Hardly the Last Word

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 24 January 2010

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4:14-21

This week’s readings are a lovely array of meta-Scriptures: a Gospel reading about Jesus reading the Scriptures, a Pauline passage about living together as God’s people, a Psalm about reading the Scriptures, and an Old Testament passage about… reading the Scriptures together.  The Bible’s texts are odd that way: I can’t think of very many places in which Plato asks to be read or bits of Homer where the attention shifts away from the fields of Troy and into the poem’s audience.  But the Bible’s books are strange in all sorts of ways, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

When I used to assign a paper that asked students to compare Plato’s Republic to some other pre-Enlightenment text, 1 Corinthians 12 always served nicely as a comparison text: in both cases, the writers assert strongly that the body (Plato’s city, you’ll remember, was analogous to a human person, a literary image which I think Paul picks up and modifies significantly when he calls the Church the Body of Christ) must acknowledge and embrace the goodness of all of its parts, not only those traditionally designated “higher,” if the body is to be healthy, and both assign a certain organizing principle to the whole as distinct from the parts.  Paul calls for cooperation from the tongues-speakers and interpreters, for deference from the strong-of-conscience and for patience on the parts of the prophets.  Likewise Plato calls for self-discipline on the parts of the wealthy, for courage from the warriors, and for wisdom from the rulers.  But both hold that there is a formal, organizing principle that ought to bind their particular communities together.  For Plato, the difficult-to-translate dikaiosyne (justice, morality, and righteousness are three candidates), while for Paul the equally sticky agape (love, charity) binds all, and Paul’s famous teaching on agape follows directly on the heels of the part on people’s various gifts.

I have to note that before Paul came along and probably before Plato wrote Republic, the book of Nehemiah offers another alternative to the two good suggestions of Plato and Paul, namely joy.  Like Plato’s dikaiosyne and Paul’s agape, Nehemiah’s chadyath stands in contrast to what might otherwise have been and calls for a sort of resistance to what’s going on at the moment.  For Plato, the untrained whims of the masses have the reins of Athens, and for Paul, the community is going about its business in a spirit of self-promotion.  In both of those cases, the P-dudes call for something higher, something that will serve as an object of desire for those who look upon its goodness.  Nehemiah likewise comes into a situation in which the people, upon hearing the text of the Torah read and interpreted, weep.  Whether because they realize that they’ve lost the distinctiveness that Moses’ teachings would otherwise have conferred upon them or because, hearing the story of the Exodus, they realize they’re still under the thumb of Persia, they cast their faces down, and Ezra and Nehemiah and the Levites point towards a higher way, that of rejoicing.

I’ll confess at the outset that I’ve not spent enough time with Nehemiah: I’m aware of the basic historical setting, but beyond that, the particulars of the narrative I couldn’t summon in a pinch.  But this moment strikes me as something that echoes in other places: to celebrate the victory of YHWH, to proclaim even in the face of a world that denies that reality, is the heart of bearing witness to the salvation that God brings.  Paul calls for such proclamation over and over, and the great oracles of Isaiah 40-55 call it forth.  Even Jacob, who goes out of his way to steal the birthright to lands that do not yet belong to the sons of Abraham, deceives in a spirit of proclamation.  (Are there ethical problems there?  Yes.  But that’s not this week’s text, is it?)  Like Paul’s call to love as a sign of God’s victory over sin, so Nehemiah calls for joy as a sign of God’s victory over despair.  May all of us be people of visible joy.

Vanderbilt’s Lectionary Page for 17 January 2010

Isaiah 62:1-5

Psalm 36:5-10

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

John 2:1-11

I’ve read some twentieth-century feminist Biblical scholarship, and some of it is quite helpful to keep me mindful of my own assumptions and sometimes my own ideology when I read the Bible.  I don’t always come away from such commentaries and monographs convinced, but I always come back to the text of the Bible more mindful.  I remember that reading especially when I’m in the prophets, those masters of metaphor, and I remember as I read them that I should not rest too easily in my own ability to “read past” the gendered-violence issues that are there, the threats against parabolic wives and the destruction of apocalyptic whores.  My practiced ignorance makes the texts inspiring rather than troubling in the quiet of my study, yet I remain aware of the trouble, and I fear that I usually nod to and then walk past the hard questions when such passages demand answers.

The nice thing about that position, of course, is that it allows me to feel superior when people of all sorts (rightly) object to it.  When the feminists tell me that I’m not taking such questions seriously enough, I can congratulate myself because no “ideology” has me pinned down.  And when the Orthodox converts (it’s always the Orthodox converts–the evangelicals know by this point that I’m incorrigible) object to my bringing “modern” or “liberal” ethical questions to bear on the prophets’ allegories, I can congratulate myself for rising above the pervasive violence of past eras.  I really can’t lose.

If you couldn’t tell I was joking at my own expense just now, you must be a new reader.

At any rate, all of the faithless wives, the public humiliation of those wives, the gendering of Israel as a wife who runs off looking for strange men with whom to couple, won’t leave me alone when I get to Jesus’ strange encounter with his mother and the invisible married couple in Cana.  (If you don’t think they’re invisible, ask yourself how old they are.  Ask who their parents were.  Ask whether either of them had a good or a bad reputation in town.  Can’t see them, can you?)  On one hand I’ve heard enough people talk about this passage (it often gets brief mention in wedding homilies) that I’m always tempted to domesticate the encounter, to imagine the mother of Jesus as I would my college roommate’s mother, volunteering Slim to lift something heavy when Slim isn’t dressed for lifting.  (I just made that scenario up–other than at his own wedding and at mine, I can’t remember seeing Slim dressed up.)  “What a character that Mother-of-God is!” I tell myself, and I imagine the people in the room getting a good chuckle out of the moment, and I can walk away without much more thought.  But then I think about the fact that, although I lack the rigorous research that I probably should do if I ever preach this text, I know that relations between men and women in the Semitic provinces of the Roman Empire were such that this scene must have been very tense, perhaps to the point of discomfort, that perhaps there might have been people in the audience wondering whether this latter-day prophet would get Gomer all over her.  (If that reference slid past you, go read Hosea.)  And when I think about just how different their reactions might have been from my own, too often I give up trying to imagine what this scene would have meant in the historical moment that Our Lord chose as the moment to become Incarnate.

And that, in microcosm, is one of my own grand difficulties dealing with the Bible all over but especially the gospels: I’m always warring with contrary tendencies, one to make the stories too familiar and to lose their ethical and existential edge, and the other to hold them at such a distance because I fear their strangeness that they can’t speak to me.  Such a tension does not paralyze me (usually), but it does challenge me to work as hard as I can on the scholarly end of interpreting such things, especially when I teach those texts, and it reminds me that I always stand to learn something when somebody else interprets from faithfulness for my faithfulness.  In the meantime, I think I’d do well to point to the text both in terms of ethical aspirations for how we treat women and give the text some credit for having something other than that violence as its main purpose, perhaps allowing some difference without becoming entirely relativistic about the difference.  Again, I know that shields me from the valid criticisms of those who (rightly) could criticize, but sometimes I just prefer to live in that intellectual superiority.

So feminists and Orthodox converts, go ahead.  Take your shots.  I have it coming.

I don’t know that I’ll do this every week, but one thing that I’m going to try to do more this year is write about the Bible, and I figure one way to do that is to write about the lectionary readings for the week.  My reflections will not be polished sermons in their own right, but I’ll be going through the same sorts of thought processes as I do when I write for the pulpit.

I always preach one or more of the lectionary texts when I preach, and I generally go to Vanderbilt’s Revised Common Lectionary Page to get the texts.

Isaiah 43:1-7

Psalm 29

Acts 8:14-17

Matthew 3:15-17, 21-22

That Jesus was baptized made little sense to me when I was a new Christian; after all, my own tradition insisted that baptism was for salvation from Hell, and as far as I could tell, Jesus was one person who was in little danger of that.  When my teachers attempted to interpret Matthew’s “to fulfill all righteousness” as purely exemplary (Jesus getting baptized so that he could provide an example for sinners), I only became more confused: after all, would not that act be one of deception, a pretense of sin-that-needed-to-be-forgiven where there was innocence and thus at the very least visually dishonest? And would not such a deception itself be a sin on the part of the one who was called “without sin”?

(I was a legalistic little booger back then.)

Honestly, I didn’t think much about the scene until I came to study the New Testament in a formal setting in college, and scholars like N.T. Wright helped me immensely to see baptism not primarily as a temporally universal ritual but as apocalyptic, an act that signifies an end of an age, a renewal of Joshua’s Jordan-crossing when the Hebrews were coming into Canaan.  I learned that John the Baptist was not by any means the only apocalyptic preacher to start popular movements on the Jordan, and I came to realize that beginning with the Exodus when I thought about baptism helped greatly when I attempted to make sense of Paul’s images of death and rising, the practice of baptism “in the name of” the virgin-born Joshua, and Peter’s insistence upon baptism in Acts 2.  (We Christian Church folks like Acts 2 a great deal.)  In other words, I found that a bit of scholarship is a handy thing when one undertakes to read the Bible.

Now, a good fourteen years after I started my training in academic New Testament studies and five years into my adventures as people’s father, I appreciate more than ever the weight of the grand stories as I live out my own life, with student loans and coworkers and Deacons’ meetings.  I understand why a regimented world such as the one that already existed in James Joyce’s time makes so much more sense with the myth of Ulysses mapped over it, and I appreciate that my own tradition still insists on dunking people in a historical moment with far more irony to it than apocalyptic fervor. We still insist that everyone coming into this adventure we call Church is, following our own apocalyptic Joshua, entering into a struggle so that God might grant us the promised rest.

I also find solace in the vast diversity of roles that water plays in the Bible.  Just in this week’s readings, Isaiah praises God as one who protects the Servant from the waters, then the gospel reading recounts Jesus’ ministry as initiated by immersion in water, and finally a moment in the strange sequence in Acts involving Water and Spirit.  In those incidents, at one end Peter tells the people of Jerusalem to be baptized for the reception of the Spirit, and at the other a group of Gentiles exhibit the Spirit and thus need Baptism, and in the middle (this week’s reading), the apostles need to lay hands on a group of Samaritans because they’d been baptized but had not received the Spirit.  In other words, even in the text of the Bible (especially in the text of the Bible?), God’s activity is nothing to be predicted or systematized but received always ad hoc, in the kairos, as a gift.

As I look at the week’s weather report and realize that any gift of water to Georgia in the next few days is likely to fall as flakes rather than as drops, I remember my own baptism, and I thank God that I’m from a tradition inside of which I can do that remembering.