Day 1170 - The Patient Gardener

The upcoming Sunday's lectionary reading (Luke 13:1-9) partly inspired this post. The reading emphasizes the importance of repentance (turning around), the uncertainty of life and at the same time the patience of the Lord who gracefully awaits that penitent act from us. This earlier than usual post was inspired also by a stunning religious editorial in last Saturday's paper (read on).

The message of the lectionary reading is for everyone, even “seekers” and non-believers.” It is difficult and unjustly used as a club of judgment lest one repent against "seekers" and "non-believers" because this reading primarily addresses disciples, which you readers are likely to be…It addresses root hypocrisy that “seekers” and non-believers” more easily see than do we ourselves.

 A Baptist preacher in North Carolina wrote a criticism of socialism in a nationally published column (see for example here, it was also published in the Chattanooga Times Free Press last Saturday). His criticism might benefit from reading and preaching this text.

“Pastor Bo,” as he likes to call himself, makes some unbelievably outrageous claims in his attack on socialism, such as women are property of men. Also he mangles scripture by partially quoting it (proof texting) to trumpet with obviously unintended irony his idea that socialism is a theological evil.

He argues socialism is evil because it mandates behavior (to take other person's property - their monetary wealth), therefore it is inimical to both American and Judeo-Christian ethics. He maintains this is so because Judaism and Christianity expect the faithful to elect (choose) voluntary behavior (to give one's wealth freely, although he seems to reject this idea).

Pastor Bo extends his argument to say that Christians who are good Americans do not vote themselves a portion of the fruits of labor of others. Had he grasped the beautifully expressed irony of his politically inspired screed, he likely would have rewritten it. (My parenthetical words in the previous paragraph illustrate the irony. I suspect he also advocates the Ten Commandments as mandated rules for righteous living, but I will not address the humor of that position in light of his argument about socialism.)

What Pastor Bo forgets (omits?) is that over many millennia the biblical warrant calls Christians and Jews to heal the circumstances that inspire socialism.

Isaiah (1:10-17) castigates Judah and Jerusalem, “…I will hide my eyes from you …cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

Paul (2 Corinthians 8) admonishes, “…it is a question of … your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.  As it is written, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

Lest Pastor Bo object that Paul is talking only about Christians coming to aid of fellow Christians we should pray that he understands the defense by Jesus of the woman who incurred exorbitant expense to anoint him before his arrest and death as irony towards her critics (See the passage in Mark and John for the two accounts of this event.) We might paraphrase his words to clarify the irony, “You can help the poor any time you choose; however, you will not and therefore you will have the poor always among you as a millstone about your neck.”

Yes, Pastor Bo, socialism is a bad thing for some people. Not because socialism is intrinsically evil (one could argue all self-serving ideals evil) but because the existence of socialism, its core motivation, intrinsically exposes an evil besmirching Judaism and Christianity - Christians and Jews are not fulfilling adequately their vocation to exercise compassion to those in need.

A pastor criticizing the evil of socialism sounds like the ultimate irony as the pastor seeks to cloak the spotlight on one’s own spiritual poverty. That is why the Lord loves a cheerful giver; the gift of grace humbles the giver, encourages compassion and helps the giver avoid the danger of judgment of those less fortunate.

Pastor Bo, why don’t we do something more compassionate than talk about the evil of socialism?

Amen.

Day 1166 – You Were Not Willing

A Reflection on a Bible Study at Second Presbyterian Church, Feb. 18, 2016, Chattanooga, TN.

The text: Luke 13:31-35  (Also the reading from the Revised Common Lectionary for this Sunday)

Luke gives us this passage exclusively among the synoptic gospels and it seems to achieve several ends. We know Herod was curious about Jesus (he beheaded John the Baptist) but this passage reveals the intent of his curiosity. This passage also conveys a second and third message from Jesus, that neither Herod (or any person) will prevent Jesus from reaching his goal. We do not know from the first two verses what is its goal, but Jesus makes it clear he is bound to another Higher authority. Finally, Jesus has an ominous lament for religious leaders and followers who fail to acknowledge his authority.

Only when Jesus laments over Jerusalem do we begin to understand what lies ahead. His draws upon Jeremiah 22:5 and Ps 118:26 lamenting that he came to gather God’s chosen together but they are not willing.

If you read the preceding verses 22-30, sometimes called “the judgment of the nations,” you will see how our verses are closely connected. Those verses describe the path to new life in the Kingdom of God as a narrow gate and reflect to the leaders of the synagogue, and by extension to the whole people of Israel, the reality placed upon them to accept or reject the Messiah and discover their own reception or rejection in the kingdom of God.

Reading verse 31 leaves one wondering, are the Pharisees trying by ruse to get Jesus to leave their presence and avoid Jerusalem? Or have they for some reason joined alliance with him against Herod, a theologically traitorous, Jewish king? One thing is certain these verses validate that Herod’s preoccupation with Jesus has a nefarious intent.

Hearing the word of Jesus in verse 32 leaves us wondering is Jesus being literal or figurative where he says, “…today, tomorrow and on the third day “I am finished.” .”) Since we are “educated” readers who know the final outcome we know Jesus can mean “Until I reach my goal,” rather than “I am finished

Yet Luke presents an intentionally ambiguous account. Is Jesus referring to his ongoing work of that will occupy his time until he reaches Jerusalem, or is Jesus presaging his final hours on the third day when he ascends to heaven fully completing his task seated at the right hand of God, saying in effect, no earthly power being Herod or Satan shall short circuit his mission?

Whatever the conclusion, verse 33 lets us know something ominous lies ahead in Jerusalem. One commentator (p. 743) suggested that we can translate the irony in 32-33 as “if you, Israel and Judah, must reject those sent you by God, then let’s have you do it properly, by doing it at the heart of all Jewish affairs in Jerusalem.”

Verses 33-34 take a turn towards a lament. Jesus draw attention to prophets being killed in Jerusalem. This is a vague sort of history. We do have events such as 2 Chronicles 24:17-23 where a king induced the people in Jerusalem to worship other gods, and Zechariah son of the high priest called them out and was stoned to death for doing it. We also know Jeremiah was imprisoned for his prophesy about King Hezekiah, and was thrown in a dry well. The theme in the preceding verses (Luke 13:22-30) and in v 35 draws heavily upon the prophesy of Jeremiah 22:1-8. Here is the concluding part of that passage:

6 “You are like Gilead to me,

                        like the summit of Lebanon;

            but I swear that I will make you a desert,

                        an uninhabited city.

7          I will prepare destroyers against you,

                        all with their weapons;

            they shall cut down your choicest cedars

                        and cast them into the fire.

8   And many nations will pass by this city, and all of them will say one to another, “Why has the LORD dealt in this way with that great city?”

These five verses pack a lot of weight. They pose and answer some core questions about the rejection of Jesus by Jerusalem (a placeholder for the entire religious establishment and those who fall under its sway?).

Can Herod forestall or short-circuit the completion of the calling of Jesus? The answer of course, as Jesus says, is entirely NO.

Is the tragedy that Herod desires to kill Jesus who must flee? No. Jesus will not flee. The tragedy is that Jerusalem for whom he has come will spurn him and its leaders turn upon him. The companion tragedy is that Jeremiah’s prophecy will be fulfilled.

Reflection:

The challenge with texts such as this one is how should we as Christians read and apply them? Do we read the judgment passage (v34-35) as judgment of the exiting Jewish religious establishment, or as a yardstick for us, or our country and its leaders?

In other words is the lament of Jesus universally applied, or is Jesus talking especially to God’s own special chosen people for whom he has a special bond, and has always promised to send a Messiah?” Many times Jesus called the ruling religious establishment to task for having turned from the call of the Law, to hold the Law in one’s heart so that one’s way of life reflects it.  That rebuke must also apply to those penitent Jews who read and know the Law. I come away thinking this passage principally is directed at Jerusalem.

However, if we come away from our study of Christianity discovering only one message, it might well be that the ministry of Jesus is a universal call to every believer to “walk the talk,” that is to have one’s way of life reflects Christ’s walk (presence) in the world.

A precept of Reformed theology is that we are all ministers. Does this passage then also by extension apply to us personally as it did to the scribes, Pharisees and priests?

Are we ministers giving lip service to the good news and the God of the Living by spreading judgment not grace, or are we willing followers of Jesus who can reply gracefully to any judgment against us, “I a living witness of the good news by my words and deeds today and tomorrow, and to the day I have finished my work and am called home”?

Day 1158 - Bread, Glory, and The Thirst for Life

A consideration of the temptation of Jesus after his baptism for the bible study group at Second Presbyterian Church, Chattanooga, TN.

The reading: Luke 4:1-13

Fred Craddock noted that Luke approached the gospel as a preacher and theologian. Luke seeks to bring to the listener themes about the relationship of church and synagogue, Jesus to the church, the church to the larger world, how the Holy Spirit relates to the life of Jesus and the church, and more.

My predilection, however, is to eschew the use of the word “church” except in its universal sense, the body of all believers. I prefer to talk about the church as particular congregations of believers who seek to know and perfect the way they walk in the world among real, individual persons as a witness to the grace God has shared with us.

Luke’s relation of the temptation of Jesus after his baptism seems peculiarly out of synchronization with Luke’s purpose unless we understand it as a validation of every act Jesus makes and every word he speaks between his baptism and his death. We could as Mark did and leap entirely over the history of the first three chapters of Luke and begin with his baptism and this reading.

This passage has a power to it, and an atmosphere that seems to clarify the divine and steadfast loyalty of Jesus to God the father as well as what is his mission and exactly where the powers of opposition to it lie. They do not lie in internal conflict, but the conflict of the external desires of humanity for bread, glory and its thirst for life. To a great extent we will hear from Luke they arise from the desire to escape poverty and the lure of wealth. Luke paints us a sublime and subtle differentiation between the power to resist evil by the man Jesus and ourselves. This event stands alone validating the full authority of Jesus as the “new Adam.”

Luke 4:1-4 describes the temptations after the baptism of Jesus. Jesus has been baptized and immediately goes into the wilderness. The words “full of the Holy Spirit” bring to mind the voice from heaven as he was baptized when the Spirit descended upon him. The “wilderness” and forty days evokes the forty days of Moses on the mountain without food confronted by the Lord (Exodus 34:28, Deuteronomy 9:9), the forty-year travail of the people of Israel in the wilderness before they entered the promised land (Deut. 8:2-6), and the flight of Elijah to the mountain of God (1 Kings 19:4-8). The hunger for bread evokes the cry of Israel against God asking for food when the lord gave them quail and manna. 

If we read the whole passage deeply, it also clearly evokes a comparison to the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:1-7) and our own personal temptations. The validation of the absolute obedience of Jesus to God unfolds here. It characterizes what separates him from us.  In essence, these scenes prove the credibility of his mission and qualification to do it.

Luke 4:5-8 steps up the intensity of the temptation. The connection to the temptation in the Garden of Eden emerges here. Though Luke uses the Greek word for devil through out the passage, we should acknowledge the power of evil in the world is characterized variedly in scripture. Evil is described as tendencies within ourselves. It is attributed to an external being outside our self, to a powerful angel gone astray, or to a cosmic force or forces allied against the will of God. Perhaps we should be somewhat humble about attributing evil to external sources rather than intrinsic, human sources.

In my sense, attributing the power of evil to external beings rather than the pull of the world on our desires diminishes the power of sin and the reality of the intrinsic human condition. The central key throughout scripture is that the evil in the world is a powerfully strong force that appeals to human desire encouraging us to pull us away from God.

The power of this passage should not be lost. This is not some divine part of God being tempted, this is the human Jesus facing the concrete forces that pull at the human longing seeking to separate us from God. In each temptation Jesus falls back upon a passage closely connected to the Law that repulses the temptation.

It is noteworthy that Jesus quotes Deut. 6:13-14 as a retort to the tempter. This temptation represents the intent to have Jesus acknowledge power comes from someone other than God.

Then we come to Luke 4:9-12 and the temple. Jesus is tempted to leap from the pinnacle of the temple so that angels of the Lord will protect him. This would demonstrate his divinity by his own connection to God, yet would destroy the unconditional love and the intent to use the cloak of humility as defense. Jesus refutes the core heresy of the temptation, saying we fail if we put the Lord to the test.

Jesus declines the temptation to use his power to reveal himself to Israel and Judah at the Temple in Jerusalem through an act that is contrary to his calling to bring people to him by faith. wouldn't succumbing to it invalidate the message of the entire gospel about the thirst for life - dying and being resurrected by God?

Then we come to the prophetic conclusion of that truth, verse 13. Here in the early verses of his gospel story, Luke gives the first signal of what lies ahead of Jesus, the opportune time marked by the beginning of our Lenten contemplation.

Reflection:  These quotations by Jesus in response to temptation cement the connection to the Exodus story where Israel was humbled by falling short doubting the steadfast love of the Lord to sustain his people yet receiving the gift of manna. The parallel to the first temptation in the Garden of Eden is inescapable.

Luke forces us to place greater significance to this event, the temptation of Jesus. This event draws a human parallel to the acts of our human disobedience, of falling to the power of sin by the people of Israel. This series of resisted temptations demonstrates that this man Jesus, the new Adam, succeeds where humanity will always fail. Jesus is glorified. This account takes on a significance that is almost beyond Luke’s focus. These events demonstrate this exemplary yet unobtainable power of Jesus to resist temptations that every human would succumb. It points to the message of the good news that will unfold in Luke.

 It sets us up for the greatest gift, something not even mentioned in the account, the gift of grace, the gift of forgiveness that comes from the unrequited love of God.

We come away from this mindful of the temptations we all face as we enter the season of Lent. It ought to give us pause as we leave the Ash Wednesday service with the cross marked on our forehead with oil and ashes, to be gracious to our fellows and thankful to the Lord that the glorification of Jesus is our own unjustified glorification.

While this story is a kind of theophany, testifying to the power of God; it also a sobering reminder of how real temptation is. It reminds us how the focus of our thirst for life is constantly torn between the comfort of personal “glory” and the gratification of our material desires and being led by the Holy Spirit that guides our work to be about God’s business.

Amen

Day 1156 - Where is your Galilee?

An amplification of a Bible study at Second Presbyterian Church, Feb. 4, 2016, Chattanooga, TN

Mark 15:46-16:8a

Last week I took Mercy Junction and the two groups Mercy Junction attacked to task for overlooking the opportunity to minister the compassion Christ taught in regard to a man of their congregation who was arrested for aggressive panhandling. 
I invite you to read this passage beginning with the last two verses of the preceding chapter. These two verses provide testimony to the death of Jesus. 
This post, an expansion on these two verses and the 8 verses that end the gospel of Mark, gives a more nuanced and real, though subtle explanation for the line separating political advocacy and the life of Christian ministry. 
I admit there is a gulf separating our views that is hard to span. They believe in a Machiavellian ideal that somehow they can use the power of the world to reshape it into their ideal "Christian life" - something their most loathed opponents believe also. It is hard to reconcile that motivation with the idea that God holds all the power, and the existence of the world in toto is an influence against the values and ethics of Christian compassion for the individual, not a tool for the collective whole that embraces that Machiavellian ideal. Every journey begins with a single step. To live those values and ethics day-by-day is the ultimate testimony to faith.

Let's begin. After this testimnoy that Jesus is dead, Mark begins to close his account of the good news:

Mark16:1-3 leads us to think perhaps the burial rites were not complete, the two women go back to the tomb to anoint the body (because now that the Sabbath was over it was proper to “work”?).  Yet they worry how will they be able to get to the body? Now Mark effects a stunning end:

Mark16:4-8  The oldest Greek manuscripts end the gospel of Mark here. More recent manuscripts contain various combinations of the verses 9-20, often called the shorter and longer ending of Mark. A very large number of scholars (as early as the second and third century of the Christian Era) recognize that these verses likely were added to harmonize the ending with the other synoptic gospels. See, for example, Luke 24 mirrors almost all the content of this longer ending. Before discussing this further let’s consider the “accepted” ending verses 1-8.

This ending has some very significant theological points. The women, as one might expect, are stunned and frightened to find the tomb empty except for this young man. The young man announces the key message of the gospel, “Jesus who was killed on the cross has been raised, he is not in his tomb.”

Mark could have ended his gospel right here but he continues with the imperative of the young man, “…go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  The English translation fails to capture the full reaction of the women is verse 8, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

The Greek words are tromos and ecstasis. Tromos really more appropriately means paralyzing, or heart-stopping deadly fear of not being able to fulfill a religious duty. Ecstasis is more appropriately translated as a fearful- and God-inspired spiritual awareness (in the sense of an ecstasy of perceiving certain spiritual knowledge). Mark is telling us the two women were petrified to the point of death not in finding the tomb empty except for this young man, but to know with certainty they were in God’s presence receiving this revelatory Good News and fearing/doubting their adequacy to respond to the command from the young man “to go and tell his disciples and Peter.”  (Would the men believe them? Could they convince them?)

Mark seals the prediction of Jesus of his death and resurrection with the certainty of the faith of women that they were in the Divine’s presence and fearful of being able to complete a religious duty. As Jesus has repeatedly said in his ministry, faith is the criterion for healing, even the sickness of sin. (See Mark 9:14-29, for an example.)

These verses contain the last great sandwich of Mark’s gospel in verse 7. The message of the young man is not only that Christ is alive, it is “he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

If we go to Mark 1:9, we find these words, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” Jesus enters Mark’s gospel coming out of Galilee, and Mark’s gospel ends with Jesus going back to Galilee. Thus all that has happened, the complete good news is bracketed by the entry into and exit from the world by Jesus through Galilee.

Reflection: Here are three considerations about Mark’s gospel and its ending:

  (1)  What do you think the abrupt ending suggests is Mark’s message about the good news? Is its message about faith?

Mark offers no road to Emmaus and demonstration of his bodily resurrection found in Luke, no reappearance of Jesus with the Great Commission. Mark offers only the testimony of two women who were awestruck feeling they were in Divine presence and carrying great fear and doubt of being able to complete the task they were commanded to fulfill, to go and tell the others about this good news.

  (2)  On the other hand, this ending also invites us to write our own beginning and ending of the Good News.  

We may find an answer by asking, “What is the significance of Galilee?” Galilee is part of the Northern kingdom of Israel. When the Assyrians defeated Israel, they accomplished a wholesale upheaval of the people, taking the so-called “upper crust” of Israeli society to Assyria, and importing people (gentiles) from other conquered lands. Galilee had become a land of few people of gentile heritage and the remnants of Israel’s lesser society who had been left behind with limited resources. Israel was also the very wealthy, successful if not contentious, sibling of its brothers and sisters in Judah/Jerusalem. Over the succeeding years immigrants from Judah and Jerusalem gradually amended the population of Galilee giving it a reputation for being the outpost of rubes and outcasts, of rebels and Robin Hoods. Galilee is a transliteration of the Hebrew “District (or circle) of the Gentiles.” It is a puzzling place for the Messiah to emerge and return until we witness Mark unfolding the ministry of Jesus – and, of course, when we take accounts such as Luke 4:16-21 that may offer an amplified account of the event of Mark 1:21-22.

I call Mark the Gospel for the marginalized, the outsider and the downtrodden. Jesus fulfilled the Law by opening the promise in Isaiah of salvation to everyone. Thus, is Mark inviting each of us to seek out our own Galilee to live a life that proclaims to others this great, good news?

  (3)  Finally, the existence of these longer endings can be read two ways. We can read them as a consequence of humanity’s distaste of uncertainty. We don’t like loose ends and want a concrete answer. We want someone to testify they have seen this risen bodily Jesus rather than having to rely upon faith alone to believe it. Yet faith alone is all we have.

The other way to read these endings is to be humble about how rigid and fixed is the canon we call the “Bible.” Over its history righteous, penitent believers have not hesitated to utilize or edit more than one version of the texts of scripture. A great example is the Book of Joshua where scholars have convincingly demonstrated at least three independent versions containing distinctly different texts with distinctly different theological emphasis.

These three texts are the Masoretic Text (that has become the Protestant Old Testament), the Septuagint (the Greek translation of another set of Hebrew manuscripts that formed the basis of the Christian New Testament until the Reformation and remains the Catholic Old Testament), and a set of scrolls found in the Dead Sea collection that clearly derive from a different, older and perhaps more faithful translation of Hebrew scripture. The three were in general circulation for over 300 years.

The message one gets is that over the history of God’s people, we have sought to use the essence of scripture, it core message, by adapted it in new text forms to fit real, current circumstances. Thus, there is some irony that upon the Protestant Reformation, scripture was cast into a rigid canon where amplification or new discoveries are not admitted. The older Septuagint used by the Catholic Church for the "Old Testament" was abandoned for the newer (1008 CE) MT translation which was embraced within 100 years as an absolute, invariant standard.

In conclusion, we have multiple endings for Mark’s gospel whose provenance we cannot know with certainty short of some new discovery of an essential manuscript. The mystery of the shorter ending of Mark leaves us with the messages that faith alone leads us to salvation, not wisdom, scientific knowledge or logic. We want proof, it is our nature, but what we have is something we believe on faith, the experience of the women in the tomb was one of awareness of God’s presence, the absence of rational proof and uncertainty of the ability to fulfill the received command. Even Paul picks up this theme in Corinthians when he says of the message of the gospel is foolishness to the rational mind.

The other unavoidable message is that in spite of the fear, uncertainty and amazement that the command invokes within us, Jesus invites us to find him in our own Galilee and to testify to this good news by our living among the people of the world. There in our work as our deeds testify, we will find Him just as the young man said, “He has gone ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.” For me, this is the essence of Christian faith.

Happy Easter, people.