Promises
Promises: Year A, Proper 5
Genesis 12:1-9; Hosea 5:15-6:6; Psalm
33:1-12; Psalm 50:7-15; Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
The Call of Abram to establish his legacy in the land of Canaan is a
powerful tale. The Lord God speaks, and Abram responds with an
epic movement of family and possessions. He stops at a spot
sacred to the Canaanites – an oak tree, or perhaps a standing stone –
and claims the land for himself and his descendants. In an act
that at once desecrates and resacralizes, he builds an altar to his own
god. Then he moves on to the hill country, to the higher
elevations at Beth-el (“house of God”), pitches his tents, and builds
another altar. It is an archetypal saga of yore, on the order of
Malory, Shakespeare, and Tolkien. The Apostle Paul updates and
extends the promise made to Abraham to “all his descendants, not only
to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of
Abraham.” Further, he tells his 1st Century Roman community that
the promise now rests on grace, extended to all those who trust that
God is able to do what God promised.
This week’s portion of Paul’s letter to the Romans references the faith
of Abraham – the trust that Abraham had in the promise received from
God that Abraham and his descendants would inherit the earth.
Just as actions that are required by the law convey no credit for one’s
personal commitment to justice – such as wage/hour laws – Paul cautions
that if the earth is inherited (appropriated?) by those who follow the
law, God’s promises are null and void. The law, Paul says, brings
“wrath” – the rightful (just) response of God to what humans have
done. Human civilization inevitably leads to retributive justice
and ultimately to the kind of empire that puts tariffs on food imports,
or exports old-growth rainforests in defiance of God’s distributive
justice-compassion.
Behind all of Paul’s circling language lies the conviction that the law
– the normalcy of civilization – leads inevitably to injustice because
the law requires retribution – payback. There is no grace (free
gift) under the law. The law does not offer radical
fairness. Under the law there must be winners and losers.
But those are justified who trust in God’s direct action in the world
to establish God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, both
through the life and sacrificial death of Jesus and participation with
Jesus in that same program. Their trust is credited back to them
as justice itself. Throughout his letter, Paul makes it clear
that the promise of God to establish that kingdom preempts human law.
The Elves skip Paul’s argument about how the purpose of circumcision
was “to make [Abraham] the ancestor of all who believe without being
circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them.” Instead
they cut to the chase: “For the promise that he would inherit the
world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but
through the righteousness of faith.” Where there is no law
[regarding circumcision], Paul says, there is no violation. By
the same token, if there is no law regarding who owns what portion of
the Planet, then the radically fair distribution of the resources of
the land preempts any imperial claim.
What seems to be left out of today’s portion of the argument is the
choice that we have to join or not to join the ongoing program of
establishing God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion at all
levels: individually, socially, politically, ecologically. Paul
hints at the consequences of not joining the program when he speaks
about how “the law brings wrath.” Tradition interprets Paul’s
argument about the wrath of the law versus the righteousness of faith
as meaning Old Testament retribution versus New Testament grace, earned
by belief that Jesus died to pay for human sin. Certainly,
cherry-picked Hosea warns of the consequences of abandoning the God of
Abraham and following Ba’al. But Hosea is preaching about an 8th
Century B.C.E. political dispute between Judah and Israel about how to
defeat the Assyrians. The Elves only included this
reading because Matthew’s Jesus quotes Hosea in a non-sequitur – “Go and learn what
this means,” he says, and then quotes Hosea 6:6a: “It is mercy I desire
instead of sacrifice.” The rest of the passage from Hosea 6:6
says, “[I desire] the knowledge of God rather than burnt
offerings.” This is a crucial redaction on Matthew’s part.
Hosea’s point is that knowledge of the nature of God as distributive
justice-compassion is more important to God than public ritual.
Matthew’s point is for pious Christians who were not comfortable with
the kind of social company Jesus kept. Matthew’s Jesus says
“After all, I did not come to enlist religious folks but
sinners!” The Five Gospels,
p. 163.
The Elves dance through Matthew Chapter 9, cobbling together a
breath-taking combination of images. First, Jesus chooses
“Matthew” as the first disciple. Then he challenges the Pharisees
who questioned his judgment about “dining with toll collectors and
sinners.” Jesus says, “Since when do the able-bodied need a
doctor? It is the sick who do,” thereby setting up the story of
healing Jairus’ daughter, eight verses later, framing the story of the
unfortunate woman – who, if she lived in 21st Century America would
have had no health insurance, and would have been dead after 12 years
of untreated vaginal bleeding. These stories seem to illustrate
the “mercy” of God, as opposed to the retributive systems of the
Pharisees. They are exaggerations, meant to convict members of
Matthew’s community, who perhaps had some doubts about whether the poor
and disenfranchised deserved justice. These stories illustrate
that sinners, collaborators, outcasts of any kind only need to trust in
the power of Jesus to do what he says he will do. They seem to
reinforce Paul’s claim that God’s promise extends to everyone.
Abraham did not “distrust” – Paul’s word. Instead, he was fully
convinced that God was able to do and would do what God promised.
For 6th Century B.C.E. people in Babylonian exile, this promise kept
hope alive that they would be restored to their own land.
Abraham’s trust resulted in a reckoning – a distribution – of
justice. Paul makes the intellectual leap that those who trust
God’s ability to raise Jesus from the dead will also have given to them
the ability to participate in that same distribution of
justice-compassion.
What happens in the 21st Century to the promises of primordial gods and
the updates to those promises by 1st Century mystics? The
metaphors in all these readings can quickly descend to 21st Century
irrelevance and dangerous Christian hegemony. The last time
anyone did something similar to Abraham’s action was in August 2007,
when the Russians planted a flag under the polar icecap and claimed
nearly half the Arctic seabed for themselves.
Needless to say, an American scientist is claiming that the technical
procedures for the dive were his, and so the spoils are in
dispute. Paul says that Jesus was “handed over to death for our
trespasses and was raised for our justification.” Watch
out. Substitutionary atonement (invented 900 years after the death of
Jesus) is out there, roaring around, looking to trap the
unwary. “Justification” does not mean being “saved” or “paid
for,” “vindicated,” or “acquitted,” but means being made just – i.e., chosen, even ordained, as
participants in God’s justice-compassion. In addition, there is a
subtle anti-Jewish note in the story of the healing of the woman with
the 12-year issue of blood if the woman is described as “unclean,” and
Jesus is credited with defying Jewish law by allowing her to touch the
fringes of his robe. See Amy-Jill
Levine, The Misunderstood Jew (HarperOne, 2006) pp. 24;
119-166.
For 21st Century Christians, these readings make three points.
First, in terms of 21st Century political realities, there is no
difference between the Russians planting their flag on the sea floor
and Abram appropriating the sacred places of the Canaanites for his own
god. Western world history is chock full of land grabs on the
part of empires in the name of God and his Christ.
Second, taking Paul’s point whole-heartedly into the present day, the
laws that human societies create eventually evolve into the kind of
empires that grab the natural resources for themselves and demand that
everyone else pay, thereby rendering God’s promise of distributive
justice-compassion null and void. There are consequences to such
violations of God’s law by imperial injustice, which may not be
apparent. The “wrath of God” – the consequences – may be long in
coming, but as the psalmist warns at the end of Psalm 51 (left out by those
discriminatory Elves), “What right have you to recite my
statutes, or take my covenant on your lips? . . . you give your mouth
free rein for evil . . . but now I rebuke you and lay the charge before
you. Mark this, then, you who forget God, or I will tear you
apart, and there will be no one to deliver. Those who bring
thanksgiving as their sacrifice honor me; to those who go the right way
I will show the salvation of God.” Some of those consequences
include global warming, sudden and catastrophic climate change, and
mass extinctions of humanity and other (more essential?) life forms.
Third – and perhaps most startling – is Paul’s insistence that faith
trumps law every time. Everyone who lives in trust of God’s realm
instead of relying on law is guaranteed the promise of distributive
justice-compassion. This is the grace of a kenotic god,
whose presence is justice and life and whose absence is injustice and
death. The struggle is to discern the difference.