multiplication and justice

The sermon at Nelson Mandela's Qunu funeral service yesterday, delivered by Methodist bishop Ziphozihle Siwa, reflected an interpretation that has become popular in some liberation theology circles.  While the bishop used his platform to focus on Mandela the advocate for justice--certainly a necessary complement to the more popular Mandela as agent of forgiveness--his interpretation does not to me do justice to the biblical texts which enshrine our notions of justice in the first place.

In the preacher's increasingly-worn interpretation, the third slave in Jesus' parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) is the truly heroic one, the one whose decision to bury his only talent exposed an unjust system because it forced the master to admit that he is indeed cruel and unjust, "reaping where he does not sow, and gathering where he does not scatter" (25:26).  In such a reading, the third slave is noble because he refuses to play the game of an unjust (read "capitalist") system, unlike his two  "comrades in slavery" (Siwa's term) who invest their money presumably along the lines of their master's expectations.  The first two slaves are collaborators; the third fearless in his resistance to evil.  Even so, the clear commendation of the third slave in such an interpretation fits awkwardly with the text's simple condemnation of that slave, a contradiction which the preacher himself left unresolved.  For indeed, although the action of the third slave was applied to the life of Nelson Mandela, so too was the master's approval ("well done, good and trustworthy slave")--an approval in the parable which is given only to the slaves who did not bury their master's property.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to substantiate our claims for justice by setting aside a simple reading of the text, a reading which reconciles our modern dichotomy between the increase of wealth and the doing of justice.  If indeed, we are able for a minute to set aside either our "capitalist" or "communist" hermeneutics, we will find that the context of Matthew 25 enshrines both dignity and justice for those who have little and the abundance that is the hallmark of God's creation.

On its own, the parable of the talents might be read straightforwardly as a call not to "squander" the gifts that God has entrusted to his people, but to use them to bring about an increase of God's goodness in the world.  Nevertheless, because the text has been susceptible to a reading that enshrines a capitalist principle of investment apart from concern for those who have little, it is helpful to be reminded of the parable within its larger, literary context.  The parable of the talents, then, does not appear in Matthew's gospel on its own but as a continuation of the teaching about the coming of the Son of Man in chapter 24.  Moreover, within chapter 25, the parable of the talents is the middle of three stories which Jesus told, the first being the parable of the ten virgins and the third being the parable of the sheep and the goats.  All three parables are set within the context of the Lord's coming, and illustrate the type of life that befits those who are waiting for him.

The first and third parables, the ten virgins and the sheep and the goats, highlight different values of the life lived in hope of the kingdom which is coming.  In fact, those values that each teaches may seem not merely different but contradictory.  While in the parable of the ten virgins, for example, the five who were wise entered into the kingdom because they did not give some of their oil to their foolish counterparts who had made no provision for their lamps should their initial oil run out, the parable of the sheep and the goats commends those who give to those who have little, to the "least of these" (Matt 25:40).  If the parable of the ten virgins commends not giving as a way to the kingdom, the parable of the sheep and the goats commends giving as the way to the kingdom.  How can Jesus teach two seemingly contradictory values?

Perhaps the answer simply is that the life which brings glory to God is about both giving and not giving, withholding and bestowing, each in its own time.  In the parable of the ten virgins, the will to give not is the reflection of the broader purpose of accompanying the bridegroom into his kingdom.  The wise virgins know their task, and base their decision not to give to the foolish on the consideration that "there will not be enough [oil] for you and for us" in order to light the bridegroom's way (25:9).  To spread the oil too thinly among too many is to extinguish the light, whereas a few burning brightly can show the way.  In such a situation, what the foolish need is not to receive the oil which will soon be exhausted, but to replenish their own stocks so that they too may enter the banquet.  Some things the wise cannot give the foolish, but the foolish may become wise by knowing the purpose of their existence, namely, to participate in the glory (light) of God.  Perhaps we may then say that the parable of the ten virgins does not counsel not giving, but precisely giving in the form of the admonition of the foolish by the wise.

On the other hand, there is a time for giving not only in word but in deed, in giving to others who have want of the physical gifts we all need to survive.  In the parable of the sheep and the goats, the recipients of giving are described as neither foolish nor wise but in need--hungry, thirsty, estranged, naked, sick, imprisoned (25:37, 42-43).  To give to these determines our worthiness to enter into eternal life (25:46), and reflects the justice of God that all should have enough to live.

We may now observe that the parable of the talents likewise commends the will to give which the parable of the ten virgins expresses as admonition and the parable of the sheep and the goats expresses as compassion.  The first act of giving is that of the master who "summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them" (25:14).  This master need not be, judged by human standards, the absentee landlord who reaps what others have sown, but the gracious creator to whom we all owe our existence, the God who loved us enough to entrust creation to our care.  Our slavery, therefore, is not the inequality of otherwise inherent equals--a predicament known simply as sin--but the indebtedness of creatures to their Creator; the slavery described by the parable is not the inequality of injustice but the inequality of grace.  Moreover, if God is the master and grace is God's will, then we who are slaves are accountable to that grace.  As God was gracious with God's gifts, entrusting them to our care, so we are responsible to "be fruitful and multiply", bearing fruit now for the kingdom which is to come (Gen 1:28).  What we are not to do, that which is inconsistent with God's giving, is to bury the property entrusted to us.  Far from being the commendable act exposing the system of injustice, resolving not to multiply wealth endowed precludes the extension of that wealth to others, thus defeating the ends of justice.  At the same time, that which may not be overlooked is that very end itself--that the purpose for which we were created is not multiplication for multiplication's sake, but multiplication for sharing the goodness of God (justice).

Seen within the context of the parable of the ten virgins, we might reaffirm the call of the parable of the talents to the responsibility of each person to use his or her gifts in the service of God's kingdom.  Just as the foolish virgins could not receive the oil which they were not prepared to hold, so, on account of his carelessness, the third slave was unable to "enter into the joy of [his] master" (25:21, 23).  His failure to care was the forfeit of his talent to the one who had been "trustworthy in a few things" (25:21, 23, 28).  That some receive the more that others might have had is, in certain cases, the evidence of the interplay between responsibility and carelessness.  But viewed within the light of compassion to "the least of these", that personal responsibility which the parable of the talents upholds is always for the sake of justice.  God's first commandment to his creatures--"be fruitful and multiply"--always goes hand-in-hand with the greatest commandment--"love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself" (Gen 1:22, 28; Mt 22:36-40).

Our choice, then, is not between multiplication and justice, or between a personal responsibility and a communal ethic.  In any moment, we must choose how to love God and neighbor, faithfully using the gifts entrusted to our care.

-Joe

the vision everlasting

The Revised Common Lectionary's Old Testament reading for this "All Saints' Day" is Daniel 7:1-3, 18-15.  The reading is one of those which, for the sake of brevity, omits a large middle section of text, in this case that which is found from verses 4-17.  Verses 1-3, an introduction in the text to one of Daniel's dreams, seem to be provided in the lectionary in order to set the scene for the assurance of verse 18: "But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever--forever and ever."

In the context of Daniel's sense of terror produced by "the visions of his head", such an assurance is indeed comforting (7:1, 15).  Beset by the horror of strange beasts representing the arrogant and violent kingdoms of the earth which were oppressing Daniel's people, the assurance that the "holy ones" of a God greater ("the Most High") than even the kingdoms will reign is good news indeed.  But something is missing. 

Between the terror and the comfort is the revelation to Daniel of "one like a human being", the "Son of Man" whose coming to the fore signals the arrival on earth of "an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away" (7:13-14).  Though "the holy ones" or "saints" are to "gain possession of [that] kingdom", their inheritance is not conditioned by themselves but by him to whom "was given dominion and glory and kingship"--the Son of Man himself (7:14).  The saints do not move from terror to comfort by virtue of any inherent right of theirs to rule but by judgment of him who holds the power to judge (7:22, 26).  Without the "one like a human being", the "holy ones" do not rule at all.

In fact, we may go beyond the scope of Daniel's vision to say that, without the Son of Man who determines their way to the kingdom, the saints, though they should rule, are doomed to go the way of the arrogant and violent kingdoms to which they were once enslaved.  Like the "fourth beast" of the vision, "terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong", the saints without the Son will too "devour, break, and stamp" all who come under their authority (7:7).  Without the Son, they will do to others that which they would not have had others do to them. 

Jesus, whose favorite self-designation was "Son of Man", defines for his followers the shape of that dominion which will last.  "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.  For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Mk 10:42-45).

On this so-called "day of the dead", then, let us give thanks to God for "the great cloud of witnesses" that surrounds us, but let not them be our focus; let us look to Jesus, "the pioneer and perfecter of our faith" (Heb 12:1-2).

-Joe

security in mercy

Several weeks ago it was my assignment to preach on Luke 16:1-13, the parable of the unjust steward and Jesus' ensuing interpretive comments.  This parable tied my mind in knots, not least because the moral that Jesus draws from the parable does not ring true in my ears: "make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they make welcome you into the eternal homes" (16:9).  I do not usually associate Jesus with dishonest wealth.

What I do associate with Jesus, on the other hand, is his statement that "you cannot serve both God and money" (16:13), a phrase that given its location must surely have something to do with the parable that precedes it.  So how might we reconcile such seemingly contradictory statements?

I found some measure of clarity by reading the parable in light of other parables, and particularly the parables that just precede the tale of the unjust steward, namely the parables of "the lost" in Luke 15.  In fact, it seems that Luke would want us to read these (four) parables together, as they all fit within a common frame: references that Jesus told these stories in the hearing of the Pharisees who were "grumbling" or "sneering" at him (15:2, 16:14).  In other words, these parables illustrate a common theme illustrated in a long textual unit stretching from 15:1-16:14.  That theme touches upon other themes, but it may be best expressed by a simple phrase from Jesus' aforementioned moral: "make friends for yourself."

The counsel to "make friends for yourself" is precisely what Jesus' opponents (the Pharisees) didn't want to hear, and what Jesus' disciples (to whom he told this parable) might accept or reject--thereby going the route of the Pharisees.  In telling the three parables of the lost (15:3-32), Jesus was responding to the Pharisees' complaint that he ate with and welcomed sinners and tax collectors (15:1-2).  The third and probably best-known of these, the parable of the two sons ("the prodigal son"), most directly connects the two parties--"the sinners" and the "Pharisees"--who were always around Jesus (with the disciples perhaps caught between these two).  It is not hard to see, for example, that the younger son in the parable of the two sons represents "sinners", those who have "squandered" the wealth that their father has graciously given them.  It is equally easy to see that the older son in that parable stands for the Pharisees, those who have not left the home or active service of their father but who grumble unmercifully--unlike the father whose character they purport to share--at those who have.

The parable of the two sons, then, sets the table for the parable of the unjust steward. For, just as the younger son in the preceding parable had "squandered" the wealth of his father, so the steward of a certain rich man "squanders" the wealth entrusted to his care (15:13, 16:1).  And just as the prodigal "comes to his senses" in an inner monologue before putting his words to action, so the unjust steward when stripped of his stewardship decides what he will do to provide for himself before putting the plan into action (15:17, 16:3-4).

What then did the unjust steward do?  The answer to this question makes all the difference, for it describes the action which Jesus commends.  That action is to use his authority to in some measure "forgive" the debts others owe to his master, thereby winning their favor.  Seeing that his job security is gone on account of his mismanagement, the unjust steward determines that his life no more rests in the service of "unjust mammon" but in the mercy of "God" through the welcome of his master's servants "into their homes."  Though the steward may not be commended for having come to such a realization freely but only when pressed to act out of utmost need, his seeking of security in mercy rather than mammon makes him too a child of God.  Like his fellow "tax collector" Zacchaeus a few short chapters later (19:1-10), the steward on occasion of the master's call transfers his allegiance from the realm of mammon to the realm of God.  No more is he a servant of money, enslaved to one master, but the servant of God, enslaved to Another.  The unjust steward, like "the sinners and tax collectors" who wandered far from home, is the one whose repentance ("turning around" or " changing direction") has gained him welcome in "everlasting homes."  Specifically, that repentance which leads to eternal security is the "making of friends", the welcoming of others in order that they may welcome you.

What then of the "dishonest wealth"?  To "make friends" may seem like good counsel, but shall we do so "by means of dishonest wealth?"  As other English translations have it, the Greek phrase which the NRSV translates "by means of dishonest wealth" might also be rendered "use worldly wealth" (NIV) or, as the New Jerusalem Bible puts it, "use money, tainted as it is."  That would seem to strike close to the reality of our own situation.  Who could argue that the world in which we live is not built upon "tainted" wealth, that the lands in which we make our livelihoods were stolen from others, that the food which we buy was produced from lands unjustly possessed and using means often degrading to the earth itself?  The world of mammon is incontestably unjust.

Nevertheless ensnared, God holds us responsible to use our "worldly wealth" to "make friends" out of enemies, to apply what resources we manage not to the breaking but to the building of relationships.  That in itself, creating a community of mutual care, would go a long way toward alleviating the suffering of our world.

-Joe

no minor message

From Monday, I've started a one-on-one study with a student leader at Bethany Bible School.  As our discussion circled around the theme of the Old Testament prophets, I shared with him certain "summaries" of the Old Testament Law.  Of course, we discussed the centrality of the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the commandment Jesus chose to summarize the Law, coupled with Leviticus 19:18.  Also I pointed him to Micah 6:6-8, whose triad of "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God" has been cited as the summation of the Law within the history of Jewish biblical interpretation.  Other rabbis boiled Micah 6:8 down to Habakkuk 2:4: "the just shall live by faith."  Quite naturally, therefore, our discussion highlighted the interrelatedness of faith, justice, mercy, humility, and love.  To put it another way, what it means to have faith is to walk humbly with God, accordingly living justly with and showing mercy to others.  That all sounds very much like loving God with all one's heart, soul, and might, and one's neighbor as oneself.

Within our study, my friend testified to me of Micah 6:8 that "this was his first time to see this verse." He also had this to say of the "minor prophets", the corpus of twelve prophetic books of which Micah and Habakkuk are two:

"They are not minor in meaning.  They are very direct.  I sometimes go into Christian bookstores and buy books with 200, 300 pages.  But they don't say anything new.  These books [the minor prophets] say far more in fewer words."

-Joe

from nakedness to clothed

Several weeks ago I was given the opportunity to address the teenage children of a school hostel in Cradock.  Every Sunday evening, Lawrence Coetzee, our friend and pastor of MWC-member Grace Community Church, organizes a service for the students.  He usually invites pastors from the community to speak and, because we were visiting, he invited me to share the word.

I had been studying the book of Ephesians a lot in the previous months (I taught a course on it in June), and so it was in the forefront of my mind as I pondered what I might say.  I chose to focus on the well-known armor of God passage (Eph 6:10-17), and found myself preaching on clothing as a motif for the proclamation of the gospel message.

Since armor is a type of clothing, and since Paul exhorts the Ephesians to "Put on the whole armor of God", it follows that the goal of the Christian life is to be dressed (6:11, 13).  That might sound unremarkable, except that in the Genesis account of creation, human beings in their state of primal "goodness" are depicted as naked: "the man and the woman were naked together and unashamed" (Gen 2:25).  If the original intention was nakedness, how can the final intention be a state of being clothed?

The tension between clothed and unclothed as both expressions of the will of God gives rise to the insight that our state of blessedness or goodness as human beings consists not in returning to a previous state of our existence but in going forward to the place where God's Spirit is leading us.  We cannot return to Eden; we can only go forward to the New Jerusalem.  We cannot recover the goodness of the first human being, unmarred before the sin of disobedience to the will of the Creator; we can only receive the goodness of the second human being, Jesus Christ, and allow his righteousness to overcome our sin.  We cannot go back to our original nakedness; we can "put on the whole armor of God" and "be clothed with the Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom 13:14).

Such a view of salvation, of being not returned but being transformed, frees us from the weight of striving to retrieve that which we find impossible to retrieve, though we often struggle precisely to put back into place that which was.  A friend once related a story to me of a "saved person", a born-again Christian, who reasoned on the basis of his faith that his old life of sin was of no consequence, and thus he has cut all ties with the child who was born to him out of wedlock.  The implicit view of salvation in such a strategy would seem to be a going back to the life one had before the act of which one is ashamed, since the man's present "peace" consists in pretending that he is in some sense as he was before--not a father to the child he "fathered".  In the biblical canon, such a strategy for dealing with regret was represented by Ezra and Nehemiah, who demanded after the return from exile in Babylon that the Jews "put away the foreign wives" whom they had married (Ez 10:3, 11, 44).  Ezra and Nehemiah espoused salvation as return to an idealized past before a time of foreign contamination of the covenant community.  In the Old Testament, books such as Ruth would seem to counter such a perspective; the blood of a Moabite woman, Ruth, mixes with Boaz to produce the line of Israel's greatest king.

The good news of Jesus Christ, likewise, accepts the consequences of behavior as a point of departure toward greater things, not abandoning the fallen or eliminating the foreign but incorporating them into the body of Christ.  Within his body, things do not look as they were before nor are they left as they are; rather, "there is a new creation" (2 Cor 5:17).  That new creation is very much a matter of clothing the naked.  It covers the shame of sin, not by undoing what has been done (which no one can do!), but with a shirt of righteousness; a belt of truth; shoes of peace; a hat of salvation; a shield of faith; and a sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.  Christ himself transforms us as we "put him on."

-Joe

resounding compassion

Some observations on Luke 7:11-17, the story of the widow's son raised at Nain, a text I preached on some weeks ago when it came up in the lectionary:

The story is about compassion, God's suffering with us in Jesus.  Jesus' compassion for the widow is central to the text.  Luke reports that, "When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her" (v. 13).  Luke underscores God's compassion for the widow in the detail that the "man who had died" and who "was being carried out" was "his mother's only son" (v. 12).  The phrase "only son" immediately evokes other New Testament texts, most notably John 3:16, in which Jesus himself is the only begotten of God whom God gave, even unto death, out of his love for the world.  Consequently, the tears of the widow for her only son are as the tears of the Father for his only Son, the very experience of loss in which human pain touches divine pain.  The Spirit of the Father in the person of the Son recognized the widow's pain for her only son as God's own, and was moved to action.

Further emphasis is laid on the close association between the divine and human experience of suffering in the crowd's acclamation of Jesus in response to the raising of the widow's son.  As Jesus had raised the son from his bier, so the crowd testifies, "a great prophet has risen among us!" (v. 16).  Just as the widow's son was dead and raised to life, so Jesus will die and be raised.  The crowd's acclamation that that prophet has even now arisen, powerful even over death, is an anticipation of God's ultimate victory over death in the resurrection of the prophet Jesus from his own grave.  Luke thereby invites the reader to see in the experience of the widow's son from death to life the eventual resurrection of God's Son from death.  All in all, the suffering of God in the suffering of humanity is an illustration of compassion, God's suffering with his people.

If compassion is God's suffering with us, then the antithesis of compassion is the posture of separation from the suffering of another.  The widow's predicament in this story, as in so many other biblical examples, is a suffering of separation from the men from whom she has been cut off.  In this story that separation is a result of the death of her son, though within its broader Lukan and canonical context, the separation of women from men is due to the unfaithfulness of men.  One example occurs subsequent to this story in the same chapter, the story of the woman who anoints Jesus' feet while he is sitting in the home of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50).  The issue in that story, as it is in the story of the widow of Nain, is the evidence of Jesus' prophetic identity.  Thus, whereas the crowd of Nain acclaimed Jesus a prophet for his mighty deed of compassion on the widow, Simon the Pharisee can only doubt the prophetic status of Jesus due to Jesus' refusal to reject the woman's act of love toward him.  Simon's concern is that the woman is a "sinner", and that Jesus' acceptance of her gift shows that he is unaware of her status, thus negating his status as prophet. Of course, the point of the story is that Simon, not Jesus, is the man unable to perceive the things of God; whereas Simon seeks to protect worldly status and privilege, Jesus values mercy and the repentance of sinners unto salvation.  In light of our first point, where Jesus values compassion, Simon would uphold separation.  Simon, consequently, is the embodiment of anti-compassion in the narrative, the contrast to Jesus' overwhelming compassion both in this story and in the story of the widow at Nain.

In valuing separation over compassion, Simon commits the sin of other men in the biblical narrative who abandoned women to their shame as sinners in the eyes of society.  An Old Testament example, the story of Tamar and the sons of Judah (Gen 38:1-26), brings together the themes of shame and death in the meaning of widowhood.  In that story, Tamar is not only a widow due to the death of her husbands (in turn the brothers Er and Onan), but a "sinner" in the eyes of Judah her father-in-law who blames her for the death of his sons.  As Judah should have provided for Tamar in her loss, he relinquishes responsibility by sending her back to her father's house.  Judah, by cultural convention responsible for Tamar his daughter, banishes her to the shame of separation from his household.  Judah too, therefore, is an embodiment of an all-too-common masculine aloofness, the anti-compassion to the compassion of the man Jesus.

The examples of Simon the Pharisee and Judah, therefore, paint the broader biblical context, both Lukan and canonical, in which the desperation of widows may be clearly seen.  Widows, as well as other women whom men have left behind, bore not simply the sting of death but the suspicion of society for the deaths of their husbands.  The predicament of "widowhood", therefore, is not simply a matter of losing a husband to death, but the abandonment of women by men to bear the shame of society.

A folk song from the American context captures well the widespread phenomenon of the separation of women from men in the South African context.

From a teenage lover to an unwed mother,
kept undercover like some bad dream
But unwed fathers, they can't be bothered,
they run like water through a mountain stream.  

Central to the salvation that Jesus brings is the restoration of men to women.  In the story, the compassion of Jesus for the widow led to the raising of her son from death.  What Jesus said to the corpse, he says to all men who have left women behind: "Young man, I say to you, rise!" (7:14).  And just as Jesus "gave [the young man] to his mother", so all men quickened by the voice of Jesus shall return to their wives and mothers as loving husbands and sons.

The compassion of Jesus in the lives of his people will resound across the earth.  The text moves from the predicament of death in "a town called Nain" to the proclamation of God's grace through Jesus "throughout Judea and all the surrounding country" (7:11, 17).  The good that is done in Nain is made known elsewhere. The compassion of Jesus spreads to all from wherever it is put into practice.

Then let the compassion that was in Jesus abound through his church.

-Joe

forgiveness and rest

My father-in-law led the workshop at Bethany Bible School over the weekend on the topic of vengeance and forgiveness.  The workshop yielded many personal stories and fascinating insights into scripture from the participants.

Among the scriptural allusions was one man's application of the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:58-60) to the theme of forgiveness.  The man's particular contribution was to link the resting of Stephen's spirit to his act of forgiving his murderers.  Thus we read that, during his stoning, Stephen first prays, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit (7:59)."  Not having yet died, however, Stephen further cries out, "Lord do not hold this sin against them (7:60a)."  Only then, after having given up the desire for vengeance in pronouncing forgiveness for his enemies, does Stephen die (7:60b).  In other words, it is only in Stephen's forgiving of his enemies that his own spirit is received or returns to its origin in God.  His first prayer--a plea for his own ultimate salvation--is answered in his second prayer--a word of forgiveness to others.

Whether or not the man's reading of the death of Stephen was the author's intended meaning, I regarded it when I heard it as an interesting and powerful testament to forgiveness.  Upon further study, however, I regard his comments as likely indicative of the author's intended meaning as well.  Indeed, the stoning of Stephen in Acts bears striking resemblance to the crucifixion of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, both the telling of a single author (Luke).  Just as Jesus forgave his enemies with "Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing (Lk 23:34)," so Stephen said, "Do not hold this sin against them."  Likewise, each man, first Jesus and then Stephen, prays that his spirit might be received.  Such comparisons of Acts with the gospel narratives of Matthew, Mark, and John are not available; it is only in Luke that the crucifixion of Jesus includes the words of explicit forgiveness and the personal plea for rest.  Jesus' first and last word from the cross in Matthew and Mark is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", whereas in John his last word is "It is finished (Mk 15:34//Mt 27:46; Jn 19:30)."  If the reader should thus view the account of Stephen's stoning and the crucifixion of Jesus in Luke together, the point at which the respective narratives diverge then becomes significant in terms of meaning.  What was Luke trying to say about the deaths of Jesus and Stephen?

For Luke, Jesus as Israel's Messiah sets the standard for the church which lives by his Spirit.  The spirit of Jesus' suffering is paradigmatic for his followers.  It is interesting to note, then, that the order of Jesus' twofold plea of forgiveness and rest is reversed in Stephen's twofold prayer of the same.  Whereas Jesus first pronounces forgiveness and then finds rest, Stephen first pronounces rest but only later finds forgiveness.  It is only in coming to forgiveness--as had Jesus before him--that Stephen finds rest.  It is only when Stephen forgives his enemies that his spirit returns to God.  It is only when Stephen's "order" of suffering truly follows that of Jesus that his spirit becomes one with his Lord.  Just as Jesus' progression from the pronouncement of forgiveness to the request for rest ended in his death, so Stephen's request for rest was finally granted in his pronouncement of forgiveness.  "When he had said this," that is, when Stephen had forgiven his enemies, "he died" (Luke 7:60).

Finally, a couple of caveats:

1. Though the above interpretation is an affirmation of the Christian necessity to forgive, also the very heart of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, it should be taken as an affirmation of the graciousness of the forgiving spirit rather than as a condemnation of the spirit that cannot yet forgive.  It should be taken as a clear affirmation of the goal to which the Christian aspires rather than as a compulsion to forgive before the time is right.  In fact, the story of Stephen itself implies this process, albeit in a short space of time.  Stephen himself did not find the rest that comes with forgiveness without a struggle.  If Jesus' graciousness in suffering is paradigmatic for the believer, Stephen's is perhaps more representative.  Victims of violence should expect, and be afforded time by others, to go through a process toward ultimate rest.

2.  Jesus' suffering is a model for Christians at the point of showing love for (forgiving) others, not for suffering's sake alone.  The stories of the crucifixion of Jesus and the stoning of Stephen have to do with suffering in order to redeem others ("do not hold this sin against them").

-Joe

the significance of ascension

Last Thursday I was invited to give the meditation at an Ascension Day service.

I chose to focus on the similarities and differences between the ascension of Jesus Christ (Acts 1:1-11) and an Old Testament ascension, the ascension of Elijah (2 Kings 2:1-18).

Both the ascension of Elijah and the ascension of Jesus take place in the company of others.  Jesus ascends from the presence of the eleven disciples on the Mount of Olives.  Elijah ascends from the presence of his disciple, Elisha, on the far side of the Jordan River.  In the Elijah narrative, however, it is not Elisha alone who is witness to the ascension of his master.  At each stage of the journey toward Elijah being taken up to heaven, a "company of prophets" meets Elisha and asks him, "Do you know that today the Lord will take your master away from you?" (2 Kgs 2:3, 5)  From Jericho, the last point of departure before the Jordan, the company of prophets follows Elijah and Elisha at a distance, presumably to see what will happen (2 Kgs 2:7).  While the company of prophets waits on the Jericho side of the Jordan, Elijah and Elisha cross over to the place from which Elijah then ascends in wind and fire.  Though it was only Elisha who crossed over with his mentor, the company of prophets also seems to have known that Elijah ascended.  When Elisha returns from the other side of the Jordan, the company of prophets recognize not only that "the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha" but that "it may be that the Spirit of the Lord has caught [Elijah] up and thrown him down on some mountain or in some valley" (2:16).  Thus, even though the company of prophets recognize that spiritual authority has passed from Elijah to another, their proposal to Elisha is to search for Elijah, as though to restore Elijah to his prior role.  Elisha disapproves of their proposal, knowing that Elijah cannot return, yet under pressure permits the company to search.

The search of the company of prophets for the ascended prophet is mirrored in Acts 1 by the "looking up toward heaven" of the disciples after their ascended Lord.  And, just as Elisha warned the company of prophets not to search for Elijah, so "two men in white robes" admonish the disciples not "to stand looking up toward heaven?" (Acts 1:10-11).  Their message to the disciples left behind is a variation on Jesus' last words to them before he was taken up.  The two men assure the disciples that Jesus will come again "in the same way as you saw him go into heaven", which is to say that for the time being Jesus has really departed from them as a person of flesh and blood.  The disciples are not to look into heaven, for they cannot bring back the one whom God has taken away.  Jesus, similarly, had just previously told the disciples that "it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority" (1:7); just as the disciples' gazing toward heaven could not bring Jesus back, so the disciples' longing for Jesus to now "restore the kingdom to Israel" could not make it so (1:6).  In either case, the disciples are looking for their leader and prophet to assume his prior position in their lives.  Their desire with regard to Jesus is as the desire of the company of prophets with regard to Elijah; they wish to bring back to earth the ascended holy man.

Jesus' plan for his disciples' lives is entirely different from their own.  Rather than doing the work of the kingdom in their stead, Jesus will empower the disciples to do God's work in his stead.  "You", he says to the disciple band, the New Testament company of prophets, "will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (1:8).  The work is no less Jesus', but the power for kingdom work and witness has been transferred from the one prophet of God to the many; witness moves from the flesh and blood body of Christ to the spiritual body of his followers.  By the power of his Holy Spirit, the church will do the work of the kingdom of God until Jesus comes again.   

Thus it is that the disciples realized in their lives what the company of prophets could not realize in theirs.  Because they did not wish to see Elisha's master, their master, taken away, because they went looking for him rather than assume the responsibility of his mission, they did not receive, as Elisha did, the spirit that once rested on Elijah.  But for the mercy of God through his messengers, the disciples of Jesus would have gone the way of the company of prophets.  As it was, however, they remembered and heeded the words of Jesus "not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father" (Acts 1:4).  Their commitment to follow Jesus was met with the power to follow Jesus from Jerusalem into the world at Pentecost.

In our own time, the church, like the company of prophets and the disciples gazing toward heaven, often rather cedes the work of God to holy individuals.  The church too would rather search for Elijah than take up his mantle (see 2 Kgs 2:13).  As a result, the spirit that might have passed to the whole company of God's people passes only to solitary Elishas.  The Protestant ideal of the priesthood of all believers goes unfulfilled.  In the words of John Howard Yoder, the church of "no one ungifted, no one not called, no one not empowered, and no one dominated" is "the reformation that has yet to happen."

One final word on the ascension of Jesus Christ: What is the significance of the ascension?  The ascension lies between resurrection and Pentecost.  The ascension makes possible the conferring of the power of the resurrection of Jesus to his followers at Pentecost.  If Jesus does not go away, he cannot come to us by his Spirit.  If he does not leave us empty through his ascension, he cannot fill us by his Spirit.  Perhaps then the ascension of Jesus is a call to the church for preparation and purification in anticipation of empowerment for service and mission in the world.

-Joe

The quote from John Howard Yoder comes from Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992), pp. 59-60.

law in light of law

Earlier this month at Bethany Bible School I taught on the topic of Law, or the course in our curriculum on the Torah or Pentateuch. The eight-hour course (in one day) is designed 1) to give students a framework for making sense of the material in the five books; 2) to gain understanding of one particular Old Testament law; 3) to gain understanding of how Jesus interprets that OT law in a gospel text. For this year, I selected Deuteronomy 25:5-10 and Mark 12:18-27 to accomplish the goals of points 2 and 3.

Deuteronomy 25:5-10 spells out the procedure for what is known as levirate marriage, or the marrying of a deceased man's widow to his brother. The purpose of such marriage is defined in the law itself as “the perpetuation of the [dead] brother's name in Israel” (25:7). Indeed, the concern for the continuation of the deceased's name appears three times in the text: 1) in the introduction to the law, “so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (25:6); 2) in the conclusion, “This is what is done to a man who does not build his brother's house” (25:9); 3) centrally, in the words of the widow pleading her case before the elders at the gate, “My husband's brother refuses to perpetuate his brother's name in Israel” (25:7). Although elsewhere in the Old Testament the law of levirate marriage is portrayed as an initiative of the widow to gain security for herself through offspring (Gen 38:1-26; Ruth), the Deuteronomy text seems not to foreground the care of the widow but the perpetuation of the deceased man's name. Though it may not be insignificant to the cause of justice for the widow that by law the widow carries out the public shaming of the brother who refuses to take her in marriage (what if all men who did not fulfill their responsibilities toward women were similarly shamed, rather than the woman bearing the shame of society by herself?), nonetheless the primary offense of failure to marry a brother's widow is stated in the law by the widow herself—the failure of the brother “to perpetuate his brother's name in Israel” (25:7). The perpetuation of the name, I argue, is the central concern of this law.

Having established with the students that the perpetuation of the deceased brother's name does appear to be the text's central concern, one older woman offered her opinion of the text: “I so don't like this lesson.” It was perhaps not the practice of levirate marriage that offended her, which is even still not unknown to our students or resides in memory in the not-so-distant past; rather, the prescription of the widow “spitting in the face” (25:9) of the her husband's brother who refuses to take her in marriage struck the woman as not in accord with the broader concern of the Torah for “holiness” and “love”. The student's disdain for the text was encouraging to me, not because my goal is for them to disdain particular texts, but because she displayed the ability to read the text in the light of other texts, in canonical perspective. For many of our students, the Bible is an authority whose commandments are beyond interpretation (perhaps in North America we have a slightly different problem: the erosion of the notion of the Bible's authority). The woman's comment thus showed an ability to critique the text in light of the Text.

The woman made one other, highly imaginative comment. The brother who refused to marry the widow, the brother whom the widow by law may publicly disgrace, is, in the words of the woman, the righteous one who belonged to the age of the resurrection. Why did the woman make this comment, and upon what was her reference to the resurrection based?

In the gospel text that appropriates the levirate law, Mark 12:18-27, Jesus tells the Sadducees that “when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (12:25). The man who did not wish to marry his brother's widow, therefore, belonged before his time to the resurrection in which “they neither marry nor are given in marriage”. In our student's perspective, the disgraced brother was the righteous one; the one shamed according to the law was the one vindicated by the word of Jesus.

Whether or not one accepts the woman's midrash, it is certain that Jesus disagreed with the Sadducees' application of Deuteronomy 25:5-10 to the issue of resurrection if not the main concern of that particular law itself. The Sadducees, those “who say there is no resurrection,” applied the levirate law to a hypothetical and highly unlikely situation in order to deny the resurrection and to humiliate Jesus (Mark 12:18ff.). Their story, in which seven brothers, each in turn taking his brother's wife following his brother's death and failing to produce offspring for his brother, somehow, in the Sadducees' mind, proved the impossibility of resurrection. The proof for the Sadducees seemed to lie in the unassailability of life by “natural” means. In Sadduceean perspective, life continued or went forward into future generations through sons, those who would carry on or “remember” the name of their father in Israel. Without offspring, the continuation of life through the perpetuation of the name was an impossibility. For the Sadducees, fathers only lived on through their sons, ancestors through their descendants who remembered them. The only possibility for a kind of “everlasting life” was via reproduction. To the extent that Deuteronomy 25:5-10 also attaches ultimate concern to the perpetuation of the brother's name, the Sadducees not incorrectly understood it as the guardian of the one way of “eternal” life.

Jesus, of course, rejected the Sadducees' way of thinking and perhaps with it the central concern of Deuteronomy 25:5-10. For Jesus, eternal life was not secured by one's capacity for offspring but through the faithfulness of God. In Jesus' perspective, human beings do not cause their own names to be remembered in perpetuity; God, as he promised Abram on the heels of the disaster of those who tried to “make a name for [themselves]” at Babel (Gen 11:4), will “make your name great” (Gen 12:2). Abram, the one whom God called to obedience in the very years of his childlessness, is the same Abraham whose name God remembered when God appeared to Moses in “the story about the bush”--the very story from the Law (Exodus 3) that Jesus used to combat the Sadducees' account of eternal life through the law. If God remembers the righteous dead, those who “walked before [God]” that they might be “blameless” (Gen 17:1), then the righteous dead continue in God. Life is secured by the God who raises the dead—not by human beings who, through all manners of desperation, attempt to “raise up” offspring for the sake of a name (Mark 12:19).

One might see all kinds of applications of this textual debate to the realities of traditional and modern life in Africa, North America, or elsewhere. I leave that work to the reader. But in terms of an understanding of biblical law and its authority for our lives, Christians still have much to learn from Christ's way of reading law in the light of law through the knowledge of “the scriptures” and “the power of God” (Mark 12:24).

-Joe

meeting the Lord

It is a not unknown counterargument to the modern doctrine of the rapture to point out the precise first-century meaning of the Greek word apantesis, "meeting", in the context of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. Even so, recent reflection on this text in light of my experience of certain African cultural practices of hospitality would seem to bolster just that scholarly counterargument.

The doctrine of the rapture, a sudden snatching away of believers to heaven to escape the destruction of the earth, is extrapolated from Paul's assurance to the Thessalonians that "we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever" (1 Th 4:17).   In the immediate background to this verse are "the dead in Christ"; those living, those remaining, those "left" are left in relation to those who have died.  Paul wants the living not to be "uninformed about those who have died, so that [they] may not grieve as others do who have no hope" (4:13).  Thus Paul informs the Thessalonians that their dead in Christ "will rise first", that is, just before or as the living "are caught up in the clouds with them" at the Lord's coming.  Together, the living and the dead in Christ will "meet the Lord in the air."  The Greek word apantesis which the NRSV translates as a verb, "meet", is actually a noun--the living and the dead in Christ will be "caught up . . . into a meeting of the Lord in the air" (4:17).  

The critical point is that Paul has appropriated apantesis, a word from the realm of politics, to describe in anticipation the scene at the coming of the resurrected Jesus.  Just as a delegation of representatives ventured outside their city to welcome an approaching dignitary in the Greek world of the first century, just as they held an apantesis with the king as he was coming, so the living and the dead in Christ will have "a meeting with the Lord in the air" as he "descends from heaven" (4:16).  As the initial reception of the king took place outside the gates of the city to which he was coming, so believers will welcome their Lord "in the air", in the middle zone between departure and destination.  For indeed, just as the purpose of an entourage is to accompany the dignitary to his destination, so believers will not remain with their Lord "in the air".  The middle space is but the point of reception; the goal is to bring the king into his city.

As I prepare a lesson on this text for teaching on eschatology to African church leaders, I am reminded of the welcome we and a group of American church visitors received from a rural African church last month.  Like the first-century delegation coming out to meet the arriving king, so these African Christians lined our pathway outside the gates of the homestead and church premises.  Moreover, just as 1 Thessalonians paints the scene of the Lord's coming with shouts, calls, and trumpets, so we too were met with singing and instrumentation (in this case, drumming).  Of course, the point of all this was not to remain with us outside the gate, never to enter the house; the inhabitants of this village were welcoming us in order to bring us in. Inside a banquet was prepared for us.

If therefore, both the first-century practice of apantesis and an African way of "meeting" in the 21st century shed light on the New Testament's description of the Lord's coming, then an escape of believers to their Lord before the earth's cataclysmic destruction seems not to be the stuff of Christian hope.  Rather, that hope which is truly Christian "catches us up" in making our world a place in which the Lord is pleased to dwell when he comes.

-Joe

joy in the judgment

Today I've been studying Ecclesiastes 3:16-22 in preparation for an upcoming lesson.

In this passage, Qoholeth, the "Teacher" of Ecclesiastes (1:1), ruminates on the fate of human beings.  The teacher does not believe in life after death.  The teacher does not share the voice of Isaiah, that those who die in the Lord "shall live, their corpses shall rise" (Isa 26:19), nor the hope of Daniel that "many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to everlasting shame and contempt" (Dan 12:2).  Far from these rare affirmations of resurrection in the prophetic and apocalyptic literature of the Old Testament, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes is that human beings "are but animals" (3:18).  Humans and animals share the same "fate"; they are one in spirit (or breath) and flesh ("dust") (3:19).  Perhaps in rebuttal of a more optimistic view of human destiny, the teacher sees little reason to hope that "the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward" (3:21).  His summary is that "all go to one place" (3:20).

If the teacher's conclusion on the fate of humans and animals was that they die to "one" and the same "place", it was his vexation that "in the place of judgment, wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there" (3:16) that led him to that conclusion.  The troubling proposition of the one and same place of judgment (or "justice", Hebrew mishpat) and wickedness, of good and evil, of saints and sinners, leads him to "the one place" of humans and animals.  Because wickedness flourishes in the place of righteous judgment,  in death humans go to the same place as animals.  In the teacher's mind, the reality of the one place of wickedness and righteousness is somehow related to the one place of humans and animals.

What is the relation?  In the teacher's mind, the one place of death follows from the same place of justice and wickedness because "God will judge the righteous and the wicked" (3:17).  The teacher, far from having abandoned hope, clings to faith in the judgment of God.  The wicked's standing, not falling, in the place of judgment, would seem to be evidence of the injustice and impotence of the world's Creator--if but for one equally conspicuous phenomenon.  For, just as the teacher has observed that it is common for the wicked to sit in the judgment seat, lording it over the just, he has observed that all human beings--righteous and wicked--die with the animals.  Just as surely as, in death, "humans have no advantage over the animals", so the wicked, by fact of their humanity, have no advantage over the righteous. Because of the animals, the place of judgment is not in the end overrun by wickedness; the witness of the animals suggests that a righteous God will yet pull the wicked from their thrones.

Consequently, while the perspective of the teacher is not exactly resurrection hope, it is nonetheless biblical faith. If the teacher could not affirm as much as Isaiah and Daniel, Paul and, of course, Jesus (“I am the Resurrection”) (Jn 11:25), he does, like them, “entrust himself to the one who judges justly” (1 Pet 2:23). Such trust, moreover, commends a distinctive course of living. For Jesus, trusting God for judgment sealed his own perseverance in love that refuses to return violence for violence. Paul, confident in God's vindication of the righteous through the resurrection of Jesus, counseled the Corinthians to “be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord” (1 Cor 15:58). The teacher wrote that “there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work, for that is their lot” (3:22). Unless we view enjoyment of the work that God has given us to do as evidence of selfishness (as though working for God should not bring us happiness), the teacher's course of action is a welcome contribution to the biblical canon. Joy in our living is not the sign of self-satisfaction but of our justification by faith in God.

-Joe

"the blood of the goat" and "the blood of the Lamb: on preaching for a transcultural occasion

On the occasion of our North American church visitors meeting some of our South African church partners at a rural homestead in the Transkei earlier this month, I found myself in the position of having to preach a message that both honored the transcultural dimension of the encounter and spoke to the spiritual realities of communities that still live on the boundary between Christianity and traditional religion.

I chose for the occasion a message that came to me much earlier but which heretofore I had not had the opportunity to preach.  While studying Revelation 7 last year, I began to ponder the significance of the white robes adorning the great throng from "every people, language, tribe, and nation" (Rev 7:9).  In an utterly paradoxical description, the robes of the faithful in John's vision were washed white "in the blood of the Lamb" (Rev 7:14).  Indeed, if it is blood that usually stains red, then the blood that cleanses white must point to a salvation for God's people beyond the physical, to a cleansing that transcends the flesh.  Along these lines, I began to ponder another biblical story of a robe--the robe of Joseph not cleansed but stained with the blood of a goat (Gen 37:31).  

The contrast between the robes washed white and the robe stained red was of far more than color; indeed their respective colors were just outward appearances of inward realities.  In the case of Joseph, the robe itself and the blood of the goat by which it was stained stood for division between the children of Israel, God's own people.  Since Israel had given Joseph a robe as a show of favoritism above his brothers, the robe aroused the brothers' jealousy toward Joseph.  At an opportune time, they stripped him of his robe, threw him in a pit, sold him into slavery, and covered up their crimes before their father through the blood of a goat: "They had the long robe with sleeves taken to their father, and they said, 'This we found; see now whether it is your son's robe or not" (Gen 37:32).  The blood of the goat, therefore, was as a seal to the robe of jealousy, marking a bitter separation between God's people which was to last many years until the time of forgiveness should come.

The robes of Revelation's faithful, by contrast, stood for the hard-won unity of God's people.  The robes of Revelation adorn not the one exalted by his father above his brothers but the many freed from their sins by the blood of God's own Lamb, Jesus Christ (Rev 1:5).  "These are they" who together--not one above another--have been made "to be a kingdom and priests serving [their] God and Father" (Rev 5:10; 1:6).  The robes of white stand for the peace of Christ, the genuine reconciliation of one human family which has come through the bitter discord of "the great ordeal" (Rev 7:14).  The robe of Joseph brought hostility, but the robe of Jesus Christ brings peace.  The blood of the goat brought separation, but the blood of the Lamb "speaks a better word" (Heb 12:24).

Thus it was that I tried to address, in one way subtle, in another way less so, what I perceived as the twofold demand of the occasion.  In terms of black and white meeting together for worship, the sermon pointed rather explicitly to the reconciliation between the races still laboring to be born years after the "great ordeal" of apartheid (literally, separate-ness) in South Africa.  And for a few hours on that day, black and white together praising our God and Father, the kingdom of God drew near.  In terms of the particular temptations of the traditionally-minded Africans with whom we worshiped, my intention was to point, in far less direct ways than to the issue of racial reconciliation, to the sacrifices which please God.  As a white person, for the cause of racial reconciliation, I am compelled to guard against being seen to be denigrating anything deemed by anyone to be a part of the cultures of black people.  And as one who preaches Christ crucified, I am also compelled, via the scriptures, to contrast the way of Christ to the ways of the world--black or white.  Thus, with what I believe was sufficient subtlety, I simply contrasted "the blood of the goat"--the most commonly sacrificed animal in Xhosa ancestral religion--with the "the blood of Jesus Christ" in the particular terms of the Genesis and Revelation texts.  By locating the contrast in terms of the texts, I believe that my chances of delivering a redemptive word are greatly increased.  Through Genesis 37's "blood of the goat" and Revelation 7's "blood of the Lamb" I can speak to issues of division and reconciliation between two groups of people even as the contrast between the sacrifices of "goats and bulls" (Heb 9:14) and the sacrifice of Christ need not be lost on anyone who has an ear to hear.  

-Joe

"What they said pleased the whole community"

We just had the privilege of having Hlobisile Nxumalo, director of Acts of Faith, a youth program in Swaziland, lead our workshop March 1-2 at Bethany Bible School.  Hlobi is trained as an accountant, but her broader passion seems to be management and, in particular, management as it pertains to the church.  She led the students of BBS in thinking about how they lead and participate in meetings in their churches.  She emphasized processes of communal decision making and building consensus in the church on divisive issues.

In her presentation on Saturday, Hlobi drew our attention to Acts 6:1-7, the text which tells of the choosing of the first deacons in the early church.  Hlobi stressed verse 5a: "What they said pleased the whole community."  Within the text, verse 5a might be quickly overlooked, a throwaway comment on the way toward a greater point.  I suspected, nevertheless, that in fact Hlobi had directed our eyes toward the very structural heart of the text--and thus the interpretive key to its message as a unit.

As I investigated the structure of Acts 6:1-7, I found an unmistakable inclusio, a two-part frame marking off the text as a distinct unit of thought.  The text begins by emphasizing that, "during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number" (6:1); it ends with a similar thought: "the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem" (6:7).  In other words, the inclusio in the text pertains to the growth of the church; the church moves from growth to growth.  Growth is the frame of the text.

This is not to say, however, that the growth of the church is something to be taken for granted, an inexorable harvest of increase until disciples of Jesus cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  On the contrary, the growth of the church passes through many troubles and trials, progressions and recessions more akin to the tides crashing on the beach during the course of a day.  Thus we read that, "during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food" (6:1).  With an initial burst of growth comes conflict.  Precisely on the heels of triumph comes frustration.  The sailing of the church is not smooth.  As the disciples were increasing, the Hellenists were arguing against the Hebrews over the equality of care for widows.  The church increased; the church was dividing.

The conflict over equal care, a matter of justice, might have destroyed the church, fractured the hard-won work of Christ's cross which had broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Hebrew and Hellenist.  Instead, however, the conflict was an extension within the life of the church of the cross of its Lord, an opportunity to confront the powers of injustice and dispel them through perseverance in love for others.  So it was that "the twelve", the acknowledged leaders of the church, "called together the whole community of disciples" and proposed a distinct course of action toward justice (6:2, 3-4).  Their proposal--the appointment of deacons (servant leaders) to be responsible for the distribution of food to Hellenist and Hebrew alike--"pleased the whole community" (6:5a).  The community which the twelve had "called together" to discuss the problem of injustice was the same community which was "pleased" by the appointment of deacons.

One of Hlobi's main points, therefore, was that the transformation of the conflict, signaled in the story by the satisfaction of the "whole community" (v. 5a), was the involvement of the "whole community" in the decision-making process.  Because the twelve had "called together the whole community", the "whole community" was "pleased".  The solution to the problem belonged to the whole community as much as it belonged to the twelve.

In addition, we might add the following lessons from this text:

1. Don't rest on your laurels.  Times of frustration are bound to follow times of triumph.  Frustration need not have the final word, but the church will need to work through conflict.  In the positive, this might be expressed, in the parlance of the New Testament's apocalyptic texts, as the injunction to "Keep awake" or "Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints" (Mk 13:35, 37; Rev 13:10).

2. Growth is dependent upon maintenance.  The increase of the community is related to the health of the community.  The church's inner life affects its outer witness.  The life and processes of the community have a direct affect upon its capacity for attracting outsiders.  The church must thus attend to its inner life, to the maintaining of justice among its members, and to the spiritual practices that enable it to attend to the needs of members.  Thus the twelve were wise in not forsaking "the word of God in order to wait on tables" even as the "waiting on tables" through the appointment of deacons was the solution to the needs of its members.  Spirituality and justice are the requirements for lasting growth.

-Joe

taking supper

When I taught on the theme of the Letters of Paul earlier this month, I used 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 as a case study in the thought of Paul.  As I had spent much time reading through the Pauline corpus in my preparation, I was drawn to a threefold emphasis on Paul’s personal call (or his relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ); Paul’s eschatological focus (or his focus on “last things”, which for Paul meant that the resurrection of Jesus was the fulfillment and “first fruits” of a final age, the embodiment in the present of the world still to come); and Paul’s ecclesiological focus (the centrality of the ekklesia, the church, to Paul’s thought, and also to his personal call and his eschatology).  The importance of his call, his belief that the old world was ending and the new world had come in the resurrected Christ, and his conviction that the church was the sign of the resurrection and that new world, seem to be the theological bases on which Paul formulated specific and contextually-shaped guidance on the everyday ethical issues facing his church communities.  1 Corinthians 11:17-34 is one textual illustration, among many potential options within his writings, of Paul’s theologically-based moral reasoning.

The problem with which 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 deals is “divisions among [the Corinthian church]” (v. 18), specifically manifested in the church’s common meal.  Paul summarizes the problem for the Corinthians as he has heard about it:

“For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk” (v. 21).

In contrast to what the church’s meal was purported to be, Paul, in light of the evidence, asserts that the Corinthians are indeed not eating “the Lord’s Supper” (v. 20).  Paul then proceeds to remind the Corinthian church what the supper of the Lord did entail, and assumes that the contrast between it and the Corinthians’ practice is obvious.

But is it obvious to us?  How is the remembrance of Jesus’ eating with his disciples on the night he was betrayed (v. 23) an antidote to the church’s practice of eating together?  What is it about the tradition of Jesus’ last supper that judged the Corinthians’ habits at supper?

Perhaps Paul’s intended contrast can be found in his use of the Greek verb lambano , to take, as he applies it to the supper etiquette of both the Lord Jesus and the Corinthian church.  Whereas “each” of the Corinthian believers or “each” of the Corinthian church factions, according to Paul, “goes ahead [prolambanei, literally takes before] with your own supper”, “the Lord Jesus . . . took [elaben] a loaf of bread and gave it to others.  Whereas the Corinthian Christians took and consumed the common food before everyone had had a chance to eat, Jesus—the honored head of the household—took the bread of the meal, gave thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body that is for you” (v. 24).  Whereas the Corinthians take their meal before everyone has been served, Jesus gives that which is his to others before serving himself.

It is this Jesus way of taking supper that Paul commends as the antidote to the Corinthians’ hunger and drunkenness, and which forms Paul’s specific counsel to the Corinthian church: not take before (v. 21) but “wait for one another” (v. 33).

As Paul moves from the problem (“taking before”) to the solution (“wait for one another”), his call, his eschatology, and his ecclesiology are clearly in view.  In reciting the Jesus tradition of supper for the Corinthians, Paul claims it as his own.  “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you” (v. 23).  That which Paul saw fit to hand on to others he first had to welcome in his own life.  Paul’s personal connection to Jesus, his experience of being embraced by his Lord, is the strength by which and for which he hands on the way of Jesus to others.

Moreover, Paul’s purpose in handing on the way of Jesus to others is eschatological; by eating the bread and drinking the cup in the manner of Jesus the church “proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes” (v. 26).  Though the resurrection of Jesus is not here explicit (but see chapter 15!), it is here for Paul the invisible pivot between the Lord’s death and his coming again.  Because he is raised, the Jesus who died will come again.

Finally, it is up to the church, the ekklesia, to proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes, that is, to embody now within its common life—indeed in the ordinary but essential practices of eating and drinking—the just and equal sharing of the age to come.  In the time between the passing of the old and the arrival of the new, the community of God’s people is the frail but precious witness to the hope of a new creation, the cause for which Paul urges greater faithfulness to the one in whom all things hold together.

-Joe

“the fellowship of his sufferings”

I’ve been immersed in the letters of Paul for the last two weeks as I’m preparing to teach on that subject for BBS next month.  I’ll try to share some of my findings here over the next few posts, beginning today with Philippians 3:2-11.

I was drawn to this text in light of the question, Who was Paul?  Indeed, in this text, Paul outlines as explicitly as he does anywhere else the details of his personal identity.  Thus, in terms of determining the identity of the man to whom is ascribed the majority of words in the New Testament, this seemed to be as good a place to start as any.

the Apostle Paul

Philippians 3:2-11 is notable for Paul’s usage of the language of “losses” (also could be translated as “damages”) and “gains”.  Those features of Paul’s life which he regarded as gains or benefits he came to regard as losses for the sake of his relationship to Jesus Christ.  If we line up Paul’s gains and losses, as the structure of Paul’s rhetoric suggests we might, some fruitful interpretive possibilities begin to emerge.

Following the Greek, I count seven losses in Christ (gains from the perspective of life apart from Christ) and seven gains in Christ (losses from the perspective of life apart from Christ).  This, then, is how they line up.

Losses in Christ (vv. 5-6)                           Gains in Christ (vv. 9-10)

1. circumcised on the eighth day . . . . . . be found in him [Christ]

2. from the people of Israel . . . . righteousness from faith of Christ

3. from the tribe of Benjamin . . . righteousness from God upon faith

4. a Hebrew of Hebrews . . . . . . . . . . . . to know him [Christ]

5. as to the law a Pharisee . . . . . . and the power of his resurrection

6. as to zeal a persecutor of the church . . fellowship of his sufferings

7. blameless under the law . . . . . . . . being conformed to his death

Though many of the losses in Christ, on the one hand, and gains in Christ, on the other, may be synonymous, seeing each as distinct uncovers rich nuances in meaning.  Paying attention to distinctions enables us, as we’ve done above, to match losses with gains.  A few of those matches may be worth commenting on.

For example, a direct contrast might be seen between Paul’s first line of loss and gain, his circumcision as a Jew on the eighth day and being “found in Christ”.  Whereas circumcision was the rite by which males born to Jewish families became forever incorporated into the people of God, Paul prefers rather now “to be found”—not among his own people—but “in Christ”.

We might draw another contrast from Paul being, “according to righteousness under the law, blameless” (line 7 above) and Paul “being conformed to the death [of Christ]”.  According to the law, Jesus himself in his death on the cross was not righteous but precisely “cursed” (Gal 3:13/Deut 21:23), though to God the cross revealed his righteousness, later sealed by his resurrection.  Having been found in Christ, Paul too seeks the righteousness of Christ “by becoming like him in his death” (3:10 NRSV)—not the righteousness “that comes from the law” (3:9).  It is no longer to the law but to God himself whom Paul desires to be “blameless”.

A third contrast can be found on line 6, between Paul formerly being a zealous “persecutor of the church” to Paul sharing in “the fellowship [Greek: koinonia] of [Christ’s] sufferings”.  In Christ, Paul now suffers with that very community upon which he once inflicted pain.  The enemies of his zeal have become the fellowship of his joy.  Likewise, it is this “fellowship of Christ’s suffering”, the church, which is the key to understanding the letters of Paul.  It is to the church that he wrote, urging its members on to faithfulness to God and love for one another amidst suffering, the cause for which Paul counted all else as loss in Christ.

-Joe