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Third Sunday in Epiphany: Last Chance for Justice
Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 4-9; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18;
Matthew 4:12-23
This Sunday, Matthew continues his midrash of Isaiah’s prophecy, this time recording that after the arrest of John the Baptist, Jesus left Nazareth and settled in Capernaum by the Sea of Gallilee, just as the prophet Isaiah predicts. In Isaiah’s blessing oracle of coronation for a Judean King, the new king liberates the land surrounding Galilee that had been subjected to enemy rule. In Matthew’s midrash, Jesus tours all over Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, curing all kinds of diseases, and proclaiming that God’s kingdom has come. These verses in Chapter 4 are the preface to Matthew 5:1 through 7:29, the great Sermon on the Mount. But with Roman Easter tied to the Northern European Spring Equinox instead of the Jewish celebration of Passover (with which the Eastern rite coordinates its Orthodox Easter), except for a couple of carefully cherry-picked verses during Lent, Matthew’s liturgical setting for the heart of Jesus’s life and teaching has been edited out of the Revised Common Lectionary. There is no time for justice in 2008.
But before we follow the Elves into the easy piety of petty sin and salvation, take a look at what Matthew and the Apostle Paul are really talking about.
Matthew may have been suggesting that his five-part treatise on the life and teachings of Jesus was a “new Torah,” to be read in place of the Pentateuch in Jewish-Christian synagogues. Instead of the law of Moses, Matthew lays out the new covenant with the Anointed One, beginning with the Sermon on the Mount, and continuing with instructions for the disciples, the parables Jesus told, regulations for community organization, and judgment for those who decline to comply. Beneath it all is the declaration that the kingdom of God (God’s imperial rule) is now in force, not Roman rule. The new day foretold by the prophets and the martyred John the Baptist has dawned. Moses and the Exodus have been superceded.
Jesus walks by the Sea of Galilee, and invites his disciples to leave their nets and become “fishers for people.” This is usually interpreted to mean saving souls from hell. But John Dominic Crossan, points out that Jesus could have brought his message of liberation anywhere in Roman occupied Judea. Why Galilee? Why Capernaum? Perhaps because Herod Antipas had built a commercial fishing operation on the shores of the lake, in direct competition with the local fishermen such as Peter, Andrew, James, John, and the others. The injustice of the Roman imperial foreign policy, “Romanization by urbanization for commercialization” (Crossan, God and Empire (Harper San Francisco, 2007, p. 102), has predictable results: namely rampant unemployment, poverty, and deprivation. What used to be freely fished from the lake now is only available at high prices from the markets. Fishing boats that had been in fishing families for generations now were taxed as franchises. Perhaps the phrase survives in the tradition because Jesus said it as a bitter joke.“People” are the only things left to be fished for.
This all sounds very familiar in the 21st Century. Instead of “Romanization by urbanization for commercialization” we have Americanization (masquerading as Democratization) by militarization for economic exploitation. But while in the 1st Century one could escape the Roman world if one were willing to walk, ride a pack-horse, or sail long enough and far enough, in the 21st Century the last frontier lies off-Planet, and out of practical reach. While there is one super-power whose economic stumbles threaten global economic collapse, it is the unjust imperial systems of all of the developed and developing nations that force plundering the world’s resources in order to survive economically and politically. As in the 1st Century, what used to be freely fished from the lakes and the oceans now is only available at high prices from the markets. Fishing boats that had been in fishing families for generations now are taxed as franchises or prohibited from the trade because either the fishing stocks are gone, or because of belated environmental regulations – which often benefit those who are able to pay their way around them.
Truly, “people” are the only life forms left to be fished for. But it is tough going, convincing the people that it is when they lose their life and livelihood that they will truly find it. That teaching has been reduced to a New Age self-help mantra (“follow your bliss”), often masquerading as Christian piety: “God has a plan for you.”
In the 1st Century, the Apostle Paul read the riot act to the hapless Corinthian house church, which had fallen into the usual factions and disagreements that every organization falls into. Paul’s sarcasm is scathing: “I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name.” They have apparently forgotten what Paul taught them about the saving grace of the risen Christ. They have reverted to the hierarchical Roman social system of patronage, and are fighting over who owes what to whom and why, and who deserves to sit at the head table, and who will get the best food. Some of them have even begun eating their meal before coming to participate in the sacramental communal meal because they don’t want to associate with people who are beneath them in the Roman social hierarchy. Piety in the form of proper behavior is clearly the order of the day.
But is that what Paul means? Cherry-picking the opening is patently unfair to the rest of the Christian theology that Paul sends to the Corinthians in two separate letters. Still, he says, in 1st Cor. 1:17, he was not sent to baptize people, but to proclaim the gospel so that “the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” The power of the cross is not saving people from hell. The power of the cross is in the radical denial of self-interest that overthrows social systems whether of patronage or conventional access to the means of survival: food, clothing, shelter, and the work required to earn them. In the 21st Century, we have to add planetary ecosystems to the list because we have strayed so far from Jesus’s experience of God’s kingdom as a seamless fabric that supports and sustains all of life.
In the Sermon on the Mount, which we are not going to study this year, Jesus’s first words are, “Congratulations to the poor, for to you belongs Heaven’s domain.” This is the version from the sayings gospel of Thomas, largely assumed to be without the gloss of late first-century Christian interpretation. The poor, who have nothing that the conventional, imperial world deems of value, own the Kingdom of God – just as the lillies of the field and the birds of the air. In the 21st Century, the earth that the poor and disenfranchised have inherited has become a commodity to be exploited. In the words of Joni Mitchell, “Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.”
In order to save life as we have known it, we must be willing to let go of conventional ideas about survival of the fittest, the richest, the smartest. The 1st Century Corinthians had decided that the message of the cross is foolishness. Paul says it’s only foolishness to those who are not being saved.