of water and spirit

One of the great treasures of cross-cultural encounter, one of my particular interests, is how my brothers and sisters interpret the Bible and what texts they use. On Sunday, for example, Pastor Ntapo made use of a puzzling text from one of the New Testament’s oft-neglected books, the letter of Jude.

“But when the archangel Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’ (Jude 1:9)

Pastor Ntapo’s particular interest in this verse, on this particular occasion, was not how it fit within the flow of Jude’s argument, but what information it might offer about the spiritual world which is hidden from human eyes. The former interpretive sensibility, that of reading verses within their literary contexts, is of primary importance for me. Pastor Ntapo, likewise, has demonstrated an ability to read the Bible that way. Nevertheless, our concern to read texts in context should not necessarily preclude our ability to glean other insights from individual verses’ particular words and phrases. In fact, there are many different contexts from which a person might see a verse: not only from a literary or historical perspective but also from the perspective of one’s personal experience of the things of God within a particular culture’s worldview. It may be, in fact, that understanding a particular living culture, being more of the worldview as those of the writers of certain biblical books, is the key to unlocking the meaning of obscure texts which strain the abilities of other interpretive methods.

Another interpretive method, however, which must be in play to evaluate a person’s use of texts is the canonical. Does the way in which a person uses a text, does the message he or she draws from it, accord with the witness of scripture as a whole, that is, with the canon of scripture? My assumption is that there is a main-track, a common vein, running throughout the otherwise diverse writings of the Bible. And for me that common vein, taking as authoritative what Jesus took as authoritative, is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and your neighbor as yourself” (Deut. 6:4; Lev. 19:18; Mt. 22:34-40//Mk. 12:28-34//Lk. 10:25-37).

So what, then, of Pastor Ntapo’s use of Jude 1:9?

Initially, for Pastor Ntapo, the verse seemed to reveal an order for what happens to a person at his or her death. Just as the archangel Michael and the devil disputed over the body of Moses upon his death, so at our deaths two spiritual forces, one of God and one of the devil, will contend with one another for our very beings. And just as Michael had to rebuke the devil in order to secure Moses, so God’s rebuke of the devil will be the determining factor in our own entrance to heaven. If this all seems too speculative, however, the reason given for why our bodies must, like Moses’, hang in the balance at all, is only too relevant. Because Moses sinned, Pastor Ntapo explained, the devil, like God, had a claim on Moses’ life. To illustrate the nature of Moses’ sin—indeed our sin—Pastor Ntapo reminded us of the story of Moses’ disobedience with regard to securing water for his people in the wilderness (Num. 20:1-13). Moses’ sin was his failure to act, in the words of the pastor, “like God.” Whereas God told him to “command the rock before their eyes to yield its water,” Moses “lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank” (20:8, 11).

In this case, it seems to me, the way in which Moses was supposed to be “like God” is not the same as the way in which, according to the serpent’s words, Adam and Eve would become “like God” (Gen. 3:5). Indeed, in the latter, becoming “like God” was a sin against God, the attempt of human beings to live not according to the design of their creator—“by every word that comes from the mouth of God”—but “by bread alone”—by their own methods of provision (Deut. 8:3; Mt. 4:4). Those methods of provision, Pastor Ntapo was implying, consist of using human strength, physical force, to secure blessings; like Moses, only striking the rock will bring water. By contrast, the power of God is through God’s Word—the power Moses might also have known had he spoken, by God’s command, to the rock. So, yes, though even Moses’ human strength brought forth water, it was not the water “from which one might drink and never thirst again” (Jn. 4:13-14).

In the end, what began as Pastor Ntapo’s interest to understand the hidden world became a clear exhortation for faithful living for his congregation. Just as the dispute over Moses’ body was the result of his own sin, so the patterns we set in life follow us into death. On the same principle, then, by God’s grace, through Jesus, by the peculiar power of his Word, we can drink even now the “water gushing up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:14).

-Joe

compassion in the story

Here is my latest column for the Anabaptist Network in South Africa.

-Joe

knowing and not knowing

The Friday session at last month’s conference at Bethany Bible School was on sexuality. For our inductive Bible study, we focused on Genesis 38:1-26, the story of Judah and Tamar.

A key verse in the story, bringing together a number of its key words and themes, is v. 16, Judah’s words to Tamar followed by the author’s explanation: “ ‘Come, let me come in to you,’ for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.”

Judah solicited Tamar, his “daughter-in-law”, for sex because he thought she was a prostitute, because “he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.” Though this might seem like the text’s absolution of Judah, a justification for his “going in” to his daughter-in-law, it is, in fact, an indictment of him. Indeed, for even if Judah would not, as the text implies, have solicited his own daughter-in-law for sex, his hiring of a prostitute is a solicitation of someone else’s daughter for the same.

Indeed, the use of the title “daughter” or “daughter-in-law” is frequent in the text. The first usage of “daughter” occurs in v. 2, where Judah “saw the daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua; he married her and went in to her.” This last comment, that Judah “went in to her”, is the same approach that he takes later on, in v. 16, with his daughter-in-law (“Come, let me come in to you”), also described by the author in v. 19 (“So he gave them to her, and went in to her . . .”). In other words, just as Judah, as a younger man, once approached a “certain Canaanite’s daughter”, so he now, as an older man, approaches his own “daughter-in-law.” And, although he would never dream of defiling his own daughter-in-law—she who belongs to him, and he to her—he, by hiring a prostitute, is quite willing to defile someone else’s. Judah, in fact, makes his opinion quite clear as to what should happen to daughters who “play the whore” (v. 24); when he is told that Tamar is pregnant through prostitution, he wishes her to be “brought out and burned” (v. 24). Yet he does not see—until Tamar’s well-conceived scheme exposes his guilt—that it is he who is responsible for disgracing her, taking away her life. As a result, he is more worthy of the fire than she, as he himself is finally forced to admit: “she is more in the right than I” (v. 26).

To Judah’s credit, his admission of guilt leads to a change in behavior. After being exposed, the text states that “he did not lie with [Tamar] again, literally (Hebrew), that “he did not know her again” (v. 26). Judah’s “not knowing” of Tamar at the end of the story brings to mind both his previous “not-knowing” of her in the middle (v. 16) and that which Judah’s late son, Onan, knew with regard to Tamar. Onan, that is, knew, according to the levirate law of the Israelites (Deut. 25:5-10), that the children born to Tamar through his seed would not be his own; instead they would belong to his late brother, Er, who had first married Tamar but died before giving her children. The children would not honor the name "Onan” but “Er”. Therefore, though it was the responsibility of Onan, the next-of-kin to the deceased, to raise up children for his brother’s widow (to give her, just as Judah once gave the daughter of Shua her own “Er”, “Protector”), he “spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife” (v. 9). Though it was what Onan “knew” that led him to “spoil his seed”, it did not prevent him from “knowing” his brother’s widow. Though the purpose of him marrying her was to produce children, he engaged in the act of procreation without allowing it. He used the widow for sex without allowing her to enjoy its fruits.

Onan’s knowing of Tamar led directly to Tamar’s being disowned. For, after “the Lord killed him” because “the thing that he did was displeasing to the Lord” (v. 10), Judah begins to fear that the source of Onan’s death, like his brother Er before him, is Tamar, the one whom they both married. Though the text is certain that the brothers died because of their own sin, Judah fears that his sons have died because of Tamar. As a result, though he owes Tamar his next-born, Shelah, he sends Tamar away from his household—though through marriage she now belongs to Judah’s family—and back to her “father’s house” to “sit as a widow” (vv. 11-12). Though, through marriage to his sons, Judah once claimed Tamar as his daughter, he now sends her back to where she came from. Judah once knew her as his daughter; his dismissal of her, though veiled with the excuse that Shelah is not yet of age, is really to say, “I never knew you.” Realizing that Judah has never intended to give her Shelah, Tamar moves from “sitting” as a widow to “sitting” on the road to Timnah as a prostitute when she hears that her father-in-law will be going that way (v. 14); she is desperate to produce children for Judah’s line. It is here that Judah meets her and asks her for sex—for “he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law” (v. 16). Thus the cycle is complete: what the son set in motion by knowing the father completes by not-knowing—the disowning of Tamar.

Yet even here, at their moment of greatest disgrace, does the redemption of Judah and Tamar begin. For the conception of their proscribed union exposes the sin of her father-in-law and restores to her her dignity as his daughter. Ashamed of his actions, Judah pronounces the one he once assumed guilty for the death of his sons now “more righteous than I.” He also “does not know her again” and, therefore, knows her again as his daughter.

-Joe

for the sake of joy

For our discipleship class with Harvest Time Ministries last Wednesday, we studied Matthew 13:44-46, two illustrations-parables Jesus used to describe what “the kingdom of heaven is like” (vv. 44, 45). In gathering the basic information from the text, the line “in his joy” emerged as a key to unlocking the message for the day. “In his joy” refers to a human being who, after finding and hiding a treasure in a field, “in his joy” went and sold “all that he had and bought it” (v. 44). Because the human being, exactly like the “merchant” in the second illustration in Jesus’ pairing, sold “all that he had” in order to get the “treasure”—or, as in the second illustration, the “one pearl of great value”—we the readers/listeners are left to wonder what was so significant about that treasure or that one pearl of great value. Why did the human being, why did the merchant, sell “all that he had” in order to acquire only “one” thing? Indeed, it seems that the human being had many things, perhaps many of them also of great value. Why then did he forsake such great treasure for the treasure he did not yet have?

It seems that the answer is because of “his joy”. Though he had many things, the sale of which was enough to acquire a thing of “great value”, the many things did not bring him joy. Though many is more than one, the many things he possessed could not bring him the joy that the one thing he “found” did. Therefore, “in his joy”, he went and sold “all that he had.”

“The kingdom of heaven is like this.”

When we “find” it, when we experience the presence of God, through his Word, in Jesus, the glory of earthly possessions begins to fade. Their value is not “great” in light of God’s value. The joy they bring is not joy in light of God’s joy. For that joy, the human being will sell all that he has.

Who then are disciples? First and foremost, disciples are people of joy, people who have an all-consuming passion, love, hunger for God and his righteousness—no matter the cost (cf. Mt. 5:6, 6:33; Heb. 12:2).

-Joe

giving up, giving back

Luke 14:25-33 contains some of the truly “hard sayings” of Jesus. In particular I note two parallel statements in three sentences which frame the stories Jesus tells to illustrate the meaning of following him (discipleship). Those statements, two sentences at the beginning and one at the end of the text, are:

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (vv. 26-27).

“So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions (v. 33).

The main reason for seeing these statements as parallel, of course, is that they both pronounce requirements for following Jesus, framed in the negative. “Whoever . . . does not hate father and mother . . .”, “Whoever does not carry the cross . . . cannot be . . .”, “ . . . none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up . . ..” What one cannot be, of course, without doing what Jesus commands is—in all three sentences—his “disciple.”

If, therefore, we see them as parallel, then we also begin to see the connection between those different “things” which Jesus tells the “large crowds traveling with him” (v. 25) that they must forsake. In other words, there is some connection between “hating” family members and “giving up” possessions. Indeed, though we may more readily accept—in theory if not in practice—that we should give up material possessions on which we have become dependent to our destruction, we are less likely to regard our beloved family members as possessions to be given up. We are very likely, in fact, to see our loving duty as precisely not to give them up, to keep them close, to protect them at all costs. In other words, even if we do not regard family members as possessions, we are inclined to treat them as such. We treat “father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself” as possessions. We regard our relationships with others as things to be possessed, held on to, maintained at all costs. Jesus calls us to “give them up”, release them, set them free.

Good relationships progress because they are free. The best relationships are those which we did not expect, those in which we found ourselves loving a person we did not set out to love. This does not mean that we set out not to love them; it simply means that we had no intention for the relationship itself, no expectations of where it might lead. We began to relate to a person free of requirements, pressures molding the relationship into a preconceived form. The moment we awake, however, to the goodness of relationship, is the moment we begin to possess it. The experience of love creates the desire to love more, and the desire to love more—beyond where we have even now loved—becomes the expectation toward which we strive to steer the relationship. The relationship becomes a thing possessed, an object of our control.

Because the goodness of relationship is the gift of God—pure grace, that which we did not expect, that which we could not create—our attempts to control it will destroy it. That which is created free cannot live possessed. Jesus says we must “give it up”, release it from our control, forfeit our expectations of it. The good news, however, is that our “giving it up” is really “giving it back”—into the hands of the loving God. God wants us, like Abraham with Isaac, to give up that which is most precious; God knows that is the only way we will remain in love.

-Joe