Here is the second October Bible Study...
OT - Healing 10/22/09
There are relatively few accounts of healings in the Old Testament. The focus of the Torah was the liberation of the people – the Exodus story recounting the setting free of the Hebrew slaves. Thus the big miracle of the Old Testament is the crossing of the Red Sea, later echoed in the crossing of the Jordan and the entry into the Promised Land. The histories then record the establishment and fall of the kingdoms. They tell of political and religious struggle not healing. There is, however, one point where a number of healings do take place: in the stories of Elijah and Elisha.
Elijah had the prestige of being the first of the Yahwist resistance prophets. A sign of the respect given to Elijah is that he appears with Moses at Jesus’ transfiguration. After the entry into the Promised Land there was a period of transition when the Israelites were led by charismatic warriors called “judges”. Then came David and Solomon followed by the splitting of the country into the Northern and Southern kingdoms. Ahab was a king who married Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon (a Phoenician city). She brought with her the Phoenician religion of the Baals. The Baals were warrior gods of violence and fertility. They were gods of the annual cycle of death and rebirth.
The word “baal” means “lord” and there are some places in the Old Testament where there is some confusion between Baal and Yahweh as a result. At the time of Elijah a tremendous effort was made to make a true distinction. Elijah fights against the prophets of Baal. He calls fire from heaven and slaughters the prophets. He defeats them, but then in fear for his life he runs away.
It is in this time of crisis in the prophet’s life and in the story of Israel that a little flurry of healings occur.1Kings 17: 8-23 tells the story of the widow of Sidon. The widow offers Elijah food from the little that she has. As a result her jar of meal and jug of oil do not fail. Later when the son of the widow becomes ill, Elijah stretches himself upon the child three times and he is brought back to life. Sidon, the place where Elijah escapes to, the home of the widow is located in Phoenicia. The miracles demonstrate both the character and the sovereignty of Yahweh. His character is illustrated in the care for the widow and child: in feeding the hungry and restoring life. His power is displayed in his actions taking place in the heart of the territory of Elijah’s enemies, over and against the “baals.” Jesus quotes this story in Luke 4:25 – but he takes from it a radical sense: rather than showing God’s sovereignty it demonstrates his healing grace is for everyone.
Another healing is the one performed by Elisha, the healing of the leper Namaan in Kings 5:1-19. An Israelite slave tells his master, a Syrian commander, of the prophet who has the power to heal his disease. The healing by Elisha is another example of the miracle displaying the power of Yahweh and his superiority over other gods. These are almost the only healing accounts of the Old Testament.
After the time of Elijah, Yahweh became established as the one God of Israel. It wasn’t until the Greek invasion of the 2nd century BCE that the influence of other gods again became something to be resisted. The books of the Maccabees give the account of the rebellion against Antiochus Epiphanes who attempted to impose Greek culture and religion on the Israelites. This time the battle is political and military. Unlike the fight against Jezebel which came down to the actions of a single prophet, this time the Maccabean family lead the violent resistance.
There were others who resisted the imposition of Greek religion but who seem to have taken a non-violent stance. Daniel 11:32-35 describes a group of people called “the wise”.
“The wise among the people shall give understanding to many; for some days, however, they shall fall by the sword and flame and suffer captivity and plunder…. Some of the wise shall fall so that they may be refined, purified, and cleansed, until the time of the end”.
In Dn 12:1-3. Michael shall rise during this time of anguish to deliver those written about in the book. “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Those who are wise [who have preciously fallen by the sword] shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” This is the first clear statement of resurrection in the Bible. It is vital to note its relation to non-retaliation and nonviolence.
Elijah fought with the sword and miracles. These “wise” people refuse to use the sword. The healing here is resurrection the greatest of all the miracles and resurrection is the last defense of the nonviolent. 1Macc 2:29-38 (written about the same time as Daniel) describes the same group. Here the “wise”, those “who were seeking righteousness and justice,” are portrayed as living in the wilderness, as refugees. They are pursued for refusing to obey the king. They refuse to fight on the Sabbath and as a result of their non-retaliation they are killed. 1 Maccabees (written from the point of view of those who did fight) says that they “die[d] in their innocence” (2:37). This group of people rejected violence. It is out of that group that the doctrine of the resurrection emerged. Out of their sacrifice a message of consolation and hope arises, one essential to the message of Jesus.
Elijah and Daniel are both instances in which God’s sovereignty is displayed. In Daniel it is through resurrection that God overcomes the world’s violence. In the same way Jesus held back healing from Lazarus to show the greater miracle of the resurrection. Resurrection is the final healing for the world. It is the healing that overcomes violence. All healings are an effect of the resurrection. They have not only power but significance because of this. Their meaning is to show that the systems of the world that lead to violence and death have been overcome.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Journey with Jesus #16
Hello again! Haven't been posting for a while but now we're back on line. Here are the next two Journey with Jesus summaries. These are from our October meetings -on the theme of healing....
NT - Healing 10/08/09
Inherent in the way humans make things is some element of destruction. Humans make things by destroying things –even at our most artistic and creative. Our meals, art, and architecture involve the gathering and using of raw materials. Even the raising of children involves a subjugation of sorts, a surrender of your freedom for the good of the child. Violence is a deep part of the human imagination – how we see things, feel things. Even the way we heal others has an element of violence. We use pharmacotherapy to bring about a desired alteration in the way our bodily systems function –but often at the cost of adverse effects and interactions. Surgery can remove disease or repair bone, but is not without risk. It is in essence an assault on the body even though the results may be beneficial. Human life is a compromise – an agreement with death. We live but not fully. The light we live by has darkness in it –it is not yet fully light.
Some would say that is the nature of life. To be human is to affirm both death and life equally. Creation and destruction – an endless cycle, You have to accept the killing as well as the life. This is an ancient view that lies deep in human thought and experience. It also speaks to modern times – as is evident in the writings of Nietzsche.
Healing is common to all cultures – how is healing by Jesus different? He did not use shamanistic practices – no shouting, talismans, magic potions or ritualistic formulae. There was no violence in his practice of healing. He didn’t counter evil with violence but with absolute self-giving affirmed in the resurrection. In Mk 3:20 Jesus is accused of casting out demons by violent power – the power of Beelzebub, king of demons. Jesus replies with a parable -a house divided against itself cannot stand. Instead of attacking evil and trying to destroy it with lethal violence, he neutralizes it by tying it up. The same passage in Mt12:24-29 reinforces the point by turning it on his attackers: “By whom do your own exorcists cast them [evil spirits] out?” Satan cannot cast out Satan – if so you remain within the system of violence. His accusers accusations are based in the worldly paradigm – that violence is necessary to bring about good.
Jesus healing is always a sign of absolute life. It is connected to his overthrowing Satan.
An early healing is described in Mk 2:1-12. Jesus and his disciples are in Capernaum where he cures a paralyzed man. In this healing forgiveness of sin comes first. The paralytic’s alienation from God is what causes his illness. This was a totally shocking thing for Jesus to say – only God can forgive sins. Jesus doesn’t say he is God, but that he is bringing God’s forgiveness into the world. He overcomes illness by overcoming the alienation and darkness that cause illness and death. Death entered the world thru sin. It is this system of sin that prevents us from complete wholeness and endless life. Jesus illustrates his authority to forgive sins by asking the man to get up and walk –which is easier to say? So he does not forgive in a legal way, but in a direct life-giving encounter with the wounded person.
Jn 11 gives the account of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus refuses to go at first to heal his friend. Lazarus does not have the illness that leads to death. It is the fundamental illness that Jesus has come to deal with. This illness is the violence of the world which produces death. It is sin, the way we structure our lives that leads to death. Jesus talks of Lazarus’ death as sleep – he is going to wake him (and us) up. As he nears Jerusalem, Jesus approaches his final confrontation with the forces of the world.
The raising of Lazarus is the last and greatest of Jesus’ signs in John’s Gospel. His healing overcomes alienation and brings life. He is the resurrection and the life!
A popularly held perception is that if I am healed and whole I am right with the world. It is a worldly standard. Often this is perceived as a desire to be someone other than who we are: more athletic, more beautiful – the ideal of perfection. In this way healing and health become yet another commodity. Health is also understood as the absence of illness. We battle against cancer, struggle against disease. In contrast healing from Jesus’ point of view is being fully yourself. Instead of a stripping away – of disease, years, decay - healing is a taking on, a filling up with spirit, love and life. Love is more than enlightenment or bliss. It involves darkness and suffering. It is loving to the depths of Jesus that leads to joy. We have no competitive expectations from others, but are instead fed by our relationship with God. This relationship completes and fulfils us. Healing replaces alienation and we find endless life. Despite scientific advances that delay the aging process and make a disease-free existence a possibility, it is more important to make this spiritual change. Without love and real transformation prolonged life would be experienced as hell. Christian community creates space for true healing to take place. It is often the pilgrimage itself, rather than the final destination, that allows the healing process to occur. The journey and companionship create space, time and rest that let the whole person be healed.
NT - Healing 10/08/09
Inherent in the way humans make things is some element of destruction. Humans make things by destroying things –even at our most artistic and creative. Our meals, art, and architecture involve the gathering and using of raw materials. Even the raising of children involves a subjugation of sorts, a surrender of your freedom for the good of the child. Violence is a deep part of the human imagination – how we see things, feel things. Even the way we heal others has an element of violence. We use pharmacotherapy to bring about a desired alteration in the way our bodily systems function –but often at the cost of adverse effects and interactions. Surgery can remove disease or repair bone, but is not without risk. It is in essence an assault on the body even though the results may be beneficial. Human life is a compromise – an agreement with death. We live but not fully. The light we live by has darkness in it –it is not yet fully light.
Some would say that is the nature of life. To be human is to affirm both death and life equally. Creation and destruction – an endless cycle, You have to accept the killing as well as the life. This is an ancient view that lies deep in human thought and experience. It also speaks to modern times – as is evident in the writings of Nietzsche.
Healing is common to all cultures – how is healing by Jesus different? He did not use shamanistic practices – no shouting, talismans, magic potions or ritualistic formulae. There was no violence in his practice of healing. He didn’t counter evil with violence but with absolute self-giving affirmed in the resurrection. In Mk 3:20 Jesus is accused of casting out demons by violent power – the power of Beelzebub, king of demons. Jesus replies with a parable -a house divided against itself cannot stand. Instead of attacking evil and trying to destroy it with lethal violence, he neutralizes it by tying it up. The same passage in Mt12:24-29 reinforces the point by turning it on his attackers: “By whom do your own exorcists cast them [evil spirits] out?” Satan cannot cast out Satan – if so you remain within the system of violence. His accusers accusations are based in the worldly paradigm – that violence is necessary to bring about good.
Jesus healing is always a sign of absolute life. It is connected to his overthrowing Satan.
An early healing is described in Mk 2:1-12. Jesus and his disciples are in Capernaum where he cures a paralyzed man. In this healing forgiveness of sin comes first. The paralytic’s alienation from God is what causes his illness. This was a totally shocking thing for Jesus to say – only God can forgive sins. Jesus doesn’t say he is God, but that he is bringing God’s forgiveness into the world. He overcomes illness by overcoming the alienation and darkness that cause illness and death. Death entered the world thru sin. It is this system of sin that prevents us from complete wholeness and endless life. Jesus illustrates his authority to forgive sins by asking the man to get up and walk –which is easier to say? So he does not forgive in a legal way, but in a direct life-giving encounter with the wounded person.
Jn 11 gives the account of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus refuses to go at first to heal his friend. Lazarus does not have the illness that leads to death. It is the fundamental illness that Jesus has come to deal with. This illness is the violence of the world which produces death. It is sin, the way we structure our lives that leads to death. Jesus talks of Lazarus’ death as sleep – he is going to wake him (and us) up. As he nears Jerusalem, Jesus approaches his final confrontation with the forces of the world.
The raising of Lazarus is the last and greatest of Jesus’ signs in John’s Gospel. His healing overcomes alienation and brings life. He is the resurrection and the life!
A popularly held perception is that if I am healed and whole I am right with the world. It is a worldly standard. Often this is perceived as a desire to be someone other than who we are: more athletic, more beautiful – the ideal of perfection. In this way healing and health become yet another commodity. Health is also understood as the absence of illness. We battle against cancer, struggle against disease. In contrast healing from Jesus’ point of view is being fully yourself. Instead of a stripping away – of disease, years, decay - healing is a taking on, a filling up with spirit, love and life. Love is more than enlightenment or bliss. It involves darkness and suffering. It is loving to the depths of Jesus that leads to joy. We have no competitive expectations from others, but are instead fed by our relationship with God. This relationship completes and fulfils us. Healing replaces alienation and we find endless life. Despite scientific advances that delay the aging process and make a disease-free existence a possibility, it is more important to make this spiritual change. Without love and real transformation prolonged life would be experienced as hell. Christian community creates space for true healing to take place. It is often the pilgrimage itself, rather than the final destination, that allows the healing process to occur. The journey and companionship create space, time and rest that let the whole person be healed.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Falling Pregnant
Fall is a mysterious springtime: there’s a feel of something arriving, of sudden light between the leaves. An old expression goes, “To fall pregnant.” Fall and falling may mean that new life is on the way, even as something old is dying.
Wood Hath Hope had a strange kind of summer. Some of my blogs now seem stratospheric. One was entitled “Summer Sublime!” Part of it had to do with completing the final chapters of my book and feeling the force of my own argument, like everyone had to be in on it. Now I know the published volume won’t hit shelves until the end of next year, it’s a little less the buzz for me. Another thing was some of us were committed to attending an evangelical reading group discussing Rob Bell and Don Golden’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians. For many this book was like being shot out of a cannon into completely new territory and it was exciting to be around the excitement. You could feel the world turning a little bit under you.
When the study came to an end we invited its members to attend a couple of Wood Hath Hope sessions billed as “An Introduction to the Bible as Peace.” The first thing to do it seemed was to set out the fundamental problem dealt with by the bible, its diagnostic so to speak. Was it “the disobedience of our first parents” and the personal attribution to us of guilt for their irresponsible eating habits? Or, was it/is it something more endemic, constitutive, part of the way we are self-set-up in chaotic desire and violence? Of course it was the latter that we presented, but sometimes it’s hard to let go of the inherited framework. When God is the judge and we’re all under judgment for a single huge fault then everyone knows where they stand and ultimate violence is the ultimate sanction. What’s not to understand about that?
Problem is Jesus didn’t talk this way. He didn’t begin from an enormous original fault that had to be atoned for. He began with a world of blessing, the kingdom of God. It’s only if you miss out on that that there is a problem. Missing out on the kingdom of peace will self-plunge the world into endless violence. And even then Jesus went to the cross to show the depths of the problem and the selfsame lengths he’s willing to go to in order still to call us out of them! Jesus absolutely does not begin from legal demerit that has to be paid out. If you want a diagnostic from Jesus go the Sermon on the Mount and you’ll see the problem is basically violence. But almost all of the time Jesus is simply active to change things in the here and now, to put things right in the dynamic core of our relationships, rather than discourse on what went wrong. (Yes, I know, there’s Paul also to think about—as if Jesus weren’t enough! But Paul is cool too and I will put something up in an On The Stump piece about "Paul and Adam.")
Anyway, you can see how the whole thing works. Inherited sinfulness is not the same as inherited guilt, but making it the same has given traditional Christianity enormous control over people’s identity and behavior. Except of course today that control is slipping and the question is whether we double down on the old methods, or reach out in the Spirit for a deeper understanding of the human condition and what Jesus so powerfully offers it today.
For Wood Hath Hope the studies were something of anticlimax. For a few weeks afterward there was only three of us, Heather, Linda and myself. But here’s the thing. This had the opposite effect from making us despondent. (Really!) We decided to double down on our own thing. It is not a matter of a doctrine or way of thinking which we want other people “to get,” but simply being true to ourselves, to the Spirit moving within us. So we decided to stop the talk and do something. We committed ourselves to sharing our evening meal and shopping for it together, splitting the expenses. Half the week one family would do the cooking , and half the week the other. (And we just bring the prepared food over to each other’s homes, each family dining on its own as usual.) We also figured out we would start a new study program in the New Year, but I’ll describe more of that in the future.
What is important is this change of attitude. We called it “making space for God.” Like prayer or fasting but in the area of food and table relationships. It’s the most natural thing in the world, sharing a table. But to do it as an act of surrender to a path of other-centeredness, this is to make space for God’s kingdom and the breath of God which moves it. And we try to do it with great humility, not as a big deal or as a gesture against contemporary social alienation and consumerism. Yes, it does amount to that, but we don’t do it for that reason, rather simply because it is what the Spirit is saying. We’re doing it to let God speak, and so for us to hear her beloved cadences of peace, forgiveness, gentleness, hope.
Perhaps this is what “fall” means, letting this new thing come to birth, as the old falls away.
Your brother,
Tony
Wood Hath Hope had a strange kind of summer. Some of my blogs now seem stratospheric. One was entitled “Summer Sublime!” Part of it had to do with completing the final chapters of my book and feeling the force of my own argument, like everyone had to be in on it. Now I know the published volume won’t hit shelves until the end of next year, it’s a little less the buzz for me. Another thing was some of us were committed to attending an evangelical reading group discussing Rob Bell and Don Golden’s Jesus Wants To Save Christians. For many this book was like being shot out of a cannon into completely new territory and it was exciting to be around the excitement. You could feel the world turning a little bit under you.
When the study came to an end we invited its members to attend a couple of Wood Hath Hope sessions billed as “An Introduction to the Bible as Peace.” The first thing to do it seemed was to set out the fundamental problem dealt with by the bible, its diagnostic so to speak. Was it “the disobedience of our first parents” and the personal attribution to us of guilt for their irresponsible eating habits? Or, was it/is it something more endemic, constitutive, part of the way we are self-set-up in chaotic desire and violence? Of course it was the latter that we presented, but sometimes it’s hard to let go of the inherited framework. When God is the judge and we’re all under judgment for a single huge fault then everyone knows where they stand and ultimate violence is the ultimate sanction. What’s not to understand about that?
Problem is Jesus didn’t talk this way. He didn’t begin from an enormous original fault that had to be atoned for. He began with a world of blessing, the kingdom of God. It’s only if you miss out on that that there is a problem. Missing out on the kingdom of peace will self-plunge the world into endless violence. And even then Jesus went to the cross to show the depths of the problem and the selfsame lengths he’s willing to go to in order still to call us out of them! Jesus absolutely does not begin from legal demerit that has to be paid out. If you want a diagnostic from Jesus go the Sermon on the Mount and you’ll see the problem is basically violence. But almost all of the time Jesus is simply active to change things in the here and now, to put things right in the dynamic core of our relationships, rather than discourse on what went wrong. (Yes, I know, there’s Paul also to think about—as if Jesus weren’t enough! But Paul is cool too and I will put something up in an On The Stump piece about "Paul and Adam.")
Anyway, you can see how the whole thing works. Inherited sinfulness is not the same as inherited guilt, but making it the same has given traditional Christianity enormous control over people’s identity and behavior. Except of course today that control is slipping and the question is whether we double down on the old methods, or reach out in the Spirit for a deeper understanding of the human condition and what Jesus so powerfully offers it today.
For Wood Hath Hope the studies were something of anticlimax. For a few weeks afterward there was only three of us, Heather, Linda and myself. But here’s the thing. This had the opposite effect from making us despondent. (Really!) We decided to double down on our own thing. It is not a matter of a doctrine or way of thinking which we want other people “to get,” but simply being true to ourselves, to the Spirit moving within us. So we decided to stop the talk and do something. We committed ourselves to sharing our evening meal and shopping for it together, splitting the expenses. Half the week one family would do the cooking , and half the week the other. (And we just bring the prepared food over to each other’s homes, each family dining on its own as usual.) We also figured out we would start a new study program in the New Year, but I’ll describe more of that in the future.
What is important is this change of attitude. We called it “making space for God.” Like prayer or fasting but in the area of food and table relationships. It’s the most natural thing in the world, sharing a table. But to do it as an act of surrender to a path of other-centeredness, this is to make space for God’s kingdom and the breath of God which moves it. And we try to do it with great humility, not as a big deal or as a gesture against contemporary social alienation and consumerism. Yes, it does amount to that, but we don’t do it for that reason, rather simply because it is what the Spirit is saying. We’re doing it to let God speak, and so for us to hear her beloved cadences of peace, forgiveness, gentleness, hope.
Perhaps this is what “fall” means, letting this new thing come to birth, as the old falls away.
Your brother,
Tony
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Living in Atlantis
The old story of a city beneath the sea, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, fascinates everyone, me included. I’m very at home in the U.S. (Green Card in hand, the possibility next year of becoming a citizen) but of course I have strong memories of Europe, so I suppose my soul is somewhere between, like Atlantis. Not only that. I find that ancient fable to be a parable of our own time: a civilization alive but drowning. In the Greek version Atlantis was a military empire and was swallowed by a massive inundation in a night and a day. In the Hebrew Bible the sea is cosmic code for violence (think the Books of Jonah, Daniel). Putting those cultural clues together, Atlantis drowned in a tide of its own violence.
Humans are no more violent today than our ancestors. But we have accumulated the tools and images of killing to an unprecedented degree. We have devised a visual feast of violence in news, movies, computer generated images, video games. It’s something literally the world has never seen before. Violence is a 24/7 human percept. And that has a double effect. It makes our minds more accustomed to scenes of violence (what people sometimes call becoming desensitized) but also much more conscious of it as a theme in its own right. I just read a book, Hunger Games. It was tenth grade summer reading at my son's high school. It tells the story of a kind of reality TV in a post-apocalyptic era. What is striking is the brutal matter-of-fact way in which teenagers kill each other because they are ordered to and everybody expects it. There is hardly any compunction or moral conflict. And that’s clearly a reflection of the way people (especially young people) are used to seeing killing through the lens of TV, movies etc. It is not a moral question, but a perceptual one. It’s how we frame and feel our reality. Today we do it with enormous doses of imaged violence. On the other hand, because of this we are more and more aware of violence. People who read the book cannot help but think about it. It’s become something that is bigger than us, happening to us as a reality in its own right.
We live inside a giant permanent Coliseum games. But it’s obviously not just a game (no less than the original Coliseum was just games). Almost every week, and sometimes more than once a week, with sickening regularity, there is news of a group of people, a family, or simply random individuals, blown away by a man with a gun and a grudge. The plasma of violence—this thing in its own right—will grip an individual with uncontrollable power and he will pick up one of the guns lying around in our country like kitchenware and act out his fury. At the same time the U.S. exports a huge amount of violence to the rest of the world. I was recently hit by this statistic: two thirds of the arms sold in the world in 2008 were from the U.S., earning $37.8 billion. Again all this is not basically a moral question. It’s a human question, about how we structure our human life and in a way that comes round to destroying it, to wiping it out. If we were to imagine some final Atlantis style melt-down for our civilization it would make Plato’s strange folk memory/myth look like a cute fairy tale.
But that’s not the point of what I’m saying. This is not a scare piece. In fact it’s the opposite. The point of living in Atlantis is to learn to live underwater. All the stuff I just described is already happening so in so many ways we’re already right there. We’re swimming in the ocean of violence. For a Christian who understands this the reaction is not to seek even more violence—this time from an angry God who will come to punish all this evil. That is simply to see God in terms of the percept of violence which dominates the human eye. For a Christian it is rather a call to build the survivability of Atlantis within its moment of disaster. Because it’s only when the crisis builds to this level—when there is no middle way between the two alternatives—that a new humanity based in forgiveness as a way of life, as the true way of being human—not just an occasional “heroic” gesture—becomes apparent. It is in fact the moment of choice, the moment when the challenge of Christ begins to come home in an unavoidable way: either an entirely a new way of being human or the endless self-fueled crisis, either the pure eye of peace or the beam-in-the-eye of violence, either forgiveness or limitless recycling fire. Living in Atlantis therefore is enormously exciting and hopeful, the time when the Christian message can really come into its own.
As Jesus said, “the only sign that will be given you is the sign of Jonah,” a human being who could live under water.
Humans are no more violent today than our ancestors. But we have accumulated the tools and images of killing to an unprecedented degree. We have devised a visual feast of violence in news, movies, computer generated images, video games. It’s something literally the world has never seen before. Violence is a 24/7 human percept. And that has a double effect. It makes our minds more accustomed to scenes of violence (what people sometimes call becoming desensitized) but also much more conscious of it as a theme in its own right. I just read a book, Hunger Games. It was tenth grade summer reading at my son's high school. It tells the story of a kind of reality TV in a post-apocalyptic era. What is striking is the brutal matter-of-fact way in which teenagers kill each other because they are ordered to and everybody expects it. There is hardly any compunction or moral conflict. And that’s clearly a reflection of the way people (especially young people) are used to seeing killing through the lens of TV, movies etc. It is not a moral question, but a perceptual one. It’s how we frame and feel our reality. Today we do it with enormous doses of imaged violence. On the other hand, because of this we are more and more aware of violence. People who read the book cannot help but think about it. It’s become something that is bigger than us, happening to us as a reality in its own right.
We live inside a giant permanent Coliseum games. But it’s obviously not just a game (no less than the original Coliseum was just games). Almost every week, and sometimes more than once a week, with sickening regularity, there is news of a group of people, a family, or simply random individuals, blown away by a man with a gun and a grudge. The plasma of violence—this thing in its own right—will grip an individual with uncontrollable power and he will pick up one of the guns lying around in our country like kitchenware and act out his fury. At the same time the U.S. exports a huge amount of violence to the rest of the world. I was recently hit by this statistic: two thirds of the arms sold in the world in 2008 were from the U.S., earning $37.8 billion. Again all this is not basically a moral question. It’s a human question, about how we structure our human life and in a way that comes round to destroying it, to wiping it out. If we were to imagine some final Atlantis style melt-down for our civilization it would make Plato’s strange folk memory/myth look like a cute fairy tale.
But that’s not the point of what I’m saying. This is not a scare piece. In fact it’s the opposite. The point of living in Atlantis is to learn to live underwater. All the stuff I just described is already happening so in so many ways we’re already right there. We’re swimming in the ocean of violence. For a Christian who understands this the reaction is not to seek even more violence—this time from an angry God who will come to punish all this evil. That is simply to see God in terms of the percept of violence which dominates the human eye. For a Christian it is rather a call to build the survivability of Atlantis within its moment of disaster. Because it’s only when the crisis builds to this level—when there is no middle way between the two alternatives—that a new humanity based in forgiveness as a way of life, as the true way of being human—not just an occasional “heroic” gesture—becomes apparent. It is in fact the moment of choice, the moment when the challenge of Christ begins to come home in an unavoidable way: either an entirely a new way of being human or the endless self-fueled crisis, either the pure eye of peace or the beam-in-the-eye of violence, either forgiveness or limitless recycling fire. Living in Atlantis therefore is enormously exciting and hopeful, the time when the Christian message can really come into its own.
As Jesus said, “the only sign that will be given you is the sign of Jonah,” a human being who could live under water.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Journey with Jesus #15
Sorry for the delay in posting this study from August. The Old Testament study that accompanies this one (Jesus and the smallest thing) will be posted in the next few weeks.
Wood Hath Hope will be interrupting it's "Journey with Jesus" to run a short two-week introduction to our Bible theology of non-violence. Our regular schedule will resume after this. Peace - Linda
New Testament - The smallest thing 08/06/09
In Luke 1:52 the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise, announces the gospel’s concern for the small and weak. Mary proclaims that God has brought the powerful from their thrones and exalted the lowly. Again in Luke John the Baptist proclaims the overturning of the established order. He quotes from Isaiah 40: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low.” High is low and vice versa.
Jesus’ parables are remarkable for their focus on small things. The parables are simple, to the point, and have the power to change your perspective. Matthew 13 is the great chapter for parables. In v.33 we have the parable of the yeast. The woman hides it in the dough. It is lost, no longer visible – and yet has the effect of causing the whole loaf of bread to rise. In v.44 another small thing is hidden – the treasure buried in a field, and in v.45. the small thing is a pearl of great price. These are all small, hidden things that once discovered shift your orientation. The world shifts and changes around you.
Perhaps the most well known “small thing” from the parables is the seed. The seed is a powerful image because it has a vitality and potency that produces newness and life. In Mt 13:31 Jesus uses the example of the mustard seed, “smallest of all the seeds.” This is the classic parable of the small thing that becomes the most important thing. In MK 4:26-29 another parable describes the seed growing secretly. The farmer does not need to do anything, does not even pay attention, yet the seed grows. In these parables Jesus shifts the established world logic that bigger is best.
In Luke 15:3-10 there are two parables of lost small things. The parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. Jesus recognizes the irrational amounts of time that we often spend in order to save the smallest coin (think coupon clipping, rebates). He taps into the human sense of having to find something that is lost; regardless of its intrinsic value it becomes the obscure object of desire. He translates these human foibles into a parable about the kingdom of God. That same feeling of joy that we have about finding something that has been lost is like the joy in heaven when one sinner repents. The parable of the lost sheep is highly counter- intuitive. The shepherd leaves the remaining ninety-nine sheep unprotected in order to search for the one lost sheep. Again there is joy when the lost is found. The parables tell us to pay attention to the small, lost, hidden element. This is where joy is.
In John 11: 49-50 Caiaphas, the High Priest, states that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed”. The Sanhedrin is trying to decide what to do about Jesus. Caiaphas’ position is that the Romans will use Jesus as an excuse to bring down violence on the people. This is a familiar theme in movies , cutting someone off to save the rest– e.g. the mountain climber who saves his friends by cutting the rope that connects him to them. This is also the human logic of war – we have to kill in order to preserve the peace. Eliminating the individual to maintain order is at the heart of sacrifice – a practice common to all traditional cultures. Jesus overturns this fundamental human logic. Sacrifice just perpetuates the cycle of violence. For change to take place the human heart needs to be transformed. We need to surrender our boxed-in way of thinking. Jesus says it is the single sacrificed thing that is important, not the crowd for which it is sacrificed. To think this way is to invert established human logic. And for Jesus to say this meant that he believed the things that box us in can be overcome, especially fear and fear of death which keep us in the old logic.
With Jesus the least and the last become first. Jesus shows us this in practice – he becomes that thing, the last, the least, the lost. He enters into the human process of sacrificing the weakest to save the nation. He says “see me, the hidden thing”. He asks us to pay attention to the least thing, the weakest thing and see its value. Salvation comes by transforming our established human logic. Jesus takes the process we use to save people (sacrifice) and turns it into something that really does save, by changing our whole viewpoint on reality.
In Lk 20:17-18 it is the stone that the builder rejected that becomes the corner stone. The stone is the rejected, the least, last, lost, the hidden –it is Jesus. But this little stone will destroy the kingdoms of this world. (A reference to the stone not cut by human hands which topples the king’s statue and becomes a mighty kingdom in Daniel 2:31-45.)
We are also ourselves the rejected thing that has been redeemed—whatever way in which he have been rendered small, disposable, Jesus makes this valuable. We have thus been given freedom and endless life because we are no longer defined by the world. Through Jesus we can turn away from selfishness and fear. This endless life is for all – God is not exclusive: he sends his rain on the just and unjust alike.
Wood Hath Hope will be interrupting it's "Journey with Jesus" to run a short two-week introduction to our Bible theology of non-violence. Our regular schedule will resume after this. Peace - Linda
New Testament - The smallest thing 08/06/09
In Luke 1:52 the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise, announces the gospel’s concern for the small and weak. Mary proclaims that God has brought the powerful from their thrones and exalted the lowly. Again in Luke John the Baptist proclaims the overturning of the established order. He quotes from Isaiah 40: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low.” High is low and vice versa.
Jesus’ parables are remarkable for their focus on small things. The parables are simple, to the point, and have the power to change your perspective. Matthew 13 is the great chapter for parables. In v.33 we have the parable of the yeast. The woman hides it in the dough. It is lost, no longer visible – and yet has the effect of causing the whole loaf of bread to rise. In v.44 another small thing is hidden – the treasure buried in a field, and in v.45. the small thing is a pearl of great price. These are all small, hidden things that once discovered shift your orientation. The world shifts and changes around you.
Perhaps the most well known “small thing” from the parables is the seed. The seed is a powerful image because it has a vitality and potency that produces newness and life. In Mt 13:31 Jesus uses the example of the mustard seed, “smallest of all the seeds.” This is the classic parable of the small thing that becomes the most important thing. In MK 4:26-29 another parable describes the seed growing secretly. The farmer does not need to do anything, does not even pay attention, yet the seed grows. In these parables Jesus shifts the established world logic that bigger is best.
In Luke 15:3-10 there are two parables of lost small things. The parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. Jesus recognizes the irrational amounts of time that we often spend in order to save the smallest coin (think coupon clipping, rebates). He taps into the human sense of having to find something that is lost; regardless of its intrinsic value it becomes the obscure object of desire. He translates these human foibles into a parable about the kingdom of God. That same feeling of joy that we have about finding something that has been lost is like the joy in heaven when one sinner repents. The parable of the lost sheep is highly counter- intuitive. The shepherd leaves the remaining ninety-nine sheep unprotected in order to search for the one lost sheep. Again there is joy when the lost is found. The parables tell us to pay attention to the small, lost, hidden element. This is where joy is.
In John 11: 49-50 Caiaphas, the High Priest, states that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed”. The Sanhedrin is trying to decide what to do about Jesus. Caiaphas’ position is that the Romans will use Jesus as an excuse to bring down violence on the people. This is a familiar theme in movies , cutting someone off to save the rest– e.g. the mountain climber who saves his friends by cutting the rope that connects him to them. This is also the human logic of war – we have to kill in order to preserve the peace. Eliminating the individual to maintain order is at the heart of sacrifice – a practice common to all traditional cultures. Jesus overturns this fundamental human logic. Sacrifice just perpetuates the cycle of violence. For change to take place the human heart needs to be transformed. We need to surrender our boxed-in way of thinking. Jesus says it is the single sacrificed thing that is important, not the crowd for which it is sacrificed. To think this way is to invert established human logic. And for Jesus to say this meant that he believed the things that box us in can be overcome, especially fear and fear of death which keep us in the old logic.
With Jesus the least and the last become first. Jesus shows us this in practice – he becomes that thing, the last, the least, the lost. He enters into the human process of sacrificing the weakest to save the nation. He says “see me, the hidden thing”. He asks us to pay attention to the least thing, the weakest thing and see its value. Salvation comes by transforming our established human logic. Jesus takes the process we use to save people (sacrifice) and turns it into something that really does save, by changing our whole viewpoint on reality.
In Lk 20:17-18 it is the stone that the builder rejected that becomes the corner stone. The stone is the rejected, the least, last, lost, the hidden –it is Jesus. But this little stone will destroy the kingdoms of this world. (A reference to the stone not cut by human hands which topples the king’s statue and becomes a mighty kingdom in Daniel 2:31-45.)
We are also ourselves the rejected thing that has been redeemed—whatever way in which he have been rendered small, disposable, Jesus makes this valuable. We have thus been given freedom and endless life because we are no longer defined by the world. Through Jesus we can turn away from selfishness and fear. This endless life is for all – God is not exclusive: he sends his rain on the just and unjust alike.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Summer Sublime
Somebody wrote me saying there was no recent news in my blogs. So, really, it’s been an eventful summer. And the first news popping up is that a few of us in Wood Hath Hope have been attending a study group run by a bunch of young evangelicals. They are using a book called Jesus Wants to Save Christians, A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell. Rob is the pastor of a church in Grandville, Michigan, and is something of an enfant terrible in evangelical circles. His previous book with the hip title of Velvet Elvis (referring to a supposed definitive artistic rendering of Elvis) attacked the rigid interpretation of biblical texts—the idea that you can know 100% of what the texts mean. He calls this “brickianity”—every bit of meaning is a brick in the wall.
In the book we are reading Bell lays out an unusual biblical pathway for evangelical faith, one not concerned with listing and enlisting God’s plan for spiritual salvation, but with the bible’s stringent critique of empire and how this applies blow for blow to the role of North America in the world. Christians in this country need take note of their situation in an imperial structure which uses the rest of the world for its power and pleasure.
The amazing thing about the study group is how seriously it takes Bell’s blasts. Outside the United States, or in seminaries or minority churches, people are perhaps used to this kind of thing as liberation theology, which is written for those at the receiving end of empire and oppression. For it to arrive at the level of the local church on main street America and as a matter of biblical faith seems nothing short of astonishing.
It makes me think that something really is up in our world of the wealthy. The Holy Spirit is prompting us to a new awareness and attitude about being Christian in the belly of the beast. I think the prompting goes well beyond a moral judgment on unjust North American lifestyles. If it was simply criticism nobody would be willing to pay attention. People are ready to listen because in fact they have already shifted to a new place in regard to a righteousness of nation and wealth and heaven thereafter. They have perhaps ended up too much on the down side of the American dream, or seen too much its dark side. So they begin to feel the reaching up in their hearts of an alternative, of a completely different goal intended by God. Bell and the group studying his book are prepared to look at this stuff not because it’s a guilt trip, but because it’s a ride to the humanly new. They’re not entirely sure what this new thing is but they’re definitely out there buying the tickets.
The second thing that has been going on this summer is that I have a book contract for my own ms., Virtually Christian, How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New. Well, yes, I was thinking of this right at the beginning but I had to show some decorum! I finally found a publisher, a British group called O-Books. They publish in the area of world religions and Mind/Body/Spirit and have expanded into theology. The contact came through a friend who has been an off-and-on member at WHH for the longest time and who himself had a contract with the same group. My friend’s thought is probably more framed by the Hindu religion than Christian faith and perhaps that contact, connecting to the publisher, says something. I’d tried most of the mainstream theological publishing houses in the U.S. and got turned down by them. So, what do you know, the kind of thing I’m trying to say theologically seems to fit better within a world religions framework! Why is that? It’s not because I take some vague multi-cultural approach. The particular of Christ is at the heart of everything I think and write: everything hinges on the figure of Jesus. I’m not entirely sure, but it could be because Christian thought is traditionally shaped as legal and normative—even Bell’s stuff is about what God wants from us—rather than transformative and holistic—what a creative God is actually doing! So trad Christian publishing can’t see it, but a MBS approach will. Where I go with theology is the already-embeddedness of Christ in culture, the way our humanity is deeply informed by his new humanity. We still very much have to make a decision for Christ, away from the chaos and destruction that a half-Christianization produces. But all the same the Christian message is organic to how we are as cultural beings (wasn’t it Tertullian who said “the soul is naturally Christian”?). So it is a matter of responding to an intense demand made on us from our human depths rather than to a terrible judge looking down on us from the outside. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves and the grace of Christ is borderless in human space.
And that brings me in a fairly neat sequence to what I’m doing much of the rest of my time—I go to the mall. To movies, to the stores, even once or twice to hang out and write. I suppose I’m a bit of a mall junky—public spaces generally. I have to say I get the strangest sensation in the mall. I get it in supermarkets too. Here’s the feeling: it’s like at first my heart is being pulled out of me, painfully, by a longing that goes way, way beyond me. It’s something to do with the enormous plenty on display. I think classically you’re supposed to get that feeling in front of wonderful vistas, of mountains, forests, seascapes, that kind of thing. It’s called the sublime, something so great it leaves you both captivated and flattened, at a total loss. Certainly you’re not supposed to feel the sublime in a mall—that’s ridiculous, inane. You can feel other things, and I have felt them, like a spaceyness from stimulus overload, or annoyance and anger at so many goods and so much greed produced at the expense of the poor; but not anything transcendent. Still the fact is I do have this feeling and then my immediate and almost automatic second-step is to give thanks. Paul said give thanks in everything. But I don’t go into the mall thinking to myself, ah yes, I’m going to practice Paul’s edifying advice. I just find myself doing it, because it’s the only thing I can do, and when I do there come peace and hope.
So here’s what I think. All the enormous plenty is a foreshadowing of God’s kingdom. It is indeed God’s desire that the earth be turned into plenty—but for all. The pain comes from that gap, from these immense blessings and the lack of awareness and love with which they are possessed. But immediately you give thanks, these things, despite the surface evidence, become what God wants them to be, free-flowing, given for all, the rich wonderful feast prophesied for all peoples (Isaiah 25). Then—alongside the actual goods and probably even more important— there is people’s desire. You’re swimming in it. You’re drunk with it. The sense of the sublime—if that is what it is—is now a very human collective one. It’s not the lonely romantic soul gazing at a sunset. Here you’re surrounded by the longing of thousands of people, sharing in their desire. We are all together reaching out for the unattainable. As I have pointed out in other blogs this liberated desire so characteristic of our global culture is already a Christian product. It has arisen through the progressive breaking of boundaries and taboos of all sorts in a history unleashed by the gospel. The desire, just like the goods themselves, is therefore an indirect reflection of Christ in the world, an unrecognized longing for the kingdom of life and love that he preached. Thus when I give thanks I realize this truth, at least in my heart, transforming the desire into love, purifying it and redeeming it. Yes, of course, this is all in my mind, in myself, but it is not illusion. It is a future reality happening now through Holy Spirit. Think, if all Christians practiced redeemed desire not as an occasional hot flush but as a matter of normal spiritual discipline how would that change the world! There would be no way of withholding the plenty of the mall—the plenty of the earth—from all the poor who are deprived of it. Then human joy would be uncontainable and the God of Christ be with us.
In the book we are reading Bell lays out an unusual biblical pathway for evangelical faith, one not concerned with listing and enlisting God’s plan for spiritual salvation, but with the bible’s stringent critique of empire and how this applies blow for blow to the role of North America in the world. Christians in this country need take note of their situation in an imperial structure which uses the rest of the world for its power and pleasure.
The amazing thing about the study group is how seriously it takes Bell’s blasts. Outside the United States, or in seminaries or minority churches, people are perhaps used to this kind of thing as liberation theology, which is written for those at the receiving end of empire and oppression. For it to arrive at the level of the local church on main street America and as a matter of biblical faith seems nothing short of astonishing.
It makes me think that something really is up in our world of the wealthy. The Holy Spirit is prompting us to a new awareness and attitude about being Christian in the belly of the beast. I think the prompting goes well beyond a moral judgment on unjust North American lifestyles. If it was simply criticism nobody would be willing to pay attention. People are ready to listen because in fact they have already shifted to a new place in regard to a righteousness of nation and wealth and heaven thereafter. They have perhaps ended up too much on the down side of the American dream, or seen too much its dark side. So they begin to feel the reaching up in their hearts of an alternative, of a completely different goal intended by God. Bell and the group studying his book are prepared to look at this stuff not because it’s a guilt trip, but because it’s a ride to the humanly new. They’re not entirely sure what this new thing is but they’re definitely out there buying the tickets.
The second thing that has been going on this summer is that I have a book contract for my own ms., Virtually Christian, How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New. Well, yes, I was thinking of this right at the beginning but I had to show some decorum! I finally found a publisher, a British group called O-Books. They publish in the area of world religions and Mind/Body/Spirit and have expanded into theology. The contact came through a friend who has been an off-and-on member at WHH for the longest time and who himself had a contract with the same group. My friend’s thought is probably more framed by the Hindu religion than Christian faith and perhaps that contact, connecting to the publisher, says something. I’d tried most of the mainstream theological publishing houses in the U.S. and got turned down by them. So, what do you know, the kind of thing I’m trying to say theologically seems to fit better within a world religions framework! Why is that? It’s not because I take some vague multi-cultural approach. The particular of Christ is at the heart of everything I think and write: everything hinges on the figure of Jesus. I’m not entirely sure, but it could be because Christian thought is traditionally shaped as legal and normative—even Bell’s stuff is about what God wants from us—rather than transformative and holistic—what a creative God is actually doing! So trad Christian publishing can’t see it, but a MBS approach will. Where I go with theology is the already-embeddedness of Christ in culture, the way our humanity is deeply informed by his new humanity. We still very much have to make a decision for Christ, away from the chaos and destruction that a half-Christianization produces. But all the same the Christian message is organic to how we are as cultural beings (wasn’t it Tertullian who said “the soul is naturally Christian”?). So it is a matter of responding to an intense demand made on us from our human depths rather than to a terrible judge looking down on us from the outside. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves and the grace of Christ is borderless in human space.
And that brings me in a fairly neat sequence to what I’m doing much of the rest of my time—I go to the mall. To movies, to the stores, even once or twice to hang out and write. I suppose I’m a bit of a mall junky—public spaces generally. I have to say I get the strangest sensation in the mall. I get it in supermarkets too. Here’s the feeling: it’s like at first my heart is being pulled out of me, painfully, by a longing that goes way, way beyond me. It’s something to do with the enormous plenty on display. I think classically you’re supposed to get that feeling in front of wonderful vistas, of mountains, forests, seascapes, that kind of thing. It’s called the sublime, something so great it leaves you both captivated and flattened, at a total loss. Certainly you’re not supposed to feel the sublime in a mall—that’s ridiculous, inane. You can feel other things, and I have felt them, like a spaceyness from stimulus overload, or annoyance and anger at so many goods and so much greed produced at the expense of the poor; but not anything transcendent. Still the fact is I do have this feeling and then my immediate and almost automatic second-step is to give thanks. Paul said give thanks in everything. But I don’t go into the mall thinking to myself, ah yes, I’m going to practice Paul’s edifying advice. I just find myself doing it, because it’s the only thing I can do, and when I do there come peace and hope.
So here’s what I think. All the enormous plenty is a foreshadowing of God’s kingdom. It is indeed God’s desire that the earth be turned into plenty—but for all. The pain comes from that gap, from these immense blessings and the lack of awareness and love with which they are possessed. But immediately you give thanks, these things, despite the surface evidence, become what God wants them to be, free-flowing, given for all, the rich wonderful feast prophesied for all peoples (Isaiah 25). Then—alongside the actual goods and probably even more important— there is people’s desire. You’re swimming in it. You’re drunk with it. The sense of the sublime—if that is what it is—is now a very human collective one. It’s not the lonely romantic soul gazing at a sunset. Here you’re surrounded by the longing of thousands of people, sharing in their desire. We are all together reaching out for the unattainable. As I have pointed out in other blogs this liberated desire so characteristic of our global culture is already a Christian product. It has arisen through the progressive breaking of boundaries and taboos of all sorts in a history unleashed by the gospel. The desire, just like the goods themselves, is therefore an indirect reflection of Christ in the world, an unrecognized longing for the kingdom of life and love that he preached. Thus when I give thanks I realize this truth, at least in my heart, transforming the desire into love, purifying it and redeeming it. Yes, of course, this is all in my mind, in myself, but it is not illusion. It is a future reality happening now through Holy Spirit. Think, if all Christians practiced redeemed desire not as an occasional hot flush but as a matter of normal spiritual discipline how would that change the world! There would be no way of withholding the plenty of the mall—the plenty of the earth—from all the poor who are deprived of it. Then human joy would be uncontainable and the God of Christ be with us.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Journey with Jesus #14
Old Testament - Mountain 07/09/09
Exodus 19-20 is a key passage in the Torah. While Genesis gives the pre-history of the world and stories of the ancestors, Exodus begins the historical account of the oppression and liberation of the Hebrews. This is the foundational event of the Bible. It is a story of liberation and Law – the people set free to live a different way; led from slavery into the service of God. The theophany on Mount Sinai in chapters 19-20 is the first clear articulation of this.
The passage describes a fearful, primitive, sacred mystery. It is a classic account of an encounter with the holy. The holy both fascinates us and fills us with dread. In order to approach the holy we must first be pure, or risk destruction. The blood of menstruation and childbirth make women impure (hence the shock of Jesus’ interaction with the hemorrhaging woman who touched his cloak). Impurity –for example blood or dirt –is associated with violence and lack of order and is therefore dangerous. It is an anthropological phenomenon. Unlike other animals, humans are no longer restrained by instinct. We have become highly volatile with the potential for excessive violence. Religion is all about controlling this volatility. Priests, sacrifice and purity laws are ways to bring control, to harness and order the sacred power of violence. The anthropological dimension is illustrated in the Sinai story: if any person touches the mountain then they must be killed by the people. The Exodus account here uses these primitive themes to underscore the transcendence of God and the importance of the event. What is vital is what is happening: the mountain is the place where God reveals his law and desire for justice.
Later, in Exodus 24:9-11, a select group of elders are permitted on to the mountain to eat and drink with God. This account has pre-echoes of the transfiguration stories in the Gospels. It is a communion with God, but the depiction is of an extremely powerful and awe-inspiring divinity. This “classic Old Testament God” is also illustrated at Habbukuk 3:2-16. This is considered an early hymn describing YHWH who dwelled in Sinai (his fortress). He leads his people into the land and battle against their enemies with the same strength he manifests on his mountain top. This is a storm-God – a poetic description of a pre-scientific God imagined as a violent thunderstorm.
Daniel 2:31-45 (written in the 2nd century BCE) gives a different understanding of God’s action in history. The God of violence no longer works – the situation of the Jewish people cannot be changed through military might. Instead God becomes more mysterious and new. The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream illustrates how God can intervene in history in a new way. God is going to deal with the nations but not as storm-god. He chooses the small stone to strike the statue and this small stone then becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. The mode of communication has changed from a hymn of power to something more mysterious, less tangible, a dream. It is less clear and needs interpretation. The Bible is reaching out to find something new. It is seeking the extra ordinary. Established human logic (of violence) has not solved the problem of oppressive nations, so it looks elsewhere.
In verse 34 the stone, not shaped by human hands (unlike the statue) becomes a mountain. It takes the space previously occupied by the statue –and more. The dream describes an action by God that brings down oppressive empires and builds a new kingdom. God’s power is not represented by the storm, but by the small single element, the exception. The mountain of Sinai is reduced to a single stone.
Jesus understands that he is the stone. In LK 20:17 he says that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls” This references Psalm 118:22 and also the passage from Daniel. The mountain as the symbol of power has been abandoned – the shift is to the stone – to Jesus who has come to destroy the old oppressive systems of the world. He does this not through the violence of the storm-god – rather through the power of something new, the single element, the exception that changes everything to itself.
Exodus 19-20 is a key passage in the Torah. While Genesis gives the pre-history of the world and stories of the ancestors, Exodus begins the historical account of the oppression and liberation of the Hebrews. This is the foundational event of the Bible. It is a story of liberation and Law – the people set free to live a different way; led from slavery into the service of God. The theophany on Mount Sinai in chapters 19-20 is the first clear articulation of this.
The passage describes a fearful, primitive, sacred mystery. It is a classic account of an encounter with the holy. The holy both fascinates us and fills us with dread. In order to approach the holy we must first be pure, or risk destruction. The blood of menstruation and childbirth make women impure (hence the shock of Jesus’ interaction with the hemorrhaging woman who touched his cloak). Impurity –for example blood or dirt –is associated with violence and lack of order and is therefore dangerous. It is an anthropological phenomenon. Unlike other animals, humans are no longer restrained by instinct. We have become highly volatile with the potential for excessive violence. Religion is all about controlling this volatility. Priests, sacrifice and purity laws are ways to bring control, to harness and order the sacred power of violence. The anthropological dimension is illustrated in the Sinai story: if any person touches the mountain then they must be killed by the people. The Exodus account here uses these primitive themes to underscore the transcendence of God and the importance of the event. What is vital is what is happening: the mountain is the place where God reveals his law and desire for justice.
Later, in Exodus 24:9-11, a select group of elders are permitted on to the mountain to eat and drink with God. This account has pre-echoes of the transfiguration stories in the Gospels. It is a communion with God, but the depiction is of an extremely powerful and awe-inspiring divinity. This “classic Old Testament God” is also illustrated at Habbukuk 3:2-16. This is considered an early hymn describing YHWH who dwelled in Sinai (his fortress). He leads his people into the land and battle against their enemies with the same strength he manifests on his mountain top. This is a storm-God – a poetic description of a pre-scientific God imagined as a violent thunderstorm.
Daniel 2:31-45 (written in the 2nd century BCE) gives a different understanding of God’s action in history. The God of violence no longer works – the situation of the Jewish people cannot be changed through military might. Instead God becomes more mysterious and new. The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream illustrates how God can intervene in history in a new way. God is going to deal with the nations but not as storm-god. He chooses the small stone to strike the statue and this small stone then becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. The mode of communication has changed from a hymn of power to something more mysterious, less tangible, a dream. It is less clear and needs interpretation. The Bible is reaching out to find something new. It is seeking the extra ordinary. Established human logic (of violence) has not solved the problem of oppressive nations, so it looks elsewhere.
In verse 34 the stone, not shaped by human hands (unlike the statue) becomes a mountain. It takes the space previously occupied by the statue –and more. The dream describes an action by God that brings down oppressive empires and builds a new kingdom. God’s power is not represented by the storm, but by the small single element, the exception. The mountain of Sinai is reduced to a single stone.
Jesus understands that he is the stone. In LK 20:17 he says that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls” This references Psalm 118:22 and also the passage from Daniel. The mountain as the symbol of power has been abandoned – the shift is to the stone – to Jesus who has come to destroy the old oppressive systems of the world. He does this not through the violence of the storm-god – rather through the power of something new, the single element, the exception that changes everything to itself.
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