Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
There are many ways of thinking about the Lenten journey of death and resurrection. Today I want to suggest that one of its meanings is dying to life under the lawgiver and judge and rising to new life as the beloved of God.
Life is short, and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. So be swift to love, and make haste to be kind. And the blessings of God, Creator, Christ, and ever-present Spirit go with you this day and forever more.
* * *
Sermon delivered at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee, as part of the Lenten Noonday Preaching Series, March 24, 2000.
Chapter 12
Living God’s Passion
IT’S SO GOOD TO SEE SO MANY of you gathered together under the umbrella Progressive Christians Uniting. You are one of the very encouraging signs of our times, as I think you all know there is a major change under way in mainline denominations in this country today, and also in the progressive wing of evangelical churches as well as a growing political consciousness. There is also a growing recovery of the riches of our tradition, when we understand that tradition nonliterally and nonexclusively.
We will be talking about progressive Christianity, or what I sometimes call emerging Christianity, or even for the sake of claiming our deep roots neo-traditional Christianity. I don’t expect that last term to catch on. But I am not willing to let our more conservative brothers and sisters have the word “traditional.” There is so much about the Christian right that is modern and has no roots in the Christian past at all, even for many Christians who would speak of themselves as orthodox rather than as part of the Christian right. So much of what passes for orthodoxy today is really the product of the conflict between the Enlightenment and Christianity and the hardening of notions like infallibility and inerrancy, which were not part of the premodern Christian past at all.
The major feature that I am going to talk about tonight is the growing awareness among progressive Christians of the political dimensions of the Bible and of Jesus. Indeed, “dimension” is too weak a term for what I am going to talk about, for it’s not just that the Bible has a political dimension; in fact, it is one of two focal points of the Bible, one of two focal points of what it means to follow Jesus. These two focal points are two transformations. One of them is personal transformation; the other one is social transformation. Though I am going to talk primarily about social and political transformation tonight, it’s important for those of us who have become passionate about social transformation not to neglect the personal dimension of the Christian gospel. The Christian life is about a deepening centering in God, and it is about social transformation.
I am using “social transformation” in its broadest meaning, the transformation of the world, the humanly created world of culture, the world of systems, political systems, economic systems, and systems of convention. As I thought about what I might say to you tonight, I realized that in many ways I am speaking to the choir. We are already, I think, all on the same page about this. So I decided not to try to tell you something you don’t know or to try to persuade you of something. Instead, I am defining my task as: How do we help other Christians to see the political passion of our own tradition? How do we do consciousness raising about this in our local communities, our local congregations?
Here I want to stress what an enormous resource the network of local congregations throughout this country is. I sometimes have said that Christianity has more outlets than Coca-Cola does. I am not sure that’s completely correct, but for those of us who are Christians, we have a network in place, and our audience is to a large extent the communities that we are part of. My perception of mainline Christians today is that maybe 60 or 70 percent are pretty committed to a political stance. But there is still a significant percentage who are apolitical or who could go either way. If we could change the voting patterns of, say, 20 or 10 percent of mainline Christians in that center bloc, it would change the makeup of state legislatures in most states, and it would change the makeup of national politics as well.
How do we help people to see the political passion of the Bible? It’s often been overlooked throughout all the centuries of Christianity’s domestication by the dominant culture. I am going to talk about “God’s Passion and Ours,” and part two will be the subtitle, “Mysticism and Empowerment, Resistance and Advocacy.”
God’s Passion and Ours
I suggest that in our local religious communities we educate people about God’s passion and invite them to reflect on it. I am using the word “passion” here not primarily in the sense of suffering, though I think it makes sense to speak of the suffering of God. I am using “passion” in the sense that we use the word when we ask somebody, “What are you passionate about? What’s the passion of your life?” My suggestion is that we ask, “What is God’s passion? What is God passionate about? What is God’s dream for the earth?”
For Christians, the answer to that question is that we see God’s passion in the Bible and Jesus. They are our two primary ways of knowing about the character and passion of God. So my suggestion is that we help people to see the passion of God initially in the Jewish Bible, the Christian Old Testament. The key to suddenly making the political focus of the Jewish Bible clear is showing people the world of the Bible. Now, I and many others have written about this in many places, so I am going to describe the social world of the Bible with four short phrases.
It was politically oppressive; that is, the ancient world was ruled by monarchs, aristocracies, and so forth. Most premodern societies from the invention and growth of large-scale agriculture, so from about 3000 BCE, onward, were economically exploitative. The wealthiest 1 to 2 percent of the population typically acquired half to two-thirds of the wealth in these societies. These were preindustrial societies, so that wealth came from agricultural production. The powerful elites set the system up in such a way that wealth from agriculture flowed into their coffers. Third, power in these societies was legitimated by religion. It was commonly said that the king ruled by divine right. The monarch or the emperor would frequently be called the “son of God.” The social order was said to reflect the will of God. Humans didn’t create it; God set it up this way. Fourth and finally, these societies were chronically violent. I am not speaking so much here about criminal violence. I am talking about war. Wars in the premodern world were initiated primarily by the powerful and wealthy elites for the sake of increasing the amount of agricultural production they controlled, for that was the only way they could increase their wealth. The term for this very common way of organizing the world is the ancient, or premodern, domination system.
Once one realizes that this is the world of the Jewish Bible as well as of the Christian Testament, then it becomes almost transparently clear what the God of the Bible is passionate about. Let me illustrate that very quickly with the two main portions of the Jewish Bible, the Law and the Prophets. Of course there is the third, the Writings, but the Law and the Prophets were sacred scripture by the time of Jesus. The Law is the Torah (the Pentateuch), the first five books of the Bible. At the center of the Tora
h is ancient Israel’s story of the exodus. You all know this, but we need to help people understand the significance of this. The story of the exodus is what the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls Israel’s primal narrative—its originating narrative—and also its most important story. And what is that story about? It’s about liberation from economic and political bondage and the creation of an alternative community marked by no monarchy, no elites, and a passion for economic justice as evidenced in the rules about land, among other things.
The second main portion of the Jewish Bible, the Prophets, speaks very concisely about the rise, failure, and fall of the monarchy. The prophets were voices of God-intoxicated socioreligious protest against the injustice and wars of the monarchy. The two central concerns of the prophets, what they say is the dream of God, are justice and peace. Here it’s important to try to raise consciousness about this by clarifying what is meant by the word “justice,” because a lot of Americans think of justice primarily as punitive or criminal justice. The central justice issue in the Bible is economic justice.
The Bible doesn’t know about racism, partly because racism was not an issue in the ancient world. The Bible doesn’t know about democracy. The Bible doesn’t know about sexism; generally speaking, it legitimates patriarchy. The central justice issue is economic justice, or distributive justice: that everybody should have enough, not as a function of charity but as the product of justice. That’s the central indictment that the prophets direct against the native domination system in their time. That system served the cause of injustice, which is about the abuse and exploitation of the poor, who were roughly 90 percent of the population.
We find these two concerns, justice and peace, brought together in a marvelous passage in Micah. You know the first part of the passage best from Isaiah 2:2–4, but the same passage in Micah 4 has some additional lines. The part that is very familiar to everybody is the dream of God as a time when the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; neither shall they learn war any more” (4:3).
Then at the very end of that passage Micah adds: “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees” (4:4). It’s an image of everybody having their own land and sitting under their own vines, their own fig trees. This isn’t about subsistence; this isn’t about a meager amount of bread. This is about vines and fig trees. I was in my early thirties when I had my first fresh fig. I didn’t know anything like that grew on trees—they are magnificent, sweet, delicious. I mean, this is gourmet food we are talking about here. My point is, God’s dream for a world of peace is a world in which everybody has what they need for a good life. Then the last phrase of the Micah passage: “And no one shall make them afraid” (4:4). I can’t resist the footnote that we live in a culture that plays the fear card again and again and again.
So what’s the dream of God according to the Jewish Bible? Very simply, a world of compassion, justice, and peace. Compassion and justice, I want to underline, are intrinsically related. Justice is the social form of compassion, and compassion is the heart of justice. This is a political vision. More precisely, it’s a theopolitical vision—not theocratic, but theopolitical. It’s about politics in the most important sense of the word, about the shaping of society, the shaping of the social world in which we live. This theopolitical vision continues in Jesus in early Christianity, and so I turn to the second half of part one.
The passion of God is revealed in Jesus. My springboard here is that for Christians Jesus is the decisive revelation or disclosure of what can be seen of God in a human life. So for Christians Jesus is the decisive revelation of the passion of God. What was Jesus’s passion? It’s twofold: God and the kingdom of God. When I say his passion was God, I mean he grew up in a God-saturated tradition. I think it’s a sound historical judgment to say that Jesus was a Jewish mystic, and mystics always become passionate about God. Jesus’s message was both an invitation and an imperative to practice a way that was radically centered in God.
The other passion of Jesus’s life is closely related to that, the kingdom of God. When helping people to see what this is about, remind them that the kingdom is “Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,” and to quote my colleague Dom Crossan, one of his great one-liners: “Heaven’s in great shape. Earth is where the problems are.” The kingdom of God is for the earth; the idea that the kingdom of God is about an afterlife is a very unfortunate notion. There is no denial of an afterlife here, but that’s not what the kingdom of God is about.
The phrase “kingdom of God” is both a political and religious metaphor in the first-century world. Religious: it is the kingdom of God. Political: the heirs of Jesus lived under other kingdoms. A “kingdom” was the most common form of political and social organization. People knew about the kingdom of Herod, they knew about the kingdom of Rome. Rome did not refer to itself as an empire, but as a kingdom. When people heard Jesus talking about the kingdom of God, they knew it must have been something different from the kingdom of Herod or the kingdom of Rome. Put very simply, the kingdom of God is what life would be like on earth if God were king and the rulers of the domination systems of this world were not.
And, of course, “kingdom of God” is the most central phrase in all of Jesus’s teaching. All New Testament scholars agree about this. Just to cite one verse, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s justice” (Matt. 6:33). That’s normally translated “righteousness”—“Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness”—but it’s really important to realize that most often in the Bible the word “righteousness” means “justice.” It doesn’t mean some kind of individual rectitude that “makes a man so damn righteous he’s no earthly good.” I think that’s a line from Will Rogers. In modern English “righteousness” commonly refers to personal virtue of a particularly rigorous kind. In the Bible it almost always means justice. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s justice, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
We’re still talking about how we help people to see this with the figure of Jesus. Two days from now is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, which climaxes in Holy Week. Lent and Holy Week offer an extraordinary opportunity for raising consciousness about the political meaning of Jesus. It sounds as though I am selling a book that John Dominic Crossan and I coauthored, The Last Week. What we do in that book is a day-by-day account of the last week of Jesus’s life as told in the Gospel of Mark. We are not speculating about what’s behind this. We are just saying, look at the text.
That week begins with an anti-imperial entry into Jerusalem. We all know the Palm Sunday story, in which Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. What few people realize is that that way of entry into the city symbolized a king of peace who would banish the warhorse and the battle bowl from the land. And even fewer people know that on that same day, from the other side of the city, the Roman governor, Pilate, rode at the head of a large number of imperial troops and cavalry coming up to Jerusalem to reinforce the imperial garrison on the Temple Mount for the week of Passover, which was often a time of disturbance. It’s real clear just reading Mark that Jesus planned his entrance in advance. This was a planned political counterdemonstration.
That’s Sunday. The anti-imperial entry of Sunday is followed on Monday by the anti–Temple authorities action. The overturning of the tables of the money changers was again clearly planned in advance. This is not what some people have cheaply called the “Temple Tantrum,” as if Jesus saw what was going on, got really mad, and just did it in a fit of anger. It was planned in advance. And that’s a symbolic act, like the ones the great prophets of the Jewish Bible would sometimes perform. They would perform an action to symbolize something and gather a crowd, and then they would speak about it. What Jesus says after the tables of the money changers have been overturned begins with a quotation from Isaiah in which God says: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations” (56:7).
Then comes the indictment: “But you have made it a den of robbers,” a quotation from Jeremiah 7:11. It’s clear in Jeremiah that the people who have made the Temple a den of robbers are the Temple authorities, the wealthy and powerful elites who have ignored justice. By quoting that passage Jesus is indicting the contemporary Temple authorities, who have colluded with Roman imperial authority in the administration of the domination systems in the Jewish homeland in the first century.
Holy Week is full of political passion. I am not going to take you through Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but go to Friday. Jesus was executed by established authority. Christians live in the only major religious tradition whose founder was executed by established authority. We ought to be taken aback by that. Of course if you want to extend it, it’s not just Jesus. Paul, the second most important person in the formation of early Christianity, was executed by imperial authority. Peter, the third most important person, was executed by imperial authority. If you think James was the fourth most important person, he also was executed by the authorities. What is this, a string of bad luck? There was something that the authorities quite frankly did not care for in Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God and the following that gathered around him because of it.
Now, I am utterly convinced Jesus was nonviolent. But it was about resistance nonetheless, and this involved a radical critique of the powers that ruled his world. So Good Friday has a profound political meaning. And then plug in Easter. Now, Easter has many nuances of meaning. But within this framework, if Good Friday is the powers that be saying no to Jesus, then Easter is God’s yes to Jesus and to the passion of Jesus. Easter is God’s vindication of Jesus. Of course it’s more than that, but it’s inescapable that it is that. In Peter’s address to the authorities in the book of Acts, he says, “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (2:36). A simple summary: for Christians, God’s passion is that we center in God as known in the Bible and Jesus, that we be compassionate, and that we seek justice.
Days of Awe and Wonder Page 13
