From Dr. Bob Cornwall on the gospel lesson for Pentecost 23C, Luke18:9-14:
In light of all that has been happening of late, it might be difficult for some to be sympathetic to the plight of the tax collector. He and his cronies in the government should beg for mercy!
This is a very interesting Adventurous Lectionary.
We often read the Psalms legalistically, i.e. all the discussion of the law leads us to believe we’re talking about some sort of righteousness by works, or better earning God’s favor through accomplishing certain works.
If we read Psalm 1 as a sort of flat discourse rather than as structured poetry, we can easily read it in support of such a mission. After all, righteous people who do certain things are blessed, and wicked people who do certain other things are not.
But Psalm 1 is, in fact, structured poetry, and it does not intend to make a catalog of good actions that one should do in order to be regarded as righteous. Rather, it contrasts two ways of life. The first is the way of life of the righteous person, and the other the way of life of the wicked, characterized by a lack of what the righteous person has. That particular element is torah or instruction?God’s instruction. The work of God’s Torah in the life of the righteous is not complete. He meditates in that instruction day and night. The Torah forms these righteous people into a community united in following that particular way.
This contrast is emphasized by the use of ki’ ‘im in Hebrew, which occurs only here in the Psalter (Bob MacDonald, Seeing the Psalter, forthcoming from my company Energion Publications, 2013).
In contrast, without that Torah, the wicked are like chaff and are blown away by the wind. They lack that community and therefore they lack its blessings.
This is not about admission requirements. This is about the choice of the way. It evokes Deuteronomy 30:15ff. “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity …” This comes not from a sermon preached to the already righteous, but rather from an invitation to people who had need of that Torah. It was an act of God’s grace.
In the same way this invitation to contrasting ways of life comes to each one of us.
There are times when I understand why we select verses to read in the Lectionary, and there are times when I don’t. In this case, I don’t. We have James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a. I don’t see adequate reason not to read 3:13 – 4:10 as a whole, and if I were to preach/teach on this passage I would definitely include the other texts. I do appreciate the inclusion of the buildup (3:13-18) which tells us the importance of 4:1-10.
This isn’t too long to read as a whole. Verses 4-6 provide additional understanding as to why these conflicts take place and what to do about them. Version 8b-10 tell us something about how to get away from the problem.
This passage has created quite a few problems over the years. There are women who feel really oppressed by it. Others feel this truly describes the perfect woman and try to get women (and girls) to live up to it. I encountered these various attitudes in a discussion group yesterday.
My strong suggestion is to read this more as satire. The author is pointing out how much of the actual work that goes on is taken care of by the women, especially the wives of the powerful, while the men hang out at the city gate, which was where the politics goes on. Then, as now, a person of means was in a much better position to work the political circuit because you needed to be there when things happened. The husband of the woman described here was in a good position to be politically powerful. He looked terribly wise, but who was actually doing the work?
One of my pastors, Geoffrey Lentz, suggested that this passage is intended to tie in with lady wisdom introduced early in the book. (He didn’t claim this as original, but he’s my footnote!) Thus the “woman of power” is, in some sense, God. I tend to agree with him on this, though only as the intention of the redactor, and as a canonical read of the text.
By the nature of Proverbs, as well as the indications in the text itself, this is a separate piece of the collection. In other words, we have no context for the words as they were originally presented. They might well have been an independent poem. In fact, I would suspect they were. But why include them in Proverbs, and specifically as the last portion? I think that positioning tends to support the idea that this is Lady Wisdom in some sense.
However you do it, make sure not to make this passage a club to beat other people with. Women have enough expectations placed on them.
I do recall my mother bringing this up at our wedding. We had arranged for a multigenerational blessing. My mother would say a few words, then our children would do so. I know Jody got tense when my mother read a portion of this passage. But then she turned it around. Her point was that a man needs to earn the Proverbs 31 woman. What sort of a man can deserve this woman? Good question, I think!
Bruce Epperly comments on the lectionary passages for next Sunday (Epiphany 3B), which are extraordinarily well suited for a process theologian. Well worth checking out!
Bruce Epperly has an excellent set of comments on the texts for Advent 1B at Process and Faith. In particular take a look at the discussion of our perception that God has abandoned us in the comments on Isaiah 64.
But are we abandoned, and what would it mean?
Perhaps, as later Jewish mysticism suggests, God must withdraw for creation to burst forth in creativity and freedom.
Read the rest . . .
The whole passage (2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10) is great, but I’m just going to link to a few notes I’ve written on the key verse in 2 Corinthians 5:21.
The way you understand the phrase “righteousness of God” will color much of the rest of your understanding of Paul, I think.
In a previous post I mentioned that one problem we have with understanding forgiveness is that we tend to make excuses and to blame others rather than feel guilt on our own account. Everything is OK, and we’re “not too bad.”
We also lose the impact of some of the richest texts about salvtion, because we lack that sense of inevitability in judgment and the results that are sure to follow sin. Read 2 Kings 24 as Jehoiakim serves the king of Babylon for three years and then rebels. Jehoiachin replaces him and escapes with his life because he surrenders himself to Babylon.
You might think this meant some sort of forgiveness, but no! Look at the list of things that happen after this surrender. Treasure is taken, people are taken, a new puppet king is put in Jehoiachin’s place. There is, in effect, a new covenant. This covenant is not like the old one–it is worse. When Zedekiah rebels as well (see 2 Kings 25) the entire nation is taken into exile.
Again, there is a new covenant with the remnant, but again the new covenant is much worse.
The key fact here, one which would have been well known and expected throughout the Ancient Near East, is that a new covenant that replaced a broken one was bound to be worse.
So here comes God. “I’m going to make a new covenant. It won’t be like the old one.” In our New Testament mentality in which all is better, we hear that as a prediction of good things–and indeed it was. But to the hearers, hearing the “new covenant language” and then the accusation that they had broken the old one would have been a terrifying thing. New covenants that replaced broken ones were not better–they were always worse.
But then we have the working of God’s grace. The new covenant, even though it replaced a broken one, even though the old one made God Israel’s “lawful lord” (I prefer this to “husband” on grounds of context, although there are good linguistic arguments in favor of husband) and Israel had rebelled. Thus the expectation could be darkness, destruction, and gloom.
But instead, we have a new covenant that is better than the old, that makes new people who will be obedient. Instead of just punishment, we have grace, empowering grace, that makes each one know what is right and wrong. Goodness is placed within.
Isn’t grace powerful?
Darrel Bock (430-433) combines John 3:1-21 into one section, titled “What Do the Signs Show? Jesus and Nicodemus”.
John’s next account is of an evening visit by a leader of Judaism. Here, outside the tensions of a public confrontation, in the quiet of table talk, the two eras meet, one old and the other emerging. …
I find the word “emerging” in those circumstances as kind of interesting, though I doubt Bock meant by it what I tend to hear. Very often we don’t understand just how revolutionary Jesus was in his impact. Even those who think he meant nothing more than a bit of reform of Judaism must admit that his followers went on into some very revolutionary changes, probably less acceptable than those “emerging” leaders plan for Christianity today.
We look at the changes Jesus brought, and we would like those to be the last changes, the ones that bring us to precisely where we should be. But Jesus is more radical than we give him credit for. God is not as tame as we would like him to be. The whole new birth thing, while it is rooted in various ideas that would have been familiar to Nicodemus, is revolutionary in its results. We always focus on the way in which Nicodemus misunderstands the who new birth/birth from above part. But I suspect what he was trying to avoid was this idea of the person led by the Spirit who could not be completely comprehended.
Didn’t God bring people out of bondage in order to get them to live righteous lives according to a set of instructions, instructions that God himself had given? Was not that the essence of righteousness? But here Jesus sounds so much like any instruction set along the was perhaps part of the way out, and not the destination.
Having set the scene, we can look at our passage for today. With Nicodemus in a bit of shock about people led by God’s Spirit being incomprehensible, going like the wind, led by God’s wind (Spirit), Jesus turns to Torah (Numbers 21:4-9), which is something that Nicodemus should understand. But he picks a very difficult passage and he uses it in a very difficult way. Whether you hear this section as part of the speech to Nicodemus*, or one to the disciples following, and whether you see the context as the confrontation between a nascent Christianity and Judaism, or more literally set in the ministry of Jesus, I think the two are intended to have a connection.
Jesus, the Spirit-led person goes to the cross. Moses the Spirit-led person lifted a serpent up on a pole. In both cases people were required to look up. In the first, this was to the serpent on the pole. In the second to Jesus on the cross. To quote Vincent Taylor as cited in Leon Morris, “There could be no vainer controversy than the disupte whether in those passages (i.e. John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32) the crucifixion of the exaltation is meant. The death is the exaltation” (p. 200n67).
But was this all? In the case of the bronze serpent they were to look to God who provided the sign. One has to ask whether God understood the potential difficulties of this situation, even though one knows the answer. With the serpent as an object of veneration but also of terror, there was every chance that the people would worship it, and indeed that eventually happened (2 Kings 18:4).
But John’s upward look includes everything there is about Jesus. He’s lifted up on the cross, out of the grave, to the right hand of the Father, and when his Spirit lifts the believers from their fear, lethargy, even apathy and into their mission. When one looks at the cross one should see both death, the death of sin (2 Corinthians 5:21) and life, the life of one whom death cannot keep, the life of one who is willing to face death so that the world can be saved. To quote Vincent Taylor as cited in Leon Morris, “There could be no vainer controversy than the disupte whether in those passages (i.e. John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32) the crucifixion of the exaltation is meant. The death is the exaltation” (p. 200n67).
If you tie the “born from above” of John 3:1-13 to the “lifted up” and the place to which the Israelites are called to look, I think you will get some more of this idea. In very broad strokes, as long as we look to this world, we cannot be redeemed from it. Even the good things of this world are failures. We have to look to something “lifted up,” something that is beyond this world in order to be redeemed from it.
All of our human plans of salvation that involve earning God’s favor are a failure. The Israelites demonstrate this level of missing the point when the worship Nehushtan, the serpent (2 Kings 18:4), by burning incense to it. They’re trying to gain the serpent’s favor; God is saying to look up and out.
John 3:16 is called a very simple summary of the gospel, and it is. At the same time it is part of one of the most theologically deep statements of the gospel. You can run through this passage time after time, follow the symbolism, and come back to something simple, but if you go back and let the words of Jesus work on you some more, you’ll find some more “simple” lessons, that put together show the depth of the gospel as well. That’s the genius of John’s gospel, but more importantly, of the Word made Flesh.
*Let me note one more thing. It is likely that the division of the passage comes between verses 15 and 16, so that the reference to the serpent is made to Nicodemus, while v. 16ff is a reflection on the passage.
