Righteousness and Peace Have Kissed Each Other, and the Pure in Heart See God

Preached at Silverton Friends Church

Nov. 23, 2025

Four more Beatitudes:

Matthew 5:8-12

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God,

Blessed are the persecuted for righteousness’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of me, for so they persecuted the prophets before you; rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

Like some of you, I grew up during the hot era of the Cold War, learning in high school how to crouch under my paddle desk in case of nuclear attack.  My teacher, who had a dark sense of humor, said, “It will be as much use to hold this civil defense book over your head.” I also read a book around that time called I Found God in Soviet Russia by John Noble, and I was pretty sure that the main enemies of Christians were communists. So when I read where Jesus says, “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, on account of Me,” I was pretty sure that the “they” in this sentence were the communists or at least atheists, and that my crime would be identifying as a Christian.

I don’t feel sure of that today, here in the U.S.A., and if I look at Jesus’s life and death, I am even less sure that my opposition is likely to be systems outside of Christianity. The people who hounded Jesus to death were of his own religion, and they were both the intellectuals and the Torah literalists, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. And these four other beatitudes we’re looking at today may help us see how to live in precarious times, when a person’s enemies may be members of their families (see Mt. 10:36). 

First, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.  As we’ve seen before, Jesus brings into his gospel many insights from the poets and prophets of the First Testament, our Old Testament, helping us see that God has not changed somehow between testaments.  Jesus nearly quotes Psalm 24:

“Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart…” 

In other words. the pure in heart are the ones who will see God.  And the identifying marks of the pure in heart are these: truthfulness, honesty, integrity—and actions that line up with a pure heart, symbolized by clean hands.

Hidden in the word for pure are the metaphors of pruning or being purified by fire, like gold.  So it isn’t a static word, it’s an ongoing process word. We can remember John 15, with its extended metaphor of pruning and abiding; parables about sifting out chaff which is thrown on the fire; and an acted parable about washing the feet. Staying open to God’s actions to bring us into our best selves, our truest selves is being pure in heart. You are clean, Jesus says, through the word I have spoken to you (John 15:3).  And Jesus is still speaking through the Holy Spirit.

This brings to mind what Jesus said about being clean, about being pure. Jesus advised his critics to clean the inside of the cup first, to admit the death hidden in whitewashed tombs, to allow God to make their inside pure so their outside could be truly pure. He told those most committed to purity, the Pharisees, to start from within, to be honest, and then to act out of that pure heart, actions of generosity and mercy.

Every committed movement has its purity laws. You must boycott this, you must praise this, you must make followers who are as zealous as you are, which Jesus referred to as making them twice as fit for hell as you are yourself. Those purity laws are focused on external behaviors but do nothing to remedy the hot mess within.

I advise you to sift through St. Paul’s pastoral advice to see how he tries to help people disallow harmful activities at the same time as he encourages them to embrace the liberty of the children of God. There is no way except to rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the example of Jesus. And that means that one additional characteristic of the pure in heart is humility.  

The second:  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. It may not surprise you that there isn’t a lot in the history of Israel praising peacemaking. But peacemaking does show up in the poets and prophets. Psalm 34:14 “Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” Psalm 85:1: “Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” Isaiah foretells the coming of  the Prince of Peace (9:6) and says,  “the work of righteousness will be peace, and the service of righteousness, quietness and confidence forever” (32:17).  “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace, and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation, and says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” (Is. 52:7). 

The peace we are talking about refers both to tranquillity and quietness and also to reconciliation and to fearlessness. So we can see that it is evident both in stillness and in action.

This Hebrew word, shalom, has so much embedded in it. Not only is it used to describe our relationship with God, where our reverence is not tainted with fear, but also our relationship with others. The messengers of God greet frightened humans with “Fear not!” Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid of those who can kill the body.” It includes contentment, which derives from having enough to meet our daily physical needs (our daily bread) as well as our need for love. It includes friendship. It includes wholeness, wellbeing, and safety. 

Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you” (John 14), the peace of an untroubled heart.  “You will have tribulation, but in me you can have peace."  This speaks to centeredness, and clearly connects to the idea of being pure in heart. 

St. Paul consistently opens his letters with “Grace and peace.” All of Romans 12 can be read as a manual for peacemaking, ending with “as much as is possible, live peaceably with everyone.” Ephesians 2:14 identifies Jesus as our peace, who has reconciled opponents with each other and has broken down the walls between us.  Hebrews 12:14 says, “Follow peace with all and holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord.”  

Following Jesus means to do what we can to help create a world where people can live tranquil, fearless lives, where we work to bring down walls and to bring opponents together in harmony.  This work, surprisingly, is counter-cultural in every culture, since each culture or subculture identifies “us vs. them” groups, people who belong inside vs. people who belong outside.  And we ourselves need to live without walls, without fearing our opponents, without our hearts being troubled. Believe in God, Jesus says, and believe also in me.

Third, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. As the Psalmist says, Righteousness and peace have kissed each other. So it will be helpful to delve a bit into what qualifies as righteousness. 

Though it came to me from the church much laden with baggage, this word righteousness means simply the state of being who we are meant to be, our true selves, our right selves. In a narrower sense, it also means justice, or giving each other what is due to another human being. What do we feel we are owed as a human? Give that to others.  

But surprisingly, giving other people their natural rights as human beings, acknowledging their inclusion as children of God, carriers of the image of God, can make some people mad.  So if we’re part of a culture, which we are, that identifies insiders and outsiders, some in our culture may well want to protect that by suggesting that outsiders are not due their rights as human beings, or maybe aren’t entirely human at all. 

Insisting on the human dignity of outsiders can turn us into outsiders, and then we will be persecuted. Persecution means driving people away, forcing them to flee, harassing them, molesting them, troubling them, mistreating them. We have seen this on viral videos in recent times.  And it is soooo hard to remain peacemakers, so hard to center on God and to keep our hearts open to God’s purifying work, so hard to be just to our opponents. 

I turned to my World War II thinkers and survivors for help on how to remain fully human and humane, how to be righteous, in hard times.  A French Orthodox Christian who was for awhile in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation, Olivier Clement wrote this:  “The war threw me into political action…I joined the French Resistance. But total war makes for total politics as well, and … total politics justifies anything and everything.  It justifies lies and violence, with no longer the recognition of any limits—whether …honor or…cannibalism.” (43)“The worst is when the shedding of blood is premeditated…During the last months of the war, this was something I could not subscribe to. So I became involved in other forms of resistance. We still risked our lives, but in order to save lives.” (44)  Clement had to leave the Resistance as a movement to remain his true self, but still he participated in actions that made others safe. (The Other Sun: A Spiritual Autobiography, tr. Michael Donley, Chester, UK: 2021)

Tzvetan Todorov looks at a Dutchwoman, Etty Hillesum, who was 27 when Nazis occupied Holland.  She felt called to minister to her fellow Jews who were in transit to concentration camps by showing them “the way to their own interior in a time of great adversity.” She constantly spoke to God, not as a potential savior, but as a power inside herself that had to be nurtured. (see Wikipedia article). Todorov writes, “Though she never stops fighting the injustices of the camp, hatred remains her chief enemy” (200).  (Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, [New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996)). She was eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Todorov is not sure that such nonviolence is the only or the most effective response to totalitarianism, and he acknowledges that even “those whose cause is just” may exchange being the hunted for being hunters, in which case “the new kingdom…will not be so new after all.” (216) He quotes Victor Frankl, survivor, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to him.” (217) He admits that “moral action [as opposed to political or military action] can perhaps be more effective than we think” (201).

I want to acknowledge that I also would like to persecute a person or two, but I’m not going to, and that is the difference between the capacity to act and the action itself. At the present time, I’m praying for those I want to persecute to meet Jesus like Saul did on the road to Damascus, as he was traveling in order to persecute followers of Jesus.

Here’s a prayer I heard on the Canterbury Cathedral choral evensong for Wednesday, Nov. 19:

“Loving God, we give thanks for the precious gift of life.  Give us strength and courage to speak out against all forms of abuse. …Lord, we pray for your world. In times of hostility to immigrants, we pray for a more generous understanding of the needs of others throughout our world. For an openness to the value that people different from ourselves can bring to our life. And for a recognition that it is only by working together that we can serve the good and the prosperity of all.  Generous God, to you all people are equal and from your love nobody can be shut out.  Inspire all peoples with this vision of your equal love that we may learn to expand our hearts in reaching out to others and find by looking on their faces with gentleness the true image of your son Jesus Christ our Lord.” (YouTube, Canterbury Cathedral Choral Evensong, Nov. 19, 2025)

Let’s move forward in our times and places with the commitment to be fully human and humane, to be true inside and out, to work for the dignity and peace of others, and to center ourselves in our experience of God’s presence and the example of Jesus. And then let’s commit to listening to the Spirit of God and doing what we are told to do.

 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 17

 Reconciliation and God’s Kingdom

Like the Prophets of his Testament, Jesus first called out the disobedience of Israel and their breaking of covenant with God. But also like the Prophets, Jesus then envisioned a future of reconciliation. Israel will serve him, and all exiles will come home, and their hearts will be devoted to loving God, as is evident in the allusion here in Mark 13:27 to Deuteronomy 30:4. In the context of that verse, God warns Israel that if they disobey and break covenant, he will scatter them among the nations. But if they return to the Lord and obey him with their whole heart and soul, then the Lord will restore them from captivity.

“If your outcasts are at the ends of the earth, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you back.” They will return to the land God has given them, and God will “circumcise your hearts to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut. 30:4).

Like other prophets, Jesus also invoked a vision of a humanity reconciled in its entirety to God. He alludes also to the prophet Zachariah, who, during the reign of Darius the Mede, sees an angel going to measure Jerusalem, and the angel says that God will be the glory in the midst of Jerusalem, that it will not need walls to protect it, because God will be a wall of fire around her. God says to Israel to return home.

 “Flee from the land of the north, for I have dispersed you as the four winds of the heavens.” Zechariah goes on to say that God is coming to dwell in the midst of Zion and “many nations will join themselves to the Lord in that day and will become my people” (Zach. 2:6). This carries forward the vision of a humanity reconciled to God.

Jesus placed his vision in the tradition of the Prophets by invoking Isaiah and Zechariah. He brings in the books of Moses by quoting Deuteronomy (the last to be written down, often dated to the Babylonian exile). He also quoted from the book of Daniel, a book of conundrums, with its pinpoint accuracy about the history of the Middle East up to the death of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and its far flung predictions in the ending chapters that no one has yet seen fulfilled.  

Jesus referenced by these quotations the covenant of obedience between Israel and God, the breaking of which led to Israel’s exile and after their return to Jerusalem, the collusion of some of Israel with the Greek invaders to the profanation of their Temple. He also spoke of God’s judgment on the occupying powers. He stated that the Israel of his own time was again breaking the covenant, some colluding with the invaders, that they would therefore be dispersed and exiled, and that their own Temple would be profaned and destroyed. He warned his followers that because of their suffering, they would be vulnerable to claims by false messiahs, but reminded them that the work before them will still be to spread the good news of God’s kingdom and God’s Messiah Jesus while enduring unto death.

He asserted as well that the coming of the Son of Humanity will put an end to nations and armies (which was opposite to what Israel hoped for) and that His kingdom will include all humanity. We hope to see this literally true, but we remember as well that Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is among/within you.” This helps define our relationship to nations and armies in our present day. Our first loyalty is always to the Kingdom of God and the King God has chosen, namely Jesus.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 16

 Apocalypse and the Kingdom

Facing into his own oncoming murder by the Jewish and Roman authorities, Jesus continued his apocalyptic mood and prophecy. He predicted false Christs who would lead even the chosen ones astray, if that were possible. Then, as it seems to me, he spoke about the end of the world, as, perhaps, does Daniel. He reminded his hearers to remember the fig tree, and to learn to watch the signs as they watch for leaves and buds, so they can know that the end is near. He said that “this race” will not pass away before the end occurs, and that his words are eternal. He also said that no one knows the exact time, except his Father, so stay alert.  

“The sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken, and then they shall see the son of man coming in clouds, and he will gather together his chosen from the four winds, from the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven” (Mark 13: 24-27).

Here Jesus alluded to the prophetic words of Isaiah: 

“Behold the day of the Lord is coming, cruel, with fury and burning anger, to make the land a desolation; and he will exterminate its sinners from it. For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash forth their light; the sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will not shed its light. Thus will I punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; I will also put an end to the arrogance of the proud, and abase the haughtiness of the ruthless” (Isaiah 13:10).

This passage in Isaiah is first to be understood as an oracle concerning Babylon, in which God calls his warriors to do battle against Babylon. Isaiah foresees that God will raise up the Medes against Babylon, destroying them completely. The fact that Jesus quoted a passage reminding his hearers of deliverance from captivity spoke to the crowd’s hope of deliverance from Rome, and must have made the leaders of the nation more uneasy, as they already feared retribution from Rome if anything like a political uprising occurred.  But Jesus also included the leaders of his own people among the wicked, arrogant, haughty, and ruthless. They might have called his diatribes against them to mind as he quoted Isaiah.

Next, Jesus referenced a prophecy where Isaiah names Edom (Isaiah 33) as a target for wrath, and prays for and celebrates Zion’s survival. Then Isaiah shifts to God’s indignation against all the nations, all their armies.

Isaiah 34:4 “And all the host of heaven will wear away, and the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; and their hosts will also wither away as a leaf withers from the vine, or as one withers from the fig tree.” 

When Jesus quoted from this passage, he put both Herod (who was Idumean, or of the Edomite people) and then all nations on notice that the time will come when all their military and political might will wither away.  Additionally, the fig tree and the vine specifically reminded his hearers of the frequent use of these plants to symbolize Israel itself.  There was nothing reassuring in any of this for his immediate hearers.

Still in an apocalyptic vein, Jesus invoked Daniel’s vision of “the Ancient of Days.” This vision is set within the reign of Belshazzar of Babylon. Daniel sees “The Ancient of Days” on a throne, surrounded by thousands and thousands, and the books were opened. The boasting beast is slain and thrown on the fire.

Daniel 7:13 “I kept looking in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven one like a Son of Man was coming. And He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, glory and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages might serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away; and his kingdom is one which will not be destroyed.” Daniel asks for an explanation, which is more of a reiteration of what he has seen than an explanation.

When Jesus quoted from this passage, it is easy to hear him repeating his self-identifying as the Son of Humanity to whom God will give everlasting dominion, whom all peoples, nations, and languages will serve. I think Jesus’s use of this passage underlies the Christian understanding that aspects of Daniel’s apocalypse point toward Jesus. 

The vision cited here in Daniel 7 foresees that all peoples will serve the Son of Humanity, and emphasizes the grace and inclusive nature of God's Kingdom even as the political powers and rulers of nations are defeated. This speaks against nationalism and political partisinship: our primary loyalty is to the kingdom where Jesus rules.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 15

 Jesus and the Temple, Actual and Symbolic

This post will repeat some of the content of earlier posts, but I’ve put that content in to address a central preoccupation of Mark 11-13, namely the Temple as the central symbol of the nation of Israel. 

Starting in Mark 11, Jesus arrived at the Temple, which formed the focus of his attention for the next three complete chapters of Mark, ending with his trial before the Sanhedrin.  The Temple was the holiest of sites for the Jewish nation, containing in its deepest recesses the Holy of Holies where the High Priest visited God once a year. Jesus had visited the Temple many times over his lifetime as a devout Jew, and this visit was his last.  

Embedded in the narrative are symbols relating to the nation of Israel. Jesus cursed the fig tree for being fruitless, reminding his followers of the traditional symbolism in which the fig tree represents Israel. This fig tree which has put all its energy into leaves rather than into buds that will fruit is a living parable. Its owners have not pruned it into fruitfulness (as per Sarah Ruden, The Gospels, 43, n.).  The next day, the dried up tree was a pointed warning to his followers about what was coming for Israel and the temple.

The allusion provided by the fig tree signifies in two directions. First, the ideal of human life is often referred to in the first Testament as sitting under one’s own vine and fig tree. National peace allows unmolested cultivation of crops, including those with some degree of luxury and pleasure.  This picture of peace is found throughout the Jewish scriptures.  Second, the prophets often target this picture and show its destruction as a sign of God’s displeasure and judgment. The prophet Joel depicts the judgment of the Lord as coming in a horde of locusts destroying the vines and fig trees, and the regeneration of Israel as productive vine and fig tree (1:7, 11; 2:22). The prophet Hosea, speaking for God: “I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, … as the first ripe in the fig tree…” but they followed after idols (9:10).  The prophet Amos identifies the diseased and worm-eaten vines and fig trees as the judgment of God, who says, “yet you have not returned to me” (4:9). It would be hard for people familiar with the prophets to miss this allusion.

In case this was too subtle an allusion, Jesus then told a pointed and provocative parable about a vineyard.  What immediately precedes this parable in Mark is the confrontation between the priests, etc., and Jesus over where his authority is from.  

“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” (Mark 12:1). 

No one familiar with the Hebrew prophets would have missed this quotation from the prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah 5, the prophet writes: “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.” The prophecy goes on to predict the defeat and downfall of the nation of Israel.

Jesus essentially said that the same conditions that provoked judgment before have occurred again, and even worse, and how can they hope to escape?  This had to be infuriating: Jesus tapped into the Jewish national fear that they would lose their holiest of places, the Temple,  which God inhabited, and that they would again be dispersed as exiles. And it confirmed their suspicion that Jesus’s message and person have political implications.  This suspicion became more intense as he continued.

The disciples pointed out the grandeur of the Temple, and Jesus said it would be torn down. They asked when, and he said, “Many will come in My name saying, ‘I am He!’ There will be wars, earthquakes, famines, the beginning as of birth pangs. You will be persecuted for My sake, and the Holy Spirit will give you the words to speak. Family members will deliver you to death, and all will hate you because of me. The one who endures will be saved. Then the Abomination of Desolation appears. Run for the hills, don’t stop to take your valuables. This will be the worst trouble since the beginning of creation, and no one will survive if the Lord does not shorten those days.  And do not believe any who say, ‘Here is the Christ.’” 

These are terrifying words, but for the Jewish hearers, the worst is yet to come.

“But when you see ‘the abomination of desolation’ standing where it should not be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains” (Mark 13:14).

This famous phrase, “the abomination of desolation,” comes out of the book of Daniel. (I think the advice to the reader was interpolated by the gospel writer, knowing that his Gentile readers needed to do some research, rather than a direct quotation from Jesus.) 

The fact that Jesus quoted from the apocalyptic book of Daniel requires attention. I was brought up to read the whole Bible with an ingenuous understanding that the stories were written just after the events they narrate, sort of like a diary, that prophecies were about future events, and that events took place as literally as their representation in the text. I also shared with others like me an anxiety over any question that opened up the possibility that scripture included fiction or legend or even oral tradition that was written down much later than the events, or that prophecy could legitimately be insights about events current to the prophet. 

As I myself learned a dead language, Anglo-Saxon (Old English), and grappled with the trouble of translating it, and then investigated the questions arising from the relationship of the text to historical events (see Beowulf for an example), I became less anxious about the Bible as well. As a Christian, the Bible remains a measuring stick for my behavior and a source of my understanding of who God is and what Jesus came to do for us, my sacred text.  I have become more at ease with thinking of it also as a complex text with many kinds of literature in it. It could have as a motto “Let the reader understand” meaning “This is going to take some study and imagination on your part, reader.”

Also, as I grew in my experience of God’s love and my understanding of God’s character, the literal interpretation of events in the Bible became less crucial to my faith. I had existential experiences of God in my life that pointed me toward seeing the whole of the Bible as the record of others’ experiences of God. The religious communities who discerned what should be in the Bible seemed to me to have chosen a collection that requires reverent imagination to reconcile together. I also became convinced that we cannot read innocently, or in other words, without the pressures of our upbringing and our experience and our allegiances, and thus that before accepting any one reading, it must be tested against the whole Bible, and particularly against the character and teaching of Jesus.

For me, the book of Daniel presents all of the textual problems that previously I could barely acknowledge.  According to The Jewish Study Bible, it has two parts: legends of Daniel and other Jewish heroes in the royal courts and four apocalyptic visions. Complicating the matter is the fact that both Hebrew and Aramaic are used, but do not define the boundary between the two parts. The first part probably circulated orally in the 4^th to 2^nd centuries BCE, and the second part likely dates to the last year of the Maccabean revolt (164 BCE) (JSB, 1640). As with other apocalyptic literature, the scholarly understanding is that they are written after the facts they describe, a symbolic recounting of the history that gives credence to the prophecies about the future (JSB, 1642).  Robert Alter points out the similarities between Daniel and the Apocrypha apocalyptic texts, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, all written in the 2^nd century BCE (Writings, 747). 

Jewish commentary notes the occurrence for the first and only time in the Jewish Scriptures of the idea of personal resurrection in Daniel 12:2-3. There is also an emphasis on the faithful few, and a judgment separating those who deserve reward from those who deserve disgrace.  This resurrection was a tenet of faith for the Pharisees of Jesus’s time and persists in some Jewish sects to the present.

Jewish and Christian commentators see different things in this book. Christians have seen prefigurations of Christ; Jewish rabbis have seen the book as a symbolic description of the exilic past and present threats (1642). Thus, the Jewish Scriptures categorize Daniel with “The Writings,” while the Christian Scriptures place it among the prophetic books. This reflects how I understand what goes into the act of reading and understanding: we are unavoidably biased in how we interpret what we read, even when we try very hard to be neutral. So it interests me even more to see what Jesus emphasizes out of Daniel and how he appears to understand it.

So back to Jesus referencing “the Abomination of Desolation.” The first reference is in Daniel 9:27. During the first year of Darius, the Mede, Daniel prays for compassion on his people, repents on their behalf, reminds God of the despair of the chosen people.  While he is praying, Gabriel comes and gives him insight into the destiny of his people. They will have “70 weeks” to restrain transgression, seal up sins, make atonement, bring in everlasting righteousness and anoint the holy place. After 69 weeks, the Messiah will be cut off, and a foreign prince will come to destroy the city and the sanctuary. He will in the 70^th week stop the offerings, “and on the wing of abomination will come one who makes desolate, even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed, is poured out on the one who makes desolate.”

Commentary in The Jewish Study Bible identifies the word Messiah, which means “anointed one,” with the high priest Onias III, killed in 171 BCE. The foreign prince is Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who placed new altar stones on the Temple altar and offered pagan sacrifices (JSB, 1660, n.). Scholars believe that a portion of the Jewish nation at the time collaborated with Antiochus. 

By referencing this history, Jesus invoked the understanding from the prophets that the Jewish people suffered invasion and exile because of their idolatry, but he also challenged the politics of his present day. The Sadducees, the priests, were willing to collaborate with Herod and Pilate, representatives of the Roman occupiers, in order to rid themselves of Jesus, fearing that Jesus himself would provoke an invasion by his talk of a kingdom. The Pharisees were willing to cooperate with the Sadducees, their religious opponents, in order to rid themselves of Jesus, who consistently provoked them by pointing out how their outward pious observances covered inward corruption and compromise. Jesus foresaw that their efforts to preserve the political and religious status quo would in the near future be desolated by invasion and ruin. Jesus also contributed  to the interpretation that the Messiah referenced in Daniel applied to him also as God’s anointed one. Death is the fate of God’s anointed ones who stand in the way of political and religious self-perpetuation and self-aggrandizement.

During the reign of Cyrus the Persian, Daniel previews (or reviews) the shifting empires of the area. A particularly evil king, a usurper of power, will lose a battle, and take his disappointment out on the people of the holy covenant. “And forces from him will arise, desecrate the sanctuary fortress, and do away with the regular sacrifice. And they will set up the abomination of desolation” (Daniel 11:31). And he will entice those irreligious away from the covenant but the people who know their God will display strength and take action.

This again details the rise and course of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (JSB, 1664), including the Jewish sympathizers who enable him to take over the Temple worship and the Maccabees who “take action” to avenge the desecration.

This next passage comes toward the end of Daniel, where the writing has moved from the symbolic review of history into apocalyptic prophecy. The shift occurs at Daniel 11:40, with the phrase, “At the time of the end.” The events described from here to the end of Daniel have no historical reference, making this a foretelling of the future, in which a major battle will occur in the area near Jerusalem. A time of great suffering will occur, the worst since there was a nation. Wickedness and goodness will be separated and appear in clarity. When the power of the holy people is shattered, the events are completed. Daniel does not understand, and asks what will be the final end. “Many will be purged, purified and refined; but the wicked will act wickedly, and none of the wicked will understand, but those who have insight will understand. And from the time that the regular sacrifice is abolished, and the abomination of desolation is set up, there will be 1290 days” (Daniel 12:11).

Perhaps Jesus was foretelling the Roman invasion in 70 CE as a fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy. At the same time, Jesus’s quotation alludes to the historical abomination of desolation, the idolatrous profanation of the holy place by a political leader, supported in his despicable action by some of the chosen people. It is possible that Jesus used the historical (and possible future) profanation as a metaphor for the way he saw the religious establishment of his day profaning the Temple by making it a “den of thieves.” Perhaps also Jesus was thinking about how his own person would be violated and destroyed at the behest of Jewish leaders using the tools of the Romans. This possibility resonates with Jesus’s words as reported in other gospels, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” referring, as other gospel writers say, to his own body.

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 6

One Misunderstanding after Another

After Jesus had chided the disciples for worrying about having literal bread, and he had healed a blind man, they walk along through the villages of Caesarea Philippi. He asked them what they think about him. Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” 

Jesus followed this up in a way that surprised his disciples. He told them plainly that the Christ, the Son of Man (Jesus’s preferred title for himself), must suffer and be rejected and killed, only to be resurrected on the third day. Peter objected, and Jesus treated his objection as he did the temptations of the devil in the desert. All this must have been very surprising to the disciples and likely hurtful to Peter.  

I wonder if this relates directly to the two-part healing of the blind man, especially after Jesus pointed them towards the double meanings of his actions. At first the blind man saw unclearly, similar to their understanding of the work of the Messiah. It was not enough that they identified Jesus as the Christ because they also continued to misunderstand the work of the Christ. So Jesus went to work to clarify their vision, and they did not get it even then.

And Jesus makes it more poignant by insisting that those who want to follow him should expect their own cross, should expect to trade their whole lives in for the work of following Jesus. 

Jesus then took Peter, James, and John up the mountain where they saw him transfigured and accompanied by Moses and Elijah. They were astonished, and Peter blurted, “Let us make tabernacles here for the three of you.”

God replied, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

They did not yet understand what Jesus was telling them about dying and rising again, and they were still unable to look at the scripture with imagination, so they asked when Elijah was to come to herald the Messiah. Jesus said, “He has already come, and they killed him.” From this they could have realized that the prophecy was a parable also, and that John the Baptist had filled the function of Elijah. 

They arrived back with the other disciples to discover that a child had been brought for healing who was so oppressed by evil so that he could not speak and had dangerous seizures. The disciples could not heal him, and the father begged Jesus to intervene “if you can.” Jesus admonishes the father to have faith and then heals the boy.

When the disciples got Jesus alone, they asked why they could not cast out this evil. It is not surprising they were puzzled because earlier Jesus had given them authority to do just this (see Mark 6). Jesus responded that this kind came out only by prayer, which must have puzzled them further, and still puzzles people today.  

On the way to Capernaum, he again told them he must die and then rise again; their response this time was to talk among themselves about which of them was the greatest. Jesus had to correct their understanding of greatness by telling them that whoever wanted to be great must serve everyone else.  

So they’ve made three mistakes in understanding Jesus since the one about leaven. They refused to see that he must die, they wanted to make him an object of worship, and they thought he would set them up in a hierarchy. 

These are mistakes we still make today. We judge people based on their obedience to religious traditions. We deny the necessity of dying, the requirement to take up our own cross every day, the unavoidableness of suffering. We want to keep Jesus in a religious house where we can go to worship him. And we think Jesus set up a hierarchy.

We come to one more error, one which resonates today in the midst of our culture wars here in the United States and similar conflicts everywhere.  John told Jesus, “We found someone casting out demons in your name and we told him to stop because he wasn’t one of us.” 

This was a fraught issue, given that they had just failed to cast out a demon themselves, so it is not surprising they were unhappy to see someone else being successful. It is a human tendency also to want to keep any kind of power within one’s own in-group.  

But Jesus told them that “whoever is not against us is for us, whoever gives you water to drink because you follow me will be rewarded, whoever causes a little one who believes to stumble would be better off drowned in the sea; if your hand, foot, eye, causes you to stumble, get rid of it; better to enter God’s kingdom maimed than to be cast into Gehenna ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ For everyone will be salted with fire (Mark 9:48). 

We can learn from what Jesus says that those doing good in Jesus’s name should be encouraged to continue, that those who cause other believers to stumble would be better off dead, and if we are controlled and hindered in discipleship by our ability to control, to be mobile, or to oversee our world, we’d be better off losing all control, mobility or vision in order to be able to enter God’s kingdom.  

The quotation is from Isaiah 66:24 and is for those who rebelled against God: “For their worm shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched” and they shall be an abhorrence to all humankind. And who are those rebels? Those who perform the rituals but prefer their own way. God promises to come in fire and whirlwind and execute judgment by fire on them. I am reminded of the cautionary comment in Hebrews, “Our God is a consuming fire”  (Hebrews 12:29), and of the passages in Paul’s epistles where our works are tested by fire in the judgment. Fire and wind are purifying and sanctifying agents, as witnessed at Pentecost with the sound of a strong wind and tongues of fire. By invoking this passage in Isaiah, Jesus taught his disciples to expect that God would indeed purify and sanctify them from their dependence on religious rituals and their preference for their own way.  

Isaiah goes on to add: “But to the ones who are humble and contrite and tremble at my name, I will extend peace and I will comfort like a mother comforts and nurses her children.  I will take some of them for priests; all humankind will come to bow down before me."  

What we learn: God prefers the humble, the contrite, and those who are awed by God’s name to any who set themselves up as enforcers, or any who perform the outward signs of religion while secretly following their own lusts and disobeying, or any who simply prefer their own way to God’s way. Jesus reinforces that by puncturing the disciples’ sense of being special: whoever is not against us is for us. I am not just for you twelve or seventy-two or the inner circle. 

And forbidding others to do good in Jesus’s name is like offending one of the little ones who believe in Jesus. It is a serious crime against life.

Jesus continually corrected the disciples’ misunderstandings to emphasize to them that they had to embrace suffering and humility and graciousness in order to follow him.