Here is the next Bible Study. Hoping to get the last three in this series posted soon - Linda.
Sacred Space #8 11/26/10
Relationships in the Gospel of John.
Jn1:35-39 gives the account of the calling of the first disciples. These were followers of John the Baptist who hear him announce, “Here is the Lamb of God.” They follow Jesus who asks them, “What are you looking for?” They ask, “Rabbi where are you staying?” Jesus replies “Come and see” - and they stayed with him.
Jn 20:15-17 describes the morning of the resurrection. Mary Magdalene sees Jesus, but doesn’t recognize him. Jesus speaks to her, asking, “Whom are you looking for?” Mary recognizes him and calls out, “Rabbouni”. Jesus tells her not to hold on to him, but instead to “go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God’”.
These two passages are bookends or literary inclusions. There is a progression between the first to the second. Both have questions, but these transition from what to whom, from the impersonal to the personal. The disciples call him Rabbi (translated as teacher); Mary calls him Rabbouni. In both accounts the evangelist uses parenthesis to give the same translation - teacher. The difference is that the word’s ending changes to give the meaning “beloved teacher” in the resurrection narrative. They are structurally parallel accounts with a common drama. Mirror stories placed at the beginning and the end of the Gospel. The first story announces the thematic –Jesus is a teacher. As the Gospel unfolds the reader enters into a deeper, more meaningful, relationship with Jesus. The Gospel is an invitation to learn from Jesus and enter into this relationship.
There is a lot of turning in this story. In v. 14, “When she had said this she turned around and saw Jesus standing there…” In v. 16, “Jesus said to her ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, Rabbouni”. The Hebrew word for repent is “to turn around”. Turning here has a spiritual and relational sense. The first time she turns she sees who she is expecting to see, what she is looking for – the gardener. The second time she hears his voice and is open to a different understanding. You can’t see this new risen Lord unless you turn, change your perspective. When you move from your fixed way of being you can begin to see him. It signifies a shift in relationship – from Rabbi to Rabbouni. In the first story the disciples follow Jesus to his home in Capernaum; here Mary is called to a new relationship.
Mary tries to hold on to Jesus, to keep things the way they were in the past. Jesus replies that “I have not yet ascended to my Father and your Father…” He then tells her to go to the brethren and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”– the present tense. He is in process of ascending. Ascension in John is not a physical thing, a movement to another place, but rather a progressive growth in relationship. Otherwise why link himself and his disciples in this way? He “ascends” in the measure that his disciples enter into the same relationship as he has with the Father.
At the same time being “raised up”, going upward, in John is all about the cross. Jesus will not complete his ascension, he will continue to ascend, until people understand that Jesus’ God, his Father, is also their God and Father, and that he is the one who willed the nonviolence of the cross. When you see Jesus you see the Father - a nonviolent God. Because of this all the barriers between us and the divine are no more. The intermediary mechanisms of sacrifice and temple are redundant once you have been brought into this relationship. Priests and Pastors may serve a useful pastoral role but cannot substitute for the new relationship with God. We see that Mary needs to let go of Jesus and this is so in order that she may enter into this privileged relationship with the Father and help lead others into it. Although we understand the Father through Jesus, Jesus in a way has to become less so that the Father becomes more.
In Jn 14:1 Jesus says to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.” Here he is talking of the same thing. That the Father is nonviolent and loving, so there is no need to worry. Jesus shows us who God is - the Father. Jesus mirrors the Father – and so creates an endless reflective relationship with us in the middle!
The accounts of the Samaritan woman at the well and the anointing of Jesus by the woman at Bethany are also parallel stories. Jn 4:6-15 describes the meeting at Jacob’s well –a holy site. Jesus gently deconstructs that sacred space. He asks the woman to give him water, breaking the cultural barriers associated with Samaritans and Women. Jesus as the source of living water will become the source welling up within you. There is no more need to return to the well. True worship is in spirit and in truth. Neither Jacob’s well nor Jerusalem will be necessary as sacred space. They are replaced by this new relationship between the believer and Jesus. The woman who anoints Jesus in Jn 12:1-8 is a mirror of the Samaritan woman in terms of relationship. She pours costly nard on Jesus’ feet in an extravagant gesture of limitless love. She has moved beyond argument to an act that shows the depth of this relationship.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Short Days, Love and Nothing
This time of year, the sun is close to its lowest point. Even after the solstice it seems to linger low on the horizon (actually I think this is technically correct for reasons I can’t remember).
The New Testament also tells us the days are short, but from a different perspective
Paul says “The present form of the world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7.31). Why? Because its “form”, its collective human construction, or “imagined reality”, is undermined by the gospel of Christ. Paul didn’t have an anthropology of the victim or a science of mirror neurons to show how this might actually be happening. But he did have a direct awareness of the impact of Christ on humanity—as did all the primitive church, and that’s why he and they called Jesus “Lord”. They knew that something really was up with the Risen Jesus!
If there was a condemned and executed man declared innocent in living fact (empty tomb/appearances to individuals) —a man who had always enacted forgiveness while saying that the kind of God we got depended on the kind of God we gave out—then it meant all previous bets about both divinity and humanity were off. And if you believed this you also knew it. There was a totally new game in town.
That was back then. To think how that might affect us now we have to hit the scene-select much later, a much more contemporary understanding that takes into account the deep course and purpose of the gospel message over the space of 2000 years. For today, after those two millennia, there is a third sense to shortened days. Our time seems to be narrowing before our eyes because of the enormous pressure on the human earth…from increased population, but also increased desires, from the relentless media stream of images and the wants they prompt.
The effect of the pressure is both physical and mental. Slowly, we are herded closer and closer together, and there is less and less room to maneuver, to step aside and find an empty space. We’re like a pot of water on the stove. The heat is the human world itself and we are the molecules, more and more agitated, bouncing off each other, with no place to go but the next bounce…
Then suddenly, in precisely this situation we see the whole point of the shortened days, the increasing pressure of so many humans and their wants…it brings us to an entirely new human possibility, an entirely new way of being human, or in other terms a totally “new year”.
For a bounce doesn’t have to be a bounce. Being brought in close proximity to the other does not have to mean conflict. It could equally well mean forgiveness and peace and community. And this is so because with the gospel there really is a new human physics, one that has as little to do with violence as time travel would have to do with road travel. There is now finally at the eleventh hour a new science of human particles to learn, a new anthropology, a new humanity. It has always been there, of course, but now with the pressure of the pot it appears more and more as the one remaining human possibility. As W.H. Auden said on the eve of WW2, "We must love one another or die".
But at once the objection comes: love seems so tenuous, so helpless, how can it possibly stand against human violence? And it is that objection which brings me to the real point of the blog. I first started thinking not about short days as such but about love, and its real existence. And it was its existence that struck me forcibly, so then I worked back to how urgent love has become in the moment of violent pressure.
For yes, love exists! But love is relational and so essentially invisible. It cannot be seen or observed. I have a friend who’s always talking about vortices and energy lines and powers in the earth. He believes what’s good and holy is located somehow physically in the world, in rocks, and rivers. I am not adverse to the thrill of certain special places and their feeling and associations, but the thing about love is that it is a new physics. You’ll never see an energy line for love, a blip on a screen or the flicker of a meter. No doubt we can see its effects in the physical world, but in its own moment, its actual existence as love, it is absolutely new and different. The closest it could be recognized would be as a vanishing trace, the signal of something that passed this way but we missed it as it passed.
And the reason for that is because love gives itself as a nothing, into the nothing. If it were to give itself as a some-thing then it would not be love, but an exchange, a something demanding something in return. (Even Christmas gifts for all their attraction have some of this, we give and expect gifts. Love expects nothing in return.)
But then—and this is the enormously cool thing—the moment that love passes by in the world, in the actions of people, it sets up a secret attraction, because at a level too deep for words, too deep for anything, we find life exactly in this. There is a level in us moved precisely by no-thing, by love. And it is this level that more than any-thing proves we are meant for more than the present order of things, the present world and its imagined reality. We are meant rather for an endless world of endless loving, of giving the self away as if it were no-thing.
So may the days be short and ever shorter, so the new day of love can begin!
The New Testament also tells us the days are short, but from a different perspective
Paul says “The present form of the world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7.31). Why? Because its “form”, its collective human construction, or “imagined reality”, is undermined by the gospel of Christ. Paul didn’t have an anthropology of the victim or a science of mirror neurons to show how this might actually be happening. But he did have a direct awareness of the impact of Christ on humanity—as did all the primitive church, and that’s why he and they called Jesus “Lord”. They knew that something really was up with the Risen Jesus!
If there was a condemned and executed man declared innocent in living fact (empty tomb/appearances to individuals) —a man who had always enacted forgiveness while saying that the kind of God we got depended on the kind of God we gave out—then it meant all previous bets about both divinity and humanity were off. And if you believed this you also knew it. There was a totally new game in town.
That was back then. To think how that might affect us now we have to hit the scene-select much later, a much more contemporary understanding that takes into account the deep course and purpose of the gospel message over the space of 2000 years. For today, after those two millennia, there is a third sense to shortened days. Our time seems to be narrowing before our eyes because of the enormous pressure on the human earth…from increased population, but also increased desires, from the relentless media stream of images and the wants they prompt.
The effect of the pressure is both physical and mental. Slowly, we are herded closer and closer together, and there is less and less room to maneuver, to step aside and find an empty space. We’re like a pot of water on the stove. The heat is the human world itself and we are the molecules, more and more agitated, bouncing off each other, with no place to go but the next bounce…
Then suddenly, in precisely this situation we see the whole point of the shortened days, the increasing pressure of so many humans and their wants…it brings us to an entirely new human possibility, an entirely new way of being human, or in other terms a totally “new year”.
For a bounce doesn’t have to be a bounce. Being brought in close proximity to the other does not have to mean conflict. It could equally well mean forgiveness and peace and community. And this is so because with the gospel there really is a new human physics, one that has as little to do with violence as time travel would have to do with road travel. There is now finally at the eleventh hour a new science of human particles to learn, a new anthropology, a new humanity. It has always been there, of course, but now with the pressure of the pot it appears more and more as the one remaining human possibility. As W.H. Auden said on the eve of WW2, "We must love one another or die".
But at once the objection comes: love seems so tenuous, so helpless, how can it possibly stand against human violence? And it is that objection which brings me to the real point of the blog. I first started thinking not about short days as such but about love, and its real existence. And it was its existence that struck me forcibly, so then I worked back to how urgent love has become in the moment of violent pressure.
For yes, love exists! But love is relational and so essentially invisible. It cannot be seen or observed. I have a friend who’s always talking about vortices and energy lines and powers in the earth. He believes what’s good and holy is located somehow physically in the world, in rocks, and rivers. I am not adverse to the thrill of certain special places and their feeling and associations, but the thing about love is that it is a new physics. You’ll never see an energy line for love, a blip on a screen or the flicker of a meter. No doubt we can see its effects in the physical world, but in its own moment, its actual existence as love, it is absolutely new and different. The closest it could be recognized would be as a vanishing trace, the signal of something that passed this way but we missed it as it passed.
And the reason for that is because love gives itself as a nothing, into the nothing. If it were to give itself as a some-thing then it would not be love, but an exchange, a something demanding something in return. (Even Christmas gifts for all their attraction have some of this, we give and expect gifts. Love expects nothing in return.)
But then—and this is the enormously cool thing—the moment that love passes by in the world, in the actions of people, it sets up a secret attraction, because at a level too deep for words, too deep for anything, we find life exactly in this. There is a level in us moved precisely by no-thing, by love. And it is this level that more than any-thing proves we are meant for more than the present order of things, the present world and its imagined reality. We are meant rather for an endless world of endless loving, of giving the self away as if it were no-thing.
So may the days be short and ever shorter, so the new day of love can begin!
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sacred Space #7
Here is the next Bible Study summary in our series on Sacred Space. Still to come are Sacred Space in the Gospel of John; Jesus and the Temple; Sacred Space and the Book of Revelations; and the final study in the series will be on the Trinity. Keep watching this space! -Linda
Sacred Space #7 11/19/10
The early Christian community
The earliest writings of the New Testament are those written by Paul. Thessalonians is one of the first – from about 49AD – roughly 20 years after Jesus death. It is a direct communication between Paul and one of the early Christian communities. It provides us with a sociological study of the early church.
The Greek word for church is ecclesia- which was a secular term meaning “called together” or “gathering”. It did not have the modern association with a sacred place of worship. Christians were called together at each others’ houses. The concept of “church” as a separate building came with Constantine. The Roman emperor gave a Basilica (a royal palace) to the church. The king’s private quarters became the area behind the altar from where Jesus/the king would emerge to be seen. The church was adopted by the imperial power and became identified with power and prestige and all of its trappings. For the first three centuries, however, Christian gatherings took place in peoples’ homes. Ecclesia was a small assembly of people. The Pauline letters usually use the phrase “church at the house of”. For example 1Cor 16:19 “Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, greet you warmly in the Lord”. (See also Romans 16:5). Prisca and Aquila were tent makers who moved around – living in Corinth, Ephesus and Rome. At that time it was relatively safe to travel – during the relatively stable Pax Romana. Other examples of house churches are found in the letters to Philemon (1:1-2) and to the Colossians (4:15).
When the head of the household became a Christian, it was usual for his household (his wife, children, servants and slaves) to follow suit. Romans 16:10 alludes to this “ Greet those in the Lord who belong to the house of Aristobulus.” In 1 Cor 1:16 we see the same thing “I did baptize the household of Stephanas.” It has been estimated that 25-33% of the population of the Roman Empire, were slaves. Paul does not argue against slavery as an institution. He did not set out to abolish slavery – rather teaches a subversive love that will ultimately undermine it. For Paul, the Christian message is not about bringing down the empire – rather it introduces a new understanding about who we are in relationship to others, something that overturns the deep structure on which the empire rested. In Philemon Paul says to receive a slave as a brother.
The Pauline message is a message of transformation. God invites us to change our hearts by the power of love. Social order is subverted from within. In 1 Cor 7: 17-24 Paul describes the freedom that comes through belonging to the Lord. The Jewish community had clear demarcating lines with its practice of circumcision, and through its dietary laws. Christianity in contrast has no preconditions. This being the case there is always the tendency to chaos. Paul’s letters struggle with the tension between anarchy and freedom in the Spirit. Paul tries to keep the freedom but at the same time seeks to introduce some order. He recognizes that freedom requires a tremendous surrender to the Spirit to make it work. Christians can experience freedom in any situation – whether slave or master, woman or man, rich or poor.
The early church also has a number of women in leadership roles. Romans 16:1-2 describes Phoebe, a deacon and benefactor. She is a woman of independent means, who traveled to Rome. Her name is not linked to any man. In Romans 16:7 another woman, Junia, is called an apostle. In the Middle Ages an “s” was often added to the end of her name to make it sound like a man’s. In Acts 16:14, Lydia, a business woman dealing in purple (a luxury dyed cloth) is described as the head of her household – another woman of influence.
The New Testament gives us a picture of the people who made up the early church. It also gives us a picture of how they worshipped as a community. 1Cor 11:17 describes problems emerging in relation to the communion meal in Corinth. Corinth was a small Christian community – perhaps just four or five households. Divisions had emerged because people had not learned to share with the poor. Paul says it is better that they eat at home if they cannot be in community.
1 Corinthians also offers teaching on the issue of whether it acceptable to eat food sacrificed to idols. There are three chapters devoted to this subject (8-10). 1 Cor 10:23 -32 sums up this teaching. There is no need to observe dietary laws if you are ruled by love. Food should not become a barrier to entering into a relationship with another. The Christian is free to eat any food, even if it has been dedicated to a god. If another believes that the dedication is meaningful, however, then don’t eat it because it might cause them offense. This concept of no rules only works if you have respect for the other and for yourself. The new Christian movement has no sacred order – instead it is trying to work out a new way of how to be free with each other. “ For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them….I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” (1 Cor 9:19-23)
Sacred Space #7 11/19/10
The early Christian community
The earliest writings of the New Testament are those written by Paul. Thessalonians is one of the first – from about 49AD – roughly 20 years after Jesus death. It is a direct communication between Paul and one of the early Christian communities. It provides us with a sociological study of the early church.
The Greek word for church is ecclesia- which was a secular term meaning “called together” or “gathering”. It did not have the modern association with a sacred place of worship. Christians were called together at each others’ houses. The concept of “church” as a separate building came with Constantine. The Roman emperor gave a Basilica (a royal palace) to the church. The king’s private quarters became the area behind the altar from where Jesus/the king would emerge to be seen. The church was adopted by the imperial power and became identified with power and prestige and all of its trappings. For the first three centuries, however, Christian gatherings took place in peoples’ homes. Ecclesia was a small assembly of people. The Pauline letters usually use the phrase “church at the house of”. For example 1Cor 16:19 “Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, greet you warmly in the Lord”. (See also Romans 16:5). Prisca and Aquila were tent makers who moved around – living in Corinth, Ephesus and Rome. At that time it was relatively safe to travel – during the relatively stable Pax Romana. Other examples of house churches are found in the letters to Philemon (1:1-2) and to the Colossians (4:15).
When the head of the household became a Christian, it was usual for his household (his wife, children, servants and slaves) to follow suit. Romans 16:10 alludes to this “ Greet those in the Lord who belong to the house of Aristobulus.” In 1 Cor 1:16 we see the same thing “I did baptize the household of Stephanas.” It has been estimated that 25-33% of the population of the Roman Empire, were slaves. Paul does not argue against slavery as an institution. He did not set out to abolish slavery – rather teaches a subversive love that will ultimately undermine it. For Paul, the Christian message is not about bringing down the empire – rather it introduces a new understanding about who we are in relationship to others, something that overturns the deep structure on which the empire rested. In Philemon Paul says to receive a slave as a brother.
The Pauline message is a message of transformation. God invites us to change our hearts by the power of love. Social order is subverted from within. In 1 Cor 7: 17-24 Paul describes the freedom that comes through belonging to the Lord. The Jewish community had clear demarcating lines with its practice of circumcision, and through its dietary laws. Christianity in contrast has no preconditions. This being the case there is always the tendency to chaos. Paul’s letters struggle with the tension between anarchy and freedom in the Spirit. Paul tries to keep the freedom but at the same time seeks to introduce some order. He recognizes that freedom requires a tremendous surrender to the Spirit to make it work. Christians can experience freedom in any situation – whether slave or master, woman or man, rich or poor.
The early church also has a number of women in leadership roles. Romans 16:1-2 describes Phoebe, a deacon and benefactor. She is a woman of independent means, who traveled to Rome. Her name is not linked to any man. In Romans 16:7 another woman, Junia, is called an apostle. In the Middle Ages an “s” was often added to the end of her name to make it sound like a man’s. In Acts 16:14, Lydia, a business woman dealing in purple (a luxury dyed cloth) is described as the head of her household – another woman of influence.
The New Testament gives us a picture of the people who made up the early church. It also gives us a picture of how they worshipped as a community. 1Cor 11:17 describes problems emerging in relation to the communion meal in Corinth. Corinth was a small Christian community – perhaps just four or five households. Divisions had emerged because people had not learned to share with the poor. Paul says it is better that they eat at home if they cannot be in community.
1 Corinthians also offers teaching on the issue of whether it acceptable to eat food sacrificed to idols. There are three chapters devoted to this subject (8-10). 1 Cor 10:23 -32 sums up this teaching. There is no need to observe dietary laws if you are ruled by love. Food should not become a barrier to entering into a relationship with another. The Christian is free to eat any food, even if it has been dedicated to a god. If another believes that the dedication is meaningful, however, then don’t eat it because it might cause them offense. This concept of no rules only works if you have respect for the other and for yourself. The new Christian movement has no sacred order – instead it is trying to work out a new way of how to be free with each other. “ For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them….I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” (1 Cor 9:19-23)
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Sacred Space #6
And another Bible Study Summary...
Sacred Space #6 11/12/10
Wisdom
The wisdom literature of the Old Testament is neither prophetic in character nor does it see the need for temple. It is a way of thinking common to all peoples –that if you act well your life will turn out well. It is age and experience passing on to the next generation the message that life has a pattern to it. If you are truly listening to life’s message then there is a level of truth within you that you can rely on. Of course it may be blown away by circumstances, but basically it holds true. Proverbs 3:13-20 talks about the source of true wealth. “Happy are those who find wisdom and those who get understanding…” Jesus uses the same form of expression in the beatitudes: “happy are the poor in spirit, etc.” - i.e. these are Wisdom statements.
Wisdom is personified as a female relational being in the Old Testament. She is not simply something in your head or inherited right thinking, but a persona. Wisdom is a shadowy figure in the Old Testament. She is linked to the tree of life at the center of the Garden of Eden. See Proverbs 3:18, “She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her’. The implication is that through Wisdom, humans can attain life everlasting. In contrast, folly leads to death. Without wisdom people come to harm. There is no God of wrath. Instead we can choose to bring destruction upon ourselves by denying Wisdom, or choose life by following her paths.
The Lord, through Wisdom, created the earth. She is a beautiful person in relationship with God. She was there at the beginning, at the moment of creation (Proverbs 8:22-36). "When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily he is delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race”(v. 30-31). The word for “master worker” can also be translated as “little child” which seems to fit better contextually. The former is usually used though, because it is less relational and more Greek, so easier to deal with. Wisdom delights in us, God delights in Wisdom. It is a wisdom thing to do – to delight in other people. There is no need for a separate sacred place if the world is full of delight – no need in fact for a temple. Instead through Wisdom we find transcendence in each other. We find the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creation.
Wisdom is a minor key in the Bible – less dominant than the Torah, the prophets and the history of the kings. But still it is one of the strands. It is present throughout the Bible. In the Torah Joseph is in fact a Wisdom figure. He figures things out through his dreams which provide insight into actual circumstances. He reorganizes the food stores of Egypt so that they are able to survive the famine. His wise actions bring life.
The book of Proverbs (a wisdom book) is hard to date. It has material from the 10th century (the time of Solomon) but probably reached its final form in the 6th century. It is fairly well developed – particularly the first eight chapters. In the 2nd century Sirach, another Wisdom book, was written. This is considered deutero-canonical by the Roman Catholic Church, apocryphal by the Protestants. Jesus knew this book and was informed by it. Parts seem to have been used and developed by him. In Chapter 24 Wisdom praises herself in the presence of the Most High. “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist…” (v.3). Here Wisdom is associated with the breath or the word of the Most High. There is an identification of Sofia (Wisdom) with the Logos (the Word). The Prologue in the Gospel of John uses this Wisdom thought, saying that all things were created through the Word. This is a wisdom theology. Jesus used Wisdom sayings and identified himself with the person of Wisdom – who invites people to eat and be filled and promises them life and peace.
In v. 13 Wisdom is depicted also as a great tree. “I grew tall like a cedar in Lebanon, and like a cypress on the heights of Hermon” In v.23 she is associated with the Torah, and in v. 31 forms a great river spreading across the earth.
In Ch 50:1-21 the scribe describes a temple service that took place at some point between 219-196 BCE when Simon son of Onias was high priest. It gives us a snap shot of the liturgy. The scribe sees this is a continuation of the world made good – It is a glorious picture of heavenly splendor come to earth. It is also the last time that Wisdom literature basks in its own confidence.
In 167 -164 the Seleucid kings of Syria take over Judea. Alexander the Great had conquered the known world at end of the 4th century. After his death, power was divided among his military leaders. Two powers in particular arose– the Ptolemies (Cleopatra was a member of this family) and the Seleucids who were centered in Damascus and Syria. The Seleucid leader, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to turn the temple in Jerusalem into a place of Greek worship. As a part of this effort he erected a statue of Zeus - the infamous “abomination of desolation”. He also forbade circumcision and the reading of the scriptures. This was the first time that an invading army had tried to wipe out the Jewish religion. There were also Jewish Hellenizers in Jerusalem promoting the Greek way of life. They adopted Greek dress and built a gym in Jerusalem. Antiochus Epiphanes’ attempt to Hellenize the temple provoked a guerilla war. The successful rebellion was led by the Maccabee family. They were not a Davidic family instead they were a minor priestly family. Following the success of the rebellion they assumed leadership in Jerusalem. Herod the Great married in to the Hasmoneans – the last of the Maccabean line. Herod was regarded as an imposter because he was of Arab blood and also married to this non-Davidic family.
1 Maccabees 1:36-50 describes the defilement of the temple. Many chose to flee to the desert rather than accept pagan rituals and laws. 1Macc 2:29-41 describes how they were pursued into the wilderness. They were overrun on the eve of the Sabbath. They refused to fight on the Sabbath and so profane it: “ ‘Let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly.” So they attacked them on the Sabbath, and they died, with their wives and children and livestock, to the number of a thousand persons” (vv 37-38).
The Maccabean leader, Matthias, is more secular minded. He justifies fighting on the Sabbath to prevent them from perishing. “When Matthias and his friends learned of it, they mourned for them deeply. And all said to their neighbors: ‘If we all do as our kindred have done and refuse to fight with the Gentiles for our lives and for our ordinances, they will quickly destroy us from the earth.’”
The initial non-violent group were, very probably, the forerunners of the Essenes (the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls). They sought holiness through purity, and refused to fight the Romans. They were not completely non-violent, however – according to the Qumran “War Scroll” they were prepared to fight when the angels came to lead them in the final battle to restore holiness to the land. The Pharisees also sought holiness through purity and were probably related in some way to this initial group.
In the context described, the project of Wisdom – that if you chose to live a righteous life you will do well – appeared to have failed. In response Wisdom thought becomes apocalyptic in the Book of Daniel. The premise of apocalyptic literature is that in order for good to prevail, for the righteous to live, God has to intervene directly. This book, the last of the four major prophets, was written at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes in 167-164 BCE. In Daniel 11: 29-35 there is an account of the Greek profanation of the temple. It also tells of non-violent resisters who fall by the sword. These wise among the people will give understanding to many. Though they fall by the sword, unresisting, this will be so that they might be “refined, purified and cleansed, until the time of the end, for there is still an interval until the appointed time.” (v 35). In Chapter 12: 1-4 we have the first clear description of resurrection in the bible. In this picture some of the dead will awake to everlasting life and then “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky…”
Wisdom from being a broad picture of living well has shifted to a key of non-violence in a time of crisis. And logically connected to this the only way we are going to make the world turn out well for life is through resurrection. In this thinking it is not a reward of “salvation” in a heavenly hereafter, but as the only way a God of wisdom can bring about the fulfillment of his project. The violence of the world may destroy you – but the resurrection makes it right and becomes our hope.
The concept of sacred space breaks down. Violent power took over the temple and the people who finally triumph through violent rebellion are not the authentic descendants of David and quickly became corrupt. At the time of Jesus, the temple was compromised. Instead the wilderness was the place where people went to meet God, awaiting a breakthrough of a just life on earth. John the Baptist represents the movement away from the temple to the wilderness and apocalyptic. He becomes the link between the Old and the New Testaments. Jesus is then the fulfillment of Wisdom’s project for the earth.
Sacred Space #6 11/12/10
Wisdom
The wisdom literature of the Old Testament is neither prophetic in character nor does it see the need for temple. It is a way of thinking common to all peoples –that if you act well your life will turn out well. It is age and experience passing on to the next generation the message that life has a pattern to it. If you are truly listening to life’s message then there is a level of truth within you that you can rely on. Of course it may be blown away by circumstances, but basically it holds true. Proverbs 3:13-20 talks about the source of true wealth. “Happy are those who find wisdom and those who get understanding…” Jesus uses the same form of expression in the beatitudes: “happy are the poor in spirit, etc.” - i.e. these are Wisdom statements.
Wisdom is personified as a female relational being in the Old Testament. She is not simply something in your head or inherited right thinking, but a persona. Wisdom is a shadowy figure in the Old Testament. She is linked to the tree of life at the center of the Garden of Eden. See Proverbs 3:18, “She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her’. The implication is that through Wisdom, humans can attain life everlasting. In contrast, folly leads to death. Without wisdom people come to harm. There is no God of wrath. Instead we can choose to bring destruction upon ourselves by denying Wisdom, or choose life by following her paths.
The Lord, through Wisdom, created the earth. She is a beautiful person in relationship with God. She was there at the beginning, at the moment of creation (Proverbs 8:22-36). "When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily he is delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race”(v. 30-31). The word for “master worker” can also be translated as “little child” which seems to fit better contextually. The former is usually used though, because it is less relational and more Greek, so easier to deal with. Wisdom delights in us, God delights in Wisdom. It is a wisdom thing to do – to delight in other people. There is no need for a separate sacred place if the world is full of delight – no need in fact for a temple. Instead through Wisdom we find transcendence in each other. We find the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creation.
Wisdom is a minor key in the Bible – less dominant than the Torah, the prophets and the history of the kings. But still it is one of the strands. It is present throughout the Bible. In the Torah Joseph is in fact a Wisdom figure. He figures things out through his dreams which provide insight into actual circumstances. He reorganizes the food stores of Egypt so that they are able to survive the famine. His wise actions bring life.
The book of Proverbs (a wisdom book) is hard to date. It has material from the 10th century (the time of Solomon) but probably reached its final form in the 6th century. It is fairly well developed – particularly the first eight chapters. In the 2nd century Sirach, another Wisdom book, was written. This is considered deutero-canonical by the Roman Catholic Church, apocryphal by the Protestants. Jesus knew this book and was informed by it. Parts seem to have been used and developed by him. In Chapter 24 Wisdom praises herself in the presence of the Most High. “I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist…” (v.3). Here Wisdom is associated with the breath or the word of the Most High. There is an identification of Sofia (Wisdom) with the Logos (the Word). The Prologue in the Gospel of John uses this Wisdom thought, saying that all things were created through the Word. This is a wisdom theology. Jesus used Wisdom sayings and identified himself with the person of Wisdom – who invites people to eat and be filled and promises them life and peace.
In v. 13 Wisdom is depicted also as a great tree. “I grew tall like a cedar in Lebanon, and like a cypress on the heights of Hermon” In v.23 she is associated with the Torah, and in v. 31 forms a great river spreading across the earth.
In Ch 50:1-21 the scribe describes a temple service that took place at some point between 219-196 BCE when Simon son of Onias was high priest. It gives us a snap shot of the liturgy. The scribe sees this is a continuation of the world made good – It is a glorious picture of heavenly splendor come to earth. It is also the last time that Wisdom literature basks in its own confidence.
In 167 -164 the Seleucid kings of Syria take over Judea. Alexander the Great had conquered the known world at end of the 4th century. After his death, power was divided among his military leaders. Two powers in particular arose– the Ptolemies (Cleopatra was a member of this family) and the Seleucids who were centered in Damascus and Syria. The Seleucid leader, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to turn the temple in Jerusalem into a place of Greek worship. As a part of this effort he erected a statue of Zeus - the infamous “abomination of desolation”. He also forbade circumcision and the reading of the scriptures. This was the first time that an invading army had tried to wipe out the Jewish religion. There were also Jewish Hellenizers in Jerusalem promoting the Greek way of life. They adopted Greek dress and built a gym in Jerusalem. Antiochus Epiphanes’ attempt to Hellenize the temple provoked a guerilla war. The successful rebellion was led by the Maccabee family. They were not a Davidic family instead they were a minor priestly family. Following the success of the rebellion they assumed leadership in Jerusalem. Herod the Great married in to the Hasmoneans – the last of the Maccabean line. Herod was regarded as an imposter because he was of Arab blood and also married to this non-Davidic family.
1 Maccabees 1:36-50 describes the defilement of the temple. Many chose to flee to the desert rather than accept pagan rituals and laws. 1Macc 2:29-41 describes how they were pursued into the wilderness. They were overrun on the eve of the Sabbath. They refused to fight on the Sabbath and so profane it: “ ‘Let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly.” So they attacked them on the Sabbath, and they died, with their wives and children and livestock, to the number of a thousand persons” (vv 37-38).
The Maccabean leader, Matthias, is more secular minded. He justifies fighting on the Sabbath to prevent them from perishing. “When Matthias and his friends learned of it, they mourned for them deeply. And all said to their neighbors: ‘If we all do as our kindred have done and refuse to fight with the Gentiles for our lives and for our ordinances, they will quickly destroy us from the earth.’”
The initial non-violent group were, very probably, the forerunners of the Essenes (the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls). They sought holiness through purity, and refused to fight the Romans. They were not completely non-violent, however – according to the Qumran “War Scroll” they were prepared to fight when the angels came to lead them in the final battle to restore holiness to the land. The Pharisees also sought holiness through purity and were probably related in some way to this initial group.
In the context described, the project of Wisdom – that if you chose to live a righteous life you will do well – appeared to have failed. In response Wisdom thought becomes apocalyptic in the Book of Daniel. The premise of apocalyptic literature is that in order for good to prevail, for the righteous to live, God has to intervene directly. This book, the last of the four major prophets, was written at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes in 167-164 BCE. In Daniel 11: 29-35 there is an account of the Greek profanation of the temple. It also tells of non-violent resisters who fall by the sword. These wise among the people will give understanding to many. Though they fall by the sword, unresisting, this will be so that they might be “refined, purified and cleansed, until the time of the end, for there is still an interval until the appointed time.” (v 35). In Chapter 12: 1-4 we have the first clear description of resurrection in the bible. In this picture some of the dead will awake to everlasting life and then “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky…”
Wisdom from being a broad picture of living well has shifted to a key of non-violence in a time of crisis. And logically connected to this the only way we are going to make the world turn out well for life is through resurrection. In this thinking it is not a reward of “salvation” in a heavenly hereafter, but as the only way a God of wisdom can bring about the fulfillment of his project. The violence of the world may destroy you – but the resurrection makes it right and becomes our hope.
The concept of sacred space breaks down. Violent power took over the temple and the people who finally triumph through violent rebellion are not the authentic descendants of David and quickly became corrupt. At the time of Jesus, the temple was compromised. Instead the wilderness was the place where people went to meet God, awaiting a breakthrough of a just life on earth. John the Baptist represents the movement away from the temple to the wilderness and apocalyptic. He becomes the link between the Old and the New Testaments. Jesus is then the fulfillment of Wisdom’s project for the earth.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Sacred Space #5
Here is the fifth in the series on Sacred Space, #6 coming shortly...
-Linda
Sacred Space #5 11/5/10
Ezekiel’s temple of doom and the temple of his dreams.
Ezekiel is one of the four major prophets (the others are Isaiah, Jeremiah and Daniel). All of these prophets pivot around the crucial event of the Babylonian invasion, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the exile. Daniel, unlike the others, was not written at that time. It was written 400 years later, but gives its 2nd century prophecy added weight by placing it in the 6th century BCE. These prophets were a big deal. They preserved the faith of the people when they had lost their leadership, land and temple. In the process of preserving the faith in the midst of unthinkable loss, they actually created something new.
Ezekiel has been called a catatonic schizophrenic! His visions have an almost psychotic feel. Why then is he considered a major prophet? He stands out. His psychic state is a matter of public record and the psychosis he is dealing with is a national historical event. Jeremiah has a relentless message of judgment; Isaiah has words of consolation and a new vision of Zion. What Ezekiel has is an intense sense of violence. There is something about his understanding of the violence of the moment, and of Israel’s role in it. Ezekiel has a priestly, ferocious image of God – a God of wrath. Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion states that the Old Testament God is arguably the most unpleasant figure in literature. His description of a violent, autocratic and patriarchal deity is not far from Ezekiel’s vision of God. Ezekiel was a temple priest and his mind is formed by the temple. Unlike Jeremiah who had little time for the temple, Ezekiel cares deeply about it.
Ezekiel 1:1-28 gives a description of the divine chariot – the merkabah. The chariot was the fighting machine of the day (like a modern tank). God is kick-ass in an armored vehicle. It is a chariot of supernatural qualities – full of fire, wings and eyes. Filled with life and spirit, it can move in any direction and immediately, without turning. Angel imagery, picked up from the Babylonians, is incorporated into the description. Sitting on the top of the chariot is the glory of God. At this point Ezekiel’s language begins to break down. In v. 26 he starts using the phrase “something like” because he can no longer fully express God’s glory.
He has this vision in Babylon five years after the first exile occurred when Jehoichin (the 18 year old king) surrendered the city. Ezekiel was one of the 10,000 members of the court, the army, craftspeople and temple who were exiled with the young leader. The city is still intact at this point – it will be another five years before Jerusalem’s destruction. Ezekiel is writing in the midst of a secular, non-Jewish alien environment. He mentally compensates for the absence of the land, temple and culture. He has lost his holy place. It is in that gap that he sees this vision – a vision of the glory of God inhabiting the temple. Ezekiel is dealing with violence done to the most precious thing to him – the temple.
Ezekiel 22: 1-16 Ezekiel describes a city of idolatry and violence. A place where strangers suffer extortion, slander leads to bloodshed and people give false witness in court, women are violated while menstruating, and where “the princes …have been bent on shedding blood.” The spilling of blood is mentioned a lot. It is an account of a bloody city. Ezekiel has an aversion to blood spilled in the wrong place (v.26). It becomes a violation of the holiness which happens when blood is poured in the right place – in the temple. Sacrifice is the only acceptable form of bloodshed. Everything else renders things impure. The city is unclean and impure. Because of this, Ezekiel says, the Lord will make you even more impure. Ezekiel makes the mechanism of vengeance clear, violation of the holy brings violation of the people. He wants to blame the invasion on the sins of the people. They have created the sacrificial crisis. The people will thus be made the sacrifice. Here he prophesies the final destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
Chapter 9:1-10 is one of the most intolerable chapters in the Bible. Here God orders the slaying of the people. He pours out his wrath on Jerusalem, defiling his own temple with the dead bodies. The people have defiled him so he will defile them in turn to show his holiness. Only those who “sigh and groan over all the abominations” will be spared – having been marked on their foreheads by an emissary of the Lord. No mercy will be given to the elderly, women or children. No sanctuary found in the temple. Scholars think that this chapter, with its instructions to the executioner, is probably an account of what actually happened. In times of invasion people often gather at the temple as a last sanctuary. That is also the place where a conquering army would target. Their goal would be to profane that place, cutting the people down without mercy. What is at stake is the transcendence of the other, which you must destroy. The Romans did the same thing. Ezekiel describes the event then gives it a theological spin. Saying that it is all part of God’s nature and his plan.
In Ez 10:1-17 the chariot described in chapter one is here in the middle of the temple. The fire from the wheels is used to burn the city and the temple. In vv 18-22, after the slaughter, the chariot carrying the glory of God leaves Jerusalem. This chariot carrying the glory of the Lord lifts from the temple and parks itself on top of a mountain halfway between Jerusalem and Babylon. Only when the people are again dedicated to holiness and purity will God’s glory be restored to the temple.
Ezekiel is sometimes called the Father of Judaism. After the return from exile, his prophesy of the rebuilding of the ideal temple (found in Chapter 40) becomes a key text. Today it is important for Dispensationalist and fundamentalist Christians. Ezra and Nehemiah look to the Ezekiel tradition for their sense of national purity. The Pharisees at the time of Jesus have dedicated themselves to holiness laws and rituals in an attempt to keep God’s favor and to forestall further disaster. They are seeking not to repeat the mistakes of the past. For Ezekiel, the sacrificial system with its focus on sin, holiness and purity keeps things controlled and is the source of the people’s security. For Ezekiel the holy is everything. At the same time he has a sense of a genuine interior transformation (“a new heart and a new spirit I will give you”, 36:26). It is for this that the prophecy is remembered more than his concern of the temple. All the same Jesus stands very much in contrast to his temple ideology. He deliberately hangs out with the impure and heals on the Sabbath. He transforms the water jars, set aside for purification, into wine. He breaks the holy open by shutting the temple down.
-Linda
Sacred Space #5 11/5/10
Ezekiel’s temple of doom and the temple of his dreams.
Ezekiel is one of the four major prophets (the others are Isaiah, Jeremiah and Daniel). All of these prophets pivot around the crucial event of the Babylonian invasion, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the exile. Daniel, unlike the others, was not written at that time. It was written 400 years later, but gives its 2nd century prophecy added weight by placing it in the 6th century BCE. These prophets were a big deal. They preserved the faith of the people when they had lost their leadership, land and temple. In the process of preserving the faith in the midst of unthinkable loss, they actually created something new.
Ezekiel has been called a catatonic schizophrenic! His visions have an almost psychotic feel. Why then is he considered a major prophet? He stands out. His psychic state is a matter of public record and the psychosis he is dealing with is a national historical event. Jeremiah has a relentless message of judgment; Isaiah has words of consolation and a new vision of Zion. What Ezekiel has is an intense sense of violence. There is something about his understanding of the violence of the moment, and of Israel’s role in it. Ezekiel has a priestly, ferocious image of God – a God of wrath. Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion states that the Old Testament God is arguably the most unpleasant figure in literature. His description of a violent, autocratic and patriarchal deity is not far from Ezekiel’s vision of God. Ezekiel was a temple priest and his mind is formed by the temple. Unlike Jeremiah who had little time for the temple, Ezekiel cares deeply about it.
Ezekiel 1:1-28 gives a description of the divine chariot – the merkabah. The chariot was the fighting machine of the day (like a modern tank). God is kick-ass in an armored vehicle. It is a chariot of supernatural qualities – full of fire, wings and eyes. Filled with life and spirit, it can move in any direction and immediately, without turning. Angel imagery, picked up from the Babylonians, is incorporated into the description. Sitting on the top of the chariot is the glory of God. At this point Ezekiel’s language begins to break down. In v. 26 he starts using the phrase “something like” because he can no longer fully express God’s glory.
He has this vision in Babylon five years after the first exile occurred when Jehoichin (the 18 year old king) surrendered the city. Ezekiel was one of the 10,000 members of the court, the army, craftspeople and temple who were exiled with the young leader. The city is still intact at this point – it will be another five years before Jerusalem’s destruction. Ezekiel is writing in the midst of a secular, non-Jewish alien environment. He mentally compensates for the absence of the land, temple and culture. He has lost his holy place. It is in that gap that he sees this vision – a vision of the glory of God inhabiting the temple. Ezekiel is dealing with violence done to the most precious thing to him – the temple.
Ezekiel 22: 1-16 Ezekiel describes a city of idolatry and violence. A place where strangers suffer extortion, slander leads to bloodshed and people give false witness in court, women are violated while menstruating, and where “the princes …have been bent on shedding blood.” The spilling of blood is mentioned a lot. It is an account of a bloody city. Ezekiel has an aversion to blood spilled in the wrong place (v.26). It becomes a violation of the holiness which happens when blood is poured in the right place – in the temple. Sacrifice is the only acceptable form of bloodshed. Everything else renders things impure. The city is unclean and impure. Because of this, Ezekiel says, the Lord will make you even more impure. Ezekiel makes the mechanism of vengeance clear, violation of the holy brings violation of the people. He wants to blame the invasion on the sins of the people. They have created the sacrificial crisis. The people will thus be made the sacrifice. Here he prophesies the final destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
Chapter 9:1-10 is one of the most intolerable chapters in the Bible. Here God orders the slaying of the people. He pours out his wrath on Jerusalem, defiling his own temple with the dead bodies. The people have defiled him so he will defile them in turn to show his holiness. Only those who “sigh and groan over all the abominations” will be spared – having been marked on their foreheads by an emissary of the Lord. No mercy will be given to the elderly, women or children. No sanctuary found in the temple. Scholars think that this chapter, with its instructions to the executioner, is probably an account of what actually happened. In times of invasion people often gather at the temple as a last sanctuary. That is also the place where a conquering army would target. Their goal would be to profane that place, cutting the people down without mercy. What is at stake is the transcendence of the other, which you must destroy. The Romans did the same thing. Ezekiel describes the event then gives it a theological spin. Saying that it is all part of God’s nature and his plan.
In Ez 10:1-17 the chariot described in chapter one is here in the middle of the temple. The fire from the wheels is used to burn the city and the temple. In vv 18-22, after the slaughter, the chariot carrying the glory of God leaves Jerusalem. This chariot carrying the glory of the Lord lifts from the temple and parks itself on top of a mountain halfway between Jerusalem and Babylon. Only when the people are again dedicated to holiness and purity will God’s glory be restored to the temple.
Ezekiel is sometimes called the Father of Judaism. After the return from exile, his prophesy of the rebuilding of the ideal temple (found in Chapter 40) becomes a key text. Today it is important for Dispensationalist and fundamentalist Christians. Ezra and Nehemiah look to the Ezekiel tradition for their sense of national purity. The Pharisees at the time of Jesus have dedicated themselves to holiness laws and rituals in an attempt to keep God’s favor and to forestall further disaster. They are seeking not to repeat the mistakes of the past. For Ezekiel, the sacrificial system with its focus on sin, holiness and purity keeps things controlled and is the source of the people’s security. For Ezekiel the holy is everything. At the same time he has a sense of a genuine interior transformation (“a new heart and a new spirit I will give you”, 36:26). It is for this that the prophecy is remembered more than his concern of the temple. All the same Jesus stands very much in contrast to his temple ideology. He deliberately hangs out with the impure and heals on the Sabbath. He transforms the water jars, set aside for purification, into wine. He breaks the holy open by shutting the temple down.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
It's Christmas Time!
Aaargh! It wasn’t yet Thanksgiving and they were playing Christmas music in the mall! Hang a shining star upon the highest bough and have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
There’s a near-automatic refudiation, as Sarah Palin would say, when someone who takes Christianity seriously hears these tunes so far away from the actual season, and with an obvious intent of milking the occasion for as much profit as possible. As the righteous slogan used to go: “Christmas sacred, or Christ massacred?”
But then I started listening more carefully and thinking: Is this all simply to make money? Is it all just digging for pay dirt?
Something about the tone of the song struck me, a sense of something precious set against a background of something lost, or threatened with loss. Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more. Through the years we all will be together, if the Fates allow
What are those “olden days, happy golden days of yore”? And what are the “Fates” that may or may not allow “faithful friends who are dear to us [to] gather near to us once more”?
Did those olden days ever truly exist? Or are they not a metaphor for a fleeting but deep rooted feeling of closeness, of life, of forgiveness, of love? Are they not in fact a popular, acceptable displacement of a much deeper eschatological (present and to come) sense, diffused through culture, of a world freed by Christ from anger, hatred, war and death?
Hold onto your evangelical and liberal hats now! I know it’s a stretch and that we’ve been taught to think about Christmas and the holidays in more and more a “secular” sense. That the world and Christian religion have to be held separate. But may not the “secular” be itself just another displacement—of the world’s own authentic drive (overlaid with lots of distortions and disfigurement for sure) toward a destiny seeded in it by the gospel?
Probably the most popular Christmas song of all is I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. As is well known this song was written and released during the Second World War and was one of the most requested numbers in the Armed Forces Network. It was No. 1 in the Billboard charts in three separate years spanning the war, 1942, 1945, 1946. It is also the best-selling single of all time, with estimated sales in excess of 50 million worldwide. (Thanks to Wikipedia for these fascinating fun facts!)
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas just like the ones I used to know, where the treetops glisten, and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.
What is that but a reaching out for a world freed from the lowering clouds and miasma of war, where nature is pristine and there are no sounds of violence, rather we can hear the music of an approaching absolute gift? And this is possible not in some vague general sense, but in the totally easy implicit sense of “Christmas”, something that happens right here, year in year out.
No wonder they want to extend the season!
For sure it’s the easy implicit sense that says it’s not to be taken seriously—we accept the nostalgia, the wisting and wishing, the deep-snow hush of Silent Night, but then afterward there is the huge trash heap from the gifts, and none of it makes any real difference. The meat-grinder of history continues just as before, and perhaps every year worse. But that’s not where my own soul leads me. If words and signs are the true human food and the best of these comes from the gospel, then I would rather say that all this longing and regret, all this wistfulness, is only there because the reality is there before it. We would not regret what we have never known, what we have never experienced. Underneath all the mixed emotions, therefore, lies the mother lode of a new earth. We experience it only here and there, as thin veins of ore, but nevertheless, if we look with true eyes, we can see they form the irrefutable traces of a transformed human way. What then makes the season so special is its constant authentic sense of a regenerative shift as the year is reborn in its journey, of an earth at peace, with all rivalries and hatreds dissolved by the absolute nonviolence of the baby Son of God. This powerless child has emptied heaven and every other vertical oppressive environment of its storehouses of thunderbolts, the bombs and drones, the diseases and death, the lies and conspiracies and cover-ups. In this new world everything is green and alive and red and full-blooded and passionate with love.
Here is Isaiah of Jerusalem’s description of this time, written centuries before the first Christmas but looking forward to coming of the Nonviolent One who could make it happen. Someone ought to set it to music and I know they’ll play it in the malls!
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food,
a feast of well-aged wines….
And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth… (Isaiah 25:6-8)
There’s a near-automatic refudiation, as Sarah Palin would say, when someone who takes Christianity seriously hears these tunes so far away from the actual season, and with an obvious intent of milking the occasion for as much profit as possible. As the righteous slogan used to go: “Christmas sacred, or Christ massacred?”
But then I started listening more carefully and thinking: Is this all simply to make money? Is it all just digging for pay dirt?
Something about the tone of the song struck me, a sense of something precious set against a background of something lost, or threatened with loss. Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more. Through the years we all will be together, if the Fates allow
What are those “olden days, happy golden days of yore”? And what are the “Fates” that may or may not allow “faithful friends who are dear to us [to] gather near to us once more”?
Did those olden days ever truly exist? Or are they not a metaphor for a fleeting but deep rooted feeling of closeness, of life, of forgiveness, of love? Are they not in fact a popular, acceptable displacement of a much deeper eschatological (present and to come) sense, diffused through culture, of a world freed by Christ from anger, hatred, war and death?
Hold onto your evangelical and liberal hats now! I know it’s a stretch and that we’ve been taught to think about Christmas and the holidays in more and more a “secular” sense. That the world and Christian religion have to be held separate. But may not the “secular” be itself just another displacement—of the world’s own authentic drive (overlaid with lots of distortions and disfigurement for sure) toward a destiny seeded in it by the gospel?
Probably the most popular Christmas song of all is I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. As is well known this song was written and released during the Second World War and was one of the most requested numbers in the Armed Forces Network. It was No. 1 in the Billboard charts in three separate years spanning the war, 1942, 1945, 1946. It is also the best-selling single of all time, with estimated sales in excess of 50 million worldwide. (Thanks to Wikipedia for these fascinating fun facts!)
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas just like the ones I used to know, where the treetops glisten, and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.
What is that but a reaching out for a world freed from the lowering clouds and miasma of war, where nature is pristine and there are no sounds of violence, rather we can hear the music of an approaching absolute gift? And this is possible not in some vague general sense, but in the totally easy implicit sense of “Christmas”, something that happens right here, year in year out.
No wonder they want to extend the season!
For sure it’s the easy implicit sense that says it’s not to be taken seriously—we accept the nostalgia, the wisting and wishing, the deep-snow hush of Silent Night, but then afterward there is the huge trash heap from the gifts, and none of it makes any real difference. The meat-grinder of history continues just as before, and perhaps every year worse. But that’s not where my own soul leads me. If words and signs are the true human food and the best of these comes from the gospel, then I would rather say that all this longing and regret, all this wistfulness, is only there because the reality is there before it. We would not regret what we have never known, what we have never experienced. Underneath all the mixed emotions, therefore, lies the mother lode of a new earth. We experience it only here and there, as thin veins of ore, but nevertheless, if we look with true eyes, we can see they form the irrefutable traces of a transformed human way. What then makes the season so special is its constant authentic sense of a regenerative shift as the year is reborn in its journey, of an earth at peace, with all rivalries and hatreds dissolved by the absolute nonviolence of the baby Son of God. This powerless child has emptied heaven and every other vertical oppressive environment of its storehouses of thunderbolts, the bombs and drones, the diseases and death, the lies and conspiracies and cover-ups. In this new world everything is green and alive and red and full-blooded and passionate with love.
Here is Isaiah of Jerusalem’s description of this time, written centuries before the first Christmas but looking forward to coming of the Nonviolent One who could make it happen. Someone ought to set it to music and I know they’ll play it in the malls!
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food,
a feast of well-aged wines….
And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth… (Isaiah 25:6-8)
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Sacred Space #4
Find below the fourth summary in our Sacred Space series
- peace, Linda
The City of Zion as Sacred Space 10/29/10
Isaiah is comparatively a huge body of text. It is generally agreed it was composed over a long period of time by a school of prophesy. The material spans over two hundred years – including a period before the fall of the northern Kingdom and up to the end of the 8th century well before the Babylonian invasion, then the Exile followed by the immediate post-exilic era (last third of 6th century). A distinctive thing about Isaiah is that it is located in Jerusalem. The prophet Jeremiah is hostile to Jerusalem – he is a prophet of doom against the temple. Ezekiel is worse - with God authorizing a slaughter in Jerusalem because of the sins of the people. Isaiah doesn’t have this sense of judgment. Instead Isaiah celebrates the city. It is a Zionist school (in a sense completely unrelated to modern Zionism). Isaiah holds the image of Zion as the sacred city.
In Isaiah the city itself becomes sacred space. A whole city becomes beloved of God, the place where God dwells. Here the focus has shifted from the temple to the city as the sacred space. When Jesus weeps upon seeing the Jerusalem (Lk 19:41-44), he is recalling the feeling and words of Isaiah. Jesus sees the drama and catastrophe of Jerusalem set against the backdrop of Isaiah’s promises for the city. There is a mystique attached to Jerusalem that persists to this day, making it one of the most fought over places in the world. It was a walled city, impregnable for a long time up until the Babylonian invasion.
Isaiah 2: 1-4 describes the city as a place of peace. A peace not resulting from overwhelming military might as was the case with the Pax Romana. Rather this peace emanates from the word of the Lord: “for out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”. Politically, Israel was never a major player, yet this prophecy describes it as the place that draws all people. It is a triumphal image.
Isaiah is not blind to the sins of the city. In the opening chapter (1: 1-17) Isaiah speaks out against the injustice and corruption in Jerusalem. In Is 1:21 Jerusalem, the faithful city, has become a whore. God abhors the evil doing and the empty feasts. Isaiah has no use for the temple – despising its uselessness, emptiness and the futility of its rituals.
Isaiah 11:1-9 is the prophecy of the peaceful kingdom: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse….” It is a picture of peace that is more than political. It spreads to the animals – the wolf living with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the kid. All flesh is related and no animal is preying on any other: “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea”. (v.9). This is the heart of the prophesy. The spirit of the Lord will rest upon the Messianic figure. He will strike the earth, not with violence, but with the rod of his mouth. Justice will come through hearing and understanding the word, through a change of heart.
Isaiah 25:6-10 continues this beautiful vision. It portrays a big feast that takes place on the mountain of the Lord. It is a feast of rich foods and well-aged wines for all peoples. God will remove the shroud that is cast over all peoples – he will destroy death. The prophesies written up to the end of Chapter 39 are those of First Isaiah and are written before the Babylonian invasion in a time of relative prosperity.
Second Isaiah begins at chapter 40. It is written after the destruction of Jerusalem. (Jeremiah is written in the period between first and second Isaiah). Second Isaiah is a new voice written in the context of the loss of everything. In the face of such devastation, he tries to make sense of the earlier Isaiahan promises. How can the earlier prophesies be true?
He begins “Comfort, Oh comfort my people, says the Lord” (40:1-11). It is the Book of Consolation. Zion is destroyed, but not irrevocably. Hope springs up again – existing when everything else is gone. The prophet urges the people to find their security in the word of the Lord. Structures can, and do, fail – but the word of the Lord stands firm. (“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (v. 8). In chapters 40-55 there is no mention of the temple because it no longer existed. Instead, like in the Gospels, compassion, promise and relationship are what are sacred.
In 539 Cyrus took over the Babylonian Empire. He decreed that all displaced peoples could return to their original lands. He was considered an enlightened ruler. He believed that it was better for people to pray to their own gods for the good of the Empire. Many of the exiled Jews returned to Jerusalem and around 520 BCE a rudimentary temple was rebuilt.
Third Isaiah begins at chapter 56. It opens with a promise that God’s covenant will be extended to all who obey his laws: “For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples”. (v. 7). This passage is quoted by Jesus attached to the quote from Jeremiah 7:11 about the house of God being turned into a den of thieves. Here Isaiah is taking a stand against an emerging movement to exclude outsiders form Judaism. There was a decisive push for the returning exiles to marry only among their own community. For Jewish leaders, the exile was seen as resulting from impurity. Their desire was to create a pure community – in practice, beliefs and bloodline, to stop such devastation occurring again as a result of the sins of the people. (Ezra and Nehemiah, written at this time, demonstrate this belief). As a result foreigners, eunuchs and other ritually unclean people were excluded from the temple. Third Isaiah’s response to this is to include all who observe the Sabbath.
In the final chapter (Is 66:1-13) there is again a shift away from the temple to the city. There is a growing disillusionment with the temple (“Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human being”), but not with Zion. Jerusalem is seen as a mother bearing children. Her days of mourning are over, after the travail of the exile. Compassion flows out from the city to her children - compassion learned through her experience of loss. Now Zion becomes a source of compassion for the whole earth. The Bible itself ends with a vastly expanded vision of the New Jerusalem. It is depicted as a perfect geometrical, symmetrical space. A place where the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations; and death is no more.
- peace, Linda
The City of Zion as Sacred Space 10/29/10
Isaiah is comparatively a huge body of text. It is generally agreed it was composed over a long period of time by a school of prophesy. The material spans over two hundred years – including a period before the fall of the northern Kingdom and up to the end of the 8th century well before the Babylonian invasion, then the Exile followed by the immediate post-exilic era (last third of 6th century). A distinctive thing about Isaiah is that it is located in Jerusalem. The prophet Jeremiah is hostile to Jerusalem – he is a prophet of doom against the temple. Ezekiel is worse - with God authorizing a slaughter in Jerusalem because of the sins of the people. Isaiah doesn’t have this sense of judgment. Instead Isaiah celebrates the city. It is a Zionist school (in a sense completely unrelated to modern Zionism). Isaiah holds the image of Zion as the sacred city.
In Isaiah the city itself becomes sacred space. A whole city becomes beloved of God, the place where God dwells. Here the focus has shifted from the temple to the city as the sacred space. When Jesus weeps upon seeing the Jerusalem (Lk 19:41-44), he is recalling the feeling and words of Isaiah. Jesus sees the drama and catastrophe of Jerusalem set against the backdrop of Isaiah’s promises for the city. There is a mystique attached to Jerusalem that persists to this day, making it one of the most fought over places in the world. It was a walled city, impregnable for a long time up until the Babylonian invasion.
Isaiah 2: 1-4 describes the city as a place of peace. A peace not resulting from overwhelming military might as was the case with the Pax Romana. Rather this peace emanates from the word of the Lord: “for out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”. Politically, Israel was never a major player, yet this prophecy describes it as the place that draws all people. It is a triumphal image.
Isaiah is not blind to the sins of the city. In the opening chapter (1: 1-17) Isaiah speaks out against the injustice and corruption in Jerusalem. In Is 1:21 Jerusalem, the faithful city, has become a whore. God abhors the evil doing and the empty feasts. Isaiah has no use for the temple – despising its uselessness, emptiness and the futility of its rituals.
Isaiah 11:1-9 is the prophecy of the peaceful kingdom: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse….” It is a picture of peace that is more than political. It spreads to the animals – the wolf living with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the kid. All flesh is related and no animal is preying on any other: “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea”. (v.9). This is the heart of the prophesy. The spirit of the Lord will rest upon the Messianic figure. He will strike the earth, not with violence, but with the rod of his mouth. Justice will come through hearing and understanding the word, through a change of heart.
Isaiah 25:6-10 continues this beautiful vision. It portrays a big feast that takes place on the mountain of the Lord. It is a feast of rich foods and well-aged wines for all peoples. God will remove the shroud that is cast over all peoples – he will destroy death. The prophesies written up to the end of Chapter 39 are those of First Isaiah and are written before the Babylonian invasion in a time of relative prosperity.
Second Isaiah begins at chapter 40. It is written after the destruction of Jerusalem. (Jeremiah is written in the period between first and second Isaiah). Second Isaiah is a new voice written in the context of the loss of everything. In the face of such devastation, he tries to make sense of the earlier Isaiahan promises. How can the earlier prophesies be true?
He begins “Comfort, Oh comfort my people, says the Lord” (40:1-11). It is the Book of Consolation. Zion is destroyed, but not irrevocably. Hope springs up again – existing when everything else is gone. The prophet urges the people to find their security in the word of the Lord. Structures can, and do, fail – but the word of the Lord stands firm. (“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (v. 8). In chapters 40-55 there is no mention of the temple because it no longer existed. Instead, like in the Gospels, compassion, promise and relationship are what are sacred.
In 539 Cyrus took over the Babylonian Empire. He decreed that all displaced peoples could return to their original lands. He was considered an enlightened ruler. He believed that it was better for people to pray to their own gods for the good of the Empire. Many of the exiled Jews returned to Jerusalem and around 520 BCE a rudimentary temple was rebuilt.
Third Isaiah begins at chapter 56. It opens with a promise that God’s covenant will be extended to all who obey his laws: “For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples”. (v. 7). This passage is quoted by Jesus attached to the quote from Jeremiah 7:11 about the house of God being turned into a den of thieves. Here Isaiah is taking a stand against an emerging movement to exclude outsiders form Judaism. There was a decisive push for the returning exiles to marry only among their own community. For Jewish leaders, the exile was seen as resulting from impurity. Their desire was to create a pure community – in practice, beliefs and bloodline, to stop such devastation occurring again as a result of the sins of the people. (Ezra and Nehemiah, written at this time, demonstrate this belief). As a result foreigners, eunuchs and other ritually unclean people were excluded from the temple. Third Isaiah’s response to this is to include all who observe the Sabbath.
In the final chapter (Is 66:1-13) there is again a shift away from the temple to the city. There is a growing disillusionment with the temple (“Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human being”), but not with Zion. Jerusalem is seen as a mother bearing children. Her days of mourning are over, after the travail of the exile. Compassion flows out from the city to her children - compassion learned through her experience of loss. Now Zion becomes a source of compassion for the whole earth. The Bible itself ends with a vastly expanded vision of the New Jerusalem. It is depicted as a perfect geometrical, symmetrical space. A place where the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations; and death is no more.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Sacred Space #3
Here is the next in our Bible Study series on Sacred Space....
Sacrifice and the Temple of Solomon 10/22/10
The Bible can be seen as a list of failed human attempts to relate to God, i.e. with means involving violence. One of the biggest of these is through the sacrifice of animals. At the Passover at the time of Jesus it is estimated there were over a million pilgrims. With each family making a lamb sacrifice, the Temple would have become like an enormous abattoir to accommodate the blood fest.
Chapter 4 of Genesis provides the first account of sacrifice. There is no preamble, no instructions from God to do it, no explanation why sacrificial practice suddenly appears in the text. It arises in the story of Cain and Abel where Abel’s animal sacrifice finds more favor in God’s eyes than Cain’s harvest offering. This leads to the first murder, Cain’s founding of the first city and the birth of civilization. A struggle exists in the text. God hears the blood of Abel crying out from the ground for justice, but then immediately God protects his murderer by placing a mark on Cain. God prefers Abel’s animal sacrifice, but then the blood of Abel himself (an even greater sacrifice) seems to lead God to protect and bless Cain in what seems a contradiction of his earlier call for justice. This is an anthropological rather than a theological text. It tells us more about us than about God. It is a reflection about who we are: that there is a deep human need in all cultures for sacrifice. That the end result of sacrifice is order, structure, civilization – and that the pouring of blood is a powerful thing. Sacrifice was common to all ancient cultures. It is a deeply embedded human practice that, because of its power, was ascribed to the will of God/the gods. It just emerges spontaneously in the Bible. This ancient human practice is incorporated into the text. The Bible both embraces it yet also cannot completely reconcile itself to it (see prophets below) - because it seems antithetical to the emerging understanding of God.
In Exodus 12:21-27 God gives the Passover sacrifice instructions. It paints an intolerable picture of God. He sends his angel of death to pass over the human metropolis of Egypt, slaying the first born sons of all whose homes are not marked by the blood of a slaughtered lamb. The blood is not just a marker (like paint). Rather it is apotropaic – something that wards off evil. Like making the sign of the cross, the evil eye or blessing someone after they sneeze. It is something holy or magical that keeps evil away. It was an ancient practice in Europe to kill an animal and place it under the threshold of the house to protect the home. Spilling blood is a powerful primitive means of protection.
In Genesis 15:7-20 God makes a covenant with Abram. He instructs Abram to cut several animals in half and to arrange their rendered bodies in two lines to form a corridor. A smoking pot and a flaming torch appear and pass along the corridor. These symbols recall the pillars of fire and of smoke depicted in the Exodus story. They represent God who now moves down the rows of animals. God is saying that if he breaks his promise then he calls down this destruction upon himself. Abram does not have to walk down the corridor – only God. The slaughtered animals act as a curse. This account gives us a picture of how ancient peoples behaved. They used blood to give binding meaning to a promise.
The book of Samuel is the story of the founding of the Kingdoms. Before there were kings, the people were led by Judges –charismatic figures (for example Gideon and Samson) who rose up according to the needs of the people. Samuel, an early prophet, objects to the establishment of a king. He eventually, grudgingly, agrees to anoint Saul king – giving in to the will of the people. The prophets emerge at the same time as the kings – speaking out against them. The kings are another failed prototype. The prophets speak out also against what inevitably comes with a king – the palace and the temple, injustice and false worship. David, Saul’s successor and the archetypal king, did not establish a temple. It was his son, Solomon, who built it. 2 Samuel 7:1-17 tells of David considering establishing a Temple, but he is dissuaded by God, through the prophet Nathan:
“Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’”
God is saying that, unlike a tent that moves with the people, you cannot move a temple.
A temple is to do with centralized, visible, vertical power.
The basis of the Book of Samuel is written by a scribe in @950 BCE. He is preserving both the memory that God did not want a temple yet also that history shows that the Temple was in fact built. The account is contradictory - God doesn’t approve of sacrifice, but then he does; doesn’t want a temple, but then allows it. There is a struggle within the text to reconcile both strands of the tradition. The account tries to resolve the dilemma by having God reply to David that his son, rather than he, will be the architect of the Temple. The temple is therefore removed, at least by one generation, from the idealized reign of David.
The mechanism that makes a temple a temple is sacrifice. The ancient human practice, recounted in the earlier Genesis stories, thus gets institutionalized and introduced into the heart of Israel. The prophets continue to speak out against the Temple and sacrifice, maintaining the struggle/tension within the text:
“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me you burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and your offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:21-24 – a text quoted by Martin Luther King).
“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6)
Jesus continues in this prophetic tradition. He takes on the whole sacrificial mechanism, becoming himself the sacrificial victim but overturning the concept itself through infinite forgiveness and love. In so doing he shows us the way to break with the human dependence upon sacrifice once and for all.
Sacrifice and the Temple of Solomon 10/22/10
The Bible can be seen as a list of failed human attempts to relate to God, i.e. with means involving violence. One of the biggest of these is through the sacrifice of animals. At the Passover at the time of Jesus it is estimated there were over a million pilgrims. With each family making a lamb sacrifice, the Temple would have become like an enormous abattoir to accommodate the blood fest.
Chapter 4 of Genesis provides the first account of sacrifice. There is no preamble, no instructions from God to do it, no explanation why sacrificial practice suddenly appears in the text. It arises in the story of Cain and Abel where Abel’s animal sacrifice finds more favor in God’s eyes than Cain’s harvest offering. This leads to the first murder, Cain’s founding of the first city and the birth of civilization. A struggle exists in the text. God hears the blood of Abel crying out from the ground for justice, but then immediately God protects his murderer by placing a mark on Cain. God prefers Abel’s animal sacrifice, but then the blood of Abel himself (an even greater sacrifice) seems to lead God to protect and bless Cain in what seems a contradiction of his earlier call for justice. This is an anthropological rather than a theological text. It tells us more about us than about God. It is a reflection about who we are: that there is a deep human need in all cultures for sacrifice. That the end result of sacrifice is order, structure, civilization – and that the pouring of blood is a powerful thing. Sacrifice was common to all ancient cultures. It is a deeply embedded human practice that, because of its power, was ascribed to the will of God/the gods. It just emerges spontaneously in the Bible. This ancient human practice is incorporated into the text. The Bible both embraces it yet also cannot completely reconcile itself to it (see prophets below) - because it seems antithetical to the emerging understanding of God.
In Exodus 12:21-27 God gives the Passover sacrifice instructions. It paints an intolerable picture of God. He sends his angel of death to pass over the human metropolis of Egypt, slaying the first born sons of all whose homes are not marked by the blood of a slaughtered lamb. The blood is not just a marker (like paint). Rather it is apotropaic – something that wards off evil. Like making the sign of the cross, the evil eye or blessing someone after they sneeze. It is something holy or magical that keeps evil away. It was an ancient practice in Europe to kill an animal and place it under the threshold of the house to protect the home. Spilling blood is a powerful primitive means of protection.
In Genesis 15:7-20 God makes a covenant with Abram. He instructs Abram to cut several animals in half and to arrange their rendered bodies in two lines to form a corridor. A smoking pot and a flaming torch appear and pass along the corridor. These symbols recall the pillars of fire and of smoke depicted in the Exodus story. They represent God who now moves down the rows of animals. God is saying that if he breaks his promise then he calls down this destruction upon himself. Abram does not have to walk down the corridor – only God. The slaughtered animals act as a curse. This account gives us a picture of how ancient peoples behaved. They used blood to give binding meaning to a promise.
The book of Samuel is the story of the founding of the Kingdoms. Before there were kings, the people were led by Judges –charismatic figures (for example Gideon and Samson) who rose up according to the needs of the people. Samuel, an early prophet, objects to the establishment of a king. He eventually, grudgingly, agrees to anoint Saul king – giving in to the will of the people. The prophets emerge at the same time as the kings – speaking out against them. The kings are another failed prototype. The prophets speak out also against what inevitably comes with a king – the palace and the temple, injustice and false worship. David, Saul’s successor and the archetypal king, did not establish a temple. It was his son, Solomon, who built it. 2 Samuel 7:1-17 tells of David considering establishing a Temple, but he is dissuaded by God, through the prophet Nathan:
“Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’”
God is saying that, unlike a tent that moves with the people, you cannot move a temple.
A temple is to do with centralized, visible, vertical power.
The basis of the Book of Samuel is written by a scribe in @950 BCE. He is preserving both the memory that God did not want a temple yet also that history shows that the Temple was in fact built. The account is contradictory - God doesn’t approve of sacrifice, but then he does; doesn’t want a temple, but then allows it. There is a struggle within the text to reconcile both strands of the tradition. The account tries to resolve the dilemma by having God reply to David that his son, rather than he, will be the architect of the Temple. The temple is therefore removed, at least by one generation, from the idealized reign of David.
The mechanism that makes a temple a temple is sacrifice. The ancient human practice, recounted in the earlier Genesis stories, thus gets institutionalized and introduced into the heart of Israel. The prophets continue to speak out against the Temple and sacrifice, maintaining the struggle/tension within the text:
“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me you burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and your offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:21-24 – a text quoted by Martin Luther King).
“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6)
Jesus continues in this prophetic tradition. He takes on the whole sacrificial mechanism, becoming himself the sacrificial victim but overturning the concept itself through infinite forgiveness and love. In so doing he shows us the way to break with the human dependence upon sacrifice once and for all.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Earth Knowledge
There’s a verse in Isaiah that has always spoken to me and, I suspect, a lot of people, for its sheer poetry, opening up an acutely wonderful idea.
“The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” (11:9)
Because it is so poetic it could be dismissed as little more, a lucid metaphor for a flight of fancy or, at best, something real but postponed for a long-distant supernatural future.
But I’d like to report that at the end of our last bible study we stood in a circle with our eyes shut and our hands spread before us palm upwards, and we felt the reality of an earth, a physical environment, that communicated the deep presence of God.
Don’t get me wrong. This is no claim to a mystical experience or to a special ritual for initiates of Wood Hath Hope. That is precisely why I’m reporting it: because it is not that. Because this thing belongs to everyone.
We were studying the book of Isaiah, from the point of view of the temple, and we were seeing how for the whole book of Isaiah the temple is not really important, but the city which surrounds it is. The Book of Isaiah exalts the city of Zion, of Jerusalem, as the place where God’s plan for the earth and humankind will be accomplished. It involves such marvelous features as the end to war, the end of violence (including among animals), the abundance of food and wine to drink for everyone, all the way to the end of death itself. These elements of biblical prophecy have been consistently played down in favor of the “heavenly elsewhere” of Platonized theology, and of standard church preaching and popular imagination. And why not? It is so much easier to get people to believe in, and pay coin for, some mechanism of a happy afterlife rather than an unlikely metamorphosis of the crappy present one.
But what I’m talking about is not a matter of preaching, of playing to the cultural preconceptions of a mass culture whose preconceptions the Christian church has helped reinforce. (By the way, when did Jesus ever talk about “going to heaven when you die”?). Rather it is the here and now transformation of our constructed sense experience by the power of the Word, by the power of a set of signs and symbols which speak to and release our deepest earthly truth.
In concrete what this means is that when we stood on the earth in the power of Isaiah’s words we stood on an earth freed from violence and death. And when we placed our hands and fingers out into the air we were touching molecules set free from the futility of death by the Holy Spirit of love. These are not false or phantasmal experiences, but the shaping of our highly moldable sense apparatus (technically it’s called neural plasticity) by the redemptive speech of the bible working in and through the Risen Christ.
There’s a feedback loop from the inspired language to our bodies passing through the new creation that Christ has already is. Indeed if Christ is physically risen what other earthly reality could Christians possible refer to except the one that is radically transformed in him?
The feeling may only last for the few moments in the slipstream of the study and its signs, but we remember it and know it’s there and are able continually to base our actions in it.
And that is why we “study”: reading and thinking about these written signs, in and through Christ, enables our human senses to be continually formed and re-formed until new creation becomes second nature.
Imagine what would happen to the Christian movement if every time Christians met they placed themselves in the power of the Word within a transformed earth!
“The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” (11:9)
Because it is so poetic it could be dismissed as little more, a lucid metaphor for a flight of fancy or, at best, something real but postponed for a long-distant supernatural future.
But I’d like to report that at the end of our last bible study we stood in a circle with our eyes shut and our hands spread before us palm upwards, and we felt the reality of an earth, a physical environment, that communicated the deep presence of God.
Don’t get me wrong. This is no claim to a mystical experience or to a special ritual for initiates of Wood Hath Hope. That is precisely why I’m reporting it: because it is not that. Because this thing belongs to everyone.
We were studying the book of Isaiah, from the point of view of the temple, and we were seeing how for the whole book of Isaiah the temple is not really important, but the city which surrounds it is. The Book of Isaiah exalts the city of Zion, of Jerusalem, as the place where God’s plan for the earth and humankind will be accomplished. It involves such marvelous features as the end to war, the end of violence (including among animals), the abundance of food and wine to drink for everyone, all the way to the end of death itself. These elements of biblical prophecy have been consistently played down in favor of the “heavenly elsewhere” of Platonized theology, and of standard church preaching and popular imagination. And why not? It is so much easier to get people to believe in, and pay coin for, some mechanism of a happy afterlife rather than an unlikely metamorphosis of the crappy present one.
But what I’m talking about is not a matter of preaching, of playing to the cultural preconceptions of a mass culture whose preconceptions the Christian church has helped reinforce. (By the way, when did Jesus ever talk about “going to heaven when you die”?). Rather it is the here and now transformation of our constructed sense experience by the power of the Word, by the power of a set of signs and symbols which speak to and release our deepest earthly truth.
In concrete what this means is that when we stood on the earth in the power of Isaiah’s words we stood on an earth freed from violence and death. And when we placed our hands and fingers out into the air we were touching molecules set free from the futility of death by the Holy Spirit of love. These are not false or phantasmal experiences, but the shaping of our highly moldable sense apparatus (technically it’s called neural plasticity) by the redemptive speech of the bible working in and through the Risen Christ.
There’s a feedback loop from the inspired language to our bodies passing through the new creation that Christ has already is. Indeed if Christ is physically risen what other earthly reality could Christians possible refer to except the one that is radically transformed in him?
The feeling may only last for the few moments in the slipstream of the study and its signs, but we remember it and know it’s there and are able continually to base our actions in it.
And that is why we “study”: reading and thinking about these written signs, in and through Christ, enables our human senses to be continually formed and re-formed until new creation becomes second nature.
Imagine what would happen to the Christian movement if every time Christians met they placed themselves in the power of the Word within a transformed earth!
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Sacred Space #2
Here is the second study summary in our series on sacred space. Peace-Linda
Jeremiah’s condemnation of the temple 10/15/10
Jeremiah had a long prophetic life spanning 45 -50 years in the 7th century BCE. He began prophesying in the reign of Josiah, king of Judah. Josiah is often considered one of the better kings because he instituted a reform to clear the land of the worship of other gods. Josiah was killed in a battle against the Egyptians at the plain of Megiddo. This was the site of numerous battles led by various armies, including those of the Canaanites, Egyptians, Napoleon and the British. Megiddo is also the supposed site of the great future battle of Armageddon. Nazareth lies about eight miles from the central Megiddo highway, and it marks the beginning of the territory of Galilee. In this particular battle, Judah had sided with the emerging Babylonian empire against the Egyptians, who were allies of the Assyrians. Josiah, despite being a righteous king, was defeated. It seemed as though God had abandoned Judah.
Jehoiachim, Josiah’s successor, became king in 609 BCE. He aligned himself with Egypt against Babylon. He was cynical – contemptuous and dismissive of Jeremiah. It is during the same year that Jehoiachim ascended to the throne that Jeremiah gives his powerful sermon against the temple. In 598 BCE Jehoiachim dies. The following year Babylon attacks and Jehoiachin (Jehoiachim’s heir, then only eighteen years old) immediately surrenders. Because of his decision not to fight, the city is not destroyed - but the king and about several thousand hostages of import are taken into captivity.
After ten years the remaining officers, court and priests, under the lead of Zedekiah, choose to rebel. They believe that the Temple is invincible. Jeremiah, in a hugely unpopular move, preaches against rebellion, but his words go unheeded. The Babylonian army returns to destroy Jerusalem, burning everything and tearing down the Temple. The people are exiled to Babylon, with just a handful of the poor left behind. Jeremiah, on the basis of his favorable prophetic message, is offered certain privileges by the Babylonians should he return with them. He declines – opting to stay in Jerusalem. The Babylonian-appointed governor is killed and those responsible escape to Egypt. Jeremiah goes with them, staying faithful to Yahweh when his companions become disillusioned with their faith and turn to the gods of Egypt. Jeremiah prophesies against them and, according to tradition, they kill him.
Jeremiah’s life is in many ways the autobiography of a failure. He gets to prophesy at perhaps the worst time in Jewish history - he complains and laments. Almost in spite of himself, he is driven to speak unpopular messages to people unwilling to hear. “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everybody mocks me. For whenever I speak. I must cry out, I must shout, ‘violence and destruction!’ For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long” (Jer 20:7-8).
Twenty years into his career he gives the sermon found in Jer 26:1- 24 predicting the destruction of the Temple. At this time Jerusalem had a fully fledged temple cult – with its architecture, rituals, priests and sacrifices. Jeremiah foretells disaster – Jerusalem will be like Shiloh (a sacred Israelite site from before the time of the kingdoms, famously destroyed, probably by the Philistines). Shiloh was the symbol of a ruined place. If the Israelites do not change their ways then the Lord will send a mighty force to destroy the Temple.
Chapter 7 gives another account of the same prophesy. Jer 7: 30-34 alludes to the practice of child sacrifice – an abomination to God. “They go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire – which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind” The site Topheth is another name for Gehenna, which lies south of the Mount of Olives. In New Testament times it became the site of the city incinerator. Jesus refers to this place when he uses it as an example of a fiery pit that never goes out.
Jeremiah frequently speaks out against sacrifice. Jer 7:21-23 suggests that the legislation found in Exodus and Leviticus is not from God. God does not want blood sacrifice, rather obedience. Jer 7: 5-7 again calls for justice rather than the shedding of innocent blood. This has to mean the blood of the sacrificial animals. The implication is that killing animals for sacrifice is not God’s will. When Jesus clears the temple before his arrest he quotes from this passage in Jeremiah: “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?” (Jer 7:11). Where Jesus’ message is of repentance and forgiveness, Jeremiah threatens the worst. If the people do not change they face ultimate destruction.
Sacrifice is present historically in all human cultures. There is something deep within us that calls out for innocent blood as a way to make things right. Sacrifice is a lightening rod for the anger and energy of the group against its enemies. The act of violence brings a transient sense of peace to the group, as the group violence is discharged through the sacrificial victim.
Jeremiah and the other prophets speak out against the Temple and sacrifice. They are generally suspicious of temple sacrifice exhorting the people instead to act justly and embrace mercy as the way to gain God’s favor. Sacrifice is a human not a divine institution.
In Chapters 30 - 31 Jeremiah preaches from the perspective of exile. In 31:31-34 he describes the new covenant that God will make with his people. God’s law will be written on people’s hearts. There is no more need for a Temple because the people will all know the Lord –will be in relationship with him. The tone has changed from threat to promise and redemption. God is on their side and has a plan – an image of a reconciled humanity. Matthew has Jesus using these words when he tells his disciples at the last supper that the cup is “my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (MT 26:28).
After the return from exile, and despite the witness of Jeremiah, the Temple was rebuilt more splendidly than before. It was gradually developed until, by the time of Jesus, it had become one of the wonders of the ancient world - its dome covered in goldleaf. It is estimated that over a million people made the pilgrimage there during the Passover – the Temple must have been awash with the blood of all of those animals. Its final destruction in 70 AD by the Romans (and foretold by Jesus) led to a huge crisis for the Jewish people, surmounted only by the Rabbinic written tradition, not depending on Temple. The deep need in people for violence and blood sacrifice is so strong that only a transformation of our hearts that goes deeper still can overturn it. This call to enter into a transformed humanity is what lies at the heart of the gospel and is the witness of the crucifixion.
Jeremiah’s condemnation of the temple 10/15/10
Jeremiah had a long prophetic life spanning 45 -50 years in the 7th century BCE. He began prophesying in the reign of Josiah, king of Judah. Josiah is often considered one of the better kings because he instituted a reform to clear the land of the worship of other gods. Josiah was killed in a battle against the Egyptians at the plain of Megiddo. This was the site of numerous battles led by various armies, including those of the Canaanites, Egyptians, Napoleon and the British. Megiddo is also the supposed site of the great future battle of Armageddon. Nazareth lies about eight miles from the central Megiddo highway, and it marks the beginning of the territory of Galilee. In this particular battle, Judah had sided with the emerging Babylonian empire against the Egyptians, who were allies of the Assyrians. Josiah, despite being a righteous king, was defeated. It seemed as though God had abandoned Judah.
Jehoiachim, Josiah’s successor, became king in 609 BCE. He aligned himself with Egypt against Babylon. He was cynical – contemptuous and dismissive of Jeremiah. It is during the same year that Jehoiachim ascended to the throne that Jeremiah gives his powerful sermon against the temple. In 598 BCE Jehoiachim dies. The following year Babylon attacks and Jehoiachin (Jehoiachim’s heir, then only eighteen years old) immediately surrenders. Because of his decision not to fight, the city is not destroyed - but the king and about several thousand hostages of import are taken into captivity.
After ten years the remaining officers, court and priests, under the lead of Zedekiah, choose to rebel. They believe that the Temple is invincible. Jeremiah, in a hugely unpopular move, preaches against rebellion, but his words go unheeded. The Babylonian army returns to destroy Jerusalem, burning everything and tearing down the Temple. The people are exiled to Babylon, with just a handful of the poor left behind. Jeremiah, on the basis of his favorable prophetic message, is offered certain privileges by the Babylonians should he return with them. He declines – opting to stay in Jerusalem. The Babylonian-appointed governor is killed and those responsible escape to Egypt. Jeremiah goes with them, staying faithful to Yahweh when his companions become disillusioned with their faith and turn to the gods of Egypt. Jeremiah prophesies against them and, according to tradition, they kill him.
Jeremiah’s life is in many ways the autobiography of a failure. He gets to prophesy at perhaps the worst time in Jewish history - he complains and laments. Almost in spite of himself, he is driven to speak unpopular messages to people unwilling to hear. “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everybody mocks me. For whenever I speak. I must cry out, I must shout, ‘violence and destruction!’ For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long” (Jer 20:7-8).
Twenty years into his career he gives the sermon found in Jer 26:1- 24 predicting the destruction of the Temple. At this time Jerusalem had a fully fledged temple cult – with its architecture, rituals, priests and sacrifices. Jeremiah foretells disaster – Jerusalem will be like Shiloh (a sacred Israelite site from before the time of the kingdoms, famously destroyed, probably by the Philistines). Shiloh was the symbol of a ruined place. If the Israelites do not change their ways then the Lord will send a mighty force to destroy the Temple.
Chapter 7 gives another account of the same prophesy. Jer 7: 30-34 alludes to the practice of child sacrifice – an abomination to God. “They go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire – which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind” The site Topheth is another name for Gehenna, which lies south of the Mount of Olives. In New Testament times it became the site of the city incinerator. Jesus refers to this place when he uses it as an example of a fiery pit that never goes out.
Jeremiah frequently speaks out against sacrifice. Jer 7:21-23 suggests that the legislation found in Exodus and Leviticus is not from God. God does not want blood sacrifice, rather obedience. Jer 7: 5-7 again calls for justice rather than the shedding of innocent blood. This has to mean the blood of the sacrificial animals. The implication is that killing animals for sacrifice is not God’s will. When Jesus clears the temple before his arrest he quotes from this passage in Jeremiah: “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?” (Jer 7:11). Where Jesus’ message is of repentance and forgiveness, Jeremiah threatens the worst. If the people do not change they face ultimate destruction.
Sacrifice is present historically in all human cultures. There is something deep within us that calls out for innocent blood as a way to make things right. Sacrifice is a lightening rod for the anger and energy of the group against its enemies. The act of violence brings a transient sense of peace to the group, as the group violence is discharged through the sacrificial victim.
Jeremiah and the other prophets speak out against the Temple and sacrifice. They are generally suspicious of temple sacrifice exhorting the people instead to act justly and embrace mercy as the way to gain God’s favor. Sacrifice is a human not a divine institution.
In Chapters 30 - 31 Jeremiah preaches from the perspective of exile. In 31:31-34 he describes the new covenant that God will make with his people. God’s law will be written on people’s hearts. There is no more need for a Temple because the people will all know the Lord –will be in relationship with him. The tone has changed from threat to promise and redemption. God is on their side and has a plan – an image of a reconciled humanity. Matthew has Jesus using these words when he tells his disciples at the last supper that the cup is “my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (MT 26:28).
After the return from exile, and despite the witness of Jeremiah, the Temple was rebuilt more splendidly than before. It was gradually developed until, by the time of Jesus, it had become one of the wonders of the ancient world - its dome covered in goldleaf. It is estimated that over a million people made the pilgrimage there during the Passover – the Temple must have been awash with the blood of all of those animals. Its final destruction in 70 AD by the Romans (and foretold by Jesus) led to a huge crisis for the Jewish people, surmounted only by the Rabbinic written tradition, not depending on Temple. The deep need in people for violence and blood sacrifice is so strong that only a transformation of our hearts that goes deeper still can overturn it. This call to enter into a transformed humanity is what lies at the heart of the gospel and is the witness of the crucifixion.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Sacred Space #1
Here is the first study summary in our new series - Sacred Space in the Bible: From Temple Place to Trinity Space. For a different take on the material, check out Tony's blog "Not my Shallow Heart, but, yes, this Shadow Heart" (October 4th 2010).
-Linda
Sacred Space #1 Jacob’s encounters with God 10/01/10
Sacred space is the space in which God or the divine is experienced. But what exactly does that mean? The purpose of this and the following studies is to pursue that question. The stories in Genesis are filled with sacred spaces marked by altars and the blood of animal sacrifice. For example 12:6-8.
“Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the Oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.”
Also 13:18 “So Abram moved his tent, and came and settled by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron; and there he built an altar to the Lord.” Abraham is portrayed as moving through Canaan mapping out territory for the God of Israel. And the same is true of the other patriarchs; see 26:23-25 among others.
There are many important narratives associated with Abraham – to do with promises, the land and circumcision. In contrast the stories of Jacob have a more personal feel. They describe his character, his strivings as an individual, his trickery and the violence this provokes. With Jacob the concept of sacred space shifts from a place of awe and transcendence to something ultimately to do with relationship.
The story of Jacob’s ladder (Gen 28:10-22) is the first of two well-known narratives about Jacob encountering the divine. Jacob’s dream is quoted by Jesus in John1:51 when Jesus tells Nathaniel (an honest Israelite) that the Son of Man will be the new founding theophany for Israel: “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”. For the evangelist John, it is the raising up of Jesus on the cross that reveals God’s glory. The ladder in the dream that bridges the gap between heaven and earth is replaced by the person of Christ crucified.
This story is twinned with a second story – one of the most intimate and fascinating in the Bible - is found in Gen 32:22-32. The context of this story is that Jacob tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright – his father’s blessing. Fearful of his brother’s anger, Jacob fled to Haran in the East to relatives of his mother’s brother Laban. There he stays for many years, marrying first Leah then Rachel, accumulating family, flocks and possessions. Eventually he decides to return to his homeland, but is fearful of the reception he will get from Esau. Gen 32:3-21 describes his attempts at allaying Esau’s wrath by sending presents of flocks, slaves and even his family ahead of him. Finally he is alone. It is at this point, in the night, that Jacob encounters a “man” who wrestles with him until dawn. Even though he is wounded (struck on his hip) Jacob does not yield and demands a blessing from his opponent. The man replies “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” and Jacob names the place Peniel (meaning the “face of God”) - for he has seen God face to face and yet his life is preserved.
In this account of the struggle between Jacob and God at Peniel God is weak against Jacob, but leaves Jacob with both a wound and a blessing. This is a different picture of God from the prevailing image in the Torah in which God is usually understood in terms of power and threat.
In Genesis 33: 1-11 Jacob meets his brother. Esau does not exact revenge, instead runs to meet him, embraces him, falls on his neck, kisses him and weeps. Esau does not want to accept any of Jacob’s gifts but Jacob responds “If I find favor with you, then accept my present from my hand; for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God”.
There is an implied critique of the violent image of God found in Deuteronomy and Exodus here. While Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and draws on ancient traditions, it reached its final form later than many of the books of the Old Testament. In the earlier Amos1:11; Jeremiah 25:21; 49:8-10 and book of Obadiah, Edom is depicted as a hated enemy of Israel. Esau is traditionally the ancestor of the Edomites (Gen 36:9). In 2 Samuel 8:13-14 David conquers Edom. In this context the attitude of Esau in Genesis is amazing. His attitude of forgiveness and brotherhood spurs his brother, who has so recently encountered God, to liken his face to that of God. This face is of a God who does not prevail against his enemies, but wounds them and blesses them through weakness.
These two stories – Jacob’s dream and his wrestling with God at Peniel- frame the story of the conflict between Esau and Jacob. The first portrays the more traditional image of a divide between heaven and earth, in which a ladder is needed for the divine to enter into the human space. The second signals that sacred space, the place we encounter God, is ultimately to do with relationship, surrender, weakness, blessing and forgiveness. In John’s gospel the Son of Man fulfills this second pathway to perfection, and so brings the ladder of the transcendent divine into the heart of human existence.
-Linda
Sacred Space #1 Jacob’s encounters with God 10/01/10
Sacred space is the space in which God or the divine is experienced. But what exactly does that mean? The purpose of this and the following studies is to pursue that question. The stories in Genesis are filled with sacred spaces marked by altars and the blood of animal sacrifice. For example 12:6-8.
“Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the Oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.”
Also 13:18 “So Abram moved his tent, and came and settled by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron; and there he built an altar to the Lord.” Abraham is portrayed as moving through Canaan mapping out territory for the God of Israel. And the same is true of the other patriarchs; see 26:23-25 among others.
There are many important narratives associated with Abraham – to do with promises, the land and circumcision. In contrast the stories of Jacob have a more personal feel. They describe his character, his strivings as an individual, his trickery and the violence this provokes. With Jacob the concept of sacred space shifts from a place of awe and transcendence to something ultimately to do with relationship.
The story of Jacob’s ladder (Gen 28:10-22) is the first of two well-known narratives about Jacob encountering the divine. Jacob’s dream is quoted by Jesus in John1:51 when Jesus tells Nathaniel (an honest Israelite) that the Son of Man will be the new founding theophany for Israel: “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”. For the evangelist John, it is the raising up of Jesus on the cross that reveals God’s glory. The ladder in the dream that bridges the gap between heaven and earth is replaced by the person of Christ crucified.
This story is twinned with a second story – one of the most intimate and fascinating in the Bible - is found in Gen 32:22-32. The context of this story is that Jacob tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright – his father’s blessing. Fearful of his brother’s anger, Jacob fled to Haran in the East to relatives of his mother’s brother Laban. There he stays for many years, marrying first Leah then Rachel, accumulating family, flocks and possessions. Eventually he decides to return to his homeland, but is fearful of the reception he will get from Esau. Gen 32:3-21 describes his attempts at allaying Esau’s wrath by sending presents of flocks, slaves and even his family ahead of him. Finally he is alone. It is at this point, in the night, that Jacob encounters a “man” who wrestles with him until dawn. Even though he is wounded (struck on his hip) Jacob does not yield and demands a blessing from his opponent. The man replies “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” and Jacob names the place Peniel (meaning the “face of God”) - for he has seen God face to face and yet his life is preserved.
In this account of the struggle between Jacob and God at Peniel God is weak against Jacob, but leaves Jacob with both a wound and a blessing. This is a different picture of God from the prevailing image in the Torah in which God is usually understood in terms of power and threat.
In Genesis 33: 1-11 Jacob meets his brother. Esau does not exact revenge, instead runs to meet him, embraces him, falls on his neck, kisses him and weeps. Esau does not want to accept any of Jacob’s gifts but Jacob responds “If I find favor with you, then accept my present from my hand; for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God”.
There is an implied critique of the violent image of God found in Deuteronomy and Exodus here. While Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and draws on ancient traditions, it reached its final form later than many of the books of the Old Testament. In the earlier Amos1:11; Jeremiah 25:21; 49:8-10 and book of Obadiah, Edom is depicted as a hated enemy of Israel. Esau is traditionally the ancestor of the Edomites (Gen 36:9). In 2 Samuel 8:13-14 David conquers Edom. In this context the attitude of Esau in Genesis is amazing. His attitude of forgiveness and brotherhood spurs his brother, who has so recently encountered God, to liken his face to that of God. This face is of a God who does not prevail against his enemies, but wounds them and blesses them through weakness.
These two stories – Jacob’s dream and his wrestling with God at Peniel- frame the story of the conflict between Esau and Jacob. The first portrays the more traditional image of a divide between heaven and earth, in which a ladder is needed for the divine to enter into the human space. The second signals that sacred space, the place we encounter God, is ultimately to do with relationship, surrender, weakness, blessing and forgiveness. In John’s gospel the Son of Man fulfills this second pathway to perfection, and so brings the ladder of the transcendent divine into the heart of human existence.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Deep Places
I’m sure it’s already a cliché of blogging and preaching—the Chilean miners rising from their tomb two thousand feet under a mountain—but who cares, it’s irresistible in a world dying for a breath of hope.
And more than this: it’s a page cut straight from the Christian culture of South America and of all those throughout the world who celebrate Easter. “Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life, that I should not go down to the Pit!” (Ps. 30:3) Who could deny that part of the thrill as each man came out of the beautiful escape capsule was its echoes of the Pascal Mystery? Because Christians say “Christ is Risen” the world had hoped that little bit more urgently, that little bit more fervently, that the thirty three miners would be saved.
But there is something even more important, more significant, than a brief media moment framed by the gospels. I used to teach a seminary student who was always talking about “thin spaces.” This person meant experiences where the normal mundane sense of the world was displaced by feelings of awe, beauty, holiness. Dead, harsh or oppressive elements of daily life were dispelled and something much more wonderful took their place.
I think, however, that “deep spaces” is a much better image. It is illustrated of course by the experience of the Chilean miners, but, beneath that, it is affirmed by the core New Testament trajectory of death, descent into the tomb and third day resurrection. John’s gospel breaks from the geometry of resurrection as an “up” movement: the passion and death of Jesus are in fact his “lifting up”. Then resurrection is simply the life-filled affirmation of that amazing, counter-intuitive “up”. And, afterward, when Jesus’ brothers and sisters learn the God-revealing meaning of all this Jesus does “ascend”, i.e. all spaces in the universe are filled with his amazing new geometry of descent.
Deep spaces are unmade space, space not controlled by the violent meanings of the world. They may be the result of violence—perhaps they always are—but those suffering in them/from them do not share the world’s meaning: rather they endure it and from the depths of their souls they cry out against it. Deep spaces are therefore the place of emptiness, of possibility, of what yet can be. They are the space of creation and re-creation.
Consequently they are the space of great love and joy. This last weekend I spent time in a monastery in southern New York. It was classic fall weather— that peculiar dry and bright intensity when all the colors of life crackle in chorus before they must turn to dust. The monastery is located high upon weathered mountains which shoulder up clouds then sweep down abruptly into carved-out stream and river valleys. There is a path at back of the monastery which leads down just such a canyon, down to the river Chemung five hundred feet below. Near the head of the path, on a wall by the last of the buildings, one of the brothers had placed a crucifix with the Christ made out of wrapped wire, like the coils of several electric motors strung together. There was something about the harshness of the medium and the way the artist made the corpus sunk entirely in death, with the knee jutting out almost at right angles. It captured the total imprisonment of the body and the fact that the only movement left for a crucified man was spiritual: either total hatred, total despair, or a total self-giving of love. Needless to say what the image captured was the last. Thus suddenly it was entirely right that the body should resemble electric coils, for it was this love that made the electrons run in the first place, across all the channels of the universe. And the crook of the knee projecting out into the void signaled the great wooded chasm below and it became filled with God’s love in a totally real and concrete sense.
This was not a thin space, suggesting a parallel, better and spiritual world. This was a deep space, the depths of this world changed and changing into what it was always meant to be. Deep spaces may not be easy. They can be filled with trauma and the imminent threat of death. But as shaped by the Crucified they are haunted endlessly by love and contain an indelible promise of life. I wasn’t thinking at all of Chile, just about the wooded canyon, about electricity, and about the mystery of love . It was only later I thought about the Chilean miners, and about all the TV stations and the Internet, their electricity buzzing with resurrection in the depths.
And more than this: it’s a page cut straight from the Christian culture of South America and of all those throughout the world who celebrate Easter. “Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life, that I should not go down to the Pit!” (Ps. 30:3) Who could deny that part of the thrill as each man came out of the beautiful escape capsule was its echoes of the Pascal Mystery? Because Christians say “Christ is Risen” the world had hoped that little bit more urgently, that little bit more fervently, that the thirty three miners would be saved.
But there is something even more important, more significant, than a brief media moment framed by the gospels. I used to teach a seminary student who was always talking about “thin spaces.” This person meant experiences where the normal mundane sense of the world was displaced by feelings of awe, beauty, holiness. Dead, harsh or oppressive elements of daily life were dispelled and something much more wonderful took their place.
I think, however, that “deep spaces” is a much better image. It is illustrated of course by the experience of the Chilean miners, but, beneath that, it is affirmed by the core New Testament trajectory of death, descent into the tomb and third day resurrection. John’s gospel breaks from the geometry of resurrection as an “up” movement: the passion and death of Jesus are in fact his “lifting up”. Then resurrection is simply the life-filled affirmation of that amazing, counter-intuitive “up”. And, afterward, when Jesus’ brothers and sisters learn the God-revealing meaning of all this Jesus does “ascend”, i.e. all spaces in the universe are filled with his amazing new geometry of descent.
Deep spaces are unmade space, space not controlled by the violent meanings of the world. They may be the result of violence—perhaps they always are—but those suffering in them/from them do not share the world’s meaning: rather they endure it and from the depths of their souls they cry out against it. Deep spaces are therefore the place of emptiness, of possibility, of what yet can be. They are the space of creation and re-creation.
Consequently they are the space of great love and joy. This last weekend I spent time in a monastery in southern New York. It was classic fall weather— that peculiar dry and bright intensity when all the colors of life crackle in chorus before they must turn to dust. The monastery is located high upon weathered mountains which shoulder up clouds then sweep down abruptly into carved-out stream and river valleys. There is a path at back of the monastery which leads down just such a canyon, down to the river Chemung five hundred feet below. Near the head of the path, on a wall by the last of the buildings, one of the brothers had placed a crucifix with the Christ made out of wrapped wire, like the coils of several electric motors strung together. There was something about the harshness of the medium and the way the artist made the corpus sunk entirely in death, with the knee jutting out almost at right angles. It captured the total imprisonment of the body and the fact that the only movement left for a crucified man was spiritual: either total hatred, total despair, or a total self-giving of love. Needless to say what the image captured was the last. Thus suddenly it was entirely right that the body should resemble electric coils, for it was this love that made the electrons run in the first place, across all the channels of the universe. And the crook of the knee projecting out into the void signaled the great wooded chasm below and it became filled with God’s love in a totally real and concrete sense.
This was not a thin space, suggesting a parallel, better and spiritual world. This was a deep space, the depths of this world changed and changing into what it was always meant to be. Deep spaces may not be easy. They can be filled with trauma and the imminent threat of death. But as shaped by the Crucified they are haunted endlessly by love and contain an indelible promise of life. I wasn’t thinking at all of Chile, just about the wooded canyon, about electricity, and about the mystery of love . It was only later I thought about the Chilean miners, and about all the TV stations and the Internet, their electricity buzzing with resurrection in the depths.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Not my Shallow Heart, but, Yes, this Shadow Heart.
I don’t normally comment on our bible studies, Linda does such a good job of writing them up and blogging them in their own right. But something struck me about last Friday’s study which made me want to sit down and trouble the keyboard, at least this one time.
At our first session on Sacred Space we did the story of Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling bout in Genesis (chaps. 32-33). The fight happened at a place which Jacob named Peniel meaning “the Face of God” which is explained by Jacob’s statement after the battle, “I have seen the face of God and lived.” There’s a lot of stuff going on but it’s clear the figure that Jacob wrestles is the figure of God in dramatic or story form. Jacob leaves no doubt about it and the fact is pivotal in the next story, the encounter with Esau, where Jacob says “seeing you is like seeing the face of God”. A key conclusion of the story then is that the fight at the very best is a draw for God, and given Jacob’s vastly outmatched ranking it could easily be counted as his win. In other words God loses against the human opponent. Or, God is nonviolent. (The issue of nonviolence is made certain by the doublet story of Esau— a man whose violence Jacob had provoked but who greets Jacob with love: even so seeing him is like “seeing the face of God”, i.e. the God who refuses violence).
A big lesson here.
For at the same time as God loses God wounds Jacob as a reminder of the fight. Jacob wins but he goes away limping. He has a permanent reminder in his body of God’s essential not-beating-him, of God’s nonviolence. And that’s what really wounds. It tells Jacob that no matter God’s power the greatness of God is God’s nonviolence, God’s refusal to win. The radical reading we gave is that it is God’s weakness that wounds and worries away at our obsessive human structure of violence.
Enter Jesus. There can be very little doubt that Jesus learnt from this story the character of his Father, the one who makes the sun to rise on the just and unjust alike. No perceptive reader can miss it. And then through the revelation of his total weakness on the cross Jesus makes the radical reading definitive. No doubt here about who loses the fight with human violence. Now it is the Jesus figure that worries and wrestles with humanity through its long night of guilt, anger, despair and retaliation. Jesus is the ultimate wrestler struggling in ever matchup, in every fighting cage, with all our historical violence.
Which brings me to the theological point of the reflection.
If this picture is true—if God in Jesus is wrestling with the depth of our humanity to change us—then many past theological constructions regarding grace, election, predestination are simply wrong-headed. The idea that God makes an unconditional decision in God’s mind regarding who shall get saved and get into heaven not only erases God’s nonviolent wrestling with us but it inverts it into a total smackdown every time—by God. This is what is called “high theology”, so high that it cannot see what’s on the ground, cannot see the actual human dynamic by which God wounds us with compassion and nonviolence. It may be the case that my own heart or humanity is continually violent—perverse as Jeremiah says—but the humanity, or the heart of Jesus, is in full human contact with me—wrestling so close I can hear it beat—and all I have to do is pay attention, stop fighting just for an instant (like a fighter who for an instant loses concentration), and he wounds me at once with his own nonviolent humanity or heart. This is not a matter of an arbitrary decision in God’s mind, but is a concrete effect of Jesus’ nonviolent humanity directly on me, the impact of a new human structuring breaking into the old.
There is no way of tracking exactly when and where I may get wounded by Jesus’ nonviolence, when and where this alternative structuring will reconfigure my violent structure; but what we do know is this is an entirely human process. It is an unfathomable mixture of historical and cultural situation, of family background, even of neural biology, but it is certain none of it is predetermined. As Jesus says it is as untraceable as the wind, but that is exactly what makes it human. It is the chaotic mix of factors that allows for that slightest atom of freedom, for that moment when the new humanity stands in balance against the old and I am able in that moment to surrender myself to this new way. When the new enters in to the old with a clarity that has so far been missing I am so to speak equally in both worlds—I am in the future, and I am in the past. At that point I am called to add the feather weight of my will to the situation. In fact it is precisely the miracle of the new which creates the mystery of freedom: it allows me an unparalleled moment of possibility between two ways of being me; there are in fact two “me’s” in existence at that moment and I simply have to let myself fall into one or the other.
The truth is I have a shallow violent heart, but in the depth of my night there is another heart in contact with me, and with all humanity. This is our shadow heart, the one first encountered by Jacob, and then through Jesus by everyone. There is a shadow heart beating for all humanity, for the whole earth. It is the physical rhythm of a new creation.
Oct. 4, Feast of St. Francis
At our first session on Sacred Space we did the story of Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling bout in Genesis (chaps. 32-33). The fight happened at a place which Jacob named Peniel meaning “the Face of God” which is explained by Jacob’s statement after the battle, “I have seen the face of God and lived.” There’s a lot of stuff going on but it’s clear the figure that Jacob wrestles is the figure of God in dramatic or story form. Jacob leaves no doubt about it and the fact is pivotal in the next story, the encounter with Esau, where Jacob says “seeing you is like seeing the face of God”. A key conclusion of the story then is that the fight at the very best is a draw for God, and given Jacob’s vastly outmatched ranking it could easily be counted as his win. In other words God loses against the human opponent. Or, God is nonviolent. (The issue of nonviolence is made certain by the doublet story of Esau— a man whose violence Jacob had provoked but who greets Jacob with love: even so seeing him is like “seeing the face of God”, i.e. the God who refuses violence).
A big lesson here.
For at the same time as God loses God wounds Jacob as a reminder of the fight. Jacob wins but he goes away limping. He has a permanent reminder in his body of God’s essential not-beating-him, of God’s nonviolence. And that’s what really wounds. It tells Jacob that no matter God’s power the greatness of God is God’s nonviolence, God’s refusal to win. The radical reading we gave is that it is God’s weakness that wounds and worries away at our obsessive human structure of violence.
Enter Jesus. There can be very little doubt that Jesus learnt from this story the character of his Father, the one who makes the sun to rise on the just and unjust alike. No perceptive reader can miss it. And then through the revelation of his total weakness on the cross Jesus makes the radical reading definitive. No doubt here about who loses the fight with human violence. Now it is the Jesus figure that worries and wrestles with humanity through its long night of guilt, anger, despair and retaliation. Jesus is the ultimate wrestler struggling in ever matchup, in every fighting cage, with all our historical violence.
Which brings me to the theological point of the reflection.
If this picture is true—if God in Jesus is wrestling with the depth of our humanity to change us—then many past theological constructions regarding grace, election, predestination are simply wrong-headed. The idea that God makes an unconditional decision in God’s mind regarding who shall get saved and get into heaven not only erases God’s nonviolent wrestling with us but it inverts it into a total smackdown every time—by God. This is what is called “high theology”, so high that it cannot see what’s on the ground, cannot see the actual human dynamic by which God wounds us with compassion and nonviolence. It may be the case that my own heart or humanity is continually violent—perverse as Jeremiah says—but the humanity, or the heart of Jesus, is in full human contact with me—wrestling so close I can hear it beat—and all I have to do is pay attention, stop fighting just for an instant (like a fighter who for an instant loses concentration), and he wounds me at once with his own nonviolent humanity or heart. This is not a matter of an arbitrary decision in God’s mind, but is a concrete effect of Jesus’ nonviolent humanity directly on me, the impact of a new human structuring breaking into the old.
There is no way of tracking exactly when and where I may get wounded by Jesus’ nonviolence, when and where this alternative structuring will reconfigure my violent structure; but what we do know is this is an entirely human process. It is an unfathomable mixture of historical and cultural situation, of family background, even of neural biology, but it is certain none of it is predetermined. As Jesus says it is as untraceable as the wind, but that is exactly what makes it human. It is the chaotic mix of factors that allows for that slightest atom of freedom, for that moment when the new humanity stands in balance against the old and I am able in that moment to surrender myself to this new way. When the new enters in to the old with a clarity that has so far been missing I am so to speak equally in both worlds—I am in the future, and I am in the past. At that point I am called to add the feather weight of my will to the situation. In fact it is precisely the miracle of the new which creates the mystery of freedom: it allows me an unparalleled moment of possibility between two ways of being me; there are in fact two “me’s” in existence at that moment and I simply have to let myself fall into one or the other.
The truth is I have a shallow violent heart, but in the depth of my night there is another heart in contact with me, and with all humanity. This is our shadow heart, the one first encountered by Jacob, and then through Jesus by everyone. There is a shadow heart beating for all humanity, for the whole earth. It is the physical rhythm of a new creation.
Oct. 4, Feast of St. Francis
Saturday, September 25, 2010
A Better Book
I have just read Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and I have to say honestly, as an author, it’s a better book than mine, i.e. the one that's coming out shortly (see Homepage). But having said that I immediately want to take it back, and I will!
So let me comment this way. Brian has written a truly remarkable book, one that Christians will be reading for many years to come. I won’t say it will have the legs of Augustine’s City of God which has lasted one and a half millennia (if only because the world we have at the moment doesn’t have those kind of legs: who are we kidding!) However, despite its decisively “keep it simple” approach assisted by a felicitous style (even the occasional big words seem to land lightly on the page like cottonwood blossom) it has the same breadth and strength of vision, the same epoch-forming glance and assurance, as Augustine’s magisterial synthesis.
Did I just say that? I did. And I think it’s true. Augustine wrote at a pivotal moment after the barbarians had taken Rome and the total collapse of the Roman empire was looming on the horizon. Augustine turned the imperial disaster of Rome into the metaphysical triumph of the church and so ushered in the character of the Middle Ages when a spiritual organization claimed “eternal” meaning and sovereignty over all worldly powers. Brian is now making a parallel but inverse move. In a moment when the “Christian West” is behaving just like imperial Rome—in the book he points out that the demographic group most likely to support torture is white Evangelical Christians—and can also seem on the point of economic and social collapse, he shows instead that the Bible nourishes a story of human historical transformation through service, nonviolence and love. Biblical faith does not point us beyond history but is “a guiding star within it…an unquenchable dream that inspires us to unceasing constructive action” (p. 62).
It is the conclusive shift in the Christian story-line carried through within our contemporary crisis that makes this book brilliant. Alaric and his marauding Goths were at the gates of Rome when Augustine penned a book for the ages. Today we have a global society, and all its billions of human issues are constantly at our gates because of the Internet and T.V. An exceptionally new situation requiring an exceptionally new theological paradigm, and Brian has served us a very plausible candidate. But it does lack something and that’s why I want to take back my initial act of deference!
My book, available through this website shortly (and later for trade release), does not have Brian’s ambitious catechetical scope nor his fine-wine-and-good-conversation tone but it is very much in the same game—shifting the Christian viewpoint and praxis to the historical and the this-earthly. But then what Virtually Christian has that A New Kind of Christianity lacks is an account of how it is the gospel of Jesus that got us all into this situation in the first place. It’s not that somehow we have just now woken up to the authentic core narrative of the Bible. That narrative has of its own inherent vigor been shaping our human context and awareness. Its exposure of all human violence as in fact violence and its simultaneous offer of compassion and forgiveness as the true mode of human existence have of their own power overturned the Augustinian synthesis (the viewpoint which in his book Brian calls the Greco-Roman narrative). In this light the Evangelical in Brian needs perhaps to go one step further. By grace we are saved! And this grace is neither purely personal, not is it passive, waiting for us to discover it intellectually in books. It is active and pro-active, producing a cultural human situation in which we can recognize it for itself. Like a caterpillar spinning its own chrysalis--and us within it--the gospel changes the human cultural world so finally the butterfly can emerge!
This makes “a new kind of Christianity” even more urgent. Augustine shaped a whole Christian era using elements of Greek philosophy and Roman realpolitik that were not the gospel. Now, in these latter days, the gospel is shaping its own era by facing us with the truth of human violence and crying out in the world for a new human way. A New Kind of Christianity and Virtually Christian are both in their way writing about a shift the gospel alone has written, and first.
So let me comment this way. Brian has written a truly remarkable book, one that Christians will be reading for many years to come. I won’t say it will have the legs of Augustine’s City of God which has lasted one and a half millennia (if only because the world we have at the moment doesn’t have those kind of legs: who are we kidding!) However, despite its decisively “keep it simple” approach assisted by a felicitous style (even the occasional big words seem to land lightly on the page like cottonwood blossom) it has the same breadth and strength of vision, the same epoch-forming glance and assurance, as Augustine’s magisterial synthesis.
Did I just say that? I did. And I think it’s true. Augustine wrote at a pivotal moment after the barbarians had taken Rome and the total collapse of the Roman empire was looming on the horizon. Augustine turned the imperial disaster of Rome into the metaphysical triumph of the church and so ushered in the character of the Middle Ages when a spiritual organization claimed “eternal” meaning and sovereignty over all worldly powers. Brian is now making a parallel but inverse move. In a moment when the “Christian West” is behaving just like imperial Rome—in the book he points out that the demographic group most likely to support torture is white Evangelical Christians—and can also seem on the point of economic and social collapse, he shows instead that the Bible nourishes a story of human historical transformation through service, nonviolence and love. Biblical faith does not point us beyond history but is “a guiding star within it…an unquenchable dream that inspires us to unceasing constructive action” (p. 62).
It is the conclusive shift in the Christian story-line carried through within our contemporary crisis that makes this book brilliant. Alaric and his marauding Goths were at the gates of Rome when Augustine penned a book for the ages. Today we have a global society, and all its billions of human issues are constantly at our gates because of the Internet and T.V. An exceptionally new situation requiring an exceptionally new theological paradigm, and Brian has served us a very plausible candidate. But it does lack something and that’s why I want to take back my initial act of deference!
My book, available through this website shortly (and later for trade release), does not have Brian’s ambitious catechetical scope nor his fine-wine-and-good-conversation tone but it is very much in the same game—shifting the Christian viewpoint and praxis to the historical and the this-earthly. But then what Virtually Christian has that A New Kind of Christianity lacks is an account of how it is the gospel of Jesus that got us all into this situation in the first place. It’s not that somehow we have just now woken up to the authentic core narrative of the Bible. That narrative has of its own inherent vigor been shaping our human context and awareness. Its exposure of all human violence as in fact violence and its simultaneous offer of compassion and forgiveness as the true mode of human existence have of their own power overturned the Augustinian synthesis (the viewpoint which in his book Brian calls the Greco-Roman narrative). In this light the Evangelical in Brian needs perhaps to go one step further. By grace we are saved! And this grace is neither purely personal, not is it passive, waiting for us to discover it intellectually in books. It is active and pro-active, producing a cultural human situation in which we can recognize it for itself. Like a caterpillar spinning its own chrysalis--and us within it--the gospel changes the human cultural world so finally the butterfly can emerge!
This makes “a new kind of Christianity” even more urgent. Augustine shaped a whole Christian era using elements of Greek philosophy and Roman realpolitik that were not the gospel. Now, in these latter days, the gospel is shaping its own era by facing us with the truth of human violence and crying out in the world for a new human way. A New Kind of Christianity and Virtually Christian are both in their way writing about a shift the gospel alone has written, and first.
Friday, September 10, 2010
The American
After “America!” right on cue The American, a media-inspired (or simply inspired) segue from the last blog. It’s a movie, a new release, which I just saw. Sumptuously shot in the high valleys of Abruzzo, a mountainous region in central Italy, it fits a familiar genre: the spy or assassin who wants in from the cold, wants to live an ordinary decent life with the newfound love of his life. Except this time the assassin is pretty clearly the eponymous paradigm for all of us, for Americans as such. It’s only because it is presented by the ever likeable George Clooney that audiences will be prepared to watch this unpalatable parable. For that it is, a parable, complete with priest, prostitutes and pointed theological dialogue.
Clooney plays Jack, the soulless assassin seeking to find his soul. In his hideout in the picturesque mountain town—in one shot we’re shown it from the sky, along with soaring eagle (geddit? the American eagle/satellite intelligence?)--he is befriended by a white-haired avuncular priest. Jack’s cover story is that he’s a photographer taking landscape photos for magazines and travel books. The priest asks him if he knows anything of “our history” and Jack replies “No”. The priest says “You're American. You think you can escape history." Later on the priest says to Jack, "You cannot doubt the existence of Hell; you live in it."
The movie is something like the experience of going to confession. The priest bugs Jack to do exactly that and the episode points up the whole screenplay. Everything has the chastened atmosphere of a visit to the sin bin, a feeling fraught with perdition. It does not exclude plenty of sexual action as Jack visits prostitutes and falls in love with one of them named Clara (of course, Francis’ love, the woman of peace). But this only serves to up the ante—the sex seems to be balancing on the edge of a bottomless precipice and makes Jack’s distance from real life that much greater. It’s as if Clooney (he’s also a producer) and the director, Anton Corbijn, are bringing us on a penitential pilgrimage to a medieval Italian hilltop shrine in order to confront us with our very 21st century American crisis.
For apart from the perennial of sex the sins are decisively modern. Jack’s secret skill is the construction of weapons and we are treated to a long wordless sequence in which he painstakingly machine tools parts and bullets for a high-power rifle. When he makes delivery of the weapon to his contact he gives her a tin full of specially made explosive bullets and says “Some candy for you.” Jack’s sins are those of relentless contemporary violence conducted by anonymous assassins, predator drones, insidious technology packaged like candy. In the first minute of the movie we see Jack shoot a completely innocent bystander (someone he’s also just had sex with) because she was about to discover his identity.
So if all this is confession where is the repentance? It comes in the climactic moment of the movie and is produced not by a change in Jack as such (he goes off to shoot someone else) but by the convergence of images and emotions the movie itself produces. It is cinematic repentance and at its root is what I would call a “cinechristocentrism”. This happens when the only image that can bring resolution to the impossible violence put up on screen is Christ. I analyze this in my book that’s coming out (Virtually Christian—see Home Page) and there I describe it as the continual rising up of the image of Christ’s compassion from the vortex of violent images around us, the one truly differentiating sign. There I give several movie examples and The American provides yet one more. The big scene happens in the context of an annual religious procession presided over by the priest. In the midst of the ritual there is an attempted assassination and a body falls off a roof and lies dying on one of the photogenic stone alleyways of the town. Jack rushes off to get information from the dying shooter and is followed in short order by the priest accompanied by a troop of acolytes. In effect the procession instead of following the plaster statue of the Virgin becomes one following after Jack and the actual event of violence. In just one more of an ever-growing list of epochal images from contemporary cinema we have the ceremonial crucifix carried by an altar boy, tilted at a crazy angle behind the priest and his holy band, and yet somehow guiding the revelatory moment. We know the image of the cross is absolutely deliberate because it has been signaled earlier when Jack, invited by the priest to dinner, casually picked up a crucifix from his desk. Now turning from the dying body Jack says the words for which the whole movie has been dying, “I’m sorry.” The cross at its tilted angle appears destabilized as a religious icon, but actually it is we who are destabilized and the cross is correct: as the human truth of violence it is the cross that is bringing us into a radical new geometry. It bends to the body on the ground and thus reveals from below the godless facticity of violence invited to become god-filled forgiveness and love.
This is “cinechristocentrism”, the truth of Christ showing up in the place where all our most intense images relentlessly concentrate. Just as violence concentrates on our movie screens so inevitably does Jesus. It means that well apart from religion and doctrine Christ is sensed “artistically” as the only principle that can deal with American violence. And this in a situation where the dominant political and religious discourse is blind and deaf and dumb to the structural challenge of Christ to our way of violence. But cinema is quintessentially “American” and even though the churches still don’t “get it” the cinematic soul of America does. Or, more accurately, America’s order of signified meaning, which is its constant swirl of images, is challenged from within because of the forgiving and living Christ--that which set it in motion in the first place. The absolute self of America is being invited in crisis to become the self that says “I’m sorry”.
Clooney plays Jack, the soulless assassin seeking to find his soul. In his hideout in the picturesque mountain town—in one shot we’re shown it from the sky, along with soaring eagle (geddit? the American eagle/satellite intelligence?)--he is befriended by a white-haired avuncular priest. Jack’s cover story is that he’s a photographer taking landscape photos for magazines and travel books. The priest asks him if he knows anything of “our history” and Jack replies “No”. The priest says “You're American. You think you can escape history." Later on the priest says to Jack, "You cannot doubt the existence of Hell; you live in it."
The movie is something like the experience of going to confession. The priest bugs Jack to do exactly that and the episode points up the whole screenplay. Everything has the chastened atmosphere of a visit to the sin bin, a feeling fraught with perdition. It does not exclude plenty of sexual action as Jack visits prostitutes and falls in love with one of them named Clara (of course, Francis’ love, the woman of peace). But this only serves to up the ante—the sex seems to be balancing on the edge of a bottomless precipice and makes Jack’s distance from real life that much greater. It’s as if Clooney (he’s also a producer) and the director, Anton Corbijn, are bringing us on a penitential pilgrimage to a medieval Italian hilltop shrine in order to confront us with our very 21st century American crisis.
For apart from the perennial of sex the sins are decisively modern. Jack’s secret skill is the construction of weapons and we are treated to a long wordless sequence in which he painstakingly machine tools parts and bullets for a high-power rifle. When he makes delivery of the weapon to his contact he gives her a tin full of specially made explosive bullets and says “Some candy for you.” Jack’s sins are those of relentless contemporary violence conducted by anonymous assassins, predator drones, insidious technology packaged like candy. In the first minute of the movie we see Jack shoot a completely innocent bystander (someone he’s also just had sex with) because she was about to discover his identity.
So if all this is confession where is the repentance? It comes in the climactic moment of the movie and is produced not by a change in Jack as such (he goes off to shoot someone else) but by the convergence of images and emotions the movie itself produces. It is cinematic repentance and at its root is what I would call a “cinechristocentrism”. This happens when the only image that can bring resolution to the impossible violence put up on screen is Christ. I analyze this in my book that’s coming out (Virtually Christian—see Home Page) and there I describe it as the continual rising up of the image of Christ’s compassion from the vortex of violent images around us, the one truly differentiating sign. There I give several movie examples and The American provides yet one more. The big scene happens in the context of an annual religious procession presided over by the priest. In the midst of the ritual there is an attempted assassination and a body falls off a roof and lies dying on one of the photogenic stone alleyways of the town. Jack rushes off to get information from the dying shooter and is followed in short order by the priest accompanied by a troop of acolytes. In effect the procession instead of following the plaster statue of the Virgin becomes one following after Jack and the actual event of violence. In just one more of an ever-growing list of epochal images from contemporary cinema we have the ceremonial crucifix carried by an altar boy, tilted at a crazy angle behind the priest and his holy band, and yet somehow guiding the revelatory moment. We know the image of the cross is absolutely deliberate because it has been signaled earlier when Jack, invited by the priest to dinner, casually picked up a crucifix from his desk. Now turning from the dying body Jack says the words for which the whole movie has been dying, “I’m sorry.” The cross at its tilted angle appears destabilized as a religious icon, but actually it is we who are destabilized and the cross is correct: as the human truth of violence it is the cross that is bringing us into a radical new geometry. It bends to the body on the ground and thus reveals from below the godless facticity of violence invited to become god-filled forgiveness and love.
This is “cinechristocentrism”, the truth of Christ showing up in the place where all our most intense images relentlessly concentrate. Just as violence concentrates on our movie screens so inevitably does Jesus. It means that well apart from religion and doctrine Christ is sensed “artistically” as the only principle that can deal with American violence. And this in a situation where the dominant political and religious discourse is blind and deaf and dumb to the structural challenge of Christ to our way of violence. But cinema is quintessentially “American” and even though the churches still don’t “get it” the cinematic soul of America does. Or, more accurately, America’s order of signified meaning, which is its constant swirl of images, is challenged from within because of the forgiving and living Christ--that which set it in motion in the first place. The absolute self of America is being invited in crisis to become the self that says “I’m sorry”.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
John #14
Here is the final Bible Study summary in our study of John's Gospel. Our next study will be "A New Kind of Christianity" by Brian D. McLaren (2010) HarperCollins Publishers. New York, NY. Further information about the study will appear shortly. Keep checking the web page - we'll post details as soon as they are fixed.
Peace, Linda
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 14- Written That You May Believe, chapter 14.
The Gospel of John #14 – Contemplation and Ministry 08.26.10
Chapter 21 is an addition – a redaction. Chapter 20:30-31 appears to be the original ending to the Gospel. The first twenty chapters were probably written around 90-95 CE, the final chapter perhaps around ten years later. What could have happened in this period to warrant the introduction of this material?
Chapter 21 accepts the pastoral ministry of Peter, but recognizes that it comes with a cost. It hints at two very different concepts of how Christian community should be. The Jerusalem-based Petrine Church and the non-hierarchical Johannine community. The chapter recognizes the role of Peter but also validates the Johannine relationship. It advocates a kind of co-existence.
Chapter 21 of John demonstrates the tension between the figures of Peter and the Beloved Disciple. The Beloved Disciple is not identified with any particular person. The figure is left empty of identifiers so that the reader may enter into that space. The Beloved Disciple recognizes the Lord before Peter. He is the primary proclaimer of the gospel message. While Peter has pastoral authority, he is secondary to the Beloved Disciple – dependent on his/her witness.
So what is this rivalry about? For Schneiders the thematic at work is the tension between Ministry and Contemplation. Ministry is exemplified by the pastoral role of Peter (this passage where Jesus tells him to “feed my sheep” is the source of the word “pastor”); the Contemplative - that is the immediate vision and receptivity to Jesus shown by the Beloved Disciple – stands in contrast to this. Schneiders, therefore, separates the contemplative and the active.
Peter is a leader of men. The disciples follow him. He is to be a “fisher of men” and hauls in the net alone(v.11). The 153 fish represent all the then known nations of the world. By the time that the Gospel was completed, Peter had already emerged as a symbolic, heroic, hierarchical figure following his martyred death in the persecution of Nero in 63-65 CE. Jesus asks Peter three times “Do you love me?” This seems to refer to Peter’s three denials of Jesus in chapter 18, but also points to something more. Jesus is addressing the person who is to become the figure representing the authority and leadership of the established church. He asks him “Do you [really] love me?” It is a question addressed to all Christians in positions of power.
The Peter of the Gospels emerges as one who is more comfortable with the idea of the triumphant Messiah. He rebukes Jesus when he says he has to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die (Mt 16:22). He wants to build a booth for Jesus on the mountain after his transfiguration (Mt 17:4), to create a monument. He is willing to fight to protect Jesus at his arrest – cutting off the ear of the high priest’s slave (Jn 18:10). In John 13:6 he initially refuses to have Jesus wash his feet. For Peter, the holy and powerful is to be kept out of the dirt of world and Jesus’ action turns his world upside down. It upsets the worldly order.
Jn 21: 18-19 has Jesus telling Peter “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go”. He is indicating the martyrdom of Peter who was traditionally crucified upside down in Rome. Peter’s heroic martyrdom cemented his position as symbolic leader. Peter asks what will happen to the Beloved Disciple, will he also suffer? Jesus replies “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” The word for “remain” is the same as that translated “abide”, found in Chapter 15 in the discourse about the vine and branches. The word has intense significance.
“Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete”.
The Beloved Disciple is asked to abide until Jesus comes. To abide in his love. In the intensity of today’s violent, media-driven world, we also need this relationship with Jesus. The institutions are no longer enough to counter the violence (undifferentiation) of the world. The institutions are in decline and Christians are seeking a new monasticism that merges ministry and contemplation. The Johannine message is rising up with more relevance. Jesus calls us into relationship that will stand even if the institutions fail. Peter is going to die, but the “beloved disciple” will abide/remain.
Peace, Linda
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 14- Written That You May Believe, chapter 14.
The Gospel of John #14 – Contemplation and Ministry 08.26.10
Chapter 21 is an addition – a redaction. Chapter 20:30-31 appears to be the original ending to the Gospel. The first twenty chapters were probably written around 90-95 CE, the final chapter perhaps around ten years later. What could have happened in this period to warrant the introduction of this material?
Chapter 21 accepts the pastoral ministry of Peter, but recognizes that it comes with a cost. It hints at two very different concepts of how Christian community should be. The Jerusalem-based Petrine Church and the non-hierarchical Johannine community. The chapter recognizes the role of Peter but also validates the Johannine relationship. It advocates a kind of co-existence.
Chapter 21 of John demonstrates the tension between the figures of Peter and the Beloved Disciple. The Beloved Disciple is not identified with any particular person. The figure is left empty of identifiers so that the reader may enter into that space. The Beloved Disciple recognizes the Lord before Peter. He is the primary proclaimer of the gospel message. While Peter has pastoral authority, he is secondary to the Beloved Disciple – dependent on his/her witness.
So what is this rivalry about? For Schneiders the thematic at work is the tension between Ministry and Contemplation. Ministry is exemplified by the pastoral role of Peter (this passage where Jesus tells him to “feed my sheep” is the source of the word “pastor”); the Contemplative - that is the immediate vision and receptivity to Jesus shown by the Beloved Disciple – stands in contrast to this. Schneiders, therefore, separates the contemplative and the active.
Peter is a leader of men. The disciples follow him. He is to be a “fisher of men” and hauls in the net alone(v.11). The 153 fish represent all the then known nations of the world. By the time that the Gospel was completed, Peter had already emerged as a symbolic, heroic, hierarchical figure following his martyred death in the persecution of Nero in 63-65 CE. Jesus asks Peter three times “Do you love me?” This seems to refer to Peter’s three denials of Jesus in chapter 18, but also points to something more. Jesus is addressing the person who is to become the figure representing the authority and leadership of the established church. He asks him “Do you [really] love me?” It is a question addressed to all Christians in positions of power.
The Peter of the Gospels emerges as one who is more comfortable with the idea of the triumphant Messiah. He rebukes Jesus when he says he has to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die (Mt 16:22). He wants to build a booth for Jesus on the mountain after his transfiguration (Mt 17:4), to create a monument. He is willing to fight to protect Jesus at his arrest – cutting off the ear of the high priest’s slave (Jn 18:10). In John 13:6 he initially refuses to have Jesus wash his feet. For Peter, the holy and powerful is to be kept out of the dirt of world and Jesus’ action turns his world upside down. It upsets the worldly order.
Jn 21: 18-19 has Jesus telling Peter “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go”. He is indicating the martyrdom of Peter who was traditionally crucified upside down in Rome. Peter’s heroic martyrdom cemented his position as symbolic leader. Peter asks what will happen to the Beloved Disciple, will he also suffer? Jesus replies “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” The word for “remain” is the same as that translated “abide”, found in Chapter 15 in the discourse about the vine and branches. The word has intense significance.
“Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete”.
The Beloved Disciple is asked to abide until Jesus comes. To abide in his love. In the intensity of today’s violent, media-driven world, we also need this relationship with Jesus. The institutions are no longer enough to counter the violence (undifferentiation) of the world. The institutions are in decline and Christians are seeking a new monasticism that merges ministry and contemplation. The Johannine message is rising up with more relevance. Jesus calls us into relationship that will stand even if the institutions fail. Peter is going to die, but the “beloved disciple” will abide/remain.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
John #13
Apologies for the late posting of these next two Bible Study Summaries, both of which have a resurrection theme. Peace, Linda
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 13- Written that you may believe chapter 13 -14.
The Gospel of John #13 – Mary Magdalene 08.19.10
Mary Magdalene is the foundational witness in the Gospel of John. Mary Magdalene is not mentioned by name before the crucifixion scene in 19:25. In John she is the sole first witness of the resurrection. In Matthew and Mark she is one of the women who go to the empty tomb, and in Matthew one of a group who see the Risen Jesus (28:8-10) but in John she is the first and only witness. (The longer ending in Mark echoes and seems to get its information from John.) This also contrasts with the account written by Paul in 1 Cor 15:3-8. This is a report of the resurrection that Paul received - a report of the tradition that dates from about three or four years after the death of Jesus. It is a very primitive narrative. In this Jesus appears first to Cephas (Peter) then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred “adelphoi” – translated either as “brothers” or “brothers and sisters”. In this account the foundational witness is to men recognized as the officials of the church.
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark (longer ending) and John represent a different tradition that goes against the official version. (Luke has the two disciples walking to Emmaus as the first witnesses – though on their return they hear that Jesus has already appeared to Peter. In this Luke belongs to the tradition that accepts the primacy of Peter). The fact that an alternative, and counterintuitive version even exists in the tradition gives it credence. It is just so unlikely that such an account, centering on women, would have been created by design. It is therefore more likely to be true.
John boils it down to one woman thus radicalizing the Matthew tradition. Like other figures in John, Mary Magdalene is a person with whom the reader can identify and whose story brings us into relationship with Jesus. So Mary Magdalene is both a named historical figure who also has a paradigmatic role. The primary purpose of the Gospel is to achieve this relationship– it is “written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31). The author is interested in leading the reader to a point of connection. John’s account is not an official formula like Paul’s – rather it ends with a relationship. For John relationship trumps authority.
In Jn 20:11-18 Jesus finds Mary Magdalene grieving and in distress compounded by thoughts that his body has been desecrated. He asks her “Whom are you looking for?” This evokes the call of the disciples in Jn 1:38 “What are you looking for?” The disciples in chapter one address him as “Rabbi” (1:38). When Jesus speaks Mary’s name she replies “Rabbouni” which means dear teacher – a relational term of affection. This also echoes chapter 10 when Jesus, as shepherd to his flock, calls each of his sheep by name.
Literary evidence points to a rivalry between Mary Magdalene and Peter as primary witness. Many of the Gnostic gospels, for example, display this rivalry. In part their rejection by orthodoxy can be attributed to this. The Magdalene strand was not suppressed completely and has been preserved in Matthew, Mark and most particularly by John. This is important for the church today as the sacred order is collapsing around us. Both Catholic and Protestant churches have adopted the male, hierarchical, Petrine tradition (even those with women ministers). The Magdalene foundational witness is feminine, non-legal, non-hierarchical and relational. It points not to Peter (hierarchy), not even to faith, but relationship of love as the new primordial foundation.
Unlike the Synoptics, John’s Gospel does not have a glorious resurrection or ascension passage. For John Jesus’ passion and death is his glorification. Resurrection is not a dramatic reversal or divine vindication, but a communication of the glorification that has already taken place. The resurrection appearances explore through the disciples’ encounters the effect and meaning of Jesus’ glorification. Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life” not “I am the resurrected one”. His glory is the possibility that we might enter into resurrected life through relationship with him.
In Jn 20:11 it is till dark, painting a predawn obscurity. The tomb is placed in a garden by John, and Jesus is mistaken as the gardener. This evokes the Garden of Eden and the image of a new creation. Mary peers into the tomb. This verb is used just three times in the New Testament – twice in John and the third time by Luke in a passage probably borrowed from John. It is the same word used in the Septuagint Song of Songs to describe the action of the lover who peers into the window searching for her beloved. (Song of Songs2:9). The garden backdrop and the peering evoke the Song of Songs – a hymn of the covenant love between Israel and YHWH which was read at the Passover. The Song of Songs is secular erotic love poetry which at the time of Jesus had been validated as part of the tradition. It was recognized as an allegory of the love relationship between God and his people.
Mary Magdalene (the beloved) searches for her lover. Earlier, in the same chapter, the Beloved Disciple also peered in the tomb (same verb) looking for Jesus. Jesus is the lover who has given himself completely. The story seeks to rebuild the relationship lost in Eden. Mary Magdalene as “woman” becomes a paradigm for the Johannine community, the church, the new people of God who are seeking this relationship.
In v. 17 Jesus says “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brothers and say to them ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’”. This has traditionally been interpreted as Jesus not wanting Mary to touch him because he is in some mystical place between this world and the next and he does not want her to interfere with his leaving the physical realm. This dualist understanding does not fit with Johannine theology which understands Jesus as already glorified through his crucifixion. He has not yet ascended because the fullness of his glorification is realized only when everyone has been told about it. Mary Magdalene is the primordial witness to this new intensity of relationship, but it cannot remain exclusive to her. The discovery of how to love must be shared. The prohibition is against making an exclusive relationship – go and tell my brothers and sisters! The discovery of how to be a true lover must be shared. The full realization of his glory comes through all people entering into a love relationship with Jesus. (See Jn 17:10 “All mine are yours and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them” and Jn 12:32 “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”)
Mary is told to deliver a message to the disciples – now siblings with Jesus. The quotation marks added by modern editors seem to give Mary the role of secretary. “Say to them ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’ ” makes it seem as though Jesus is referring to the Father and God of his brothers alone. If these quotation marks are removed (they would not have existed in the Greek) then the God and Father belong to Mary and the disciples collectively and the message relates first to her. Jesus uses the present tense “I am ascending”. He is still ascending to his Father. Until the whole world accepts Jesus and enters into this relationship modeled by Mary his ascension is not complete.
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 13- Written that you may believe chapter 13 -14.
The Gospel of John #13 – Mary Magdalene 08.19.10
Mary Magdalene is the foundational witness in the Gospel of John. Mary Magdalene is not mentioned by name before the crucifixion scene in 19:25. In John she is the sole first witness of the resurrection. In Matthew and Mark she is one of the women who go to the empty tomb, and in Matthew one of a group who see the Risen Jesus (28:8-10) but in John she is the first and only witness. (The longer ending in Mark echoes and seems to get its information from John.) This also contrasts with the account written by Paul in 1 Cor 15:3-8. This is a report of the resurrection that Paul received - a report of the tradition that dates from about three or four years after the death of Jesus. It is a very primitive narrative. In this Jesus appears first to Cephas (Peter) then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred “adelphoi” – translated either as “brothers” or “brothers and sisters”. In this account the foundational witness is to men recognized as the officials of the church.
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark (longer ending) and John represent a different tradition that goes against the official version. (Luke has the two disciples walking to Emmaus as the first witnesses – though on their return they hear that Jesus has already appeared to Peter. In this Luke belongs to the tradition that accepts the primacy of Peter). The fact that an alternative, and counterintuitive version even exists in the tradition gives it credence. It is just so unlikely that such an account, centering on women, would have been created by design. It is therefore more likely to be true.
John boils it down to one woman thus radicalizing the Matthew tradition. Like other figures in John, Mary Magdalene is a person with whom the reader can identify and whose story brings us into relationship with Jesus. So Mary Magdalene is both a named historical figure who also has a paradigmatic role. The primary purpose of the Gospel is to achieve this relationship– it is “written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31). The author is interested in leading the reader to a point of connection. John’s account is not an official formula like Paul’s – rather it ends with a relationship. For John relationship trumps authority.
In Jn 20:11-18 Jesus finds Mary Magdalene grieving and in distress compounded by thoughts that his body has been desecrated. He asks her “Whom are you looking for?” This evokes the call of the disciples in Jn 1:38 “What are you looking for?” The disciples in chapter one address him as “Rabbi” (1:38). When Jesus speaks Mary’s name she replies “Rabbouni” which means dear teacher – a relational term of affection. This also echoes chapter 10 when Jesus, as shepherd to his flock, calls each of his sheep by name.
Literary evidence points to a rivalry between Mary Magdalene and Peter as primary witness. Many of the Gnostic gospels, for example, display this rivalry. In part their rejection by orthodoxy can be attributed to this. The Magdalene strand was not suppressed completely and has been preserved in Matthew, Mark and most particularly by John. This is important for the church today as the sacred order is collapsing around us. Both Catholic and Protestant churches have adopted the male, hierarchical, Petrine tradition (even those with women ministers). The Magdalene foundational witness is feminine, non-legal, non-hierarchical and relational. It points not to Peter (hierarchy), not even to faith, but relationship of love as the new primordial foundation.
Unlike the Synoptics, John’s Gospel does not have a glorious resurrection or ascension passage. For John Jesus’ passion and death is his glorification. Resurrection is not a dramatic reversal or divine vindication, but a communication of the glorification that has already taken place. The resurrection appearances explore through the disciples’ encounters the effect and meaning of Jesus’ glorification. Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life” not “I am the resurrected one”. His glory is the possibility that we might enter into resurrected life through relationship with him.
In Jn 20:11 it is till dark, painting a predawn obscurity. The tomb is placed in a garden by John, and Jesus is mistaken as the gardener. This evokes the Garden of Eden and the image of a new creation. Mary peers into the tomb. This verb is used just three times in the New Testament – twice in John and the third time by Luke in a passage probably borrowed from John. It is the same word used in the Septuagint Song of Songs to describe the action of the lover who peers into the window searching for her beloved. (Song of Songs2:9). The garden backdrop and the peering evoke the Song of Songs – a hymn of the covenant love between Israel and YHWH which was read at the Passover. The Song of Songs is secular erotic love poetry which at the time of Jesus had been validated as part of the tradition. It was recognized as an allegory of the love relationship between God and his people.
Mary Magdalene (the beloved) searches for her lover. Earlier, in the same chapter, the Beloved Disciple also peered in the tomb (same verb) looking for Jesus. Jesus is the lover who has given himself completely. The story seeks to rebuild the relationship lost in Eden. Mary Magdalene as “woman” becomes a paradigm for the Johannine community, the church, the new people of God who are seeking this relationship.
In v. 17 Jesus says “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brothers and say to them ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’”. This has traditionally been interpreted as Jesus not wanting Mary to touch him because he is in some mystical place between this world and the next and he does not want her to interfere with his leaving the physical realm. This dualist understanding does not fit with Johannine theology which understands Jesus as already glorified through his crucifixion. He has not yet ascended because the fullness of his glorification is realized only when everyone has been told about it. Mary Magdalene is the primordial witness to this new intensity of relationship, but it cannot remain exclusive to her. The discovery of how to love must be shared. The prohibition is against making an exclusive relationship – go and tell my brothers and sisters! The discovery of how to be a true lover must be shared. The full realization of his glory comes through all people entering into a love relationship with Jesus. (See Jn 17:10 “All mine are yours and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them” and Jn 12:32 “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”)
Mary is told to deliver a message to the disciples – now siblings with Jesus. The quotation marks added by modern editors seem to give Mary the role of secretary. “Say to them ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’ ” makes it seem as though Jesus is referring to the Father and God of his brothers alone. If these quotation marks are removed (they would not have existed in the Greek) then the God and Father belong to Mary and the disciples collectively and the message relates first to her. Jesus uses the present tense “I am ascending”. He is still ascending to his Father. Until the whole world accepts Jesus and enters into this relationship modeled by Mary his ascension is not complete.
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