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

warriors and women

In giving a word of encouragement before handing over to me to preach last Sunday, the pastor made a correlation between four women in the congregation and two other sets of people in the Bible.  The day before, I had preached on Mark 15, so that chapter was on the pastor’s mind.  In particular, his attention was fixed on verse 40 which tells of three women “looking on” at the death of Jesus.  These were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome.  This was the first set of biblical people to whom the pastor compared the four mothers in his church.  To these he added “the Three” warriors of David’s army—Josheb-basshebeth a Tahchemonite, Eleazar son of Dodo son of Ahohi, and Shammah son of Agee, the Hararite—whom David extolls in his “last words” from 2 Samuel 23 (2 Sam 23:8ff.).

The pastor’s point was that, just as Jesus had been attended by three women, and David by three warriors, so these four churchwomen in particular had steadfastly stood beside him in the ministry.  Comparing members of the body of Christ to warriors always raises my Mennonite (pacifist) eyebrows.  Yet the fact that these mothers could in no way be mistaken for soldiers of the flesh in the mode of David’s fighting men hinted at a beautiful transformation of the warrior-motif in the pastor’s interpretation.  What the pastor has in mind as the epitome of warrior-hood is not, in fact, those who fight—as did David’s men—with physical weapons, but those praying mothers who prepared a great feast for God’s people on Easter Sunday.  By using the biblical examples to point to the flesh-and-blood women in his church, the pastor cast the text in a new light.  For if these women count for genuine warriors in the pastor’s eyes, is another meaning of warrior-hood likewise intended beneath the surface of the text?  Must a text like 2 Samuel 23:8 be read to affirm acts of physical war, or does it rather commend that which both soldiers and “ordinary” women may have in common, namely, the dedication in giving one’s life to something greater than oneself?  Put another way, is what the text might commend not the cause for which one fights, but the manner in which one fights?  Indeed, I would argue that it is not the cause which unites soldiers and members of the church, for intrinsic to the calling of the former is protecting a geographic domain while the latter serves the kingdom of God (insofar as the latter does not conflate the two).  Rather, it is only to certain virtues which both soldiers and Christians might subscribe, and it is the calling of the Christian to know in whose service alone and how such virtues may be exercised.

The pastor’s way of reading scripture exhibited here I have encountered more broadly in these years of my African sojourn.  Indeed, I have often heard African preachers draw lessons for life from texts which do not seem to have an overlap in the literal sense to the real-life situations which the texts are used to address.  Thus one might find an African preacher using a battle text as a metaphor for perseverance or trusting in God when encouraging a person struggling with an illness.  By contrast, a western preacher might seek out a more literal correspondence between the text and life, so that when addressing a situation of disease one looks to texts of physical healing in the scriptures.  If it is thus fair to say that, in this sense, an African way of reading scripture is more metaphorical than a western one (undoubtedly it could also be more literal in other ways), then I as a North American have learned a lot from African ways of reading.  And if other western readers are like me, then this African approach can help us to hear more of the Bible speaking to our lives.  The pastor’s example above, for example, helps us to see the way in which Old Testament texts have meaning beyond justifying war and promoting a wrathful God—complaints I have frequently heard among North American Mennonites (and others).

I am persuaded that a closer examination of most biblical texts uncovers, in surprising ways, the voice of God speaking to the people whom God loves.

-Joe

of water and spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Joe

literal metaphors

At the weekly meeting of our Bible Study/Fellowship Group on Tuesday, we read the stories of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9) and the coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-21) in preparation for Pentecost. Of course, the two are often paired together because of their focus on language; whereas language was confused at Babel, people at Pentecost heard clearly the disciples "speaking about God's deeds of power in [their] own languages" (2:11). In the Babel story, one language becomes many; at Pentecost, many languages--though not eliminated--become one, united in their capacity to communicate the message of the gospel.

That interpretation is well-enough known. For the present I am interested in another discussion that arose when reading the Babel account: literal versus metaphorical reading of scripture.

One man from among us, a pastor, contended that the stories "at the beginning of Genesis" must be "taken with a pinch of salt", that is, they cannot be taken as literal, which is to say, "historically true". Two others present, one man and one woman, both successful in the modern world but raised in traditional, African villages, contended that the stories are literal or can be taken that way. Anna and I did not really enter the fray; I have found that in discussions such as this, language, words, and meaning fails between people--much like it did at Babel itself. But then, in using such a phrase as "like it did at Babel itself", am I suggesting that the story is literal?

Such a phrase illustrates the point at hand precisely. In speaking as if the events of Babel really happened, I take the story at face-value before probing the hidden depths of its meaning. Or, in other words, I take the story first as a story. The first step in the re-telling of any story--be it a narration of events which happened to one person in the course of one's day or one of Aesop's fables--is to know the story. The first step is to remember the events, put them in order, gather them up. The first step is not to decide whether the story really could have taken place according to other criteria. The first step is to respect the integrity of the storyteller--to take her at her words, to consider that he is giving you a trustworthy account of something. From there, of course, we may discern that the story sounds more like a joke than a report or whatever. But first we must simply listen.

My problem with the interpretation of the pastor is that he had none beyond his contention that the story was metaphorical. It was as if his theories about the stories and texts of the Bible were themselves the message of the Bible rather than what the stories themselves reveal. I much prefer the literalism of the Africans in the room since their literalism--whatever that word even means--leads them to the theological meaning of the story, to revelation, to the moment when God shows God's character, mind, and heart (metaphorically-speaking!) to his people. And they were led to the meaning of the story.

The woman started off the discussion by puzzling about the humans' pretension of building a tower "with its top in the heavens" (11:4).

"In the heavens!?" she gasped. "Did they really think they could reach the heavens?"

Pastor: "Well, you have to take the stories at the beginning of Genesis with a pinch of salt."

Silence.

Perhaps the discussion then continued in other directions for awhile. Eventually the man spoke, returning again to the detail about the height of the tower.

"I think that God intervened because he knew that they would not be able to build the tower without it falling down and killing them. He confused their language so that they would stop building it. It was for their own good."

I thought his interpretation beautiful. He arrived at a profound insight about God. He got there by following the story--then using his imagination. His interpretation was, on one hand, hyper-literal. He did not choose to follow, for example, that the people would be ruined by their pride, by their desire to "make a name for themselves" (11:4), the embodiment of which was the tower, but the tower itself, literally toppling under its own height upon them. It was first from the tower's destructive potential--not first from the destructive potential of what the tower might be said to stand for--that God saved the people. Yet it was God who saved the people from their own destructive ingenuity. That is the common message of the story, the message which might unite both modern and pre-modern interpreters of this text.

We see also then that the issue is not really literal versus metaphorical readings of scripture; the point is that the literal and the metaphorical are the same. I am no longer sure of their difference. Even less am I sure that one can find God by setting out to read the text as metaphorical literature. But one will find God by reading, simply, the story.

-Joe

You might find themes pertinent to this discussion in this fine article from The Mennonite.

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

an interpretive stone

Another Bible conference. Another obscure reference to Absalom.

Last May, you might remember, one man had asked about the kiss of Absalom.http://joeannasawatzky.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-kisses.html On Saturday, in the reports of small groups to the general assembly, a young woman unveiled Absalom's stone (2 Sam 18:18).

If you don't get the pun, you don't live in this part of South Africa. The woman's "unveiling" of an obscure part of scripture for me came precisely in the context of her using that verse as a justification for her cultural practice of "unveiling tombstones" for deceased loved ones. Although I think it can happen at the same time as the funeral, tombstone unveilings commonly occur some months to a year after the person's death. As many families do not have enough money for both the funeral and the stone, the stone often follows at a later date. At that time, the family will again hold some kind of service (one of our Committee members in the Bible School assures me that an unveiling is strictly a family event, just a small event, and need not involve the broader community or the church. In reality, people often do make a big deal of it).

At any rate, the young woman's comment irritated me. The topic for the day was eschatology, or the theology of "last things." Because most of our students are fixated not on eschatology in its sense as the goal of history/creation but as the destiny of their dead loved ones, I too chose to focus the lesson on its personal dimensions, that is, on so-called "personal eschatology". Closing the first session leading into small group discussion, I had left students with the question, "What is our responsibility toward the dead?" Now I was getting the answers from this young woman. First, "we bury them." Then, "we unveil tombstones". Both answers, of course, came not on their own but with a scripture verse thrown in for support. And therein lies my irritation.

If there is a scriptural justification for tombstone unveilings, this was not it. First, Absalom was not setting up a stone for a loved one; he was setting it up for himself, worried that he would die without a son to remember him. Second, who is Absalom, and why should we follow him? The young woman's answer showed little concern for these considerations. In the end, Absalom's practice in this verse has no more to do with the woman's own than the stone. And that, it seems to me, is no rock on which to build the house of God.

-Joe

two kisses

I've posted a reflection on our other blog, which can be accessed at http://joeannasawatzky.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-kisses.html

-Joe

parts and the whole

It was the kind of question for which I had designed the lesson.

We were studying Genesis 19:1-14 as a representative text of biblical narrative. I had asked the students to find the repetitions in the text, having made the plea that if the author has seen fit to repeat himself, the repeated word, and therefore its meaning, must be of importance. The students had found numerous examples, and we had had a fruitful day of building meaning from the specific words and phrases.

This one man, however, would not accept that the word "know" in the request of "the men of Sodom" had connotations of rape. He was, of course, quite right that "know" in most usages means simply the possession of knowledge of this thing or that person or whatever. He was, at the same time, mistaken for not reading "know" within its immediate surroundings:

• as interpreted by Lot as "evil" intent.
• as parallel to its only other usage in the text in which Lot offers his two daughters who have "never known a man" in place of "the men"--Lot's guests--whom the "men of Sodom" wish to "know."
• as parallel within Genesis to the refrain, for example, of chapter 4: "Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore . . . " (v. 1, cf. vv. 17, 25).
  

The man's obstinance, in face of his peers' many attempts at correction, reflected an extreme version of a tendency I had earlier observed in the interpretive methods of some students: to find meaning in words, phrases, or texts without discerning their place as parts of a larger narrative that lends meaning. The problem, by the way, is not distinctly African.

If then, we do not permit words, phrases, or even texts to stand on their own, we do, on the other hand, view them as indispensable parts without which the greater meaning remains hidden.

Let us then proceed to the texts!