GOD IS LOVE - A Homily

 The following is the homily this blogger delivered in Christ Episcopal's Zoom worship service on January 30, 2022.

GOD IS LOVE

Those three words in some form or another is a truth expressed  in every known spiritual or theistic religion.  

As followers of Jesus, they have profound implications not only in understanding who God is, but who we are and why we are.  If God is love, then we are made in the image of love and made to love God by loving that which God loves, in the way that God loves, and the way that God loves, the very nature of God, is the subject of our reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians; in particular, the portion of today’s reading that defines love. 

Allow me to paraphrase and reread that portion substituting God for the word love:

“God is patient; God is kind; God is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. God does not insist on God’s own way; God is not irritable or resentful; God does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. God bears all things, has faith in all things, hopes in all things, endures all things. God never gives up.”  

What Paul is describing is the unconditional love of God, the love that Jesus portrayed as the father in his parable of the Prodigal Son, the love exemplified in every step of his redemptive ministry, the love he pronounced when forgiving those who crucified him, and the Love that raised him to new life.

This is the love we were made from and the ministry of love we are called to.

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So how are we doing?

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It is good that God is patient.  In the nearly twenty-one hundred years since Paul wrote this letter, we Christians, as a whole,  continue to struggle with demonstrating God’s redeeming, unconditional love for all.  

Jesus' approach to redemption was to forgive people, to heal people, as unconditionally as he loved them.  

  

It’s unfortunate that we have been indoctrinated through these years to fall on the sword of our imperfections by pleading original sin as an excuse for failing to forgive and to love unconditionally, as Jesus did.   Sin is not original to us, just as it was not original to Jesus. Sin came to us, as it always comes to us, a temptation wrapped as an opportunity to do things our way.    This is why Jesus taught us to ask God to lead us away from temptation and the evil it causes.

What is original to us is the grace of being made in the image of God’s love, the grace which Jesus revealed to us and about us in himself.

That God does not insist on God’s own way is because God’s assessment of creation is that it is good and worthy of love, including the least of us and the worst of us.  God has faith and hope in our original goodness even when we don’t.  This is why Jesus taught us to ask that God’s will is done in our lives because it is the will of God for us to love.

The first letter of John sums this up nicely when it says:

 

“We are of God.  So let us love one another because everyone who loves, knows they are born of God and knows God.  For God is Love.”

May the revelation of God’s love in Christ Jesus enlighten and strengthen us to love.   Amen.

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Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm

MYTH AND JESUS

 In the well-known hymn attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, "O Sacred Head Now Wounded," is the following verse:    

                                                What language shall I borrow to thank thee dearest friend,

                                                 for this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end?

                                                O make me thine forever!  And should I fainting be,

                                                Lord, let me never, never, outlive my love for thee.

This is perhaps my favorite verse in all of Christian hymnody because of its opening line, "What language shall I borrow. . ."   Indeed, what language can we use to describe something too deep for words?    

As mentioned in my previous post, we humans are physically limited in our abilities to perceive the world around us by our five senses and three-dimensional perspective and for most and for the most part they work very well in finding our way around it.  

Beyond them, however, we humans are gifted with imagination and intuition, which help us formulate our experiences as knowledge which is retained by the faculty of memory. 

Beyond that we humans have evolved a means of recording and sharing our memories through speech and language.  

Beyond that we have invented a way to preserve and systemize our language through writing. 

This evolving human journey is amazing in itself as I am reminding myself while I am siting here typing away on my laptop preparing this post electronically and will be digitally preserved in a binary code that exceeds my current understanding of how such things work.  Things we can do today, fly around the world in the matter of hours, travel into space, communicate with billions of people around the world simultaneously through picture and sound at the speed of light would have been considered nothing more than science fiction and fantasy a little more than a hundred years ago, but such fantasy, as we know today, can become reality as a result of the four "I's":  Intuition, Imagination, Intellect, and Invention. 

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ALL KNOWLEDGE IS ROOTED IN MYTH

Amazing as all of that is, we still encounter things too deep to understand in simple terminology.  We have yet to find a scientific answer to the intuitive inquiry as to why anything exists and that exhausting one-word question, "Why?" that every child learns to ask as soon as he or she begins to question frequently leads impatient parents to answer with the ambiguous answer, "because."  To answer the "Why" of some things requires the use of imagination and story-telling to provide a context for understanding the question and that provide the semblance of an answer to it.  

There is one catch-all word that we humans have come up with to answer that question, a word that has no intrinsic definition of its own, a word that proceeds from the depth of human intuition about why anything exists,  a word that requires the telling of stories to make any sense of it, and a word that kindles the mythic imagination and that word is  "GOD." 

God is an imaginative mythic word that can be divided into any number of gods and goddesses.  It can be given a shape and it can transcend any shape.  Gods are generally considered immortal, all-powerful, and beyond comprehension, yet accessible through prayer.  Gods can be ambivalent, capricious, caring, involved in human affairs, and so on.  The word God is a paradox in some religious understandings; in that, it is a noun describing verb.  This is particularly the case in Abrahamic monotheism, where God is love and God is light and where it is forbidden to make a concrete image of God, where God is whatever God is at any given moment.  

Myth is a very misunderstood word and method.  It shouldn't be, but it largely is because we have been taught that myths are lies.  Let me emphatically say that myths are not lies and the reason I say that is because myths never pretend to be facts and should never be taken as such.  Myths are about something deeper than facts and they appeal to something deeper in us than cold facts, something that attempts to answer that perennial question, why?  Myths are about exposing truths that lie beneath the surface of our factual experiences.  Myths are stories that give voice to an intuitive body of knowledge that is older than recorded history, an imaginative knowledge upon which every facet of intellectual knowledge is rooted in.  Myths attempt to answer the ultimate questions as to why anything exists.  In doing so they expose us to truths about ourselves and the universe we live in that resonate within our living souls.

Science itself gives a nod to the mythic by the fact that it theorizes phenomena that are true enough to be utilized in factual ways but are, as yet, unprovable in themselves.  After all, the root word in theory is "Theo" the Greek word for god.  As such, scientific theories are mythic formulae that are true enough to be factually utilized.  In fact, some theories are so true that they are no longer considered by some to be theories.  Darwin's theory of evolution is such a theory because it so effectively explains the how, the what, the where, and the when of life on our planet emerged. The one thing it doesn't explain is the why.  That it cannot answer that question doesn't make it false.  Instead the theory of evolution has drawn us closer to the truth about ourselves and our universe than any other theory to date, making Darwin a saint in my book.

* * *

Christianity struggles with the mythic imagination, which is unfortunate because Jesus regularly employed myth in telling parables and all the Gospel writers use it to explain who Jesus is in one way or another because there is no contextual way to explain some things without its use.  An example of this is found in the mythic of all the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of Luke, where we find the well-known story of the Rich Man and Lazarus.  This mythic story combines the factual condition of greedy wealth of man and extreme poverty of Lazarus with the metaphorical imagery of heaven and hell to expose a truth that is not apparent by cold fact itself.  Why greed is wrong is not something that is based upon it intrinsically being so but rather it is deemed so by the rippling experience and effect that can be traced back to it, an experience that was initially expressed in myth. 

The term the Kingdom of God is a mythic term or as Jesus says in the parabolic Gospel of John, "My kingdom is not of this world," during a discussion with Pilate on the issue of truth.  The Kingdom of God, mythically speaking, lies both above and beneath the surface of the world of our making.  It cannot be grasped by human hand or seen with the physical eye. It can only be perceived and grasped by something deeper within us that is intuitively perceived and emotionally felt; perceptions and emotions that can be and are shared.  

When Jesus preached about the Kingdom of God he did not directly clarify what that meant as he did to Pilate in the Gospel of John; in part, because I believe Jesus wanted his audience to seek its presence in the present, in their daily experiences, and to that end he told them parables to engage their imagination and connect intuitively with them to see the truth of what he was saying.  One can deduce that sense of its presence in the present by the fact that when he talks about the Kingdom of God he uses the present tense, "The Kingdom of God is like...." as opposed to an anticipatory future coming, "The Kingdom of God will be like... ." In other words, we can see its presence within the world of our making, if we look for it.  "Seek the Kingdom of God and God's righteousness and all this will be added to you". - it will become apparent in our lifetimes in what you do and how you act.  

The mythic employs and resides within the parameters of our social and cultural experiences and upbringing that have been shaped myths extending back to the dawn of human experience.  In Jesus' mythic imagination and as a result of his intuitive vision,  God is his Father.  This is not surprising as Jesus was the product of a patriarchal society and upbringing. That intuitive vision shaped his understanding of his world and prompted him to question himself and the world around him.  It also opened his eyes to what the Kingdom of God meant and that God was not a self-righteous, capricious god, but a loving Father whose kindness and mercy knows no end. 

Understanding and appreciating Jesus' use of myth serves as an inspiration to those who are seeking truths beyond fact, to truths too profound for words alone, truths that can only be understood within the context of imaginative and intuitive story-telling.

Until next time, stay faithful,

Norm

 

 

                

                                            

                                              

FROM WATER TO WINE - A REFLECTION ON THE WEDDING AT CANA

 This is the homily I delivered during a virtual Zoom worship service of Christ Episcopal Church in Yankton SD, on January 16, 2022. A recording of this service can be found on the church's Facebook page, Christ Episcopal Church Yankton, SD - Posts | Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com › ChristYankton › posts.

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FROM WATER TO WINE

The Epiphany season is contextualized by two events in the life Jesus, his baptism  where he is declared God’s Son in whom God is pleased and his Transfiguration, in which God says ,“This is my son, my chosen.  Listen to him.”  In last week’s gospel reading, John the Baptist declared, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming….  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”   

Today’s reading from the Gospel of John proves to be an interesting followup to what John the Baptist was saying last Sunday.  Unlike the Synoptic Gospels, there is no story of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist and no specific account of Jesus’ Transfiguration in the Gospel of John and yet baptism and transfiguration figure prominently throughout it.

The Gospel of John is a theological or Christological work that functions like a parabolic catechism in which Jesus portrays himself as the Cosmic Christ who leads us on a journey into what the Church calls the Mystery of Faith.  It begins by identifying Jesus as the Incarnate Word of God through whom all things are made and this journey into Mystery begins on a day when John the Baptist points us to Jesus and says, “Behold  the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”  The next day, according to John’s Gospel, Jesus is calling some of his disciples and Phillip invites a skeptical Nathaniel to “Come and see.”  Which bring us to today’s reading, the door to this Mystery which begins “On the third day… .”  The day of resurrection, the threshold of a new creation.  

Here the author ofJohn channels Jesus’ use of parables and employs his imagery of a wedding feast to represent the Kingdom of God.   Today’s reading cast Jesus and his disciples as both guests and the bridegroom and his servants.   Its mention of six jars of water used for the Jewish rite of purification to ritually cleanse someone considered impure after having touched a corpse underscores this being a story associated with the death and resurrection of Jesus.  

As followers of Jesus, we are instructed in a motherly way by Jesus’ mother Mary to do whatever he tells us to do, to follow his teachings. a cryptic reference to his teachings found in the Synoptic Gospels.  The story of the Wedding of Feast at Cana is set in a real place and in real time, a metaphor for the Kingdom of God being in the here in now. This parabolic story identifies the primary sign of Jesus as his transfiguration from death to life from the purifying waters of his death to the fiery wine of new life as Christ Jesus, a sign of our journey from baptism to full communion with God in Christ.

May the light of Christ enlighten us as we journey through the mystery of faith that this life to the fullness of new life in God through Christ.

Amen.

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Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm

UNDERSTANDING JESUS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Like so many great religious and philosophical figures in antiquity who are known to us not by what they wrote and who have no corroborating evidence of their existence other than that of their disciples and followers Jesus as a person is difficult to know.  As I have mentioned in previous posts, the Synoptic Gospels offer us the only picture of what Jesus was like as a person.   Unfortunately, they have been written and edited to reflect an understanding of who Jesus is after the fact of his time on earth. It is difficult to get a sense of what it was like to be around Jesus on a daily basis during his brief ministry. 

If Jesus is a person just like the rest of us, we can assume some things because our collective history as a species hasn't changed in the more than two thousand years since Jesus walked on earth.  Behaviorally, we humans continue to do the same things over and over again since the beginning of recorded history.  We can assume, broadly speaking, that Jesus acted and reacted pretty much the same way people today act and react to things and events in our lives.  The basic human responses of happiness, sadness, and anger and what makes us happy, sad, and angry haven't changed because behaviorally and emotionally we haven't changed.  

What has changed, however, is our understanding of the world and universe we live in.  We live in an age of discovery about ourselves and the universe we find ourselves in.  We have discovered more about ourselves, the planet will live on, and more about the universe we float around in within the last one hundred years than at any other time in our history.  We know more of the past than at any time in our past.  We know more about the present in real time than we have at any other time.  We know how fragile life on this planet truly is and that much of the fragility is due to us.  What we have discovered in the past one hundred and fifty years has changed how we understand ourselves and our finite place in a vast and expanding universe.

We also know more about the time and place where Jesus lived and worked than what people understood a thousand years ago because so much of history lied buried in the earth or was kept hidden away.  In short, we are experiencing a sense of unvarnished discovery about us.

Histories can be buried or hidden away for centuries but at some point they emerge and are revealed.   When it comes to Jesus and Christianity, the Dead Sea scrolls and the discovery at Nag Hammadi come to mind.   Even the New Testament scriptures and the credal history of the Church point out that after Jesus death and reported resurrection, Jesus' question within the Synoptic Gospels, "Who am I" became "Who is Jesus" and more to the point, "What is he?"    

Who and what is Jesus is once again emerging as the question of our time, a question that has never really disappeared despite all the theological and doctrinal attempts to put a lid on it and to bury it in creeds formulated to stop the questioning.  That lid has been cracked open by what we know today and it is time to re-examine and ask, "Who is Jesus?"  It is no wonder that some religious leaders are joining some of their secular and political counterparts in trying to put a lid on history and the questions such historical revelations are prodding us to ask.

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Whatever else we may believe about Jesus, there is one simple fact that we cannot dismiss.  Jesus was a human being who lived in Galilee during the early part of the first century of the Common Era.  To the local residents of his hometown of Nazareth he was simply known as the carpenter's son.   To others he was considered a healer,  a rabbi, a prophet, and the longed for Messiah.  

From the Synoptic Gospels we can deduce that he was intelligent and likely educated by rabbincal scholars.  He is depicted reading Hebrew as all of his teachings were grounded in the scriptures of Judaism that he studied and knew. 

What was provocative was the context in which he presented his teachings on the Torah and the prophets. He preached about them in the context of the Kingdom of God and its imminence and presence in the here and now.  We know he was perceived as a threat to religious authorities and ultimately to the Roman authorities, which led to his being crucified as a rebel.  

After his death, stories about Jesus emerged.  Reports of his resurrection quickly spread and a community of Jewish followers of Jesus was established in Jerusalem which sent out apostles (missionaries) to spread the word of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection to Jewish communities throughout the known world.  The result of their efforts led to the eventual establishment of a new religion, Christianity.

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Twenty-one centuries later, Christianity remains enthralled by the stories about Jesus; in particular, his birth stories, his death stories, and his resurrection stories.  Within less than a century after his death and reported resurrection, Jesus had been made a god, but not just any old god, but GOD, being assigned the second person slot in a trinity of a three-person God. With that said, Jesus became understood as the only human manifestation of God in the flesh who, for the period of a human life time, lived among us and whose purpose in doing so was to sacrifice himself to pay the price of our collective sins so that those who "believe" in him will be saved and have eternal life.  After his death, Jesus was raised from the dead by God who was manifested in the human form of Jesus.  Shortly, thereafter, Jesus returned to his heavenly throne to await the end of earth's allotted time when it is believed he will to return to earth and judge those still living and and those who have died since the beginning of time.

For one thousand, six hundred, and forty years, the Nicene Creed which provided an outlined summation of this premise in 325 CE has become the standard expression of "right belief" about who and what Jesus is. That creed was brutally enforced as such by the Roman Emperor Theodosius in the year 381 CE when Christianity was established as the only religion of the Roman Empire.   Expressing belief in it premises as the true expression of who God and Jesus remains the doctrinal standard by which a Christians is recognized as a true follower of Jesus.  As a result, Jesus is hardly recognizable as a human being just like us, even though the Nicene Creed gives a nod to Jesus being  human by virtue of being born into our world through the Virgin Mary.

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As I have mentioned in other posts, the idea of Jesus somehow being the only-begotten Son of God and being both purely human and purely divine makes Jesus unrecognizable as one of us, no matter how one formulates the equation.  Even in the twenty-first century that understanding holds true, but the question I am putting on the table is whether that understanding of who and what Jesus is remains valid, and if so, in what context does it make sense? 

I see a need for Christianity to take a huge step back from the Nicene and other creeds that have been used to chain the minds of those who love God and are followers of Jesus from freely loving God and knowing Jesus as a brother who is truly one of us.  To do so requires that one unwinds these doctrinal and historical understandings of who Jesus is and go back to the Synoptic Gospels and take a deeper look at them.  What I have come to conclude from them is this:  "What is true about Jesus is true about us, and what is true about us is true about Jesus, a deduction from what Jesus in these Gospels taught. 

Let me be clear.  In stepping back, way back, from the creeds that defined me as a Christian at my baptism and which I have repeated for most of life in countless worship services, I have come to understand Jesus much differently.  First and foremost while I believe Jesus forgave us our sins, I don't believe Jesus was sent to earth to die for them.   I only have the Gospel of Luke to base that belief on; a Gospel that readily employs a mythic imagination to express it.  It is only in Luke we hear Jesus forgiving those who crucified him.  By extension Christians have largely concluded that the rest of us are also forgiven for not knowing what we are doing.  I don't know if Jesus actually said those words on the cross as he was dying but they captured my imagination and if we are to believe our sins are forgiven by God because of Jesus's asking God that we be forgiven then Luke's mythic Gospel is the one that champions that understanding.

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Being a human means that we are limited by our five senses and a three-dimensional perspective by which to understand the world we live in.  Beyond those limitations, however, most of us possess the ability to imagine.  I consider imagination to be on par with our physical senses.  

We can create.  Creativity is linked to our ability to imagine.  The human imagination has led to discoveries beyond what our five senses and three-dimensional perspective can perceive.   It has led to discoveries that effect our lives everyday.   It was Einstein who said that imagination is more important than knowledge because it is through our imaginations that our intuitions are awakened and from which knowledge is formulated and acquired.  

Unfortunately, Christianity has a long history of manipulating and suppressing the imaginative if and when it leads one to wander beyond the parameters set by the creeds and ecclesial authority.  Ecclesial authority has also attempted to concretize the imaginative myths surrounding Jesus' birth and resurrection as historical facts.  Let me be clear, the story of Jesus birth by a virginal Mary who never had sexual encounter with Jospeh before Jesus' birth is a myth as are the stories of Jesus' resurrection.  The person of Jesus is enshrouded by these myths that are treated as factual events.

After twenty-one centuries, there is no other way to understand them other than as myths because they are not facts as we understand fact today; which is to say, something that is corroborated by other sources and can be forensically or scientifically repeated.  There is no historical proof of these events ever having occurred other than the existence of their stories which were written between forty and seventy years later after Jesus' death by those who had (at best) second hand information passed to them.  There are no verifiable events of that kind that are known beyond those expressed in what Christians consider the myths of other religions.  

Myth is a dirty four-letter word to most Christians, thanks to First Timothy.  This is unfortunate because as I have said in other posts myths are the oven-mitts of truths too hot to be handle.  It is through the mythic that the imagination is engaged, allowing one to probe the meanings of our being that lie below or beyond the mundane surface reality of the world we have made for ourselves.  These myths are important portals to examine truth but they should not be treated as facts.  They lead to deeper understandings that awaken within us another sense of perception, intuition.    

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I will explore the mythic side of Christianity in subsequent posts, but for now I want to return to Jesus, the human who possessed the same five physical senses, three-dimensional perspective, and the same imaginative and intuitive abilities we possess.  We see these abilities at work in his parables, his metaphorical and mythic tales that offer us insights into his teachings about the Kingdom of God.  Intuitive people are imaginative people, they are visionary and are likely to experience visions.  I would suspect that most of us have had experiences with intuition, imagination, and perhaps have experienced a vision or two in our lifetimes that have made us question the concreteness of accepted reality.  

Jesus was such a person.  He was a product of the times and place in which he lived, but he also questioned and took issue with a concrete world-view regarding what constituted power and authority.  He was a gentle but passionate soul whose vision of his relationship with God extended to all he encountered.  If Jesus came to save us, it was not by dying but rather by his having lived a life shaped by a love that would not let him go, a love that could not die with the death of his body.  Jesus teachings help us understand that we are like him in every way, children of God, born of God's love.  Like Jesus we are the incarnate manifestations of that love.  Jesus offers us no proof of that other than his own visionary perspective of who he and we are as found in his teachings.

The teachings of Jesus are vital to understanding how to live into becoming the children God that we are.  It is not so much that Jesus saved us from our sins, but rather that he has redeemed (reclaimed) for us the vision and knowledge  of who we truly are.  It is clear throughout scriptures of the Holy Bible, that God's will cannot be averted by any human action or failure; that the pronouncement of God as recorded in Genesis; that creation is inherently good remains how God has always and always will see it, including us.  The biblical story is above all else the stormy story of our collective (past, present and future) relationship with God told through allegory, legend, and myth and through the mediums of poetry, prose, parable, prophecy, and proverb.  

To study and understand scripture is to understand the literature one is reading; to be able to identify the type of literature one is reading and its purpose in being written in the format it was written in.  Beyond that, especially for the New Testament reader, it is vital to be able to identify editorial comments when one encounters them; comments that can be deceptive and misleading as to their intent and meaning.  

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All of biblical scripture has been subjected to editorialization.  Some by the original authors of these scriptures and some by later editors.   In the New Testament, editorials were added to deny the mythic elements of the original story.  I will offer just a few examples with regard to the Synoptic Gospel accounts of Jesus life.  Most of these revolve around Jesus' birth and lineage.   

Matthew 1 begins with "This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham." Then in verses 24 and 24 of Matthew 1 we read: "When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.  But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.    In Luke 3 we encounter another genealogy of Jesus that extends all the way back  to the first "son of God," Adam (see verse 34). This genealogy begins in verse 23 by saying, "...he (Jesus) was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph..."  These underlined comments are editorial in nature.   The problem with both of these accounts is that whereas Jesus was considered a son of Abraham; in particular, a Jew by having a Jewish mother, Mary,  Jesus being the Son of David was passed through Joseph's bloodline.  If Jesus was not the biological son of Joseph, Jesus wasn't the Son of David.  Oops!

Such comments also appear in the story of Jesus' resurrection, apparently to demonstrate Jesus physically appearing after his death, as proof of his being resurrected.  In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus appears to his disciples behind locked doors and to dispel any thought that Jesus was a ghost or a figment of their imagination, Luke adds the following,  "(Jesus) showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, 'Do you have anything here to eat?' They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence."   

In the Gospel of Matthew, the women who encounter the resurrected Jesus, "clasp" his feet.  In Mark's Gospel, beyond the women who went to Jesus tomb and found it empty and were told to go and tell Jesus' disciple that he is risen.  That is where the earliest manuscript of this Gospel ended. Someone added more information that was consistent with Matthew's account, apart from that  there is no editorial comment offered attempting to explain a physical resurrection. In fact, the additional ending admits that there were those among his disciples who doubted his resurrection and who Jesus rebuked.  The Gospel of John is entirely a theological work that casts the story of Jesus parabolically ending with an editorial addition depicting that Jesus  (who couldn't be touched by Mary Magdalen) cooking fish for his disciples.  

Such efforts to cast Jesus' resurrection as a physical occurrence were employed to underscore the truth of its meaning for us but ventured into overkill in doing so.  Unfortunately, these Gospel writers seem to have had no knowledge of or ignored the fact that Paul describes Jesus' resurrection in his letters as a purely spiritual event. "Jesus died a physical body and was raised a spiritual body." - 1 Cor. 15:44 .  The epistles of Paul are the earliest known Christian writing that predate the Gospels by at least 20 years.

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There are two sides to Jesus' story,  the story told through Jesus' teachings and the stories told about Jesus. It is important to know both and to know the difference, but it is vitally important to know and embrace Jesus as one of us in order to understand who we are.  If we lose that understanding and put Jesus on a pedestal above and beyond our reach, we lose the good news of our own goodness, the goodness Jesus was trying to get us to embrace and manifest in our lives.

Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm

  

THE ETHICS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS - JESUS ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

The Gospel of Matthew's expansive list of Jesus' teachings reflects a much later account of Jesus' life and teaching found in Mark and Luke.  The author of Matthew's Gospel pieced together in a systemized collection of Jesus' sayings  in what we know as The Sermon on the Mount.  As a later gospel, one cannot be sure that the author or later editors of this gospel didn't employ poetic license when formulating the Sermon on the Mount in order to capture the spirit of Jesus' teachings by  expanding on the teachings of Jesus found  in the other Synoptic Gospels.   

An example of this found in the Beatitudes.  In Luke's Sermon on the Plain there are only four beatitudes, whereas in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount there are eight with the eighth expanded upon in what can be considered a ninth.  In addition, Matthew expands on their meaning.  For example, "Blessed are the poor" in Luke becomes "Blessed are the poor in spirit" in Matthew and "Blessed are those who hunger" in Luke becomes "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness" in Matthew.  These shifts represent a shift in interpretation over the course of time.  As such, the ethical perspective of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is presented in an a more expansive and straightforward manner than in the Gospel of Luke.  For the purpose of this post, I will keep my comments primarily focused on what Matthew presents as Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, as it offers a concise overview of Jesus' ethical perspective.  

                                          THE ETHICS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Beginning with the Beatitudes,Matthew adds to the four in Luke: 

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."  

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy."  

"Blessed the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 

"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"

Salt and Light

These four additional beatitudes that not are found in Luke can certainly be derived from other teachings Jesus gave, and it is quite possible that the author of Matthew's Gospel expanded on this list of beatitudes to serve as an outline for the ethical teachings that follow.  Before going on, however, Jesus underscores the importance of leading a "righteous" (ethically oriented) life.  He begins metaphorically, "You are the salt of the earth," and " You are the light of the world."    The point of these teachings is to underscored  the importance of making them a daily practice not only for oneself, but also for others.  If you are not flavoring the world and lighting it up with righteousness in the forms mentioned in the Beatitudes, the Kingdom of God remains hidden and untouched.  The goodness we produce gives glory to God and will invite others to taste and see the goodness God in their lives.

The Law and the Prophets

In addition to these metaphors, Mathew begins by addressing what appears to be a problem amongst those he had in mind when he wrote this gospel; a problem Christians periodically run into with being Christian.  Jesus addresses the purpose of the law and the prophets.  Matthew is certifying that what Jesus is teaching in this sermon is rooted in the law and the prophets and is claiming that nothing is taken away from them.  While that is primarily true, Jesus will within a few verses make some adjustments to what the Mosaic and Levitical law, in particular, is saying.  

The difficulty with reading editorialized scriptures (and all of them have been subject to editorialization) is to recognize editing when one encounters it.  If Jesus was giving this sermon in the real time of his day, there would have been no need for Jesus to talk about the law or the prophets in this manner to the Jewish audience of his day because the law and the prophets were an accepted way of life.  

Why then is it being mentioned here? 

The likely issue appears to be that there were some who were teaching that the laws and the prophets of the Old Testament were no longer valid since Jesus' resurrection and ascension.  In what amounts to over-kill the author or editor of Matthew has Jesus going so far as to say not a single bit of the Hebrew lettering of the law is being change until everything is accomplished or fulfilled, meaning that while we're living in the world of our making, the law and the prophets remain in force.  Jesus doesn't address every eight hundred plus laws found in Judaism.  He is selective in what he is talking about to illustrate a deeper perspective of the law. 

EXPANDED DEFINITIONS

Murder

Jesus does not address the Ten Commandments in full, but rather expands on the two of them, murder and adultery.  Here Jesus expands the definitions of these terms.  Murder involves more than actually taking someone's life.  Murder is also disregarding someone's life, demeaning them or holding them in contempt. Jesus basically is saying such judgements will bring hell on earth, will make not only the person's life one is demeaning hell, but also will make the person who says such things or thinks such things a living hell.  

Adultery

In a like, manner, Jesus expands the meaning of adultery to include lusting after another person in his or her heart is guilty of adultery.  While Jesus is largely talking to the men in his audience, woman would be subject to the same rule.  

Divorce

Jesus then moves beyond the Ten Commandments to Deuteronomical Law and divorce to which Jesus tightens up a loose end that gave men the right to dismiss or divorce their wives at will.  Jesus goes far beyond this to say that the only reason to divorce one's wife is if she is her being faithless in their marital relationship.  Any other reason will cause his wife to become an adulteress and any man who marries a divorced woman will be considered an adulterer.  

This needs some clarification.

Being in a male-dominated cultural and social setting, Jesus seems to be only addressing the male side of the marital equation.  There is reason for the because women were very much thought to be and treated as the property of their husbands and could be dealt with anyway the husband saw fit.  Jesus is breaking that concept apart.  What Jesus is saying here is that if a man divorces his wife without the just cause (i.e. her unfaithfulness) he will wrongly accuse her of being unfaithful by virtue of his having divorced her and any man who marries her will be an adulterer because she, in the eyes of God, is lawfully married to her husband because there is no just reason for her husband to have divorced her.  

It would logically follow that a husband who wrongly divorced his wife and married another woman would also have committed adultery, except for the fact that when Jesus was preaching and this Gospel was written men could have more than one wife. We need to be clear,  Jesus was not one who defined marriage as between one man and one woman only.  Men could marry more than one woman.  Nevertheless, Jesus was making a bold assertion for his time and in that culture he lived in that was intended to protect the women of that time and place from wrongful divorce.   

The Integrity of One's Word

Jesus then goes on to address righteousness in terms of maintaining one's integrity by addressing being faithful to what one says or agrees or disagrees with.   One's word should be sufficient in any agreement. If someone agrees to something, one needs to follow through with that agreement.   If someone says no to a proposition, that should suffice.  Let your yes and no stand on your integrity.  Be a person of your word.  There is no need to bring God into the equation to convince someone of your sincerity.  People who swear by God to validate their commitments lack the strength of personal commitment. 

REDEMPTIVE JUSTICE

Jesus was not a biblical literalist.  He took issue with laws and practices that could be deemed draconian if applied, especially, if they conflicted with his promulgation of redemptive justice.

Retributive Justice and Loving One's Enemies

When it comes to exacting justice on someone who has done wrong, Jesus takes issue with the law.  I'm not sure who edited the Matthew read what Jesus is saying here, because Jesus totally eliminates the legal practice of "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" sense of justice found in Exodus and replaces it with his sense of redemptive justice.  Here we see Jesus replace this law of Moses with a law spoken by the prophet Micah, "O mortal, what is good" And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8).  Chesed is the Hebrew word for the love of mercy and to be compassionate to the point of what the world of our making would consider ridiculous.  

Here Jesus teaches us not to resist evil or what is described as bullying behavior, but counter it with openness.  Offer the other cheek when someone slaps you on one cheek.  Offer a second coat to one who sues you for your coat.  If someone bullies you into do something he or she can do, go the extra mile.    In other words, do not allow yourself to be victimized by the bullying behavior of others.  Treat the bully with kindness as it reveals such bullying behavior for what it is to the bully and, if not the bully,  everyone else.

 

While Leviticus 19:18 does not specifically tell the people of Israel to hate their enemies, Jesus is addressing an understood fact that Leviticus 19:18 which decrees that one should not seek revenge on one's own people but rather to love one's neighbor, does not extend that decree beyond one's borders or to anyone outside of "one's own people.  Jesus sense of loving one's  neighbor includes one's enemies, just as the story of the Good Samaritan does in the Gospel of Luke demonstrates.

The Ethics of Personal Practice

Redemptive justice begins with one's personal practices.  After telling us to love our enemies, Jesus goes on to say that being righteous is accomplished by being "perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."  The Greek word translated as perfect that Matthew uses is τέλειοι, a word that connotes reaching one's goal in life, to living into fulfilling one's purpose, and the word that I associate with that process is to develop a sense of integrity, to be as faithful as God is faithful in all that God does, and thus this becomes and appeal to aspire to be faithful as a child of God in all that we do.  In the Gospel of Luke this understanding of perfection was to expressed as being as merciful as God is merciful.

If we are to emulate the grace of God then, like God, the good we do should slip under the radar of most, just as the goodness of God is mostly a silent affair.  After all, as Jesus said at the end of Matthew 5 God causes the sun to rise on the both the evil and the good and causes rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous.   

When it comes to putting chesed, compassionate mercy, into practice one should not turn it into a public show of "how good I am" but rather to allow one's goodness to reflect the goodness of God upon whom we all depend.  Giving to the needy should be a routine practice.  So much so that the giver hardly pays attention to the amount of his or her giving.  Giving to those in need is to become a way of life. 

Prayer and Forgiveness

For Jesus, prayer was a private matter more than a public one. In fact, the Gospels portray Jesus as being notorious for going off by himself to some isolated spot to pray.  In keeping with the notion that God is not boisterous, God speaks within the silence of our lives and to those who honor the silence of simply being.  In this teaching Jesus is channeling Elijah who encountered God in the silence of a passing moment.  Prayer is not to be a boisterous affair, but a private and mostly a silent one.   People who pray a great deal know this.  Jesus also says that prays need not be long.  God knows what we are seeking before we ask, which may beg the question, "Why pray at all?"   

Prayer is the greatest of all personal acknowledgements of God's presence in one's life.  Prayer is one's entry into the paradox of God being both personal and cosmic; of finding oneself as being a being within that Being in which all of creation lives, move, and has being, to paraphrase Paul quoting a prayer dedicated to the Greek god, Zeus. 

In the Gospel of Matthew, we come across Jesus' teaching on how to pray, "The Lord's Prayer" or the "Our Father" in the middle of his Sermon on the Mount, which I tend to think was deliberate on the part of Matthew's author.  In Luke's Gospel Jesus gives this teaching in response to his disciples request that he teach them how to pray.  

Whereas Jesus starts out by instructing us to pray privately, he reminds us that our prayers are communal in nature, that one's needs are connected to the needs of others.  At the center of this prayer is embedded Jesus' thesis on redemptive justice, "Forgive us our debts/trespasses/sins as we forgive those who are  indebted to us/trespass against us/ sin against us."  The "Lord's Prayer" is the ultimate  Christian creed because it tells us what it means to be a follower of Jesus, what it means to be a child of God, how to act as one, and how to participate in God's redemptive Kingdom.  In this prayer, Jesus underscores that redemption is centered first and foremost on our forgiving others; so much so in fact, that our being forgiven is dependent on our ability to do so.  This is how the Kingdom of God is realized in our time.  

Piety  

Jesus turns our attention to the subject of fasting which broadly speaking is talking about one's personal sense or practice of piety.   Fasting is the meditative practice of withholding food to bring to the forefront of one's mind one's dependence on God.  It is also used to meditate and commiserate with the sufferings of others throughout the world.  While such practices can be helpful on a personal and private level, they can become detrimental to furthering the Kingdom if such practices depict one looking as if one is suffering, being dour figure in one's community, or acting as if the entry into the Kingdom of God is a matter how good one is at giving up earthly pleasures.  One's personal piety should not be expected in others or be a challenge to others.  Sincere piety is a hidden affair apparent only to God.

Jesus then segues into an esoteric discussion about storing up treasures in heaven rather than on earth and an even more esoteric discourse on the eye being single.   These short discourses have been interpreted in various ways; straightforwardly in the case of storing up treasures in heaven as meaning foregoing treasures here on earth or perhaps using (expending) our treasures on earth for righteous causes; such as, caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, etc., which in turn will result in storing up treasures in heaven.  This is, of course, a valid interpretation, but coming on the heels of a discussion of being private about one's prayer life and piety and connecting it to our hearts desires keeps this in the realm of private endeavors.  Jesus is not being prescriptive here.  He is not telling us what to treasure but rather to pay attention to what we treasure, to be alert to where our hearts' true desires lay.  

Jesus then moves on to one's eye being single (ἁπλοῦς in Greek) as opposed to double (δίπλους in Greek) its antonym. Much has been made of the single use of the word eye as opposed to the fact the we humans have two eyes.  Some of have associated this with the middle eye concept of yogic or far eastern thought.  It is an odd construct implying that we are to be focused and avoid being visually duplicitous; to see things for what they are and not what we want them to be; to look at things through a folded lens; such as, lowering the blinds of the mind to cut the glare of truth.  Light and truth are synonymous in the scriptures.  If our minds are open to the light of truth, we will be filled with it.  If one becomes duplicitous in what one is seeing, one is pulling the shades of one's mind down and the light and the truth cannot enter in and one's vision of the life God intends us to live into will fade and will risk life becoming an increasing descent into darkness. 

Jesus ends his discourse into living a pious life by taking a final swipe at duplicitous living by saying that a person cannot serve two opposing master because eventually there comes a time when one must choose one or the other.  Jesus says, one cannot serve God and mammon, often translated as money, but  mammon is contextually used to represent that which has no intrinsic value or lasting value in itself.

Staying in the Present

Jesus addresses our anxieties about the future.  Jesus points out that most of our worries concern what is going to happen down the road of life or what we are going to encounter as we turn some sort of bend in the road ahead of us.  What is unique in his discussion is that he uses the mundane to illustrate the pointlessness of our worries; such as, what shall we wear or what shall we eat tomorrow.  

Jesus points us to nature; the birds of the air and lilies of the fields, surmising that all of one's worrying will not add a single second to one's life.  The troubles of today is all we need to be concerned with,  is what we need to address today.  We cannot possibly get ahead of ourselves by addressing the possibilities of a tomorrow that has not yet dawned on us.  Likewise, we can't possibly enjoy the moment we're in when we are consumed by worries that haven't been realized and are the products of the phantom memories of past ignored issues projecting themselves into our sense of the future.  

To counteract such dilemmas, Jesus advised that we seek the Kingdom of God and God's righteousness and our tomorrows will take care of itself because the Kingdom of God is encountered in the now of every moment.  

Judgment

In Matthew 7, Jesus recaps what he has discussed in the previous two chapters with a pragmatic twist given to them.  The ethics of righteousness must be worked at.  They are not a given in the dystopian world we live, the world of our making, and Jesus is not presenting us with an unrealistic, utopian world view.  

The ethics of righteousness are rooted in the faith, hope, and love of God. They are to be practiced as n individuals and as a community of faith.   As such, we must strive to understand ourselves as individuals and as communities of faith.  Self-righteousness is properly understand selfish-righteousness, blindness to our own faults and failures. To recap what he has already said, Jesus begins by telling us not to judge others.  

When our vision is duplicitous, we tend to see the problems obscuring the vision of others quicker than perceiving our own blindness.  Judging others as to their worthiness and level righteousness is a treacherous undertaking.  We can only help the blindness of others if we are truly focused on seeking the Truth that is God, a Truth that no living human fully possesses.  At best we can only catch glimpses of it and understand that we cannot fully hold a Truth that is ultimately is holding us.  

Forgiveness is a powerful ethical tool.  So many live under the weight of their own self-inflicted burdens, who can't forgive others simply because they can't forgive themselves, yet alone understand the power of forgiveness.  Forgiving oneself can be the most difficult undertaking.  It is like removing the beam in one's eye.  It is difficult to forgive the faults we fail to see in our own lives and once we see them it can be difficult to feel worthy enough to forgive them.  Forgiveness begins with oneself and it is best to consign such forgiveness to God whose image we bear, which brings us to Jesus' teaching on seeking, asking, and finding. 

This life is about becoming; about seeking, about asking, and about discovery.  Sitting smuggly in a pew or on a couch "believing" that entertaining concretized beliefs in what the Bible says is all that is necessary for salvation misses the point of why the scriptures exist.  The scriptures exist to be explored.  They do not answer our many questions, but help us to formulate the questions that we should be asking.  The answers to our questions will be found along the way of our life-journeys.

Jesus concludes with the golden rule of treating others as we would have others treat us. This includes how we view others and how we think of them.   Jesus then warns us about false prophets and religious leaders who will claim having authority to speak on God's behalf but whose actions and life style will reveal their emptiness.  

Jesus' view of the righteous life is not about obtaining popularity in this world, about sticking with one's tribe, or going along with the crowd.  Righteousness begins with introspection, knowing oneself and seeking to do the will of God in one's life by discovering the child God each and every one of us are and by living into becoming that child.  This will undoubtedly be a life-long process,  just as it was for Jesus.  As long as one is alive there is an evolutionary process taking place, an ongoing transfiguration in our perspectives.  

The body will wear out because it is a product of the earth, but the spirit will not because it is the very presence of God in us.  If we can be kind to ourselves, to the image we truly bear, the transcendent wisdom that accepts and seeks the righteousness of God, we will enable the light of God to shine through us so that others will come to know the light and love of God in their lives  

Until next time,  stay faithful.

Norm

PARITY IN PARADOX - JESUS' ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE GOSPEL OF LUKE

In my previous post I posited that the essence of Jesus' teaching is that the Kingdom of God is comprised of all creation and that we humans are the daughters and sons of God. The challenge for Jesus throughout his ministry was to demonstrate how God's Kingdom differed from what his audience was experiencing at the time he was proclaiming its presence.  

Kingdoms are hierarchical. At the top was a king or an emperor.  Kings ruled by word and the sword.  Their words were law and its enforcement the sword. They had armies to carry out the will of the king. Kings had the ability to reward friends and destroy enemies at will.  Such imagery is employed in scriptures to describe God's Kingdom also, including some of Jesus' parables about the kingdom to make a point about the seriousness of what Jesus was talking about, but at the core of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God is something much different than our understanding about the kingdoms in the world of our making.  As the writer of John's Gospel has Jesus perceptively putting it,  the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with the world of our making.  It is a cosmic kingdom that envelopes the whole of creation.

Going back to John the Baptizer, we are not given a full picture of what John taught but we have in the Gospel of Luke a sense of what John was talking about when he was calling people to repent:.

And the people asked him (John), saying, What shall we do (to repent) then? He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.  Then came also publicans to be baptized, and said unto him, Master, what shall we do?  And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you.  And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages. [Luke 3:7-14 KJV]

Does this sound familiar?

In this snippet of John's teaching about what he meant by repentance, we see a foreshadowing of what Jesus would follow through with in in his Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6 and in his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, 6, and 7.  The difference between John and Jesus is how they approached the same message.  For John, doing these things was an act of repentance preparing one for the coming of God's Kingdom; whereas for Jesus, acting in a particular ethical way was participating in the Kingdom of God by living into being the children God intends us to be.  One could  say that Jesus was also calling people to repent by acting in a particular ethical way except that Jesus rarely uses the word. Instead,  Jesus calls us to conduct our lives in a way that reflects the righteousness (the presence) of God in our lives.  For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was to be sought in this life,  "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness..."  and (paraphrasing)  God's Kingdom becomes apparent in our lifetimes. [See Matt. 6]

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The Kingdom of God is reachable within our lifetimes or why else seek something that is not attainable in this life?  Jesus then gives a huge clue as to how this kingdom is realized.  To seek the Kingdom of God is to seek the righteousness of God, a seemingly impossible task, but again Jesus is not teasing his audience with an impossible task, but something attainable.  

Righteousness is term that is thrown around a good deal in religious circles, but what does it mean when our scriptures talk about it?  In particular, what does Jesus mean when he is talking about seeking the righteousness of God?   

If one looks up righteousness in a dictionary, one will find a simple definition like being morally correct, but if one looks at the synonyms one can use to convey righteousness one will encounter twenty or more to choose from.  What struck me in looking through the list of synonyms for righteousness were two words, integrity and justice.  In Godspeak, justice means mercy and integrity means to be true to who we are, to the person God intended one to be - a child of God.

In Luke 6:36, Jesus says righteousness is accomplished by following his dictum, "Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful." [οἰκτίρμονες in Greek]. Luke associates the righteousness of God with God's compassion and mercy.  In other words, to seek the righteousness of God is to become compassionate and merciful towards all, which is how God enacts justice. 

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What I see in the collections of Jesus' sayings known as the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain is Jesus' ethical perspective of the Kingdom of God.  Ethics and morality are often used interchangeably, but I would like to make a slight distinction between the two terms.  

Jesus' moral compass is set to loving that which God loves - the whole of creation -  and in that love we find parity and paradox.  In human terms this means loving ourselves as the God who brought us to life loves each of us, to love those around us as we love ourselves, to extend that love to those who do not return our love, to love those who we may see as an enemy or who see us as their enemy with that same measure of love, and to love all that God has brought into being, for in doing so we fully love God.  Morality then is to love God in the fullness of loving that which God loves.  Ethics is how we engage and follow Jesus' moral compass.   Jesus demonstrated unconditional love to every person he met and because of his heightened sense of what being moral meant, he was often accused by those who practiced conditional love as being immoral.

Jesus' ethical perspective of God's Kingdom expanded on John's call to repent by meeting the needs of others in sharing one's abundance and not taking advantage or doing harm to our fellow human being, as noted above.  Jesus noticeably never uses the word repentance in any of these sermons.  Instead What Jesus meant the Kingdom of God is at hand is that it is present in the here in now and in his teachings he laid out a plan for realizing the Kingdom of God in one's lifetime.  

Both the writers of Luke's and Matthew's gospels shared a common source for these sayings.  Whereas Luke's account of these sayings is spread throughout his gospel, Matthew's account is a more detailed, direct, and expansive account of Jesus's ethical teachings and perspective of the Kingdom of God  covering three whole chapters.  Luke's presentation of Jesus' ethical teaching on the Kingdom of God are briefly outlined in his Sermon on the Plain, but more fully talked about in his parables which are only found in Luke, like the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan.

Both Luke and Matthew present this ethical perspective by starting with defining who makes up and are included in the Kingdom of God in what we know as the Beatitudes.  This list of the blessed is counterintuitive to what the world of our making considers blessed or fortunate.  I can only imagine that when Jesus gave these teachings there were probably those who were listening and who felt blessed enough that might have been scratching their heads, over how are the poor or the hungry blessed?  What blessing can be found in sorrow?   How is anyone blessed when one is hated?  What foolishness is this?   

At the same time there were the poor who would have heard that the kingdom of God belongs to them, the hungry who heard they would be filled, the suffering and sorrowful  who heard they would find happiness and joy, and those who were hated and felt outcast who would find great reward in the Kingdom of God; all whose hearts were filled with hope and gratitude.  In the Kingdom of God paradox and parity abounds where our sense of sight and sound give way to insight and meaning.  Things are not as they appear and understand them to be in the world of our making. In God's eyes all creation is equally good.  

As mentioned above, Jesus brilliantly conveys this sense of ethical paradox and parity through his use of parables not found in the other Synoptic Gospels.   The parable of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son are parables that display the ethics of Jesus' redemptive justice.   Redemptive justice is foundational in Jesus' teaching, “Don't judge and you won't be judged. Don't condemn, and you won't be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven." ( Luke 6:37)  Restorative justice differs from redemptive justice in that restorative justice is premised on reconciliation; the willingness of the offender to admit to being the offender, whereas redemptive justice as practiced by Jesus begins with forgiveness that shines a light on who the person is, a child of God who is deeply loved by God and whose embrace breaks the hidden chains that enthrall us.  

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus depicts a man, presumably a Jew who is was brutally beaten up by robbers and left to die.  A priest and a Levite see the man and pass him by, but a Samaritan saw the man and immediately checked on him, treated his wounds and put him on his donkey and took him to an inn where he stayed overnight treating the man and then giving the innkeeper money for his and the wounded man's stay and telling the innkeeper to take care of the man and he would repay him for any costs.  [See Luke 10]

This parable was the result of a question asked by a scribe regarding who is considered one's neighbor and Jesus takes the law regarding one's neighbor beyond one's immediate neighborhood broadens it to a global neighborhood.  The ethics of neighborliness is an ethics of a justice question - what's the right way to treat one's neighbor?  As some would point out, the priest and the levite might have avoided the man because he was bloody and they didn't want to be considered impure because they came in contact with his blood.  That might have been a factor that led them to pass by, but being in a road that was notorious for robbers they might have also considered that the man was a robber himself who probably got what he deserved and therefore they felt justified by leaving him to his just deserts.   

The Samaritan  saw the man's suffering and whether the man deserved it or not did not enter into his calculus.  The injured man could have been robbed because he made a show of his wealth, or was a Jew who "had it coming" because Samaritan and Jews were traditional enemies. The Samaritan could have entertained such thoughts, but he didn't.  He set aside judgment and saw a human being like himself in need of help and so he helps in ways that exceeded any expectations to ensure the man's well-being.  Such an unmitigated act of compassion and kindness goes beyond restoration, it becomes redemptive, and it is resurrectional. 

Then there is the the parable of the Prodigal Son.  This is perhaps the most poignant ethical story in the Holy Bible.  It does not appear to be a story of ethics, but ultimately it is.  It begins with a moral premise in the form of the prodigal son's immoral behavior and what appears to be the father's lack of moral responsibility towards ensuring his son's ability to handle wealth.  What parent would give his obviously immature son his inheritance before his time with absolutely no restriction on how he would use it?  What parent would be so foolish?   Of course, if one thinks about that question as one reads the story, one understands exactly who such a foolish father is, God.

Naturally, this story does not make a whole lot of sense in the world of our making and that is precisely the point Jesus is trying to make in the story because in a very broad sense, the world of our making is exemplified by the prodigal son and his older brother, two different sides of the same coin.  Our attention is initially drawn to the younger son who takes the portion of his inheritance and runs off to live the life of his dreams and so he does until he wakes up in a nightmare of his making. With no skill to fall back on he finds himself taking on the most servile of jobs, slopping pigs and living on the slop he feeds them.  It is a wake up moment that leads him back home to his father, knowing he is unworthy to be his son and willing to be one of his father's servants who his father treated well.  

The story gets interesting when the prodigal son returns to his father and we learn that the father has been on the lookout for him ever since he took off, waiting for this very moment. The father has not been waiting for this moment so that he can rub the fact that his youngest made a mistake, he is waiting to embrace him and tell him how much he is loved and redeems him as his son as the son who was lost but is now found. This father proves to very wise after all, knowing that life experiences are better teachers than anything he could have said that might have made his son resent him.  

Meanwhile his old brother is less than excited about his younger sibling's return. In fact, he is jealous at the extravagant display of his father's love poured out on his younger brother.  He complains to his father, "Why haven't you thrown a party for me like this? I've been loyal to you all along and didn't go out and waste my life like he did."  The father's reply is simple,  "Don't be angry. Your brother was lost and has returned.  That is reason for great joy and you should be happy, besides everything I have is yours.  You lack nothing."

In this story, Jesus sense of God's paradox and parity is on full display.  God loves the seemingly unloveable.   The father loves the son who takes advantage of his goodness and wastes it and he loves the son who doesn't understand his love at all, who feels entitled to being more loved than is his wastrel  younger sibling because he didn't cause waves and stayed close to home.  In the apparent imbalance of the father's reaction to his younger son is found the balance of his love for both his sons.  This is the love of God for all his children.  There is parity in paradox.  

Realizing the Kingdom of God is a matter of engaged ethical behavior that seeks to find parity in the paradox of God's love of all by loving that which God loves.  Ultimately, the knowledge of good and evil that we continue to judge ourselves and others ultimately gives way to the wisdom of God's love for all.

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Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm

 

 

 

THE WISDOM FROM ON HIGH - A Homily

I presented this homily on December 19, 2021 at Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton, South Dakota.  It is probably one of the shortest homilies I ever gave.

 O come thou wisdom from on high, who orders all things mightily, to us the path of knowledge show, and teach us in her ways to go.   Amen.

The Gospel according to Luke wonderfully depicts God’s holy wisdom at work in our world.  In Luke’s telling of Jesus’ story; from the moment of his conception to his death, from Mary saying to Gabriel, “Be it unto me as you have said” to Jesus’s dying words, “In to your hands I commend my spirit,” we are shown the pathway of God’s wisdom.

In Luke, this pathway begins with the story of two unexpecting, expectant mothers, Elizabeth, considered incapable of having children and Mary who wasn’t anticipating having a child when Gabriel appeared to her.   Like the parabolic thief in the night, the loving essence of God, God’s Spirit, came into the world of our making, to a remote village in Galilee to overshadow one our world wouldn’t notice; to Mary whose great faith and purity of heart was so favored by God that she was entrusted with bearing the hope of our world in her womb. 

Paradox is a sign of God’s wisdom at work in our world, and Mary’s story presents us with a paradox.  Mary, a child made in the image of God, like us, was chosen to bear in her womb the incarnate love of God made our image; who became one with us by becoming one of us.  As such, Mary became the living ark of God’s new covenant in the person of Jesus, who would show us the path of knowledge; God’s loving wisdom working for us through him.

In today’s Gospel reading, Luke brings the stories of these two expectant mothers full circle in a joyous reunion where Mary praises God with her whole being in the words of the Magnificat.  In it, Mary rejoices at God’s wisdom working within herself and then traces it back through the generations to Abraham; recalling how God chooses to reveal God’s wisdom through those so often ignored; the hungry, the poor, and the vulnerable, and so a humble young girl was chosen to bear God’s son, our brother Jesus, who was, himself, born in a humble stable at Bethlehem. 

 

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Mary is called the Theotokos, the God-bearer.  From this term comes the Western concept of Mary being the Mother of God.  That Mary holds such an exalted title is not surprising.  Having born in her womb the one whose image we bear and the one who bears our image, Mary becomes our Mother also, the new Eve of God’s new creation, which came to fruition in the resurrection of Jesus, the new Adam.  

The story of Mary’s willingness to participate in bringing about God’s new creation presents a model for us who desire to follow the knowledgable path of God’s wisdom; to be in ourselves the humble bearers of God’s love in our world.  With Mary’s story in our hearts and minds, let us open ourselves to the daily visitation of God’s wisdom in the words of the familiar Christmas hymn:

“O holy child of Bethlehem descend to us we pray. Cast out our sins and enter in.  Be born in us today….   O come to us, abide with us our Lord Immanuel.”  Amen.

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Until next time, stay faithful.

Norm