Jesus and His Bible, Part 11

 The Rejected Cornerstone

Immediately following the parable of the faithless vine-growers, Jesus carried the confrontation into the religious leaders’ camp.  He asked them: “Have you not even read this scripture: ‘The stone which the builders rejected, this became the chief corner-stone; this came about from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” (Mark 12:10). 

Let’s not ignore the implications of how Jesus introduced his quotation.  “Have you not even read this scripture?” Not conciliatory in the least.  And you can tell this is so by their reaction, which is to move toward assaulting him, only restrained by their fear of the crowd. I wonder how often today God’s Holy Spirit says to each of us, “Have you not even read this scripture?” Do we respond with defensiveness or do we sit down to listen? I remember when the Spirit brought these verses into my heart and said, “Have you not even read these scriptures?” And I had not actually let them sink in to form the foundation of my faith until that point.

Hebrews 10:1 The Law foreshadowed good things to come but could not bring them about.

Ephesians 2:15 Christ abolished in his flesh the law. 

Romans 7:4-6 We are dead to the Law by the body of Christ; we are delivered from the Law.

Romans 7:25-8:2 The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death.

Hebrews 7:18-19 The earlier commandment has been annulled and replaced by a better hope in Christ as our high priest, through whom we draw near to God.

Galatians 2:16-21 We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not annul or reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law. 

So Jesus’s question to religious people of his day is still resonant today.

The passage Jesus quotes is from Psalm 118. This Psalm celebrates the everlasting kindness of God. The psalmist says that he called to God and God answered, that the Lord is for him, and that with the Lord’s name he cut down all the nations. “You pushed me hard to knock me down but the Lord helped me. My strength and my might is Yah, and he has become my rescue.” He claims the Lord as his rescuer. Then comes the passage that Jesus quotes: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. From the Lord did this come about—it is wondrous in our eyes. (Psalm 118:22-23).  The psalmist then petitions the Lord for rescue and prosperity and then this: “Bind the festive offering with ropes all the way to the horns of the altar.”

By quoting this passage, Jesus identified himself with the psalmist as one who fears the Lord. He asserted that God has answered his call, that God is for him, that God is his strength and might. Yet at the same time, the faint echo of the coming offering/sacrifice is hinted at as well.  

Jesus also calls his critics to account—do they fear the Lord? Can they point to where God has answered their call?  Are they rejecting the cornerstone, the stone from which the whole building is measured out and built? 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 10

The Faithless Vine-Growers

Mark 11 ends with the priests, scribes, and elders asking Jesus who gave him the authority to do such things as clear the merchants out of the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple.  He “answered” them with a question about where the baptism of John came from, whether heaven or humans.  They refused to answer, because he had trapped and immobilized them. 

Mark 12:1 And He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, and put a wall around it, and dug a vat under the winepress, and built a tower, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey.” 

The parable goes on to tell how, each time he sent servants to collect the rent, the vine-growers beat them, stoned them, shamed them, and killed some of them. So he sent his son, thinking they would respect him. But instead they reasoned that killing the son would make them the de facto owners, so they did kill him and throw his body out of the vineyard. 

Jesus asked the crowd, “What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine-growers and give the vineyard to others.”

Jesus’s Bible has so many references to vines and vineyards that they cannot all be brought to mind here.  The references are particularly prevalent in the Prophets, and we will look at just one, Isaiah:

“Let me sing now for my well-beloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard.  My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. 

And he dug it all around, removed its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. And he built a tower in the middle of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; then he expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones. And now…I will lay it waste…For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his delightful plant. Thus he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress…Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil…Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight.” (Isaiah 5)

The context of this parable is the prophet Isaiah’s call to his nation to repent; his description of the suffering their sinfulness will call down on them; his prediction of the dissolution of their community and kingdom; his list of their sins, including a plea to “cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow” (1:17). Interspersed among the warnings and accusations are visions of a blessed future, where war is no more, where Zion is holy and protected, which Isaiah so much wanted to be true. 

Isaiah  goes on following his parable of the vineyard to predict the defeat and downfall of the nation of Israel.

By quoting this passage, Jesus brought before the priests, scribes, and elders their worst nightmare—the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem and the nation.  It had happened before when Babylon invaded, and the Jews were dispersed out of their homeland. Isaiah’s prophetic vision was accurate.

Jesus essentially said to his hearers that the same conditions that provoked judgment before have occurred again, and even worse, and how can they hope to escape?  This was infuriating, and it confirmed their fear that Jesus’s message and person had both personal and political implications. Their arrogance and their will to power and their personal corruptions were laid bare by Isaiah’s words in Jesus’s mouth.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 9

Welcome and Worship in God's House

To summarize events between the last quotation and this next one: After his encounter with the rich man, Jesus educated his followers on how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Then he said that those who left their houses and relationships and lands would receive back  a hundred times their loss in this time, accompanied by persecution, and in the time to come, would receive eternal life.  He told the disciples he would be killed in Jerusalem, and the response recorded by Mark is that James and John came to ask for seats of preeminence in the kingdom. Jesus said they would have to share in his experience, and that they would indeed share it, but that he didn’t decide who was preeminent in the kingdom of God. (He had just said that the last would be first, so that’s a clue.) He also said that whoever wants to be great among Jesus’s followers must be the slave of all.  Then he healed blind Bartimaeus. 

He entered Jerusalem on a colt and the crowds hailed him as King. He looked around the temple and went back out of Jerusalem for the night.

On the way back into Jerusalem, he cursed a fig tree without fruit, and then returned to the temple. It is easy to connect the fig tree to the temple as an enacted parable, given what happened next.  He drove out those who bought and sold in the temple and turned over the tables of the money-changers.

And then he said: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robber’s den” (Mark 11:17). The picture invoked is that the merchants in the temple are like a band of robbers who hurry back to their safe hideout to count their takings, and the temple is that cave.  

Jesus quoted two prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The first is Isaiah 56:7. This quotation comes from a passage that begins “Preserve justice, and do righteousness, for my salvation is about to come and my righteousness to be revealed.” The passage promises blessing to those who do not profane the Sabbath and who do no evil. The blessing is also for the foreigner and the eunuch who keep God’s Sabbaths and choose what pleases God and hold fast to God’s covenant.  

Jesus invoked Isaiah’s inclusive prophecy as he cleared out all the hubbub and chicanery from the court of the Gentiles.  By his action, seen as a parable, Jesus took the holy interior of the temple where only Jews could go and extended it out into the outer court where Gentiles were allowed to visit. He invited outsiders into God’s presence, including them in the privilege of worshiping God. 

The second is Jeremiah 7:11. This comes from a word that Jeremiah was told to speak in the Lord’s house, the temple, to all the people of Judah who entered to worship. This is the immediate context: 

Amend your ways and deeds and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not think that because the temple is here, you are ok. You must practice justice, you must not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, or the widow, and you must not shed innocent blood or worship idols. But if you do wrong and then come here and say “We are delivered”—has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight? 

This directly confronts any sense of being exclusively chosen to belong to God, the sign of which for the Jews is the temple. Sadly, however, their actions do not reflect justice and mercy to those who are other and those who are needy or helpless. If they are implicated in the death of the innocent and if they put anything (like wealth, see the rich man of Mark 10) ahead of God in their worship, they have made the temple a robbers’  hideout. (It is not hard to apply this to the many who make money out of religion in our time.) Jeremiah highlights the teachings of the Torah that specifically command justice and mercy to vulnerable groups of people and the many instances in the Hebrew scripture that insist on care for the innocent and putting God first. 

In both quotations from Jesus’s Bible, the context has to do with the fact that the chosen people have themselves chosen to act without justice and righteousness and they have thus obscured the intent of God, which is to invite and include the foreigner, the powerless, the eunuch in the knowledge and worship of the true God, and to protect the interests of the helpless, friendless, and innocent.  Instead, in Jesus’s time, the place these folks were welcome had become a marketplace rather than a place of worship, a place where the “protected” classes were taken advantage of in order to accumulate money.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 8

Mark 10:19 The Rich Man Wants Eternal Life

Question: Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Answer: Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.

“Why do you call me good?” This abrupt response puzzles me. I think, as with other surprising responses, it is tailored to the person with whom Jesus was speaking. It suggests that this conversation began with a compliment from one good person to another.  I recognize you as good, the rich man said, because I also am good. Jesus brought him up short when he asserted that “no one is good except God alone.” While this is not a direct quotation from Jesus’s Bible, it sums up multiple references to God’s goodness in the Psalms, and in many of those, God’s goodness is linked directly to his loving kindness, his mercy. This mercy, this care for the weak and helpless, is what the rich man is apparently specifically missing.

But first, Jesus made the “law-abiding” answer: “You know the commandments: do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.” Interestingly, Jesus did not begin with Exodus 20:3: “You shall have no other gods before me,” nor did he include the prohibition of sacred images, or swearing oaths falsely using God’s name. He omitted the positive command about keeping the Sabbath. Instead, he focused on the ethical commands, the ones which detail how we are to treat other people. (See Exodus 20:12-16; Deut. 5:16-20.)

Jesus concisely summed these ethical commandments up, with the interesting addition of “do not defraud,” which extends “do not covet”  into the actions that result from covetousness. Fraudulent practices are condemned in some detail in various teachings about honesty in business practices in both the Pentateuch and the Prophets.

Embedded in this story are numerous political and theological threads, making the answer a complicated one, despite its apparent simplicity. The questioner who asked about eternal life, if sincere, must have been a Pharisee. They were at odds with the Sadducees over this issue. The Pharisees also were strict followers of their interpretation of Mosaic Law, both the written and oral traditions. By agreeing that “eternal life” is possible, Jesus aligned himself with the Pharisees in their debate with the Sadducees. And yet he was in constant conflict with the Pharisees over how to fulfill the Law. Specifically here,  when Jesus summed up the “other-facing” laws so concisely, he confronted the complexity of the traditions followed by the Pharisees. 

Jesus’s assertion that “no one is good except God alone” confronted the rich man’s awareness of his own goodness, as exposed in the exchange in which the rich man asserts that he has kept the commandments from his youth. This came out of Jesus’s  love for the questioner, a love which insisted on his looking honestly at himself.

Then Jesus answered with “sell all you have and give it to the poor”; Jesus reasserted that mercy is an essential aspect of goodness. He challenged the rich man to radical generosity. Mercy goes beyond the law of Moses into the law of love; now it isn’t about stealing or defrauding but about giving.  

Further, Jesus said: “Take up your cross and follow me.” Crucifixion was the punishment for rebels against the civil power of the Romans. In this context, Jesus signified the need to rebel against the idea that legalistic fulfillment of the law is enough, the need instead to embrace the idea of a whole-self giving away of privilege and power. This rebellion, though figurative, would have made real the worshipful attitude the rich man began with (“good master”).  “You call me good, but none is good but God; if you really believe I am good (if you really believe I am God), throw away your life and follow me. This is the absolute best I can offer to those I love.”