My 2016 Lenten Journey--Day 12

February 21, 2016 ~ Day 12

My 2016 Lenten Journey: Exploring the Gospels to discover what following Jesus and becoming more like him would look like? ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32 NRSV).

Matthew 5:38-48 ~ These teachings may be among the most difficult of all Jesus’ teaching. Never retaliate? Never? Turn the other cheek? Really?

Give to everyone who begs from you? Won’t that just reinforce their life-style of irresponsibility? or is it really my business to evaluate their level of responsibility--to judge their worthiness to receive my charity? And what if they don't measure up to my standard? Did Jesus qualify his statement; did he leave me an "escape clause?"

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’” This “ethic of limited retaliation actually was an improvement over the previous ethic of unlimited retaliation, which usually led to escalating retaliation. But now this: “Never retaliate!” Yeah, but...

And how about this: “Love your enemy?” But what if my enemy is a Muslim terrorist? or a child molester? What if he raped and murdered my daughter? Don't I get a 48-hour "kick-out" clause?

Surely Jesus wasn’t serious! He was just a naïve idealist, and his teachings are straight from “Never Never Land!” You try to live like that and people will take advantage of you! You try to live like that and people will destroy you!

You mean, like crucify you?

Hmmmm. This following Jesus thing may be more difficult than I anticipated.

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father (John 14:9 NRSV)

‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32 NRSV).

That's the way it looks through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

In God We Trust?

“In God We Trust.” But we trust more in our guns and in our violent ways of enforcing our ways. It’s been that way consistently, regardless of the governmental or economic system in place, in every culture since human history has been recorded.

We trust in violence and we persecute those who advocate any alternative in dealing with social and interpersonal disagreements and problems. Even our films and television shows constantly rehearse the necessity of violence as the only effective way to bring about “justice” (retributive justice) and to ensure our safety.

Even our Scriptures proclaim violence as a way of maintaining order. The Holy Writ attributes violent jealousy and vengeful wrath as a part of God’s character and nature.

Well, at least part of the Scriptures do.

Many of the Hebrew prophetic writings project a compassionate God whose love engenders faith and loyalty in those who seek Him (sic). But most readers of Scripture and practitioners of Christianity choose to ignore those parts, or at best to privatize them. The most common (almost unanimous) assimilation of that message is that God offers love and compassion only to those who are faithful to Him and who jump through His hoops. God’s love is conditional; and that message continues to leak through even our loudest pulpit-pounding about God’s grace.  And those who are outside God’s grace are still doomed to violent retribution by this “loving” God.

The greatest tragedy is that so many of us use Scripture to justify our trust in violence. We have approached the Scriptures on a legalistic all-or-nothing basis, when the Scriptures themselves are not presented as such. Too often we have seen the Scriptures as self-contradictory, and then proceeded to “protect” the Holy Writ from itself by inventing all sorts of incongruous rationalizations and justifications to avoid what we see as contradictions.

But, instead of contradictions, the Scriptures present an ongoing courtroom-like debate among God’s people. On one side is the testimony of those who see God as a hero/warrior who competes with other gods over people and territory. Even after Judaism—or at least most of the religious leadership of Judaism—had become monotheistic, that God image persisted.

On the other side is the counter-testimony of those who understood God as one whose love is universally inclusive. They called upon Israel to be a “light to all nations” (Isaiah 60:1-3, et al).

The reader is the jury, and must decide which testimony to believe. Historically, God’s people consistently have chosen to reject the vulnerability of love in favor of the seemingly more secure use of violence and retributive justice.

Jesus made the unpopular choice. He chose to reject the violence in the Hebrew Scriptures and chose instead to lift up love: compassion, restorative justice, reconciliation and enemy love. And the power people of his time found his message so confronting to their own lives that they killed him. Power people still persecute all who challenge them.

At best, again, we privatize those words of Jesus that call for restoration and healing and love, and we wrap them in conditions. As a society we still trust in violence. We think it keeps us safe; we think it makes us strong.

The problem with a system built upon strength and power is that eventually somebody stronger always—ALWAYS—comes along. Love does not need power, for love is the strongest force in the universe. God is love (I John 4:8).

For all these reasons, it will not be enough simply to point out the harm that comes from violence. That harm will simply be called “unfortunate-but-necessary collateral damage.” We will need to demonstrate to the world that there are viable nonviolent alternatives to dealing with societal problems—“ways that are not only effective, but in fact are more effective than violence at resolving conflict and keeping us safe.”[1]

There are numerous historic manifestations of effective non-violent confrontation of injustice and evil. Even in my own life-time names like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela come to mind. Yes, Bonhoeffer’s and King’s non-violent strategies, like Jesus’, cost them their lives; nevertheless, their effectiveness in weakening the evils they confronted is unquestionable. I know no one who denies that love is risky. And those who have challenged violent defense and retributive justice continue to be persecuted.

Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions: instead of asking, “How can we be safe and protect ourselves?” maybe we should be asking, “How we can be loving as Jesus was loving?”

That’s the way I see it through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

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[1] Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence-Loving Conservatives and Why We All Need to Learn to Read the Bible Like Jesus Did (San Francisco: Metanoia Press, 2014), Kindle edition, Location 2289.

Change? (Gasp!)

Beyond the gospels the central and dominant figure in the New Testament is, arguably, Paul (nee Saul of Tarsus). Before his conversion Saul had studied the Scriptures under the best of teachers. He was convinced that to be faithful he should commit violence in God’s name. He felt certain that for the survival of Judaism this Christian heresy must be rooted out.

“After his encounter with Christ, and his experience of healing and enemy love from Jesus’ disciples (Acts 9:11-18), Paul needed to completely reassess how to understand the same Scriptures he had read previously in such a toxic and violent way. The change produced a radically different understanding of God’s will, and a radically different way of interpreting those same Scriptures.”[1]

NOTE: Nothing in the Scriptures changed! It was only Paul’s way of reading the Scriptures that changed! Nothing is more central to my Lenten Pilgrimage than this distinction!

I would say virtually every person of faith at some point along the journey of life comes face-to-face with the possibility that our understanding does not mesh with the reality presented in the sacred writ. Not every person has the strength and integrity to confess, “I was wrong.”

Martin Luther had such a confrontation with his own faith while he was reading the Epistle to the Romans. It was during the reading of that same epistle that I had my first conscious realization that what I had been taught was not consistent with what I was reading.

It’s a terrifying realization. But sometimes integrity demands that we go a different way.

As Derek Flood points out, for Paul, of utmost significance may be not so much in what he says as in what he doesn’t say. It is revealing to note how he deals with violent passages in the Old Testament—texts that call for killing Gentiles.

In Romans 15:8-12, for example, Paul quotes several Scriptures to make his point that Gentiles “may glorify God for his mercy” because of the gospel. Note what he doesn’t include in those Scriptures:

 (NRSV) For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, ⁹ and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Thou didst make my enemies turn their backs to me, and those who hated me I destroyed. They cried for help, but there was none to save, they cried to the Lord, but he did not answer ... For this I will extol thee, O Lord, among the nations[2], and sing praises to thy name.” (Quoting Psalm 18:40-49) Again, it says, “Praise his people, O you nations; for he avenges the blood of his servants, and takes vengeance on his adversaries, and makes expiation for the land of his people.” (Quoting Deuteronomy 32:43)

Within Paul’s change of Scriptural understanding is his re-contextualizing of these passages; instead of focusing on violence against Gentiles he declares God’s mercy in Christ for Gentiles. Not only does this represent a reinterpretation of the relationship of faith to violence, it constitutes a major redefinition of how salvation is understood. Instead of meaning God’s deliverance of Israel from its political and military enemies, Paul now understands salvation to mean the restoration of all people in Christ, including those same “enemy” Gentiles.[3]

                                                                                                               

Now, instead of excluding Gentiles, Paul embraces them within God’s mercy; indeed, he is singularly committed to taking that message of God’s mercy to them. Now, instead of using violence to purify the world from them, he is exposing himself to violence in order to include them. Such is the nature of radical commitment to the gospel—not the exposure to violence, per se, but the radical shift from rabidly narrow exclusion, even violent elimination, to universal, merciful embrace. The violence is the byproduct of resistance to change.

Note again, however, that Paul’s personal shift did not indicate in any way a shift in Scripture, itself. Indeed, the precedent had been set at least as early as Isaiah’s metaphor of Israel as a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6). Paul could easily have used these more pastoral texts from the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps he was being intentional in using and reinterpreting passages that previously had been used to justify violence.

In the same spirit of Jesus’ teaching, “You have heard… but I tell you…” Paul is moving faith to the next level, and it is a move for which he paid a high price.

I suspect that Paul sensed the futility of trying to move his Jewish community to this new understanding and chose, instead, to align himself with the new movement. Cultural and ethnic exclusivism is nowhere as strongly rooted as in the sanctions of religion, and most especially within the ranks of fundamentalist expressions of religion. And Paul should know. He was a Pharisee.

And so, where does all this bring me in my Lenten wandering through the wilderness of my own temptation? I am torn between the desire to lash out at (for example) terrorist extremists to who are inflicting blasphemous atrocities on other humans in the name of God, and the knowledge that violence breeds violence and does not bring lasting peace. But most of all, I am conflicted over my growing awareness of the value and effectiveness of non-violent confrontations and my knowledge that those who practice it frequently end up being crucified.

That’s how I see it through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

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[1] Derek Flood, Disarming Scriptures: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence Loving Conservatives and Why We all Need to Learn to Read the Bible Like Jesus Did (San Francisco: Metanoia Books, 2014), Kindle edition, Location 781

[2] The word also is sometimes translated “Gentiles,” and “heathen”.

[3] Derek Flood, op. cit., Location 797.