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

the gift of repentance

It's customary at this time of year to sing the line, "Let every heart prepare him room", but probably less common to connect these words to the theme of repentance.  That's the gift of the Advent readings in the lectionary: the theme of preparation was set last week in the context of John's proclamation of a "baptism of repentance" in the wilderness.  I had the privilege of preaching the gospel text of Luke 3:7-14 last Sunday.

My own preparation led me to compare and contrast Luke's telling of the story with Matthew's (3:7-10).  Right from the beginning there is a significant difference from Matthew to Luke.  Whereas John the Baptizer's message of repentance was aimed at the "Pharisees and Sadducees" in Matthew, in Luke the wilderness preacher's call is extended to "the crowds that came out to be baptized by him" (Lk 3:7).  Matthew remembers that John called the "Pharisees and Sadducees" a "brood of vipers"; Luke remembers that John affixed that label to "the crowds".  Regardless of audience, however, the purpose of John's preaching was the same: "Bear fruits worthy of repentance" (Lk 3:8; Mt 3:8).

Luke, for his part, spells out the exact nature of such fruit-bearing repentance.  Luke's narrative will not allow  "the crowds"--like the Pharisees and Sadducees--to ritualize repentance (water baptism being one such form) apart from the will to "turn around" or "change direction."  Luke's John, more explicitly in this case than Matthew's, demands the making of amends.  John's proclamation of repentance in Luke is the repentance of Genesis's Jacob, he who tried, with physical gifts, to return his father's blessing mischievously taken from Esau his brother (Esau, for his part, had the grace to forgive without need of restitution, though that in no way cancels Jacob's obligation, for his part, to give).  Indeed, John's counsel to the crowds in Luke is, 

"Whoever has two coasts must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise"  (3:10-11).

It seems like a reasonable directive, one able to followed by rich and poor alike.  "Whoever has two coats", John says, can give one to someone in greater need.  "Whoever has food" should share with someone who has less (emphasis mine).

Advent, therefore, like the Christmas in which it ensues, is a time (and not the only time!) to put into practice the way of the kingdom which will arrive with the King, the one "coming after" John (see Lk 3:16). The preparation of Advent is the giving of gifts to others ahead of the Gift we all receive at Christmas.

-Joe

to him

In two different settings recently, the story of Jesus' encounter with the Sadducees has occupied the center of my message. One was at a funeral in which it was appropriate to speak about the destiny of the dead. The other was last week at our Bible conference, in which we discussed that same topic under the broader category of eschatology.

Though I probably preached a synthesis of the three versions of the story, appearing as it does in Matthew (22:23-33), Mark (12:18-27), and Luke (20:27-40), it was a line unique to Luke which proved critical.

"To him all of them are alive." This was the line Jesus used to sum up his defense of the resurrection to the Sadducees, "those who say there is no resurrection" (20:27). It came following Jesus' brilliant recontextualization of Exodus 3, "the story about the bush" (20:37), for an audience, that is, the Sadducees themselves, which accepted only the five books of Moses (of which Exodus is one) as scripture. Other Hebrew texts, for example, Isaiah (26:14, 19) and Daniel (12:2) had taught more explicitly the resurrection of the dead; these, however, were not authoritative for the Sadducees, though they were for both Jesus and other Jewish groups such as the Pharisees. As a result, Jesus did not base his response to the Sadducees on texts which were not to them scripture; he made his point from their (and, yes, also his) scripture. He selected the story of God's self-revelation to Moses in the wilderness, in the burning bush.

In that story, God had revealed Godself in relation to God's people; God is God because God is God to someone, in this case, "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob", three men who yielded their lives, not each to his self, but to God. When they died--and they had been dead for centuries by the time Moses appeared on the scene--their lives remained in the presence of their God who is, the "I am who I am" (Ex. 3:14). Or, as Jesus implied, God did not say of Godself in relation to the dead ones, "I was", but "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

In other words, "he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive" (20:38).

Jesus' logic in this story had always perplexed me. Approaching it from an academic point-of-view, his logic seemed more like an affirmation of the existence of the person between biological death and the resurrection of the dead--the so-called intermediate state--than it did the resurrection of the dead, the actual issue at hand in his encounter with the Sadducees. That is, it was not obvious to me that the continuation of personhood after death for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob automatically proved their coming resurrection on the last day; the only "proof" of that was Jesus' appearances to his disciples following his own death, a unique mode-of-being within the corpus of post-death experience available to us from the scriptures, a resurrection promised also to us who "have been united with him in a death like his" (Rom. 6:5).

However, preaching the story, that is, approaching it with a pastoral intent, introduced different questions and, in turn, yielded different answers.

The specific Africans in whose presence I proclaim the Word of God do not, like the Sadducees, have a difficult time accepting the continuation of life for the dead. Quite the contrary, the dead are all too alive for them! The dead still demand attention, still receive care--and this at the great expense of the living. In such a setting, the key question and answer comes from Luke.

To whom are "all of them" alive? "To him all of them are alive."

The dead are not alive to us, their living descendants. The dead are alive to God, their and our living Creator. God remembers the dead. God loves the dead. God cares for the dead. God judges the dead. If the dead receive such good care from an all-powerful God--if to him all of them are alive--what more can we give them? What more do they need from us?

We do not honor the dead by seeking their favor, or fearing their wrath. We honor them by seeking the God who holds them in his care.

-Joe