Tuesday, 04 April 2006
The Liturgy of the Passion - Year B
Isaiah 50: 4-9a NRSV text
Psalm 31: 9-16 NRSV text
Philippians 2: 5-11 NRSV text
Mark 14: 1-15: 47 NRSV text
It feels very peculiar to be concentrating on the Passion a week before it happens! But then, many people move directly from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, missing out the passion itself! It’s therefore very much a case of what to put in and what to leave out – particularly given the weight and size of the lectionary readings for the Liturgy of the Passion. I want, therefore, to do nothing more than to highlight some of the issues that leap out at me as I read Mark’s account of the Passion, and which seem to me worth stressing to someone who will otherwise miss out on this crucial (a quite deliberate pun!) section of the gospel narrative. It is, after all, the crunch – what it is all about. Mark has brought us at incredible pace to the outskirts of Jerusalem. The pace alone tells us how determinedly he has headed to this point. Interestingly, it is only once we are “at the city gates” that Mark slows the narrative pace, concentrating on the passage of time. There is a sense in which the entire gospel has been on “fast forward” as he whips through the lead-up that brings us to the events of Holy Week. Now he lets go of the button, and the story is allowed to proceed slowly enough for the readers to take in every moment of the unfolding drama.
Messianic anointing at Bethany (14: 3-9)
This is a strange passage in several ways – not least because of what it includes (Simon’s name, that he was a leper, the monetary value of the ointment) and what it leaves out (the silence on the woman’s name is positively deafening). This is extraordinarily ironic: the woman who will be remembered wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world and in all time is anonymous! Wouldn’t it be good to know who she was? And is it surprising that it is a woman who is so strikingly “forgotten” even as she is remembered? This is the significance of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s book, In Memory of Her.
What is it about what she does that is so “memorable”? Jesus is doing more than saying, “This is a very striking incident that ought not to be forgotten”. He is holding the woman up as a paradigm of discipleship. Remember that the second half of Mark’s gospel is about the way of the cross, and the deep resistance of the disciples to it. The point here is that the woman – unlike the disciples, and Peter in particular – accepts that Jesus is facing the cross. She does not try to dissuade him from the path, but prepares him for it. In effect, she says, “I am doing what I can to walk this road with you”. It is costly ointment because the road ahead for Jesus is costly.
Sell-outs and signals: life in the shadows
The authorities have been conspiring to kill Jesus ever since 3:6. As the Passover approaches, Mark resumes the conspiracy narrative. Judas’ actions and the elaborate preparations for the Passover (14: 12-15) are puzzling at first sight. Why do the authorities need a traitor? Why not simply seize Jesus? And why the emphasis on the Passover preparations that have led many commentators to see this as some sort of miraculous foreknowledge that Jesus has about what the “two disciples” will find in the city?
These begin to make perfect sense when we recognise that Jesus and the disciples have gone underground. Jesus is planning his “Jerusalem campaign” strategically. Bethany is a safe haven for the group, which is being hunted by the authorities. Jesus has been careful to date: his appearances in the city have been public, in the temple, where it would have been difficult to seize him without provoking a riot. Mark paints a picture of a volatile situation that both makes it difficult for the authorities to move openly against Jesus and makes it necessary for Jesus to be very circumspect.
They are in Bethany in secret. If the authorities are to take him at a time of their choosing (preferably at night), they will need to know the group’s movements. They need someone on the inside who is prepared to keep them informed – and that person is Judas. Judas initiates the betrayal: he goes to the chief priests and agrees to betray Jesus for the promise of money. Mark doesn’t invoke any theory of satanic inspiration for Judas’ actions: it is straightforward, grubby money-grabbing. And so Judas begins to look for an opportunity to deliver Jesus to the authorities at time when he can be taken without fear of a riot. That means that he needs to find a time when they are in the city (rather than at Bethany) or close enough for the authorities to get together an arresting party at short notice. And it needs to be at a time that will enable them to act without being observed by the people – ideally, therefore, at night.
It will be the Passover that provides the opportunity. Jesus and his disciples will have to go into the city. This is highly dangerous, as well Jesus knows. Clearly, there was an anonymous group of sympathisers, living in the city and linked to Jesus and his group. Jesus makes arrangements with them to have a private room in which to celebrate the Feast with his disciples. The logistics are worked out carefully. Two disciples are to go into the city. Two men are hardly likely to attract the attention that Jesus and his band would if they went in en masse. There is an agreed signal: a man carrying a water jar. That’s the contact. Carrying a water jar is normally women’s work. It’s a clever signal – unusual enough to be unmistakeable and noticeable, but not so unusual as to be conspicuous or arouse suspicion. The two are instructed not to talk to him, but simply to follow at a distance. The contact will lead them to the house. The two are to wait until he’s gone in, then knock, and give the owner the agreed code (V14). Jesus has already had word that this man is able to provide them with a large, unfurnished room upstairs that they can use. The two disciples are instructed to prepare the unfurnished room, and then return to Bethany to lead the group secretly into the city under the cover of darkness. Wonderful cloak-and-dagger stuff – yet terrible, terrifying and deadly.
Betrayal and covenant
When we realise just what is at stake, and just how careful Jesus is having to be, we begin to take on board just how callous and cynical Judas’ betrayal is. It doesn’t matter how elaborate the precautions are that Jesus takes to ensure the group’s safety: there is a traitor in their midst. They are doomed. We – the audience – know this. And so does Jesus.
Small wonder, then, that the opening words recorded in Mark’s gospel are words of sorrow and accusation: “One of you will betray me!” The disciples are probably just beginning to relax, and believe that everything has gone safely according to plan. Jesus’ words area bombshell, and they “begin to be distressed”, as Mark puts it. This is the closest Mark comes to English understatement! They would have been shocked, frightened and devastated. It can’t be true! The pressure must be getting to Jesus – he’s losing the plot. After all, if he only stopped and thought about what he was saying – even for a second – he’d realise just how ridiculous it sounded. They begin to relax, having convinced themselves that it’s all down to stress. So Jesus speaks again. “Yes, I do know what I’m implying. So let me tell you straight. We’re not talking about one of our friends, who has helped us thus far. I’m talking about you – the people in this room. It is one of the Twelve – however unbelievable you find that!”
One question that arises is, given Jesus’ antipathy to the temple and its compromised cult, why does he bother with the Feast – particularly in view of the dangers associated with being in the city itself? The answer lies in what Jesus will do at the Passover. This is to be the new covenant. Here is a word of hope and promise. Until now, he has told the disciples only that he will be handed over, will suffer horribly, will be killed and will rise again. Now he promises them that it is not in vain. This has a purpose: his death is for others.
We talk glibly about the “new covenant” as a covenant of grace. Yet it is when we listen to the words of institution, prefaced by “On the night in which he was betrayed …” and realise the sick despair that Jesus must have been feeling as he sat at the meal, that we begin to appreciate what “grace” means. It means Jesus facing the fact that one of his hand-picked friends, with whom he had shared his life and hopes and dreams, had callously and deliberately decided to betray him. And Jesus knew that this was the night. He knew, too, that his best efforts to convince the disciples about the way of the cross had failed. They would all desert him before the night was out. If his criterion for true discipleship was “denying themselves, taking up the cross and following”, then none of the Twelve was actually going to make the grade. Everything that Jesus has worked for is about to be smashed beyond any hope of repair.
Looking all this fully in the face, Jesus’ response is to promise them a future. It is a future based on what he will do alone. It is a new covenant based not on their faithfulness but on Jesus’ faithfulness. It is the promise of fellowship, given to traitors and deserters. Even though Peter will deny three times that he ever even knew who Jesus was (another sign of the intense threat facing the community), Jesus will never deny him.
Gethsemane: torment and terror
As the group (now minus Judas) leaves the upper room to return to the safety of the countryside, Jesus knows that it is too late. They have been betrayed. Escape is impossible. Jesus must face the cross. Typically – and unsurprisingly – he chooses to spend the short time he has left in prayer. But this is a startlingly atypical “Jesus-in-prayer” scene. Mark’s account of Gethsemane is deeply shocking. Something terrible and destructive is happening between Jesus and the God whom he calls Father. Several times in the gospel we find Jesus withdrawing at key points to be alone in prayer (cf 1:35, 6:46). He draws strength and encouragement from communing alone with his Father. Here in Gethsemane, Jesus is desperate not to be alone in God’s presence! He asks his friends to keep watch with him – because he is terrified. The language of 14:33 is very strong: he “shudders in distress” (ekthambeisthai) and “anguishes” (ademonein). Its force is difficult to covey adequately. The scholar Lohmeyer says, “The Greek words depict the utmost degree of unbounded horror and suffering”.
This is no reassuring time spent with God! Jesus throws himself to the ground, begging God like a child (“Abba, Father, please …”) to spare him what lies ahead (v36a). And he is answered with silence. Yes, Jesus could have refused to go through with it, and yes, Jesus responds by saying “Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll do it” (v36b). Yet Mark wants us to understand that Jesus finds the silence of God appalling. God will not grant his request – and this is the reason for Jesus’ terror.
What is it that is so appalling? Clearly, there is deep dread at what lies ahead. Jesus would not be human if he didn’t fear it. Yet Jesus is no coward. There seems, in these verses, to be an altogether more terrifying prospect: the fear that he, the Son, the Beloved, who loved the Father as no one else has, could be ‘forsaken’. He will not refer again to God as “Abba”, but only formally as “God”. Jesus did not fear for his life. He feared for God. He experienced God’s silence as abandonment, and it tore his soul apart.
What did the cross mean for Jesus? We see it here, as he struggles in Gethsemane. But struggles with whom? It is more than his struggle with what lies ahead, more than his struggle with himself. Gethsemane is Jesus’ struggle with his experience of God – the death of the Father-Son relationship. This is his torment, and this is what he endures on the cross through his self-surrender.
The collapse of the discipleship narrative
This is a dark and depressing story. We are watching the disintegration of all that Jesus has been about unfolding. The tragedy is as inexorable as it is inevitable. Try and imagine what it must have been like for Jesus. He is utterly alone. The disciples have slept, completely impervious to his agony. They just will not “get it”. Jesus wakes them – literally and symbolically. As they struggle into wakefulness, still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, all hell breaks loose. An armed crowd arrives. They haven’t evaded their enemies. Then Judas steps forward from among the crowd – their Judas! – and kisses Jesus. There is an immediate scuffle. Jesus is taken. Terrified, the disciples scatter. Mark puts it starkly: “All of them deserted him and fled” (14:50).
A sign of hope
At this point, however, Mark introduces a tantalising mystery in the form of “a certain young man who was following” (v51). The armed crowd try to grab him as he runs off, catching hold of his clothing (a linen cloth). He tears away and flees into the night, naked, and leaving them holding the linen cloth.
This “young man” is a symbol. The cloth is the symbol of the cloth in which Joseph of Arimathea will wrap Jesus’ body for burial (cf 15: 46). The young man “reappears” at the resurrection, now wrapped in the white robe of the saints and martyrs (16: 5). He is the symbol of the promise of a renewed community of discipleship. He flees the Garden naked (symbolising shame) and is found “restored” in the tomb (symbolising the new community that is given birth through the resurrection).
At the hands of the powers: the double trial narrative
Jesus is tried twice. The accounts follow an identical structure: Jesus is questioned about the main charge against him; he doesn’t reply; he is pressed further and responds ambiguously: “Am I!”/”You said!” Both hearings are then followed by some sort of consultation (between the high priest and the Sanhedrin, and between Pilate and the crowds). Each ends with a verdict, followed by mockery and torture.
Several scholars have suggested that Mark’s intention is to exonerate the Romans as far as possible, and to blame the Jewish authorities for the death of Jesus. The Sanhedrin, they point out, tries fair means and foul to obtain a conviction; Pilate, by contrast, tries to avoid condemning Jesus. He is well aware of the Sanhedrin’s determination to secure a conviction at any cost (15: 4), and tells the mob baying for Jesus’ blood that he has not done any evil to deserve crucifixion (15: 13).
However, the whole of Mark’s narrative has been structured to show the collusion between Rome and the temple. Jesus’ ministry has been a constant challenge to both. His trial is the moment of confrontation with the very powers he has come to destroy – Imperial Rome and the temple purity cult. Jesus is crucified as a messianic pretender and blasphemer: the truth is that he is the Messiah. He is crucified as a self-styled King of the Jews and political revolutionary: the truth is that Jesus is Lord and king.
Mark uses the mockery of the crowds to shout aloud the truth about Jesus. And nowhere is this to be seen more clearly than in the releasing of Barabbas. His name literally means “Son of the Father”. Jesus calls God “Abba”. The crowd call for the release of the “Son of the Father” and for the crucifixion of the true “Son of the Father”. We know this from 1:1 – Mark’s is the story of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God. But this true Son of God is also the true revolutionary! His revolution is a different sort of revolution from the one Barabbas was part of. Jesus will die to bring about something more far-reaching than the kingdom of David. The revolution that Jesus is mounting is a one-man confrontation with powers, in the name of the kingdom of God.
Seeing and believing
The mockery is no more pronounced than on the cross itself (15: 25ff). Mark is doing more than using narrative irony to proclaim who Jesus is, however. This is “the Messiah, the King of Israel” (v32). The mockery is both total and Mark’s point about the “last word” on the Good News that Jesus preached and lived. Jesus is mocked by the passers-by, the chief priests and scribes, and the two bandits on either side of Jesus. Jesus is alone. The voice of God at his baptism and transfiguration is replaced and drowned out by the voices of mockery: “Everything you said and believed is rubbish! You thought you were so special! You thought you were God’s Son! You believed the Voice! Well, just look at you now!” Two things are happening. The first is that Mark is following his dramatic narrative formula of using irony to disclose truth. The chief priests will “see and believe” that he is the Messiah, the King of Israel, if he comes down. The ironic truth is that he is those because he chooses not to come down! Jesus is reaping the consequences of the “Your will be done!” choice he made in Gethsemane.
The second is that Jesus’ soul is being torn to pieces – because these voices make sense to him! Even though he hangs on (literally) and doesn’t turn back from the way of the cross, he does so in the face of the utter despair of being abandoned by God.
Golgotha: despair and death
There are no reassuring words from the mouth of Mark’s crucified Jesus. Jesus hangs on the cross in silent agony for three hours. He is utterly alone in his silence. He has been abandoned by his disciples: he is no longer the Master. He has been abandoned by his people: he is no longer a Jew. He has been abandoned to crucifixion: he is no longer regarded as human. And, at the moment of his death, he lifts his head to scream in despair, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
It is difficult to imagine how these words could have entered into Christian faith if they had never been uttered. Nor will it do to note that they are the opening words of Psalm 22, thereby making them less shocking and offensive. Psalm 22 ends up as a prayer of thanksgiving for deliverance from death. Placing the cry of abandonment in that wider context robs the words of their horror and offence, but it will not do. The popular notion that Jesus recited the psalm his dying moments, after three hours on a cross, is simply ridiculously implausible. And the whole point is that there was no deliverance from death on the cross! Jesus dies, utterly alone, calling to God, but in despair and accusation. He does not refer to God as Father, but quite formally as “God” – as though he had come to doubt what had been fundamental to his identity throughout: that he was the Son, Beloved of the Father.
Three responses to Jesus’ death
Traditionally, there are three “true disciples” – three non-mockers, who respond appropriately to the death of Jesus: the centurion, Joseph of Arimathea and the women. The centurion’s statement, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!” is commonly taken as the climax of the gospel. He is the “ultimate witness” to the truth that Mark tells us at the outset of the narrative, and which is confirmed by the heavenly voice at Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration. Joseph is the other, repentant “Nicodemus-type” figure – Jesus’ “friend at court” among the Sanhedrin, who fails to do enough while Jesus is alive but now, with his death, finds the courage he previously lacked and aligns himself with Jesus (see, for example, the way in which he is portrayed in The Greatest Story Ever Told). Both of these assessments need to be questioned.
The centurion: “Rome has triumphed over Jesus!”
This, at least, is Ched Myers’ contention. The centurion’s statement has frequently been questioned as an unambiguous confession of divinity. It could equally be a colloquialism – effectively saying, “This was a son of god (ie a human being)”. If so, we ought to read this as “This was (and is no more) a human being” – ie “This man is dead”. It is a formal declaration by the person responsible for overseeing the executions on Golgotha, and a declaration that Rome’s sentence and will have been carried out properly. That is precisely what we would expect of the man in his position. Moreover, the centurion then goes off to Pilate to report the successful completion of his mission (15: 44). If this is about an epiphany and conversion experience of a centurion who becomes a disciple, Mark is singularly silent about telling us so! There is no discernible change in the centurion – only an immediate return to his true Lord – Pilate! Pilate is wondering whether the power of Rome (Caesar) has “triumphed” over the “King of the Jews” (Jesus). The centurion’s role is to confirm that this is what has indeed happened!
Joseph of Arimathea: “The Sanhedrin has defeated Jesus!”
Mark is at pains to tell us that Joseph is “a respected member of the council” – in other words, deeply complicit in Jesus’ death. He is “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God”. The traditional view is that he is an exception to his brother councillors in this. Yet there is never any suggestion in the gospel that the problem the authorities had with Jesus was that he preached the kingdom of God! They, too, were “expecting” it. Everyone was! The problem was the content Jesus gave to the kingdom. The Sanhedrin had found this blasphemous. They had sought to have Jesus killed – and now he had been. An end had been put to that little blasphemy. It could be safely “buried”.
It was, indeed, a bold move to go to Pilate. But is the boldness occasioned by fear of Imperial opposition, or is it a boldness that, under normal circumstances would be grossly impertinent, but, given the co-operation between the Sanhedrin and Rome in Jesus’ death, but in this context has as its basis a shared common goal?
Myers suggests – extremely plausibly – that the Sanhedrin wished to clear the whole matter away as quickly as possible, presumably to minimise possible trouble when the whole matter became public. What better way than to have Jesus taken down and buried as hastily as possible? And what clearer statement could be given that this matter was finished and filed in the archives?
Rather than a mark of respect, in other words, we need to see Joseph as acting on behalf of the Sanhedrin to consolidate their victory over Jesus. Joseph does not tend to any of the traditional offices or rites of burial – a reason, in fact, for the women to have to return to the tomb. Joseph appears only to wrap Jesus (carelessly?) in the nearest thing to hand – a loincloth (itself a symbol of the disciples’ desertion) and almost toss his body into the tomb and shut it in order to get things done as quickly as possible. There is nothing that shows any sense of respect: quite the opposite. This, then, is a hurried burial – the final indignity.
Further weight is lent to this argument by Mark’s use of symbols. A key area of contention between Jesus and the Sanhedrin has been the conflict over Sabbath observance. Jesus has stood far too loose on this matter. He is, as we are told in 2:28, “Lord of the Sabbath”. In the end, the Sanhedrin has successfully seen off Jesus’ challenge to the symbolic order represented by Sabbath observance. The one who claimed to be “Lord of the Sabbath” is subjected to the ultimate insult: a hurried, improper entombment for the sake of the Sabbath order, lest Jesus’ dead body profane the Sabbath! Surely Mark is not unaware of the irony here: the Sanhedrin, in the name of God, has conspired to have Jesus murdered. Their hands are covered in his blood; their system of justice manipulated, shamed and in tatters. And now they are claiming the sort of purity-holiness that Jesus despised and decried by attending scrupulously to Sabbath observance – as though that were a greater profanity than Jesus’ execution!
The women – the true disciples
The women are the “lifeline” of the discipleship narrative. These are the women who have followed Jesus from the Galilee, and served him. They have followed to the foot of the cross, and now they follow to the grave. Like the woman at Bethany who anoints Jesus, the women have not deserted him and fled. Neither have they tried to avoid the cross. In both of these things – being servants and following all the way to the cross and beyond – they have done what the male disciples were incapable of doing.
And so, at the conclusion of the Passion, in the place of death and entombment, we find ourselves in the company of the women who will be the first witnesses to something utterly astounding – something that will change everything forever: resurrection!
Amen.
14:02 Posted in Isaiah , Mark , Philippians , Psalms , Year B | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this | Tags: Bible Study
Wednesday, 28 December 2005
Holy Name Year B
Numbers 6: 22-27 NRSV text
Psalm 8 NRSV text
Philippians 2: 5-11 NRSV text
Luke 2: 15-21 NRSV text
What’s in a name? When it comes to the name of Jesus, pretty much everything! Jesus – which means “God saves” – is the means by which God has chosen to save all of created reality. All of creation will be summed up in Jesus as Paul tells us in Philippians 2:10-11. It is at this name that every knee shall bow and this person that every tongue confess as Lord. “Jesus” is therefore not only a name, but a cause. It is the shorthand for God’s project of salvation.
But this means that “Jesus” is an intensely disputed name. It is disputed, not in the sense that there is lack of clarity about which individual is being designated, but in the sense of the “how” and the “what” of God’s salvation. What does God intend by “salvation” in Jesus? How is this salvation to be accomplished? There is also the disputed sense of “who”: who is the God that is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth? What kind of God is this? The fact that God intends this baby to be the means of salvation puts Jesus on a collision course with the powers of his day – religious and political – from the moment of his public ministry. It is a ministry that will end in death on the cross. Ironically, it is precisely because it does so that God exalts Jesus (Phil 2: 9). This is a salvation that is effected by God’s humility – in taking flesh and being prepared to suffer the total rejection and humiliation of the cross. In Luke’s account of the cross, it is through the radical grace and forgiveness of God in Jesus: when human beings have fully, finally and ultimately rejected God, Jesus speaks the words of promise and forgiveness – “Father, forgive them …” and “This day you will be with me in paradise”. Salvation in Jesus happens because there is nothing that we human beings can do to cut us off from God’s love, and when we have spoken our last word on the subject, God has still another Word to speak: the Word of Resurrection.
But what sort of salvation is this? If Christian history shows us anything clearly, it shows us that there are many Jesuses, in the sense that Jesus is claimed by various opposing groups in history to be on their side because their cause is part of God’s saving actions in the world. South African Christians claimed that Apartheid was the manifestation of God’s saving grace – the way in which God was apparently “blessing and keeping” South Africa, “being gracious” to its people and “making his face to shine upon them”! The German Christians saw Hitler similarly. As did the Inquisition, and the white supremacists in the United States.
One of my Christmas presents was the DVD The Kingdom of Heaven, which told the story of the capture of Jerusalem from the Christian king by the great Moslem leader, Saladin. Those of you familiar with the history will recall that what was so remarkable was that, whereas a generation before, the Christians who captured the city had massacred every Muslim in the city, Saladin spared not only the inhabitants but the Christian army, as well. It raised acutely the question of who was more Christ-like: those who fought in Christ’s name, or who acted mercifully? Put differently: which is the real Jesus – the Jesus who commands and blesses the slaughter of so-called infidels, or the one in whom we see God’s grace, peace and justice made a reality on earth?
What is important is not that people do things in the name of Jesus, but what they do in his name. Bob Dylan wrote With God on our side, a military history of the United States, as an ironic reflection on the ease with which Jesus is commandeered as a justification for militarism and conquest. His final verse exposes his own disquiet: “Through many a dark hour/I’ve been thinking about this:/that Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss./Now I can’t think for you,/you’ll have to decide/whether Judas Iscariot had/God on his side!” This is a song that is informed by the same gospel tension where Jesus says that there will be many who say to him on the last day, “Lord, Lord, didn’t we cast out demons and perform many miracles in your name?” and he will reply, “Depart from me. I never knew you!”
Christian faith is not simply a matter of naming the name of Jesus – even in worship! It is not enough to be baptised in his name, or belong to the community of faith that exists in this name. Christian faith is about discipleship, which means following in the way of Jesus and doing as he did. It is Jesus-shaped living and acting in the world. Or, as he himself put it when asked by his disciples how to pray, it is doing God’s will on earth.
Jesus’ mission was the means by which God was saving the world. The community in which Jesus lived was under military occupation. They expected the imminent intervention of God – by which they meant the overthrow of the Romans, the purification of Israel and a newly-established theocracy in Jerusalem which would be their vindication to the whole world. Yet the saving activity of God in Jesus was something radically beyond all that Jesus’ contemporaries – including the religious leaders – could possibly imagine. God had a bigger agenda than the salvation of Israel. God’s agenda was nothing less than the salvation of everything that had been created! Its scope reached far beyond the narrow confines of Jerusalem. It was global. Indeed, as Paul reflects, it is cosmological in breadth.
Yet its beginnings and its means are astonishingly, ridiculously small and insignificant. It begins in the stable in Bethlehem, witnessed by shepherds. And while we are clearly meant to understand that Luke is telling us, “This is the Shepherd of Israel”, we are also meant to understand that the incarnation – heaven come down to earth – is first and foremost Good News to the despised, the marginalised and the unimportant. Jesus, we are reminded, is the name given to Mary at the annunciation. It is Mary’s song of praise – the Magnificat – that reminds us of the how of God’s salvation. This is a God who will lift up the lowly, cast down the mighty from their thrones and bring in a new order of human living and relating. Jesus is the Liberator, the Hope of the hopeless and Voice of the voiceless. The kingdom that he proclaims and inaugurates is the kingdom of peace and justice longed for through the ages and promised through the prophets. It is the world as it ought to be. And it begins with the very least first.
That is why Jesus’ is the way of radical humility. It is the way of selflessness, the abandonment of our own interests and the embracing of those of the very least. It is committing ourselves to the struggle for a world where justice makes war and violence redundant, and where poverty, disease and starvation will be a thing of the past. It is the way of the cross. But it is the way to Life, because it is the way of Jesus and there is no other name under heaven by which God is saving the world.
Amen.
14:25 Posted in Luke , Numbers , Philippians , Psalms , Year B | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Bible Study, Holy Name Year B, Luke 2: 15-21, Philippians 2: 5-11, Numbers 6: 22-27, RCL, lectionary resources, commentary on lectionary texts
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 deepest reality of our lives. Yet we can never divorce Jesus from his message. Matthew tells us clearly: “Where Jesus is, there the kingdom is present!” And the focus of Jesus’ message is always primarily on the kingdom. Discipleship is about personal relationship with God through Jesus – the life of the kingdom – but in order to empower us as disciples to go out and “do God’s will on earth” (join in God’s mission of transforming the world into the kingdom of God). That (rather than faith itself) is the “fruits of the kingdom” to which Jesus refers (v43).
Thirdly, the vineyard will be “leased to other tenants who will give [the landowner] the produce at the harvest time” (v41). As Paul reflects on the implications of a gospel that is Good News to those outside the confines of Jewish faith, so Jesus confronts his hearers with the boundary-breaking grace of the Good News of the kingdom, manifested in his ministry. This is a gospel for all – and for the least first! It is a gospel of radical inclusion. It is not based on merit, birth, purity or religious observance, but on the invitation of God and its joyful welcome by Jesus’ hearers. Not only are the religious leaders confronted with the need to break from the past and understand God in new, frightening and unfamiliar ways, but with the challenge also of relinquishing control. To give over our spaces and churches to those from the outside; to allow that they may have heard God more clearly than we can because of the muffles of our familiarity, traditions and narrow expectations, is a humbling and frightening thing. To consider that Paul’s Damascus Road experience might be precisely the sort of kairos confronting the Christian church now, and requiring a similar reassessment of our religious traditions and practices, is profoundly disturbing. How much are we prepared to allow to be up for grabs? If push comes to shove, how much will we count as “rubbish” when compared with “the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ”?
A final comment. The metaphor of the vineyard is framed within the context of the whole vexed question of land in Israel. The land, its ownership and its stewardship are at the heart of Isaiah’s and Jesus’ parables. It was not a theme plucked at random from thin air. It arose from the political potency of the land question within both those societies. It takes a wilful blindness, therefore, to ignore its contemporary relevance to events in Israel/Palestine. As we have watched the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the continued expansion of the settlement programme elsewhere in the West Bank, we cannot ignore the prophetic denunciation of the Judah of Isaiah’s day. The society, which was supposed to manifest Yahweh’s concern for the very least and be a place of justice and human flourishing, was little different in reality from the region today. The shootings, bombings, missiles and misery in Israel/Palestine are a direct result of the Israeli occupation and confiscation of Palestinian land and its oppressive policies. Those Christians who argue that Israel is justified in what it does because God has given the Holy Land to the Jewish people in covenantal perpetuity ought to read their bibles more carefully. When the vineyard is unfruitful (ie when the society becomes unjust and oppressive), Yahweh breaks down its walls and abandons it. The God revealed in Jesus is the God who hears the cries of the least – especially when they are the victims of those who have received mercy, grace and forgiveness! It is the covenant of the grace of God in Jesus Christ that will stand forever. Those of us who are disciples need to bear fruits of the kingdom – peace with justice, liberation for the oppressed, food for the starving, clothing for the naked, relief from poverty, hope and promise for the despairing. If we fail to do, God will take the vineyard from us and give it to other tenants who will give God the harvest.
Amen.
10:35 Posted in Isaiah , Matthew , Philippians , Year A | Permalink | Comments (7) | Email this
Monday, 19 September 2005
Pentecost 19
Ezekiel 18: 1-4, 25-32 NRSV text
Philippians 2: 1-13 NRSV text
Matthew 21: 23-32 NRSV text
“Get with the programme!” That is the burden of the texts this week. God is doing something new and unexpected – something that undermines the comfortable notions we have inherited from the past. There is enormous tension in these three texts – a tension that throws into question the authority of the past. The new thing that God is doing challenges us to discern God in the unexpected and to have the courage to put away inherited understandings. In so doing, we will be freed to respond to God in new, life-giving ways. Yet if we fail to discern the activity of God, or fail to muster the necessary courage to revise what we might always have held to be self-evidently true, we will miss God’s kairos and find ourselves paralysed by the past.
Israel is in exile. The proverb of Ezekiel 18: 2-4 (cf Jeremiah 31:29-30) sounds like a tribal saying, asserting the solidarity of the community of Israel over the generations. Decisions made by one generation affect subsequent ones. This is the wisdom of ages. Yet the exile undermines the truth of the proverb. The proverb is a recipe for inaction and helpless quietism. If it is true that the exile is punishment of the present generation for the sins of their forebears, then there is nothing to be done other than patiently to endure it. There is no creative space for new responses and new possibilities. Both exilic prophets (Ezekiel and Jeremiah) want to assert that the present is the arena for new, creative and life-giving responses to a God who wills Life. In order for that to happen, the authority of the old proverbial wisdom must be defeated.
Walter Brueggemann makes the point that the crisis of received wisdom is characteristic of any society undergoing rapid change. New experience throws into question accepted wisdom. This is particularly difficult to handle when the received wisdom leans close to biblical wisdom. These apparently self-evident truths are deeply-rooted social coping mechanisms. They give us an interpretive grid for “reading” society and “keeping intact a known, manageable, social world” (Brueggemann).
We in the Church are living through a time of enormous upheaval. The old answers don’t deliver any more. The social fabric is changing beyond recognition and we are adrift. It is, for many, a terrifying time. There are no guarantees because old formulae simply don’t apply, or don’t work. While many of us talk about “new ways of being church” and the church of the future being unrecognisable from the way it is now, we fear the open-endedness of what we proclaim and feel lost in the unknown. Many more of us, like Israel in the exile, cling ever more tenaciously to the old wisdom and the old ways in order to have a compass bearing and sense of control. But, the prophet warns, this won’t work.
The problem is that our God is the God of new wine! And new wine cannot be contained in old wineskins. The old wineskins burst at the seams. Jahweh asserts through the prophet that it is this generation that is called to faithful response. This is our hour! God is doing something new that breaks our previous categories. We are called to a new paradigm of living and believing that renders the old as obsolete as Copernicus’ discovery that the earth orbits the sun and not vice-versa. But what are the Israelites supposed to discover? They are supposed to discover that they have not been taken into exile to die as punishment for the sins of their forebears, but to respond to God and live! “Why will you die, o house of Israel? Turn then, and live” says God.
The Parable of the Two Sons has a similar theme. I have always read this parable as Jesus asserting the importance of orthopraxis (right action) over orthodoxy (good theology!). That is certainly one of the implications of the parable. But read in context, there is another, different emphasis. What sparks the parable is a debate about Jesus’ authority for doing what he does. God is doing something new in Jesus that began with John the Baptist. This new thing is happening outside the religious structures and wisdom of the past. This is what is behind the question about authority. For the chief priests and elders, Jesus’ ministry provokes a crisis. If he is from God, then God is not acting as they suppose God ought to act! Received wisdom doesn’t give them a structure for making sense of Jesus or responding to God. The reason for Jesus’ apparent hard-heartedness and refusal to explain is made clear. In posing the question of whether John’s baptism is from God or of human origin, he is asking, “Are you prepared to see God in new and unexpected ways? Have you the courage to throw over your safe, accepted notions of truth?” When they will not commit themselves to an answer, Jesus refuses to discuss it on their terms, but instead poses the question in the form of the parable.
Jesus is not unsympathetic to their difficulty. When the faith and wisdom of the ages is challenged, it is right to be suspicious! But we must not allow faithful caution to paralyse us from new response and understanding. The key to the parable is the reaction of the first son. His initial reaction is to refuse his father, but “later he changed his mind and went” (v29). This becomes the accusation against the religious leaders: “even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him”. In other words, initial scepticism is not condemned, but a refusal to be open to change is evidence of a hard-heartedness and resistance to God that ends in death, not life.
The humility of Christ in the Philippians hymn is yet one further instance of the challenge to discern God acting in totally unexpected, new and offensive ways. If Jesus is the eternal Son of God, then the journey of humility that ends in the scandalous death on the cross is profoundly un-godlike! It is beneath divine dignity! And yet it is the profoundest moment of God’s self-revelation, grace and salvation, for those who have eyes to see. For those who will not, it is “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence”.
It is grace that makes God so startlingly unpredictable and dangerous. God is dangerous because God continually confounds our expectations. Grace destroys the boxes in which we place God. Just when we think we have God taped, God floods our wineskins with new wine, demanding that we throw over our old valuations, our old theology, our old way of being church. This is not to say that God is capricious! It is to understand what Jesus tells us in John’s gospel: “God is Love!” God has a passion for this world that will not be thwarted. When God acts in grace, we rush to control the unexpected. We assume that “This is it! We’ve understood! God cannot surprise us again!” Why else do we find the battles of the Reformation still being fought and re-fought?
What these passages challenge us so strongly to recognise is that God is sovereignly free in grace to change the rules! If we refuse the grace of one method of working, God simply changes the rules and acts anew to woo and win us. God did it in Ezekiel’s day. God did it in Jesus and God is doing the same in our post-modern, post-Christian world. We are called to a more fearless faith and challenged to discern God’s acting for our living and flourishing. God’s call is the same to us in the present exile of the Church today as it is to Ezekiel’s hearers: “Why will you die? I have no pleasure in the death of anyone. Turn, then, and live!”
Amen.
23:50 Posted in Ezekiel , Matthew , Philippians , Year A | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this