Jesus and His Bible, Part 21

Agony and Trust

The gospel of Mark propels Jesus through his trial before the religious leaders to his appearance before Pilate, the release of Barabbas, the sentence of crucifixion, and his torture by the Roman soldiers. Then Jesus carried his cross as far as he could until the soldiers pressed Simon of Cyrene into service to carry it the rest of the way. 

As Jesus hung above them on the cross, with the inscription THE KING OF THE JEWS over his head, the soldiers below divided up his garments. Then Mark quotes the Jewish Testament for only the second time as narrator: “they ‘divided up his garments among themselves, casting lots for them’” (Psalm 22:19), and then “those passing by were…’wagging their heads’ (Psalm 22:8). These quotations are irresistible to the narrator as deriving from from Psalm 22 which Jesus quoted from the cross.

Years ago, I heard Brendan Manning preach on this moment in Jesus’s dying, and I think what he said set me off on this whole study of the scriptures Jesus quoted and how knowing their context lights up aspects of Jesus’s interactions that would otherwise remain obscure.  

What I took from what Brendan said is this: Many people think when they read what Jesus said at the moment of his dying, that God abandoned him. This is understandable, given that Jesus “cried out with a loud voice, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:34). From this understanding has arisen the notion that when Jesus took on himself the sins of the world, God could no longer look on him or be in his presence. In this understanding, God turned his back on Jesus because of our sin which he took on as his own. 

What Brendan said that changed everything for me was that when Jesus quoted Psalm 22, he brought into the event the entire psalm. Jesus made the psalm about him, and the significance is enormous. Specifically, said Brendan, the shift of the latter half of the psalm into an assertion of trust and confidence in God was implicit from the quotation, making it clear that while Jesus truly suffered as any human being would, in the midst of agony he could still affirm his confidence in God.  It came clear to me that there was no more separation between Jesus and his Father than there is between any suffering human and God. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me”—another statement of faith in another Davidic psalm.

The editors of The Jewish Study Bible  discuss the Davidic authorship of the Psalms ascribed to him, noting: “An ancient and pervasive tradition, going back to the Bible itself, attributes the authorship of Psalms to David” (1281), and that this tradition has continued into modern times for both Jews and Christians. Certainly this would have been the tradition received by Jesus, and his quoting a David psalm is deliberate as well as appropriate to his suffering. (Modern scholars are skeptical that David wrote all the psalms attributed to him; this does not seem very relevant to the context in which Jesus grew up and learned the scriptures.)

In his anguish, Jesus cried out with this Davidic psalm to express his brokenness and isolation. However, by quoting this psalm, he also identified himself with David, an anointed one who was targeted for assassination by King Saul. a king who also faced abandonment by his people on occasion, It is possible that in this quotation, Jesus asserted again his vocation as the anointed one of God and the son of David, in fact the true King of the Jews.

The psalm begins with the psalmist’s lament that he feels God to be far away from him in his time of dire need.  “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from my deliverance and from the words of my groaning” (Psalm 22:1). And he continues in that sorrow and despair for nearly half the psalm until a shift occurs in verse 22.  Robert Alter translates that verse this way, “Rescue me from the lion’s mouth. And from the horns of the ram You answered me” (The Hebrew Bible: The Writings, 68).  Alter’s use of past tense goes against the majority of translators, who make it parallel to the first half of the verse: Rescue me…Answer me.  However, Alter justifies his use of the past tense as a literal translation of the received text, and writes “perhaps the verb in the past tense is intended as a compact turning point: God has indeed answered the speaker’s prayer” (69, n.).  

Following that shift, the psalm becomes one of praise, the speaker calling all people to praise the Lord.  God “has not spurned nor has despised the affliction of the lowly, and has not hidden His face from him; when he cried out to Him, He heard” (Psalm 22:25, tr. Alter, Writings 69).  To see this affirmation implicit in the first cry of agony means that God did not abandon Jesus at his lowest point. When Jesus cried out, God heard him. And we, in our small flawed selves, can with confidence know that God does not and will not abandon us either, no matter how alone or agonized  we feel.

Additionally, if we read to the end of Psalm 22, we see again the vision of a humanity reconciled to God. “And all the families of the nations will worship before thee; for the Kingdom is the Lord’s, and he rules over the nations.” Even the dead will bow before him, which, writes Alter, “is unusual because a reiterated theme in Psalms is that the dead, mute forever, cannot praise God” (n., 69)  But for a Christian reading this through the lens that Jesus spoke truth about the resurrection of the dead, it is the most natural and hopeful vision possible.

As a literary scholar, I have frequently looked at the context of allusions and quotations writers incorporate for enlightenment and expansion of the text before me. This is why Brendan Manning’s exposition stopped me in my complacent assumption that Jesus’s quotations of his Bible say only what they appear to say. It seems completely reasonable to me now to assume instead that they said far more to his scripturally alert audience than they appear to say, and these reverberations account in part for the hostility with which religious leaders met Jesus. 

In this specific instance, the gulf between thinking that God abandoned Jesus because of sin and thinking that Jesus invoked the trusting and even confident ending of Psalm 22 is enormous. God can look on sinful persons, God loves sinful persons, God hears sinful persons when they cry out their distress, and God will save them. We have only to look at the flawed humans in Jesus’s Bible to see this is true.

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.”

The Law Is Nailed to the Cross

Preached at South Salem Friends Church
May 21, 2017

I’m a missionary kid. My parents went to central Africa, right at the end of WW II. I was born in Kansas, but went back with them at 6 months old. Eventually, they put me in a School for Missionary Children, a boarding school. I was seven.

At boarding school, I had to make my bed, tidy my drawers and surface spaces, dust and sweep my room every morning. While I was in classes, my dorm mother inspected the rooms, and if they were not up to her standards, we came back to find our names in the doghouse. We had to clean it to passing standards right away.

If we got put in the doghouse three successive days, we were confined to our rooms for the time between school and supper. I can’t remember what happened if our tidiness still didn’t meet standards, but I’m guessing it involved more of the same.

It was embarrassing to be put in the doghouse and have the fact posted in public. But even worse was the consequence for wetting the bed. My roommate was a chronic bed-wetter, and every morning she had to drag her soiled sheets up to the laundry room and wash them out by hand. Again a public event. One night I had a bloody nose and had the same consequence. I told everyone who would listen that it was a bloody nose, not wetting the bed. This public humiliation was hard to bear.

And once in school, still seven years old, I didn’t have my homework done. I was so afraid of the teacher’s response that I wet myself, and the urine ran into a puddle under my chair. But I remember in this case that the teacher scolded the boy who laughed at me and made him clean it up, and she sent me to the dorm to change my clothes without berating me.  After school, she asked me why I was so frightened, and I explained that I had heard her scold a different boy who didn’t do his homework and threaten him with a spanking, and so I expected the same. She said, "He almost never does his homework."

And that same year, I deliberately broke a rule by reading a Nancy Drew mystery under my covers with the flashlight after lights out. My roommate told on me, and I had the book confiscated and was in significant trouble.

This is vivid to me because at seven, I entered a system of law different from what I had previously experienced. I didn’t know before that time that I should make my bed. I doubt if I knew how to make it, even. I didn’t know about homework. Learning to read with my mother had been a game. I was unaware of obligation, to a large extent, though of course my parents had a few rules. And since at home we had to turn off our electricity at 9 p.m. or so, I may have been reading by flashlight without penalty before I went off to boarding school.

Now the apostle Paul has some interesting things to say about sin and law in Romans 5:12-21:

I need to make some things clear, says Paul.

Before a command was given, sin was in the world, but it wasn’t counted against anyone.

(To connect this to my story, my not making my bed was not a disgrace before I went to a school with rules.)

Paul says: Sin is not part of the reckoning without law. However, until God gave the Law to Moses, death had the upper hand even over those who did not directly disobey God’s command as Adam did.

(For me as a little girl, even though I wasn’t penalized for messiness before I went to school, there was in fact messiness, and someone had to clean it up. Messiness does rule if no one cleans. And when there is a rule against messiness, shame arises. And shame is a kind of death.)

In fact, the Law came in so that we humans could see how sinful we are, how prone to error; but where sin increased, grace hyper-increased, grace filled and overflowed the deficit caused by sin.

Adam is a prefiguring of Jesus Christ In his effect on those who came after.

And if Adam involved all humanity in sin and death, how much more does Jesus involve all humanity in the grace of God. Adam’s trespass brought a condemning judgment, but Jesus’s free gift brings many trespasses into favorable judgment.

Just as through one human, sin, error, trespass, disobedience came into the harmony of the cosmos, with sin came death, and death passed through all humans because all sinned—to repeat: if by one man, Adam, death ruled over humanity, how much more will life gain the upper hand, and people will receive abundance of grace and the gift of being set right with God and will reign in life by the one man, Jesus.

Therefore, as by the disobedience of one man all were condemned, so now by the obedience of one man all are set right with God and brought into life.

  

So just as sin has ruled through death, even more grace rules because grace makes people who they are meant to be even into eternal life.

Paul is very repetitive about how grace through Jesus Christ dominates and dismantles the law and with it shame. But it’s hard to imagine living without rules. So who can we look at to see what that kind of life is like? We can look to Jesus.

Jesus himself said, I have come not to blow up or break apart the law, but to demonstrate what it looks like when someone understands its true intent and fulfills that intent. Matt 5:17-18 (fulfilled = completed, filled up, satisfied, accomplished) Paul, reflecting on the work Jesus did, said, “Christ in his flesh abolished the law” (Eph. 2:15).

This is what it looks like for Jesus to fulfill the Law: Jesus and his disciples were not scrupulous about following the law to wash up before eating. Jesus violated Sabbath restrictions and had the nerve to say that both he and his Father were still working. He said work done to help was holy and not a violation of the Sabbath laws. Jesus said that God had set up Sabbath laws for the welfare of humans, rather than creating humans so they could obey Sabbath laws. You break Sabbath in order to circumcise, to cut a person up; yet you want to kill me for breaking Sabbath to make a person completely whole (John 7:22-23).

Jesus touched the dead and the lepers. Both made him unclean—unable to participate in temple worship. The same is true for the woman who was bleeding.

Jesus did not condemn a woman taken in adultery, stoning her to death as the law required, but instead told her not to make that mistake again. Jesus called the Pharisees to account for their marriages and the hardness of heart that destroyed their married unions, but when he met the Samaritan woman, he brought her serial marriages into the light but did not scold or condemn or shame her.

Jesus consistently told people to examine their own hearts and behavior before judging how others were being obedient. Did Moses give you the Law, and none of you keep it (John 7:19).

The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (John 1:17).

Whoever loves another fulfills the Law, and love works no harm for another (Romans 13:8-10).

Jesus showed us what it means to love another and thus fulfill, or fill up, or satisfy, the Law.

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

Paul says that the Law is useful like a schoolmaster.  The Law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, but now we are children of God by faith, and in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, but all are one in Christ (Gal 3:24-29).  We are dead to the Law by the body of Christ; we are delivered from the Law (Romans 7:4-6). 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 (Heb 7:18-19).

The fact that we can’t keep the Law, in other words, creates in us the awareness of ourselves as sinners in need of grace, and the need for grace drives us to trust in the character and work of Jesus Christ. And when we put our trust in what Jesus has accomplished through his death and resurrection, and we trust God’s Holy Spirit to lead us every day, we live in freedom, not under the law.

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 reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law (Gal 2:16-21).

Keeping the Law does not justify, but we are justified freely by grace through the redemption accomplished by Jesus; justified by faith in Jesus, not by works of the Law (Romans 3:20-24, 28).

The Hebrew and Greek words we often translate as “sin” have in them a number of pictures that help us understand this theological concept.

Sin is To Miss the Way, to Stumble, to Wander, to Misstep, to Slip, to Stumble.

Sin is To Miss the Mark, to Miss the Goal.

Sin is To Fail at the Assignment, To Avoid, to Neglect, to Overstep.

Sin is To Run the Wrong Way when Terrified, To Lose Oneself.

Sin is To Bend, to Make Crooked, to Distort God’s Truth.

Sin is To Overturn God’s truth, To Trespass, to Rebel, to Break Away From, to Defect.

You can see that “sin”—or trespass, or iniquity, or transgression, or other synonym—is a living word that works on several levels of intentionality. 1) We can try to do right and end up messing things up even if we have given ourselves to God, and 2) we can decide to do wrong, and 3) we can deliberately assert that we belong to ourselves, not to God. All are kinds of sin. The last is most dangerous.

As John says in the first letter, if anyone says she or he is without sin, they lie. But if we confess or own up to how we have messed things up and gone the wrong way and avoided what we know God wants from us, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sin and clean us up and set us straight. This verse is about how those who want to belong to God can keep themselves moving with rather than against God.

There is a path God wants us to travel through our lives; there is a purpose toward which God wants us to aim; there are things God wants us to do; there are things God wants to make plain to us; there are principles God wants us to live by. What are these?  Jesus said the two great commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. How do we do this? We live out of love as much as we can, we ask God how to live out of love and we do what God puts before us to do, and we try not to harm our neighbor or ourselves. And when we fail, we confess it to God and let God work to help us do better the next time we have an opportunity to show love. We live under the law of liberty and we count on our gracious God to help us use our freedom lovingly.

Speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty (James 2:12).

For in Jesus Christ all that counts is faith working through love (Gal 5:5-9, 13-25).

God chose to birth us through the word of truth; we need to humbly accept that word which is planted in us and which can save us, and obey it, the perfect law of liberty; be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry (James 1:18-25).

But if we really are living and walking in the Light, as He is the Light, we have true fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ the Son cleanses us from all sin and guilt. If we say we have no sin, we delude and lead ourselves astray, and the Truth is not in us. If we admit we have sinned and confess our sins, He is true to his own nature and promises and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness  (1 John 1:7-9).

I started out talking about the shame of finding myself in the doghouse because I couldn’t measure up, and about being humiliated for my human frailty. I added in the fact that sometimes I deliberately broke a rule. However, I did not want to own myself rather than to belong to God. This kind of active rebellion can occur in church-goers and in atheists, and it prevents the rebels from knowing that God is Love.

The Law helps us realize we have missed the mark and are sinners in need of grace. However, when the Law brings us to the point of trusting Jesus, it has done its work and has no more to say to us. We know that Jesus is the answer to our frailty, our imperfect attempts to do the right thing, our mistakes, and even our deliberate wrong-doing. We know that when we come to Jesus, he does not condemn, even when he does instruct. Sadly, we can also turn our backs on God and insist on owning ourselves, of earning our own way, and when we do this, we cannot grow in grace and we rely on keeping rules rather than obeying the Holy Spirit of God.

Let us give ourselves to God, accept the grace Jesus gives, and live guided by the Holy Spirit. Let us embrace our freedom to live out love for God and neighbor.

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Psalm 119: Active Meditation and Doing God's Will

What do you think of when you hear the word “meditate”?  I think of emptying one’s mind of busy everyday thoughts in order to allow it to fill up with the awareness of God.  I think of sitting still, of keeping quiet. I don’t think of singing, complaining, talking to myself, or turning something over and over in my mind.  These seem so active, and my impression of meditating is more passive.  Yet the word used in Psalm 119 that is translated (NKJV) as “meditate” is siyach, and it has in it these very active ideas. So when the Psalmist says, “I will meditate,” the meaning is more like, “I keep on turning this over in my mind; I sing it out; I talk about it; I talk to myself about it; I commune with it; I complain about it; I muse on it.”  In its heart, the word has the idea of germinating, putting forth shoots and buds, bringing forth, producing, daring, lifting up. I am so taken with the interactive nature of the word “meditate” with the end result of life, growth, productiveness, adventure. This is not what I expected.

Here are the verses from Psalm 119 (NKJV) that include this word.

119:15 I will meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways.

119:23 Princes also sit and speak against me, but your servant meditates on your statutes.

119:27 Make me understand the way of your precepts; so shall I meditate on your wonderful works.

119:48 My hands also I will lift up to your commandments, which I love, and I will meditate on your statutes.

119:78 Let the proud be ashamed, for they treated me wrongfully with falsehood; but I will meditate on your precepts.

119:148 My eyes are awake through the night watches, that I may meditate on your word.

Since the Hebrew word is so interactive, I’ve rewritten the verses to incorporate that sense.

I watch all night, wide awake, complaining about what you have said; singing about what you have said; pondering what you have said; talking with myself about what you have said.  I muse on it until it germinates, brings forth new life in me, helps me to dare to be obedient. 

I keep on pondering, thinking about, talking through, musing on your assignments and charges, even complaining about them, and thus I keep my attention on your path, your way of living.

Leaders badmouthed me and threatened me, but I am your slave, and I keep on thinking about, singing about, complaining about, talking with myself about the limits and boundaries you have set.

Keep on disconcerting those who are puffed up, the presumptuous ones; they twisted me up for no reason; but I keep on focusing on what you’ve given me to do, thinking it through, talking with myself about it until it comes to life and I dare to stand up and obey. 

Help me discern the direction of what you have given me to do; so shall I keep on pondering, singing about, talking about your continual wonders, your strength, your mysteries, how you are different from everything and everyone else.

I keep on carrying your orders in my hands, orders I have loved to carry out, and I continue to think about and ponder and pray about what you tell me to do until it bursts into life in me, a life that stands up and dares to obey you.

These verses remind me so much of the life of Jesus. Jesus interacted with God’s words to him. His meditation is not passive, but passionate. He fought the devil in the desert in order to understand God’s word, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” He discerned the kernel of falseness in the devil’s suggestions of how to be the son of God. Jesus’s life illustrates the fact that obedience to God includes standing up to presumptuousness, to arrogance, to power, daring to speak the truth, respecting the boundaries set up by God.

Jesus knew his calling was to live in direct obedience to every word of God. Everything God told him to do, he did, and he did nothing that was not directed by God. “If you want to enter into life, keep (attend carefully to) the commandments (the orders).” Do what God tells you to do.  (Matthew 19:17). “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in (live in, dwell in) my love, just as I keep my Father’s commandments and abide in my Father’s love.” This shows an emphasis on paying attention and obeying similar to that of the psalmist of Psalm 119.   “If you continue in (abide in) my word (what I have said), you are my disciples indeed” (John 8:31). “As the Father loves me, so I love you; continue in my love” (John 15:9).

Jesus meditated on the command of God in the garden of Gethsemane; he talked to God about it; you could say that he complained a bit when he asked whether things had to be done this way; and he expressed his willingness to do what God wanted, but he wanted to be sure. “Is this really what you mean for me to do?” he asked his Father. “Is there any other way?” Then he dared to rise up and do what his Father told him to do.

In the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood, the cross itself speaks about Jesus: “Then he stripped, he who was God almighty, the young hero, strong and resolute.  He ascended the high gallows, brave in the sight of many, when he desired to redeem humankind.” Jesus’s lifetime of paying attention to the will, the word, the command of his Father ended with the most heroic act in the history of the universe, his death that brought us all freedom and his resurrection which gives us all life.