The New Ekklesia and Our Commitment to Do God’s Will Lent 1A

 The New Ekklesia and Our Commitment to Do God’s Will

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” [i]

Among many others, John Dominic Crossan asks readers of the Bible to challenge many, if not most, of our assumptions about Jesus and the texts themselves. This story in Matthew 4: 1-11 is a primary case in point. Our lack of understanding the roots of the Greek text and the culture of Judaism in which Jesus lived and moved and had his being has long called this episode, The Temptation of Christ.

 

Jesus is proclaimed at his baptism by the voice from above as “God’s Son.” This let’s us and everyone know that this Jesus is a person of impressive stature. Throughout Matthew, Jesus is styled as “a prophet like Moses” to form a new ekklesia, a new assembly, a new community of people committed to do God’s will. It is an alternative community defined “not by blood ties, tribe, nationality or political loyalty (whether to Rome or to another empire, then or now) but by a commitment to do God’s will. The new community is endlessly inclusive; anyone who does the work of the creator is a member.” [ii]

 

After forty days and forty nights of fasting in the wilderness, narrator Matthew tells us Jesus is famished. He is hungry! Enter a new character, ha-satan. This ha-satan in the text is not an evil power engaged in eternal conflict with God, nor anything at all like the figure we associate with the Christian image of SATAN. I say Christian because the kind of full-blown cosmic battle between SATAN and God, good and evil, comes more from medieval Christendom than any understanding of ha-satan that may have existed in first-century Jewish monotheism. [iii] This ha-satan proceeds to what the text calls peirazō, which although it can mean to tempt, more often means to test or examine, and even to examine oneself.

 

Rather than a temptation scene, what we have is an appointed agent sent to test Jesus’s integrity as the Son of God who is sent to gather a new, inclusive community of people willing to commit to doing the work God calls us to do. Note, this is no ambush. Jesus was led into the wilderness by the spirit-breath of God for this test of his integrity and ability to be the new Moses in the midst of the ongoing crisis: being under the yoke of yet another empire: Rome. First there was Egypt; then Babylon; now Rome.

 

Immediately taking advantage of forty days of hunger, Jesus is challenged to turn stones into bread to eat. But he answers, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” This happens to be from Moses’s farewell speech in Deuteronomy 8:3. The full text ought to interest us: “He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” We know that manna was a kind of bread that was given daily. Matthew’s Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, teaches his new community to pray, ‘give us this day our daily bread.’ To give us our daily manna. And on the night before he is to be crucified by Rome, he tells his new ekklesia that he is the manna and that the bread of the last supper is his body., We are to remember this every time we partake in the Lord’s Supper.

 

Next, the examiner tells Jesus to step off the highest place on the Temple and let gravity do its work? Here the tester examines Jesus to see if he is inclined to do stupid things on the basis of a trust in God. This time Jesus answers from Deuteronomy 6:16: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.” Next up, Jesus is offered dominion and glory to rule all the peoples of the earth if only he will worship the ha-satan. He responds once more from guess where? Deuteronomy 6:13: “The Lord your God you shall fear, him you shall serve.” Evidently, he passes the test: “Then the ha-satan left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.” Finally, after forty days, and who knows how long this examination lasted, we can trust that the angels, those messengers of God, put together an appropriate feast for concluding his fast.

 

Given the ambiguities of the biblical Greek, it is reasonable to imagine this to be some sort of vision. Or, even a kind of dream-like self-examination. Imagine you are Jesus. You are familiar with how the ha-satan was involved in the story of Job. You seek out John’s baptism. Unexpectedly, a voice declares that you are God’s Son, the Beloved, with whom God is well pleased. Just what does that mean, you ask  yourself? But before you can even think that through, God’s spirit-breath whisks you away to a lonely place by yourself where there is to be no eating for forty days and forty nights. That is the biblical metaphor for a long time – longer, at least, than a lunar cycle. The nights in particular can be harsh and cold throughout the year in the wilderness areas of Israel. Perhaps you seek shelter in a cave. When all of a sudden you begin to have doubts about what happened back in the River Jordan. And even more for what lies ahead.

 

Am I really cut out for this work of being God’s Son? Can I persuade people to take God’s commandments, the way of the Lord, seriously? How can I possibly bring his law to life? Will people really follow me to bring healing to those who suffer in body and mind? To be generous rather than stingy; to be grateful rather than resentful? To be poor in spirit and so recognize the gap between what you have and what others need; between the way things are and the way things should be? To be meek and don’t lord it over others? To hunger and thirst for righteousness and feed the hungry? To be a peacemaker? To be salt that makes life taste good for everyone? To be a light for others? To be reconciled to each other? To love enemies as God’s own children? To trust God to provide? Paul states, “…love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law?” [iv] When we fulfill Torah, then we will be fulfilled. [v]

 

One day, not too long after this testing period, Jesus is in his hometown synagogue where he reads a vision from Isaiah of what God’s community is to be like, and then says, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing!” Evidently, he passed the test, because here we are: God’s new inclusive ekklesia of people committed to fulfilling the Word of God! May God’s Son, God’s Spirit-Breath, and Almighty God himself, find us engaged with the life Jesus calls us to embrace and make real, not only for ourselves, but for others – all others. Amen.

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[i] John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus

[ii] Levine, Amy Jill, Toward the Kingdom of Heaven, (Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2020) p.14

[iii] For more about ha-satan and this text, see Richard W. Swanson, Provoking the Gospel of Matthew (Pilgrim Press, Cleveland: 2007) p.106-112

[iv] Romans 13:10

[v] Levine, p.9

Experiences of God Last Sunday after the Epiphany A 2023

 Experiences of God

“Tell no one of the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Really? Peter, James and John had just seen Jesus transfigured, talking with Elijah and Moses, and then heard the divine voice from the cloud of God’s glory remind them of what people had heard when John baptized him: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” But, really? They are not to tell anyone of their extraordinary experience of God and God’s glory that day on the mountaintop?

 

Then again, how does one even begin to describe an experience of God? It is nearly impossible to describe such unutterable experiences in ways that can convey the depth and power one feels in the presence of God’s glory. Sometimes the best we can do is to join with those who have had such experiences and follow them on their journey to the mountaintops and the blazing brightness of God’s glory.

 

Just follow the three Master Escape Artists at the heart of this Sunday’s gospel.[i] Elijah, Moses and Jesus. For Elijah it began as he stood in a mountain crevasse. God promised to pass by: there was wind, but God was not in the wind; an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake; fire, but God was not in the fire. Then he heard a still small voice, a quiet whisper, a low murmur, asking, “Why are you here, Elijah?” Elijah replied, “I have been zealous for the Lord, and now they want to take my life.” Then he took off on a journey with God that resulted in his escape from this world in a blazing chariot of fire!

 

Moses went up the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. The cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. From there Moses led the people on a journey with God for forty years, took them to where the edge of the land of promise, and then Moses departed, escaped, never to be seen again.

 

And now James, John and Peter follow Jesus up that mountain. He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there were Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Saint Luke says they were speaking of his exodos, his departure, his escape – an escape that would begin with his arrest, his being crucified on a Roman cross, his body placed in a borrowed tomb, sealed with a rock. Then suddenly, he is raised to God’s Glory. It is his Passover, a new exodus, into eternal liberty. His resurrection is our Passover!

 

He had told James, John and Peter six days earlier – but of course Peter would have none of it. And as he rebuked Jesus, Jesus saw Satan once again, behind Peter. No doubt he is telling Eljah and Moses all of this when Peter comes running up to them saying, “Let’s build three booths, three tabernacles like those in which our ancestors lived with you, Moses, in the wilderness!” Peter once to stay there in the vision forever! That is, until it happened. The cloud that sat upon Mount Sinai for seven days as Moses sat, and sat, and sat – patiently waiting upon the Lord. The bright cloud of God’s glory came upon them, and the voice that had spoken down by the river; as he had come up out of the water, and the Spirit-Breath landed on him like a dove; the voice that said: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

 

When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. That’s when he tells them to tell no one until he rises from the dead. They remember he had said this six days earlier, but they could not comprehend at all what he was talking about. No doubt they were too afraid to ask if Elijah and Moses had actually been there. Was he really shining like the Sun? Remember, they said, when Moses came down from Sinai his face shown so brightly they had to put a veil over his face lest he blind the people who had already blinded themselves by worshipping a golden calf.

 

It is said that Saint Clare of Assisi, an early follower of Saint Francis, would come from prayer with her face so shining it would dazzle everyone around her! Her enclosed order of women was almost unthinkable at the time, although soon throughout Europe other women were doing the same. Some, like Agnes of Prague, daughter of King Ottokar I of Bohemia, sister of Wenceslaus I of Bohemia, formed such a community and wrote to Clare for advice. Clare urged Agnes, and all others, to spend time daily before the Cross of Christ; that it is the mirror in which we can see ourselves for who we truly are. In her fourth letter to Agnes, Clare writes: “Place your mind before the mirror of eternity! Place your soul in the brilliance of glory! Place your heart in the figure of the divine substance! And transform your whole being into the image of the Godhead itself through contemplation! So that you too may feel what His friends feel as they taste the hidden sweetness which God Himself has reserved from the beginning for those who love Him.”

 

I read this and re-read this letter to Agnes and imagine Agnes, like Clare, emerging from her time before the mirror of the Cross with her face shining, dazzling with the love of Christ, God’s own Beloved. Several days a week I stand before a statue of Clare holding a cross which frames a mirror with Christ’s face at the center, a tear seeming to fall from his right eye as he meets my gaze. I pray for Ukraine. I pray for Michigan State University. I pray for Rock Spring Parish. I pray for our country; the country I love; the country for which my father fought against the rise of the White Supremacy of the Nazi regime.

 

If one looks at the mirror in Clare’s hands at just the right angle, one can see the Saint Francis Cross hanging over the altar at the other end of the chapel at the Shrine of Saint Anthony of Padua in Ellicott City. The cross that Francis from which Jesus asked him “to repair my church.”  It is impossible to describe what it is like to see these two crosses, one reflected in the other, while at the same time experiencing the divine presence burning in the candles that surround Clare on both sides. Feeling what his friends must have felt that day upon the mountaintop.

 

There are people who will doubt that any of this really happened: Elijah rising in his chariot of fire; Moses’s face shining so brightly it needed to be veiled; Jesus shining like the Sun, his clothes dazzling bright; Clare’s face shining like her transfigured Lord; Agnes giving up a life of a princess to live a life of poverty, prayer and contemplation; Francis hearing Christ speak to him from the cross; we, with his friends, feeling touched by Jesus who says, “Do not fear, do not be afraid.” We have forty days ahead of us to contemplate just what we think of these stories, and perhaps, if we are lucky, we too will have similar experiences of God’s love and know, really know deep down inside, that we too truly are God’s Beloved. To place our minds before the mirror of eternity. To place our souls in the brilliance of glory! And to know just how good it is!

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[i] Matthew 17:1-9

Choose Life! Epiphany 6A

 

Choose Life!

The Sermon on the Mount: best understood as a Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven. We tend to think Jesus is breaking new ground as a departure from the commandments, ordinances and traditions of the God of Israel. Yet, when we last heard from him in chapter five, Jesus makes it clear: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” [i]

 

That is, he is in fact interpreting and reenforcing what Moses says just before the escapees from Egypt are to leave the wilderness, which itself was a 40 year-long “beginner’s guide to living with God and neighbor,” and enter into their new homeland: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you, life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” [ii]

 

In chapters 5-7 of Matthew, Jesus is reviewing what Moses and Jesus’s own people had learned in the wilderness: how to walk in the Way of the Lord. And that this Way is life and a blessing. And to abandon the way of the Lord is death and a curse. Jesus reminds us all: Choose The Way of Life. Thus, Matthew presents Jesus as the “new prophet” Moses promised will one day come: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen…”

 

Which raises the question: Have we been listening to him? Five times he says, “You have heard it said….but I say.” He is not, as some have suggested, creating new commands, new law, or a new Torah. He is outlining how we all might fulfill the existing code of behavior and ethics outlined in Torah, the books from Genesis through Deuteronomy.

 

For instance, as regards the command against murder, Jesus says: “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” [iii]

 

Jesus here practices a long-standing rabbinic tradition called ‘building a fence around the Torah.’ It is a way of keeping you at arm’s distance from a familiar commandment, in this case, “Thou shalt not kill.” Our anger, calling people names, insulting one another can be viewed as a kind of murder, as character assassination. Such behavior does not exemplify what it means to Love God and to Love neighbor. If we can avoid doing these things, we will get nowhere near to murder.

 

Liable to judgment, however,  is vague. It may refer to Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, …by a human shall his blood be shed.” This and a few other passages also deal with homicide as a capital offense. Yet, both the Bible and post-biblical Judaism undercut any thought of capital punishment. In Genesis 4, for instance, God spares the life of Cain. And in Exodus 2, although Moses murders an Egyptian, he is not executed, and becomes God’s chosen leader to liberate God’s people from slavery. And after telling Noah about punishment for homicide, God goes on to say, “For in his own image, God created humankind.” [iv] This introduces a problem: those who commit murder are also made in the image of God – they also represent the divine image. Therefore, we need to come up with a response that is not execution. [v] Which is just what Jesus does when he urges us to avoid anger, name calling, insulting one another – essentially, treating one another as enemies. Indeed, in The Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven, he urges us to pray for and to love our enemies! He repeats the idea of ‘an eye for an eye,’ which by his time referred to financial restitution, not physical, throughout both Israelite and Roman cultures. And he stops short of saying ‘a life for a life.’ Any claim that Jesus would approve of capital punishment receives support only from what is not said. [vi]

 

Instead, building this fence is important in so many ways because of behaviors we see rampant among us today, especially the kinds of public name-calling which has become common place daily. We often say, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Yet, we know this not to be true. Names kill when young people are bullied and cyberbullied to death; people take their own lives because of the barrage of insults they suffer; individuals even strike out at others, often others they do not even know, in mass-killing events that often end in their own death also – either by law enforcement or at their own hand. Jesus is right. Names kill. If only we would listen to him. [vii]

 

A brief word about the kind of “hell” Jesus invokes. The Bible has no word or image for hell as Dante’s Inferno imagines it. In fact, the Bible knows of no place called hell, but rather imagines we end up dead one day in a pit – all of us – awaiting some sort of judgment day, or the final establishment of God’s kingdom. Rather, ancient Israelite and Persian cultures believed that on that coming ‘day of the Lord,’ some may awaken to everlasting shame and contempt – not eternal torture – a kind of self-imposed annihilation or oblivion. Such feelings of shame and contempt can burn like a fire within us. Like his co-religionists, Jesus believed in Sheol, the pit, where all of us, good and bad alike all end up. And where the prophet Ezekiel imagines possible resurrection as the Valley of Dry Bones is blown upon by the divine-ruach, the divine spirit-breath, and brought back to life once again! A new kind of life we cannot even imagine!

 

We would do well to consider what General of the Army, Omar Bradley, once said after World War II: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace; more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus’s remarks do not reject the Scriptures of Israel, nor the interpretations of rabbis, Pharisees and others. He interprets the traditional commands and ordinances, and builds a fence around them to keep us from harming ourselves and others. We pray, “Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed.” Jesus, like Moses before him, sets before us life and death, blessing and curse. Let us choose life!

 

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[i] Matthew 5:13-20

[ii] Deuteronomy 30:15-20

[iii] Matthew 5:21-37

[iv] Genesis 9:6

[v] Levine, Amy Jill, The Sermon on the Mount (Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2020) p.28ff

[vi] Ibid, Levine, p.43

[vii] Ibid, Levine, p.30

Ours Is The Kingdom of Heaven Epiphany 5A

 

Ours Is The Kingdom of Heaven

Amy Jill Levine, professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University and Hartford Seminary, gets it just right when she suggests that what we refer to as The Sermon on the Mount, chapters five, six and seven in Matthew, is not so much a sermon, but rather is Jesus’s Beginner’s Guide to Live in the Kingdom of Heaven. [i] What is striking about this Beginner’s Guide is that Jesus says nothing about a need for us to believe anything. It is all about what disciples, followers, of his are meant to do – how we are to act. The kind of faith Jesus teaches is about being involved in shaping a future – a future based on Jesus’s interpretation of Torah, a new look at the ways in which God wants us to live.

 

 It begins with a series of blessings. A striking detail is the use of the present tense in the very first blessing: Blessed are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not will be. Not shall be. The Kingdom Jesus speaks of is here, it is present. The poor in spirit do not have to wait for those pearly gates. They already have one foot in the kingdom Jesus proclaims here and now!

 

Like Moses before him, Jesus goes up a mountain, sits down, his four disciples Andrew, Peter, James and John sit down with him, and in the centuries of Jewish tradition, he begins to interpret the scriptures and traditions of his people. There is a crowd also following him from all over the ancient world, and we can imagine some of them listening in. The first blessing sets the stage for the rest of the Beginner’s Guide: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The kingdom of heaven, where God rules, is both present and future – since the divine reign is still not fully present on earth.[ii]

 

To be ‘poor in spirit’ has often been viewed as ‘weak in faith,’ or not being conceited or prideful. Rather, Levine suggests the poor in spirit “are those who recognize that they are both beneficiaries of the help of others, and part of a system in which they are to pay it forward and help those whom they can.”[iii] They do so with humility, not looking for recognition, not resentful for having not received what they consider sufficient honor. They know they do the right things. And they know God knows, and that is enough.

 

If we accept that those who are ‘poor in spirit’ recognize their dependence on others, and other’s dependence on them, it becomes easy to see how they are blessed. How we are all blessed! They are those people who not only pray to our Father in heaven, as Jesus also teaches in this Beginner’s Guide, “they also see themselves on earth as part of a family, defined by doing God’s will and so engaging in mutual support.” And anyone can be a part of this new movement, this new family, as we heard in chapter 4 the crowd on the mountain with Jesus includes Gentiles and Jews from all over. When he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” like Moses on Sinai, he is speaking across generations, right down to all of us, here and now. Should we follow in his movement of recognizing we did not get her on our own, and so are ready to offer mutual aid to others, we already have one foot in the kingdom of heaven. [iv]

 

No doubt, Jesus is familiar with Isaiah’s image of what God intends for us all. In Isaiah 59:1-9a, we hear of people who are not ‘poor in spirit complaining,’ “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” No humility in this complaint. God’s response: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly…”

 

This is what God’s Mutual Aid Society is to look like. This is what it looks like to be poor in spirit. This is what it means when Jesus says, ‘you are the salt of the earth’ and ‘you are the light of the world.’[v] These are not commands. It is present tense, ‘are’, and the ‘you’ is plural. We are salt and we are light. We are not salt for ourselves, but for the earth, for the whole world and everything and everyone therein. When people see us, they should know that we represent what is good in the world. The word salt shares its Latin root, sel, with the English word ‘salary.’ Salt has value; it was a precious commodity. Further, the monthly salary to Roman soldiers was called salarium -they were paid in salt. As salt of the earth, we have value. Yet, when salt gets diluted with other things, like the cares of the world, it loses its value. And too much salt is worse. It brings too much attention to itself and seems to say, “Look at me!” Rather, disciples who are the salt of the earth recognize they are valuable not because of who they are, but for whose they are and what they contribute to the world, this fragile earth, our island home.[vi]

 

Disciples living with one foot in the kingdom are also “the light of the world.” Like salt, light is necessary for life. Without light we would have no plants and no warmth. Just as salt can be diluted, so darkness seeks to overcome light.[vii] It can also be snuffed out, and thus is also a precious commodity that must be preserved. And as too much salt can kill, too much light can blind. Effective light does not call attention to itself, but rather lights up the world for all to see!

 

We also hear Jesus say, “I am the light of the world…as long as I am in the world.”[viii] This calls the disciples to both take up his role, acting as he does, and at the same time Jesus is in the world when we recognize his presence in others: “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink., I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.” [ix]

 

Jesus concludes that we cannot keep our salt and light for ourselves – they given to us as gifts by God’s grace to share with others. Therefore, we are to “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God.” For faith that does not manifest itself in works of the kingdom of heaven is no faith at all. Faith is our active involvement in shaping a future. A future fully becomes the kingdom of heaven. For when we are poor in spirit, all that we say and all that we do points beyond us to God in Christ Jesus so others will give God the glory. Then we will know, ours truly is the kingdom of heaven. Here and now, on this fragile earth, our island home.

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[i] Levine, Amy Jill, Sermon on the Mount (Abingdon Press, Nashville: 2020).

[ii] Ibid, p.xiii

[iii] Ibid, p.10

[iv] Ibid, p. 10-11

[v] Matthew 5:13-15

[vi] Ibid, Levine, p.47-48

[vii] John1:5

[viii] John 9:5

[ix] Matthew 25:35-36