Since the beginning of Luke's narrative of the Galilean ministry of Jesus in chapter 3 of his gospel, beginning with his baptism in the Jordan and his desert retreat, but for our purposes from the sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth (Lk. 4:16-13), the author of the third gospel is spelling out in story after story exactly what Jesus believes the mission of God to be. In the simplest terms, the care of God is showered upon all, every person is beloved, the blessings of jubilee are meant for the whole world. But this is an "opt in" jubilee, and those who have experienced bounty in their lives, or some other manifestation of jubilee economics, are bound by gratitude and family-love to share that with others. We are not to see this jubilee as meant for ourselves, or our family, or our nation alone, but for the whole human family. Jesus, soon along with the disciples, moves about the region, preaching the "good news to the poor," exorcising demons (a liberating practice which we would come to spiritualize as "redemption"), and healing (which we would come to term "salvation"). The fragment of Isaiah 61 upon which his sermon was based was meant to call to mind the whole sweep of sabbath and jubilee economics (Lev. 25: 8-24) as the intent of the "kingdom of heaven," which we, again, came to think of as a place other than where-we-are, a place where God lives. It took a while for us to start to understand that things are just fine in heaven: it's here, on earth, now, where we need to do the work of Christ. Earth too is the realm, or kingdom, or empire of God as well, only God is less like an emperor or king than the head of a family, Jesus tells us. Jesus will show the way. "Follow me," he says, to get inside this new thing God is doing. We'll bring the others along too.
Unlike Matthew who, for his more Jewish audience, edited his narrative to show Jesus as a new Moses and his followers as a new Israel (and think of "new" here as "new creation," rather than as a retread of the old), Luke wants to show Jesus as a new (different, not rivalrous or a retread) Caesar, using the infancy narrative to situate him in the Roman empire, using vocabulary ("gospel" and "peace") that was the provenance of Caesar Augustus to describe the birth of Christ, along with the ancestry of David to place him within the mythology of Israel's "once and future king." (Crossan & Borg, The First Christmas.) Luke, whose gospel continues into the second book that we know as Acts, has already seen the outcome of story of Jesus, the crucifixion and resurrection, Pentecost, the conversion of Saul, and the spread of the Way from Damascus to Rome and beyond. Among those claiming the name Christ, the titles of the emperor have been turned over to Jesus: Lord, Son of God, Prince of Peace, Light of the World. But Luke also knows that Jesus is a radically different "emperor" and radically different "God" from the emperor in Rome. Luke in his lifetime has already seen the world turned upside down, or as he puts it in the "Magnificat" overture to his gospel, "(God) has torn the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."
Our gospel this Sunday begins the "sermon on the plain." Where Matthew has Jesus do this earliest bit of teaching in an extended "sermon on the mount," pointing to the story of Moses giving to Israel the book of the law from God, Luke has the sermon take place on "level ground," a different way of seeing God and people together more in line with Jesus's egalitarian proclamation of the jubilee. These first few verses of the sermon on the plain are made up of Luke's four beatitudes, followed by four woes.
When John Kyler called me late last year to take part in the PrayTell blog's new series, "60 Second Sermons" for C year that began this past Advent, he asked me to do the sermon for this Sunday, and when I saw the gospel, I thought it was worth spending the minute tying in Luke's beatitudes with the "reversal of worlds" theme of the gospel, and also saying a word about the influence of the Deuteronomist on much of the Septuagint and therefore on the evangelists. I think we need to be careful reading these texts that we read them with the heart of Jesus, who had no problem casting aside texts and traditions that he felt did not adequately or fully represent the God whom he represented. Soon after today's gospel pericope in Luke comes the parable of the new wine and old wineskins: Jesus knows that a new proclamation of God's favor will require a new attitude about old presumptions garnered from the law and the prophets. This is not to say that it all has to be cast aside. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the counteroffensive mounted by human culture against the ideas of mutual love, hospitality to all, share resources, not to mention enemy love, will make its appearance in the Bible, right in the very place where the countercultural jubilee is announced. We want walls. We want a god who hates the same people we do. The violent god of the Caesars makes his appearance in the Bible, all the way to the book of Revelation, where he is made up to look like Jesus. But we need to keep in mind as we read that that Jesus was clear that violence is not the answer, that the sword must be put away, that service is the mark of leadership, not coercion.
The language of relationship between the god-emperors of Mesopotamia, the Assyrians, Babylonians, possibly the Sumerians before them, and kings and peoples they conquered, is found in covenants that still exist and can be read in various references. As we read them, we see how they are imitated by the covenant language of Deuteronomy. "If you do as I command," the Assyrian god-king will proclaim, that is, pay the tributes, work the land, obey the occupying forces, then your harvests will be plenty, your children happy, your barns full, your wives and daughters your joy. But if you do not do as I command, then fire will rain down on your fields, the armies of Assyria will devour you like locusts, your children split open on the rocks, your wives and daughters will be our slaves. You get the idea. Compare this to, for instance, the language in Deuteronomy 28 and 29 (and other places.) Dead ringer.
The thing is, the Bible, with the influence of the Deuteronomist front and center, is how we learned what God is like. Do good, God loves you. Do bad, you go to hell. Simple as that. Blessings for those who love God, curses for those who don't. We then started looking at the world as it is, and started making judgments on ourselves and others about who was blessed. That person has money, status, good trajectory. That person must be blessed by God. That person is sick, lost a family, had her house burned down, had a child run away. That person must have done something to deserve it. Even though that kind of judgement doesn't jibe with the teachings of Jesus about who God is, we clung to it. It works for us: we're blessed for doing good, cursed for doing evil.
There's a huge hole in the logic, though, the more we look at the world. The author of the book of Job points it out clearly. As one theologian put it, after Job, the Deuteronomist should have been erased once and for all, but it didn't happen. In fact, not even Jesus could put the Deuteronomist to bed, because the Deuteronomist is what we want to believe. But God is not like that. "Blessed are the poor," Jesus says. "Blessed are those who mourn." Jesus turns our idea of who's blessed upside down. In Luke he even makes sure we get the point by stating the other side of the coin: "Woe to the rich!" They're not blessed after all, it appears. "Woe to those who have enough to eat." However it appears, God is not on the side of those with more than their share, as long as there are those who are underserved, hungry, unhappy. God is with those people. That is what "blessed" means. (Woody Allen, I think, also struggled with this reality in his brilliant and underrated movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, which asks the question "Why do good things happen to bad people, and vice versa, and is there any punishment in this life for the most heinous of crimes (murder)?"
Jesus turns our view of who is blessed (to whom God is near and present) upside down. It has nothing to do with status, well-being, or the luck of the draw. Our psalm and first reading today, like the gospel, present what seems to be a dualistic view of life: good people prosper, bad people are ruined. But maybe it's possible to see the dualism not as a reflection of God, but as a reflection of bad choices we make. It's not God who does the cursing, who makes life woe for those who choose wealth, power, comfort, and influence, but rather it is a result of the choices they make. The thing is, this seems to go against our experience as well, if we are looking through the lens of the reign of the world (as Ezekiel puts it, the one "whose heart turns away from the Lord,"), and not of the reign of God, (the one who "who trusts in the Lord.") We don't see, in the first case, the influence we have upon the whole human family, the damage we cause by our self-interest. In the reign of God, it is always the other upon whom the gaze of our concern lies because we imitate God in loving all people, in wanting the good of all people, not just of ourselves, our family, our country.
This was the lesson of the Nazareth sermon, when Jesus's explication Isaiah savaged the expectations of his listeners, people who up to that moment had been enthralled with his preaching. They wanted confirmation bias, what they got was the gospel: the announcement of a new empire, a new king in town, who not only wasn't going to do what was expected, he wasn't even going to be a king in any recognizable way. These good citizens of Judea (and Rome) wanted nothing to do with Jesus's global view of God. They showed him to the door and then to a precipice in what seems to be a literary rehearsal of a scapegoat ritual (from the rite of atonement). Literary, because we know that there weren't any cliffs in Nazareth. Rehearsal, because we know, with Luke, that even though Jesus "passed through their midst" unharmed, there was going to come a day when he would not, and for the same reasons.
What's the lesson for us? Well, we could start by not thinking of people who are rich, well fed, happy, and unharmed as "blessed." People like most of us. We might be lucky, but blessed has nothing to do with it. "Blessed" has a different role call. The rich, well fed, and happy might be blessed when they learn to share their bounty in significant ways with those who are poor, hungry, and sorrowful. Otherwise, they're not blessed at all, at least not in those qualities. Jesus has introduced us to a world turned upside-down, where the greatest among us serve the rest, where power serves, where God, who is holy, goes to dine with sinners. We need to stop thinking like they want us to think, that we are nothing more than what we can produce and purchase, that we need to buy more things and better things to have self-esteem, that our value resides in where we were born, the color of our skin, the things we own, who our friends are. We need to stop thinking that might makes right, that "he who has the gold makes the rules," that "God is on our side," and not on the other side.
Jesus says that God is for everybody. God is like a Father, and we are all related and need to take care of each other. Jesus shows up our gods for what they are: images of ourselves, the petty despots and vengeful judges that we want to be, vested with the guns-blazing, golden-armored authority of the divine. "Blessed are the poor" means, "Think different, my friends. Follow me. We're going in the other direction. Don't be afraid, I'll go first. It's going to be better than you can imagine."
I'll leave you with the video clip of my "Sixty-second sermon." I would have started with it, but then why would you take six thousand seconds to read the rest of this stuff?
Here's what we're singing at St. Anne this week, if, for the first time in a month, crappy weather doesn't 86 rehearsal for the choir:
Entrance: How Can I Keep from Singing Part of the struggle is just to keep remembering who we are, the children of God, all of us beloved together. What makes it good news is hearing in some broken part of our lives that the doctor is in the house. We're all broken, and God is faithful, and in Christ, God in present to us in each other.
Celtic Alleluia
Preparation of Gifts: There Is a River (Manion) Tim's great gospel song of divine solidarity with human beings turns Psalm 46 is a musical post-it note that reminds us that we have nothing to fear when we stick together in our quest for peace and the promise of new world right here, on this planet.
Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)
Recessional: Canticle of the Turning ...because the Magnificat is part of the Lucan overture to the whole gospel, and nothing says "the emperor is a liar and a phony" like the song of an unmarried, pregnant teenage girl who teaches her son what power and glory really look like at the hearth of a little house in a backwater town in a third-rate province of the Roman Empire. More here in another blog post.
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