13. See M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 86-105. I’m grateful to my friend Sue Sweeney for introducing me to Peck’s overview of community. Sue is a curriculum and instruction specialist for a school district and is part of the preaching team at Catalyst, the church where I pastor.
14. For a debate to be helpful and fruitful, both parties should be able to articulate their opponents’ position as well as or better than the other can. Sit with that for a moment. Imagine your next debate if you adhered to this rule.
8 BETWEEN ROME AND A HARD PLACE
1. The film is based on the book of the same name by Dennis Lehane, a writer of hard-boiled, noir-ish detective novels and a staff writer on The Wire, one of the greatest TV shows of all time.
2. Church tradition has assigned the fictitious three magi names. The cathedral in Cologne, Germany—which is the second largest in the world—even has the coffins of these three kings on display.
3. Though we get our words magic and magician from magi, Zoroastrians didn’t practice sorcery. Rather they viewed astrology the way we think of cutting-edge science today. The Greeks did use the word magi to refer to sorcerers and magicians, which is how the word came to mean what it does to us today.
4. The Hasmonean dynasty was founded by the brother of Judas Maccabeus, who led the rebellion that freed Israel from foreign rule for the first time since the Babylonian Exile. The dynasty lasted about a century.
5. When Aaron’s sons offered unholy sacrifices, they were burned alive (Leviticus 10:1-2). When a man named Uzzah touched the ark of the covenant to keep it from falling, he was struck dead (2 Samuel 6:6-7).
6. A Kabbalistic legend claims that the high priest wore bells or a rope tied to his ankle in case he died in the presence of God. There is no historical basis for this legend, but it captures the sense of danger associated with God’s holiness.
7. That enemy was backed by none other than Parthia, which hoped to exploit the Roman civil war to take Israel for its own. More on that in a bit.
8. Antony became half of the first power couple, Antony and Cleopatra. A shame they didn’t get a power couple name: Antopatra? Clantony?
9. For instance, Herod used cutting-edge engineering technology to create a harbor. He built a port city and named it Caesarea Maritima, “Caesar by the Sea.” On the hill overlooking the harbor, Herod built a temple and dedicated it to Augustus. All of this infuriated the Jews, so to placate them, Herod expanded Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem. By the time his massive renovation was finished, the Jewish temple was the envy of the ancient world.
10. Gordon Franz, “The Slaughter of the Innocents: Historical Fact or Legendary Fiction?,” Biblical Archaeology, December 8, 2009, www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2009/12/08/The-Slaughter-of-the-Innocents-Historical-Fact-or-Legendary-Fiction.aspx.
11. Spencer Ackerman, “41 Men Targeted but 1,147 People Killed: US Drone Strikes—the Facts on the Ground,” The Guardian, November 24, 2014, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147. Micah Zenko, “Obama’s Drone Warfare Legacy,” Politics, Power, and Preventive Action (blog), January 12, 2016, www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-drone-warfare-legacy, shows that, as of 2016, US drones have killed 470 civilians, which accounts for more than 12 percent of total killed. The number is generally agreed to be very conservative, given the difficulty of obtaining accurate reports of casualty numbers.
12. Derek Thompson, “The Myth That Americans Are Busier Than Ever,” Atlantic, May 21, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-myth-that-americans-are-busier-than-ever/371350.
13. Chris Isidore and Tami Luhby, “Turns Out Americans Work Really Hard . . . but Some Want to Work Harder,” CNN Money, July 9, 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/09/news/economy/americans-work-bush.
14. “Regular” attendance once implied weekly. Today it’s more often two times per month at best. Further, a generation ago, many regular churchgoers attended three times weekly: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and some sort of midweek gathering. Today many “regular” attenders participate only in the main weekend worship gathering.
15. Shane Hipps, Selling Water by the River: A Book About the Life Jesus Promised and the Religion That Gets in the Way (New York: Jericho Books, 2012), 159.
10 THE CAT’S IN THE CRADLE
1. Mark 6:14-19. Note that Mark called Herod II “Philip.” This is not Philip the Tetrarch (who Salome married), which has led scholars to wonder if Herod II was called Herod Philip. It’s equally possible Mark had as much trouble sorting out Herodias’s family tree as we do, and he didn’t have the luxury of Wikipedia to consult. Don’t blame Mark. Blame Herod.
2. A few years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, this conflict with Nabatea spilled over into all-out war. Antipas was deposed by Rome and exiled with Herodias to Gaul (modern-day France).
3. Matthew and Luke, who used Mark as a source in writing their Gospels, diminished Herodias’s role in John’s death significantly. Matthew attributed her rage to Antipas, and she appeared in the story only after Salome’s dance. Luke didn’t mention her at all.
4. Mariamne was the Hasmonean princess Herod married to secure his claim to the throne of Israel.
5. That is probably the most confusing sentence in human history. Why do they all have to be named Herod?
6. The Herodians weren’t allowed to call themselves kings. Augustus gave them the title tetrarch, which meant “ruler of a quarter”—just in case they forgot who was in charge.
7. In Jesus’ day, Pontius Pilate served as the governor of Judea.
8. While Augustus lived, Livia enjoyed the freedom to do as she pleased and became very popular among the Roman citizens. After Augustus’s death, Livia faced increasing opposition from the Senate and her own son, Tiberius, because of her unwomanly pursuit of power.
9. If that’s not messed up enough, try this: then I would imagine that God decreed backward in time extra pain for Jesus to suffer on the cross each time I did something wrong. My love of theology and science fiction combined to create a perfect shame engine.
10. See M. Glasser, I. Kolvin, D. Campbell, A. Glasser, I. Leitch, and S. Farrelly, “Cycle of Child Sexual Abuse: Links Between Being a Victim and Becoming a Perpetrator,” British Journal of Psychiatry 179 (2001): 482-94.
11. Robert Barron, And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 49.
12. That trash bit is frankly terrifying. If you want to become very self-conscious about throwing away anything, read the excellent graphic novel Trashed by Derf Backderf.
13. I am painfully aware this is not everyone’s experience in church. I pastor a whole community of people who bear terrible scars they received at the hands of church people. We’ll address this in the coming chapters.
12 WHAT DEATH SMELLS LIKE
1. Kerioth is the name of a city in the far southern reaches of Judea, about ten miles south of Hebron, where Herod the Great was buried. Kerioth was not far from Idumea, the birth country of Herod’s father.
2. Another idea, employed by Tosca Lee in her excellent book Iscariot, is that Judas was a member of the Sicarii, an assassins’ organization dedicated to driving Rome out of Israel. This is obviously the most awesome option, but many scholars doubt the Sicarii were active in Jesus’ day.
3. Not everyone expected a messiah. The Sadducees, for instance, did not believe in a messiah at all.
4. Most scholars agree that Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source material for their Gospels. About 85 percent of Mark’s Gospel is reproduced in Matthew and Luke.
5. Fun fact: a good translation of the Greek is “Follow me, Satan.” So what’s the antidote to a wrong picture of Jesus? Get behind him and start acting like him.
6. Scholars call this the “Messianic Secret.”
7. Isaiah 66:1, for instance, describes heaven as God’s throne and the earth as God’s footstool. Psalm 132, a song pi
lgrims sang as they made their way toward Jerusalem, encourages travelers, “Let us go to his dwelling place; let us worship at his footstool” (v. 7).
8. Luke moved the story to Jesus’ Galilean ministry. In his version, Simon is a Pharisee who disrespects Jesus, while the woman is “a sinner.” John moved the story to the beginning of Holy Week, before the Triumphal Entry. Instead of Simon, Lazarus—who had just been raised from the dead—threw the banquet, and his sister Mary (of Mary and Martha) was the one who anointed Jesus.
9. Because Luke and John remove this story from its place in Holy Week, they also ascribe motivations to Judas we don’t find in Mark or Matthew. Luke tells us that Satan entered Judas, while John claims Judas was a crook who stole from the Twelve’s common purse. Judas may have skimmed some money, and that’s unquestionably wrong, but one sin does not imply or necessitate the other. Judas could have been a thief and not a betrayer.
10. See Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3. Nicodemus struggled much as Judas did, but in the end, Nicodemus was at the foot of the cross, giving his king a royal burial.
11. Mark Driscoll, in “7 Big Questions,” Relevant, January/February 2007, http://web.archive.org/web/20071013102203/http://relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7418.
12. What this pastor and many others reading Revelation 19 miss is that Jesus’ robe is dipped in blood before the battle begins (v. 13). In Revelation, Jesus is the always-slaughtered Lamb, the God whose very nature is most perfectly revealed not as a ferocious, roaring lion, but as a lamb willingly offering himself up to death for us. He is not a warrior with “the commitment to make someone bleed,” but a warrior whose sword is his very creative Word, whose only weapon is truth itself—a truth most fully expressed on the cross where he died.
13. I have a cross tattoo, so that’s not a dig on those who have them.
14. Indeed, we have no easy analog in our culture for the shame the cross meant to the first-century world. As James Cone observed, the nearest may be the lynch mob’s noose. See his The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
15. Lecrae, Twitter post, July 4, 2016, 12:05 p.m., https://twitter.com/lecrae/status/750012773212401665/.
16. Steve, Twitter post, July 4, 2016, 12:55 p.m., https://twitter.com/Hevi_On_Honkers/status/750025267117076480.
17. See Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). He writes, “When we grab hold of ‘correct’ thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sense that we need to let go and move on, at that point we are trusting our thoughts rather than God. We have turned away from God’s invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol. The need for certainty is sin because it works off of fear and limits God to our mental images. And God does not like being boxed in” (19).
18. For a hilarious, provocative, and insightful exploration of this, read My Imaginary Jesus by Matt Mikalatos.
14 RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL
1. My mother later suggested he simply wanted to spend time with me and was trying to get my attention. Right, Mom. As if!
2. If we’re making lists of artists we think might be satanic, let’s start with Nickelback, Coldplay, and Justin Timberlake.
3. See Origen, Origen Against Celsus, in Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, ed. A. C. Coxe, vol. 4 of Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 592.
4. Origen’s methodology is clear in his Against Celsus, chap. 44. He makes sweeping identifications of the devil because “every one who prefers vice and a vicious life is (because acting in a manner contrary to virtue) Satanas, that is, an ‘adversary’ to the Son of God” (p. 593). His allegorical reading of Scripture allows him to claim that historical persons are actually Satan, a hermeneutic that makes modern readers uncomfortable at best.
5. In his commentary on Isaiah, Calvin wrote, “The exposition of this passage, which some have given, as if it referred to Satan, has arisen from ignorance; for the context plainly shows that these statements must be understood in reference to the king of the Babylonians. But when passages of Scripture are taken up at random, and no attention is paid to the context, we need not wonder that mistakes of this kind frequently arise. Yet it was an instance of very gross ignorance to imagine that Lucifer was the king of devils, and that the Prophet gave him this name. But as these inventions have no probability whatever, let us pass by them as useless fables.” John Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, vol. 1, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Christian Classic Ethereal Library, n.d.), www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom13.xxi.i.html.
6. Fun fact: this is the passage used to claim Satan was the worship leader in heaven. In the King James Version, Ezekiel 28:13 reads, “The workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.” Since tabrets and pipes are musical instruments, interpreters read them as metonymy, insisting that Satan was the first worship leader. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for all of us who love rock ’n’ roll!), the translation of those two Hebrew words is uncertain at best, and they probably don’t refer to instruments at all. Whoops! Sorry, every hair metal band ever.
7. Greg Boyd rightly observed that the “ancient serpent” John is referring to here is the Leviathan, a mythical sea serpent that embodied evil in the ancient Near Eastern imagination. See Gregory Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 95.
8. The book of Job, notably, refuses to do this. We’d do well to follow Job’s lead and, at the end of our questions, throw up our hands and declare, “I have said too much already. / I have nothing more to say” (Job 40:5 NLT).
9. See Shawna Dolansky, “How the Serpent Became Satan,” Biblical Archaeology, April 8, 2016, www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/how-the-serpent-became-satan. The idea of a talking snake is strange to us, but not to readers of this ancient text. Note too that neither the man nor the woman found the serpent’s ability to speak unusual. Though the snake did test the man and woman, which we’ll see is part of Satan’s role, Genesis 3 doesn’t identify the snake as anything other than a snake. It could be Satan, but nowhere in the whole of Scripture is this made explicit. Ancient readers would have known that snakes were considered symbols of wisdom in Babylonian culture. When read in light of the Babylonian exile, the story leaves no uncertainty as to how God feels about the wisdom of Babylon.
10. John H. Walton calls this figure “The Challenger.” See his discussion in Walton, The NIV Application Commentary: Job (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 64.
11. God tested the faithfulness of humanity throughout the Scriptures. God tested Abraham (Genesis 22:1) and Job. Moses saw the forty years in the wilderness as an extended time of testing (Deuteronomy 8:2). The Old Testament only talks in terms of testing, while in Greek, the same word is translated as both tempting and testing. To say that God tests us, then, seems initially at odds with James’s claim that God “tempts no one” (James 1:13). But James goes on to clarify that testing arises because of our sinful desires. In other words, if we weren’t sinful, we’d ace the test. We experience temptations precisely because we are sinful.
12. Satan is not alone in this. As in the book of Revelation, he marshals the powers of this world to deceive us. Government, media, education, economics, and even false teachers in the church herself assist in this mission of deception.
13. See, for instance, Luke 7:33-34. He wasn’t a drunkard or glutton, of course. But his opponents wouldn’t have hurled such titles at him if he were more like his cousin John, a Nazirite who abstained from wine altogether. Jesus was apparently the life of the party—and why should that surprise anyone?
14. Maybe it’s not so surprising that the heaven this kind of religious person imagines is similarly dull. We often hear heaven
described as flying around on clouds while playing harps. Boring! I bet they don’t even allow any Ramones covers.
EPILOGUE: EMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
1. As a fan of horror movies, it pains me to type that. Don’t tell anyone I said it, okay?
2. Julianna Baggott, “Author Julianna Baggott and the World of Pure,” The StoryMen, Podcast audio, March 14, 2013, www.storymen.us/julianna-baggott.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. That’s the second Grover reference (you know, from Sesame Street) in this book. You usually don’t get one, and here I’m giving you two! Sure, it’s in the acknowledgments, but it counts, right? It’s a bonus treat for reading these.
Contact the author
Sign up for my mailing list to get updates on current projects, pop culture recommendations, and more! Go to jrforasteros.com/stuff.
I would love to connect with you. Find me on Facebook or Twitter (@jrforasteros). You can also send an email to [email protected].
Empathy for the Devil Page 20
