Golden Bull, Golden Bear: Year A, Proper 23

Exodus 32:1-14; Isaiah 25:1-9; Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:1-9; Matthew 22:1-14

The Golden Calf! What a story for our times with global credit markets crashing, and panicked investors stripping off their assets and thrusting them into gold and cash money markets.

The Elves have set it all up for us, as usual. On the one hand, undisciplined people, unable to wait for guidance from their leader who has gone up the mountain to seek guidance from God Himself, have forgotten who they are, and who saved them from the worst kind of oppression. Psalm 106 tells how “Moses, [God’s] chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them.” But Matthew’s Jesus has no time for compassion: “Many are called, but few are chosen.” On the other hand, Isaiah sings of the great feast, the banquet on the mountain, prepared for the just at the end of time. Paul exults in the nearness of the Lord, and the beloved Psalm 23 leads us gently home.

The choice is clear, if stark: right-wing conservatism, or left-wing liberalism; the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie; violent apocalyptic judgment or non-violent distributive justice-compassion. The conflict is as old as time. Once more we are sent back to the four questions of the apocalypse :

1) What is the nature of God? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

This week’s focus is on Jesus’s message.

The parable of the wedding celebration appears in three versions: Matthew 22:1-14, Luke 14:16-24, and Thomas 64:1-12. Matthew’s version is the most elaborate, and the most compromised with contemporary First Century Christian concerns. Jerusalem has been destroyed, along with Jewish temple-centered religious practice; the Romanization of society has brought systems of patronage and collaboration. Anyone who isn’t properly dressed, who doesn’t fulfill the proper qualifications, is subject to exclusionary judgment. Only the elect can be trusted to be part of the community.

The version in Thomas, found in The Five Gospels, is much simpler. Here, a person is receiving guests, and has prepared a dinner party, not a wedding party. Thomas has no reference to invading armies that destroy the city. But the party-giver is frustrated when four invited guests turn him down. He has his slave go out and “bring back whomever you find to have dinner.” Then the transcriber of the sayings collected in Thomas opines, “Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my Father,” (The Five Gospels, p. 509), which puts a very different spin on the story.

The third version in Luke is not included in any of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the three-year cycle. Apparently the Elves decided that Matthew’s version is the definitive one for Christian theology and practice. However, the Jesus Seminar scholars point out that the version in Luke is likely the closest to what the historical Jesus would have told, although it too is permeated with early Christian piety. Imagine the scene, based on the stripped down version (The Five Gospels p. 353):

When Jesus was in Jericho, he encountered a head toll collector – a rich man named Zacchaeus. Later that evening, Jesus arrives for the banquet at Zach’s house. After the meal, as the wine jug is passed among the reclining guests, Zach asks Jesus what is the Kingdom of God? What is it like? How do we find it?

Jesus says, “There was a man who held an important position in Herod Antipas’ administration. He wanted to give a dinner party for some local businessmen so that he could recruit them to act as liaison with the Roman proconsul. But they declined the invitation for perfectly good reasons – don’t forget, it’s the law that if the Romans draft you for some project, you can finish your own work first. So later, this guy sends his servant around again telling his cronies that the feast is ready, but they all refuse to come. In a rage, now, the host tells the servant to bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. . . .” Jesus looks around at the group, but they don’t seem to get it. He goes on: “When he sees that there is still room in his banquet hall, he sends his servant out into the countryside to round up people at sword-point.”

This parable is a huge joke, which does not translate well in a 21st Century world where the Roman patronage system no longer is in force. According to John Dominic Crossan, in First Century Rome, everyone participated in the patronage system, from God to the Emperor, to the noble classes, to the merchants, the traders, the military, servants, slaves, and the totally disenfranchised. Everyone was either a patron or a client, and everyone had both patrons and clients, people to whom and from whom favors or commercial debt was owed. The way to repay the debt among the upper classes was to hold a banquet, usually a sacrificial banquet, in which an animal (or several) were slaughtered in the temple, the blood poured out for the gods, and the meat shared among the guests – all of whom were clients of the one giving the feast. For a guest to refuse to attend would be social, political, and commercial suicide, regardless of where one was in the social strata. For a host to then fill the banquet hall with people with whom one did not and would never do business would be ludicrous. There would be no possibility of ever receiving an invitation or favor in return.

But of such is the Kingdom of God. This story is about grace, not apocalyptic judgment.

As for the Golden Bull, the temptation to extrapolate the metaphor to include pious diatribes against Wall Street Greed is great, but irrelevant. Moses makes his own Wall Street deal with God when he reminds God that if God takes out his frustration and anger on the people, God will look bad in the eyes of all the surrounding tribes and nations, including – especially – Egypt. “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster he planned to bring on his people.” Then in the part we never read in any of the 3-year cycle of the Common Lectionary (Exodus 32:15-35), Moses takes on the roll of God and commands the Sons of Levi (who answer the call to be on the Lord’s side, and later become priests) to kill “your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.” So a great blood bath ensues. Perhaps in order to reinforce the point, by the end of chapter 32, God has gone back on his promise to Moses not to punish the people, and sends a plague on them “because they made the calf – the one that Aaron made.”

Taking Matthew’s version of the parable of the wedding feast as definitive, and including the entire story about Aaron and the Golden Calf, puts post-modern, 21st Century followers of Jesus, in the same camp with an avenging, double-crossing Moses in the service of a capricious God. Is the nature of God then violent, and is Jesus’s message then exclusive and relentlessly judgmental? Or are these stories illustrations of the constant human struggle with the normalcy of civilization, and the consequences of failing to act with distributive justice-compassion?

The relevance of the 21st Century Christian message for sustainable life on Planet Earth depends on the answer we choose. As we have seen in the past several lessons, in the realm of God, the requirements of Empire for debt and death have no power.

BLOG ARCHIVE

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.

BLOG ARCHIVE

Third Sunday in Lent: Repent for the Kingdom III: Accepting Grace

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

Traditional Christian interpretation of how the “Old Testament” replaces the “New” is clear in the readings for this Sunday. The first reading is the familiar story from Exodus, where the Hebrew people complain that Moses has led them out of slavery in Egypt into the desert only to die of thirst. In order to satisfy their demand that Moses prove God’s promise is reliable, Moses uses his staff to strike a rock and produce a rush of water. The Psalm confirms the moral: “Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me . . . For 40 years, I loathed that generation . . . Therefore in my anger I swore, they shall not enter my rest.” The portion selected from Paul’s letter to the Romans confirms the tradition: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Like a good story teller, the Elves return us to the opening metaphor, as John’s Jesus trumps Moses by supplying the enemy Samaritan woman not with physical water, but spiritual water – recalling last week's conversation with Nicodemus about the necessity of baptism for salvation.

Most traditional Christians don’t even need to read the text. We already know these stories and their traditional meaning. But the “tradition” has been in danger of diverting into false paths from the beginning. One of those false paths, which is all too easily found in John’s Gospel, opposes Christian “enlightenment” to the “darkness” of Jewish tradition. Another is the path that leads to collaboration with political empire. Both result from answers to what I pose as the “four questions of the apocalypse,” which have informed these commentaries since they began. The four horsemen of the apocalypse – War, Famine, Disease, and Death – galloping down the ages out of the Revelation of John of Patmos (not the author of the Gospel) – have brought humanity to the brink of extinction in the 21st Century. We continue to terrorize ourselves with their seeming inevitability. Whether or not that metaphor is the one that prevails depends upon how humanity (not just Christians) decides to answer:

1) What is the nature of God (or the Universe)? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message (or any spiritual message)? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

These are eschatological questions because the choices we make about each of these dichotomies determine not only the quality of our individual and corporate lives, but the sustainability of human life on the Planet. Indeed, to chose non-violence, inclusiveness, justice-compassion, and liberation directly challenges violence, exclusiveness, literal belief, and salvation, which define the seemingly inevitable development of John Dominic Crossan’s theology of empire (John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (Harper SanFrancisco, 2004) pp. 72-73; 288 ff).

The traditional interpretation of the stories chosen for consideration on the Third Sunday in Lent in Year A assumes that the answers to these four questions must be 1) Violent; 2) Exclusive; 3) Literal Belief; and 4) Salvation from Hell. Therefore, these readings need to be carefully unpacked and reclaimed, if possible, in the light of post-modern scientific and political knowledge, and post-Christian scholarship.

Probably the most important question to start with in considering these particular readings is whether “faith” means “literal belief.” Very few (if any) of the stories in the Bible are literally “history remembered.” Certainly the magical qualities of these particular stories should be suspect: Moses uses his magic wand to hit the rock and produce water. Jesus supernaturally reads the Samaritan woman’s entire sexual history when she lies, “I have no husband.” Taking these stories as literal, physical truth robs them of their meaning and power. Moses is reduced to a Wizard controlled by a vengeful, violent God, who holds a grudge for 40 years. Jesus is reduced to a New Age self-help guru, mobbed by clamoring fans.

The second most important dilemma to consider with these particular readings is whether God is violent or non-violent. Taken literally – as it has been for most of Christian theology – Paul’s language implies violence. “. . . while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely [therefore], now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.” What most Christians listening on Sunday morning have no access to is the footnote in the Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV), which explains that “The wrath of God” is not God’s anger – a human emotion – but “the rightful response to what humans have done” – i.e., rejecting God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion and embracing retributive justice – getting even – which is not justice at all. See Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV) p. 2117, note 1.18. The Old Testament is chock full of cautionary tales about what happens when the people turn away from trust in God’s realm of distributive justice (where the rain falls equally on the good and the bad) and begin to rely on human systems.

Third, is the message inclusive or exclusive? At first blush, John’s story would seem to be inclusive. After all, Jesus – against all social taboo – speaks alone to a woman outside the town. Not only that, this woman is a Samaritan – the sworn enemy of the Jews. John’s Jesus also says to her, “. . . salvation is from the Jews.” But he goes on to make it very clear that “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth,” presumably as opposed to Jewish tradition and religious law. “[F]or the Father seeks such as these to worship him.” John’s Jesus seems to be saying that while “salvation” may have come from the Jews, it has not stayed with them, and furthermore, God himself no longer seeks them out as true worshipers. This language is extremely dicey in today’s world. By contrast, the portion of Paul’s letter to the Romans says that “Christ died for the ungodly,” which means everyone. If the writer of John’s Gospel had access to Paul’s arguments, he did not agree.

The last choice – salvation from hell or liberation from injustice – only becomes clear when the words – especially Paul’s words – are translated correctly into contemporary language, and when the customary understandings of such First Century concepts as “sacrifice” and “reconciliation” are explained in 21st Century terms.

In the first century, “sacrifice” was a ritual act that served two functions, both having to do with the restoration of right relationship (reconciliation). One function was to restore the balance between human patrons and clients in the Roman world. Put in simple 21st Century social terms, if somebody invites me to dinner, I am then obligated to pay them back by inviting them to dinner. If hosting dinners (or picking up the tab) begins to fall on me too often, then I begin to resent it, and if the “friend” or colleague doesn’t get the hint that it’s his turn, I’ll stop inviting him. Newspaper advice columns are full of these kinds of conundrums. In the First Century Roman world (which included the entire Mediterranean area), the social system of patronage prevailed on a vertical, class, basis. Dinners were given by patrons for clients below them, and were accepted by clients of patrons above them. The banquet restored the balance between patrons and clients. This spilled over into the spiritual realm when the meat for the banquet was first ritually prepared as a sacrifice in the local temple. The animal was sacrificed (made sacred) by being first ritually slaughtered, then burnt on the altar to restore the balance of relationship with God (or gods – or in some cases with Cesar himself, as the ultimate patron); then a portion of the sacred meal was brought back to be shared among the people, or political, social, and business clients. As John Dominic Crossan points out, no one ever imagined that the animal that was slaughtered for the sacrificial – reconciling – meal, deserved to die, or was killed as a substitute for the person holding the banquet.

Paul’s language about “justified by the blood of Christ” does not mean that believers’ lives are paid for with the murdered blood of Jesus. It means that everyone has been included in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, and are made just – become just – are restored or reconciled in their relationship with God because of Jesus’s death. In Paul’s culture, Jesus was the metaphor for the sacrifice that restores right relationship. If Jesus’s death is the metaphoric sacrifice, how is that sacrifice distributed to the people? Symbolically, through the ritual of the common meal; practically, through the acceptance by each person of the challenge and opportunity to participate in the ongoing, here-and-now, realm of distributive justice-compassion. That participation is the radical abandonment of self-interest, and Jesus’s life is the model. The result is salvation as liberation from injustice.

Given all this, does the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well have anything to say to post-modern Christian exiles from the traditional belief? Only in the sense that what Jesus offers is Grace – free gift – automatic relationship with God in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. Grace is not “pardon” for sinning with six husbands; Grace is not letting anybody off the hook for petty trespass. Grace is the free gift of citizenship in God’s Realm extended to all, not just those who worship on the mountain or in Jerusalem. Grace is the free gift of eternal life, realized through trust in the nature of God’s realm – where there is no death, only transformation. “I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor,” John’s Jesus says. “Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

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