dreams, words, life

I taught on the apocalyptic literature of the Bible, the books of Daniel and Revelation, at Bethany Bible School last Saturday.

I enjoyed both my study of these texts in the weeks leading up to last weekend and the actual presentation and interaction with students around these books.  For the sake of clarity and simplicity, I chose three main features of biblical apocalyptic literature (based on  my own reading and re-reading of Daniel and Revelation).

1. Dreams and Visions
2. Prophetic Words
3. Exhortations for Right Living

The three are inter-related.  Dreams and visions are the means by which God, sometimes through angels, communicates to human beings (e.g., Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, John of Patmos).  Yet, because those dreams or visions usually are cryptic, those who receive them seek understanding through prophets.  The prophets give words to the visions, that is, they provide interpretation.  Finally, however, neither the dreams nor their interpretations are ends in themselves but calls to right living for the ones to whom they have been given.  Thus, the prophet’s job is not only to interpret but to exhort, to urge on toward faithfulness.

One example may be drawn from Daniel 4.  King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon has a dream of a large tree with its top in the heavens (one is reminded of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11).  The tree is beautiful, its reach vast, its fruit abundant, its shade and its branches a shelter for many.  This is the vision.
 
On the other hand, in spite of its beauty, its appearance is terrifying for the king, for he also hears a “holy watcher” command that the tree should be “cut down” (Dan 4:13ff).  Nebuchadnezzar, as with his dream of a great statue in chapter 2, does not have words for his fear.  And it is precisely those words which might bring relief.  So Nebuchadnezzar calls upon Daniel for interpretation.  Daniel tells him that the tree is not really a tree, but the king himself, his greatness and his sovereignty (4:22).  As for the tree being cut down, Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar that his kingdom will be taken from him “until [he has] learned that the Most High has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals, and gives it to whom he will” (4:25).  This is the interpretation, the prophetic words which explain the dream.

Finally, although Nebuchadnezzar’s fate is sealed—he will be driven from human society (4:25)—it is so only in the absence of Nebuchadnezzar’s own repentance.  The decree of heaven for Nebuchadnezzar is fixed as Nebuchadnezzar is—not as Nebuchadnezzar might be.  And because even now there is hope for Nebuchadnezzar, or at least to leave him without excuse, Daniel gives the word of exhortation.

“Atone for your sins with righteousness, and your iniquities with mercy to the oppressed, so that your prosperity may be prolonged” (4:27).

This is the call to right living.  Of course, the king did not heed it, and had to find out the hard way that God is God over even Nebuchadnezzar’s realm (4:28ff.).

These categories may also be applied to the New Testament’s apocalyptic offering, Revelation, which will be the subject of my next post.

-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

fear and fears

Last week I reported on some of my method and content for teaching the Gospel of Matthew at our Bethany Bible School conference earlier this month. Now for Mark.

Mark's gospel is the one with which I have been the most familiar, having taken a course on it in seminary. And, if I had to choose one gospel with which to be most familiar, I would choose Mark, for knowing Mark allows one to know the basic structure of the Jesus-story; Mark's frame is the one which Matthew and Luke most likely built upon in giving us their own account of Jesus' life.

Even so, I needed to revisit Mark afresh to pump new life into my ability to teach it. This time around I particularly noticed Mark's narrative comments about the "sea" in Jesus' ministry. Jesus is always on or around the sea (of Galilee): teaching "beside the sea", from the boat while a great crowd listens to him from the land (3:7-9; 4:1); going across the sea to the "other side", where he delivered the man from Gerasa who had a "legion" of demons, and fed the five thousand in a "desert place" (5:1-21; 6:30-44); on the sea, preaching peace to the storm, and later, "walking on the sea", revealing himself as the presence of God to his disciples ("Do not fear--I AM") (6:50) (4:35-41; 6:47-52).

Why does it seem that Mark was so keen on emphasizing that the Jesus story took place on or around the sea? We might say simply that this is so because the Jesus story did take place beside the sea, and Mark was simply reporting the facts. But something more is going on. Each gospel writer did frame the Jesus story in his own way. We noted how Matthew emphasizes Jesus' teachings in five main sections, each encapsulated by a common narrative refrain. Luke chose to emphasize, even though the early part of Jesus' ministry also takes place in Galilee, that Jesus' ministry took place "on the way to Jerusalem" (from 9:51 onward). The word "Jerusalem" occurs 30 times in Luke, compared with only 10 and 12 respectively for Mark and Matthew. This is all to emphasize that Mark framed his own story about Jesus around the sea; that was the detail he particularly wanted to highlight about Jesus' ministry. So again we ask, why? And so I asked my students.

"What is the significance of the sea?"

"The sea is like the kingdom of God," said one man. "You go to the sea and it takes away everything. Everything [sin, impurity, etc.] gets washed away in the sea."

"The sea is like God," said one old woman.

"How?" I inquired.

"It is sort of scary."

The sea is scary as God is scary--this would be the old woman's logic. I think that many western Christians would deny such a statement with their words. At least I think they wouldn't come out with such a statement as innocently, unashamedly as this woman seemed to do so. Indeed, God for us is supposed to be gentle, comforting, a shepherd who carries us on his shoulders rather than one who keeps us in line with his staff. Scariness, or fear, is supposed to be the enemy of God who is love, whose "perfect love casts out fear" (1 Jn. 4:18).

If, however, I am honest with myself, God is still scary to me. I also experience the comforting God, the God who casts out my fear and leaves joy in its place. But I am not so mature as to have left behind the scary God. We might say that scary is not the right word, and it wouldn't be my first choice. Let us use instead "fear", which is a biblical word and which we might rationalize can mean something more along the lines of that which inspires awe. Yet even that awe is not without fright, for it is the awe of an experience of something so immense that it could utterly overcome, consume the one who stands in its presence. Not unlike a human being before the sea. The sea is big to us in a manner like God is big to us. The woman's point is well-made.

I also think this is Mark's point. The sea, in broad biblical perspective, is that untameable force which was tamed by God. The order of creation came about by God separating the waters, assigning them their place in order that dry land could appear, then produce, then sustain human life. The waters were there, the great, dark "deep", before God said "Let there be light" and began to make a world (Gen. 1). The waters indeed seem before all things, except the One who is not a thing. We might think that the sea is God, if God had not revealed himself, as he did to Job, as the one who said to the sea, " 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped' " (Job 38:11).

All this points us to a reality that something greater than the sea is with us, someone greater, in fact, than all powers and principalities of this world. If that is the case, we need not fear, as Jesus commanded his disciples in the midst of the storm on the sea; we need not fear, that is, the sea and all powers because "I AM", "God is with us" (Mk. 6:50).

But must we fear the One who is greater than the sea?

I think we must. I think, in fact, it is the only way to live joyfully, peacefully, lovingly, in a world which fears the world. The world is now betraying us, as we have betrayed it. Natural disasters increase, sweeping humans away, as our climate changes. We are told we are on the brink of chaos. We can no longer trust the world. Our misplaced trust is now exposed. Yet if God is our Fear (Gen. 31:42, 53), the fears of the world will not destroy us. If God is our Fear, we will not cling to our lives as if no other life exists. If scarcity increases, we will share what we have with others in faith that God will provide. We will "not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell" (Mt. 10:28). Jesus said that. And it is that fear which he meant to be our comfort.

-Joe

faith of our fathers

Perhaps an alternative title to this blog should be "conversations with Pastor Ntapo", as so many of my insights into African culture and biblical interpretation come in give and take with him. Let that be preface to today's entry.

After a separation of several weeks over the holidays, we met back up in our Bible School office last Thursday. He filled me in on one of the sermons he had preached on a recent Sunday.

He tracked for his people the journey of Abram in Genesis 11-12. Abram, he recalled, left Ur of the Chaldeans with his father Terah, who died on the way to Canaan in the land of Haran (11:31-32). From there, God summoned Abram to continue on his father's journey into "the land that I will show you" (12:1). Later, Pastor Ntapo, continued, "Abram went down to Egypt" (12:10).

His point: Abraham's feet touched down in every place where his descendants would go; his journey anticipated theirs.

Indeed, the Israelites came out of slavery in Egypt to Canaan, and back also to the land of the Chaldeans, to captivity under the Babylonians. And just as Abraham would also go up from Egypt (Gen. 13:1),and later his descendants, so also, in centuries later, his descendants would come back from Babylon. From slavery to freedom. From freedom to slavery. And back again.

As Pastor Ntapo recounted the story, I remembered that Jesus too, went down to Egypt and back up again. "Out of Egypt I called my son," wrote Matthew, applying the words of the prophet Hosea to the boy Jesus (Mt. 2:15; Hos. 11:1). "I also touched on that," said the pastor when I brought up Jesus' journey. "Jesus did the same thing [as Abraham] on the other side."

Thus I observed, as I had in previous encounters, the importance to my African brothers in the faith of the reality that the way which we walk has been prepared beforehand for us by our ancestors. Their experience then is ours now; their suffering, ours; their redemption, ours. More than that, in the words of another pastor at Bethany Bible School when recalling one of last year's lessons on the Israelites' wilderness wandering, "the God who helped them is the same God today."

Because of the story--of Abram and Sarai, Moses and Miriam, of Jesus--"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us" (Rom. 8:18). The story is hope. Without it there is naught.

-Joe

"Who then is this?"

Our November conference topic at Bethany Bible School was the Lord's Supper. Based on five key repeated words in the text, Mark 14:12-25, I made five points.

1. The Supper is the Lord's. The possessive pronoun "my" in relation to Jesus is prominent in the text.

2. The Supper is for disciples. The word "disciples" makes four appearances, all but one in explicit relation to Jesus through the use of the possessive "his" or "my", depending on the speaker. In addition, the text makes two references to "the twelve", a synonymous term.

3. The Supper requires preparation. Variations on the verb "prepare" number five in the text.

4. The central act of the Supper is eating. Variations on the verb "eat" number four.

5. The Supper was a Passover meal. The noun "Passover" likewise makes four appearances.

I learned much by studying and teaching this text. Above all, the text confronted me again--in the manner of Mark's gospel--with the question of Jesus' true identity.

How? The character of Jesus inspires wonder. He is direct, unequivocal; for that very reason he is mysterious. Ordinary people do not speak as Jesus speaks.

He calls ordinary bread "my body." He takes a cup and says "this is my blood." Earlier, he instructs the disciples to go into the city where they will meet a man carrying a jar of water. As they are to follow that man, Jesus tells the disciples to enter "wherever he enters" and "say to the owner of the house, " 'The Teacher asks, Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples' " (14:14). It is there, in that guest room--"a large room upstairs whose furnishings have been fully prepared"--that the disciples will prepare the Passover.

Though the disciples will prepare the Passover, however, they find that preparations have already been made for them. At the beginning of the text, they do not know where they will observe the Passover: "Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?" (14:12); their Teacher has known all along. His word has gone before, preparing their way. Or perhaps he has foreseen the man carrying water, the owner of the house, the upper room. Regardless, the guest room, like the bread and the cup, are his--"my room"; "my body"; "my blood."

Earlier in Mark, the disciples "were filled with great awe" at him who calmed the storm: "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (4:41) Similarly, we might ask, "Who is this, who calls bread "my body" and a cup "my blood"? This is not only a looking forward, that is, to his crucifixion--"my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many" (though it is surely that); this is a looking back, to the beginning. Before the disciples mixed the flour and formed the cakes, before the grapes were gleaned and pressed for drink, someone made the sun to shine and the rain to fall. Someone grew the grain and ripened the fruit.

"Who then is this, who says, 'Creation is mine' ?"

This is Jesus, the giver of life, the Lord of creation.

-Joe