Get with the Program:
Year A Proper 8
Genesis 22:1-14; Jeremiah 28:5-9; Psalm 13;
Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
“Paul, having mentioned sacrificial atonement by Christ, does not
develop it further in any way, but speaks instead of participation in
Christ, which . . . is the heart of his theology. And where
sacrificial atonement got only one verse (3:5), participation gets a
whole chapter (6:1-23).” John Dominic Crossan, In Search of Paul (Harper
SanFrancisco 2004) p. 384.
The Elves, of course, divided
the chapter into two parts, thereby robbing Paul
of the integrity of his argument. In the first half, Paul says
that if we have indeed died to sin, by committing to living the same
way of life as taught by Jesus, we shall then live not according to our
own self interest, nor according to the interests of empire (foreign or
domestic), but according to the kenotic
(self-abandoning) rule of God. The “end” or result
is“eternal life.” The result of living according to the normal
rules of civilization is death, says Paul: Not physical death,
but spiritual death – the death of injustice, which also brings with it
the death of god. But the free
gift of eternal life (grace) here and now is extended to all who choose
to participate with the risen Christ in God’s realm of distributive
justice-compassion.
The horrific story about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to
God has nothing to do with the “Christian God” sacrificing “his son” in
order to “save us” from “eternal hellfire and damnation” (atonement –
substitutionary or otherwise). It does, however, have to do with
that same “free gift” in Paul’s argument. The name “Isaac” means
“God will provide.” In the bare bones of the story, God provides
the proper sacrifice and spares Abraham the barbarism of murdering his
son. The story is so obscured with Christian gloss that it is
nearly impossible to avoid the Christian metaphor. But in its own
context, the story does two things: It illustrates an awakening
spiritual awareness on the part of humanity that human blood sacrifice
is not necessary to become reconciled with one’s gods; and the legend
provides a graphic, pre-Christian demonstration of the level of
commitment required to keep the Covenant. The old ways of literal
blood-sacrifice of the first-born child were overthrown by the Covenant
established for the people between God and Abraham. The Covenant
continues, says the Apostle Paul, whenever anyone signs on to the
program begun by Jesus.
Cherry-picking Jeremiah robs Jeremiah’s witness to the will and wisdom
of God of nearly all its power. All we hear from the Elves is
that God’s prophets always foretell gloom and doom, and the false
prophets claim peace. Jeremiah tells Hananiah that when the
prophesied peace comes, “then it will be known that the Lord has truly
sent the prophet.” The doctrinal assumption is that the Creation
is “fallen” permanently into sin; therefore, any prophet has to be
false who claims God’s peace instead of God’s “wrath”
(“judgment”). A second assumption is that the reading simply
reflects an ongoing rhetorical debate between false and true prophets,
and we already know that Jeremiah is the good guy. Neither
assumption honors the integrity of the story. Both lend
themselves to pious self-righteousness.
In the encounter with Hananiah, Jeremiah has put an ox yoke on his own
neck, demonstrating submission to the Yoke of Babylon “until the time
of his own land comes.” Jeremiah tells the people, “if any nation will
not serve this king, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and put its neck under
the yoke of the king of Babylon, then I will punish that nation with
the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, says the Lord . . . . You
therefore must not listen to your prophets . . . who are saying [the
opposite] to you. . . . But any nation that will bring its neck under
the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will leave on its own
land . . . to till it and live there.” Jeremiah 27:8-11.
When we know the context (see last
week’s blog) we find that Jeremiah has had to resort to drama in
order to get anyone to listen to him regarding the political fact that
the Babylonians have won. But wait – doesn’t that make Jeremiah a
collaborator with the very Empire these commentaries have been railing
against for two cycles of the Revised Common Lectionary? Again,
the answer lies in the context of the entire story of Jeremiah – who
stayed with the remnant of Israelites in Jerusalem while the rest were
exiled to Babylon. “[T]he trick is to discover trust in that
covenant regardless of the circumstances. As a demonstration of
his trust in the covenant with God, the prophet Jeremiah buys a field
at Anathoth on the eve of the Babylonian conquest, when the people of
Israel are facing certain exile and slavery. This is a defiant –
even a subversive – act in the face of Empire. He honors the
Mosaic law spelled out in Leviticus 25:25-28,
that allows – perhaps obliges – a family member to “redeem” land that
is in danger of being lost to debt. With the Babylonians at the
gates of Jerusalem, Jeremiah agrees to buy the field. It is an
act of trust that the people will return by the Jubilee Year, 50 years
after the sale is arranged, and the land will then be restored to
them.” Year C Commentary on Proper 21, The Field At Anatoth.
God’s plan is that the people make the best of a bad situation and live
in safety in their own land. All they need to do is trust in
God’s promise to preserve that land for its own great destiny.
But Hananiah has aligned himself with the politicians who want to
overthrow the Babylonian empire and establish their own – despite the
reality of overwhelming imperial military forces. Worse, Hananiah
has the audacity to physically break the ox yoke that Jeremiah has
attached to his own neck, thereby symbolically defying God’s
will. As Matthew’s Jesus says, “The one who accepts you accepts
me, and the one who accepts me accepts the one who sent me.” The
obverse – that the one who does not accept you does not accept me –
means that if God’s prophet is defied, God [himself] is also
defied. In the part we are not supposed to read this week,
Jeremiah goes back to Hananiah and warns him that because he broke the
wooden yoke, an even stronger yoke of iron is now attached to the necks
of all the nations conquered by the Babylonians, and furthermore,
Hananiah will be dead within the year. Sure enough, “In that same
year, in the seventh month, the [false] prophet Hananiah died” (Jeremiah 28:10-17).
The editorial in the Christian Science
Monitor of June 18, 2008,
discusses the U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding Guantanamo
detainees and habeas corpus.
The Court divided 5 to 4 between the majority who held that “Liberty
and security can be reconciled,” and the dissenting view that “lower
courts will almost certainly release dangerous detainees and cause more
Americans to be killed.” The
Monitor concludes that “America’s identity rests on its ideals,
such as due process. They help preserve a quality of life that may require a sacrifice of life”
(emphasis mine). The editorial point concerns secular politics
(and arguably imperial theology) not Covenant. Nevertheless, as
Jeremiah demonstrated with his ox-yoke (and perhaps underlying and
informing The Monitor’s view),
the fact that Empire holds sway does not rule out distributive
justice-compassion, which not only may
require sacrifice. The readings for this Proper 8 assert
that it does. Abraham was willing to give up any hope of
realizing God’s heady promise that he would be the father of a great
nation in order to remain obedient to that same God of
justice-compassion. Jesus gave up his life because of that same
obedience to the rule of distributive justice in God’s realm. The
only time the prophet gets derailed is when she makes false promises of
easy piety, war, victory, and peace. The trick is to distinguish
between Covenant (non-violent, distributive justice-compassion), and
the easy piety of empire. Anyone who thinks that participation
with the risen Christ in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion
is easy, is listening to false prophets. The defining factor is
justice – so long as justice is distributive and grounded in
compassion, all is well. As soon as justice becomes retributive,
and rooted in violence, the difference between the false and true
prophets becomes clear.