Here is the next Bible Study summary - Peace, Linda
Old Testament - Desert 06/18/09
Numbers 14:26-35 tells of the Israelites refusal to enter the land by attack from the south and Yahweh’s displeasure. As a result they have to endure 40 years in the wilderness, and the Promised Land is withheld until that generation had died. This is how the people, in retrospect, made sense of their time of rootless wandering –it was a lesson from God . During those forty years, however, the slaves liberated from Egypt became the people of Yahweh. Yahweh becomes known to them, distinct from other gods - the God who freed them from slavery, a God of justice in whom alone they trusted. The years in the desert became a period of transformation and changed meaning.
Hosea 2:14-23 was written in the 8th century BCE. Here the desert is no longer portrayed as a place of punishment. That time is understood as a time of passionate, first love. Yahweh seeks to recreate the honeymoon time in the desert, a time of intense relationship. God is the lover who is going to lure, tempt and seduce his wayward wife back into this relationship - just as Jesus (“my beloved”) is later impelled to go into the desert after his baptism. In Hosea the result of this allurement is a peace with the natural order, a new fertility and a banishment of weapons. It is the transformation of the Earth from wilderness to paradise.
There is another, darker, association of desert in the Old Testament. In Genesis 4: 10 the life blood of Abel cries out from the ground for justice and revenge. The ground becomes a voice of accusation for Cain. Cain is cursed from the ground – the ground will no longer bear fruit – instead he will become a wanderer in a place where nothing grows. Cain wanders on the earth, finally settling in the land of Nod (which means “wandering”). He lives a nomadic existence in a human desert as a result of his brother’s murder. He forfeits his relationship with God who is “hidden from his face”. Eventually Cain creates the first city in reaction to the intolerable wandering. The city gives a sense of place and meaning, born out of murder and alienation. God places a mark on Cain to stop endless reciprocal killings. Later, in Genesis 4:23-24, his descendant Lamech (seven generations after Cain and a bad guy) describes the relentless multiplication of violence: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged seven fold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” In other words the mark of Cain has only served to redouble violence. And cities remain centers of alienation and violence. The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is another attempt to give meaning to human existence. The Tower will be so tall that it will be visible for miles. It will provide a center of the landscape and so everyone will know their place. Although it is not named as part of a city it is obviously a centerpiece of civilization. It makes a statement “we are important” – like sky scrapers today. The early stories of Genesis describe human alienation, the absence of relationship – the real desert experience inside all of us.
In Isaiah 40 the physical desert is the place that brings us back into relationship with God. It is the way home – something to be desired, a place of hope and regeneration. In 40:1 Second Isaiah begins with the words “Comfort my people”. The desert is a place of consolation. It becomes God’s way of returning his people from exile. The desert is made a highway, a pleasant pathway and a fruitful journey. The desert again becomes the place where meaning is changed – a bad hostile environment transformed into a place of redemption. Isaiah 35 gives this changed meaning of desert. Here it is described as a place of renewed relationship with God and the place from which redemption comes. A place where the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the deaf hear and the lame leap like the deer. The desert is the place where the brokenness, the alienation, the desert within us is transformed and healed. In all four gospels the figure of John the Baptist fulfills this theme, the “voice crying in the wilderness” with which the gospel begins.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Jesus = Humanity Otherwise Than War
The world today is Christianized but not necessarily in a good sense. When I was doing my Ph.D. in religion professors and students used to talk about the imperialism of Christianity. What they meant was that from its base in the West Christian culture determined the terms of discussion of other religions and just about everything else in the world. The problem was that even as they protested this imperialism my colleagues invoked essentially Christian values to do so, i.e. recognition and respect for the stranger, the victim, the enemy. The reason the protest has any kind of effect was because it demanded basically a form of Christian repentance. So even as Christian imperialism is critiqued the Christian mindset is affirmed. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan echoes unacknowledged in the halls of academe.
However, this is only at a high abstract level of reflection. In the meantime what I see as the truly universal effect of Christianity is not at the level of academic principle but at the level of freedom and desire. And in this area the effects are acutely dangerous, including, yes, redoubling violence. In fact what you’re dealing with is a kind of cultural mutation, a genetic distortion of Christianity missing one or two essential bits of Jesus DNA. To understand this we have first to glance at the overall historical impact of Christianity.
The relentless rise of the individual, democracy and human desire has Christianity in its engine. The assumption that we somehow got democracy from the Greeks—from Athens—is as uncritical as it is prevalent. The barons who wrote the Magna Carta in England and first shared out the power of the king were not listening to the history of Athens when they came together on a regular basis to get a dose of human meaning. They were listening to the gospels, to Jesus who said, “Blessed are the poor, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice… ,” to Jesus who “calls his sheep by name and leads them...” In other words those precisely left out of the system are the ones who will be given status, and each individual has (at least potentially) a unique personal standing in the world. Moreover the barons already had a four-hundred-year-old presence of Benedictine monasticism at the heart of their culture, where the monks elected the abbot and together made up a council to guide the abbot in important matters. All the spiritual and human prompting necessary for democracy, therefore, was already present in medieval Christian culture. It goes without saying the barons were just as self-interested and ruthless as the king but—precisely—we’re not talking about personal morality but structural values and structural change.
Jesus also said things like, “If God so clothes [more splendid than Solomon] the grass of the field...will he not much more provide for you...?" He is suggesting that the things of this earth are both beautiful and available to all under the Father’s care. Oscar Wilde said Jesus was the first romantic because he made the ugly beautiful. The intense blessing communicated to this world by the Galilean is continually underestimated in the production of Western desire. Genesis already said everything in the world was “good:” Jesus proved it absolutely by healing human brokenness, feeding the hungry with multiplied bread, and forgiving human sin and alienation. Looked at over the long run this could not help produce a concrete culture where the material world becomes more and more secured in value, its objects of desire affirmed and multiplied, and our personal relation to them essentially celebrated and assured. Hence both capitalism and romanticism.
It is absurd to think that the vigor of Western democracy, capitalism and romanticism has nothing to do with the spiritual universe at the core of its culture. To say this is, on the one hand, a way for certain intellectuals and writers to claim they invented human progress out of their divine little heads, and on the other for the dark side of all this (which is increasingly dark) to hide itself from the radicalism of love that could make it all actually work. For of course—and this is where I’ve been driving—the release of freedom and desire in the world left to its own devices has nowhere to go except the destruction of resources and redoubled violence toward the other. Freedom and desire without service and love are a cultural mutation out of a gospel environment which is driving us a hundred miles an hour down a dead-end street. It is the paradox of Christianized freedom and desire—left to themselves they become relentless war.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that as the crisis continues to swell in the cancerous forms of freedom and desire the authentic gospel solution remains at its source and becomes itself steadily more apparent. The welcome of all to his single table is one of the most assured facts of Jesus’ historical ministry and its concrete human effect was a transformation of a mindset of sin into one of life and love. (This is the point of the wedding garment parable.) Then, at the term of his ministry, the sign of Jesus’ cross and resurrection becomes the transcendent anthropological instrument which challenges for all time the effects of violence with life-filled peace and peace-filled life. This radical solution is now culturally more and more apparent, standing behind Christianity’s historical mutation like a ghost of Christmas present seeking to replace the ghost of Christmas past. And if a mutated Christianity cannot see it then unprejudiced human minds can, demonstrating that the gospel of Jesus produces a cultural shift in and of itself. Here is just one from a continually growing casebook of examples.
On Killing, The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books, 2009) is a book by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. He is a former soldier who no longer dresses up war in some sort of heroic necessity or morality but calls it simply killing. He argues that apart from a few actual psychopaths ordinary men and women involved in war have to be brutally conditioned to overcome the natural aversion to taking another human life. The consequences of this murderous training are profound spiritual damage. “The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must ever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt.” At the same time, Grossman points out, we’re applying the same perverse teaching to the whole civilian population through violent movies, violent video games and violent role models. So on the one hand killing is traumatic and on the other we continually traumatize ourselves.
Now whether we agree with the particulars of his argument, or whether he has worked out all their implications, doesn’t matter. What is important is the way he is breaking down the boundary distinctions, between “justified” killing in war and killing pure and simple, between the neutral “job” of the soldier and traumatic psychic harm, and between the soldier and the civilian, between war and peace. This means, of course, an enormous crisis in the business of war and killing, in fact its progressive untenability as a human course of action. But from where can this genuinely anthropological crisis be derived? After all human beings have been in the business of killing since year one. Why should a professional soldier suddenly decide that his very business is humanly impossible? Grossman doesn’t mention Christ but he doesn’t have to. The only decisive anthropological intervention declaring our enemy to be our brother and his killing not to be a matter of fate but of persecutory human violence is the Risen Crucified. On this basis, therefore, we can see that subtly and implicitly, yet powerfully and irreversibly, the gospel of Jesus is provoking a crisis in cultural values and hand-in-hand proposing its true radical solution, that of forgiveness, nonviolence and love.
The gospel is the genuine alternative to the crisis the gospel itself has produced. The mutated cultural uptake of the gospel is untrammeled freedom and desire. But limitless war is their necessary consequence. Yet the gospel does not rest, and just as it revealed the possibility of freedom and desire it now discloses the human intolerability of violence. The initial cultural reaction to the gospel was largely a cancerous form, but the very volume of the cancer in the contemporary world turns our attention to the true regeneration at its source. What we are assisting at today is anthropological shift of unparalleled significance. And so progressively we have the choice of a dangerously half-Christianized world, a world at war, or a humanly Jesus-centered one, a world of forgiveness, peace and life.
Tony
However, this is only at a high abstract level of reflection. In the meantime what I see as the truly universal effect of Christianity is not at the level of academic principle but at the level of freedom and desire. And in this area the effects are acutely dangerous, including, yes, redoubling violence. In fact what you’re dealing with is a kind of cultural mutation, a genetic distortion of Christianity missing one or two essential bits of Jesus DNA. To understand this we have first to glance at the overall historical impact of Christianity.
The relentless rise of the individual, democracy and human desire has Christianity in its engine. The assumption that we somehow got democracy from the Greeks—from Athens—is as uncritical as it is prevalent. The barons who wrote the Magna Carta in England and first shared out the power of the king were not listening to the history of Athens when they came together on a regular basis to get a dose of human meaning. They were listening to the gospels, to Jesus who said, “Blessed are the poor, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice… ,” to Jesus who “calls his sheep by name and leads them...” In other words those precisely left out of the system are the ones who will be given status, and each individual has (at least potentially) a unique personal standing in the world. Moreover the barons already had a four-hundred-year-old presence of Benedictine monasticism at the heart of their culture, where the monks elected the abbot and together made up a council to guide the abbot in important matters. All the spiritual and human prompting necessary for democracy, therefore, was already present in medieval Christian culture. It goes without saying the barons were just as self-interested and ruthless as the king but—precisely—we’re not talking about personal morality but structural values and structural change.
Jesus also said things like, “If God so clothes [more splendid than Solomon] the grass of the field...will he not much more provide for you...?" He is suggesting that the things of this earth are both beautiful and available to all under the Father’s care. Oscar Wilde said Jesus was the first romantic because he made the ugly beautiful. The intense blessing communicated to this world by the Galilean is continually underestimated in the production of Western desire. Genesis already said everything in the world was “good:” Jesus proved it absolutely by healing human brokenness, feeding the hungry with multiplied bread, and forgiving human sin and alienation. Looked at over the long run this could not help produce a concrete culture where the material world becomes more and more secured in value, its objects of desire affirmed and multiplied, and our personal relation to them essentially celebrated and assured. Hence both capitalism and romanticism.
It is absurd to think that the vigor of Western democracy, capitalism and romanticism has nothing to do with the spiritual universe at the core of its culture. To say this is, on the one hand, a way for certain intellectuals and writers to claim they invented human progress out of their divine little heads, and on the other for the dark side of all this (which is increasingly dark) to hide itself from the radicalism of love that could make it all actually work. For of course—and this is where I’ve been driving—the release of freedom and desire in the world left to its own devices has nowhere to go except the destruction of resources and redoubled violence toward the other. Freedom and desire without service and love are a cultural mutation out of a gospel environment which is driving us a hundred miles an hour down a dead-end street. It is the paradox of Christianized freedom and desire—left to themselves they become relentless war.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that as the crisis continues to swell in the cancerous forms of freedom and desire the authentic gospel solution remains at its source and becomes itself steadily more apparent. The welcome of all to his single table is one of the most assured facts of Jesus’ historical ministry and its concrete human effect was a transformation of a mindset of sin into one of life and love. (This is the point of the wedding garment parable.) Then, at the term of his ministry, the sign of Jesus’ cross and resurrection becomes the transcendent anthropological instrument which challenges for all time the effects of violence with life-filled peace and peace-filled life. This radical solution is now culturally more and more apparent, standing behind Christianity’s historical mutation like a ghost of Christmas present seeking to replace the ghost of Christmas past. And if a mutated Christianity cannot see it then unprejudiced human minds can, demonstrating that the gospel of Jesus produces a cultural shift in and of itself. Here is just one from a continually growing casebook of examples.
On Killing, The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books, 2009) is a book by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. He is a former soldier who no longer dresses up war in some sort of heroic necessity or morality but calls it simply killing. He argues that apart from a few actual psychopaths ordinary men and women involved in war have to be brutally conditioned to overcome the natural aversion to taking another human life. The consequences of this murderous training are profound spiritual damage. “The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must ever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt.” At the same time, Grossman points out, we’re applying the same perverse teaching to the whole civilian population through violent movies, violent video games and violent role models. So on the one hand killing is traumatic and on the other we continually traumatize ourselves.
Now whether we agree with the particulars of his argument, or whether he has worked out all their implications, doesn’t matter. What is important is the way he is breaking down the boundary distinctions, between “justified” killing in war and killing pure and simple, between the neutral “job” of the soldier and traumatic psychic harm, and between the soldier and the civilian, between war and peace. This means, of course, an enormous crisis in the business of war and killing, in fact its progressive untenability as a human course of action. But from where can this genuinely anthropological crisis be derived? After all human beings have been in the business of killing since year one. Why should a professional soldier suddenly decide that his very business is humanly impossible? Grossman doesn’t mention Christ but he doesn’t have to. The only decisive anthropological intervention declaring our enemy to be our brother and his killing not to be a matter of fate but of persecutory human violence is the Risen Crucified. On this basis, therefore, we can see that subtly and implicitly, yet powerfully and irreversibly, the gospel of Jesus is provoking a crisis in cultural values and hand-in-hand proposing its true radical solution, that of forgiveness, nonviolence and love.
The gospel is the genuine alternative to the crisis the gospel itself has produced. The mutated cultural uptake of the gospel is untrammeled freedom and desire. But limitless war is their necessary consequence. Yet the gospel does not rest, and just as it revealed the possibility of freedom and desire it now discloses the human intolerability of violence. The initial cultural reaction to the gospel was largely a cancerous form, but the very volume of the cancer in the contemporary world turns our attention to the true regeneration at its source. What we are assisting at today is anthropological shift of unparalleled significance. And so progressively we have the choice of a dangerously half-Christianized world, a world at war, or a humanly Jesus-centered one, a world of forgiveness, peace and life.
Tony
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Hubble and Flight 447
If you go on the Internet and search Hubble space photos you get a succession of mind-blowing images. How can there be forms out there that look like wombs, fetuses, cells, eyes and heads?
It’s like the heavens have become a giant Rorschach card where we humans are able to project ourselves onto the dust clouds of space.
But are we projecting? Perhaps these images are in fact systemic, meaning that there really is some kind of continuity. That at some root level the structure of matter is the structure of life, and matter repeats that structure at ever greater levels of organization until you get actual life, and in fact human life?
But then again, would not androids see electric motors and micro circuits up there? Perhaps, but would that that make any real difference? So long as you’re alive and sentient you will see life and sense everywhere—no matter the specific formation it might take—because life and sense is what it’s all about. Right?
No, sadly, wrong. Because if life and sense is what it’s all about, how come we’re so darn good at blowing it all to kingdom come, and imagining ever more and more terrible models and images of violence. In the Star Trek movies, as the intrepid voyagers explore strange new worlds, what often comes up on “full screen” is a monstrous green crustacean, covered in scales and weapons, exuding galactic fury. Funny enough I didn’t see too many of these super-violent crustaceans up there in the Hubble images. But sci-fi movies are full of them. Why? Pretty clearly there’s something else at play, more than simple life and sense, something earth-grown, terrestrial, very human and deadly. When we imagine these new worlds, the thought of the enemy equipped with fearful violence comes unbidden. It must therefore lurk at the core of our human relationships, capable in a split second of turning the bright morning star into a nuclear holocaust. “Cain said to his brother, Abel, 'Let us go out to the field.' And when they were in the field Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”
So the Hubble images cannot be the final conclusive sign of life and sense for us humans as we gaze uncertain into space. These cosmic images remain ambiguous, fuzzy, tricks of the eye and ego. The sign we really need, the one with real meaning, must be itself earth-grown, very human, and capable of transforming this lurking violence within.
And, yes, this sign exists and gets more and more airtime and power as the 21st century moves forward and becomes our time. We see it and hear it everywhere on the radio stations and TV channels of our contemporary world, the world of media that girdles the planet. What is this sign? It is the sign of the victim inviting compassion on a planetary scale.
French President Nicolar Sarkozy said it the other day. Commenting on Air France Flight 447 that went down in mid-Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board he said that most of the passengers were Brazilian and some forty were French. He then added: “It doesn’t change anything; they’re all victims.” Meaning the French President somehow had already given up the priority of national identity in favor of the universal category of the victim inviting compassion.
What Roman or Greek governor would have used that language? They would have said the fates decreed it, that the gods were angry. They would never have said, “They are all victims.” So where did this sign of compassion for the victim come from, if not from the Crucified, right there at the beginning of our 21 centuries? Jesus, the innocent one who died instilling terrestrial forgiveness and peace.
Tony
It’s like the heavens have become a giant Rorschach card where we humans are able to project ourselves onto the dust clouds of space.
But are we projecting? Perhaps these images are in fact systemic, meaning that there really is some kind of continuity. That at some root level the structure of matter is the structure of life, and matter repeats that structure at ever greater levels of organization until you get actual life, and in fact human life?
But then again, would not androids see electric motors and micro circuits up there? Perhaps, but would that that make any real difference? So long as you’re alive and sentient you will see life and sense everywhere—no matter the specific formation it might take—because life and sense is what it’s all about. Right?
No, sadly, wrong. Because if life and sense is what it’s all about, how come we’re so darn good at blowing it all to kingdom come, and imagining ever more and more terrible models and images of violence. In the Star Trek movies, as the intrepid voyagers explore strange new worlds, what often comes up on “full screen” is a monstrous green crustacean, covered in scales and weapons, exuding galactic fury. Funny enough I didn’t see too many of these super-violent crustaceans up there in the Hubble images. But sci-fi movies are full of them. Why? Pretty clearly there’s something else at play, more than simple life and sense, something earth-grown, terrestrial, very human and deadly. When we imagine these new worlds, the thought of the enemy equipped with fearful violence comes unbidden. It must therefore lurk at the core of our human relationships, capable in a split second of turning the bright morning star into a nuclear holocaust. “Cain said to his brother, Abel, 'Let us go out to the field.' And when they were in the field Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”
So the Hubble images cannot be the final conclusive sign of life and sense for us humans as we gaze uncertain into space. These cosmic images remain ambiguous, fuzzy, tricks of the eye and ego. The sign we really need, the one with real meaning, must be itself earth-grown, very human, and capable of transforming this lurking violence within.
And, yes, this sign exists and gets more and more airtime and power as the 21st century moves forward and becomes our time. We see it and hear it everywhere on the radio stations and TV channels of our contemporary world, the world of media that girdles the planet. What is this sign? It is the sign of the victim inviting compassion on a planetary scale.
French President Nicolar Sarkozy said it the other day. Commenting on Air France Flight 447 that went down in mid-Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board he said that most of the passengers were Brazilian and some forty were French. He then added: “It doesn’t change anything; they’re all victims.” Meaning the French President somehow had already given up the priority of national identity in favor of the universal category of the victim inviting compassion.
What Roman or Greek governor would have used that language? They would have said the fates decreed it, that the gods were angry. They would never have said, “They are all victims.” So where did this sign of compassion for the victim come from, if not from the Crucified, right there at the beginning of our 21 centuries? Jesus, the innocent one who died instilling terrestrial forgiveness and peace.
Tony
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Journey with Jesus #11
New Testament - Desert 06/04/09
The desert is an important theme in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament it is a place of foundation, of rebellion, of punishment and of purification. For forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert under the leadership of Moses. Through struggle, and by subsequent conquest or conversion of numerous small city states, they formed a people who believed in a single God, of justice– Yahweh. The desert was the place in which the group belief in this God first emerged. Subsequently the desert was seen as a place of punishment for disobedience, but also of purity of relationship and of preparation for settlement in the Promised Land
Later in the Old Testament – in the books of the Maccabees –the desert becomes a place of resistance against the Hellenistic invaders. It was the gathering point for those escaping from the imperial powers located in the cities. The Essene community near the Red Sea continued this tradition. Their community, founded a hundred years before Jesus, and still there during his life-time, was located in the desert just eight miles from the Jericho Road. The Essenes were reclusive, exclusive and intensely purist. From the Dead Sea scrolls we learn that they were biding their time waiting and preparing for the final, apocalyptic, battle. At this time God would send his angels to help them free the Land from its oppressors and to establish his reign.
In the Gospels, the desert is the place where Jesus’ ministry begins. In Mark’s Gospel everything starts in the desert. In Mk 1:1-14 the desert is mentioned four times: the quote from Isaiah tells of a voice crying out in the desert, John the Baptist appears in the desert, the Spirit drives Jesus into the desert, and Jesus remains in the desert for forty days. The actual Greek word here is eremos which means “deserted place”. It is in the desert that Satan finds Jesus to tempt him. In Mk 1:13 Jesus is “with the wild beasts”. This could reference that he is the coming Messiah who will bring peace – the lion will lie down with the lamb. However, there is a threatening feel to the words that links the violence of the animals to the wildness of the place. The wild animals could be a reference to the beasts from the abyss in Daniel 7 – a description of the violent principalities and powers that will be overcome by “one like a son of man”. It should also be remembered that Mark’s Gospel was written shortly after Nero’s persecution when Christians were thrown to the lions. The wild animals could symbolize these forces of violence and destruction.
Matthew’s Gospel, written after Mark, has an expanded account of the temptation of Jesus. In Mt 4:1-11 the temptations are described: to turn stone to bread, to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and finally Satan offers him the kingdoms of the world. Temptation here is not so much persuasion or seduction but to put under trial. Jesus was under stress. The desert that holds so much significance for the people of Israel, becomes for Jesus a place of conflict.
Did Matthew use an oral tradition of the temptations as a basis for his account, or did he extrapolate the story by reflecting upon obstacles that Jesus dealt with during his ministry?
The three temptations are evident elsewhere in the Gospels. In Jn 6:26, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus says the crowd is looking for him not because they understood the sign but because they are looking for food. This is the temptation of welfare religion. It is not wrong to help people in need, but if this is all there is then it becomes a distortion of the gospel. In Mt 12:38-40 they ask for a sign that Jesus is the promised Davidic Messiah who will sweep away their enemies. This is the second temptation – the mind-boggling visual act of power, miracle religion. That Satan chose the pinnacle of the temple would suggest divine approval for this kind of religion. Jesus responds that no sign will be given but the sign of Jonah. In Jn 6:15 the crowd seeks to make him king, so he withdrew to the mountain by himself. This is his response to the third temptation, of imperial religion.
In Mk 8:1 is another clear account of the same temptation. Jesus rebukes Peter for first rebuking him, trying to stop him going to Jerusalem where he will be put to death. That Peter feels he can rebuke Jesus indicates a close relationship and that he was in a position of influence. Jesus tells him to “get behind me, Satan.” It is much harder to tell Satan to be gone when he is speaking through your best friend. Peter’s words reflect the world’s agenda. He speaks with a worldly mentality and concern. The temptation Jesus faced was not about doing evil. It was about how to do good. The temptation he rejected was to execute his ministry according to the ways of the world. The best political leaders promise to give the people what they want: i.e. food to eat; they will make use of wonderful signs (technology, publicity, space travel, anything that wows) to rally people to their side; they will always use military and violent power at their disposal to bring about good. People are always looking for a leader who can put things right – bring peace, order and security. In the temptations Jesus rejects these key anthropological pathways. Jesus sees that these human responses do not fundamentally change anything. He does not place his hope in them. In the desert – the deserted place – he can free himself of these basic human dynamics and allow the Spirit to guide him. The temptations are his rejection of these human ways. Jesus seeks to bring about human goals in an entirely new way.
In Mk 6:30-44 we have the story of the feeding of the five thousand (one of the few stories found in all four Gospels). It takes place in a deserted place. Jesus uses bread to feed the people, and also as a miraculous sign of the kingdom. He divides and organizes the people into groups – into cohorts or regiments. All three temptations are addressed and subverted here – feeding the hungry, wondrous sign and political space or empire. The deserted space is filled and transformed with a new humanity based in Jesus’ compassion and the community that comes from it. Human needs are affirmed but responded to differently – not as a project of violent power, but through and for the sake of compassion.
What is our relationship to the desert? We are in the human dynamic – the ways of the world surround us and are inescapable. The desert is the place where the dictates of the world can be stripped away, creating an empty space that the Spirit can fill. This process can be painful and scary, but also liberating, and cannot be avoided for spiritual growth.
The desert is an important theme in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament it is a place of foundation, of rebellion, of punishment and of purification. For forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert under the leadership of Moses. Through struggle, and by subsequent conquest or conversion of numerous small city states, they formed a people who believed in a single God, of justice– Yahweh. The desert was the place in which the group belief in this God first emerged. Subsequently the desert was seen as a place of punishment for disobedience, but also of purity of relationship and of preparation for settlement in the Promised Land
Later in the Old Testament – in the books of the Maccabees –the desert becomes a place of resistance against the Hellenistic invaders. It was the gathering point for those escaping from the imperial powers located in the cities. The Essene community near the Red Sea continued this tradition. Their community, founded a hundred years before Jesus, and still there during his life-time, was located in the desert just eight miles from the Jericho Road. The Essenes were reclusive, exclusive and intensely purist. From the Dead Sea scrolls we learn that they were biding their time waiting and preparing for the final, apocalyptic, battle. At this time God would send his angels to help them free the Land from its oppressors and to establish his reign.
In the Gospels, the desert is the place where Jesus’ ministry begins. In Mark’s Gospel everything starts in the desert. In Mk 1:1-14 the desert is mentioned four times: the quote from Isaiah tells of a voice crying out in the desert, John the Baptist appears in the desert, the Spirit drives Jesus into the desert, and Jesus remains in the desert for forty days. The actual Greek word here is eremos which means “deserted place”. It is in the desert that Satan finds Jesus to tempt him. In Mk 1:13 Jesus is “with the wild beasts”. This could reference that he is the coming Messiah who will bring peace – the lion will lie down with the lamb. However, there is a threatening feel to the words that links the violence of the animals to the wildness of the place. The wild animals could be a reference to the beasts from the abyss in Daniel 7 – a description of the violent principalities and powers that will be overcome by “one like a son of man”. It should also be remembered that Mark’s Gospel was written shortly after Nero’s persecution when Christians were thrown to the lions. The wild animals could symbolize these forces of violence and destruction.
Matthew’s Gospel, written after Mark, has an expanded account of the temptation of Jesus. In Mt 4:1-11 the temptations are described: to turn stone to bread, to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, and finally Satan offers him the kingdoms of the world. Temptation here is not so much persuasion or seduction but to put under trial. Jesus was under stress. The desert that holds so much significance for the people of Israel, becomes for Jesus a place of conflict.
Did Matthew use an oral tradition of the temptations as a basis for his account, or did he extrapolate the story by reflecting upon obstacles that Jesus dealt with during his ministry?
The three temptations are evident elsewhere in the Gospels. In Jn 6:26, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus says the crowd is looking for him not because they understood the sign but because they are looking for food. This is the temptation of welfare religion. It is not wrong to help people in need, but if this is all there is then it becomes a distortion of the gospel. In Mt 12:38-40 they ask for a sign that Jesus is the promised Davidic Messiah who will sweep away their enemies. This is the second temptation – the mind-boggling visual act of power, miracle religion. That Satan chose the pinnacle of the temple would suggest divine approval for this kind of religion. Jesus responds that no sign will be given but the sign of Jonah. In Jn 6:15 the crowd seeks to make him king, so he withdrew to the mountain by himself. This is his response to the third temptation, of imperial religion.
In Mk 8:1 is another clear account of the same temptation. Jesus rebukes Peter for first rebuking him, trying to stop him going to Jerusalem where he will be put to death. That Peter feels he can rebuke Jesus indicates a close relationship and that he was in a position of influence. Jesus tells him to “get behind me, Satan.” It is much harder to tell Satan to be gone when he is speaking through your best friend. Peter’s words reflect the world’s agenda. He speaks with a worldly mentality and concern. The temptation Jesus faced was not about doing evil. It was about how to do good. The temptation he rejected was to execute his ministry according to the ways of the world. The best political leaders promise to give the people what they want: i.e. food to eat; they will make use of wonderful signs (technology, publicity, space travel, anything that wows) to rally people to their side; they will always use military and violent power at their disposal to bring about good. People are always looking for a leader who can put things right – bring peace, order and security. In the temptations Jesus rejects these key anthropological pathways. Jesus sees that these human responses do not fundamentally change anything. He does not place his hope in them. In the desert – the deserted place – he can free himself of these basic human dynamics and allow the Spirit to guide him. The temptations are his rejection of these human ways. Jesus seeks to bring about human goals in an entirely new way.
In Mk 6:30-44 we have the story of the feeding of the five thousand (one of the few stories found in all four Gospels). It takes place in a deserted place. Jesus uses bread to feed the people, and also as a miraculous sign of the kingdom. He divides and organizes the people into groups – into cohorts or regiments. All three temptations are addressed and subverted here – feeding the hungry, wondrous sign and political space or empire. The deserted space is filled and transformed with a new humanity based in Jesus’ compassion and the community that comes from it. Human needs are affirmed but responded to differently – not as a project of violent power, but through and for the sake of compassion.
What is our relationship to the desert? We are in the human dynamic – the ways of the world surround us and are inescapable. The desert is the place where the dictates of the world can be stripped away, creating an empty space that the Spirit can fill. This process can be painful and scary, but also liberating, and cannot be avoided for spiritual growth.
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