Jesus and His Bible, Part 19

 The Suffering Shepherd

The story in Mark moves from the argument about the perfume to the oncoming disaster. Judas met with the religious leaders and offered to betray Jesus. Then as Passover began, Jesus and his disciples observed the first night of Passover with a supper. Jesus told them that one of them would betray him, to that man’s harm. He blessed the bread and broke it, and said, “Take it, this is my body." Then he gave thanks for the wine, and said, “This is My blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many.” Then they sang a hymn.

On their way to the Mount of Olives, Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away, because it is written, I will strike down the shepherd and the sheep shall be scattered” (Mark 14:27). He added, “After I have been raised, I will meet you in Galilee.” But Peter and the others insisted they would stay with him.

The scripture Jesus quoted is Zechariah 13:7: “Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man my associate, declares the Lord of hosts. Strike the shepherd that the sheep may be scattered; and I will turn my hand against the little ones.”

The historical context of Zechariah is after the return of the exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem under Cyrus the Persian and the rebuilding of the temple in the 6th century BCE (Robert Alter, “Prophets,” The Hebrew Bible, A Translation with Commentary, 1193). This quotation comes midway in a prophecy that begins with Zech. 12:1. In that prophecy, Zechariah reverses the oracles against Israel to describe Israel as a bowl of poison, a burdensome stone, and a flaming torch to annihilate any invaders. God will destroy the nations coming against Jerusalem, and after that will pour out “grace and graciousness” upon David’s house and those who live in Jerusalem (Alter, “Prophets,” 1380.)  Chapter 13 goes on to promise cleansing for Israel’s offenses and impurities, the demise of false idols, and the punishing of false prophets. 

However, it pivots to this poem, which is what Jesus quotes: “Sword, rouse against My shepherd, against My companion man—said the Lord of Armies. Strike the shepherd and let the sheep be scattered, and I will bring My hand back against the shepherd lads” (Alter, “Prophets,” 1382-83).  The chapter ends with the apocalyptic vision that two-thirds of the population will die and the remaining third will be purified as if by fire, until they call out for God and say that the Lord is their God.  

This particular quotation continues Jesus’s theme of apocalypse, perhaps intensified by his foresight that he will soon suffer and die. Indeed, Christians from early times have seen in Zechariah 12:10 and 13:1 predictions about the Jews in relation to Jesus. “They will look on the one whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for him, as one mourns for an only son…in that day a fountain will be opened for sin and for impurity.” Understandably, the Jewish commentators see Zech. 12:10 as directly following from the battles and sieges foreseen early in the chapter; thus this mourning is for all their countryfolk who have died in the battle. Intriguingly, the Hebrew can be translated as singular or plural: “they shall lament to Me about those who are slain, wailing over them as over a favorite son and showing bitter grief as over a first-born” (Berlin and Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible, 1264). 

The way Jesus uses Zech. 13:7 not only references apocalyptic cleansing, but also invokes the promise of reconciliation that comes before and after this passage, so that even though a disaster is coming upon his followers, the result will be their longer-term spiritual good.

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.

Respect for the Body

1 Corinthians 6:19, 20

Preached at Newberg Friends Church, October 21, 2012

When a person dies, we can tell that something crucial is gone that we had counted on being there.  The body looks just like the person we know but the animating spirit is gone.  In physical terms, all the electrical energy that circulated through the nerves and brain and kept the lungs breathing and kept the heart pumping simply stops. Though the body is not equal to the person, yet without the body, we would never know each other.  Our bodies are not all we are, but through them we relate to each other and to God and it matters to God what we do in and with our bodies.

Our mind and spirit, we are pretty sure, depend on our bodies for their beginnings.  One of my daughters asked me when she was 2 or 3 where she had been before she was born.  I wasn’t sure which answer to give, so I gave the philosophical Idealist answer: “You were in the mind of God,” I said.  She took that in and then some time later came up with this comment about the dog: “When Dusty was in the minda God…” (I will have to add that my other daughter told me that when she was in heaven before she was born, she picked our family out as the one she wanted to come to.  This is sweet, but it creates more questions than it answers.)

Though God has known us from before time, we have not known ourselves without our bodies. But we do start to know our bodies very early, and one of the joys of grandparenting and parenting is watching babies learn to live into their bodies and their minds. And somewhere, we watch babies act in ways contrary to their best interest and contrary to what their parents tell them to do, and they learn they have their own separate will.

I may be making this too simple, but the entire rest of human life is learning to use that separate will.  And we exercise our will in how we use our bodies.

The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being….Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” …So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man….And the man and the woman were both naked, and were not ashamed.

The story of sin’s entry into human experience is in part a story of becoming ashamed of being human, and particularly ashamed of the body.  The exact form of the temptation to disobey was to become like God.  Adam and Eve rejected their status and limitations as human beings. After Adam and Eve disobeyed the one rule God gave them, their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked,  They knew as God knows just how far from being godlike they were.  Therefore, they covered themselves with clothing made of leaves because they were ashamed and afraid of being human.

However, Jesus never depicts the body as despicable or its vulnerabilities or imperfections as shameful. Remember the many times Jesus touched the sick and disabled, the lepers and the other unclean.  Remember that Jesus said that the man born blind was not born that way because of sin, either his own (from before birth!) or his parents’ sin.  Instead, he was born blind so that the glory of God could show up in him. I think the glory of God is not the healing, but the condition of his heart which was ready to meet Jesus. His good heart is revealed by the healing and he stands up for Jesus the son of God.  (In contrast, the man by the pool turns Jesus in to the religious leaders after he figures out who he is.)

God wants us to live fully into our humanity. And Jesus came to show us how to live fully into our humanity: namely, to live in mindful listening and consistent obedience to God.

Personally, I have persisted in a course of action that in my gut (note the body’s usefulness) I knew was unwise or downright wrong.  I ignored the warning signs from my body—the physical symptoms of heartburn, stomach ache, tight muscles, headache, and so on.  Our bodies are one of the ways God talks to us:  you’re putting yourself in danger, our stomachs tell us; you’re still angry, insomnia tells us; you’re making your job too important, our ulcers remark. One way we misuse our will is to ignore the truth we can learn from our bodies.

The body has its own wisdom, instinctive, intuitive.  We need to listen to what it says.  The listening is done with our minds, of course, our imaginations, but the attitude we preserve is one of respect.  Otherwise, we can pervert our common sense, logic, all kinds of useful thinking skills to justify a course of action that our intuition, based more than we like to admit on the body, rebels against.

Jesus calls us to account for our tendency to blame our sin on the body in Matthew 5:29-30. Jesus knows that the source of sin is the will, not the body.  People sin because they choose to. To those who blame the body because they lust, Jesus said, “Cut off whatever causes you to sin.” Just how much of the body will one have to remove in order to quit lusting after what God does not will for us to have? My opinion is that cutting off parts of my body to prevent my sinning will work only if I cut off my head.

C. S. Lewis said in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy that his body never led him very far astray by itself.  It was his imagination that got him into serious trouble.  By imagination, he meant the whole human capability of imagining circumstances different from reality and choosing to prefer that illusion.  The first illusion depicted in Genesis is imagining being like God, or being God.  When we place our will in the place of God’s will, what we want is more important than what God wants.  This, put simply, is idolatry. 

Matthew 15:10-20

Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles….Do you not see that whatever a person eats enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what a person says arises from the mind, the will, the character of that person, and this is what pollutes a person. As a result, out of the inner self come evil or distorted thoughts and arguments, murder, adultery, illicit sexual intercourse, theft, false witness, speech that destroys another’s reputation or misrepresents God. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.” The sin that pollutes us starts in the will, not in the body.

Jesus said to Nicodemus that a human must be born again in order to enter the Kingdom of God.  That new birth includes both spirit (the same word as breath) and body.  We may be entirely wrong to think that spirit exists separate from body.

In a letter to an early church, Paul calls the body “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (I Cor. 6:19-20).  Christians talk about God living in their hearts, which is clearly a metaphor; but what if this temple phrase is literally true?  What if God dwells in our bodies?  That makes them holy places, inside and outside.  We can’t put God out of our minds and do irresponsible or wicked things with our bodies or with the bodies of other people.  I think of this when I worry about how workers in other countries or even in our own are treated.  I don’t want my wardrobe to be made by mistreated factory workers.  I think about the body’s holiness when I evaluate addictions.  I don’t want to destroy my body by using food, exercise, or chemicals that excite or soothe my mind at the expense of my body.  I think about the body’s holiness when I am confronted with abusiveness.  Violating another person’s body is violating a holy dwelling where God lives. (As an acquaintance once said about the practice of female circumcision, “I can’t make moral space for that.”) God comes with us wherever we go and whatever we do, and God inhabits those we meet as well. 

Romans 12 helps us recognize that because of what Jesus has already accomplished through identifying with our humanity, our sin, and our death, and through prefiguring the resurrection we all hope for, we are free to offer our whole selves, body and spirit, to the service of God. We don’t have to be pawns of the forces that dominate our social world. As we obey God with our bodies, we worship God in spirit and in truth. God renews our minds so we can see clearly the good, acceptable, complete actions that are the will of God for us.

Jesus consistently locates sin in the will and diagnoses a sinful will by looking at what people do with their bodies.  Matthew 25:31-46

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. Just as you did it to one of the least of these members of my family, you did it to me. My Father blesses you. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

Just as you did not do it unto one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment. In John 5:28, 29, Jesus adds that when the dead hear his voice they will come out and those who have done good will be resurrected into life.  So it really does matter how we treat other people, how we treat other people’s bodies.

Jesus rewards kindness to other human beings in their bodies. Kindness has in its heart the recognition that others are the same kind as we; and the Golden Rule and the law of love pertain.  How do we want to be treated when we are hungry, thirsty, homeless, defenseless against the elements, sick, imprisoned?  What can we do by means of our own bodies to make another’s life more bearable?

So if I were to modify the Northwest Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice statement about respect for the body in any way, I would add to it the emphasis that we respect the bodies of others as temples of God, also.

In Genesis, God breathed into human bodies the breath of life. When Jesus appeared to the disciples in his resurrected body, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit of God now lives inside our bodies, as intimately as the air we breathe.  

Christians live in a mystery; we do not earn the grace of God by being good or by doing good deeds.  Rather, by believing what Jesus has taught us about God by Jesus’s own life, death, and resurrection, and by trusting that Jesus has brought us through death into new life, we are free to live as Jesus did, in complete confidence that God is good and loving toward us.  The Holy Spirit breathes in us and guides us daily into knowing and doing good. 

Paul teaches what Jesus teaches:  food is for the belly, the belly is for food, both will come to an end in death; however, the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body.  We are the limbs of Jesus, the members of His body.  Therefore, what we do with our bodies makes a difference.  In John 9, Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” And in Matthew 5, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world; let your light shine before others so they may see your good works and glorify our Father in heaven.” 

Paul refers to the body as a tent (II Cor. 4:18-5:1, 4). Thinking of it as a tent, we recognize its temporary status.  We are always camping out in it. We can repair it, we can take good care of it, but we can’t keep it from wearing out, blowing away in a storm, or collapsing.  Gravity holds it on the earth, but it also drags it down, given enough time. Practically, this means that we have to do maintenance—reasonable exercise, healthy diet, occasional patching (I heard a woman once say that after forty, it’s patch, patch, patch), but it also means we don’t expect it to look new forever.  Christians believe that the tent is not finally transcended in death; instead, it is replaced by a more permanent house, a new body.

We need to pay the right kind of attention to the body, our own and others’. We neither worship the body nor dismiss it.  We recognize that the body is how we stay connected with this planet and other people. God’s presence in each human being gives each body eternal value. We take appropriate care of the body, both our own and others’, preserving the body’s wholeness and holiness, and we listen to the body when it helps us recognize truth.   We use our bodies now to obey the Holy Spirit of God who lives in us, and we look forward to joining Jesus in the resurrection.