Parousia – The Coming of the Lord – Part I:  Year A, Proper 24

Exodus 33:12-23; Isaiah 45:1-7; Psalm 99; Psalm 96:1-13; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

The Elves in their wisdom have paired Matthew’s version of Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees trap about whether to pay the Roman poll tax with the first installment of a five-week study of 1st Thessalonians.  The themes seem to be unrelated.  As the Christian liturgical year winds down toward the new season of Advent, Paul’s only authentic letter to the Thessalonians conforms nicely with the dogma that Jesus is coming again.  But if John Dominic Crossan’s interpretation is correct, Jesus’s advice to “pay the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor and God what belongs to God” sums up the key to the kingdom for both Jesus’s followers during his lifetime, and Paul’s Thessalonian converts to the Way 20 years later.

As with last week’s parable of the wedding feast, the version of the story about the attempt to trick Jesus with a Roman coin appears in three of the four synoptic gospels.  Also as with last week’s parable, Matthew’s version is taken as definitive for Christian dogma.  We never read the versions in Mark or Luke (and certainly not Thomas 100:1-4).  The story really does not change much among the four interpretations.  Jesus’s reply to the loaded question is pure authentic Jesus, without any attempt at dumbing it down or re-interpreting the setting for pious purposes.  The Jesus Seminar scholars even imagine that Jesus pocketed the coin while his challengers were trying to figure out what his answer meant (The Five Gospels, p. 526)!  Traditional Christian interpretation of Jesus’s open-ended reply has been to pay taxes, not to withhold them.  The apostle Paul spent some time struggling with the question (Romans 13:1-7), and according to conventional interpretation, comes down on the side of paying, because political leaders are appointed by God.  

But in my commentary, Call and Response, Year A, Proper 17 , I point out that Paul is hardly abandoning his argument that the strength of sin lies in the law:  

        “. . . [C]onsider what Paul is actually saying.  “Therefore, one must be subject [to the representatives of the law – the authorities] not only because of wrath [the proper response to injustice] but also because of conscience.”  In other words, be subject to the law not only because of God’s inevitable action in response to injustice, but because of individual conscience.  He continues, “Pay to all what is due them – taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.”  Behind these words is the call to resistance against unjust taxes, unearned and undeserved riches; resistance to those to whom no respect or honor is due because their actions do not command respect or honor.”

Paul’s response is just as subversive as Jesus’s ambiguous answer.  Any Jew would know that even though Cesar’s image is everywhere – on coins, on monuments (the 1st Century equivalent of billboards, advertising Cesar’s divinity) – the earth belongs to God.  “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it; for he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers” (Psalm 24:1).  “I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god” (Isaiah 45:5).  Cesar is entitled to his coins, but God owns the Universe.

In Thessalonica, Paul was calling for allegiance to a God of distributive justice-compassion, and the radical abandonment of self-interest – the same message that Jesus preached during his lifetime, and for which he was crucified.  In those opening words of the Letter that seem so innocuous Paul was calling for people to serve “a living and true God,” not the Emperor.  As John Dominic Crossan puts it:

        “. . . Paul believes absolutely that “Jesus” or the “Messiah/Christ” or the “Lord” all refer to the same person . . . On the one hand, “lord” was a polite term usable by slave to master or disciple to teacher.  On the other, “the Lord” meant the emperor himself.  What we see here is what Gustav Adolf Deissman described . . . as “the early establishment of a polemical parallelism between the cult of Christ and the cult of Cesar in the application of the term kyrios, ‘lord’” [citation omitted].  Or, if you prefer, polemical parallelism as high treason.”  In Search of Paul (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), p. 166.

Perhaps 1st Thessalonians is read at the end of Year A because Paul speaks in this letter about Jesus coming again.  “Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.”  For over 2,000 years, these words have meant future apocalyptic judgment, not present-day participation in Jesus’s ongoing program of restoring God’s distributive justice compassion (the natural order of the Universe).  Jesus and Paul, and other martyrs to the anti-imperial Christian cause, have taught Covenant, non-violence, distributive justice-compassion, and peace; not piety as social values violently enforced, war, and insistence on victory as a prerequisite to peace.  

The words “wrath of God” are not generally understood to mean God’s (or anyone’s) proper response to injustice.  Instead, those words conventionally mean judgment, leading to punishment for wrongdoing.  But under a non-violent Covenant the proper response from God or prophetic humanity is not judgment, but outrage that warns of consequences set in motion by injustice.  Those consequences have nothing to do with retribution, payback, or punishment.  The consequences set in motion by injustice include poor health, premature death, crime, drug abuse, economic collapse, war, and the extinction of life-forms (including human), among others.

After the outrage (righteous anger) comes the wrath of God as direct action.  But direct action as Covenant is not violence.  Instead, the “wrath of God” expresses itself in radical self-denial (kenosis).  Kenotic wrath in Covenant terms is the only proper response to injustice.  The most obvious example for Christians is Jesus – whom Paul and Christian theologians proclaimed was God’s direct kenotic action on earth to restore God’s distributive justice.  (See Philippians 2:6-7).  For post-modern, post-Christian, non-theists, a kenotic God is, as Crossan puts it, “the beating heart of the universe . . . [a god] whose presence is justice and life, but whose absence is injustice and death.”  In Search of Paul, p. 291.  Kenotic action – whether on the part of God, Jesus, Paul, or anyone – requires a radical trust that is beyond simple piety.

In another seeming irrelevancy among the readings for Proper 24, Moses tries again to get God to pledge to stay with his people, for the sake of God’s reputation if nothing else.  God says he will stay with them, but he makes no promises about the outcome.  “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.”  In other words, God will do whatever God will do, and meanwhile, you can see my backside. . . Less polite language strongly suggests itself here.  God is saying that non-violent Covenant means distributive justice cannot be codified – despite Moses later carrying another copy of the Ten Commandments back down the mountain (Exodus 34:1-29).  God is just, and the world belongs to God.  Throughout the history of the Jewish people, God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust; God sometimes abandons his people, whether or not they have acted with injustice; and whether anyone believes in or accepts God as God, if justice is served, God favors that one.  Isaiah 45:1-7 confirms God’s alliance with the conqueror Cyrus.

One may well ask, why bother with this theological argument?  Because if John Shelby Spong is correct, and Christianity must either change or die, one of the first changes must be to jettison the superstition that Jesus will return bodily from the sky to save the elect and condemn unbelievers.  Such dogma might have made sense in the first century or two, but only if we assume that 1st Century folk were unable to distinguish between metaphor and everyday physical realities.  Beyond that, however, such dogma is highly useful to Empire, whether it be 1st Century Rome or 21st Century global entities.  Magical, otherworldly, life-after-death belief distracts people from the injustices they suffer, and robs them of the power to do anything about it.  As soon as people start claiming the just consequences of kenotic wrath, the empire is in jeopardy.  Soon the prisons being to fill, torture becomes legal, and heads begin to roll.

BLOG ARCHIVE