disclosing new worlds

Monday, 14 November 2005

Pentecost 27

Ezekiel 34: 11-16, 20-24 NRSV text
Ephesians 1: 15-23         NRSV text
Matthew 25: 31-46          NRSV text

Sunday is the feast of Christ the King, and the parable of the sheep and the goats is a fitting climax to the block of teaching, begun all those weeks ago now when Jesus entered the temple and was asked by the chief priests and elders of the people, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you the authority?” (21:23). Matthew has gradually unveiled Jesus’ authority: he is the messiah, the son of God, the one like the Danielic Son of Man. He is the bridegroom, for whose “wedding feast” the whole creation waits. Now, in this final parable, we see Jesus, enthroned and coming in glory, to judge the world. Jesus is the climax of creation; the climax of human history.

I’ve begun to feel just a little bit sorry for the chief priests and elders. Matthew 21:23 has got to be right at the top of their list of “Questions I wish I’d never asked”! They didn’t know what they were getting into. It’s been a rollercoaster ride of surprises, shocks, and outrages – and Jesus keeps it up, right to the very end. Having stood their traditional notions of authority, God, election and covenantal faithfulness on their heads, Jesus here delivers the coup de grace. “The Last Judgment,” he says, “is not what you expect it to be! Nothing like it!” In Jesus’ hands, the parable of the sheep and the goats joins together two issues: the Jewish expectation of the culmination of history and the meaning of true discipleship.

The culmination of history in Jewish expectation was the eschatological pilgrimage of the nations to Jerusalem for the final “sorting” (cf Isaiah 2). The nations would be judged according to their treatment of Israel. The chosen people would be vindicated and take their rightful place in the world, as Yahweh’s own people. They would “inherit their kingdom, prepared for them from the foundation of the world” (v34). But Jesus radically reinterprets the tradition of Israel as the Suffering Servant (cf Isaiah 53) in terms of himself. The nations, he says, will be judged by their reaction to him! Those who saw him hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick or in prison and alleviated his suffering will be welcomed. Those who failed to respond to his suffering are cast out. Jesus, in other words, is like the Son of his earlier parable who is sent into the vineyard, and the tenants are the nations. He, rather than Israel, is to be the measure of all things. It is not only the Easter events themselves, but this parable also, that resulted to the christological reading of the Servant Songs and the increased prominence of the Servant tradition. It is made possible because of the relativising of Israel. If Jesus, rather than Israel, is to be the measure of all things; if the nations are to be judged by their response to Jesus, rather than Israel, then Israel too will be judged as the other nations. Israel has become just one more of the nations (as it were), because Yahweh’s intention is not a global community whose head is Israel, but instead, the new messianic community. The world has become the kingdom of God announced by God’s messiah, Jesus!

The crucial move in the parable, however, is the standard by which judgement is to be made. It is by the treatment of the very least, whom Jesus calls “my family” (v40). In other words, it is the community that Jesus makes with the marginalised that is the touchstone of the entire course of human history! This is not the same thing as the Church. Of course, the Church ought to be that community – the messianic community of the margins – but often isn’t. The treatment of the least, therefore, relativises the Church in the same way as it does Israel’s claim to be the elect community of Yahweh. The “sorting” of the parable includes the sorting of the Church, as well as the nations. Not all those who are Israel are God’s people; not all those who are Church are the messianic community. Here is a parable which cuts through complacency!

Let’s take a closer look at the parable. I am struck by two things immediately. The first is the complete absence of “theology” as a standard of sorting. We preach and teach as though Christian faith was primarily about “getting our theology straight”. Look at Christian history: we have killed on another over how to understand Christ’s presence at Communion, or on the finer points of Christology and the Trinity. Many of us spend most of our time and energy sniffing out “heretics” and evangelising those Christians who believe differently from us in the conviction that they are going to hell. I say “most of us”, because that has been the historical heritage of almost every denomination and movement in Christian history.

The second thing that strikes me is that, although response to the suffering Jesus is the criterion for judgement, no one in the parable recognises Jesus! The sheep and goats respond identically: “But Lord, when did we see you hungry, and thirsty, and naked, and a stranger, and sick, and in prison?” The sheep are not self-righteous! It’s as though they say, rather embarrassedly, “Lord, it’s great that you’re welcoming me, but honesty compels me to admit that I don’t know what you’re talking about! Are you sure you’ve got the right person?” while the goats respond in horrified indignation: “What do you mean, we saw you hungry and did nothing about it? You’ve got the wrong person! I never did that!” And Jesus says the same thing: “It’s about how you treated the very least, whom I call my brothers and sisters. Even though you didn’t realise it, you were doing it to me!”

This identification with the marginalised is what makes the parable densely theological. It relates treatment of neighbour with treatment of God. This is the Matthean equivalent of Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan: it makes clear how Jesus understands the relationship between the two great commandments to love God and neighbour. The reaction of both the sheep and the goats to the needs of the least is shaped by compassion, or its absence. Just as the pivotal moment of the parable of the Good Samaritan is the point at which the Samaritan (in contrast to the priest and Levite) saw and was moved with pity, so the difference between the sheep and the goats is not that one group recognises Jesus and the other doesn’t, but rather that the sheep see the needs and are moved with pity.

Compassion is at the heart of Jesus’ understanding of fulfilling the Law, doing the work of the kingdom and of God. God’s heart, says Jesus, is filled with compassion. Look at Ezekiel’s image of Yahweh the shepherd in Ezekiel 34: 20ff. Here Yahweh judges not between sheep and goats but between fat sheep and lean sheep. It is the scattered flock that Yahweh will save (v22) – the weaker sheep who have been butted out of the way by their abler, fatter, more powerful brothers and sisters. Yahweh is going to “seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured and strengthen the weak” (v 16). Absurdly, this Shepherd is going to destroy the fat and the strong! What sort of shepherd does that? Only Yahweh, because the fat and the strong have set out to live at the expense of the weak and the lean. Yahweh is the God who hears the cries of the slaves in Pharaoh’s brickyards, or, to change the image as Ezekiel does here, the Shepherd who hears the cries of the lost, strayed, weak and injured. And saves those, as absurdly as Jesus the Good Shepherd will leave the 99 exposed on the mountain in order to seek the one lost sheep! It is the compassion of God which makes sense of the absurdity of grace.

Jesus is saying something profound about Christian faith and the truth of God. Christian faith is about looking with the eyes, hearing with the ears and responding with the heart as God does in Jesus. It leads to action. Jesus, as the Suffering Servant, is the one who is identified with all who suffer. The God who comes among us in Jesus does not abandon this world to suffering, but shares in it. Where is God in human suffering? In Jesus, God is with those who suffer as one of them.

Yet God is also with the suffering in the persons of those who work to comfort them, aid them and transform their situations. Truth is not something abstract. It is something to be practised. It lives – in concrete actions. It is not what we profess but what we live that discloses the deepest truths we hold about God. Believing is less about the head than it is the heart, because the heart is the deepest part of us – the seat of our deepest loves, convictions and commitments. It is the location for the things we live by. The truths of God are done, rather than spoken.

I learned this lesson when I was in Cambridge in the late 1980s, helping to run Wintercomfort, a charity for homeless people. I was a deacon of a large city-centre Baptist church at the time and Wintercomfort was looking for a place to run a winter night shelter. Our church had just completed a £1 million building project, and had a brand new hall which would have been ideal for the shelter. I was confident that the church would be delighted at the opportunity to make use of the premises for such an obviously good cause. I had to go to the next council meeting and report that permission had been refused by the church meeting, because of concerns that the new badminton floor in the hall would get scuffed. In fact, we received similar rejections from all the mainline city centre churches. The only church that offered to help was the Unitarian church – and they gave us not their hall, but their sanctuary, because they reckoned the hall was too primitively equipped with heating! The shelter was staffed by volunteers. The most difficult slot to fill was the “graveyard shift” – 3am – 5am. Every week, who should come faithfully on his bicycle for this shift but Don Cupitt – he of the Sea of Faith fame (or notoriety) who had abandoned belief in a “real” God for a thoroughgoing ethical interpretation of Christianity. So who were the sheep and who were the goats in that contemporary parable?

Spoken truth is all too often contradicted by lived truth. Yet lived truth makes sense of spoken truth. That is why Paul begins this week’s section in Ephesians with thankfulness for the Ephesians’ faith in Christ, expressed concretely in their “care for the saints” (the Jerusalem collection) in verse 15, and this leads him seamlessly into a glorious, poetical, theological reflection (vv 16ff).

Jesus locates himself firmly in the prophetic tradition: God’s purposes in calling human communities into being which bear God’s name is that they manifest God’s character of love, compassion and passion for justice. This is “lived truth”. It is, says Jesus, the only truth that matters. It is the truth by which we will all be judged, whether nation, church or individual. And he asks of us, “What happens to you and inside you when you see the deepest needs of your world, nation and community?” That is why one of the Five Marks of Mission is “Responding to human need with loving service”. A response which is motivated by compassion, with no thought of reward, is as missionary and as evangelical as any preaching or witnessing. It is powerfully disclosive, even when its intention is [only!] helping someone in need! It bears testimony to Christ the King, proclaiming, in Graham Kendrick’s words, “This is our God, the Servant King!”

Amen.

14:05 Posted in Ephesians , Ezekiel , Matthew , Year A | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this

Monday, 07 November 2005

Pentecost 26

Zephaniah 1: 7, 12-18 NRSV text
I Thessalonians 5: 1-11 NRSV text
Matthew 25: 14-30 NRSV text

“God is like a money-grabbing bully!” Is that what Jesus is really saying? Before we say, “No, of course not! How could you possibly imagine that?” we ought to recognise the shocking ways in which Jesus’ own practice cut across accepted notions of good taste and proper piety. Jesus’ pronouncements about God are often equally shocking. After all, he’s just likened Christian leaders and disciples to foolish, young, unmarried girls – hardly the sort of comparison guaranteed to win the hearts and minds of male hearers in a gender-stratified society! That was bad enough. That parable left unanswered the question of what “waiting” might mean. The parable of the talents answers the question, but in no less a shocking and offensive way.

Before looking at the parable in more detail, I want to reflect a moment on the emphasis on shock and unexpected surprise in the texts, not only for today, but over the past few weeks. The prophetic texts have emphasised the fact that the longed for Day of the Lord will be completely different from what is expected. This is because of the character of Yahweh. To use CS Lewis’s image from the Narnia Chronicles, “Aslan is not a tame lion!” Yahweh acts in sovereign freedom, in love, breathtaking grace, but also in anger and in judgement. Yahweh defies expectations and refuses all the boxes that people try to put their God in. Jerusalem cannot conclude from the covenant that Yahweh has made with Jerusalem that they are safe from judgement or destruction. Israel’s injustice does not go unnoticed and will not go unpunished. Election does not mean that God is restricted to using the chosen people – Yahweh calls Cyrus “my messiah”. Zephaniah reminds the inhabitants of Jerusalem that Yahweh is a player in the affairs of the people who cannot be ignored. Yahweh’ sovereignty is not about disinterested distance! This is not a God who can be relied upon to do “neither good nor harm” (Zephaniah 1: 12). This sort of complacency is about to be shattered: the great day is near and it will be a day of wrath, distress, anguish, ruin, devastation, darkness, gloom, battle and destruction (vv 14-16). Yahweh is about to make “a full, a terrible end” of the people (v18).

Two things define Yahweh’s sovereignty in these prophetic texts: Yahweh’s power and Yahweh’s moral seriousness. Yahweh’s unpredictability and capacity to shock is not an exercise in capriciousness or some fragile god-sized egomania. It is about a God whose will for life and relationship will not be contained, and whose action – however terrifying – is aimed at human flourishing, not its destruction. This is necessarily a statement of faith. We are forced by the texts of the Bible itself to wrestle with the fact that the experience of God’s people is that God appears to contradict the divine promises and fail to live by the covenant boundaries that God has set. Look at Zephaniah 1: 18: “in the fire of his passion the whole earth shall be consumed; for a full and terrible end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth”. Here is direct prophetic announcement that God intends to overthrow the promises made under the Noahic covenant never to destroy the earth again. Until we understand the exile as an apparent and clear contradiction of Yahweh’s promises to the people, made particularly to and through David, we fail to understand the crisis of faith the exiles produced and the need to understand God afresh.

The delay of the parousia is the New Testament equivalent of the exilic crisis. Jesus had clearly promised to return in the lifetime of his hearers. We have been reading 1 Thessalonians, and seeing the struggles of one of the earliest Christian communities to cope with the non-fulfilment of divine promises. This week’s text has the well-known verse about the day of the Lord coming “as a thief in the night” (5:2). The passage echoes the prophetic warning against complacency and the warning of sudden, imminent and unexpected destruction (v3). Ironically (in the light of last week’s parable where Jesus does not criticise the sleepers), Paul uses the image of staying awake as a metaphor for being prepared. People of the night sleep in a drunken stupor: Christians, by contrast, are people of the day – of the Light. He uses this contrast as a pun on “sleep”: there is such a thing as appropriate sleep, but it is “falling asleep (ie dying) in Christ” (v10).

Paul echoes the prophetic dynamic in trying to cope with the unpredictability and shock of a God who apparently fails to keep the divine word: the conviction that God is ultimately about salvation, not destruction. Paul puts it in terms of God “not destining us for wrath but for salvation though our Lord Jesus Christ” (v9). Zephaniah’s prophecy ends with the oracle of salvation and restoration (3: 16ff). We need to be clear, though, that this is an act of faith. The evidence of experience is that God is not true to the covenant, and to divine promises. While Scripture affirms the constancy and consistency of Yahweh, Yahweh is sovereignly free to act in ways that shock, disturb and shatter faith – particularly a faith that has become complacent. Yahweh is a God who will not be put into any kind of box. True faith, then, is to hang on to the conviction that God is ultimately about the business of salvation, not destruction; of grace, not condemnation; that, as Paul says elsewhere, God can use all things – even the most terrifying and apparently self-contradictory – to work together for good.

If the texts are at such pains to warn us against thinking we know God and have God taped, we ought not to be so surprised at the parable of the talents, in which Jesus likens God to a money-grabbing bully. Let’s look at the parable more closely. Most exegesis is at pains to deny the possibility that the master is the character described by the third slave who hides the talent in the ground – the “harsh man, reaping where he does not sow, and gathering where he does not scatter seed” (v24). An unscrupulous businessman, in other words, who profits not from his own hard labour or investment. Most exegetes make much of the fact that, while the master does not dispute this analysis, he merely hoists the slave on the logic of his own argument: “If that is the kind of man you think I am, surely logic dictates that you would have invested the money, rather than burying it, so that I would at least have got a return on my investment?” The Catholic scholar, Larry Broding, has pointed out that a number of factors in the parable militate against letting the master off so lightly.

 

1. The rabbis taught that no one could be condemned for burying money for safe-keeping. It was prudent stewardship because it was risk-free. Inflation in the ancient world was unthinkable. Money retained its buying power from generation to generation. The slave had not cheated his master out of income by failing to bank the money so that it could accrue interest. The master’s anger at the slave would sound shocking and unfair to Jewish ears, and his condemnation harsh and unjust.
2. Jesus’ parable would have raised immediate suspicions of theft, shady dealing and exploitation among his hearers in a way that it doesn’t to us. The eight talents given to the slaves are an enormous sum of money – nearly £2 million by today’s standards. Contemporaries of Jesus believed all the wealth of the world was limited and the distribution of riches was preordained. In addition, the economic systems of the ancient world existed for many generations and had grown rigid over time. Conspicuous wealth – particularly gained over a relatively short time – would normally only be possible by shady means. While someone could quickly amass a fortune, the general populace suspected that person of theft, bribery, or extortion. In a culture wary of change, only the devious and immoral could rise up the economic ladder.
3. There is a strong suggestion in the parable that the master is a foreigner, and that he is returning home for a while (for a long time – v19 – an obvious reference in the Matthean community to the delayed return of Jesus). As non-Jews, he and the slaves could lend money at exorbitant rates and enforce repayment. Given the fixed nature of the economy, the fact that the first two slaves are able to double the money while the master is away serves only to reinforce the message to Jesus’ contemporaries that this was done by foul means rather than by fair. The third slave, by contrast, acts as a good Jew would, who is both a faithful steward and concerned to conduct business dealings within the law.
4. In this context, the slave’s description of his master makes perfect sense. The master and the slaves were precisely the sort of exploitative lenders so hated by the Jewish populace for their unfair business practices that amounted to theft.

Here lies the shock value of Jesus’ parable: Jesus appears to commend the unscrupulous amassing of wealth as precisely the sort of “waiting” and faithful stewardship appropriate to the kingdom! How, then, might his hearers have understood what he was saying?

If we look in Matthew’s gospel for clues, the nearest we find is the parable of the sower (Matthew 13: 18-23), which, like this, is a parable of increase. We are justified in drawing a parallel between the two parables because there is no doubt that in both, the increase is due to the power of the Word in the hearts and lives of the hearers as a result of the preaching of the gospel. Yet we are still left with the problem of the unscrupulous methods employed by the slaves in the parable of the talents.

What Jesus appears to commend in the parable is the single-minded determination of the first two slaves to take every opportunity to maximise their opportunity for using the time while the master is away to get a “return” on what they have been entrusted with. This is interpreted (within the logic of the parable) as a sign of fidelity. The slaves are rewarded identically, not because of the different amounts that they raise, but because of the fact that the “yield of the harvest” is, in both cases, a hundredfold. They have been willing to take risks for the sake of kingdom.

Once we grant that Jesus is being deliberately outrageous and setting out to shock, the point of the parable emerges even more strongly. The fall guy” in the story is the prudent, self-righteous Jew. For a start, the Matthean community was probably made up of precisely the sort of people with a past like that of the slaves and their master. They were scorned and sneered at by the Jewish establishment. There is a certain black humour, then, in Jesus telling such an outrageous story of inverted righteousness – especially as this belongs to the block of Jesus’ teaching in which he has roundly condemned the Pharisees.

Jesus uses dramatic irony to commend the sort of passionate risk-taking and commitment that he expects of the disciples during the time of waiting. This is not a time for prudent burying. The kingdom is not for a small, select group like the Essenes, who waited in the desert, withdrawing from society and keeping themselves “pure” and untainted. The gospel is supposed to be salt and light and yeast. The followers of Jesus are not to be withdrawn from society and the world, but to “get out there” and do the job of sowing the seed – or investing the money – so that it will yield huge increases.

Jesus, then, stands in the prophetic tradition that does not shirk the fact that God is frequently experienced as shocking. What God has done in his own ministry, after all, has shocked and scandalised the religious leaders of his day. Time and time again, Jesus has provoked the reaction, “God is not supposed to act like that!” - no more so than in the days since his entry into Jerusalem! Furthermore, he stands in the tradition that affirms that, however shocking and unpalatable God’s actions may sometimes appear to be (or his own, if the context is his non-appearance), God’s purposes in so acting are good, not evil. Faith in these contexts is a risk – and the risk is to be embraced wholeheartedly. When it is, the disciples discover that, however small their faith was to start with, it grows. By contrast, those who will not risk their faith and their lives for the kingdom find that even what they start with withers away, atrophies and dies. That’s how it is with Jesus and the kingdom.

Amen.

21:45 Posted in 1 Thessalonians , Matthew , Year A , Zephaniah | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this

Monday, 31 October 2005

Pentecost 25

Amos 5: 18-24         NRSV text
I Thessalonians 4: 13-18  NRSV text
Matthew 25: 1-13    NRSV text

It seems from the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids (or virgins) that late, late opening hours for corner shops are nothing new!  The foolish bridesmaids are able to nip down to the shop at midnight and buy oil to trim their lamps.  I also find myself bridling (or should that be spelled “bridalling”?) at the attitude of the wise bridesmaids who appear remarkably selfish in their unwillingness to share their oil.  But both of these observations miss the point of the parable, unique to Matthew, which is clearly to warn and encourage the listeners to be ready for the unexpected arrival of the bridegroom.  It belongs with the preceding parable of the wicked slave, who sees the delay of the master’s return (24:48) as an excuse for drunkenness and abuse of those under him.  In both parables, the watchful and the faithful are rewarded, while the wicked and the unprepared are excluded.

The gospel passage belongs to the block of Jesus’ teaching on the imminent destruction of Jerusalem.  The problem for the early church and beyond has always been that Jesus links his own return with this event (24:30ff) – something he expected within the lifetime of at least some of his hearers (24:34).  The destruction of Jerusalem happened in AD70; the second coming has not happened, even after 2000 years!  Jesus was right about Jerusalem and the imminence of its destruction; he was quite straightforwardly wrong about his imminent return.  I say “straightforwardly” because the clear reading of the discourse (and its parallel in Mark 13) is that Jesus expected to return in the lifetime of his hearers.  That is what his listeners believed.  It was what was conveyed to the churches and became part of the apostolic preaching.  It is what Paul had told the Thessalonians – and now some of them were dying!  Crisis point!  Did this mean that those who died were lost?  Was their death a sign that they were “outside” – among the foolish bridesmaids and wicked servants?  Paul writes to reassure them that this is not so.  But the non-return of Jesus constituted a crisis and resultant rethinking of faith and theology that has its closest Old Testament parallel in the exile. 

We can’t doubt, therefore, that the “straightforward” reading of the text is the one that Jesus intended.  It is fascinating to look at the exegetical history of the passage, and the attempts to “rescue” Jesus by making him say something less straightforward than he did.  It is also sobering to see the crisis of faith this brings on for some people.  “If Jesus was wrong about the date of his return, how can we trust that anything he said is right?”  When we encounter this sort of disturbance in ourselves and others, then we have some idea of how the Thessalonians (and no doubt most other Christians) were feeling!  What are we to do with what Jesus said, if the immediate historical referent for his return has passed?

Let me say that I have personally always found Jimmy Dunn’s explanation for Jesus’ error helpful.  He maintains that it is the intensity of Jesus’ prophetic, eschatological vision that misleads him about the time frame.  Jesus hadn’t a date for these things (24:36), but the clarity of his vision was such that there could be no doubt that the destruction of Jerusalem was clearly just around the corner for him.  And he was right!  If the same intensity was there for him with regard to his return, then it is perfectly conceivable that he conflated the two events – mistakenly.  In other words, we are left with precisely the option that the early church took: to understand the present as a time of “waiting for the bridegroom” and mission.  I personally believe that Jesus will return, and that there will be a specific moment or time when this world will be transformed into the kingdom.  Other Christians believe that we ought to interpret his “return” allegorically or symbolically, rather than as an event in time and space parallel to the incarnation.  In terms of its significance, we end up in precisely the same place and details about what, when and how are supremely unimportant – and we’re never anywhere other than in the realm of best guesses, anyhow!  Waiting is not passive and empty: it is about active preparation, faithful mission, and eager watchfulness.

What I do not think sustainable is the “Last Days” eschatology of Hal Lindsey and others, who build a theology of the second coming, the “rapture” of the church, the “tribulation” and the millennial rule of Christ on the founding of the State of Israel.  This a fundamentalist “rescue Jesus”-type understandings of eschatology that simply doesn’t add up.  It’s basis is that the “Last Days” began with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, and that this was the fulfilment of the last prophecy needed to trigger the “Last Things”.  It was the “beginning of the end”.  The clock started ticking. “This generation” (ie post-1948) is the one to whom Jesus was really speaking in the gospel reading.  And if a biblical generation is 40 years, then any world time after the 1980s is an unexpected bonus!  For them, the passage is all about getting straight with God, because the end and judgment are just around the corner.  It is also these Christians who link the end times with the restoration of the Jerusalem temple.  They long for the destruction of the mosque on the Dome of the Rock and the restoration of the Jewish temple – because it will trigger the second coming of the messiah and Armageddon – the destruction of the world as we know it.  They wait with unholy glee for this cataclysm, and sponsor the Israeli government to take ever more oppressive measures against the Palestinians.  But they are absolutely wrong – for no other reason than that the “Last Days” began not in 1948 with the restoration of Israel, but with the resurrection of Jesus!  That is the clear teaching of the New Testament.  We are no more or less the “terminal Generation” (to use one of Lindsey’s book titles) than any generation before us.

The compilers of the lectionary have linked today’s gospel reading not only with 1 Thessalonians (which is an obvious and important link to make because it is about “waiting” and not fearing) but also with Amos 5.  This introduces a new element for reflection: what is it that we are expecting from God?  What is it that Jesus’ return will accomplish?  As I see it, Christians who await mayhem and the destruction of others and the world, on the one hand, and their own vindication on the other, have failed utterly to understand what God is doing in Jesus.  They are like Amos’ audience who long for the day of the Lord for the wrong reasons.  Israel had become corrupt.  They saw their election as a divine insurance policy that guaranteed that they were “on God’s side”.  The day of the Lord would be their vindication.  But they had forgotten that Yahweh is a God of justice and therefore of community.  Yahweh’s will is the flourishing of all – not just of some, at the expense of others.  Yahweh’s deliverance of the people from the slave pits of Pharaoh was so that they could establish a kingdom of righteousness and peace, where there was “no sorrow, or crying, or death, or pain”.  It would therefore be a place where the needs of the very least were met.  It would be a place where all would flourish.

Because Israel isn’t like that, says Amos, the people are in for a rude awakening.  The day of the Lord will be a day of darkness and destruction because Yahweh was going to destroy the systems that enslaved people, kept them poor and prevented their flourishing.  Remember that the deliverance cycle in Exodus ends with the Hebrews looking at the dead Egyptians on the seashore (Exodus 14:30).  The Hebrews have been delivered and the entire slave system has been destroyed.  It is the work of Yahweh.  This, says Amos, is the character of the God who has delivered them.  God’s will and work is to establish justice that is as secure as a river that doesn’t fail – even in the dry season!

Eschatology is not about the calculation about dates, or arguments over how to predict what it might all look like from the symbol-laden language and imagery of the Bible.  It is part of the answer of “How should we then live?”  Christian eschatology is intensely political because it belongs within the category of prophecy – which is not essentially prediction, but about announcing God’s character and will for justice and peace.  It is rooted in God’s promises of salvation for this world.  It teaches us, therefore, how to “live in the waiting”.  Note that Jesus does not condemn the bridesmaids for sleeping.  This isn’t a spur to frenetic activity.    Waiting for the groom, at weddings in Jesus’ day, was not about twiddling one’s thumbs, tutting about the tardiness of the groom.  It was about active preparation for a banquet and celebration that went on for several days.  There was a time to rest during the preparations.  When the groom arrived, the wedding began.  And in the parable, the groom doesn’t recognise the foolish bridesmaids because they weren’t there, welcoming the groom upon his arrival at the wedding and the start of the festivities.

What sort of activity is “waiting” for the Church?  It is surely about mission – the work of the kingdom.  It is about preparing the world as the place for the marriage feast of the Son.  It’s mission in all its facets.  To wait for the return of Christ and long for it is to pray with all earnestness “Your Kingdom come; your will be done on earth” and to get on and do it – however long the wait.

Amen 

15:07 Posted in 1 Thessalonians , Amos , Matthew , Year A | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this

Thursday, 27 October 2005

Pentecost 24

Micah 3: 5-12           NRSV text
Matthew 23: 1-12    NRSV text

 

Christian leadership is not about directing or commanding people, but about enabling them.  The most enabling thing that a Christian leader can do is to put people in closer touch with God, because God is the source of grace and life.  At the heart of God’s intention for human beings is a deep freedom – the freedom that comes from knowing ourselves loved, accepted, forgiven and welcomed by God, just as we are.  The God whom Jesus calls Father and encourages us to do likewise is the one “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden”.  And in this perfect and transparent knowledge of us, God in Christ affirms that we are loved and wanted, not condemned.  The ultimate gift of grace is therefore none other than God.  God gives us God’s self.  Christian faith, therefore, is living in response to this gift.  It is not a burden or a terror.  Christian leadership is “servant ministry”, as Jesus indicates in verse 11 of the reading.  These are words that slip easily and frequently off the tongue, but today’s gospel reading challenges us to recognise that we might have the rhetoric and the theology right, but prove to be “blind guides” and “hypocrites – the wrong thing for all the right reasons!

The heart of Christian leadership, ministry and preaching is disclosing God (and therefore the nature of the world and human living in the light of God).  The qualification for Christian leadership is not knowledge about God, but knowledge of God.  It is about relationship and discipleship.  It is depth-knowledge of God, the sort of knowledge that comes with long and inmate acquaintance, rather than through study and technical dissection of the Law and theology.  If the question is, “How are we to understand what God has said?  Is in this way, or that …?” the answer lies in “What is God like?”  This is at the centre of the dispute between Jesus and the chief priests and Pharisees.  God, says Jesus, is like he says God is!  The Pharisees have not understood the character of God – that is why they get things so terribly wrong, and “make new converts twice as fit for hell as they are themselves” (23:15).

Jesus was closer to the Pharisees than to any other religious group of his day.  That is why he reserves his most vehement criticism for them.  Jesus literally thinks, “You should have known better!” (23:2-3). Jesus and the Pharisees agree on the greatest commandments.  They also agree that this world – starting with the Jewish nation – is under the rule of God.  They both have a “kingdom of God” theology, in other words.  That is why Jesus can tell his listeners, “Do whatever they teach you, and follow it”.  The Pharisees, though, try to extend the kingdom by extending the purity laws governing the Temple outwards into society.  There is a clear logic to what they are doing: if God’s presence is located in the temple, in the holy of holies, then, by extending the “contamination-free zone” outwards, God is freed to be more and more present in the world outside the confines of the temple.  “Make the world more holy” = “extend the purity zone”!

It is precisely this equation of holiness with ritual purity that Jesus disputes.  Holiness is not a matter of the minutiae of religious observance (the scrupulous tithing of mint, dill and cumin of v23) but God-likeness.  Holiness is seen in the passion for the things about which God is passionate – justice, mercy and faith.   Jesus, in his denunciation of the Pharisees, claims the authority of Israel’s prophetic tradition for his interpretation of the Law.  In particular, he echoes the 8^th century BCE prophetic critique of a cult that has lost sight of the fact that the political economy ought to reflect the character of Yahweh – a God of compassion, liberation, mercy and justice.  By contrast, the Pharisee’s appeal to “tradition” is shown to be nothing more than playing among the tombs (v27). 

For the 8^th century BCE prophets such as Micah, Israel’s apostasy was evidenced by a thriving yet self-satisfied cult in a nation sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots.  The cult was at the service of those with power and economic means and ranged directly against the poor and dispossessed (Micah 3:5).  The prophets of Micah’s day had sold out to the powerful.  There was no prophetic voice articulating Yahweh’s cry of anger and judgement, Yahweh’s preferential option for the poor.  Yahweh was being silenced!  Hence Micah’s oracle against the prophets, and the presentation of his own credentials by contrast (v8), in which we must note the link between power, the spirit of the Lord, and justice and might. 

The prophet, as Micaiah reminded Ahab, is the one who “stands before Yahweh” and hears the deliberations and pronouncements of the divine court”.  This is the source of his authority.  It is what sets the true prophet apart from the false.  The prophetic voice in the Old Testament keeps alive the Samuel tradition – the conviction that the monarchy is a disastrous mistake, because it will be corrupted by power and end up enslaving the people – particularly those most vulnerable.  The defining characteristic of the prophet, then, is the opposition to the abuse of political and religious power and championing the cause of the very least.  It is rooted in the defining memory of the Exodus: “Remember, Yahweh is the one who heard the cries of the slaves and liberated them!  This is a God who frees us from burdens, not who imposes them!”

It is this role and tradition that Jesus embraces and claims.  The Pharisees create intolerable burdens for the neediest.  Despite their radical opposition to Rome and their strong nationalism, they have become courtiers who revel in the respect and scraping of others (vv 6-7).  They set themselves up as teachers, whereas they end up creating rules that cut people off from God because they are weighed in the balances of purity and found wanting, and are pronounced cut off from God by the Pharisees.

By contrast, Jesus is able to disclose God with the authority of the Messiah (v10) who, as we have learned time and again from this section of the gospel, is also the Son of God.  This is a radical claim.  Jesus’ is also a radical interpretation of the Law – radical not so much for its emphasis, which had a venerable history in Israel’s prophetic tradition, but in the breathtaking authority and freedom Jesus exercised in teaching.  What made his message radically distinctive, however, was the character of the God he disclosed.  In sharp contrast to the Pharisees, and in ways that would have shocked even the prophets whom he claimed as allies, Jesus discloses God as the one whose heart is love and grace.  This is a God of radical welcome.  And Jesus therefore radically reinterprets holiness.  Holiness is not about being “good”, or “pure”, or “following God’s rules”.  Holiness is God-likeness – reflecting the character of God and allowing who God is to shape who we are, how we view the world and what sort of world we make as a result. 

The Pharisees look at the people of their day and their society and they see uncleanness everywhere.  They look, judge, and despise.  By contrast, Jesus looks through eyes he claims are none other than God’s.  What he sees is a community of lost children or of chicks in desperate need of the love and protection of the mother hen.  God, says Jesus, is the hen who longs to gather those chicks and welcome them in (v37).  When Jesus speaks of servant ministry, he shows his authority by being among them as a servant (v11).  And when the chicks refuse to be gathered, he is not going to stand on parental authority, but rather give his life in order to gather them.

Amen.

 

 

14:58 Posted in Matthew , Micah , Year A | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

Tuesday, 18 October 2005

Pentecost 23

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18 NRSV text
Matthew 22: 34-46 NRSV text

 

In chapter 21 v23 Jesus enters the temple. While he is teaching, he is asked by the chief priests and the elders of the people, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” This is the question that has controlled everything since. It happens in the temple. Jesus is teaching. There is a clash between Jesus and “those who sit in the seat of Moses” (23:2) ie between Jesus and the authoritative interpreters of Torah. It is in this clash, which Matthew sets as a series of exchanges in the temple, that we are told who Matthew understands Jesus to be.

Look first at 22:41ff. The Pharisees, Saducees, Herodians, chief priests and scribes – the various authority figures – have all “tried” Jesus as a usurper of God’s authority, or a blasphemer. Matthew 21:23-22:46 is, in terms of the narrative structure of the gospel, Matthew’s presentation of the trial of Jesus. This is when Jesus actually answers and responds to the “charge” of blasphemy on which he will later be condemned (26:65-6). In his trial before the Sanhedrin (26:57ff), Jesus is notably silent as false witnesses are wheeled out to give “evidence” against him. The testimony against him culminates in the question about the temple – the charge that Jesus claimed that he personally could destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days (26:61). Matthew is positively screaming to his readers, “We’ve already been through all this! Jesus has dealt with these questions – openly, publicly, and demonstrated his authority in the temple! This is no blasphemer! This trial is a farce. It’s rigged, and Jesus knows it. That’s why he will not participate!” We are taken back to the section from 21:23ff, and to today’s text, where the answer to the million dollar question at the trial (“Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God”) is actually given.

The equation of Messiah and Son of God did not happen until Jesus. When the people of Jesus’ day spoke of the coming Messiah, they were not expecting the Son of God. There were all sorts of options floating around. One of the most powerful and the most politically explosive was that the Messiah would be a royal Davidic figure – the Son of David. Hence the significance of the crowd who cry “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (21:9) which leads the whole of Jerusalem to ask, “Who on earth is this?” (21:10) He immediately enters the temple, to be challenged by the chief priests and scribes who are angry at the children who are crying, “Hosanna to the Son of David” (21:15). They ask him, “Do you hear what they are saying [about you]? [Are you going to tell them off for calling you the Messiah, or is this a designation you accept?]” Jesus effectively says, “Yes, it’ll do!”

But now, in 22:41, when all the questioning voices have been silenced, it is Jesus’ turn to ask a question. He turns straight to the question which ahs been at the heart of all the exchanges since his entry into Jerusalem: “Who are you, Jesus? Are you the Messiah? How is it that you teach and act with the authority that you do? Where does it come from? How have you the right to set yourself up as an authority even over Moses himself?”

In the parables of sons and fathers, Jesus has all but expressly said, “I am the Son of God!” But he hasn’t done so explicitly. So now he probes: “You believe the Messiah is the son of David. Yet David calls him Lord! Who could possibly be more important than the son of David; who could David have seen sitting at the right hand of God and having everything put under his feet?” Here is the narrative origin of the question to Jesus at his trial. In effect, the high priest says, “Look, Jesus: a few days ago, in chapter 22:42ff, you effectively claimed to be the Messiah – and a messiah who is not only son of David, but in fact, even greater than David himself: the very Son of God! So now’s the time to be absolutely unambiguous and tell us straight: is this how it is? Is this who you claim to be?”

This passage in 22:46 is where that question is answered publicly. Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. The one whom they have been questioning is greater than David, whose authority comes from the throne of God. And they are stunned into silence. No one dares ask him any more questions – publicly and truthfully. The only time they will dare to do so will be under the cover of night, with the doors shut, buoyed up by lying witnesses.

Jesus, Matthew tells us, is Messiah by virtue of his royal blood. He is king. But he is also prophet and priest, because the one on “trial” here is greater than Moses, who was the greatest of the prophets, who stood between God and the people, and through whom the Law – the very words of God – were given. That is the significance of the test over the Law in 22: 34-40.

There is an obvious parallel with the lawyer who stands up to test Jesus in Luke 10:25-28 by asking the same question and receiving the same answer. This occasions the parable of the Good Samaritan. Matthew and Luke make the same point, but for different audiences and with different emphases. The question behind the test is the same: how come Jesus sets himself up as an authoritative interpreter who has the effrontery actually to alter the Law (“You have heard it said … but I say to you …”)? Matthew has set this exchange in the temple, at the seat of Moses – the sign of the rule of Torah in the life of the nation and the seat of the Pharisee’s authority. Their authority derives from the fact that they occupy the seat of Moses! Beat that, Jesus!

What is clear from the gospel accounts is that Jesus and the Pharisees were extraordinarily close on their understanding of the Law. Both of them agree that Israel is to be holy as Yahweh is holy (Lev 19:2). The covenant people of God are called upon to reflect the character of their God. They likewise agree that obedience to the Torah is the way to find Life, and that it reflects the character of God. They agree in the summary of the Law under the two great commandments to love. Why, therefore, does Jesus (from the Pharisee’s point of view) sit so loose to the Law and behave and teach as he does?

The Pharisees’ interpretation of the Law was one of ritual cleanliness. This is what being holy meant: to be separated, free from contamination. Thus to obey the first commandment to love God meant necessarily shunning and excluding those who put themselves beyond the pale, who were regarded as pollutants. They operated, therefore, with a hierarchy of commandments. The commandment to God came before the command to love neighbour because loving God might actually prevent people from acting lovingly, graciously and welcomingly to their neighbours (for example, passing by on the other side of the road …). The God of the Pharisees was a God obsessed with purity, judgemental and condemning of those who failed, and demanding rigorous standards of visible “holiness”.

Exactly what Jesus thinks of this will become clear in next week’s texts. The point is that Jesus saw it differently. Yahweh – the God whom he knew as Father – does not require us to make choices between love for God and love for our neighbour. Yahweh’s is a heart of compassion. God’s compassion is the well-spring of grace. To love one’s neighbour as one’s self is, therefore – according to Jesus – the way to fulfil the commandment to love God with heart, soul and mind! Jesus interprets the Law of Moses in this light. In his hands, the law to love becomes the law to do graciously. Love, as Jesus proclaims it, is God-likeness – which is true holiness! And God-likeness is seen in the grace that flows out of compassion. This is what makes possible the radical welcome and inclusiveness of Jesus’ vision of the kingdom.

What exactly is “the Kingdom of God” in Jesus’ teaching? One way of describing it is to put it in these terms: “Ultimately, the Kingdom of God is the whole universe, structured and governed and populated by a human race that loves God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and neighbour as self. It’s the world transformed by love. It is the world governed by the politics of grace and the economics of care for the least. It’s the world in which peace and righteousness kiss. That is why Jesus’ message is so politically explosive and subversive. It’s revolutionary because it tears at the fabric of a universe that is structured on other grounds, not because Jesus is advocating revolution. And it is religiously explosive because it cuts the foundations away from an understanding of God as one who flees pollution, rewards the righteous and condemns the sinners. If God is as Jesus proclaims and teaches (with the authority of the Son!), then the very raison d’etre of the temple and its system is collapsing.

While this passage focuses on Jesus' identity, it does so only to assert the importantce of his message. It is the message of the kingdom that is the Good News. That is not to say for a moment that Jesus is not himself Good News! It is to say that what Matthew wishes us to take most to heart is that the answer to the question about Jesus' authority is his identity. The authority being questioned here is Jesus' authority to teach. In other words, christology is the answer to the seriousness with which we must take Jesus' words and message to heart as the way to live in the world with God and our fellow human beings. We must recall that Matthew, alone of the evangelists, has the account of the temptation in which Jesus tells the tempter, "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the moutn of God". Here we learn that his message is just that - the bread of life; words from the mouth of God.

His is the message we are to hear, understand, and believe, because the one who says these things is greater than Moses and greater than David. It is Jesus – the Messiah, the Son of God.

Amen.

13:55 Posted in Leviticus , Matthew , Year A | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

Tuesday, 11 October 2005

Pentecost 22

Isaiah 45: 1-7 NRSV text
Matthew 22: 15-22 NRSV text

Collaborationist or subversive? Which is Jesus on the Poll Tax? That is the question with which Jesus is faced, and his answer is decidedly ambiguous! He confounds his opponents who are out to trap him, not with the clarity of his reply but with the skilful way in which he evades the trap they have tried to spring. The move to have Jesus publicly discredited as a teacher of truth backfires. Jesus’ opponents are confounded, his integrity is intact and his authority is enhanced. They slink away in confused amazement to regroup and try again another day – that is the sense of v22. Yet the ambiguity of Jesus’ reply to their direct question – “Tell us, is it or is it not lawful to pay taxes to the emperor?” – can be seen from the history of the exegesis of this passage. The dominant exegetical tradition has taken Jesus to mean, “Yes, it is lawful to pay taxes to the government of the day, but don’t forget your responsibility under the Law of God to render what is due to God!” In other words, the classic model for the Christian citizen. Yet the tension has remained: after all, that isn’t what Jesus said! Had it been what he intended, he could have said so far less ambiguously, couldn’t he?

The problem for most exegetes has been the failure to recognise that this encounter is over an issue which is political dynamite. While most recognise the need to contextualise this passage in terms of the relationship between the Jewish population and the Roman occupation, they have been too unselfconsciously bourgeois – too quick to read back their own situation of citizens equally at home in both state and church, comfortable with both civic and religious duties. The problem, in other words, is that the solution has appeared too easy. There is too little at stake on their answer. That is how they show they have missed the huge danger inherent in the question with which Jesus is faced. When we stop reading this passage as a generalised meditation on civic duty and see it as the most carefully designed and potentially deadly move in a sustained campaign to murder Jesus, we begin to enter into the narrative.

Let’s look at this passage, headed misleadingly, in my NRSV, “The Question about Paying Taxes”. I want first to look at it in its context within the gospel. Then we need to unpack the politically explosive elements of the Poll Tax issue.

1. Gospel context
We mustn’t forget that this follows immediately on from Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and forms part of the story of the confrontation between Jesus (with his message of God’s kingdom) and the religious and political leaders of his day. Matthew concludes the pericope of the triumphal entry (21:1-11) with the controlling question that is going to be answered in the unfolding of the confrontation, the killing of Jesus and the resurrection: “When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’” (21:10) This is a king who is very different from the one expected – or tolerated – by the establishment. Confrontation is inevitable and begins immediately with the cleansing of the temple – an act dripping with eschatological, theological and political significance. It is this that leads to the question from the chief priests and elders that has formed the context for our texts for the past few weeks: “By what authority do you do these things?” (21:23) Jesus has made extraordinary claims for his own authority through the three parables he tells in response. This is a confrontation that Jesus is winning! And in winning it, he demonstrates that a new authority – which Jesus calls the authority of none other than God – is at work in and through him and has bypassed and made redundant the political and religious authority of the establishment. Jesus is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the crowds – the people who are agog to find out just who Jesus really is. It is in this context of the absolute crisis of their authority that the Pharisees plot to trap Jesus. Luke is explicit that they will use this as a means of handing Jesus over to the Romans, who have the power to execute him (Luke 22:20). It is a less prominent theme in Matthew’s gospel, but the fact remains that Jesus can only – and is – put to death by Roman order, and for a political crime. And so they plan a trap that will allow them to denounce him to the Romans for a treasonable offence – the refusal of the emperor’s authority, experienced and acknowledged by all through the payment of the Poll Tax.

2. Politically explosive
Why this particular issue, though? In 6CE Augustus converted Archelaus’ failed kingdom into a Roman province, and conducted a census in order to compute the per capita tax that was to be levied on all its subjects. The kenson (Gk) or tributum capitis was valued at a denarius. It was experienced by the rich as a tax on moveable property. For the poor, who had no such assets, it was a tax literally on their bodies – the one thing they owned. Just as all land was held ultimately to belong to the Empire, so were all people. For the poor – many of the crowds from Jerusalem who heard Jesus – the tax was the reminder that they were slaves – body and soul – to the Romans. Those who heard the Good News of the kingdom were being cruelly reminded that they were not free or liberated. Despite all that Jesus claimed about the freedom God offered them, the daily reality was that they belonged to the emperor, who had the right of life and death over them as his property. The Poll Tax demonstrated that. And Jesus had not said anything about refusing to pay the tax (as had the Zealots and some of the Pharisees, for example).

Secondly, the Poll Tax offended the most devout people of his day. Israel had no king other than Yahweh. Jewish people were subject to no other lord. The Poll Tax was thus an abomination because it proclaimed the illegitimate authority (that question again!) of the emperor. For these people, paying the Poll Tax was a denial of Yahweh’s lordship. The political revolutionaries and devoutly religious experienced Rome’s illegitimate claim to lordship through the Poll Tax and expressed resistance and subversion by refusing to pay it. The tax was a measure of piety, national spirit, integrity, courage … it was one of the questions of the day.

Thirdly, advocating withholding the tax was a capital crime. It was rebellion against the authority of the emperor (just as the tenants in last week’s parable were rebels against the crown). Once Jesus answered “No”, he was at their mercy. They had easy access to the Roman governor. We need to remember that Luke, who records the political machinations over the trial in more detail than the other evangelists, has Jesus expressly accused of telling people to withhold their Poll Tax. It is one of the three charges against him (Luke 23:2).

Jesus, then, is faced by his opponents with a deadly trap. The arena is deliberately public. The “genre” is the public debate, in which the audience is the judge. The one whose argument is cleverest and who avoids being cornered wins the contest. It is a “winner takes all” situation, because it is a competition for the hearts and minds of the crowd. But the fact that this is a public arena makes their choice of the topic all the more sinister and deadly. Remember: these are subject people, who have to be very careful about appearances. To all intents and purposes, they must appear publicly co-operative and docile. Their public discourse must be conformist. They must be willing to shout, “We have no king but Caesar!” Dissent and subversion might thrive, but it must do so in the shadows. You might encourage your neighbour to resist, to refuse to pay the Poll Tax, but you do so in whispers, or, if more publicly, in coded speech for which you cannot be held publicly and legally accountable. The trap is therefore set. Jesus must, against the tenor of everything he has preached about the reign of God, either acknowledge Caesar’s lordship and so discredit himself and his message, or else publicly and explicitly state that the tax was illegal, for which he could be denounced and condemned.

 

Your move, Jesus …
The flattery of v16 is important. It ups the stakes. Jesus is called “sincere, teaching the way of God in accordance with truth, and impartial”. This then is what is at stake for Jesus. If he allows the tax, he will be accused of being false to his own teaching, and saying what he does out of fear. If he disallows it publicly, he is finished. Note what Jesus does:

1. He distances himself from the tax. He himself has no denarius. He does not name the coin. He does not pay it. His opponents have to produce the coin – conceding the ground. They are already polluted and compromised by their complicity with the tax. They are shown to have already made their own answer by association.
2. He refuses to recognise the emperor’s lordship – he asks, disingenuously innocently, “Whose head? What inscription?” In effect, Jesus says, “This coin is something I have never come across before, and I have no idea whose image this is or what this inscription says”.
3. Jesus emphasises the idolatry of his opponents. They have had to produce the coin, gaze at the image, read the inscription and name the emperor. They are hoist on their own petard – collaborators and idolators.
4. The key, though, is Jesus’ response. If his opponents have wrong-footed him with the question, Jesus has regained the public ground. But he has still to answer. His response is translated as “Render to Caesar …” But the word can equally and better be translated, “Give back” or “repay”. This alters Jesus’ meaning significantly.

Public subversion
Jesus could not have advocated paying the Poll Tax, whatever he might have said about our modern forms of taxation. It was contrary to everything he preached about the reign of God and human freedom, and to his clear conviction that the earth and its people belong to no-one other than God. There is no other lord – all other seeming-owners are but tenants. Neither can he publicly denounce the Poll Tax without courting martyrdom. But here, by adroitly outmanoeuvring his opponents, he is able to say “Here – take this coin and the system it represents which belongs to Caesar and give it back to him. I will have no truck with that idolatrous filth! Get rid of it. Clear Israel of its pollution!” Yet its ambiguity allows two further interpretations. It allows him to say to his opponents, “You enjoy the fruits of collaboration. You could not be where you are without colluding with Rome. Therefore it is perfectly just that you pay Caesar for the privileges you enjoy. Go and pay Caesar what you owe. But remember: you have already failed to pay God what you owe God! You are condemned by your own lights!” And it also evades the trap: after all, Jesus could simply have been saying, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s!” And no-one would be able to prove otherwise.

Is it the weight of traditional exegesis that has placed the Isaiah reading alongside this incident? Are we to read today’s passages as “an example of good Christian citizenship”? Are churches supposed to recognise their governments as part of God’s saving plan, just as Cyrus the Persian is called by Yahweh, “My messiah” (Isaiah 45:1)? Is Christian public living about uncritical, co-operative being-at-home equally in the state and in the Church? Jesus doesn’t encourage this reading! Jesus did not amaze the people by neatly and quite obviously doing what any pragmatist might have done – divide up matters of faith and matters of state and assign each their separate sphere. This was precisely how Afrikaner readings of Kuyperian neo-calvinism managed to sever the relationship between church and state and maintain apartheid! Prophetic criticism was emasculated!

The Jesus we see in this passage is no political street corner revolutionary. Yet he is deeply political and politically astute. He is careful about what he says – yet he is clear that what he says is profoundly subversive. He will not allow any power the role that belongs only to God. His vision of the kingdom is of a world that belongs to God – a God who wills Life and salvation. No other power may hold a child of God in slavery. And the children of God are those made in God’s image – those whose bodies bear the mark and therefore the lordship of God! The only power he will allow wielded over them is the power of God at work in and through him – spirit, life, grace and resurrection.

Amen.

14:30 Posted in Isaiah , Matthew , Year A | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

Monday, 03 October 2005

Pentecost 21

Isaiah 25: 1-9 NRSV text
Psalm 23 NRSV text
Matthew 22: 1-14 NRSV text

 

Perhaps the first thing to strike the reader is just how unsatisfying this parable is when compared to Luke’s Parable of the Great Feast (Luke 14: 16-24) which, if not Matthew’s version of an identical parable, is the closest parallel. At first reading, the reaction is probably something like, “Hmm – not one of Jesus’ best!” The perplexity for the hearer/reader comes from the problems of the narrative logic - the way in which the story is constructed. Parables, by their nature, are drawn from the everyday – things that the hearers would readily understand. There are things about this situation that make it very difficult to reconstruct a believable everyday context. Why, for example, would a king be virtually begging reluctant guests to come to a wedding feast? Can we readily envisage the invited guests beating up and killing the messenger slaves? Isn't that overkill (no pun intended!)? If this was taking place in a city, we would presume that the king was in the same city – so why would the king set about burning his own city in reprisal? And if the wedding feast is ready, with all the food cooked, how could a twice-repeated invitation, the killing of the servants, the report back to the king, the reprisal, and the invitation to those in the highways and the byways all take place within a day?

Yet the greatest difficulty is the apparent internal contradiction of the message of the parable which comes from the guest who is not attired properly, and the king’s harsh reaction. Why should some poor soul, hauled in from the roadside at the last minute, be expected to be attired properly for a wedding, let alone called to account for that and be punished? It is as though the message of vv1-10 continues the theme of grace and radical inclusion, but vv 11ff immediately contradict it! Here is a king (God) who seems to act petulantly and harshly – a God with a fragile ego who requires the appropriate bowing and scraping! The culminating saying of the parable – “Many are called, but few are chosen” – serves only to make God sound capricious, or as harsh as the most neo-calvinist double predestinarian: God calls the man in along with the rest, only to make an example of him and throw him into outer darkness!

Let me say this clearly: I do not believe it is the job of the exegete or preacher to rescue Jesus' parables! If it's a badly constructed story, we ought to be able to say so and move on to more fruitful areas of the gospels! A great deal of exegesis on this passage seems to me to be trying to make coherent a story which is fundamentally incoherent. Unless, of course, we haven't read it correctly in the first place ...

The parable – its story and its message – begin to make far more sense when we read this as a parable set within the context of a political revolt, as Richard Bauckham suggests that we ought in the Fall 1996 issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature. Consider the following points:

1. A king giving a wedding feast for his son has clear political overtones. Royal weddings celebrated political alliances. Kings and sons carry unmistakeable overtones of dynastic succession.
   
2. That the response for the Pharisees and Herodians in the following pericope seek, as a direct result, to spring a political trap on Jesus over the issues of taxes is far less coincidental if we read this parable of the royal wedding feast politically.
3. “The attendance of the great men of the kingdom at the wedding feast of the king's son would be expected not only as a necessary expression of the honor they owe the king but also as an expression of their loyalty to the legitimate succession to his throne. Political allegiance is at stake. Excuses would hardly be acceptable, and the invitees (unlike those in the Lukan parable) offer none. To refuse the invitation is tantamount to rebellion. In refusing it, the invitees are deliberately treating the king's authority with contempt. They know full well that their behavior will be understood as insurrection. This is what they intend, and those who kill the king's messengers only make this intention known more emphatically. The king responds as kings do to insurrection (v. 7). It is only because interpreters so regularly fail to register the political significance of the wedding feast of the king's son that they equally regularly find v. 7 explicable only as an allegorical reference to the destruction of Jerusalem, which has been inserted incongruously into the story” (Richard Bauckham, JBL Fall 1996, p484).
4. The co-ordinated refusal of the invitation (tantamount, therefore, to rebellion) and the killing of the servants makes clear sense when viewed in the context of a rebellion against the authority of the king by his political subjects.
5. The importance of going ahead with the feast, complete with a full banqueting hall (rather than cancelling because chosen friends were not interested in attending) makes sense in the context of a royal wedding.
6. There is no need to impose a 24 hour framework on the feast. Preparation for a royal wedding feast would take time. This should not be read as the story of a king arriving at the feast to find the banqueting hall empty, and who only then begins to try and find out what had gone wrong. Rather, it is about a king who starts out in good time to sensure that all the proper preparations for the wedding feast of his son are in place.
   

The point I am making, therefore, is that the parable makes far more obvious sense as a story and a situation with which Jesus’ hearers would be familiar when we read it in the context of a political insurrection. It locates it, too, within the story of the exile - Israel's faithlessness, God's judgment and restoration. It echoes the movement of Isaiah 25: 1-9, our Old Testament reading. How does this shape the reading of the parable – at least, the first part (vv 1-10)? Most importantly, it makes sense of the king’s reaction. This is a king facing a serious revolt which needs to be put down, not some over-egotistical nobleman who, when slighted, reacts with “maximum force”. If the invitation to those from the highways and byways is about grace (which it certainly is), then the king is not alternating unpredictably between despotism and unparalleled generosity (before reverting to type in the case of the guest without a wedding robe).

It means, though, that we cannot read this as a straightforward Matthean alternative to the Lukan parable and draw the same exegetical points. This is the third in a series of parables that Jesus tells in response to the question about his authority. All three feature a father and his son(s). Two feature vineyards. Two feature tenants or vassals who beat up and/or kill the lawful emissaries. In other words, these are parables which belong very specifically within the context of the debate between who are the true inheritors of the covenant promises made to Israel. Matthew makes one point at least crystal clear: Israel has been faithless and failed to live as the covenant people God intended. This is shown by three things: (1) the refusal of the religious leaders to recognise the drama of salvation from John to Jesus as coming from God, (2) their refusal to recognise Jesus as the Son of God, and (3) the promise that, as a result of their opposition, the kingdom is being taken from them and given to others – prostitutes, tax collectors, street people, Gentiles – who will bear fruit for the kingdom. In other words, one of the primary points of the parable, which is emphasised by its setting within a political rebellion within a kingdom, is the polemic about Israel’s faithlessness and the Church taking on the role Israel previously occupied. The Church is the God’s new vineyard. Yet there is nothing automatic about this. God’s purpose is always to call into being a people who will live and act in certain ways. The Church is God’s new covenant people only to the extent that the people live in christlike ways and so prove themselves to be disciples of Jesus. If they do not, the warning is absolutely explicit: God will judge your faithlessness in the same way that Israel was judged.

This parable shares with the story of the two sons an emphasis on the will and willingness of the hearers to respond. In 21:29 the first son answers, “I will not (I don’t want to)”. But he changes his mind. The same term is used of the guests in 22:3 – they would not come to the feast. To be sons and daughters of God, and obedient disciples, means to hear God’s invitation of grace and respond. The gospel, for Matthew, is not complete until it has done its work of transformation, evidenced in christlike living and acting.

What, then, are we to make of the wedding guest without the proper robe? Once we grant an extended timescale, with preparations being made in due time rather than a last-minute, frantic commandeering of “bums on pews”, the wrath of the king makes sense. We can allow the echoes of the feast with an overflowing cup (Psalm 23) and the marriage feast of Revelation to run. Rich wedding guests would be expected to wear white. Poorer guests would wear as near white a garment as possible, in honour of the occasion and as a mark of due respect for the privilege done to them by inviting them. No one would turn up to a wedding feast without clearly having made an effort at least to wash and press their garment. In fact, it was the custom for poorer guests to borrow wedding wear. To be improperly attired was a slight – a refusal to recognise the generosity and position of the host.

This, then, is no poor soul wrenched as he is from the streets at a few minutes' notice and then publicly humiliated for being poor and ragged. This is a man who has had notice of an unthought of privilege – an invitation to the king’s son’s wedding! And he has deliberately refused to dress appropriately. Or (if Augustine is right and the king would have provided robes for the guests) he has refused to wear the offered garment. Whichever the case, we are supposed to understand that the guest is as wilfully rebellious as the original invitees! He has turned up his nose at grace.

This man is not being held up in order to distinguish between the good and the bad guests. In v10, both the good and the bad are invited. Is Jesus saying that this is sorting the wheat from the chaff; that the good are welcome and can be distinguished from the bad by their appropriate dress code? No. This would run counter to the shock of Jesus’ message to the religious people of his day: the kingdom will belong precisely to the disreputable, the outcasts and the impure. We must read carefully for the warning that this parable contains. Both good and bad, in this parable, are there by grace. They’ve come from the streets. They are not those who could possibly expect to be on the invitation list to a royal wedding! There are two wrong ways of responding to grace.

The temptation for the good people who receive grace is to lapse into an overemphasis on purity and legal obedience that makes outcasts of those whom God wishes to be part of the kingdom. The temptation for the bad people is to see grace as licence to do as they wish. This is the point of the second half of the parable (or, as is most likely, a separate parable that Matthew has incorporated into the story of the royal wedding feast). Grace is intended for a purpose – the transformation of the recipients and their transformation of the world. It is unconditional in that it is offered regardless of desert – in fact, the more undeserving we are, the more gracious God is to us! But grace is not some consumer product, given for our endless titillation and narcissistic pleasure. It is given in order that we might share in Christ’s relationship to God as Abba, and that, as God’s children, we bear fruit for the kingdom. 

Fruit is the metaphor of the vineyard parables. Here the metaphor is clothing - a metaphor especially loved by the prophet Isaiah. For example, we have the startling image of Yahweh putting on war clothes to fight against injustice - the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, garments of vengeance and a mantle of fury (Isaiah 59:16ff). Clothing is symbolic of characteristics. Transformation is sometimes expressed in terms of changing clothes - exchanging "the garment of praise" for the spirit of heaviness, for example. Paul uses the image of being "clothed" in Christ. God's people are supposed to "clothe" themselves with christlikeness just as the newly baptised used to put on a brand new, white garment (similar to a wedding robe!). Clothing is a metaphor that denotes recognisable christlikeness. It is something both individual and collective - it is to characterise disciples of Jesus, but also the community of disciples. What is appropriate clothing? In terms of the three parables, obedience, love, joyful response, justice, radical hospitality, faithful discipleship, and worship.

Amen.

16:40 Posted in Isaiah , Matthew , Psalms , Year A | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this

Tuesday, 27 September 2005

Pentecost 20

Isaiah 5: 1-7   NRSV text
Philippians 3: 4b-14   NRSV text
Matthew 21: 33-46  NRSV text

 
There’s no getting around Jesus!  However we might feel about Jesus, the fact is that he is God’s Son and God has done something decisively through him that relativises all that has gone before, however venerable and sacred.  And what God has done has been done in order to elicit a response.  God poses the question to us: “This is what I have done in Jesus.  What have you got so say in response?  How will you believe now, and live now, and pray now in the light of what you see me doing in my Son?”  The difficulty faced by the people of God in this week’s texts is how to deal with this radical, God-induced break with the past.  What is the value of the old in the light of the new?

The NRSV heads the section in Philippians chapter 3 “Breaking with the Past”.  The context of Paul’s writing is the long-standing debate about the status of the old covenant.  Do Gentile Christians have to become Jews?  Must they be circumcised?  In this week’s passage, Paul gives an unequivocal “no”.  Paul is hardly restrained in his language, calling his opponents “dogs” and “evil workers”, who “mutilate the flesh” (v2).  Remember, he is referring to good, pious Jews, those who are trying to be faithful to the demands of the old covenant!  The strength of his language (to call a Jew a “dog” was the ultimate insult) has less to do with personal feelings than it has to do with his theological rhetoric.  If circumcision is of no value in the new dispensation of grace ushered in by God in Jesus, then it is nothing more than “mutilating the flesh”.  Paul wants to make it clear that the break with the past is decisive because of what God has done in Jesus Christ.

It is not Paul’s intention to rubbish the old covenant.  All that God has done in the Jewish past has been an act of grace for salvation.  But it has been frustrated by human resistance.  So the Law, which he sees as a “schoolmaster, designed to lead us to Christ”, has ended up imprisoning resistant human beings in guilt and condemnation.  God has therefore done something new, totally unexpected and wonderful in Jesus Christ.  “[W]e who worship in the Spirit of God” echoes the promised new covenant of Jeremiah 31:31ff.  This is a covenant “engraved” not on the body (through circumcision) but on the heart (through the Spirit).  Thus for Paul, all that God has done in Jesus has gathered up, fulfilled and surpassed the old ways.  There is continuity with the old, but also a radical newness that makes the old redundant.

“Confidence in the flesh” (v4a) is often used in church-speak to mean the same thing as “works rather than faith” – ie human self-confidence.  Yet Paul refers here to the confidence in the covenant promises of God, sealed by the sign of circumcision.  And as far as the past is concerned, says Paul, his credentials are impeccable!  But these no longer have any value.  They are obsolete.  They cannot deliver what they were supposed to – a sharing in the covenant blessings – because the old covenant pointed towards Jesus Christ, was fulfilled in Jesus Christ and yet, ironically, they led Paul to persecute Jesus Christ (v6)!

So now Paul counts these past things as “rubbish” and as having no value in the light of the “surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord”.  To “know” Christ is to share in the resurrection life of God and in God’s purposes of salvation for the world. 

Although we need to recognise this primarily as a piece of theological rhetoric, the language and single-mindedness of Paul’s writing reflects his own personal struggle and biography.  This was not a conclusion he came to coolly and soberly in the light of his study.  This didn’t emerge from a dispassionate consideration of texts or theological reflection.  It was born in the cauldron of his conversion experience on the Damascus Road.  Note the irony of v6: “as to zeal, a persecutor of the church”.  All that Paul had counted dear; all he had lived his life by; all that he had believed and worked for; everything he knew about his God had brought him to the Damascus Road, en route to carry out violence against the Christian heretics.  There he learns that it is Jesus himself whom he is persecuting; that Jesus, executed by crucifixion, is none other than God’s Messiah and the means of God’s salvation for the world.  It is difficult to imagine the sorts of inner conflicts that Paul must have gone through as he wrestled with the huge gap between his expectations and beliefs, and God’s reality.  We cannot talk about “breaking with the past” glibly.  It is heartbreaking, difficult and little short of rebuilding life and faith.  But it is unavoidable – and worthwhile because of all that God has for us and the world in Jesus Christ.

The gospel reading and Isaiah 5: 1-7 come at the subject via the metaphor of the vineyard.  The parable of the wicked tenants consciously echoes the Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard in Isaiah 5: 1-7.  The metaphor of Israel/Judah as Yahweh’s vineyard was well known.  The exile was Yahweh’s judgement upon the failure to be the People of God Yahweh intended: a nation of “justice and righteousness” (v7).  Instead, it was place of bloodshed and “crying” (echoing the cry of the Hebrew slaves in Pharaoh’s brick pits that Yahweh heard and responded to in the exodus).  Jesus recasts the theme of the vineyard in terms of response to himself.  The parable gives the answer to the earlier question about the source of Jesus’ authority: he is the Son of the vineyard owner.  In Isaiah 5:3, the people of Judah are invited by Yahweh to “judge between God and his vineyard”.  What is the vineyard owner to do with a vineyard that will not yield fruit, despite all his care and attention?  In the parable, the twist is made possible by introducing the tenants (the religious leaders) who have been charged with the care and flourishing of the vineyard.  So, in Matthew 21:40, the religious leaders are invited to judge between God and the tenants: “What will he do to those tenants [who have murdered the son and stolen his inheritance]?”

There are three points to note.  The first is that the tenants refuse to recognise the authority of the son (and thus of the vineyard owner).  Jesus behaved in a way that scandalised the religious leaders.  He broke the purity laws with impunity.  Such a man clearly could not come from God, but in fact needed opposing – arresting and killing, if necessary – in faithful obedience to God.  Yet the truth is that Jesus was precisely the focus of God’s presence and saving activity in their midst.  This is part of Matthew’s Christology.  Jesus is the Son of God and, as such, is not only the focus of God’s plans and purposes but the standard by which all are judged.  The criterion of judgement is our response to Jesus himself.  Look at v45 and compare it to v26.  Like John, the crowds regard Jesus as a prophet.  The implicit question posed by Jesus in vv 42ff is this: “Look at me and all that I am doing, and tell me: is this from God, or of human origin?”

The second point is that, while being a christological parable, it is at same time a parable of the kingdom of God (see v43).  The focus on response to Jesus must not be understood in an inappropriately narrow way as “What is your personal response to Jesus?”  The question is never less than that, and summons us to personal faith in Christ and discipleship of Jesus.  We are challenged at least to recognise what the crowds saw and did.  They recognised that Jesus was from God, and they followed.  We are challenged to further to make our own confession as Peter did: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!”  That is not intended as a theological statement but a testimony to the deepe