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Proper 24: Paradox and Participation:
Piety v. Covenant 6
Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 121; Genesis 32:22-31; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Psalm 119:97-104; Luke 18:1-8
This is the sixth in a series on “piety v. covenant,” which began September 16. As I pointed out in that initial blog, “Along with Luke – which is nearly all about justifying normal social behavior in the Roman world – these readings fall far short of any kind of actualization or fulfillment of the radicality of God’s relationship with God’s people, whether expressed through the story [Genesis, Exodus, Kings, etc.], or the strenuous objections of the prophets to any acceptance of the laws, customs, gods, or morality of the surrounding or conquering civilizations. In short, the remainder of Year C contrasts Covenant with the God of Distributive Justice, and the compliant Piety of the comfortable citizens of the Empire.”
In the readings for Proper 24, Luke’s angry Jesus berates the community that doubts whether God will deliver justice comparable to the Empire, where judgment is awarded to the one who is most politically persistent. The writer of the second letter to Timothy is blind to the hypocrisy of dogmatic piety.
Jesus’s bitter joke is totally misconstrued by Luke. Rather than being an illustration of faith (belief) in God’s answer to prayer – as Luke forces the parable to be – Jesus is saying that the Roman judges are so corrupt, they reward judgment to those who scream the loudest, and who threaten their reputations the most. If Jesus were to tell the joke today, it might be about the U.S. criminal “justice” system, which treats racist taunting by White children as “pranks,” barely deserving a reprimand, but tries as adults for attempted murder the outraged Black children who retaliate.
The commentary from The Five Gospels says, “[The corrupt Judge] decides in [the widow’s] favor to be rid of her. He wants to avoid being harassed, perhaps to avoid having his honor or reputation beaten black-and-blue (such is the implication of the Greek term used here) by her continual coming to demand vindication.” The nature of the “kingdom of God” is not that if we persist, God will eventually grant us our wishes. That is the expectation of citizens of Empire, which demands loyalty and piety, not integrity, and retribution, not distributive justice.
If there was a real Timothy who accompanied the real Paul on a couple of his trips around the Mediterranean, he must have been tempted to kill the messenger who delivered those two letters – the 1st Century equivalent of 21st Century email spam. Just because they have Paul’s name attached, and just because there are a couple of paragraphs that might actually make sense in terms of following the Christian Way, is no reason to accept them as any kind of guide for Jesus’s radical abandonment of self-interest.
“For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.” 2 Tim. 4:3-5. This is fertile fodder for fundamentalist fantasy, which results in martyrdom and religious wars. “Sound doctrine” has meant belief in a premodern myth of a dying-rising god, suspension of disbelief in a literal, personal, interventionist God, and a literal reading of the Bible that ignores post-modern cosmology and the struggle for relationship with the divine that goes back to Jacob.
The Genesis story is set up to be the prequel to the admonition to “endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully,” just like Jacob, who ends up with a dislocated hip in his fight with God. The classic 1947 re-write of the Bible for children by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut tells the story this way:
And while Jacob was alone, he felt that a man had taken hold of him,
and Jacob wrestled with this strange man all the night. And the man was an angel from God. They
wrestled so hard, that Jacob’s thigh was strained in the struggle. . .
. Then the angel said: “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but
Israel, that is ‘He who wrestles with God.’ For you have wrestled
with God and have won the victory.”
And the angel blessed him there. And the sun rose as the angel
left him; and Jacob gave a name to that place. He called it
Peniel, or Penuel, words which in the language that Jacob spoke mean
“The Face of God.” “For,” said Jacob, “I have met God face to
face.” And after this Jacob was lame, for in the wrestle he had strained his thigh.
Emphasis mine.
The story is watered down,
not only for children by Hurlbut, but for anyone who does not take
seriously the Old Testament stories, which are foundational myths about
the history of the Hebrew people and their relationship with their
God. In the usual interpretation, the man who wrestles with Jacob
is not God, but an angel from God; Jacob has won the victory and
becomes (in the King James Version) a “prince” of his people, just as
Jesus won the victory and became the Christ; Jacob sees God
face-to-face, but Hurlbut leaves out the fact that having done so, he
escapes with only a dislocated hip instead of losing his life.The Jeremiah reading also seems to predestine the reading from 2 Timothy, if we accept the convention of prophecy and confirmation or actualization from the Old Testament to the New: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.” Jer. 31:27-28. The section cherry-picked from Psalm 119 is further accompaniment to the pious posturing offered by the writer of 2 Timothy, who is blinded by dogma, and is unable to see the paradox or hold the contradiction that is necessary for distributive justice-compassion (the “kingdom” or realm of God) to hold sway. “Covenant” for that writer is a one-sided demand from God to humanity, somehow alchemically reconciled through the blood of the Christ.
But Jeremiah is actually reminding the people in exile that there is a time for every purpose: a time to plant, etc., and God will keep God’s part of the bargain by providing protection and care. All the people need to do is live in justice-compassion, and trust the promise. See Psalm 121. Covenant for Jacob is the struggle for meaning in a relationship with “God.” Not a corporeal god, but a paradox that includes strength and weakness, love and fear, good and evil, presence and absence. John Dominic Crossan proposes a “kenotic God,” [link to blog.4.1.07] “a God whose gracious presence as free gift (Paul’s charis) is the beating heart of the universe and does not need to threaten, to intervene, to punish, or to control. A God whose presence is justice and life, but whose absence is injustice and death” (Crossan, In Search of Paul, HarperCollins Publishers 2004, p. 291).
The ability to live centered in paradox is a sign of human spiritual and emotional maturity. The point is the struggle, not the intervention of supernatural power. The only way to engage the struggle and survive is to trust the process. Jacob encounters the human-divine paradox, and comes out of it surprised to be alive, wounded or diminished in physical power, yet whole.
By now readers should realize that in the theology I am exploring, Covenant requires active participation in an ongoing mutual relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and – yes – Jesus. When Jesus speaks of the “Kingdom of God,” he is talking about a realm – a paradigm – a parallel universe – where distributive justice-compassion rules. This “kingdom” is in direct opposition to the “empire” of Rome – and any other empire that comes down the pike of history, from the Babylonians to the British to the 21st Century “pax Americana” promulgated by the policies foreign and domestic of U.S. presidents since (perhaps) Monroe.* The realm or “kingdom” Jesus was talking about is accessed by simply – and only – radically abandoning self-interest, and trusting the consequences of distributive justice-compassion.
*[The fact that James Monroe declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits for European and/or British colonization may or may not have led to U.S. imperial hegemony; that is a point for political science debate, which is beyond the scope of this blog.]