument – place anti-Semitism like a faint watermark in the background.

But from Israel’s ancient past, Isaiah’s “suffering servant” models a different kind of power that brings God’s justice-compassion. Whether the servant is a person – perhaps a future king – or represents the collective people of ancient Israel, power is redefined as kenotic power. That is, power that is self-denying, not self-aggrandizing. In the first of these “servant songs,” the prophet says that the former ways of doing business are well established, but new ways are coming. The mandate is unmistakable: the servant is a partner with God in establishing God’s justice, and “the coastlands” – the earth within its coastal boundaries – actively wait – anticipate – look forward to hearing – whatever the servant has to say. Suddenly there is no threat of retributive mayhem or payback, and the universe – perhaps weary of the constant bombardment of human unwillingness to live in trust and wholeness – is waiting for that teaching.

Mary’s action at Lazarus’s dinner party claims unequivocally that the first part of the prophecy in Isaiah 42 has been fulfilled in Jesus. The meaning of this story is far removed from what is presented in Hebrews.

"Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching."

Three times, God says his servant will bring justice, and while it will come with non-violence, and without fanfare, it will come nevertheless with power. How is justice brought forth with power and without violence? Here is where post-modern Christian exiles must part company with the Christian orthodoxy represented by the writer of Hebrews. Jesus death was not a blood sacrifice required to “purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God.” Jesus’s death was in the service of God’s distributive justice-compassion.

That death – although violent – did not happen in order to bring about God’s distributive justice-compassion. That violent death was a result of subverting the old ways of doing business – retributive justice, payback, the usual power structures. Isaiah says that the servant “will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice . . . a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”

The poor and those denied access to the usual social and political powers afforded to citizens of civilized societies (the disenfranchised) demand justice because they live with injustice daily. But any human being is susceptible to the corruption of political, social, economic, and personal power systems that lead seemingly inevitably to what John Dominic Crossan calls “the normalcy of civilization.” Justice under this “normal” condition is retributive. Power-over others and getting even define the only power that seems to make a difference. The rich – the privileged – who control access to the usual expressions of political or social power are the ones most easily corrupted by the power they hold.

This may be the trap Judas found himself in. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus may have been among the rich patrons who supported Jesus. Lazarus sponsored a dinner party for Jesus. Mary may have bought the perfume herself. So what is Judas complaining about? In John’s story, Judas is outraged by Mary’s extravagant waste of a commodity that could have been sold and the money given to the poor. But it is a false piety. “He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief,” says John. “He kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.” The writer was probably setting up Judas for the betrayal to come. But money is not what brings God’s distributive justice. What brings God’s distributive justice is “my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” Mary uses the money to buy a pound of pure nard, and instead of keeping it “for the day of my burial,” as Jesus suggests, she anoints Jesus’s feet with it. Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Money designated by the rich for the poor merely continues to buy into the normal systems that keep injustice and violence in place. Instead of making the expected donation, Mary has acknowledged Jesus as the servant of God, and has anticipated his death. The writers of both Luke and John say that the reason Judas betrayed Jesus was that he was possessed by Satan. Without working through the metaphor suggested by this characterization (“the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” 1 Timothy 6:10), it is possible that after Mary’s extravagant misuse of the company funds, the only way Judas could see to ensure his own economic survival was to turn Jesus in to the collaborators with Roman authority.

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Palm Sunday

2010-03-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

Holy Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis
copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.

Luke 19:28-40; Luke 22:14-23:56; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11 (Readings from Year C)

Palm Sunday is also known as “Passion Sunday.” The minister has the choice of concentrating on Jesus’s triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, hailed as a conquering hero by the fickle crowds (the “Liturgy of the Palms”), or telling the entire “passion” story. The Abingdon Press edition of The Revised Common Lectionary of 1992 (RCL) admonishes worship planners that “whenever possible, the whole passion narrative should be read.” As a result, the liturgy on Palm Sunday can run the dizzying gamut from adulatory parade to Pilate’s death sentence in an hour.

In Year C, the RCL offers for consideration Luke’s descriptions of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and Pilate’s decision to grant the demand of the crowd and sentence Jesus to death, along with a portion of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The traditional view of both the Jerusalem procession and Philippians 2:9-11 is that this is the imperial Christ triumphant. “Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (NRSV).

Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan suggest that Jesus’s “entrance into Jerusalem” on a donkey during the festival of Passover is a parody of Pilate’s procession into the city at the same time. Jesus’s “peasant procession” came from the east, down the Mount of Olives. Pilate’s “military procession” came from the west, in a show of force for law and order. (See The Last Week, Harper SanFrancisco, 2006). While they base their study on the Gospel of Mark, Luke’s Gospel uses Mark, but adds details. A very telling detail – never read if the RCL is followed – is Jesus weeping over the consequences that will arise because of the inability of the people to recognize their visitation from God and the “things that make for peace” (Luke 19:41-44). The Palm Sunday parade is a political protest. If Borg and Crossan are also correct in their theory that Luke’s birth story was meant as a counter to the birth stories told about Cesar Augustus (see The First Christmas, Harper SanFrancisco, 2007), then Luke’s gospel appears to be threaded (albeit subtly) by subversive imagery.

In addition, as these commentaries have suggested, based on Jesus Seminar scholarship, Paul’s theology is not one of domination, but of transformation; not of violence and political victory, but of non-violent justice-compassion. Despite the use to which these verses in Philippians 2:9-11 have been put throughout Christian history, the Apostle Paul was not establishing Jesus as the new commander-in-chief of the military might of the known and unknown universe. The hymn was probably not written by Paul. Instead it is probably one of the earliest used by followers of Jesus’s Way, and quoted by Paul.

The portion of the hymn to the Christ that Paul quotes may be seen to fulfill Isaiah’s expectation of deliverance from injustice. It is an ecstatic, mystical declaration that the Emperors of Rome, living and dead, who declared themselves and their ancestors to be “god” and “son of god” and even “very god of very gods” would have to acknowledge that Jesus’ name was above even theirs. Jesus was the one chosen by God to be the one to restore God’s distributive justice-compassion, in place of the Emperor’s retributive justice. In place of law, the Christ establishes radical fairness. The servant of God gives up the power associated with the usual systems of imperial civilization (See Luke 4:1-13) The servant of God is not interested in pay-back or retribution, nor in reward and glorification. The servant of God works with God to establish God’s distributive justice-compassion. The servant does the work for the glory of God, and is vindicated, delivered from injustice and death.

Luke’s scene where Pilate condemns Jesus to torture and death, along with Philippians 2:7-8 (Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” – NRSV) has been interpreted to mean that Jesus agreed to submit to the orders of a violently vengeful god and to accept the death penalty on behalf of sinful humanity. Without that payment, humanity cannot be saved from hell. This is the “ransom theory of the atonement.” It is the earliest of the atonement theories, probably beginning with the writer of Mark’s gospel in the 60s to 70s C.E. Since the 12th Century, St. Anselm’s substitutionary atonement has defined the death of Jesus at the hands of the Roman Empire. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ, is perhaps the penultimate illustration of that theology. God required that Jesus not only die in our place, but should suffer in order to pay for the sin humanity inherited from Adam and Eve. The greater the sin, the greater the vicarious suffering, the greater Jesus’s love for us.

But the first part of the hymn to the Christ is about neither ransom nor substitution. It is about personal kenosis – the act of disregarding petty human desires, and defeating the temptation to revel in being the equal of God. “[A]lthough he was born in the image of God, did not regard 'being like God' as something to use for his own advantage, but rid himself of such vain pretension and accepted a servant’s lot” (Scholar’s Version, forthcoming October 2010. For more information contact the Westar Institute).

Because Isaiah 50:4-9a is part of the Palm Sunday liturgy, the words of that hymn might be seen as a kind of midrash – a retelling or reframing of that portion of sacred story. As the hymn restates the nature of the ultimate servant of God, the suffering servant described by Isaiah becomes the suffering messiah, who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (NRSV). The servant is obedient to God’s law of justice-compassion to the point of death on a cross – the ultimate symbol of imperial law and order. “That is why God raised him higher than anyone and awarded him the title that is above all others . . .” (Scholars Version).

Isaiah 50 is not some kind of foretelling of the fate of the future Jesus. It is a model for those who would teach the nature of God. “Morning by morning [God] wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught” sings Isaiah. When we let go of self-interest – ego survival – we “think in the same way that the Anointed, Jesus, did . . .” (SV). We think and act kenotically in a constant, evolving struggle of spirit for justice-compassion against the normalcy of civilization. The “suffering servant” trusts God’s vindication, that God will prove the servant to be right in the end: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word . . . God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious. . . . I did not hide my face from insult and spitting. . . . Who will declare me guilty? All of them will wear out like a garment.”

The cherry–picking of Paul’s writings, which are scattered throughout all three years of the Revised Common Lectionary, means that the Palm Sunday verses from Philippians are separated from the context in which Paul wrote them. When that happens, Christians can easily ignore or dismiss the action that is called for in 2:1-5, just before the hymn to the Christ. Paul urges the community in Philippi to have this same kenotic mind that Jesus had: “regard others as better than yourselves. . . . look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (NRSV) With those words, Paul invites the 1st Century Philippians (and anyone in the 21st Century) to a radical abandonment of self-interest. Paul is talking about creating the realm of God on earth. In such a realm, greed has no place, and debt has no power. Creating such a realm requires the kind of obedience that comes from total commitment to distributive justice-compassion, which can (and often does) lead to death at the hands of imperial systems.

Later in the letter (3:8-9) Paul writes “Indeed, I now regard everything as worthless in light of the incomparable value of realizing that the Anointed, Jesus, is my lord. Because of him I wrote off all of those assets and now regard them as worth no more than rubbish so that I can gain the incomparable asset of the Anointed and be found in solidarity with him, no longer having an integrity of my own making based on performing the requirements of religious law, but now having the integrity endorsed by God, the integrity of an absolute confidence in and reliance upon God like that of the Anointed, Jesus. This integrity is endorsed by God and is based on such unconditional trust in God” (SV). Here is the basis for kenosis at all levels:

•   a kenotic foreign policy – in which crushing debt carried by nations such as Haiti is summarily dismissed;
•   kenotic business practice – in which profits are secondary to safety, reliability, and sustainability; where debt is not leveraged in order to amass fortunes that seduce others into debt they cannot afford;
•   kenotic management – in which suggestions for improvement, or whistle-blowing corruption are valued;
•   kenotic relationships – in which the well-being of the other is foremost.

In the 21st Century CE, some are calling for punishment of the speculators and managers who seem to be responsible for the global financial melt-down of 2008-10. Others are holding individual people responsible for making poor choices, or for not having the good sense to avoid the deal that seemed too good to be true. But this is pious revenge. If justice is distributive, there is no need for punishment beyond the consequences already befalling all of us who are caught in the system.

Luke’s Jesus weeps over the inability of the people to recognize the coming of the kingdom, and the consequences that will result from that inability. Christians today are too busy getting ready for the Easter Bunny. We don’t want to hear how our failure to keep the promises we made during Lent to give up chocolate or stop smoking somehow make us personally responsible for the death of the Son of God two thousand years ago. Somewhere deep in our post–modern brains, we know that just isn’t true. But what is true is that as soon as we abandon justice-compassion, or ignore the consequences of our actions that lead to unjust systems, we are caught in the powerful currents that propel civilizations into empires. This is not an indictment of human nature, as John Dominic Crossan is careful to make clear. Empire can happen when people begin to organize themselves into societies, but the good news is that Empire is not necessarily inevitable. If we truly turn from our destructive, unjust habits, the old patterns will not be repeated. Sign onto the Covenant. Pick up your Blackberry and start making sustainable deals that ensure that no part of the interdependent web of life on this Planet is compromised. That is the promise and the hope of Palm Sunday. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

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Introduction to Holy Week – An Exploration of the Meaning of Kenosis

2010-03-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

copyright 2010 by Sea Raven, D.Min.

Throughout Holy Week, the Revised Common Lectionary readings for all three years focus on the Gospel of John, and the Servant Songs of Isaiah. The readings are carefully selected to show that Jesus is God’s Son, the Anointed One, known and ordained by God from the beginning of time to suffer and die for the sins of humanity, as foretold by the Prophet Isaiah. The writer of John’s Gospel intensifies his proof that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One, the eternal Logos, the Word of God known from the beginning of time, and the light of the world.

Over the next two weeks, this Holy Week series assumes particular answers to the four questions for the apocalypse, which have defined Liberal Christian Commentary for the past 4 years.

1) What is the nature of God? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or trust and commitment to the great work of distributive justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

“God” here is non-theistic, and “kenotic.” Kenosis classically means “emptiness.” As a Christian term it has been defined as in Philippians 2:6-7: “. . . although [the Anointed] was born in the image of God, [he] did not regard “being like God” as something to use for his own advantage, but rid himself of such vain pretension and accepted a servant’s lot. . . . [H]e was born like all human beings . . .” (Scholars Version, forthcoming from Polebridge Press [October 2010]) In John Dominic Crossan’s words, a kenotic god is “the beating heart of the Universe, whose presence is justice and life, and whose absence is injustice and death” (John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom, Harper SanFrancisco, 2004, pp. 288-291). In these commentaries, that “god” is the creative force that both contains and is contained by the Universe.

In answer to the questions, the nature of that force is nonviolent; Jesus’s message is inclusive. Faith is trust in an inclusive, non-violent universe. The context for human personal, social, and political life then becomes a Covenant with justice and life, and commitment to the ongoing struggle for liberation from injustice.

Civilization defines justice as retribution – payback; an eye for an eye. But the deeper meaning of justice is fair distribution. “Distributive justice” usually is narrowly defined as the fair distribution of wealth. But here the meaning is both wider and deeper to include the fair distribution of justice. Far beyond economics, as the rain falls on the good, the bad, and the ugly without partiality, distributive justice shows no partiality for any particular human condition. Human civilizations have not used that definition except in cases where there is clearly injustice if partiality enters the picture. The classic example in the United States is that if you are rich, white, and male your chances of serving jail time for possessing cocaine is an order of magnitude less than if you are poor, black, and female, charged with possessing marijuana. Occasionally there is a reversal of this pattern, as when an over-zealous North Carolina prosecutor trumped up a case of gang rape of a black stripper against a championship team of white LaCrosse players. In either case, distributive justice is at work – although in a negative sense.

The positive understanding of distributive justice is contained in the term distributive justice-compassion. The normal development of civilizations has historically led to systems for assuring safety and security of citizens. But as any reader of Charles Dickens must be aware, those systems often exclude the poor, the uneducated, those who are presumed to have no economic or social power (women, minorities). Members of societies who are denied access to those powers often become ensnared in activities deemed anti-social or criminal in order to survive. Distributive justice-compassion would not demand payback or retribution for such activities, but would provide solutions: reeducation, rehabilitation, redress of grievances.

Distributive justice-compassion holds sway in the Covenant relationship with the non-violent, inclusive, kenotic realm or Kingdom of God. Justice as retribution/pay-back holds sway in the normal march of humanity into civilization. The short-hand term for the seemingly inevitable systems of injustice that are the result of that march is “Empire.”

See especially the work of Jesus Seminar scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus J. Borg for a thorough discussion of these concepts.

The context for the above four questions of the apocalypse is the post-modern era of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Generally, historians speak about time in terms of premodern, modern, and post-modern. Pre-modern refers to the time before the Enlightenment and Descartes. The Modern era (post-Enlightenment) lasted for about 350 years. During that time, God was a separate being or entity, who created the universe, and proclaimed humanity to be the fulfillment of God’s creativity. The “post-modern” era might be argued to have actually begun with Charles Darwin. But regardless of the timing, “post-modern” means the time in which humanity began and continues to deal with the nature of the Universe as science has defined it. “God” as a separate being who intervenes in human life from “heaven” somewhere beyond Antares no longer makes intellectual sense.

This leads to another term that has migrated from post-modern science into post-modern spiritual and religious language. Cosmology means the science or theory of the universe. But the term as used by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox in his ground-breaking theology of original blessing goes beyond the scientific. Cosmology for Fox means humanity’s intellectual understanding of the nature of the universe. “Cosmology” as Fox (and this writer, among others) uses the term can describe the mind-set of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern people, as each of these evolutions of human thought has understood our place in and our relationship to the universe, and God.

If, as John Shelby Spong argues, Christianity is to have any relevance at all to post-modern spirituality, changes in focus and metaphor must be made. This series of essays for Holy Week calls for a change in paradigm, and points toward a beginning.

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Jesus: Magician or Liberator?– The Choice for Progressive Christians

2010-03-12T07:26:00.000-08:00

Luke 8:19-9:6; cf Mark 4:35-5:42

The writer of Luke/Acts had a very different agenda from the writer of the gospel of Mark. Mark’s Gospel is a progression – a journey – from Galilee to Jerusalem. Mark was the first to pull together the sayings and stories about Jesus and create a narrative that took listeners from confusion to clarity, from misunderstanding to revelation. Mark’s Gospel announces the arrival of God’s rule based on radical fairness and inclusion of poor and marginalized people. For Mark, God’s rule is in direct opposition to Roman law and order. Luke’s job, in contrast, was to make the new Christian Way acceptable to his Roman patron, Theophilius. (See The Five Gospels, p. 294.) He takes Mark’s stories and mixes them up so that Mark’s logic is lost. The emphasis changes from social and political justice to magic and miracle.

As we continue with Luke’s gospel, the next section begins with Jesus’s mother and brothers coming to see him. They can’t get to him because of “the crowd,” and he seems to dismiss them: “My mother and my brothers are those who listen to God’s message and do it,” he says. The question is, what is the message, and what are we to do? For Luke, the answer seems to come at the end of this series of exorcisms and healings. “He called the 12 together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to heal diseases.” The work seems to be to bring “good news and healing everywhere” (9:1-6). After this, Luke shifts to relating the parables; there is one more exorcism, and one more healing. Luke seems most concerned with convincing people that Jesus was the messiah, and with the importance of Christian piety.

Luke’s version of Mark’s story about Jesus “rebuking the wind and the waves” so that a “great squall” dies away is most often considered to be another miracle story. “Who can this fellow be?” the terrified disciples ask each other, “that even the wind and the sea obey him?” In Mark’s sequence, the story follows the parables of the Sower and the Mustard Seed. The irony in Mark’s story is that Jesus’s clueless followers still don’t get what Jesus is trying to teach them. Mark’s Jesus could not be more clear: “Why are you so cowardly?” he asks – perhaps with some irritation. “You still don’t trust, do you?”

But watch out. Christians traditionally have added or assumed that Jesus is implying the disciples don’t trust him. But that’s not what he says. Look at the way Mark originally set the scene (Mark 4:35). In contrast to Luke, who says “One day Jesus and his disciples happened to get into a boat . . .” Mark’s Jesus is teaching beside the sea, or Lake Galilee. “Later in the day, when evening had come, he says to them, ‘Let’s go across to the other side.’” Any fisherman worth his salt should have known that even though the Lake was subject to sudden storms, in the evening, there is often (if not always) a calm as the sun sets. How many recreational sailors on the Chesapeake Bay (or any large body of water) have had to either use their onboard engines, or be towed back to Annapolis once the sun approaches the horizon and the wind dies? So Jesus falls asleep on some cushions in the stern of the boat, and a sudden squall materializes. Why should those supposedly seasoned sailors panic? Surely that squall would have died out as quickly as it came up? In Mark’s view, Jesus’s followers not only do not understand what Jesus was trying to teach them. They don’t even trust their own experience of God’s natural world.

The 5th Chapter of Mark contains three stories of deliverance. The first, which we read in Year C from the Gospel of Luke, is the story of the “man of the city” possessed by a demon named “Legion.” When the demons ask Jesus not to send them back to “the abyss,” he sends them into a herd of swine instead. Now, swine are unclean animals. So the swineherds must be outcast people – perhaps they are gentiles, even Roman servants. So when the man says his name is “Legion,” is he saying his life has been taken over by Roman oppressors? The people of the surrounding country are frightened by Jesus’ action in healing/delivering/liberating the man from the oppression of the Roman demons by releasing them into the pigs, which are then destroyed because they run down the bank into the lake and are drowned. The people ask Jesus to leave, and he does. When the liberated man asks to go with him, however, Jesus tells him to go home and let people know “how much God has done for you.” But instead of proclaiming how much the Hebrew God had done for him, the man claims instead how much Jesus had done for him.

Perhaps if the man had claimed the Hebrew God instead of the man Jesus, the Romans would not have paid so much attention to Jesus as a threat to Roman authority. Beyond that, however, is the possibility that when Jesus sends the man home, back to his gentile village, he is sending his message of distributive justice-compassion into the heart of Roman-occupied society.

Mark follows the demoniac with two healings, and Luke makes no changes. The first is the raising from the dead of the daughter of a “synagogue official.” That story is interrupted by the second story about a woman in a seemingly permanent state of uncleanness because of a “flow of blood” that has lasted 12 years. After she is healed by surreptitiously touching Jesus’s robe, Jesus goes on to tell the supposedly dead child of a possible collaborator with Rome to get up. The possibilities for metaphors about 1st Century resistance to unclean Roman rule fairly leap off Mark’s pages. These are not miracle stories about medical cures, demon possession, and the mis-use of livestock. They are parables about subverting political and spiritual oppression; they show how trust in God’s reality transforms one’s oppressed life under imperial (Roman) occupation into freedom and justice. In Luke’s context, these are illustrations of healing and miracle working, which Jesus’s real “mother and brothers” are supposed to be doing

For 21st Century Christianity, the question is, which interpretation makes the most sense? Magic and miracle, or liberation from injustice? Scholars and commentators are often accused of reading 21st Century world views back into 1st Century writings. That is a fair enough criticism; however, two points need to be made. First, the sayings and stories about Jesus have been re-interpreted from the point of view of whatever century any particular scholar or preacher happened to be in since the day after Jesus’s death. Second, – and most important – even if the historical Jesus was really about magic and miracle (and contemporary scholarship is divided about that), 21st Century, post-modern, reason-based, would-be followers of Jesus cannot accept that interpretation without suspension of disbelief at a level that threatens our integrity.

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