Here is the second of three Christmas Bible studies - this one focusing on Luke's Gospel....
12/10/09
Luke’s nativity has a different atmosphere than Matthew’s. Luke is the author of the classic nativity story - the shepherds, the stable, the manger. He is the master of spin – presenting a story that would be recognizable and acceptable to a predominantly Greek and Roman audience while hanging on to the key gospel elements.
Luke begins in Chapter 1:1-4 with a formal introduction similar to others of the day. There were no publishers in the ancient world – instead there were patrons. Writers would dedicate their manuscript to an important person who would then distribute it. Luke’s Gospel has this same style – it opens with an introduction to “Theophilus” which means “lover of God”. The name may indicate that this is not a real person but symbolic of the emerging Christian community. Luke is using an accepted and easily recognizable opening to ease his audience into the narrative. He is pitching his story to the educated cultured people of his time to communicate the story of Jesus in a way that they will embrace.
Luke’s Gospel is about political and social transformation. His focus is transforming the human space. It is arguably the most human of the Gospels and is sometimes considered the Gospel of the Catholic Church. It roots Christianity in recognizable human society. Luke places itself in the age of the gentiles – looking to a time when the gospel is communicated through the whole world.
The nativity narrative begins with the temple –with Zechariah and Elizabeth, privileged priestly figures. They bring to mind authority and holiness and immediately set the reader at ease. They are easily recognizable (every culture has temple figures) but Luke links them to Old Testament themes. He repeats motifs from the Old Testament – in particular the stories of Abraham and Sarah and of Hannah and Samuel. These are stories of barren women living in a time when motherhood gave women status and value. Elizabeth’s story fits with this archetype. Her experience (LK1:24) is the same – the childless woman rescued by God.
Luke intertwines the stories of Elizabeth and Mary in 1:26-80. Elizabeth overcoming adversity cues the reader to expect something similar with Mary. Zechariah and Elizabeth are totally legitimate characters (they come from the house of Aaron who was Moses’ right hand man). Intertwining their story with Mary’s gives her credibility and acceptability. The text does not give any background to Mary – her parentage and lineage. She is identified as a relative of Elizabeth’s, but this is unspecified. It is Joseph who can claim the house of David. St. Anne and St Joachim were later identified as Mary’s parents – but this is a tradition from the second century and is not scripturally based. There is a murkiness to Mary’s story and background. Luke builds her up. He portrays Mary’s story as even more amazing than Elizabeth’s– birth by virgin trumps that by old woman!
Unlike Matthew’s nativity, there is no element of scandal attached to Mary in Luke’s narrative. She explicitly states literally “I do not know man” which is translated as “I am a virgin”. Here an angel addresses her as “the favored one” – if anything her prestige goes up. Luke transforms the irregularity of Jesus’ conception into something beautiful and mysterious. Luke’s account of the miraculous conception has elements of both the Greek and Jewish. Nietzsche said that the story is reminiscent of the Greek Gods, such as Zeus, who impregnated mortal women in the guise of a swan, a bull and a shower of gold. Other scholars disagree – in the Lukan account there is nothing explicitly physical – it does not make sense for God to be supplying the y-chromosome. There is also no trickery involved. It involves the consent of Mary. The touch of God is so light and mysterious echoing the movement of the Spirit over the waters at the dawn of creation.
Mary achieves enormous status in Luke. Joseph, so important in Matthew, is a tangential figure in Luke. In Luke’s Gospel it is all about Mary. More than any of the other Gospels, Luke boosts the role of women and shows a concern for women’s issues. He gives Mary a voice – and she proclaims a knockout hymn of praise – the Magnificat (V46-56). Mary’s Magnificat repeats some of the words of Hannah (the mother of Samuel) in 1Samuel 2. The theme of the Magnificat is reversal – the powerful will be dethroned, the lowly lifted up. Mary gets to be the voice of the overturning of the world order. It encapsulates the social reversal that Luke is all about. Luke has set the stage so that by the time Mary makes her revolutionary proclamation you are totally on her side. While Matthew’s nativity story addresses and counters the violence of Herod and worldly power; Luke is about overcoming inequality. This message is reinforced by the story of the shepherds.
Chapter 2:1-20 is the account of Jesus’ birth. The census places Jesus not just in Herod’s Palestine, but in the context of the whole Roman Empire and points to Augustus Caesar as the most powerful person in the known civilized world. Historically there is no record of this particular census. Others took place but not at this specific time. Luke uses the device of the census to connect Jesus to the historical, political world of his time. The contrast is stark - the savior of the world lying in a manger because of the dictates of the worldly emperor. Jesus is born in a byre with the animals, placed in an animal’s feeding trough. His birth is recognized and celebrated by shepherds. The symbolism is strong – of Jesus as the good shepherd, the sacrificial lamb, as the bread of life. But shepherds were also poor, landless people, living on the mountainside like gypsies. They were people remote from culture, living outside the system and its taxation. Yet it is to shepherds that the angels appear. Traditionally it is the temple where you meet God, where God is revealed – Zechariah’s place. In Luke’s story the heavens open and God is revealed in a field to the forgotten and marginalized. If God is in the feeding trough then the temple becomes redundant. Ultimately it is a revolutionary and challenging message that offers hope, presenting the possibility of a different world.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Christmas Study
Here is the first of our Christmas studies...
Christmas #1 12/03/09
Of the two major Christian feasts (Easter and Christmas) Christmas, while less central to the Christian message, has been the one most widely embraced. December 25th was superimposed upon the older Roman feasts of Saturnalia and New Year. St Francis of Assisi introduced the nativity crib, and then the Santa story and other mid-winter traditions were all thrown into the mix. There is something about the Christmas spirit – the giving of gifts, the message of peace and goodwill, that makes us feel good. Soldiers in the first year of the 1st world war reached out across the trenches to play football with the enemy on Christmas morning. Another attraction of Christmas is the very human interest in origins – in particular of famous and important figures. How did they come to turn out like they did? There is truth in the saying “the child is the father to the man”.
Neither Mark (the first of the Gospels chronologically) nor John recount Jesus’ birth or childhood. Both start with Jesus’ adult ministry. Only two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, have nativity narratives. These narratives differ widely – much more so than the “single eye” with which these gospels approach the account of his adult life. Raymond Brown, an eminent Roman Catholic scholar of the 20th century, describes the nativity narratives as “folkloristic stories”. They come from people’s conversation. They can have an element of truth, but also an element of elaboration. If they are not taken with naïve literalness then the meaning of story is allowed to come through more powerfully. The four key teachings of the nativity story are:
1. That Jesus represents a radical alternative and contrast to the imperial power under which he was born.
2. Jesus represents a fulfillment of humanity’s search for wisdom.
3. Jesus sides with the poor and abandoned.
4. The core story and circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth to an unwed mother.
Matthew has more formal structure and has a more systematic approach than the earlier Markan Gospel. By the time of Matthew’s composition the Jesus’ story was well established in the growing Christian communities. Matthew’s audience was from communities emerging from a predominantly Jewish background. His Gospel is constructed in five sections that recollect the five books of the Jewish Torah, and Jesus is presented as the new Moses.
Jesus was born marginal to both his own community and to the imperial power of his time. In Matthew we have the story of Herod the Great and the visit of the magi. Pliny, a historian writing towards the end of the first century, describes kings from the east visiting Nero guided by a star. In MT 2:1-23 we have the story of the magi, the flight to Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents. This echoes the story of Moses in the Torah. Pharaoh demanded that the Hebrew newborn sons be killed immediately they were born by throwing them into the Nile. Moses escaped death by being set adrift on the Nile hidden in a basket. In Jesus’ story Herod takes the place of Pharaoh, and Jesus of the whole of Israel. There is no account of the slaughter of the innocents by Herod outside of the New Testament, however he was notorious for his brutality. It was said that it was “better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son” because his religion forbade him to eat pork, yet he killed several of his sons, his wife and other relatives because of his paranoia of rivals. When he was dying, he ordered his soldiers to round up 2 men from each village to be cut down by arrows when he died so that there would be mourning in the land (recorded by Josephus). So the Gospel story is credible to his character and fits with the historical portrait that exists. Herod’s response is of deadly fear against an unknown threat. Worldly power senses the threat inherent in innocence and non-violence. Dietrich Bonheoffer used the example of Herod in his famous Christmas sermon that resisted the Nazi regime. Herod reacts brutally by killing a lot of people. It is often the case that the gospel can initially seem to make things worse if it is taken seriously. The gospel confronts us and challenges us and upsets the established order. It is because of this that Christianity is often contained and boxed in, because it is so disruptive.
The Magi were scholars of arcane and esoteric knowledge. They gathered this knowledge from the stars and from ancient prophecies. They studied an ancient and deep secular wisdom. The tradition developed that they were also kings because of the cost of their gifts (gold for sovereignty, frankincense for deity and myrrh used in the anointing of the dead). The story of the magi indicates that human wisdom will recognize Jesus. His importance is for the whole earth and extends beyond the Jewish people. In this he is like other key Old Testament figures such as Cyrus king of the Persians (“the anointed” in Isaiah). It also brings to mind the Isaiah prophesies of the Servant - the ends of the earth are waiting for his teaching. The magi story seems to say that the truth of the gospel can be found in any wisdom tradition if one searches deeply enough.
Many people today still place faith in astrology – signs and meanings derived from the constellations. The Babylonians and Persians were famous for it. Our cosmology (our understanding of the heavens and our universe) is usually dependent on our understanding of ourselves. If we are violent then we will project that violence in to our cosmology (a violent God, cosmic battles and end-times filled with conflict). If we see the heavens through the lens of the baby Jesus, then they are transformed into a peaceful place filled with the music of angels and the light of a brilliant star. The story of the star that leads the magi suggests a restructuring of our violent cosmology.
Matthew’s Gospel begins with the genealogy of Jesus. This is divided into three groups of fourteen generations. From Abraham to David; from Solomon to Jeconiah; and from Shealtiel to Joseph. Fourteen represents a doubling of the number seven – a number associated with divine activity (e.g. the seven days of creation). Three represents the divine presence (for example the three angels who visited Abraham, the Trinity, etc). The genealogy is there to underscore the divine influence and involvement in the birth of Jesus. Except that there are only thirteen in the final group. Some scholars say that it was a miscalculation by Matthew. It seems more likely though that the final person listed in Jesus’ genealogy is meant to be Mary. MT 1:6 reads “and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born,” (the same verb, in passive form, as used of the male progenitors). This claim is backed up by the presence of four other women mentioned in the long list of male names. These four are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba). All four of these women were associated with sexual impropriety. Rahab was a prostitute, Tamar and Ruth acted as prostitutes and Bathsheba was the victim of a rape. All four were of gentile origins (Rahab and Tamar were Canaanite; Ruth was a Moabite and Bathsheba’s name indicates that she was a “daughter of Sheba” and her husband was a Hittite). All four were marginal women and yet they were crucial to the line that led to Jesus. Their presence in the genealogy sets the scene for Mary – another marginal woman crucial to Jesus’ story.
Mt 1:18-25 describes Mary’s situation which was one of great dubiousness and impropriety. In the Talmud Jesus is described as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus’ illegitimacy is hinted at by his accusers (Jn 8: 41). In v. 18 Mary is found to be with child “of the Holy Spirit”. These four words were added by Matthew at this point of the narrative to decrease the scandal of her situation for the reader. If omitted what remains is a much more real and concrete account of vulnerability and peril. Deuteronomy 22:13 states the consequences to an unwed mother if discovered – death by stoning. What stood between Mary and this fate was the compassion of Joseph, although as a righteous man he was also going to reject her.
We are used to the idea of a virgin birth because Luke makes this explicit when Mary says “I have known no man”. As well as this Matthew substitutes the Greek word “parthenos” for the original Hebrew word “maiden” or “young girl” used in the Isaiah prophecy: “Behold a virgin will conceive..”. If you allow yourself to step away from this idea for a moment then the redeeming action of God in the world becomes even more profound. Jesus enters the world as he leaves it – both condemned and yet innocent. From the very beginning of his life he has to confront the condemnation of the world. The taint of illegitimacy would have impacted Jesus – his relationships with outcasts, his compassion for the outsider. Yet love was also present in his childhood providing a witness of a different kind – of acceptance, forgiveness and mercy among the members of his immediate family. Not knowing his biological father may have strengthened his relationship with his heavenly Father. Perhaps what makes this a more powerful understanding of the nativity would be the realization that God takes and transforms the situation of all people - however lowly. God is revealed in terrible circumstances and takes the part of the discarded. In his very act of being born Jesus brings mercy and redemption – to Mary, to Joseph.
This reading of the Gospels has been largely veiled by the Christian tradition –it was even too much for the Evangelists themselves to clearly present. Historically those disputing the Virgin Birth have often been people trying to detract from the divinity of Jesus. Perhaps today, with illegitimacy not such a scandalous event, we can begin to understand the truly wondrous nature of God that enters our world in such a way to bring forgiveness and redemption to all. In his birth Jesus establishes that there is no place outside of God’s love. “Of the Holy Spirit” means exactly this: all human situations of rejection and condemnation are rendered forgiven and filled with God.
Christmas #1 12/03/09
Of the two major Christian feasts (Easter and Christmas) Christmas, while less central to the Christian message, has been the one most widely embraced. December 25th was superimposed upon the older Roman feasts of Saturnalia and New Year. St Francis of Assisi introduced the nativity crib, and then the Santa story and other mid-winter traditions were all thrown into the mix. There is something about the Christmas spirit – the giving of gifts, the message of peace and goodwill, that makes us feel good. Soldiers in the first year of the 1st world war reached out across the trenches to play football with the enemy on Christmas morning. Another attraction of Christmas is the very human interest in origins – in particular of famous and important figures. How did they come to turn out like they did? There is truth in the saying “the child is the father to the man”.
Neither Mark (the first of the Gospels chronologically) nor John recount Jesus’ birth or childhood. Both start with Jesus’ adult ministry. Only two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, have nativity narratives. These narratives differ widely – much more so than the “single eye” with which these gospels approach the account of his adult life. Raymond Brown, an eminent Roman Catholic scholar of the 20th century, describes the nativity narratives as “folkloristic stories”. They come from people’s conversation. They can have an element of truth, but also an element of elaboration. If they are not taken with naïve literalness then the meaning of story is allowed to come through more powerfully. The four key teachings of the nativity story are:
1. That Jesus represents a radical alternative and contrast to the imperial power under which he was born.
2. Jesus represents a fulfillment of humanity’s search for wisdom.
3. Jesus sides with the poor and abandoned.
4. The core story and circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth to an unwed mother.
Matthew has more formal structure and has a more systematic approach than the earlier Markan Gospel. By the time of Matthew’s composition the Jesus’ story was well established in the growing Christian communities. Matthew’s audience was from communities emerging from a predominantly Jewish background. His Gospel is constructed in five sections that recollect the five books of the Jewish Torah, and Jesus is presented as the new Moses.
Jesus was born marginal to both his own community and to the imperial power of his time. In Matthew we have the story of Herod the Great and the visit of the magi. Pliny, a historian writing towards the end of the first century, describes kings from the east visiting Nero guided by a star. In MT 2:1-23 we have the story of the magi, the flight to Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents. This echoes the story of Moses in the Torah. Pharaoh demanded that the Hebrew newborn sons be killed immediately they were born by throwing them into the Nile. Moses escaped death by being set adrift on the Nile hidden in a basket. In Jesus’ story Herod takes the place of Pharaoh, and Jesus of the whole of Israel. There is no account of the slaughter of the innocents by Herod outside of the New Testament, however he was notorious for his brutality. It was said that it was “better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son” because his religion forbade him to eat pork, yet he killed several of his sons, his wife and other relatives because of his paranoia of rivals. When he was dying, he ordered his soldiers to round up 2 men from each village to be cut down by arrows when he died so that there would be mourning in the land (recorded by Josephus). So the Gospel story is credible to his character and fits with the historical portrait that exists. Herod’s response is of deadly fear against an unknown threat. Worldly power senses the threat inherent in innocence and non-violence. Dietrich Bonheoffer used the example of Herod in his famous Christmas sermon that resisted the Nazi regime. Herod reacts brutally by killing a lot of people. It is often the case that the gospel can initially seem to make things worse if it is taken seriously. The gospel confronts us and challenges us and upsets the established order. It is because of this that Christianity is often contained and boxed in, because it is so disruptive.
The Magi were scholars of arcane and esoteric knowledge. They gathered this knowledge from the stars and from ancient prophecies. They studied an ancient and deep secular wisdom. The tradition developed that they were also kings because of the cost of their gifts (gold for sovereignty, frankincense for deity and myrrh used in the anointing of the dead). The story of the magi indicates that human wisdom will recognize Jesus. His importance is for the whole earth and extends beyond the Jewish people. In this he is like other key Old Testament figures such as Cyrus king of the Persians (“the anointed” in Isaiah). It also brings to mind the Isaiah prophesies of the Servant - the ends of the earth are waiting for his teaching. The magi story seems to say that the truth of the gospel can be found in any wisdom tradition if one searches deeply enough.
Many people today still place faith in astrology – signs and meanings derived from the constellations. The Babylonians and Persians were famous for it. Our cosmology (our understanding of the heavens and our universe) is usually dependent on our understanding of ourselves. If we are violent then we will project that violence in to our cosmology (a violent God, cosmic battles and end-times filled with conflict). If we see the heavens through the lens of the baby Jesus, then they are transformed into a peaceful place filled with the music of angels and the light of a brilliant star. The story of the star that leads the magi suggests a restructuring of our violent cosmology.
Matthew’s Gospel begins with the genealogy of Jesus. This is divided into three groups of fourteen generations. From Abraham to David; from Solomon to Jeconiah; and from Shealtiel to Joseph. Fourteen represents a doubling of the number seven – a number associated with divine activity (e.g. the seven days of creation). Three represents the divine presence (for example the three angels who visited Abraham, the Trinity, etc). The genealogy is there to underscore the divine influence and involvement in the birth of Jesus. Except that there are only thirteen in the final group. Some scholars say that it was a miscalculation by Matthew. It seems more likely though that the final person listed in Jesus’ genealogy is meant to be Mary. MT 1:6 reads “and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born,” (the same verb, in passive form, as used of the male progenitors). This claim is backed up by the presence of four other women mentioned in the long list of male names. These four are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and the wife of Uriah (Bathsheba). All four of these women were associated with sexual impropriety. Rahab was a prostitute, Tamar and Ruth acted as prostitutes and Bathsheba was the victim of a rape. All four were of gentile origins (Rahab and Tamar were Canaanite; Ruth was a Moabite and Bathsheba’s name indicates that she was a “daughter of Sheba” and her husband was a Hittite). All four were marginal women and yet they were crucial to the line that led to Jesus. Their presence in the genealogy sets the scene for Mary – another marginal woman crucial to Jesus’ story.
Mt 1:18-25 describes Mary’s situation which was one of great dubiousness and impropriety. In the Talmud Jesus is described as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus’ illegitimacy is hinted at by his accusers (Jn 8: 41). In v. 18 Mary is found to be with child “of the Holy Spirit”. These four words were added by Matthew at this point of the narrative to decrease the scandal of her situation for the reader. If omitted what remains is a much more real and concrete account of vulnerability and peril. Deuteronomy 22:13 states the consequences to an unwed mother if discovered – death by stoning. What stood between Mary and this fate was the compassion of Joseph, although as a righteous man he was also going to reject her.
We are used to the idea of a virgin birth because Luke makes this explicit when Mary says “I have known no man”. As well as this Matthew substitutes the Greek word “parthenos” for the original Hebrew word “maiden” or “young girl” used in the Isaiah prophecy: “Behold a virgin will conceive..”. If you allow yourself to step away from this idea for a moment then the redeeming action of God in the world becomes even more profound. Jesus enters the world as he leaves it – both condemned and yet innocent. From the very beginning of his life he has to confront the condemnation of the world. The taint of illegitimacy would have impacted Jesus – his relationships with outcasts, his compassion for the outsider. Yet love was also present in his childhood providing a witness of a different kind – of acceptance, forgiveness and mercy among the members of his immediate family. Not knowing his biological father may have strengthened his relationship with his heavenly Father. Perhaps what makes this a more powerful understanding of the nativity would be the realization that God takes and transforms the situation of all people - however lowly. God is revealed in terrible circumstances and takes the part of the discarded. In his very act of being born Jesus brings mercy and redemption – to Mary, to Joseph.
This reading of the Gospels has been largely veiled by the Christian tradition –it was even too much for the Evangelists themselves to clearly present. Historically those disputing the Virgin Birth have often been people trying to detract from the divinity of Jesus. Perhaps today, with illegitimacy not such a scandalous event, we can begin to understand the truly wondrous nature of God that enters our world in such a way to bring forgiveness and redemption to all. In his birth Jesus establishes that there is no place outside of God’s love. “Of the Holy Spirit” means exactly this: all human situations of rejection and condemnation are rendered forgiven and filled with God.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Journey with Jesus #19
Here is the final Journey with Jesus Bible Study for November. Look for a series of three Bible Studies on the theme of Christmas coming soon - the first will be posted in the next couple of days, then weekly until Christmas. -Linda
Old Testament - Time to Come 11/19/09
The Old Testament prophets are famous for warning of a disastrous future of terrible violence resulting from the disobedience of the people. Perhaps the best examples of this come from the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. Amos lived in the relatively prosperous period preceding the fall of Israel to the Assyrians. He preached judgment to the wealthy leaders because of their neglect of the poor and oppressed. Jeremiah lived in the time of the fall of Judea and the subsequent Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. While Jeremiah has some hopeful elements, Amos has no mercy. His book ends in total destruction. There is a final urgency in his message – “your time is up”. The storm clouds are already on the horizon. Jeremiah tried to overcome the complacency of his people. But then the hammer fell. He said things as they knew them were coming to an end. Jeremiah was considered a traitor in his lifetime, although he was ultimately proven right in his predictions – Jer 52:1-16 describes the fall of Jerusalem and its society.
This sense of time as an urgent future coming towards us is a hallmark of Old Testament prophetic teaching. It differs from the more stationary or cyclical sense of time present in many other ancient cultures. When John the Baptist and Jesus started to preach of impending destruction if the people did not repent it was therefore taken seriously. The Israelites had lived through it before and knew it could all come down again –and in fact did in 70AD, with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Our culture has absorbed this sense of urgency and so we live in the expectation of impending violence and doom. We live under the shadow of nuclear winter and now ecological disaster. Just think of all the “end-time” movies out there– for example The Day after Tomorrow, Terminator, and most recently 2012.
Another Old Testament prophet, Isaiah , had a different approach and a different sense of the future. He has an almost timeless, exalted vision of the future. The first part of Isaiah (Chapters 1-39) describes Zion as the city of God that will endure. All peoples of the world will come to Zion to learn the Law of the Lord. The future is an endless and boundless time in which the forces that take away life and peace are themselves done away with. It is the time when all life is fulfilled and accomplished on the Earth. Death has no sting in that future Earth filled with life. Is 25:6-10 describes the end of war, hunger and death. In their place there is a feast for all peoples, the end of disgrace, and death is swallowed up forever. This exalted vision is tied to the earth by a specific place (Mount Zion). This vision contrasts with the more abstract, ethereal and Greek understanding of life after death that is common today – of escaping the earth to a place out of time. This “heaven” is a static place of no movement. The world is left behind along with all of the things that makes time so oppressive.
Jeremiah ends with the destruction of Jerusalem. The Second book of Isaiah (from chapter 40) was also written at this time of absolute loss. A time without king, priest or other significant political or cultural leadership. In Is 42:1-4 a new figure is revealed – the “servant”. In Second Isaiah it is a person not a city who will put things right. He is described as gentle, hardly noticed. He respects the weak and is himself apparently weak. His teaching will go to the ends of the earth, the “coastlands,” and they are waiting for him. In the servant prophesies the peoples of the world do not come to the city, rather his teaching goes to them. Through this figure justice will come to the earth. The future is no longer something to be feared, but hoped for. And there is a sense that it does not have to be fought or strived for, but that it is going to happen inevitably. Just as with the earlier Isaiah visions of the future, this one is emptied of all that harms and destroys life.
The Old Testament opens up our sense of time. The prophets reject the concept of fate. They move away from the traditional cyclical experience of time and the focus on the times of sowing and harvest. While the seasons are good and beautiful they do not change the human situation. The Biblical story begins in a garden and ends in a city – the New Jerusalem. The city represents all that humans have brought to the world in the form of human culture. The future becomes a transformed human space here on earth where death and violence have no place.
Old Testament - Time to Come 11/19/09
The Old Testament prophets are famous for warning of a disastrous future of terrible violence resulting from the disobedience of the people. Perhaps the best examples of this come from the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. Amos lived in the relatively prosperous period preceding the fall of Israel to the Assyrians. He preached judgment to the wealthy leaders because of their neglect of the poor and oppressed. Jeremiah lived in the time of the fall of Judea and the subsequent Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE. While Jeremiah has some hopeful elements, Amos has no mercy. His book ends in total destruction. There is a final urgency in his message – “your time is up”. The storm clouds are already on the horizon. Jeremiah tried to overcome the complacency of his people. But then the hammer fell. He said things as they knew them were coming to an end. Jeremiah was considered a traitor in his lifetime, although he was ultimately proven right in his predictions – Jer 52:1-16 describes the fall of Jerusalem and its society.
This sense of time as an urgent future coming towards us is a hallmark of Old Testament prophetic teaching. It differs from the more stationary or cyclical sense of time present in many other ancient cultures. When John the Baptist and Jesus started to preach of impending destruction if the people did not repent it was therefore taken seriously. The Israelites had lived through it before and knew it could all come down again –and in fact did in 70AD, with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Our culture has absorbed this sense of urgency and so we live in the expectation of impending violence and doom. We live under the shadow of nuclear winter and now ecological disaster. Just think of all the “end-time” movies out there– for example The Day after Tomorrow, Terminator, and most recently 2012.
Another Old Testament prophet, Isaiah , had a different approach and a different sense of the future. He has an almost timeless, exalted vision of the future. The first part of Isaiah (Chapters 1-39) describes Zion as the city of God that will endure. All peoples of the world will come to Zion to learn the Law of the Lord. The future is an endless and boundless time in which the forces that take away life and peace are themselves done away with. It is the time when all life is fulfilled and accomplished on the Earth. Death has no sting in that future Earth filled with life. Is 25:6-10 describes the end of war, hunger and death. In their place there is a feast for all peoples, the end of disgrace, and death is swallowed up forever. This exalted vision is tied to the earth by a specific place (Mount Zion). This vision contrasts with the more abstract, ethereal and Greek understanding of life after death that is common today – of escaping the earth to a place out of time. This “heaven” is a static place of no movement. The world is left behind along with all of the things that makes time so oppressive.
Jeremiah ends with the destruction of Jerusalem. The Second book of Isaiah (from chapter 40) was also written at this time of absolute loss. A time without king, priest or other significant political or cultural leadership. In Is 42:1-4 a new figure is revealed – the “servant”. In Second Isaiah it is a person not a city who will put things right. He is described as gentle, hardly noticed. He respects the weak and is himself apparently weak. His teaching will go to the ends of the earth, the “coastlands,” and they are waiting for him. In the servant prophesies the peoples of the world do not come to the city, rather his teaching goes to them. Through this figure justice will come to the earth. The future is no longer something to be feared, but hoped for. And there is a sense that it does not have to be fought or strived for, but that it is going to happen inevitably. Just as with the earlier Isaiah visions of the future, this one is emptied of all that harms and destroys life.
The Old Testament opens up our sense of time. The prophets reject the concept of fate. They move away from the traditional cyclical experience of time and the focus on the times of sowing and harvest. While the seasons are good and beautiful they do not change the human situation. The Biblical story begins in a garden and ends in a city – the New Jerusalem. The city represents all that humans have brought to the world in the form of human culture. The future becomes a transformed human space here on earth where death and violence have no place.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Journey with Jesus #18
Here is the first of the November Bible Studies - the second will be posted shortly -Linda.
NT- Time to Come 11/12/09
There are two ways to look at time. The first way is traditional clock time. Here time is measured movement. Like the movement of sand through the hour glass. The second way is experienced time. For example, time has a different feel for children. Things take more time, and there is always something to look forward to. Time for children is very future oriented. There is an excitement about what is coming, or just arriving. Children don’t have much of a past. Adults construct their own past. It is made up of others’ past, their nation’s past. Part of being formed by a culture is to receive a past. Time is constructed for you by your own experiences and by your culture. A child hardly looks back – they are always looking forward.
Children’s sense of time is closer to the Christian sense of time. The Gospels are full of this future sense of time, and this Christian sense of time has also entered into our culture.
In Mt. 24 Jesus gives his apocalyptic discourse (also in Mk. 13 but it has been expanded by Matthew). In it Jesus teaches about what is coming. There is a powerful, urgent sense of the coming of the new. There have been various interpretations of this text.
In the 19th century a former priest in the Church of Ireland, John Nelson Darby, began to map out a detailed timetable of how the events and tribulations of these end times were going to occur. He promoted what is called “dispensationalism,” a teaching about distinct phases and eras in God’s dealing with humankind, including Darby’s special contribution of a “secret rapture” of the just, leaving the earth behind to tribulation and chaos. His views were promoted in the commentary and cross-references of the Scofield Bible, an enormously popular U.S. bible version through the early part of the 20th century. They thus entered the mainstream of evangelical thinking in the U.S. Darby’s beliefs have become widely accepted as theologically sound and because of them a mythic view of the end times became entrenched. They depict a violent future in which Christians are on the winning side. The basic timetable he described include the secret Second Coming or Rapture; seven years of Tribulation (when God violently defends Israel against, its enemies Gog and Magog – often depicted as the Arabs and Russians); the Thousand Year Reign on earth of Christ and his saints; Satan’s escape from the pit; the Final Battle and the End of the World.
When the present is intolerable and the gospel of compassion is not preached, those who feel abandoned by society and history gravitate to this kind of message. It offers a mathematical control of the future, providing self-vindication buttressed by a kind of fate. Something similar is present in Nostradamus, almanacs and horoscopes. The most current secular version is the Mayan 2012 prediction of the end of the world.
Classical church belief has been a kind of virtual millennialism—the reign of Christ on earth becomes a mystical abstract thing. There is a backing away from any expectation of a real transformation in history. The Church itself becomes the embodiment of Christ’s rule.
It is necessary to read the Matthew passage in a different way. The time of Christ is a newness that we are being pulled toward, both individually and collectively. How it will work out we don’t know, but there is no doubt the pull of the new provokes crisis and challenge.
Jesus uses symbolism to open us to the possibility of something new. He uses several images to symbolize the coming of the end times. The fig tree, the flood, kidnappings, a thief in the night, and slaves waiting for their master’s return. (Interestingly vv.40-41: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together, one will be taken and one left,” have been used as a reference to rapture by arbitrary connection to 1 Thessalonians 4:17. More traditionally they are linked in the sense of final judgment to the earlier v. 31 where the angels “gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” The nearest sense, however, derived from the image of sweeping away in the flood [v.39], suggests forceful abduction– it is the ones who are left behind who are the lucky ones! In line with this, previous gatherings in Matthew are of the wicked from the earth [13:30 & amp. 40-41—“collect the weeds first,” and the angels “will collect out of the kingdom all causes of sin.”] In other words the “one taken” can be read either positively or negatively, with a suspicion toward the latter. It is mythical to derive literal descriptions from selective verses, rather than a broad description of challenge and crisis.)
Jesus’ metaphors are either from nature or from catastrophic events. They represent both sides of the coming change – it is organic but also shocking and dramatic, totally new. Or, like the images Jesus uses for the kingdom of God, yeast and mustard seed, which are completely natural but bring about huge changes.
Mk 13:32 is the original version of the parable of the slave watching for his master’s return. This includes the classic statement in which Jesus makes it clear that no-one – not even the Son – knows the hour of the end times. (Seems like Darby knew more than Jesus!) The message here is to stay alert and to keep awake. Mt. 24:45-51 expands the theme (the need for watchfulness) to include punishment of the unfaithful slave. Matthew’s audience was the early Christian community, and perhaps reflects a warning to church leaders who have become domineering and exploitative. Matthew’s violent language stems from his desire for authentic Christian community.
Mt. 13:24-30 gives another parable of the end times – the parable of the tares and wheat. Here the harvest gives an image of the end of time – again organic but momentous. The servants offer to pull up the weeds that are growing alongside the wheat – but are told to wait. There is no way to distinguish between good and evil people because we are all interconnected. While theologians like Augustine say this is because you can’t tell at any historical moment who is one of the final elect, the point is rather that we are all so intertwined. Separation is impossible now and must come at the end. As time goes on the choices we make—between goodness and evil, between life and death—will become more and more evident. It will be clearer what we need to do. Those who choose nonviolence, forgiveness and peace will live. In the growing crisis the clarity of choice will grow. Thus these parables are pictures of choice not predictions of outcomes. What is valued and is of the kingdom will last, what is worthless will be lost. The emphasis is on the choice. Matthew’s explanation of the parable at v. 36 (likely an editorial addition and exposition) shifts the emphasis from our interconnectedness and our choice to the final sorting. You can already see happening the temptation toward prediction and pre-emptive division!
A New Testament passage that crystallizes the gospel sense of time and the breaking in of the future into the now is 1Cor. 7: 29. It describes not a physical destruction of the earth, but rather the passing away of the forms of the world as they have been up to now. Not the world passing a way but the present form of the world transforming! What Paul is saying is that what has seemed important and valuable in worldly terms – marriage, mourning, celebration, wealth and dealings with the world are no longer important. What is coming is the key thing.
In the light of all this the thousand year reign of Christ may be understood as the continued pull of Christ on the world, shifting it toward compassion, peace, forgiveness. It is a subversive reign but it is a reign all the same, because it is the root guiding force of all contemporary history. There is no guarantee that the world will submit, and so the outcome remains uncertain. But in the meantime the subversive reign is real and the thousand years is now. It is contemporary with present history, as indeed all the images of Revelation are, including the battle of the Word against the kings and armies of the earth. It is the same movie plot played out again and again! Christians today are called to live into the future-now of the new thing Christ has brought.
NT- Time to Come 11/12/09
There are two ways to look at time. The first way is traditional clock time. Here time is measured movement. Like the movement of sand through the hour glass. The second way is experienced time. For example, time has a different feel for children. Things take more time, and there is always something to look forward to. Time for children is very future oriented. There is an excitement about what is coming, or just arriving. Children don’t have much of a past. Adults construct their own past. It is made up of others’ past, their nation’s past. Part of being formed by a culture is to receive a past. Time is constructed for you by your own experiences and by your culture. A child hardly looks back – they are always looking forward.
Children’s sense of time is closer to the Christian sense of time. The Gospels are full of this future sense of time, and this Christian sense of time has also entered into our culture.
In Mt. 24 Jesus gives his apocalyptic discourse (also in Mk. 13 but it has been expanded by Matthew). In it Jesus teaches about what is coming. There is a powerful, urgent sense of the coming of the new. There have been various interpretations of this text.
In the 19th century a former priest in the Church of Ireland, John Nelson Darby, began to map out a detailed timetable of how the events and tribulations of these end times were going to occur. He promoted what is called “dispensationalism,” a teaching about distinct phases and eras in God’s dealing with humankind, including Darby’s special contribution of a “secret rapture” of the just, leaving the earth behind to tribulation and chaos. His views were promoted in the commentary and cross-references of the Scofield Bible, an enormously popular U.S. bible version through the early part of the 20th century. They thus entered the mainstream of evangelical thinking in the U.S. Darby’s beliefs have become widely accepted as theologically sound and because of them a mythic view of the end times became entrenched. They depict a violent future in which Christians are on the winning side. The basic timetable he described include the secret Second Coming or Rapture; seven years of Tribulation (when God violently defends Israel against, its enemies Gog and Magog – often depicted as the Arabs and Russians); the Thousand Year Reign on earth of Christ and his saints; Satan’s escape from the pit; the Final Battle and the End of the World.
When the present is intolerable and the gospel of compassion is not preached, those who feel abandoned by society and history gravitate to this kind of message. It offers a mathematical control of the future, providing self-vindication buttressed by a kind of fate. Something similar is present in Nostradamus, almanacs and horoscopes. The most current secular version is the Mayan 2012 prediction of the end of the world.
Classical church belief has been a kind of virtual millennialism—the reign of Christ on earth becomes a mystical abstract thing. There is a backing away from any expectation of a real transformation in history. The Church itself becomes the embodiment of Christ’s rule.
It is necessary to read the Matthew passage in a different way. The time of Christ is a newness that we are being pulled toward, both individually and collectively. How it will work out we don’t know, but there is no doubt the pull of the new provokes crisis and challenge.
Jesus uses symbolism to open us to the possibility of something new. He uses several images to symbolize the coming of the end times. The fig tree, the flood, kidnappings, a thief in the night, and slaves waiting for their master’s return. (Interestingly vv.40-41: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together, one will be taken and one left,” have been used as a reference to rapture by arbitrary connection to 1 Thessalonians 4:17. More traditionally they are linked in the sense of final judgment to the earlier v. 31 where the angels “gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” The nearest sense, however, derived from the image of sweeping away in the flood [v.39], suggests forceful abduction– it is the ones who are left behind who are the lucky ones! In line with this, previous gatherings in Matthew are of the wicked from the earth [13:30 & amp. 40-41—“collect the weeds first,” and the angels “will collect out of the kingdom all causes of sin.”] In other words the “one taken” can be read either positively or negatively, with a suspicion toward the latter. It is mythical to derive literal descriptions from selective verses, rather than a broad description of challenge and crisis.)
Jesus’ metaphors are either from nature or from catastrophic events. They represent both sides of the coming change – it is organic but also shocking and dramatic, totally new. Or, like the images Jesus uses for the kingdom of God, yeast and mustard seed, which are completely natural but bring about huge changes.
Mk 13:32 is the original version of the parable of the slave watching for his master’s return. This includes the classic statement in which Jesus makes it clear that no-one – not even the Son – knows the hour of the end times. (Seems like Darby knew more than Jesus!) The message here is to stay alert and to keep awake. Mt. 24:45-51 expands the theme (the need for watchfulness) to include punishment of the unfaithful slave. Matthew’s audience was the early Christian community, and perhaps reflects a warning to church leaders who have become domineering and exploitative. Matthew’s violent language stems from his desire for authentic Christian community.
Mt. 13:24-30 gives another parable of the end times – the parable of the tares and wheat. Here the harvest gives an image of the end of time – again organic but momentous. The servants offer to pull up the weeds that are growing alongside the wheat – but are told to wait. There is no way to distinguish between good and evil people because we are all interconnected. While theologians like Augustine say this is because you can’t tell at any historical moment who is one of the final elect, the point is rather that we are all so intertwined. Separation is impossible now and must come at the end. As time goes on the choices we make—between goodness and evil, between life and death—will become more and more evident. It will be clearer what we need to do. Those who choose nonviolence, forgiveness and peace will live. In the growing crisis the clarity of choice will grow. Thus these parables are pictures of choice not predictions of outcomes. What is valued and is of the kingdom will last, what is worthless will be lost. The emphasis is on the choice. Matthew’s explanation of the parable at v. 36 (likely an editorial addition and exposition) shifts the emphasis from our interconnectedness and our choice to the final sorting. You can already see happening the temptation toward prediction and pre-emptive division!
A New Testament passage that crystallizes the gospel sense of time and the breaking in of the future into the now is 1Cor. 7: 29. It describes not a physical destruction of the earth, but rather the passing away of the forms of the world as they have been up to now. Not the world passing a way but the present form of the world transforming! What Paul is saying is that what has seemed important and valuable in worldly terms – marriage, mourning, celebration, wealth and dealings with the world are no longer important. What is coming is the key thing.
In the light of all this the thousand year reign of Christ may be understood as the continued pull of Christ on the world, shifting it toward compassion, peace, forgiveness. It is a subversive reign but it is a reign all the same, because it is the root guiding force of all contemporary history. There is no guarantee that the world will submit, and so the outcome remains uncertain. But in the meantime the subversive reign is real and the thousand years is now. It is contemporary with present history, as indeed all the images of Revelation are, including the battle of the Word against the kings and armies of the earth. It is the same movie plot played out again and again! Christians today are called to live into the future-now of the new thing Christ has brought.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Christianity As Pollution
I labor under a couple of disabilities, but I have compensating advantages! I mean this in respect of relating to churches and what you might call formal Christianity.
I was formed in the R.C. tradition where models of passionate relationship to God and the human are held up for emulation. They are often called saints, but the approach extends to imagery and art, that kind of thing. There was an undercurrent of sensate love celebrated and I do miss that, that intimate chapel feeling of being close to the divine. Or all those wonderful El Greco faces and their freaky flesh stretched out in ecstasy!
But who am I kidding? Those models are the ones that got past the censor, the ones that accepted the bargain of a huge world-historical organization where passion is only good when kept within the box. The Roman Catholic church is pure Plato’s Republic, a city ruled by philosopher kings with twenty-twenty vision of the eternal forms communicating their laws to all the lesser, clay-bound creatures under them. Augustine’s City of God practically said it in the title, but Augustine was also up to something else.
Augustine knew that there was no way you could perfectly identify the church with the heavenly city as opposed to the earthly one, and neither would you want to. First, God’s choice for salvation was insuperable and you could never tell who might actually be in the church but would not finally make the cut. But also—and this is a matter of opinion on my part, I have no real chapter and verse—I think Augustine secretly reckoned on some worldly types in the church’s ranks in order to bring it hard-nosed realpolitik in its long march through time. And whether I’m right or wrong, you do get the picture. Those Renaissance popes (and later too) certainly behaved as if salvation was secondary to worldly success.
Meanwhile, back with Augustine, the hordes of people then pouring into the church from the Roman Empire were told there was one sure thing—you may not be absolutely certain of final grace inside the church, but outside you are definitely damned. This was the message that got through: the church is the ark of salvation run by its captain priests; all those not aboard are going down. Hence, in that framework, a certain disability for me.
But then along came Luther. He fixed everyone a life-raft. Threw them out on the raging sea like there was no tomorrow. Everyone became the captain of his or her soul and they set sail for Paradise like an immense flotilla of migrating jellyfish. That really did a number on the Roman church’s pretensions, but in the process it also did a number on the solidarity of folk. They were no longer in the big boat together, very much the contrary. The whole thing of sensate love, of something happening in the human order that changed the human order, well this got definitively displaced to the individual and his/her happy hereafter. Hence, another disability.
For, as I say, Catholicism always had this undertow of real stuff in a real world—of the Word made flesh-- but to break the grip of the corporate guys who managed it all Luther individualized it precisely and exclusively to the soul. Gone was the solidarity of the flesh. Each individual instead had this other-worldly thing inside them communicated to directly by this other-worldly God, and bam! we’re all basically out of here. Now I don’t know if in some sense I’m still a Catholic but this individualism is completely foreign to me. And so if I find it hard to communicate with a lot of Catholics because of rejecting their church’s Platonic organization, I find it perhaps twice as difficult to communicate with a lot of Protestants who go even beyond Plato, reducing the human city to the dimensions of a single soul.
“Shoot,” I hear you say, “this guy has so many disabilities I wonder why he bothers.” Well, hold on, there are also the compensating factors I mentioned. These factors are in fact so strong that I think there is a complete renewal of Christianity under way, one which makes both Catholicism and Protestantism perhaps little more than bumps on a road of Christian history rather than the end of the road itself.
It’s to do with that sensate love I was talking about. My feeling that God’s love affects the real human world is not restricted to devotional images or works of art. And really it couldn’t be. If the gentle Spirit of self-giving love has touched human beings, and over the course of two millennia, then it has to leave traces in all sorts of ways. One of the happiest times in my life was spent in a town called Spello. I lived in a small community of manual work and prayer among the vine-and-olive hills of Umbria. The place seemed flooded, saturated with prayer. That special Italian light melded together with stories of St. Francis and produced a contemplative constant. But for me the light reached out beyond the silver hills. It said indeed we inherit the earth. It meant a whole different world, a world at peace, and in love.
Christianity is a pollution of light in the world, like Los Angeles from the air, where there is this bronzy pink haze over everything. That’s pollution, but it’s also a strange captivating light. Let me give you an example. A relative of one of the victims of the so-named “Beltway Sniper” said recently he had to forgive the perpetrator both because the bible taught him to do so, and because, related to this (his words), if he didn’t forgive him hate would eat him up from the inside. I’m not sure if he expressly intended this but I think his sense was that the Gospel can actually (paradoxically) make hate worse so long as there is not forgiveness. So long as the message of Christ is broadcast in culture there is something saying there is possible forgiveness for all sorts of killers and offenders, and our anger and hatred, if maintained, are prolonged. In a Christian-infected culture we are unable to consign these people to ultimate final darkness. Christ has entered the time of the earth, that is our time, and forbidden killing, and has done so in the very depths of our imagination. So, short of a complete surrender to the time of forgiveness, human culture can only experience a thicker and thicker haze of anger and hatred which at the same time continues to show strange mesmerizing tints of a beautiful light. That light is an earth at peace.
It is far too easy to dismiss these effects cynically, as too little to make a real difference or simply willed to show God’s judgment in an absolute metaphysical fashion but not to change anything. Either response—scandal before the Gospel’s weakness or turning it into some horribly inverted legal condemnation—flies in the face of love itself, of light itself. Love hopes all things, believes all things. And light which gives itself with boundless generosity, squandering itself on all things without discrimination, cannot change its nature. It can only be light. In contrast it’s only we who can change, from killing to peace, from darkness to light, and we in our time are constantly pressed to do so.
So, you see, the compensations way outweigh the disabilities! Who would want to go back to a Christianity of either Catholic or Protestant Platonism when we can have one of loving pollution transforming the human earth itself?
Tony
I was formed in the R.C. tradition where models of passionate relationship to God and the human are held up for emulation. They are often called saints, but the approach extends to imagery and art, that kind of thing. There was an undercurrent of sensate love celebrated and I do miss that, that intimate chapel feeling of being close to the divine. Or all those wonderful El Greco faces and their freaky flesh stretched out in ecstasy!
But who am I kidding? Those models are the ones that got past the censor, the ones that accepted the bargain of a huge world-historical organization where passion is only good when kept within the box. The Roman Catholic church is pure Plato’s Republic, a city ruled by philosopher kings with twenty-twenty vision of the eternal forms communicating their laws to all the lesser, clay-bound creatures under them. Augustine’s City of God practically said it in the title, but Augustine was also up to something else.
Augustine knew that there was no way you could perfectly identify the church with the heavenly city as opposed to the earthly one, and neither would you want to. First, God’s choice for salvation was insuperable and you could never tell who might actually be in the church but would not finally make the cut. But also—and this is a matter of opinion on my part, I have no real chapter and verse—I think Augustine secretly reckoned on some worldly types in the church’s ranks in order to bring it hard-nosed realpolitik in its long march through time. And whether I’m right or wrong, you do get the picture. Those Renaissance popes (and later too) certainly behaved as if salvation was secondary to worldly success.
Meanwhile, back with Augustine, the hordes of people then pouring into the church from the Roman Empire were told there was one sure thing—you may not be absolutely certain of final grace inside the church, but outside you are definitely damned. This was the message that got through: the church is the ark of salvation run by its captain priests; all those not aboard are going down. Hence, in that framework, a certain disability for me.
But then along came Luther. He fixed everyone a life-raft. Threw them out on the raging sea like there was no tomorrow. Everyone became the captain of his or her soul and they set sail for Paradise like an immense flotilla of migrating jellyfish. That really did a number on the Roman church’s pretensions, but in the process it also did a number on the solidarity of folk. They were no longer in the big boat together, very much the contrary. The whole thing of sensate love, of something happening in the human order that changed the human order, well this got definitively displaced to the individual and his/her happy hereafter. Hence, another disability.
For, as I say, Catholicism always had this undertow of real stuff in a real world—of the Word made flesh-- but to break the grip of the corporate guys who managed it all Luther individualized it precisely and exclusively to the soul. Gone was the solidarity of the flesh. Each individual instead had this other-worldly thing inside them communicated to directly by this other-worldly God, and bam! we’re all basically out of here. Now I don’t know if in some sense I’m still a Catholic but this individualism is completely foreign to me. And so if I find it hard to communicate with a lot of Catholics because of rejecting their church’s Platonic organization, I find it perhaps twice as difficult to communicate with a lot of Protestants who go even beyond Plato, reducing the human city to the dimensions of a single soul.
“Shoot,” I hear you say, “this guy has so many disabilities I wonder why he bothers.” Well, hold on, there are also the compensating factors I mentioned. These factors are in fact so strong that I think there is a complete renewal of Christianity under way, one which makes both Catholicism and Protestantism perhaps little more than bumps on a road of Christian history rather than the end of the road itself.
It’s to do with that sensate love I was talking about. My feeling that God’s love affects the real human world is not restricted to devotional images or works of art. And really it couldn’t be. If the gentle Spirit of self-giving love has touched human beings, and over the course of two millennia, then it has to leave traces in all sorts of ways. One of the happiest times in my life was spent in a town called Spello. I lived in a small community of manual work and prayer among the vine-and-olive hills of Umbria. The place seemed flooded, saturated with prayer. That special Italian light melded together with stories of St. Francis and produced a contemplative constant. But for me the light reached out beyond the silver hills. It said indeed we inherit the earth. It meant a whole different world, a world at peace, and in love.
Christianity is a pollution of light in the world, like Los Angeles from the air, where there is this bronzy pink haze over everything. That’s pollution, but it’s also a strange captivating light. Let me give you an example. A relative of one of the victims of the so-named “Beltway Sniper” said recently he had to forgive the perpetrator both because the bible taught him to do so, and because, related to this (his words), if he didn’t forgive him hate would eat him up from the inside. I’m not sure if he expressly intended this but I think his sense was that the Gospel can actually (paradoxically) make hate worse so long as there is not forgiveness. So long as the message of Christ is broadcast in culture there is something saying there is possible forgiveness for all sorts of killers and offenders, and our anger and hatred, if maintained, are prolonged. In a Christian-infected culture we are unable to consign these people to ultimate final darkness. Christ has entered the time of the earth, that is our time, and forbidden killing, and has done so in the very depths of our imagination. So, short of a complete surrender to the time of forgiveness, human culture can only experience a thicker and thicker haze of anger and hatred which at the same time continues to show strange mesmerizing tints of a beautiful light. That light is an earth at peace.
It is far too easy to dismiss these effects cynically, as too little to make a real difference or simply willed to show God’s judgment in an absolute metaphysical fashion but not to change anything. Either response—scandal before the Gospel’s weakness or turning it into some horribly inverted legal condemnation—flies in the face of love itself, of light itself. Love hopes all things, believes all things. And light which gives itself with boundless generosity, squandering itself on all things without discrimination, cannot change its nature. It can only be light. In contrast it’s only we who can change, from killing to peace, from darkness to light, and we in our time are constantly pressed to do so.
So, you see, the compensations way outweigh the disabilities! Who would want to go back to a Christianity of either Catholic or Protestant Platonism when we can have one of loving pollution transforming the human earth itself?
Tony
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Capitalism, Not The Whole Story
I just saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism, A Love Story. Weird, this movie is supposed to be about money and all that evil stuff (which it is), but I don’t think I’ve seen such a Jesus-centered film since The Passion of the Christ.
It’s a very personal film, perhaps Moore’s most personal. He has his father in it, an old guy in Flint, Michigan, pointing out where the factory used to be where he worked almost all his life but now raised to the ground. Michael clearly loves and respects his Dad. It also has a short grainy film from Michael’s first communion and the revelation that at one time, as a little boy, he wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest because of the priests he saw committing their lives to the poor. But underneath it all, underneath Moore’s shambling sweet-comic persona, there is a barely concealed, simmering anger.
He’s angry because of destruction of unions, because of banking deregulation, because so many people lost their homes and land, because of Wall Street dealing in “exotic instruments” and needing a massive bail-out from taxpayers (I understand “exotic” like this: you’re running a horse in a race that you’re sure is going to lose [because it’s actually people buying houses they can’t afford] and at the same time you’re taking bets in the form of huge I.O.U’s with a small but significant upfront payment against the time when the horse will actually lose and meanwhile you’re delaying the race and every week the horse doesn’t lose you’re paying out partial winnings and everybody’s happy because people keep placing the bets and there’s an astronomical amount of fictitious money pumped into the system until finally the horse collapses in plain sight and everybody’s asking where’s my money and of course there is none, and if that makes no sense then go see the film for the ridiculously funny bits when Moore gets a finance professional and a professor to try explain “derivatives” and they both get lost in the first sentence. It’s not meant to be understood.)
Michael is angry, and he’s also frustrated because he can’t figure out why the rest of us are not just as angry as he is, why in fact we’re not in a state of open revolt. He would like us to be but we’re not.
Now poor Michael, he’s is in a terrible bind. He knows the only way he can make his point and try to rouse us to action is by entertaining us, by making us laugh. He has to be funny, clownish, non-threatening in order in the process to inform us, provoke us, get us ultimately to threaten the massively vested interests that have got us in this mess. But how can that work? He runs the risk of being just about as subversive as Mary Tyler Moore. To make his point he has to be part of an entertainment industry whose business it is precisely to keep us with glazed eyes only half-aware of what really is happening to us and just too couch-comfortable to do anything. If Eisenhower back in 1961 warned of a military-industrial complex I think more likely he’d name it today as a military-financial-entertainment complex.
So where does that leave Michael Moore the filmmaker. What can he possibly show us to make a difference? Because that’s the thing about filmmaking, it’s about showing stuff, not primarily about abstract thought or ideas. It works at the level of the visual, of visual signs and the immediate impact they have. And what Moore shows us, unmistakably, out of the crisis of communication that grips him, is Jesus. The figure of Jesus runs through Capitalism, A Love Story like Best Supporting Actor, second only to Moore himself. He turns up in the priests and bishops Moore keeps interviewing, in hilarious clips from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with mashup voiceover in ripe Robert Powell tones (“I’m sorry I can’t heal you, it’s a pre-existing condition"), in an image of the Crucified strung up over the big banks, and finally in the stirring Woodie Guthrie song heard while credits roll, “They laid Jesus Christ in his grave.”
This is not liberation theology, telling us that Jesus is on the side of the poor. Sure, it is that on one level, but what difference is the theological idea going to make when we can’t even connect with the notion of $700 billion (and counting) being fleeced from the nation’s collective pockets? What is much more potent, and the only hope, is the abyssal truth of Jesus, crucified at the heart of the world system and slowly but surely subverting it with the earthquake of the innocent yet forgiving victim. You see what I mean? I mean it’s not about a political change founded in distributive justice and the struggle for such justice. It’s already too late for that. We’re like lobsters in a pot, cooked alive with lies and the violence of lies. But Jesus is faithful to the truth at a level deeper than any lie, and it is that faithfulness which calls us at this moment in time. He calls us to be faithful at this radical level, as individuals, as groups, as small communities, finding ways to live justly through love and forgiveness with each other. We do so in the knowledge that the world system is terminal and cannot be salvaged without a change that goes way beyond what any politician today can imagine or propose. It can only be helped at the level of the Crucified, the one who reveals all violence while offering it all forgiveness, and that means effectively, in the actual surrender of violence by humans. (For-giveness only really happens when the perpetrator gives in reciprocally to the giving of forgiveness.)
That is what Moore as artist and filmmaker understood and showed. And I take my hat off to him. Really there has always been capitalism, plutocracy etc. But the protest against it is a biblical thought—“let there be no poor among you.” What Jesus is doing goes deeper still. He says “Blessed are the poor,” meaning the absolute change in the world order has already occurred. Those who follow Jesus live that way, in an absolutely new way. For them the transformation has already happened, no matter what Fox News or Wall St. does. And by making Jesus Best Supporting Actor in his movie Moore really said that, even though he perhaps didn’t realize it. I am glad he didn’t get ordained. I don’t think the robes would suit him. But I’m sure glad he’s a filmmaker-priest, holding up the image of Christ deep in the world’s abyss.
It’s a very personal film, perhaps Moore’s most personal. He has his father in it, an old guy in Flint, Michigan, pointing out where the factory used to be where he worked almost all his life but now raised to the ground. Michael clearly loves and respects his Dad. It also has a short grainy film from Michael’s first communion and the revelation that at one time, as a little boy, he wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest because of the priests he saw committing their lives to the poor. But underneath it all, underneath Moore’s shambling sweet-comic persona, there is a barely concealed, simmering anger.
He’s angry because of destruction of unions, because of banking deregulation, because so many people lost their homes and land, because of Wall Street dealing in “exotic instruments” and needing a massive bail-out from taxpayers (I understand “exotic” like this: you’re running a horse in a race that you’re sure is going to lose [because it’s actually people buying houses they can’t afford] and at the same time you’re taking bets in the form of huge I.O.U’s with a small but significant upfront payment against the time when the horse will actually lose and meanwhile you’re delaying the race and every week the horse doesn’t lose you’re paying out partial winnings and everybody’s happy because people keep placing the bets and there’s an astronomical amount of fictitious money pumped into the system until finally the horse collapses in plain sight and everybody’s asking where’s my money and of course there is none, and if that makes no sense then go see the film for the ridiculously funny bits when Moore gets a finance professional and a professor to try explain “derivatives” and they both get lost in the first sentence. It’s not meant to be understood.)
Michael is angry, and he’s also frustrated because he can’t figure out why the rest of us are not just as angry as he is, why in fact we’re not in a state of open revolt. He would like us to be but we’re not.
Now poor Michael, he’s is in a terrible bind. He knows the only way he can make his point and try to rouse us to action is by entertaining us, by making us laugh. He has to be funny, clownish, non-threatening in order in the process to inform us, provoke us, get us ultimately to threaten the massively vested interests that have got us in this mess. But how can that work? He runs the risk of being just about as subversive as Mary Tyler Moore. To make his point he has to be part of an entertainment industry whose business it is precisely to keep us with glazed eyes only half-aware of what really is happening to us and just too couch-comfortable to do anything. If Eisenhower back in 1961 warned of a military-industrial complex I think more likely he’d name it today as a military-financial-entertainment complex.
So where does that leave Michael Moore the filmmaker. What can he possibly show us to make a difference? Because that’s the thing about filmmaking, it’s about showing stuff, not primarily about abstract thought or ideas. It works at the level of the visual, of visual signs and the immediate impact they have. And what Moore shows us, unmistakably, out of the crisis of communication that grips him, is Jesus. The figure of Jesus runs through Capitalism, A Love Story like Best Supporting Actor, second only to Moore himself. He turns up in the priests and bishops Moore keeps interviewing, in hilarious clips from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with mashup voiceover in ripe Robert Powell tones (“I’m sorry I can’t heal you, it’s a pre-existing condition"), in an image of the Crucified strung up over the big banks, and finally in the stirring Woodie Guthrie song heard while credits roll, “They laid Jesus Christ in his grave.”
This is not liberation theology, telling us that Jesus is on the side of the poor. Sure, it is that on one level, but what difference is the theological idea going to make when we can’t even connect with the notion of $700 billion (and counting) being fleeced from the nation’s collective pockets? What is much more potent, and the only hope, is the abyssal truth of Jesus, crucified at the heart of the world system and slowly but surely subverting it with the earthquake of the innocent yet forgiving victim. You see what I mean? I mean it’s not about a political change founded in distributive justice and the struggle for such justice. It’s already too late for that. We’re like lobsters in a pot, cooked alive with lies and the violence of lies. But Jesus is faithful to the truth at a level deeper than any lie, and it is that faithfulness which calls us at this moment in time. He calls us to be faithful at this radical level, as individuals, as groups, as small communities, finding ways to live justly through love and forgiveness with each other. We do so in the knowledge that the world system is terminal and cannot be salvaged without a change that goes way beyond what any politician today can imagine or propose. It can only be helped at the level of the Crucified, the one who reveals all violence while offering it all forgiveness, and that means effectively, in the actual surrender of violence by humans. (For-giveness only really happens when the perpetrator gives in reciprocally to the giving of forgiveness.)
That is what Moore as artist and filmmaker understood and showed. And I take my hat off to him. Really there has always been capitalism, plutocracy etc. But the protest against it is a biblical thought—“let there be no poor among you.” What Jesus is doing goes deeper still. He says “Blessed are the poor,” meaning the absolute change in the world order has already occurred. Those who follow Jesus live that way, in an absolutely new way. For them the transformation has already happened, no matter what Fox News or Wall St. does. And by making Jesus Best Supporting Actor in his movie Moore really said that, even though he perhaps didn’t realize it. I am glad he didn’t get ordained. I don’t think the robes would suit him. But I’m sure glad he’s a filmmaker-priest, holding up the image of Christ deep in the world’s abyss.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Shaking Pivots! (or making space for the space God has made)
My friend, Jerry from Liverpool wrote saying he liked the blog “Falling Pregnant” but didn’t get the last paragraphs about “making space for God.” So I tehought I’d follow-up.
The way I take here might not first seem to the point, but stay on it and it should get there. So here goes.
The world makes perfect sense. It’s just that our ways of understanding it don’t!
Take the Big Bang. It’s not so much that there is this galactic elephant in the room—the question, what caused the Big Bang in the first place: and although I understand that in a scientific and philosophical method sense you just can’t ask this question that doesn’t stop it coming to mind as an ultimate horizon. But aside from that, the whole explosive device and expansion thing seems absurdly one-sided. It’s like what a little boy would imagine, a huge bang and that’s it! There has to be an equal backward flux or return movement for the whole thing to hold together. Only currents and circles and cycles make full sense. And maybe that’s what they’re calling “Dark Matter” is but as yet I’ve not heard it expressed or developed in this way. And if it were it would change our cosmology enormously, and with that our anthropology. Because the way we imagine the universe—and this is a key point—is the way we imagine ourselves. If it’s a mind-numbingly huge explosion we will probably think about our life with ultimate violence as its ultimate sense. If it’s some sort of cycle of surrender and return, then we will perhaps gauge our behavior as gift and love.
Anyway, you see what I mean? From a “making sense” perspective many explanations don’t really make sense. It’s only when you take the human into account—holistically—that you approach a true, full account. Both the universe and the human have to go together. And it’s not a matter of cherry-picking the evidence and forcing the data, because we do that all the time unconsciously anyway. (Einstein said something along these lines: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”) We see according to the way we are, and we are according to how we are structured. It’s a creative enterprise and the point is to find a truly life-giving explanation of the universe and humanity all in one, in order that humanity might live. From a biblical point of view you could say that the whole biblical enterprise—the bible itself—is a story told over and over, reimagining the beginning, both in theory and practice, and thus seeking the right ending—one of boundless life.
Today it’s most of all the field of anthropology that underpins the intuition of the profound interconnectedness of our intellectual universe and the way we are as human beings. Our thinking is rooted in how we are set up relationally and structurally. According to Rene Girard it is violence that holds the key to how we are originally structured, and our intellectual universe is based on the world-shaping power of foundational murder at the dawn of culture. Human thinking begins in mythology and ritual, brim full of violence, and science for all its “objectivity,” has not escaped the trauma of its birth.
According to Rene Girard it has been the bible which has provided a progressive revelation of the violent founding mechanisms of humanity. He doesn’t put equal stress on the equivalent revelation of new human mechanisms, of justice, forgiveness and love, but I think this logically has to be the case. Really you can’t have the former without the latter, even if, understandably, the former appears more evident: violence is always more noisily apparent than peace. Part of the problem is that because the biblical pathway has deeply affected human culture the old mechanisms are critically weakened, while people hesitate to turn to the new ones. The result seems more and more chaotic and dangerous. One passage from the bible has been going through my head recently and it seems to sum all this up : “The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called….” The line is from Isaiah’s magnificent vision of the Lord in the temple with the seraphs in attendance and it is their voices calling “holy, holy, holy” which have this thunderous impact (6:1-4). The image communicates the power of what was happening: it is enough to make the temple itself shake, including the hinges on its doors. To my mind, the shaking of the pivots is the trembling of the very system of differentiation whereby we can hinge back and forth smoothly from the world of the archaic sacred—read “mystified violence”—to the world of the ordinary or profane. Let me explain further.
This division of the sacred and profane is commonplace to scholars of religion and culture. But adding in the Girardian piece tells us that it’s really violence that is being negotiated, not some mysterious transcendence. When violence is in the temple it is controlled and directed—used up in sacrifice or directed outward to the enemies of God or the tribe, and so it generally keeps the area of the profane (the broader territory around the temple) free of violence. Thus the world is divided up in an orderly fashion between ritually controlled sacrificial violence and the world at peace around the temple precincts. But now here’s the kicker: the biblical God does not allow this division. This God breaks out in awe-inspiring love to re-found the world, not on violence but forgiveness and love. And so the pivots on the temple doorposts shake!
So now, we can bring all this together and provide an answer to our initial question. If (1) space itself, that is the whole physical (and metaphysical) area around us, used to be controlled by the effects of violence concentrated in a sacred place making the rest of the area relatively safe the rest of the time, and (2) the biblical tradition broadcast in culture has served progressively to break this down, then the meaning of space itself has changed. The change is twofold, each compellingly powerful: on the one hand there is no longer the traditional ordering of the universe (and there are a lot of names for this tectonic change, from freedom, competition, consumerism, to anomie, alienation, anxiety, to lawyers, gun rights, and war on terror), and, on the other, there is also the spontaneous hidden growth of spaces of compassion, forgiveness, peace and love. In other words this anarchy is at the same time the hidden growth of the kingdom because the kingdom is in fact its root cause, the breaking out of awe-inspiring love! I emphasize hidden because it cannot be delimited by the old boundaries and system of boundaries. And so it stays hidden to ordinary bilateral sight! Many people don’t recognize it, don’t think it’s there. But as they say, you will know it when you see it!
Thus, finally, the business of Christians is to seek consciously and actively to act on and create these spaces by lives of love and simple service. Being demarcated by belonging to a temple or church doesn’t really cut it anymore. And that’s what I meant by “making space for God.” By members of Wood Hath Hope sharing a food budget, cooking and some actual meals we are attempting to act on the emergence of new humanity inspired by a God of love. But doing these things does not of itself make the new humanity—to say that would simply create a new temple. It is simply a response in faith both to what only God can accomplish, but also to what God is in fact accomplishing! Making space for God is making space for the space that God has made!
Tony
The way I take here might not first seem to the point, but stay on it and it should get there. So here goes.
The world makes perfect sense. It’s just that our ways of understanding it don’t!
Take the Big Bang. It’s not so much that there is this galactic elephant in the room—the question, what caused the Big Bang in the first place: and although I understand that in a scientific and philosophical method sense you just can’t ask this question that doesn’t stop it coming to mind as an ultimate horizon. But aside from that, the whole explosive device and expansion thing seems absurdly one-sided. It’s like what a little boy would imagine, a huge bang and that’s it! There has to be an equal backward flux or return movement for the whole thing to hold together. Only currents and circles and cycles make full sense. And maybe that’s what they’re calling “Dark Matter” is but as yet I’ve not heard it expressed or developed in this way. And if it were it would change our cosmology enormously, and with that our anthropology. Because the way we imagine the universe—and this is a key point—is the way we imagine ourselves. If it’s a mind-numbingly huge explosion we will probably think about our life with ultimate violence as its ultimate sense. If it’s some sort of cycle of surrender and return, then we will perhaps gauge our behavior as gift and love.
Anyway, you see what I mean? From a “making sense” perspective many explanations don’t really make sense. It’s only when you take the human into account—holistically—that you approach a true, full account. Both the universe and the human have to go together. And it’s not a matter of cherry-picking the evidence and forcing the data, because we do that all the time unconsciously anyway. (Einstein said something along these lines: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”) We see according to the way we are, and we are according to how we are structured. It’s a creative enterprise and the point is to find a truly life-giving explanation of the universe and humanity all in one, in order that humanity might live. From a biblical point of view you could say that the whole biblical enterprise—the bible itself—is a story told over and over, reimagining the beginning, both in theory and practice, and thus seeking the right ending—one of boundless life.
Today it’s most of all the field of anthropology that underpins the intuition of the profound interconnectedness of our intellectual universe and the way we are as human beings. Our thinking is rooted in how we are set up relationally and structurally. According to Rene Girard it is violence that holds the key to how we are originally structured, and our intellectual universe is based on the world-shaping power of foundational murder at the dawn of culture. Human thinking begins in mythology and ritual, brim full of violence, and science for all its “objectivity,” has not escaped the trauma of its birth.
According to Rene Girard it has been the bible which has provided a progressive revelation of the violent founding mechanisms of humanity. He doesn’t put equal stress on the equivalent revelation of new human mechanisms, of justice, forgiveness and love, but I think this logically has to be the case. Really you can’t have the former without the latter, even if, understandably, the former appears more evident: violence is always more noisily apparent than peace. Part of the problem is that because the biblical pathway has deeply affected human culture the old mechanisms are critically weakened, while people hesitate to turn to the new ones. The result seems more and more chaotic and dangerous. One passage from the bible has been going through my head recently and it seems to sum all this up : “The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called….” The line is from Isaiah’s magnificent vision of the Lord in the temple with the seraphs in attendance and it is their voices calling “holy, holy, holy” which have this thunderous impact (6:1-4). The image communicates the power of what was happening: it is enough to make the temple itself shake, including the hinges on its doors. To my mind, the shaking of the pivots is the trembling of the very system of differentiation whereby we can hinge back and forth smoothly from the world of the archaic sacred—read “mystified violence”—to the world of the ordinary or profane. Let me explain further.
This division of the sacred and profane is commonplace to scholars of religion and culture. But adding in the Girardian piece tells us that it’s really violence that is being negotiated, not some mysterious transcendence. When violence is in the temple it is controlled and directed—used up in sacrifice or directed outward to the enemies of God or the tribe, and so it generally keeps the area of the profane (the broader territory around the temple) free of violence. Thus the world is divided up in an orderly fashion between ritually controlled sacrificial violence and the world at peace around the temple precincts. But now here’s the kicker: the biblical God does not allow this division. This God breaks out in awe-inspiring love to re-found the world, not on violence but forgiveness and love. And so the pivots on the temple doorposts shake!
So now, we can bring all this together and provide an answer to our initial question. If (1) space itself, that is the whole physical (and metaphysical) area around us, used to be controlled by the effects of violence concentrated in a sacred place making the rest of the area relatively safe the rest of the time, and (2) the biblical tradition broadcast in culture has served progressively to break this down, then the meaning of space itself has changed. The change is twofold, each compellingly powerful: on the one hand there is no longer the traditional ordering of the universe (and there are a lot of names for this tectonic change, from freedom, competition, consumerism, to anomie, alienation, anxiety, to lawyers, gun rights, and war on terror), and, on the other, there is also the spontaneous hidden growth of spaces of compassion, forgiveness, peace and love. In other words this anarchy is at the same time the hidden growth of the kingdom because the kingdom is in fact its root cause, the breaking out of awe-inspiring love! I emphasize hidden because it cannot be delimited by the old boundaries and system of boundaries. And so it stays hidden to ordinary bilateral sight! Many people don’t recognize it, don’t think it’s there. But as they say, you will know it when you see it!
Thus, finally, the business of Christians is to seek consciously and actively to act on and create these spaces by lives of love and simple service. Being demarcated by belonging to a temple or church doesn’t really cut it anymore. And that’s what I meant by “making space for God.” By members of Wood Hath Hope sharing a food budget, cooking and some actual meals we are attempting to act on the emergence of new humanity inspired by a God of love. But doing these things does not of itself make the new humanity—to say that would simply create a new temple. It is simply a response in faith both to what only God can accomplish, but also to what God is in fact accomplishing! Making space for God is making space for the space that God has made!
Tony
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