American Politics

The War Horse of Pilate; The Peace Donkey of Jesus Christ

The world’s most famous horse is Bucephalus of Alexander the Great.

Historians are split on whether Alexander the Great or Jesus Christ was history’s most consequential figure. What is not in dispute is that by the age of thirty, Alexander defeated King Darius III of Persia and subsequently amassed one of the largest empires in the history of the world. We know a lot about Alexander, but we also know a lot about his horse. Alexander’s supposed ancestor, Achilles, said that his horses were “known to excel all others—for they are immortal. Poseidon gave them to my father Peleus, who in his turn gave them to me.” Alexander understood the potential for his horse to grow his myth and legend, and so grow his empire. Horses are powerful animals. A cavalry of soldiers on war horses projects all kinds of symbolism: Freedom, power, might, sexiness.

Which is why when insecure nations want to project power, they begin by constructing a statue of some guy on a war horse.

In Rome, Italy is a statue of Marcus Aurelius on a war horse. In Lisbon, Portugal is a statue of King John I on a war horse. In China is a statue of Yue Fei on a war horse. In Medellín, Colombia is a statue of Simón Bolivar on a war horse. In Zacatecas, Mexico is a statue of Poncho Villa on a war horse. In Bremen, Germany is a statue of Otto Von Bismarck on a war horse. There are thousands of statues of guys on a war horse. It’s a universal symbol.

And this symbol works in America too.

Just south of the Washington National Cathedral is a statue of George Washington on a war horse. Three miles from there is a statue of Andrew Jackson on a war horse. In Gettysburg, PA are statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and others—each on a war horse. And just like John Wayne, you’ll find General Lee on a war horse in towns small and large and towns north and south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Which is why I find it so damning that at the exact same time that Alexander the Great was out conquering the world on his war horse, the Bible tells of the Hebrew prophet Zechariah, who—like all Hebrew prophets—was able to see past all the bullshit of war horses:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion!
Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
His rule will extend from sea to sea
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.
Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope;
even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.
I will bend Judah as I bend my bow
and fill it with Ephraim.
I will rouse your sons, Zion,
against your sons, Greece,
and make you like a warrior’s sword.

Zechariah c9

Zechariah captured a thought that has held true since the beginning. War isn’t glorious. It doesn’t set the world right. It does not ever bring peace. War ruins people. And as I’ve said many times on this blog, Israel and Judah are history chief sufferers and judgers of war. While the rest of the world stood in awe at the mesmerizing power of spears and shields and swords and chariots and horses of the world’s empires, the Hebrew prophets saw them for what they really are.

They saw them as evil.

Satanic.

And the Torah saw them the same way.

The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself.

Deuteronomy c17

Zechariah then, like all of Israel’s and Judah’s prophets, and like the Torah was preparing God’s people to prepare the world for a time when the world would be rid of this. A time when, as Isaiah put it, “Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they study war anymore.” Zechariah saw through the lie of Alexander the Great and his great empire. He saw through the lie of his war horse.

And he declared that a day was coming when God would raise up a king who would not be like Alexander the Great and King Darius and Nebuchadnezzar. This king wouldn’t exercise the splendor of conquest. He would be a lowly king. He wouldn’t stomp all over the earth on a scary war horse. He would gently come to power on a little peace donkey.

Fast forward, then, hundreds of years.

Persia and Greece were gone, and in their place was Rome. The gospel writers tell us that Jesus—who had grown up as a boy reading Zechariah—in his final week made the uphill journey from Jericho by the Dead Sea to the city of Yerushela’im. Jerusalem, which had seen more blood than anywhere else in the ancient world, ironically means “way of peace.” As Jesus entered Jerusalem, it was exactly one week before the Jewish festival of Passover. Normally, about 40,000 people lived in Jerusalem, but the city would swell to more than 200,000 during Passover. Understand, you put that many occupied people in one place, and the occupiers will take notice—especially consider what the occupied people were there to celebrate. Jews from all over the known world flooded into the City of the Way of Peace to celebrate Yahweh freeing them from bondage under the Egyptians.

The Romans weren’t stupid. They could read the story of the exodus and figure out that they were now the Egyptians. They had no problem understanding that Jerusalem’s idea of peace was a world without Rome.

So they flooded the city with troops.

Literally on the same day that King Jesus to the shouts of “Hoshana!” entered Jerusalem from Jericho in the East, the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate and his army entered Jerusalem from Caesarea Maritima in the West. Understand that when the gospel writers wrote the story of Jesus, they assumed you would know this and would quickly make this connection.

When Pilate entered Jerusalem, he was accompanied by six hundred war horses and tens of thousands of foot soldiers. It was an unmistakable display of intimidation. It was like saying, “Don’t even think about it.”

If there is anything that we as Americans need to learn today, it is what Jesus did when he came to Jerusalem to announce that he would be king over all the world’s kings.

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethpage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

“Say to Daughter Zion,
‘See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

Matthew c21

Jesus did not ride into Jerusalem on a donkey so that you can know how to go to Heaven when you die. Jesus rode on a donkey to free us from the seduction of violence and warhorses and empire. He died on the Roman cross to free us from our Hell-bent march that comes from believing the world will be made right when we kill all the bad people.

Of course, no one in the City of the Way of Peace listened to him, and that led to this lament over the city.

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day the way of peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

Luke c19

And Jesus was exactly right.

On September 16, 2001, the United States declared war on terror. In that week or terror, I was among the majority of Americans whose heart was moved to go to war. I was inspired by Sean Hannity’s book, Deliver Us From Evil, a proclamation of a world free of terror because America would finally use its military muscle that politically correct liberals had for so long curtailed.

We’ve spent trillions on the war since then, and that raises all sorts of questions. Like . . .

Do you feel safe yet?

Have we . . . won?

And if we haven’t won yet, when will we win?

Do we expect to win soon?

If not, do we need an even bigger military?

Are we not killing enough people?

What will winning look like?

How will we know that we are safe?

I ask these questions because next year’s newest adults will have never have known  an America that wasn’t at war.

We are raising a whole generation to lack any of the prophetic imagination found in the Bible.

On Monday, we memorialize those who died while serving in our nation’s armed forces. As followers of Jesus, we embrace the peace donkey over the warhorse. You don’t hear much of this in America’s churches, but America’s churches for the most part have little interest in being followers of Jesus. I have faith in the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, who rode the peace donkey and preached the way of peace. I have faith like Peter, who met Cornelius the Roman centurion and preached to him and his household the gospel of peace. I have faith in exactly what the Bible says that Jesus came to teach: Peace. I have faith in the very first word that Jesus spoke after he was executed as an innocent man on the execution device of the empire: Peace.

Yet, as followers of Jesus, our shunning of war does not mean that we seek to dishonor those who have ever served in the military. Really, the way you can know that I honor our troops is that I don’t want to send them into war again! The Bible is against war from Genesis c1 to Revelation c22, but the sin of war isn’t on those whom the nation sends to fight in it. I’m friends with many people who serve in the military. Many in my family serve and have served. Our soldiers are the victims of war, not its victors, not its profiteers. They go to foreign countries as eighteen-year-olds. They lose their lives. They lose their bodies. They lose their peace. They come home from war, and for the rest of their lives their minds cause them to relive it. They experience Hell in the truest biblical sense. The sin of war is not on them.

The sin of war is on the nation that sends them.

I’m worried about President Trump and his national security advisor, John Bolton, who has made no secret his desire to go to war with Iran and North Korea. Bolton, you should know, was one of America’s champions for the war in Iraq. I’m worried that, as a result of pulling out of the agreement with Iran and the summit with North Korea, we will seek to secure their cooperation through shock and awe. But we tried this in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. We know by now what will happen. We won’t get peace. We’ll kill lots of foreign people, destroy lots of foreign buildings, and our young people will come home with PTSD so that more young people can go and kill lots of foreign people and destroy lots of foreign buildings. This is the judgment of the Lord. This is the Hell that the Bible describes.

So instead of appropriating our nation’s treasury on new war horses, lets spend it on the tens of thousands of homeless veterans we walk by on our streets each day. How about that for honoring those who have fallen on foreign soil? Instead of appropriating our nation’s treasury on new war horses, let’s build more schools and hospitals. On this Memorial Day, let’s honor our nation’s dead servicemen and servicewomen by learning from their pain rather than sending a new generation of young people into the same hopeless and un-Christian cycle of death. Let’s instead pray for the life that comes from the eternal. On this Memorial Day, I hope you will join me as I pray this ancient prayer from Saint Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 12

The Jews are a uniquely trampled-upon people.

They are history’s sufferers-in-chief. As one global empire after another sought to control the land of Judea—the strategic land bridge between Africa, Europe, and Asia—it was the Jewish people who suffered most. Owing to their position as the world’s perpetual underdog, the Jews became champions of social justice and consummate visionaries of a world beyond the imaginary capacity of what the Apostle Paul called the “principalities and powers.”

If you got nothing else from this series, I hope you see that the project of that rabbinic Jew from Galilee we know as Jesus was not to position us for where we go when we die, but to fulfill the Jewish dream of how good societies are arranged while we live. The gospel is about broad human flourishing, and it cannot be explained divorced from the global empires that subjugated the people who wrote the Bible.

To make my case, I’ve taken you all over the Bible and stressed the earthy significance of recurring literary signifiers like “gospel,” “kingdom,” “Jesus is Lord,” “Messiah,” “Son of Man,” “King of the Jews,” and even “Armageddon.” I’ve tried to articulate the great power in the more humble, ordinary, and even boring parts of the Bible (think Ruth). And I’ve tried to give necessary context to understand parts of the Bible that might be lost on readers who aren’t ancient middle eastern Hebrew slaves.

 

Critical to the motivations of those who wrote the Jewish Bible is the question: what do we need to do so that we quit being destroyed and conquered and losing everything we have to the self-centered ambitions of these global empires?

Over many centuries, various movements and developments within Judaism answered that question differently. These responses often found their inspiration in the literary and cultural achievements of their neighbors and, in particular, the various empires who subjugated them. You see this within the Old Testament: The writer of Deuteronomy had different ideas on this question than the writer of Ruth; the writer of Nahum had different ideas on this question than the writer of Jonah; the writer of Leviticus had different ideas on this question than the writer of Psalm c40 v6. Some streams of thought emphasized that Yahweh would come to the defense of the Jews only if they maintained fidelity to the temple regulations and sacrifices. Others emphasized social justice and explicitly downplayed the importance of the temple. Others sought to exclude foreigners from the assembly, while others welcomed foreigners. Some thought that the Jews would have to take up the sword in a final apocalyptic battle.

And these different lines of Jewish thought continued to develop and evolve between the Old and New Testament.

Which gets me back to the Jewish-Roman War that started this obnoxiously long series of essays—the war that was principally responsible for the fact that we have the written story of Jesus. This was a tax revolt. It was humiliating enough that the Romans had conquered and subjugated Israel; it was unbearable that they forced the Jews to pay the imperial tax that supported the very military that kept them subjugated. It was taxation without representation, so they did what Americans celebrate every July.

They revolted.

Mark tells the story of some Pharisees and Herodians who wanted to trap Jesus. If they could have caught him instructing his disciples not to pay the imperial tax, they could have haled him before Pilate and had him executed. So, they asked him,

“Rabbi, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn’t we?”

I have no doubt that, before you read this series, you knew Jesus’s clever response. It was indeed clever.

“Why are you trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

And they were amazed at him.

If you grew up as I did, you probably understand Jesus’s words as a neat way of saying something that in substance is not super remarkable: Pay your taxes and follow laws. I agree that Christianity is not a religion of lawlessness, but if that is the bare amount you got from this story, you really missed its subtle enduring power. Jesus was too good at what he did to ever say something so one dimensional as “follow laws.”

It turns out, Jesus took this question about taxes and laid out one of the essential tenets of his whole ministry: Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s. This sentence is Jesus’s answer to the whole Jewish project of how to the defeat the empire. It is where the whole Bible had been heading since it began in Eden. And this powerful, yet brilliantly sneaky quote is made all the more interesting by the fact that Mark places it within a dispute about taxes—the very thing that led to the war that led to the devastation that led to the Gospel of Mark in the first place. When the story was read aloud for the first time after the war, I promise you they got it. It’s a simple line. It’s a clever line. But it is a heavy line, and I love it.

Because when you start to think about what belongs to Caesar, all you have to do is start looking around.

In Part 11, I wrote about the Iron Triangle of Herod, Pilate, and Caiaphas. I wrote about the mutually beneficial relationship of the concentrated economic powers, war powers, and religious powers. If you read Jesus’s command for all it’s worth, at the heart of the Jesus movement is his followers giving that system away. Rabbi Jesus tells us to give back our systems that advance a small few at the expense of many. He tells us to give back to Caesar our desire to inflict violence back on those who harm us. His teaching reflects what should be too obvious by now: that the world isn’t made peaceful by blowing up bad people. He tells us to give back our religious systems that merely reinforce Caesar’s triangle. Those things aren’t God’s. They are Caesar’s.

Imagine surviving a war and hearing that for the first time.

Like EVERYTHING in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s response to the question is a prophetic critique of both sides of the war. On the one hand, Mark clearly portrayed Jesus as condemning the Jew’s violent tax revolt. That message would not have been missed. But on the other hand, if you place the story within the stories of the people who survived the war, Jesus’s response to the Pharisees was a message of hope: If you will give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, you will finally be rid of Caesar. You will be rid of the thing for which you started and lost in war.

Have I ever told you that the Bible is sharp?

And it speaks loudly to those who today might consider themselves part of the “Resistance.” It speaks loudly to those who see a world gone wrong and dream about a world made right. Imagine if the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated in his Letter from Birmingham Jail that African Americans take to the streets with clubs. Imagine if when Nelson Mandela in 1990 left Victor Verster Prison, he declared to the large crowd that black Africans must arm themselves with machetes and fight back against apartheid?

That would have been the pursuit of justice by the very reviled system already mastered by the powerful. It wouldn’t have gotten rid of the ways of Caesar, but only perpetuated them. In perhaps more tangible terms, it would have been a human disaster. It would have been the story of suffering I told you in Part 1.

But, instead, Rev. Dr. King Jr. and Mandela’s deputy, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, knew their Hebrew prophets and knew the prophetic tradition out of which came Jesus the Messiah. The struggle for civil rights remains unfinished, but millions of people today are far better off because these leaders were brave enough to give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Every movement that is courageous enough to see beyond the present power structure must also be brave enough to see beyond the present means of obtaining power. Those movements that embrace violence in its various forms always end poorly. You could say, “those movements that live by the sword die by the sword.” When you open your Bible and read somewhere that Jesus forgave people of their sins, the big story was not that they would be pure enough on some future judgment day so they could hang out in the clouds with his dad. The big story is that Jesus had broken down the thing that separated people.

You are reading about the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Jesus’s first words of the new world of his resurrection were “Peace be with you.”

The followers of Christ are to be a peaceable people. In the second century, it was their peaceable nature that made the Jesus Movement explode with new followers. Giving back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and instead being a peacemaker is how we tangibly realize the imaginative literary painting at the end of Revelation when Heaven comes down to Earth. It is how we win.

Blessed, then, are the peacemakers.

….

When I started this project, I expected about six parts. This being part twelve, I hope this wasn’t terrible. Nevertheless, I’m ready to call it and move on to the next thing.

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 11

Jesus grew up a rural peasant, but on Good Friday found himself before Governor Pontious Pilate in his Praetorium. The chamber was lined in marble. Above Pilate’s seat was the imperial seal. Surrounding him were regal attire, statues, art, torches, guards, and spears. Everything in the scene conveyed the full might and grandeur of the known world, and here came a Galilean who was born among the cattle.

Pilate had little patience to hear a Jewish dispute against a rabbi from Nazareth, so he moved to the heart of the matter as it concerned him. “Are you a king?” he asked. Remember from earlier that this was a loaded question: Only Rome had the power to make kings, and decades before had made Herod “King of the Jews.”

“You say I am a king,” Jesus responded, affirming.

This trial was actually one of three short trials Jesus endured on this day—first before Caiaphas, then Herod, and then Pilate. The literary work here is important. Don’t miss it.

  • Rome appointed Joseph Caiaphas to be the high priest.
  • Herod was one of the wealthiest individuals in the world at that time, owing to Rome installing his father as “King of the Jews.” The family continued to dominate the economic landscape well into Jesus’s lifetime.
  • And Rome appointed Pontious Pilate governor of Judea. His task was to route out and quash any rebellions that might form in what was an oft-troubled region of Judea.

The three individuals who tried Jesus each exercised a different kind of power, but each received their power from Rome. The gospel writers really, really, really want you to connect them this way. In fact, the gospel writers were already working on this triangular connection long before you get to Good Friday. Consider Jesus’s forty days of fasting and temptation in the desert, the beginning of the story:

  • Satan first tempted Jesus with the idea of turning stones into bread. Don’t read that simply as Jesus being tempted to eat. I’m sure that was part of it, but the real temptation was about economic power, a monopoly over the world’s grain supply. The power to turn stones in bread would have made Jesus, not Herod, the most wealthy man in the world.
  • Then, he tempted Jesus with the idea of jumping off of the temple and commanding angels to catch him. Anyone performing this stunt would instantly be recognized as possessing the authority of the temple institution. This would have made Jesus, not Caiaphas, the holder of the religious power in the triangle.
  • Finally, he tempted Jesus with all the kingdoms of the world. This is war power, which Rome had given to Pilate.

The gospel writers were thoughtful artists, and they want you to notice how what happened at the very beginning of the story connects with what happened at the very end. They want you to see that Jesus’s three trials on Good Friday were the same three trials he had faced in the wilderness.

This triangle forms the real substance of Jesus’s few statements once it became his turn to get to the heart of the matter as it concerned him: “For this purpose I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who listens to the truth listens to me.”

“What is truth?” responded Pilate, apparently a philosopher. But if you have payed attention to the power triangle, you will soon catch how Pilate unknowingly answered his own question and, thus, tied together the whole narrative of Jesus’s ministry.

Pilate sent Jesus to the barracks, which, to the absolute hatred of the Jewish people in Israel, he had set up directly adjacent to the Temple. After the soldiers flogged him there, they decided to have fun with him. They’d heard that this homeless rabbi claimed to be a king, so they placed a purple imperial robe on him, put a reed in his hand to resemble a staff, and then lodged thorns into his skull to resemble a crown. Having decorated their beaten-up prisoner to look like a Roman client king, they chanted “Hail King of the Jews!” and bowed down to him.

Of course, they meant it as a joke, but this was the precise moment Jesus had spoken of a week earlier.

During his march to Jerusalem, Jesus explicitly told his disciples that he was going there, in his words, to become king. (Except, in a way that would confound the Caesars for centuries.) Instead of entering Jerusalem on a war horse, he entered on a colt donkey. Then, for a week, he prophesied against each three interconnected powers of Rome—over and over emphasizing that his kingdom would be a difficult place for the powerful to enter.

Finally now—garbed in purple robe, back bloody from being whipped, a crown of thorns lodged in his head, and receiving a mocking prostrated praise—Jesus was now what he claimed he had come to Jerusalem to become. This beaten up peasant from Galilee was king.

And having been corronated king in this once-in-history fashion, Jesus was brought back to the Praetorium to face down Pilate again.

“Where are you from?” Pilate asked. But, Jesus was king now, and he no longer answered to Pilate. Pilate had no power to interrogate him.

So he remained silent, and we learn Pilate’s truth.

“Don’t you realize I have the power to release you or to crucify you?!” shot the incensed governor.

There it was. This is the worldview at odds with the gospel writers’ artistry. The narrative arc that began in the wilderness found its fulfillment in Pilate’s chambers. Beneath the literary framing, Pilate can be heard saying:

I’ll tell you what truth is. Truth is power. The only truth is I have power over you. I can let you go, or I can release you because the world is run by men of power.

Economic power.

Religious power.

War power.

Armies, economies, and temples. These three make up an iron triangle: always in tension, and yet mutually reinforcing. According to Pilate, the triangle is the thing that rules the world. But Pilate didn’t know that Jesus had outlasted the triangle three years before. Jesus could have chosen to be a billionaire. Satan offered this to him. Jesus could have commanded the authority of the temple. Satan offered this to him. Jesus could have become the next world conqueror, the successor to Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar. Satan offered this to him. But Jesus declined the whole system. In his forty days of fasting and temptation in the desert, Jesus had overcome the iron triangle. And he did it again on Good Friday.

“For this purpose I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who listens to the truth listens to me.” Do you feel the weight of those words now? What Jesus did on Good Friday was expose the triangle for the lie that it is. If your imagination has no space for a world that is not ruled by the iron triangle, you have not been properly formed as a follower of Yeshua. And that gets me to this sad tweet from the president of the largest Christian college in the United States:

The kingdom that Jesus described is a direct threat to the triangle (the Caesars understood this well), and yet the church as I’ve seen it in my life has mostly operated in a way that effectively defends it. While the war powers and the economic powers openly work towards their patently greedy ends, I’ve observed a church that has mostly been either (1) teaming up directly with the other parts of the triangle (“we have no king but Caesar”, “what is truth?”), or (2) drawing our attention away from the abuses of the triangle (“this world is not my home”) and effectively rendering Jesus subservient to the triangle. In this understanding, Christ is king the decisions we make as private individuals but not king over anything else. Christ has nothing to say to whoever occupies the White House (excepting, of course, when it involves abortion—a topic found zero times in the Bible).

But in a world in which Jesus is not king over Caesar, Jesus would find himself back in the Praetorium still under the authority of Pilate’s questioning. Pilate would still be interrogating Jesus, and Jesus would still be compelled to answer. This is not the story that the Gospels tell.

We are eleven posts in and have finally reached the point of the title I chose for this series.

While the kingdom of Jesus described and performed is one in which the triangle bows down to him, the church of America mostly works in the service of having us bow down to the triangle. When the war powers and the economic powers work to crush the life chances of the world’s most vulnerable, our church leaders tell us that the spiritual thing to do is to just focus on going to Heaven—in effect releasing the triangle from the authority of Jesus. Focusing on “earthly” things like systemic poverty and justice and peace, so these wise men say, is below us. The triangle generates and spends incredible sums propagating these ideas. You can find them in the churches and books and films and speaking engagements of prominent religious leaders who defend the triangle.

Many church leaders and church congregants are innocently caught up in this system and are simply blind to it. These are the ones to whom I hope my writing reaches.

But still many church leaders are outright in the business of securing White House invitations.

This is Caiaphas.

When Pilate brought Jesus out to Caiaphas, whom Pilate hated, he mocked him with, “behold, your king.” Of course, Caiaphas wanted no more to do with this outsider to the power triangle than did Pilate, but his response reflects more and more the direction I see churches trending today.

“We have no king but Caesar.”

Joseph Caiaphas was Israel’s teacher. He should have know better, and, for this reason, among Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, I would argue that Caiaphas was the worst of all.

Mr. Falwell is mostly an echo of Caiaphas. He is America’s teacher, and yet so obviously, life for him consists of proximity to power. He is the defender of the triangle and his position in the triangle. Caesar does not bow to Jesus. Pilate does not bow to Jesus. Herod does not bow to Jesus. Caiaphas does not bow to Jesus.

This speaks loudly today. This is why the church has lost its prophetic voice—what Walter Bruggeman calls its “voice from elsewhere.” We aren’t a voice in the wilderness preparing for the kingdom of the world; we are rightly recognized as merely the third leg of a power triangle. So obvious is this to most people that they want nothing to do with the church.

Frankly, I’m happy about this. I’m happy that young people are dropping out of churches as they are currently constituted. I don’t sit around worrying about losing numbers. I hope it only happens faster. Why? Because when Jesus said, “everyone who listens to truth listens to me”, that means that when people are leaving the triangle that Jesus condemned in the wilderness and on Good Friday, they correctly recognize it for the falseness that it is. As we see church numbers decline, I’m reminded that the world isn’t full of cynical people like Pilate and Caiaphas and Herod, but the large crowds of ordinary people who received news of the kingdom with rejoicing.

Religious leaders play their game in the White House, get the blessing of the powers, and then bless whatever power gives them power. They bless our devastating wars. They bless our massive concentrations of wealth.

You know you’ve seen this. You know that the economic powers and the war powers enjoy in America freedom that they do not enjoy in less religious countries. You know that the wellbeing of people who live in the most religious parts of the America is worse than the wellbeing of those who live in its least religious parts. Where there is broad human flourishing in the world, the war powers and the economic powers don’t have the religious powers in their service to deflect attention.

Part 12

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 10

For nine posts I’ve hammered home that God’s plan from the beginning was mostly concerned with how societies are arranged. No doubt, the arrangement of society involves the actions of individuals. And no doubt, the proper actions of individuals arise out of the proper formation of individuals. This is religion, and this is our religion. Last post’s topic, Jubilee, was about a massive transfer of wealth from society’s winners to its losers (or, you could say, from its job creators to those who “should have just gotten a job”). Jubilee is radical, and it is a matter of faith.

But other parts of the Torah also demanded that society take from its winners and give to its losers.

Those other parts are readily identifiable, and I could just list them here and be done with it so we could move to Part 11. That would be an easy way to simplify my work, but in this post I would rather you walk Torah. I would rather take your imagination to where Torah really does its work. Sometimes Torah is best taught from a vantage point way up in the sky, but today we will see it operate at the ground level.

Today I’m going to tell you a love story.

This story is already in the Bible, but it’s almost always told poorly, and I think it deserves retelling. The story is complex, edgy, absolutely scandalous, rebellious, controversial, political, rule breaking, and unmistakably Jesus. Tragically though, the way the story virtually always gets taught saps out all of this.

Of course, I’m talking about the Old Testament book of Ruth. If you’ve been taught the story of Ruth and didn’t come away with what I just described, you need to go back to whoever told it to you and demand your money back. 

I used to think Ruth was boring—kind of a vanilla story about two friends.

Today, I can’t believe they ever allowed that book in the Bible.

Before we get to the story, I want to make a few general observations about it. First, in order to appreciate the story, you need to accept the fact that the Old Testament does not speak with a single voice. I’ve written about this plenty, but its worth saying again: the Old Testament is constantly arguing with itself. This is not a flaw but an essential feature of the whole project. When you read the Old Testament, you are reading on-going debates about a variety of issues, and both sides are usually presented without censorship. Ruth is part of that tradition. It was written as part of a big dispute. When you get to the life of Rabbi Jesus in the New Testament, the subtext of much of his teaching is him actually picking sides in on-going debates. What I’ve just said is an essential part of reading the New Testament well. Ruth is important for the Christian not simply because it is in the Bible, but because Jesus emphatically sides with the arguments its author makes throughout the story.

Ruth is also important because of its unique perspective. The first seven books of the Bible—Genesis through Judges—are dominated by larger-than-life characters and stories: Noah and the Ark; Abraham, the “father of all nations”; Jacob, the father of the tribes of Israel; Joseph, the prime minister of Egypt; Moses, the giver of the Torah; Joshua; Sampson; Gideon; etc. Their stories are epochal, supernatural, and fantastical. But the story of Ruth is none of that; Ruth is an ordinary person. Her story involves no conquests, no parting seas, no battles, no angels or spirits, and no miracles. Also, Ruth is the only book of the Bible in which women do more of the talking than men (interesting then that Jesus would adopt so much of this book). For these reasons, Ruth provides perspectives that the rest of the Bible sometimes misses.

Lastly, as Old Testament stories go, Ruth is probably one of the more recently written stories. As I said earlier, Ruth wasn’t written to tell you “what happened”. It’s not just some history. It’s not just a nice thing that involved a woman named Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi.

Ruth is a polemic.

It is an argument.

It may not be a “true story”, but yet it is a completely true story.

Sickness, Death, and Bitterness

The story of Ruth begins not with Ruth, but with Naomi. She has a husband and two sons, Mahlon and Khilion. They live a spartan but content life in Bethlehem. Beit-lekhem is famous today, but it carried zero notoriety in this time (as when Jesus was born in one its many caves that are used as barns). Few people lived there, and what few people did live there were unmistakably poor.

So to begin the story of Ruth, the author tells us that the conditions of this poor village were made all the worse by a regional famine (read this as “economic crisis”). Economic crises, of course, hit hardest the most poor, and so it did with Naomi’s family. And the problems piled on. After months of the stress that comes from living in any famine, the economic crisis hit Naomi’s family especially hard. They couldn’t pay their debts, the bank foreclosed, and they lost their home. By the way, all of this takes place before the very first sentence of the story is completed. It’s as if whoever was first listening to this story was already well acquainted with these kinds of life events.

Ruth doesn’t finish the first verse, and the story is already ground level stuff.

Having lost all they owned and all hope of survival in Bethlehem, the family moved across the Jordan River to the nation of Moab, hoping to find work there. Naomi’s sons married two Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth, but the drought continued.

(Yes, this is the Orpah after whom the leading 2020 presidential candidate is named).

But, as Naomi had known so often, good times were always followed by tragedy. First, Naomi’s husband died.

And then her two sons died.

(BTW, her sons’ names, “Mahlon” and “Khilion”, are Hebrew words that mean “sickness” and “death.” Unless you’re inclined to believe that a real mother had real children and actually named them Sickness and Death, you should be clued in by now to Ruth’s literary genre)

In this time when people—let alone women—had few means by which to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Naomi and her daughter-in-law suddenly found themselves all alone and vulnerable in Moab. Naomi was too old to work for herself, and now she had no one to support her. Of course, she had no economic prospects back in Judah either, but at least she had some friends and some family there. And one day, after hearing that Judah was beginning to recover from its economic crisis, she decided it would be better to trek back to the village of Bethlehem than die as a childless widow in Moab where there was no social safety net. She left for Judah when Orpah and Ruth began the trek along behind her.

But, in one of the more tender scenes of the Bible, Naomi turned around to face her daughters-in-law. “Go back to the land of your family. May the LORD grant you kindness as you have shown me kindness. Why would you come with me? Even if there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight then gave birth to sons—would you wait until they grew up?” Naomi could muster the strength to utter those words, but could hold it in no longer. The women wept together on the road, and Orpah agreed to go back home.

Ruth, however, was insistent, and the words she spoke have resonated for thousands of years: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.”

No doubt, those words are a beautiful statement of devotion and friendship. They stand on their own as an exemplar of loving faithfulness, but where modern-day Christians make an important mistake is assuming that this was the point of the story. That this is what made Ruth important. Judaism’s guiding ethical principal is and has long been khesed, or faithful devotion, but this was true long before the book of Ruth was penned down.

Yet, in recording these words of the story—which has found its way into untold women’s devotional books and Bible studies and sisterhoods and traveling pants—the author could not have been more controversial if he or she had tried. I’ll explain shortly.

Naomi and Ruth entered the village of Bethlehem, and, even through the new wrinkles on Naomi’s face, people soon recognized her. However, in one of the sadder moments of the Bible, Naomi protested that no one in the village call her Naomi (which means, “pleasant”). “Call me Mara,” which means “Bitter”, “for I’ve had a hard life. I went away full, but have come back empty.” Naomi had always had a hard life, but the previous ten years had given her the face of one who had known little more than hunger, worry, exhaustion, and thirst.

Naomi and Ruth entered Bethlehem homeless. As such, they were tired, hungry, and afraid.

Edges, Wings, and Blankets

Before we advance further, I have to teach you some Torah and some Hebrew. As I said earlier, the story of Ruth was part of a Torah dispute, and the author uses different parts of the law as well as some Hebrew wordplay to connect different parts of the story and, thus, to shape the questions you should be asking about it.

The Torah instructs those who own land not to harvest the edges of their fields; the edges of the fields are for the poor of the community to come in and “glean” whatever had grown there.

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus c19

Not only did the edges of the field have to remain unharvested, but if you were harvesting the middle of your field and a sheave of grain were to fall off of your cart or wagon, the Torah said that you could not pick it up. Those sheaves were for the poor.

This law of gleaning sets in motion what happens when Ruth and Naomi enter Bethlehem.

Now some Hebrew: The Hebrew word for “edge” is the word kanaf. It also means “wings” and it also means “blanket.” As you’re about to see, the author of this story gets a lot of mileage out of this word. These different uses of the word are meant to make you link different parts of the story.

And now back to the story.

When Naomi and Ruth arrived in Bethlehem, the author tells us about a relative on Naomi’s late husband’s side named Boaz, one of “standing” who owned several barley fields. Naomi—who before would have been too ashamed to enter the life of a dependent welfare recipient—now instructed her daughter-in-law to go glean in the field of her relative, Boaz.

Gleaning was frustrating, humiliating, and even dangerous work. First of all, landowners knew well the commercial parts of the Torah and were careful to leave just as little unharvested grain as permissible under the law. Gleaners were maligned and frequently were attacked.

(Had Fox News been around in this time in Judah, Tucker Carlson would have run nightly reports on “those lazy, immoral, and ungodly gleaners.”)

Nobody wanted their field to be known as the place for gleaners to feel too comfortable. This was especially true when the gleaners were women, even more so when the female gleaners were foreigners.

Further, Ruth is shy, she’s a foreigner, she’s in a new land, and she’s about to embark in a lifestyle that was subject to harassment. The author of Ruth assumes you know that it is only out of profound desperation that anyone would take on this sort of life.

And that gets us to Boaz.

When all the nervous gleaners arrived on this particular morning at the start of the harvest, Boaz didn’t try to run them off. He didn’t call the police. He greeted them. At some point in the day, Boaz noticed Ruth, for she was a gleaner he hadn’t seen in years past. When Boaz asked one of his workers who she was, the man responded, “She is the Moabite who came back from Moab with Naomi.”

And that gets me to a second point about the Torah. There’s something I haven’t told you this whole time, this time about one of the Torah’s darker corners. The Israelites and the Moabites were bitter enemies, and, by the time of this story, had been for a long time. Most of Israel’s national stories go out of their way to paint the Moabites in a bad light. There’s a story behind that, but what you need to know is that the Torah is absolutely 100% clear that Moabites may not have any participation in Israelite society.

No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation.

Deuteronomy c23

Just pause and think about what this story is doing.

Not only is Ruth poor.

Not only is Ruth a welfare recipient.

Not only is Ruth a foreigner.

Ruth is an illegal immigrant.

And one from a place the Israelites would have considered a shithole country.

Ruth should not be as virtuous as she is. She should be rotten to the core. She should be selfish and greedy and violent and foaming at the mouth—she’s a Moabite. She’s illegal. If this Moabite wants to glean in our fields—the fields we worked hard on—she should go back to Moab.

But that’s not how the author the story describes her. Ruth is a Moabite who has the best qualities to which Israelites would aspire. Imagine a modern Israeli story about a Palestinian with these qualities, and you will begin to understand the scandal. The words that we read earlier, “I will go where you go; your people will be my people; your God will be my God,” would suddenly jump off the page.

Can you believe what Ruth said??? would have been a common response.

So Ruth, a woman of noble character, finds herself on this morning at the field of Boaz as the prime target for savage mistreatment. And that’s when Boaz activated some pre-Jesus Jesus, “My daughter, you are welcome to glean in this field. Just follow along after the harvesters. I have told the men not to lay a hand on you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.”

If at this point you need a moment to let out a good cry, I assure you this post will wait on you.

…

…

…

Of course, Ruth too was in shock over his kindness. She’d never encountered in Moab such a generous national system like this one for taking care of poor foreigners like her. It was dog-eat-dog in Moab. But Boaz was not even done! While Ruth was pondering it all, Boaz quietly went over to his field hands and instructed them to make sure that plenty of grain sheaves would accidentally fall out of the wagon. “You’re going to do your worst work today”, he said. Finally, he goes back to Ruth and tells her this:

“I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband—how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.”

That word, “wings” is that word kanaf again. It’s the place where the poor and foreigners and refugees could come and glean in the fields. This is what God has in mind for societies of means. The gods of Moab didn’t take in refugees and let them glean in fields, but the God of Israel was insistent on it.

And then, just to make sure she felt 100% welcome there, he offers her to take some bread and dip it with him in some wine.

(Are the blinkers on your Christian dashboard going off yet? Are you seeing the literary tradition from which centuries later Jesus would borrow?)

It’s okay to cry again.

I want to repeat what I said earlier: this story is scandalous, and it’s only just getting started. Sure, the Torah required that foreigners be able to glean in fields. But Ruth is a Moabite! She is in violation of the Torah. Boaz should have called ICE and had her deported. At the very least, Boaz should not have been kind to her.

Because the law!

…

Over some period of time, Ruth continued to glean in Boaz’s barley fields and brought home each day more than she and Naomi even needed, yet Boaz continually insisted that she bring home even more, just in case her mother-in-law might need more. Out of Boaz’s illegal generosity it appears that over time, Ruth was able to use some of the surplus to make a living and buy some clothes.

And that gets me to Naomi’s plan.

One day Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi said to her, “My daughter, I must find a home for you, where you will be well provided for. Tonight Boaz will be winnowing barley on the threshing floor in his barn. Wash, put on perfume, and get dressed in your best clothes. Then go down to the barn, but don’t let him know you are there until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, go and uncover his feet and lie down with him. You will know what to do.”

Ruth agreed to the plan. She put on some of her new clothes and put on perfume. Then that night she went out to the barn and hid behind some sheaves of barley. Boaz worked that night threshing barley, finished for the night, ate and drank, and fell asleep in the barn. Once the commotion of threshing and carousing had ceased, Ruth came out of her hiding place and laid next to Boaz.

Now, your Bible says that she “uncovered his feet.” Before we go further, you need to understand is your Bible uses a whole range of euphemisms for the main male organ and for sex in general. So, I don’t care what you think you’re reading in the third chapter of Ruth, she was not uncovering his feet, nor laying at his feet. I’ll let you use your imagination to figure out what she really did.

Regardless, when Ruth did what she did, it caused Boaz to wake up. Before I can explain what happened next, I have one more bit of Torah to teach you: the law of guardian redeemers. Under the Torah, if a creditor were to foreclose on a property, a relative of the property owner had the right to pay the creditor to redeem the property. This was true even if the creditor had already taken the property.

If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and loses some of their property, their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have lost. If, however, there is no one to redeem it for them but later on they prosper and acquire sufficient means to redeem it themselves, they are to determine the value for the years since they sold it and refund the balance to the one to whom they sold it; they can then go back to their own property. But if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can then go back to their property.

Leviticus c25

So when Boaz asked the woman who she was, she replied: “I am your servant Ruth. Spread your blanket over me, since you are a guardian-redeemer of our family.”

(yes this is sexual, yes the author is connecting it to the story’s other uses of the word kanaf, yes she is using sex to get out of her poverty, yes this is in the Bible—are you starting to see what this story would have caused outrage?)

So, after a night of passion under the blanket in the threshing barn, Boaz the next day went out to find the man who ten years before had foreclosed on Naomi’s home. But it turned out Boaz could not redeem the property because there was another man who was more closely related to Naomi. Under the law, this man had the first right of refusal.

Boaz found the man and let him know that he wanted to buy the property and add it to his estate, but that he had the right of first refusal. The man at first indicated that he was interested in exercising his right of redemption, but in a final literary exclamation point, the author tells us that the man changed his mind when he found out that redeeming the property would mean under the law that he would have to marry the Moabite woman. Because of course.

In the end, Boaz redeemed the property, married the illegal Moabite, and gave the property back to Naomi.

…

I’m not impressed with people who say that we want our country to be generous, but these people are illegal so we can’t. Our nation doesn’t get to avoid being a place under whose wings foreigners come to take refuge by hiding behind its laws. The story of Ruth is the story of a man who avoids the law by finding an incredibly questionable loophole. Further, and more importantly, if our laws are the thing that stands between what we have today and justice rushing like a river, what we need to do is change our laws.

I’m also not impressed with those who say that relaxing our laws will lead to lawlessness.  The book of Ruth did not lead to an outbreak of crime and anarchy. It did develop the Israelites in their vocation to shine justice on the rest of the word. And just as the redeemer of Ruth woke up in a barn in Bethlehem, the redeemer of the world also woke up in a barn in Bethlehem. Later, he would offer all people a see at the table to take some bread and dip it in wine.

Or maybe I could sum up this long post by saying it this way: I cannot imagine God blessing a country that complains about how many of its immigrants come from shithole countries. Today, America is in the position of Boaz. We have the means. We don’t have to find loopholes in our laws; we can simply change them. And, like Ruth, people are exposing themselves to great risk and humiliating themselves in numerous ways to come here and try to feed their families.

So here is the question: Do we want to be like Israel or do we want to be like Moab?

 

Part 11

“But, Chris, the Bible Isn’t Political”: Part 8

I spent the first half of the year portraying the Bible as the freeing thing that it is instead of the enslaving thing that we’ve made it. And I’ve spent the second half of the year working on your spirituality becoming more earthy. So today we’re going to tackle what you surely have been thinking is the most obvious question.

Why was Jesus baptized?

(didn’t see that coming, did you?)

The Bible provides little about Jesus’s life until the day he went to the Jordan River to visit his thunderous but mysterious cousin, John. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke inform us that John was immersing large crowds in the Jordan River in a “baptism of repentance.” Jesus traveled among the crowds to participate in these baptisms. Now, before I go any further, let’s stop right there and pay attention to what should be a nagging problem.

According to all the atonement theory I heard growing up, God needs stuff to die when we sin and Jesus could perfectly atone for our sins as a sacrifice only if he himself was a perfect sacrifice. Yet, the only baptisms we find in the New Testament are John’s baptism of repentance and Peter’s baptism for the forgiveness of sins. According to Paul, when we are baptized we enter into Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. And, of course, we read that to mean: I’m a wretched sinner, but Jesus as the sinless sacrifice means I get my sins forgiven! I’m saved! Hallelujah!

We baptize thousands of frightened young teenagers in summer camps all over the country by convincing them that that one time they masturbated means God now views them as a loathsome spider, and they will spend eternity in a scorching and searing torture chamber—unless they accept the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ!

(and we wonder why kids leave their upbringings with all kinds of psychological problems)

Except . . . wait a second.

Wait just one second.

If Jesus was the perfect atoning sacrifice who never sinned—who never needed to repent of anything—then what was he doing at his cousin’s baptism of repentance extravaganza in the Jordan River?

Of course, the church of Christ (my tribe) has a quick theological answer for this (as we always do when we get backed into a theological corner). In order to protect our tight biblical scheme, we like to say that Jesus would never ask us to do something he wasn’t willing to do himself, and so he set the example to emphasize that we either do that little thing in water or else burn in fire for eternity. And that does it. We swiftly move on from the temptation in the desert through the rest of Jesus’s life—not asking too many questions about what we find there—until we reach the writings of Paul where we really stop and savor good old atonement theology.

But, really. Is that it? Is that really the point of the whole baptism story? Is that the point of Paul’s writings on atonement? Is that the whole point of life? Believe in Jesus and get in some water and you’ll be saved from fire?

(Really, this is a point for another post, but if conservative Christians understood Paul’s writings more critically, I’m convinced we’d use them nowhere near as much as we currently do.)

Well, I think that is a miserable understanding of Jesus, Jesus’s baptism, Paul’s letters and the years you’ll spend on this planet of coral reefs and glaciers and swamps and rainforests and beaches and mountains and deserts and sunsets and wind and rain and sunshine. The good thing is there’s a better way of understanding the story—a way that doesn’t suck all the life out of the thing. But it requires more critical reading than we usually bring to the Bible.

The first thing you need to notice about the story of Jesus’s baptism is what Luke does immediately afterwards. Unfortunately, that thing is the very thing that your attention-sapped brain is almost certain to ignore: a genealogy.

Not just a genealogy.

But a long one.

Full of names you don’t know.

Or care about.

(And—most importantly—one that has nothing to do with what one must do to get out of Hell.)

Do not ever skip a genealogy. Never ever, ever. If ever there was a sin worthy of being consigned to the weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, skipping a genealogy in the Bible might be that sin. You need to understand that every time you read your Bible and it suddenly forces you to read a genealogy—a long one full of names you don’t know or care about and you think “this has nothing to do with what I must do to get out of Hell”—what your Bible is really doing is making an important argument about something.

When Jesus comes out of the water, the story tells us that a voice comes out of Heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” In the baptism story, God announces from the Heavens that Jesus is the son of God. Remember that when you read the genealogy, which states as follows: “Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli . . . [skipping a lot] . . . the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.”

That’s very interesting. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus gets baptized, God announces Jesus as the son of God, and, immediately after that, we read a genealogy in which Adam is named the son of God. And if you’re wondering whether Luke wants you to connect those two things, you are absolutely right. Luke wants you to connect Jesus with what happened in the Hebrew creation myth of Genesis.

On day one, God saw what he made and said that it was good (“tov”).

On day two, God saw what he made and said that it was good.

On day three, God saw what he made and said that it was good. (twice actually)

On day four, God saw what he made and said that it was good.

On day five, God saw what he made and said that it was good.

On day six, God made plants, animals, and humans, and God saw what he made on that day and said that it was very good (“tov meod”).

Very. Good.

The story of the Old Testament is the story of how God made everything in the beginning to be tov but greedy systems of oppression, injustice, inequality, poverty, war, and empire (played out in the narrative of the Old Testament and symbolized in the garden story that itself is a repurposing of important national myths from the mighty Babylonian empire) separated humanity from God’s adama tov (“good earth”). It should be no surprise then that Jesus’s baptism took place in the same river where the Israelite’s historical myths recorded that they entered the land of Canaan (and slaughtered everyone they found). Jesus’s baptism is in one sense a kind of redo. A kind of lets-start-from-the-beginning-and-try-again. A return not just to the entry into the promised land but a return to the original blessing that all created things are good.

Luke wants you to think of Jesus as the new Adam.

Not as one who came so we could separate ourselves from the Earth. Or who came to announce that we should live in accordance with only those things that fit into neat religious categories.

No.

God loves the Earth. He loves the cherry blossoms in Japan. The Grand Canyon in Arizona. He loves the Northern Lights in Iceland. The sequoia redwood trees in California. The Alps of Switzerland. The rice fields of Vietnam. The cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta.

He loves brown bears. And antelope. And hippos. And kangaroos. And eagles. And alligators. And lions. And big dogs. And small dogs. And those little bitty dogs in the toy category of the National Dog Show. And maybe a few cats.

He loves humans. And human culture. He loves the English language. The French language. The Chinese language. The Swahili language. He loves the riddled poetry of T.S Elliot. The literary triumphs of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He loves the Delta Blues songs that were sung on Saturday nights by black plantation workers in Mississippi and the gospel music songs that were sung by those same plantation workers on Sunday mornings. He loves the paintings of Marc Chagall and Mark Rothko. He loves the heartbreak of Beethoven’s symphonies and Shakespeare’s sonnets. And plenty more.

Dance.

Food.

Wine.

Exploration.

Discovery.

Science.

Government.

But what God doesn’t love are the systems of Caesar, Pharaoh, and Nebuchadnezzar. Systems that work for some but don’t work for most.

This is what John the Apostle meant when he wrote “do not love the world or anything in the world.” When John wrote those words, he wasn’t questioning the first chapter of Genesis. He wasn’t arguing against God, who said it was good. He wasn’t arguing with Jesus who said that God so loved the world that he sent his only son to save it. He wasn’t saying that what Jesus really meant was God sent his only son to save us from it. No, he was warning us not to love the systems of power he observed in the world that had not yet been reconciled in the image of Christ (which he calls “the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”). He was warning us against systems that seduce us into feelings of power, but ultimately bring about suffering to most of the world.

And this is the sin from which Jesus repented when he made the long hike down from Galilee to the Jordan River. We confess that Jesus committed no individual sins, and I have no qualm with that.

As we confess that Jesus saves us from our sins, Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan calls us to question what exactly that means. I think Jesus’s baptism is a recognition that our primary sin is the sin we do as a group—as a nation—as a planet. A recognition that we are all in this together. A recognition that you cannot separate the individual from the system. Jesus lived in systems that separated the mass of humanity from the good creation that the poets of the post Babylonian exile described in Genesis. He grew up in and lived in them.

And because—as John’s words reverberated throughout the countryside—the kingdom of Heaven was at hand, Jesus repented of the system.

I’ve been talking about systems for several posts now. God’s care for them is central to a proper and complete understanding of the Bible. It is central to what Jesus calls “abundant life”. Yet, most conservative, atonement-theory Christians simply aren’t good at this. We lump all of life into (1) things that fit into our atonement-for-sins-so-we-don’t-burn-in-fire theology and (2) everything else. Once we’ve successfully placed everything into the holy and the profane (or “spiritual” and “worldly”) we celebrate the one and neglect the other, thinking we’re being godly.

We aren’t.

I’m calling Christians to a more earthy, more Jewish theology. A theology in which everything is spiritual. A theology of rocks and trees and soil. Of sweat. A theology of wine. A theology of justice. A theology of peace.

I’m calling Christians to turn their gaze away from some invisible place beyond the clouds (where nothing is changing) and return it down to God’s adama tov.

The amount you can learn about God from trying to use your Bible to escape this world pales in comparison to what you will learn by sitting in the mountains, reading great literature, listening to Delta blues, eating strange foods with foreigners, and involving yourself with the most vulnerable people in your midst.

 

Part 9