Committed Critic

A quick disclaimer: My wife is Roman Catholic (see her blog here), and I am a member of a Church of Christ. We are committed together to working for unity among our Christian fellowships, and we believe that table fellowship––that is, sharing of the Lord’s Supper––should be an early step toward this goal. So as I consider John 6 here, I make no pretense of being a disinterested interpreter.

My friend Scott Slaughter made a good point in response to my last post, and I want to take it up as a new post interpreting John 6. Scott wrote:

Seems to me that Jesus was stringing together little bits of information at a time so the people could understand it.

He feeds the 5000 and the people missed the point. Right off the bat he tells them that they need to work “for food that endures to eternal life”.

So they stand around scratching their heads while thinking about what’s for dinner that night that would keep them alive forever.

Jesus tells them again. “I am the bread of life.”

They miss it again. Eventually Jesus repeats himself…again. Now the Jews really start to freak out, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Seems to me that the people Jesus was speaking to, just didn’t get it. They were so stuck on thinking with their stomachs that they were not making the connection.

How could they make the connection that he meant his flesh his body, his blood would all be a sacrifice for sin?

To me, this entire passage seems to be more about faith than communion. The people got frustrated and went away after waiting for their food handouts. The disciples got frustrated and Jesus calls them on it. Verse 62…“What if you see the Son of Man ascend”…

If they have to see it to believe, then where’s the faith?

I think Scott gives a good reading of what’s going on in John 6, and he highlights something that I didn’t do justice to with the sermon in the last post––that people constantly misunderstand Jesus in John’s Gospel, and that it’s often because they take things literally when he means them spiritually. So let me see if I can think through this more clearly than I did before.

Misunderstanding in John

Nicodemus (John 3) thinks Jesus is talking about being born a second time from his mother’s womb, while Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth: the word can mean either “born again” or “born from above,” and it seems Nicodemus thinks the former, and Jesus means more of the latter.

The Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) thinks Jesus is offering her actual water that will last forever: the phase “living water” in Greek was the normal expression for “running water,” and it seems the woman thought that’s what Jesus meant, whereas he actually meant a different kind of “living.”

It seems simple to read these in light of John 3:31 and be done with it: “The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about earthly things.” If we take that at face value as our interpretive principle, then we expect to see Jesus in John rejecting physical meanings in favor of spiritual meanings.

Spiritual and Physical as a False Dichotomy

But Jesus isn’t always talking about purely spiritual things. In 2:18-22, the Jews misunderstand what Jesus is saying, but the real meaning isn’t spiritual as opposed to physical––rather Jesus was talking about his body (a physical thing) instead of the Temple (another physical thing). Now of course, spiritual application was key––Jesus’ death on the cross was certainly a spiritual event. Yet it was his body, not just a spirit, that died. So while the deeper spiritual meaning of the crucifixion might be key, the physical death on the cross was necessary and indeed central to what was happening.

This is what I was pushing with the sermon: on the one hand there’s a sharp break between the world and God, between the physical and the spiritual. But in another sense there isn’t. My sermon suggests that communion is a place where the division breaks down.

What is being revealed in John 6?

So then in John 6, Jesus tells people to look for food that endures (6:27), which sounds a lot like what he said about water with the Samaritan woman at the well. At this point, we can take Jesus as saying something spiritual, which the crowds misunderstand as physical. Then he calls himself the bread of life and compares himself with the manna from heaven; again, we could take this as spiritual talk which the crowd misunderstands as physical. The Jews think they know where Jesus is “from” (his mother and father, Mary and Joseph), while John constantly reminds us that Jesus is actually “from” the Father above.

Next Jesus says, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). Now things are getting more confusing for the crowd, so the Jews naturally ask, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (6:52). We as Christian readers assume that Jesus “giving” his flesh must have something to do with the crucifixion (and I think we’re partly right), but we’re waiting for his explanation of exactly what he’s getting at.

Yet what’s striking to me is that Jesus’ explanation that follows says nothing about the crucifixion, nor does it say anything about faith. Instead, he says this (NRSV):

“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

If the answer to the whole quandary raised by chapter 6 was that Jesus’ talk of bread refers directly to our faith in him through his crucifixion, then what Jesus says here at the end of the discourse is exceedingly unhelpful for making that point. Instead we get “my flesh is true food,” to which is added (out of the blue) “my blood is true drink.” Granted that flesh and blood tend to go together, blood hasn’t been mentioned since John 1:13, and here suddenly it shows up in 6:53, 6:54, 6:55, and 6:56.

So what do we make of this? I’ll grant that there’s not a completely self-evident answer, yet the sudden reference to flesh and blood as food and drink is striking. The last supper traditions in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul (1 Cor 11:23f) all use very similar language to John here. In 1 Corinthians, it’s explicit that churches were reciting that tradition in preparation for communion: bread and wine were body and blood. And it seems like the other Gospels are doing the same thing.

So when John turns to flesh as true food and blood as true drink, it seems that almost any Christian reader at that time would naturally think of communion. To me, that has to be the first interpretation of the text, unless John gives us some reason to think he’s talking about something else. Yet as I’ve noted, John’s concluding explanation for the discourse (6:53-58) doesn’t say a thing here about faith or about the crucifixion. Instead, it repeats over and over again that those who follow Christ must eat his flesh and drink his blood. John must have known people would assume this meant communion, and he does nothing to deny that that’s the case.

The possible problem with my argument here is that Jesus goes on to make another anti-flesh comment in 6:63. Here’s the passage:

Many of his disciples, when they heard this, said [to one another], “This is a hard teaching. Who can heed it?”

Now Jesus knew in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, so he said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the son of man ascending to where he was before? The spirit is the one who gives life––the flesh does not contribute anything. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning which ones didn’t believe, and which one was the one who would betray him.) “This is why I said to you that no one can come to me unless it is granted to him from the Father.”

I can see how someone could want to use this passage to summarily dismiss all the references to the flesh in 6:52-58, but I don’t think such an argument is warranted. Rather, the start of the quote above (6:60) has the disciples wondering who can accept Jesus’ teaching, and the end of the quote (6:65) has Jesus answer that God must be the one to draw people to Jesus. Assuming that that’s the topic of discourse, then the dismissal of flesh in 6:63 isn’t a blanket statement claiming that all flesh is useless, so the Lord’s supper must not entail Jesus’ real flesh. Rather, it affirms that people cannot accept Jesus’ teachings on fleshly terms––which is what the disciples are trying to do, and are finding difficult. Instead, Jesus’ teachings must be accepted spiritually, through faith––which only happens when God grants it to people.

So coming back to Scott Slaughter’s comment: I think he’s exactly right until he writes, “this entire passage seems to be more about faith than communion.”

Instead, I would say that the passage encompasses both of these things, but with an emphasis on the latter. Jesus’ audience is indeed taking things too literally, but that doesn’t mean Jesus’ alternate explanation is purely physical. Both the crucifixion and the communion table are thoroughly physical, but they’re also charged with spiritual action and spiritual meaning. The crucifixion is where Jesus became bread, and that’s why we take communion.

Now, the tough question is: In what sense is the communion meal Christ’s flesh and blood? For that, I’m not sure. However, I see nothing in John 6 that somehow pushes faith and memorial over against Jesus’ actual body and blood. Rather, John seems adamant that somehow, we consume Christ’s body and blood when we eat communion. And while this obviously happens in faith, I don’t think John 6 allows us to reduce the whole thing to faith alone. The eating of Jesus’ body isn’t something we do through faith while eating communion, but rather something we do by eating the physical bread and drinking the physical wine of communion.

I’m not sure how anyone could prove to me that this must be transsubstantiation. But I don’t see how I could read John 6 and then insist that it isn’t.

This post is adapted from a sermon that I gave at Brookline Church of Christ this past Sunday, August 9.

The lectionary text was John 6:35-51:

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever has faith in me will never be thirsty. But I said of you that you’ve seen me but don’t have faith. The ones that my Father gives me––all of them come to me, and I’ll never cast away a person who comes to me.

You see, I’ve come down from heaven to do not my own will, but the will of the one who sent me––and this is the will of the one who sent me: not to lose for him anything that he’s given me, but to raise it up on the last day. That is, this is the will of my Father: that whoever sees the Son and has faith in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise that person up on the last day.”

Then the Judeans started to grumble about him because he had said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven.” They said, “Isn’t this Jesus the son of Joseph? Don’t we know his father and mother? How can he tell us now, ‘I’ve come down out of heaven’?”

Jesus answered them, “Don’t grumble among yourselves!”

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets: they all shall be taught by God. Everyone who hears from the Father, and learns, comes to me. But of course, no one has seen the Father except the one who is from the Father––that is the one who has seen the Father.

Truly I tell you, whoever has faith has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and died; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one who eats it will not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If someone eats from this bread, she will live forever. The bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The last line, where Jesus’ flesh is given as bread “for the life of the world,” highlights the rocky relationship in John’s Gospel between Jesus and the world that will be the topic of this post.

To help clarify the discussion, I want to start out with a sketch of John’s view of the cosmos. It’s helpful if you imagine it visually:

John’s Cosmos
Below is the world, created by God but now a dark place, under the control of evil powers. Above is the realm of the Father, where truth and light reign. Jesus, then, is on a sort of a mission: he is from the Father, but he is sent here, into the world, to bring the light and truth from the Father into the dark world, more or less behind enemy lines.

Like lots of stories, John’s has good guys and bad guys. Most of the dark world rejects Jesus and kills him. But some of the people in the world see the truth when they see Christ, and they have faith. These people remain in Christ even as Christ returns to the Father, leaving the Counselor behind. The promise is that Christ will prepare a place for us, then return to the world a second time and raise us up on the last day to take us with him to the Father.

John on the World
Now, some specific passages. Some of the Jesus’ words about the world in John seem very positive:

John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order for the world to be saved through him.”

This is very good news for the world. God loved the world. Not just certain individuals, but the world. Jesus didn’t come to judge or condemn the world, but to save the world.

Yet God’s love for the world doesn’t preclude condemnation for people in the world. For example, John 12:47-48:

If anyone hears my words and doesn’t keep them, I am not the one who judges him; for I didn’t come to judge the world, but to save the world. Yet the one who rejects me and doesn’t receive my words has a judge: the word that I spoke will judge him on the last day.

Jesus is saying that his office isn’t to judge, at least not during his first coming. Rather, the truth is something fixed, revealed by Christ, and people effectively judge themselves by whether they accept it. So the message of good news for the world includes also a message of judgment. Jesus came to save the world, but people in the world who reject him are still condemned.

Then later in the Gospel, Jesus has harsher things to say about the world (NRSV):

If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you don’t belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world––therefore the world hates you (15:18-19).

In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world! (16:33).

Anti-Worldly?
Depending on how you read these passages, it’s easy to end up with a world that people need to be saved from, rather than a world that Jesus came to save. If we’re not careful, we could jump to the conclusion that Jesus is opposed to the created world. At one point in John 6 Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless” (6:63). The book of 1 John, which seems to be written for the same church as the Gospel of John, but at a later date, suggests that this church has actually split from other Christians who deny that Jesus came in the flesh. Apparently they thought that human flesh was unseemly, such that Jesus wouldn’t want to have any part of it. The second century saw an explosion of groups with these kind of beliefs, often called Gnostics. Many Gnostics thought the world wasn’t created by God at all but was actually a horrible mistake, created by demons. And some of the Gnostics seem to have liked the Gospel of John.

Even people who affirm that God created a good world can be drawn into an attitude that flesh is basically evil. For example, we could assume that human lives aren’t very important, because our souls are the only part that will survive. Or that we don’t have to take care of the world, because it’ll be burned up when Christ returns. Or perhaps most likely, we may simply denigrate the world and the bodies God has given us, which are an extraordinary gift. It’s possible, by trying to be more “spiritual,” for us to ignore whatever is physical to the point of ingratitude toward God.

Affirmation of the world
So we have this Gospel that in some ways is very other-worldly. But it is in this same story of John’s Gospel that God becomes very much a part of this world, because John also says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It would seem that that moment changed everything. Christians have long affirmed that once Jesus became flesh, flesh could not longer be dismissed at sinful or dirty. God became a part of the world of matter, a person made of dirt, like the rest of us.

When Jesus, the Word, offered his flesh up to death, he became the bread of life: in his teaching, in the crucifixion, and in the Lord’s Supper. As the lectionary reading tells us, Jesus said that “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). And as he will tell us later in the chapter, his flesh is real food, and his blood is real drink.

So even if the earth isn’t permanent, while it’s here Christ becomes a part of this world for our sake. One of the inspirations for this sermon is a book by a Greek Orthodox priest called For the Life of the World. The author says that the Greek Orthodox church understands all of creation as a sacrament by which God gives us his grace. What that means is that the life that Christ gives us is a life we live in this world. Because of that, we don’t need to be saved from the world itself––not from our bodies, not from the creation around us. This is God’s world, first and foremost, and it’s a gift given to us. Our life will continue eternally with God, but on this earth our life still embraces creation.

Saved from the world
But there’s another side. Christ came to save the world, and he did it because the world is lost. The world is still a dark place, and we still need a savior who is bigger than its boundaries. There are false voices in the world that want to deceive us.

Most everyone agree that there are false voices in the world––politicians, marketers, preachers, theologians, philosophers––we just tend to disagree on which voices are false. 1 John has a guideline for deterining which is which, a passage I alluded to earlier: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2).

We don’t just accept this uncritically, of course. Some people confess Christ and spout lies, and non-Christians often say things that are true and that should command Christians’ attention. And we also have to admit that the even the faithful followers of Christ we love and admire––and of course we ourselves––have our own falsehood mixed in with the truth.

But when we’re considering what the truth is, John does give us a very clear standard to start with, and that’s Jesus Christ. We’re too much a part of this world to be able to save ourselves from it, so we can’t just turn to our own ideas, or whatever we can derive from reason. Christ is the one who came into this dark world and spoke light.

We also have to avoid following just the idea of Christ, or a purely spiritual Christ, which is what the group who left John’s church seems to have taught. Instead, we follow the actual risen Jesus Christ, the word who became flesh and walked among us. And that Christ, who saves us from the world, also leaves us here to live in our flesh in this world. And he remains here with us in the flesh––the flesh that he gave for the life of the world, which is real food, and which Christians share at communion every Sunday. It is at the communion table where the body of Christ (the church) encounters the body of Christ (the bread). There is a sort of nexus between heaven and earth, where Christ’s flesh is present among us here in the world, even as we gather at the foot of God’s throne with all the saints of heaven.

John’s Gospel doesn’t tell us everything we need for our Christian lives––it is famously short on moral teachings, for example––but the book is acutely clear on another point: when we’re looking for truth, Jesus is our starting point. The bread of life that nourishes us is truth, come from heaven down to this world for us. And the place we start is each week at the table of Communion, where Christ gives to us his flesh for the life of the world.

The communion table is the center of our Christian worship, because it is something the God gives to us––lest we get confused and think that the songs and prayers we offer to God are the most important things that happen on Sundays. It is this worship that drives our lives as Christians. The communion table is where we meet him in the flesh, to give us life for our time in this world.

My previous post compared Jesus’ trial before Pilate in Mark and Luke, and I tried to explain how Luke, who was probably basing his story on Mark’s version, changes the scene to make a different point than Mark made with it.

Here I’ll add Matthew to the mix (Mt 27:11-26):

Now Jesus was standing before the governor. And the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus said, “You say so.” And when he was being accused by the chief priests and the elders, he didn’t answer anything. Then Pilate said to him, “Don’t you hear all the things they’re testifying against you?” But he didn’t answer him with even a word, to Pilate’s great amazement.

At feast-time, it was the governor’s practice to set free for the crowd one prisoner whom they wanted released. At that time they were holding a notorious prisoner named Jesus Barabbas. Pilate gathered them together and said to them, “Which one do you want me to set free for you, Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called messiah?”

While he was seated on the platform, his wife sent him a message saying, “Have nothing to do with that innocent man; I had a very painful dream about him today.”

But the chief priests and the elders convinced the crowd to ask for Barabbas, and to execute Jesus. So when the governor asked them, “Which of the two do you want me to set free for you?”, they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called messiah?” They all said, “Let him be crucified.” [Pilate] said, “But what wrong did he commit?” But they shouted louder, “Let him be crucified!”

Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but that it was becoming a riot, he took water and washed off his hands in the presence of the crowd and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood––see for yourself.”

And the whole people answered, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

(For all three accounts in parallel columns, see this page.)

Matthew keeps the story a lot closer to Mark’s account than Luke does, though he does add the part about Pilate’s wife, which is absent from the other Gospels. Because of her dream, we have a stronger sense that Pilate actually wants to save Jesus’ life, though Matthew doesn’t make this nearly as clear as Luke, who has Pilate practically beg the crowd to acquit Jesus.

The other major change in Matthew comes at the end of this passage, and I think it shows us what Matthew finds most important about this part of the story. Unlike any of the other Gospels, Pilate washes his hands in front of the crowd, saying that he is innocent of Jesus’ blood; then the crowd of people cry out, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

MATTHEW AND THE JEWS

This is a climactic scene, and scholars rightly suspect that Matthew’s angle on the story tells us something he holds very dear. The theme of blood shows us the point: Matthew wants to be very specific about where blame is assigned for Jesus’ death.

I wrote recently about how this passage has often been used by Christians to blame “the Jews” for Jesus’ crucifixion, and at times Christians have turned against Jews in violence for this reason. But the anti-Jewish reading falls apart, especially since practically everyone in the story (including Jesus, of course) is Jewish, and the only Gentiles we see are the Romans who carry out the crucifixion.

Probably, Matthew considered himself a Jew, and he believed Jesus really was the Messiah for the Jews. The Old Testament has a long tradition of prophets proclaiming violent punishment against Israel and Jerusalem for their faithlessness, and it is likely that that’s what Matthew has in mind here. The people who accept Jesus’ blood-guilt before Pilate are not “the Jews” as a race or religion, but rather the people of Jerusalem at that time, and Matthew (writing perhaps in the 80’s A.D.) thinks that the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. is Jerusalem’s punishment for rejecting its messiah. That doesn’t mean they stop being God’s people, just that they’re punished for disobedience.

There may even be some irony intended in the story: if Matthew is thinking of the Christian belief whereby Jesus’ blood cleanses us from our sins, then the story could both demonstrate Jerusalem’s guilt and foreshadow their forgiveness as seen, e.g., in Acts 2.

However, there’s another side to the matter: Matthew also believes that Jesus and his apostles are the leaders that Israel must now answer to, so Jesus’ teachings do effectively turn most of Israel into apostates (i.e., outsiders), since they reject Jesus’ teachings and lordship. This is a problem that Paul wrestles with in Romans 9–11, and it’s still a theological problem today. (Paul thinks all Israel will eventually believe in Christ [see Rom 11:11, 23, 25-26], but that doesn’t seem to have happened.)

In any event, from a Christian theological perspective, Matthew’s general view makes good sense: Jesus was the Jewish messiah who called all Israel to repentance and obedience, after which he invited Gentiles throughout the world to join the people of God as well.

WHAT CAN COMPARISONS GET US?

Redaction criticism is the academic term for studying how authors like Matthew and Luke copied certain parts of their Gospels from earlier works (especially Mark) but changed parts of the source text to suit their own message.

The reason redaction criticism is so important is that it helps highlight the arguments that the different Gospels are making about Jesus, since we can see where they went out of their way to change the text they used as their source for the story. It helps us draw conclusions about the authors and the churches they were writing for, which can also help us find where the author wants us to be surprised, angry, or amused by the story he tells.

For some contexts, I suppose it is fine to conflate the different stories; however, my conviction here is that these three Gospels want to tell us different things about what Jesus’ trial means, and that we are meant to understand all three of them as different insights into our faith.

In these two posts, I have suggested three very different points that the Gospels make using Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate. Each serves as a trial scene, but not exactly the kind we would expect:

• Mark emphasizes the injustice of the envious high priests manipulating the scornful and cynical Roman governor so that Jesus gets crucified by getting caught in the middle of an unjust system. In effect, it is the world that is found guilty, for no one in Mark’s Gospel (including the disiples) passes the test of believing in Jesus properly.
• Luke puts Jesus on trial before the readers of Luke’s Gospel, so that Pilate, Herod, the criminal on the cross, and the centurion by the cross all become witnesses who testify that Jesus is innocent. The jury is Luke’s Gentiles readers, who find Jesus a worthy lord despite his shameful execution.
• Matthew puts the people of Jerusalem on trial, which is ironic since they’re condemning themselves when they think they’re condemning Jesus; Jesus’ unjust punishment is crucifixion, while their just punishment is the destruction of Jerusalem 40 years later. Yet there is the possibility of forgiveness for those who later repent, even though Jerusalem will be destroyed nonetheless.

On the whole, we should compare each Gospel to a stage play rather than a history book. While a history book needs to cover all the facts and acknowledge all the subtleties of history, a play can simplify story-lines and stylize confrontations between characters in order to make us feel things and realize things that we might miss if we were only given facts. This, I’m convinced, is what Mark, Luke, and Matthew have done for us here.

A key idea of Gospel studies is that each author told the story of Jesus in order to emphasize different things about who Jesus was (or is). One way to put it is that the Gospels are works of rhetoric; they don’t just tell a story, they also make an argument.

A great place to see this at work is in the different accounts of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. Here I’ll deal with just Mark and Luke, though all four Gospels are different. Most scholars think Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke both copied Mark’s story as the basis for their own––so when we see differences in their stories, Matthew and Luke probably changed Mark for some particular reason.

First, Mark’s account (Mk 15:2-15):

Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then the chief priests accused him of many things, so Pilate asked him again, “Aren’t you going to answer anything? Do you hear all the things they’re accusing you of?” But Jesus no longer answered anything, to Pilate’s amazement.

At feast-time, [Pilate] typically set free for them one prisoner that they requested, so the crowd came up to him and began to ask him to do what he usually did for them. Pilate, knowing that the chief priests had handed [Jesus] over because of their jealousy of him, answered [the crowd], “Do you want me to set free for you the “King of the Jews”? Now, there was a man named Barabbas, who had been imprisoned with some men who had committed murder during a revolt. So the chief priests stirred up the crowd for him to set free Barabbas for them.

Then Pilate again answered them, “Then what do you want me to do with the one you call the “King of the Jews”? And they again cried out, “Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “But what wrong has he committed?” But they cried out even more, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, wanting to satisfy the crowd, set free Barabbas for them, and he handed over Jesus to be flogged and crucified.

Now, compare the same story in Luke (Lk 23:2-25):

They began to accuse [Jesus], saying, “We found this man stirring up our nation, and stopping people from paying taxes to Caesar, and saying that he is an anointed king.”

So Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, “I find no charge against this man” But they persisted and said, “He’s been stirring up the people, teaching through all of Judea, beginning in Galilee and coming all the way here.” When Pilate heard this, he asked if the man was a Galilean. When he found out that [Jesus] was from the jurisdiction of Herod, he sent him before Herod, who was in Jerusalem in those days.

When Herod saw Jesus he was very pleased, because he had wanted to see him for some time: he had heard about [Jesus] and hoped to see some sign done by him. [Herod] questioned him at some length, but [Jesus] didn’t answer him anything. The chief priests and the scribes stood there accusing him vehemently; meanwhile Herod, along with his soldiers, belittled him and mocked him, wrapping a purple cloak around him and sending him back to Pilate. That day, Herod and Pilate became friends, while previously they had been enemies.

Pilate called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who was stirring up the people, but I have examined him right in front of you, and I haven’t found any charge against this man such as you have accused him of. And neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us, and look––nothing deserving death has been done by him. I will discipline him and set him free.”

But they cried out together, “Take this one! Set free Barabbas for us!” ([Barabbas] had been thrown into jail because of a certain revolt that had happened in the city and because of a murder.) But again Pilate spoke to them, wanting to set free Jesus. But they cried out, saying, “Cruficy! Crucify him!”

Then a third time he said to them, “But what wrong has he committed? I haven’t found any capital charge against him. So then, I’ll discipline him and set him free.”

But they insisted with loud voices asking for him to be crucified, and their voices prevailed. So Pilate passed judgment that their request be carried out. He set free the man they asked for, who had been thrown into jail because of revolt and murder, but Jesus he handed over to their will.

A couple of parts of the story are almost identical, but Luke has obviously made the story a lot longer with the trial before Herod and with Pilate speaking more to the crowd.

But Luke has also lost something: in Mark, the whole episode with Barabbas is really just a sly attempt by Pilate to embarrass the chief priests (Mk 15:9-10) by getting the crowd to request that Jesus be released while the priests are trying to have him killed. Jesus becomes a pawn in their political game, as the chief priests stir up the crowd to thwart Pilate’s move. Pilate briefly questions whether Jesus has done anything wrong, but he quickly gives in once they shout for crucifixion.

WHY THE DIFFERENCES?

Luke isn’t really interested in this whole exchange, at least not as a battle of wits between Pilate and the chief priests, and in fact he leaves out the explanation of why Pilate would release a prisoner to the crowd in the first place (compare Mk 15:6). Instead, Luke has Pilate declare Jesus’ innocence not just once (as in Mark), but three times.

It’s not that Pilate is being portrayed as a good guy here in Luke, even though he seems to lobby on Jesus’ behalf. If we look at the rest of Luke 23, we see that Jesus’ innocence is enormously important to Luke. Not only does Pilate insist three times that Jesus has done nothing wrong (Lk 23:4, 14, 22), but he also points out that Herod has found no charge against Jesus (Lk 23:15). Then in 23:41 we have one of the criminals on the cross declaring that Jesus has done nothing wrong (a passage that isn’t in Matthew or Mark), and in 23:47 the centurion by the cross declares, “Indeed this man was innocent” (where both Matthew and Luke have the centurion say that Jesus is the son of God).

This amounts to six proclamations of Jesus’ innocence in the span of 46 verses, which seems to be Luke’s way of hammering home a key point. Mark surely agrees that Jesus is innocent, but Luke wants to make it exceedingly clear. Pilate, meanwhile, doesn’t actually come off so well in Luke. While Mark portrays Pilate as not caring much whether Jesus dies or not, Luke makes him adamant that Jesus doesn’t deserve the punishment, which implies that Pilate is just too weak to stand up to the crowd.

We can’t know for sure exactly why Luke put so much emphasis on Jesus’ innocence, but one theory is that Luke wrote for Christians who wanted to defend the legitimacy of their religion in the eyes of sophisticated urban people, much as many Christian apologists do today. The Christian Gospel obviously included the story of Jesus’ death on the cross, which we might compare to being hanged, drawn, and quartered in more recent days. The point is that crucifixion wasn’t just painful, it was above all shameful; Roman skeptics wouldn’t have had a lot of sympathy for someone Rome had executed. So if Jesus was going to die a shameful death, it needed to be completely undeserved, a point Luke makes more clearly than Mark did.

Interestingly, Luke does the exact same thing with Paul in the last few chapters of Acts, where Paul is repeatedly proclaimed innocent even though he stays in prison and eventually (though not reported in Acts) gets executed in Rome. Paul created the same problem as Jesus: Christians were reading his letters, yet he was known to have been executed by Caesar; Luke’s two stories defend both Jesus and Paul in the same way.

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

It would be nice if we could know exactly how things went down during Jesus’ trial, but a careful reading of each of the Gospels suggests that we can’t just harmonize the different texts, assume they “mean” the same thing, and conclude that we’ve recovered what really happened. The reason is, whether Pilate declared Jesus innocent three times or one time or never at all, Mark and Luke also tell their stories in ways that suggest why Pilate did what he did, and their suggested motives differ. In Mark, Pilate comes across as fickle and uncaring, while in Luke he comes across as an earnest weakling. The only way to combine these two characterizations is to destroy both of them.

These dramatic portrayals can’t just be dismissed. Just like a movie gives totally different ideas about a character by what kind of music or lighting it uses, a story tells us things about characters by its portrayal–things that can’t be set aside for the sake of establishing the blunt “facts” of history. If I had to choose, I’d say the account in Mark is closer to history, but in reality I don’t know whether either Gospel reflects history accurately. The stories seem intended not so much to describe what happened to Jesus, but rather to explain who Jesus was and why he matters.

Sunday morning I preached on the Magnificat, the poem Mary recites shortly after learning she’ll become mother of the Son of God. The passage reflects Mary’s celebration that she, a peasant girl, is to be blessed with such an honor (Lk 1:46-55):

My soul magnifies the Lord
And my spirit exults in God my Savior,
For he has looked upon the humility of his slave-girl.

Look: from now on all generations will regard me as blessed
Because the Mighty One has done great things for me;
Holy is his name,
And his mercy is from generation to generation
for those who fear him.

He has done a mighty deed by his arm;
He has scattered the haughty in the thought of their heart;
He has pulled down the powerful from thrones,
And has exalted the humble.
The hungry he has filled with good things,
And the wealthy he has sent away empty.
He has helped Israel his servant,
Remembering mercy,
just as he announced to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed
Forever and ever.

I’ve been talking with my fiancee Beth (who’s Roman Catholic) about Mary as a model of spirituality, so I wanted to reflect on how we’re supposed to read toward that end.

One point I decided to press is that when we use Mary as a model for our spiritual lives, we should also consider another model alongside her: Paul. This might seem odd, and I could imagine Catholics and feminists being irritated that I brought Paul into the discussion. The two figures are quite different, in particular that Mary was a peasant girl and Paul was an educated Pharisee. But since a lot of us are more like him than like her, I think we could be misled by focusing on Mary’s example in Luke without considering Paul as another angle on Christian spirituality.

A key theme of the Magnificat, especially as it relates to Mary, is God’s lowering of the mighty and exaltation of the humble and lowly. Mary reflects this humility, both in her attitude and in her station in life. The danger for us is that we’ll try to imitate the first half of her example (the attitude) even though the second half (our station in life) is wildly different than hers. That is to say, if we put all our emphasis on Mary, we’re liable to think that God is satisfied if we simply change our attitude. I think that’s a half-truth that ignores what Luke really has to say about Jesus.

When you read the teachings of John and Jesus in Luke, it’s clear that the call to repentance goes well beyond changing one’s attitude. Jesus has a few things to say about how we feel about money, for example, but more often he gives specific instructions for us simply to give money away. The reason this is important is that it allows us to actually participate in the kind of reversal that the Magnificat proclaims. The reason we should take it literally is because it’s exactly what Paul does, giving up status for the sake of the gospel.

Probably the most famous passage where Paul addresses his loss of status is 2 Cor 12:7b-10:

So that I wouldn’t become arrogant, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to strike me so that I wouldn’t become arrogant. I begged the Lord three times about this, that he would take it away from me, but he said to me, “My grace is enough for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Accordingly, I enjoy boasting in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can rest upon me. I am pleased with weakness, with insults, with needs, with persecutions and distresses, on Christ’s behalf. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

I think that when people read about Paul’s strength in weakness, they usually assume either that he’s being humble and “staying out of God’s way,” or else that he’s acknowledging his feeble human abilities that God overcomes to allow him to write great letters.

I think this is missing Paul’s point. When he talks about weakness, Paul talks a lot more about his suffering, and about the embarrassing things that have happened to him –– things like being flogged, which left real scars that people would see if he ever had his cloak off. In the ancient world, people who had status in a city or community had their rights protected by that community; people without status weren’t guaranteed the same kind of protection. A strong person could avoid suffering or persecution; only a weak person or a slave would have to submit to floggings and danger. That’s what Paul accepted willingly for his ministry.

Paul gave up being respected and cared for by society. Weakness, in this sense, means losing some of the ability to control your own life and call your own shots –– the opposite of having power, which means being able to do what you want. Being genuinely weak means making your life less convenient and putting yourself at the risk of sufferings that are no longer under your control, leaving yourself at the mercy of God and other Christians to get you through things. That is what so few Christians ever do, even when it puts us at risk of becoming “the last,” by Jesus’ own words, when he returns.

Other parts of Scripture make a different point, and as I’ve said, there are plenty of passages that call us to have humble attitudes. But I think that Mary’s poem reflects what Christ will do to us unless we do it first. In other words, the way to avoid being knocked from our thrones when Christ returns is to surrender those thrones ourselves, while we have the freedom to do so.

In the incarnation, God didn’t just change his attitude in order to understand how we might feel; instead, he took on flesh and became human. The change didn’t keep God from still being God, but it was still a real change. Paul didn’t lose everything –– he still had his education, for example, that helped him write powerful letters. But he wasn’t content to just try for an inner change. If we want to live up to the teachings of Christ, I would argue that our loss of power and status needs to be real and external as well.

Bible scholars have recently challenged the “supercessionist” idea that Jesus intended to replace Judaism with Christianity, or that the New Testament replaces Jews with (Christian) Gentiles as the people of God. A key battleground text for this question is the Gospel of Matthew, and a key assumption in the way I will interpret it is that different parts of the Bible don’t always agree with one another.

I’ll pursue the idea that Matthew’s church believed that the Jews were still the people of God, and that Gentiles, though welcome to join in following Christ, had in no sense inherited the faith from the Jews as a whole.

Here are four key texts for the issue. The first is from the Sermon on the Mount, where this particular passage represents Jesus’ fundamental teaching about the law (Matt 5:17-19):

Don’t suppose that I came to overthrow the law or the prophets; I didn’t come to overthrow but to fulfill. Truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one iota or one stroke of a letter will pass away from the law until all things have happened. Therefore, whoever rejects one of the least of these commandments, and teaches the same to other people, will be called least in the heavens’ kingdom. But whoever does and teaches them will be called great in the heavens’ kingdom.

In a second text, Jesus remarks on the faith of a Roman Centurion (Matt 8:10-12):

Truly I say to you, I haven’t found such faith from anyone in Israel. I tell you, many from the east and west will come and recline at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the heavens’ kingdom, but the sons of the kingdom will be cast into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

In a third passage Jesus responds to Pharisees and scribes who ask why his disciples don’t follow the tradition of ritually washing their hands before eating. A key point of his response is Matt 15:11, 17-20:

What enters the mouth does not make a person unclean; but what comes out of the mouth, that is what makes a person unclean…Don’t you know that everything that enters the mouth moves to the stomach and then is expelled into the toilet? But the things that come out of the mouth come out of the heart, and these make someone unclean; for out of the heart come disagreements, wicked deeds, murders, adulteries, thefts, false testimonies, and blasphemy. These are the things that make a person unclean, but eating with unwashed hands doesn’t make a person unclean.

Finally, at the crucifixion of Jesus, there is an important exchange between Pilate and the people of Jerusalem (Matt 27:24-25):

Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but that it was becoming a riot, he took water and washed off his hands in the presence of the crowd and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood––see for yourself.”

And the whole people answered, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

TWO INTERPRETATIONS:

One traditional Christian understanding of Matthew runs something like this:

• Jesus “fulfills” the law by spiritualizing it, so that Christians simply love God and one another in place of the Jewish law. Jesus’ encounter with the Roman centurion provides the occasion for him to prophecy that the Jews, who lacked faith in Jesus, would be replaced by Gentile Christians as the people of God. Jesus’ teaching about what enters and exits the mouth is his proclamation that Jewish purity laws no longer pertain to Christians. And the crowd’s statement, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children,” represents the Jews (as a whole) rejecting Jesus and accepting guilt for his death.

In contrast to this is an alternate reading, proposed in recent years by scholars who feel that Matthew’s gospel is too Jewish to intend such an anti-Jewish message. This interpretation runs as follows:

• Jesus “fulfills” the law by showing Jewish Christians how to observe Torah by intensifying it in a particular heart-felt way rather than with the (also heart-felt) Pharisaic practice using strict oral traditions to be sure of observing Torah. Jesus’ encounter with the Roman centurion leads him to issue a standard prophetic warning, much like those in the OT prophets, that God would punish Israel if they did not repent of their sins. Jesus’ teaching about what enters and exits the mouth only rejects the Pharisaic practice of hand-washing, not the entire system of Jewish purity laws. And the crowd at the crucifixion represents not the Jews as a race or religion, but the people of Jerusalem as a generation that rejected Jesus; Matthew sees the punishment for Jesus’ blood as coming back against the people of Jerusalem and their children (i.e., the next generation) when Jerusalem is destroyed by Rome 40 years later.

SOME OBSERVATIONS

I lean toward the latter reading. Here are a few points supporting it:

• In Matthew 5 Jesus never gets rid of any laws––whether for Jews or Gentiles––and indeed he explicitly criticizes those who would.
• Jesus never breaks the Jewish law in Matthew. When accused of breaking the Sabbath (Matt 12:2), he only claims that his work is a justified exception in the same way as an emergency rescue or priestly work in the Temple.
• In Mark’s story about hand-washing, Mark does claim that Jesus was declaring all food clean (Mk 7:19). However, Matthew eliminates that line from the story, and then he adds Jesus’ statement only against handwashing (a tradition of the Pharisees, not a biblical law). It seems here that Matthew disagrees with Mark about what Jesus means: he was only saying that handwashing was unnecessary for purity, not that all food were clean.
• The Hebrew prophets say many awful things about the Israelites/Jews, but the assumption is always that the Jews remain the people of God. To use Jesus’ harsh words against Jews as evidence that God was rejecting the Jews as God’s people is to misunderstand Jesus’ role as a prophet.

IMPLICATIONS

It is no surprise that Matthew is often read as supercessionistic by Christians: Matthew claimed that Jesus had the only true interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, open also to Gentiles. As time passed, and more Gentiles than Jews became Christians, Matthew’s words seemed to have a different meaning. However, at the first, all of Jesus’ followers were Jews, and the earliest Palestinian churches were Jewish. If we hypothesize that Matthew wrote for one of these Jewish communities, the Gospel of Matthew would fit that context very well.

If there were NT Jewish Christians who could follow Jesus and still observe Torah, it should discourage us from too easily championing “Christian faith” against “Jewish legalism.” In Matthew’s opinion, Jesus did not reject Judaism, but rather called Jews (and ultimately Gentiles) to a particular form of Judaism.

Perhaps most important, the fault for Jesus’ crucifixion does not fall on “the Jews” in any broad sense. All of the heroes at the crucifixion were Jews, and the villains were a mixture of Jews and Gentiles. Matthew seems to think that one generation of Jerusalem residents, led by a wicked High Priest, rejected Jesus and were almost immediately punished for it. To suggest that blood remains on the heads of Jews today would not only be dangerous and possibly hateful, but it would miss the point made my Matthew.

My reading distinguishes between what we believe and the implications of what we believe. For Christians, it is still difficult to escape the conclusion (based on Matthew, at least) that non-Christian Jews are outside of the people of God. Though the idea is obviously offensive to Jews and many Christians as well, the Christian confession “Jesus is Lord” leaves little room for equivocation, at least on the question of where one’s loyalty must lie. But scholarly readings of Matthew that challenge us to shift our perspective can help us see that whatever our present faith, our Scriptures probably looked very different to those who wrote them.

Most of my ideas here are based on reading Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community, by Anthony J. Saldarini. For a shorter and less technical study of Matthew that somewhat disagrees but deals with similar issues, see the The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew (from Cambridge University Press’s New Testament Theology series), by Ulrich Luz.

Fields of academic study are typically named using a Greek word related to the field combined with the Greek root logos, which means word or reason. So for example, biology is the study of life (Greek bios).

When it came to the study of words, however, whoever decides these things apparently decided against the redundant logology, opting instead for philology, which literally means love of words. Whatever the reason for the choice, I think it’s appropriate, since I can’t imagine anyone ever studying the development of words simply because they thought it was useful. To get into something that technical, I think you have to love it.

And in this sense (as well as professionally, to an extent), I consider myself a philologist, which I suppose is the only possible explanation for this post.

An English transliteration of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a place

Because Christians are constantly dealing with texts that have been translated from other languages, words and names from Scripture are frequently misunderstood or distorted as the tradition is passed along. Here I’ll deal with one that I find interesting: Calvary.

Believe it or not, this word––used so often in Christian sermons, songs, and church names––is not in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

It had bothered me for awhile that I couldn’t think where I had seen the word in Scripture, so finally I looked in my Greek concordance (where I would expect it to look something like Kaluaria) and found that it wasn’t there. A computer search of the KJV, however, turned up the word in Luke 23:33: “And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.”

(Brief, important definitions: to translate something is of course to write what it means in another language. To transliterate is to just take the letters of the original word and write them, in the same order, in a different language or with a different alphabet. As an example, hallelujah is the English transliteration of a common Hebrew phrase; its translation would be Praise the Lord.)

What’s odd about the KJV reading of Calvary is that when you look at Luke 23:33 in Greek (the original language), the name of the place is Kranion, which means skull. In the three other Gospels (Matt 27:33, Mark 15:22, and John 19:17), when this same Greek word shows up at the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, the KJV translates it accordingly, as skull.

But even though they were supposed to be working from the original Greek, the KJV translators let their Latin creep into the process: it turns out that the Latin translation of Kranion is Calvaria, which is surely where the KJV translators got the name Calvary. Problem is, the original New Testament was wasn’t written in Latin, so there’s no reason a word transliterated from Latin should end up in any English translation.

There is at least a plausible explanation for why the KJV translators didn’t make this same mistake in the other Gospels, and this is where the situation gets (more) complex. In Matthew, Mark, and John, the name of the hill is identified as Golgotha, which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word Gulgoleth. The transliteration into Greek at this point makes sense, since Gulgoleth is probably the actual name that native speakers called the place near Jerusalem.

The authors of Matthew, Mark, and John wanted their audiences to know both the name of the place and what it meant, so all three of them included both Golgotha (the transliteration of the name from Hebrew) and Kranion (a translation of the Hebrew word that their Greek-speaking readers/hearers would understand).

It’s easy to see why the KJV translators didn’t make the mistake of using Calvary in these three passages like they did in Luke, since it would have made little sense for the text to say, “Golgotha, which means Kranion” or “Golgotha, which means Calvary.” English readers wouldn’t have understood what Kranion or Calvary meant, so instead the KJV refers to Golgotha and place of the skull.

But Luke never gives us the name Golgotha. He only writes, “they came to the place called Kranion,” which might suggest to a Greek reader that Kranion was the actual proper name of the place. In this case, the translators from Greek to Latin were quick enough to realize (probably from knowing the parallels in the other Gospels) that Kranion was just a translation of the name, so they translated it also, to the Latin Calvaria.

But the KJV translators, who probably knew the Latin translation of the Bible quite well, seem to have let the familiar reading affect their work. And so instead of translating the name (i.e., as Skull), they inserted the Latin transliteration and passed it along.

Great, so what?

I’m actually not sure what I’m contributing here; everyone knows that Calvary refers to where Jesus was crucified, so there should be no problem with going on using it.

I do suppose that I’m potentially ruining a bunch of pretty Christian songs for some people (think: “Jesus keep me near the cross: There a precious fountain / Free to all, a healing stream / Flows from Skull’s mountain”).

What is worth considering is how religious language functions for us. The frequency with which the word Calvary is used, coupled with the fact that I’ve never heard anyone question where exactly it comes from, suggests that the root meaning of a word need not have anything to do with its meaning for real people who participate in a religious tradition.

At the very least, the word points to how useful it is to have certain words that function as shorthand. You can say to any Bible-belt Christian, “Remember Calvary,” and they’ll probably know what you’re talking about. The Cross has a similar function.

Perhaps we like Calvary because it is a pretty word that fits well in names like Calvary Baptist Church, whereas the darker Golgotha, or the morbid Skull, might put people off. Of course, I suppose that if we can make crosses of gold, we could also knock the rough edges off the word skull if we wanted to.

When we talk about spiritual growth, a key point to learn is the distinction between motive and action. God, it seems, wants us not only to do what is right, but also to do it for the right reason.

Looking to straighten out their motives, Christians might turn to Matthew 6:1-4, where Jesus teaches,

Take care not to perform your righteousness in the sight of humans, to be seen by them; if you do, you will receive no wage from your father who is in heaven. Instead, when you perform your righteousness, don’t blast a trumpet in front of you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they will be honored by humans. Truly I tell you, they already receive their wage in full.

But as for you, when you give alms, your left hand should not know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms are given in secret. And your father, who sees what is done in secret, will pay you back.

I’m not sure this passage tells us exactly what we want to hear, if we’re approaching it with normal ideas about Christian spirituality. Though we want Jesus to send us into our own hearts looking for good motives, Jesus appears more concerned with how alms are given than with why alms are given. In the case of the hypocrite, it appears that the two are the same: he wants to be seen giving alms, so he does it publicly.

But for the disciple, Jesus never really gets at why she should give. He doesn’t seem to insist here that the giver have pure motives, or that she even care about the people she’s helping. In fact, the use of the word “wages” sort of sets up the whole thing as a trade-off. It seems that Jesus uses our hope for reward as motivation to do good.

The question, as he presents it, is not whether we have pure motives, or whether we would give if no one were looking at all. All Jesus talks about is who will see us––God or humans.

If we don’t pay attention, we can be tempted to out-spiritualize Jesus. When it comes to caring for the poor, Christians naturally want to make sure we have right motives and to put our hearts into the help we give others. Some good-natured folks who wish to avoid works righteousness might even say something like, “It’s really not about what we do; what God really wants is our hearts.” And I think this reflects something important for Christians.

However, while God does want our hearts, for us to act as if our own spirituality should be our focus in things like helping the poor surely leads us away from what God really wants. As my friend Matt has written before on his blog (or maybe mine), when God tells us to feed the poor, God may hope to win our hearts over so that we give cheerfully (thus 2 Corinthians 8–9), but we should probably assume that what God really wants is something a lot simpler: for the poor to have food to eat, houses to live in, and jobs to work at.

I think it is instructive that the prophets call the people of Israel to stop offering sacrifices because they aren’t taking care of the poor, not the other way around.

I bring all this up because of a blog post I read this week by Larry James, who runs a major food pantry and community development center in Texas called Central Dallas Ministries.

He suggests that a lot of people, when they say they want to “really make a difference,” rather than “just throw money at a problem,” actually mean they want to make a difference in their own life. In other words, their spirituality is turned inwards, so that they don’t feel they’re doing anything good if they can’t really put their heart into it and get involved.

James, however, suggests that often, the best way to make a genuine difference in the life of someone who struggles with poverty is indeed to throw money — lots of it — at organizations that help people in need. Heart-warming experiences are great, but money puts a lot more food on people’s plates.

Last week I bought lunch for a panhandler in Boston. We had a nice conversation, and I think it was absolutely worth my time and money to share that meal with a nice fellow who frankly seemed more lonely than poor. But I shouldn’t kid myself that I was somehow fighting poverty by the $6 is spent on him. I’m sure it was a nice change for him, and of course I get to feel sort of virtuous about the whole thing. But in the end, that kind of experience is no substitute for giving a substantial portion of my income to people like Larry James who know how to work within poor communities to improve people’s lives.

Maybe at some point in my life I’ll make the time to really participate in an organization like that, but in the meantime it would be a tragedy if I used my failure to give time as an excuse not to give money either.

So if you have the time, please read Larry James’ post, because I think it will help you grow. In fact, subscribe to his daily blog on your rss feeder: larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com.

But once you’re done reading it, please give to his organization, and then keep giving regularly every month. I really doubt in this case that God is as concerned with what you learn from Larry James as God is with whether people have jobs, homes, and food.

One of the more apparently out-of-place exchanges in Luke, it seems to me, occurs at the last supper. Jesus, preparing to give himself up to the authorites for crucifixion, tells his disciples to arm themselves with swords:

And Jesus said to them, “When I sent you out without purse or bag or sandals, you didn’t want for anything, did you?”And they said, “No, nothing.”

Then he said to them, “But now, whoever does have a purse should pick it up––and likewise whoever has a bag––and whoever doesn’t have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this writing must be fulfilled in me: ‘Indeed, he was considered one of the lawless.’ For indeed, it has its fulfillment in me.”

So they said, “Lord, we have two swords here.”

And he said to them, “That’s enough.” (Luke 22:35-38)

According to messianic expectations, it would make perfect sense for Jesus to tell his followers to get swords. He was about to be ambushed, and weapons could come in useful. Perhaps, the disciples may have reasoned, Jesus had finally decided to set aside his non-violent ways and take his throne by force.

But there’s a problem: What use are two swords to twelve men? They’re about to face an angry mob, and two swords are enough? What are Jesus and the other nine disciples supposed to do?

The story soon overturns the disciples’ expectations anyway:

While he was still talking, suddenly a crowd came, with the one called Judas, one of the Twelve, leading them. He walked up to Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus said, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”Then, when those with Jesus saw what was happening, they said, “Lord, should we strike them with the swords?” And one of them struck the slave of the Chief Priest and cut off his right ear.

But Jesus responded, “No more of this!”, and he touched the ear and healed it. Then Jesus said to those before him––the Chief Priest and the captain of the temple, and the elders––“Have you come out as if you were after a bandit, with swords and clubs? Every day when I was with you in the temple, you didn’t stretch out your hands against me, but this is your hour––the authority of darkness. (Luke 22:47-53)

This second story seems to explain why the apostles didn’t need more swords, but the problem remains: Why did Jesus tell the disciples to bring swords at all if he didn’t want them to use them? Presumably he didn’t simply change his mind in the middle of the story.

I would argue that the two swords at the last supper were “enough” precisely because they weren’t meant to be used. Jesus isn’t intending the swords to serve as weapons, but rather as props. The two swords aren’t enough to fight with, but they are enough to fulfill the scripture: “Indeed, he was considered one of the lawless.” The swords, then, create a sort of miniature drama whereby a rabbi and his disciples are transformed into a band of criminals, just in time for an angry mob to come hunting them down.

The important point, though, is that they’re a rather pathetic band of criminals, with no chance of fighting off the mob. When one of the disciples does try to defend himself, he manages only to cut off a servant’s ear. Jesus, of course, heals the ear and again says, “That is enough.” One swing accomplished what the swords were for.

It is precisely the disciples’ inability to defend themselves that allows Jesus to confront the Chief Priest and his mob the way he does: they show their own weakness and injustice by arranging for a clandestine, violent confrontation with a man who poses them no physical threat but whom they have been too afraid to arrest in daylight.

Thus the arrest on the Mount of Olives is loaded with an irony that is not lost on Jesus. The two swords Jesus’ disciples hold highlight the absurdity of the situation by portraying Jesus’ disiples as the very thing the Chief Priest’s response suggests they are. In the end, Jesus manages to use the entire scene to mock the most important Jews in Jerusalm for gathering late at night and pulling together a gang of ruffians in order to subdue the Rabbi Jesus and his mismatched, and only nominally armed, band of disciples.

In Luke’s portrayal, Jesus is above all innocent, and the arrest of a band of disciples as if they were a gang of bandits emphasizes the injustice of the crucifixion.

Irony in the Divine Drama

In addition to its place in Luke-Acts, I think this episode works as a commentary on the nature of evil and injustice as they are confronted by the kingdom of God.

In Christ, God engages the world with truth rather than with force; but because the world is no match for Christ’s truth, it uses violence to take advange of his refusal to use force. This is something we witness (and some of us experience) every day, and it can be excruciating for those who suffer––believers or otherwise.

What makes Christians different is that we get the irony of the story. Take away the irony from Luke’s Gospel, and all you have is a horrible injustice perpetrated against an innocent man. But careful readers have two key advantages: (1) recognition that the kingdom of God is present even if invisible, and (2) knowledge that resurrection will follow death. This fundamentally changes the meaning of Jesus’ death in Luke’s Gospel, and it fundamentally changes the meaning of the life and death we experience.

If there is no kingdom and no resurrection, then we (humans) are indeed to be pitied. But knowing the reality behind the appearances, even if it still can’t make suffering meaningful, does remind us that our world––which comes at night with swords and clubs to attack the truth it cannot defeat in daylight––may yet be redeemed.

In the previous post, I suggested the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) as an example of a transparent text, meaning that although Jesus delivers the sermon to the other characters in the story, it’s actually intended primarily for the reader, so that we can see through the story to a message intended for us (or, originally, for Matthew’s first-century readers).

I’d like to propose here that the kind of Christian reader Matthew wrote for (i.e., having the appropriate cultural background, knowledge of the Jewish scriptures, etc.), if they started at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel and read through its first seven chapters, would most naturally experience the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount less as an historical account of Jesus’ words and more as teachings intended specifically for her and any other believer. I’ll do my best to show how the beginning of the Gospel sets up this expectation.

The beginning of Matthew leads the reader to expect Jesus to be, above all, a king. Jesus is introduced in 1:1 to be the Messiah (i.e., the anointed king; compare 2:2 with 2:4) and the Son of David (from a kingly line). The Magi come from afar to worship one who is born King of the Jews (2:2), and Herod (the king of the Jews at the time) views him as a threat (2:3). And then at Jesus’ baptism, a voice from heaven announces, “This is my Son,” a phrase quite similar to Psalm 2:7, where “You are my Son” is God’s way of designating the anointed king whom God will set up in Zion (= Jerusalem, Ps 2:6) to rule over all the nations (Ps 2:8).

Jesus also is presented in categories that are more reflective of Christian theology as most of us know it. Jesus, then, is one who will save his people from their sins (1:21), and he is one who will represent the presence of God with God’s people (1:23).

But there is still another side to Jesus’ character that Matthew presents in his opening chapters, and we must recognize it in order to understand the rhetoric of Matthew’s story––in particular, why the Sermon on the Mount is placed where it is, and what it’s supposed to mean for the reader.

When Herod starts killing children (2:16), an angel of the Lord tells Joseph to flee with his family to Egypt; after Herod dies, the family returns and settles in Nazareth (2:23). This might seem merely like a piece of the plot, but the passage quoted in explanation of the journey, “Out of Egypt I called my son,” is a reference to Hosea 11 that refers to Israel’s exodus from Egypt. Just as Israel (God’s son) left Canaan (in the days off Joseph) to go down to Egypt, and then later returned, so did Jesus.

When we soon find Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness being tempted/tested (4:2), the parallel between Jesus and Israel becomes unmistakeable. The point is not that Jesus’ story is exactly like that of Israel, but that these certain motifs keep coming up that give the sense that Jesus is being compared with Israel. In response to the devil’s temptations in the wilderness, Jesus quotes passages from Deuteronomy that were originally instructions to Israel regarding what God wanted them to learn during their own forty (years) in the wilderness. The upshot is that where Israel failed to remain faithful, Jesus succeeds.

Coming back into Galilee, Jesus resumes his role as expected king, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” (4:17). The reader who has understood what came before knows that Jesus’ kingdom means far more than a new political arrangement. Not only has he come to fill the throne of his father David, but he has come to transform Israel’s relationship to its God, bringing about repentance, forgiveness, obedience, and the presence of God.

The story of Israel’s exodus is not the only literary connection Matthew creates, and here is where we arrive at the key point for understanding the Sermon. Jesus’ fast of forty days and forty nights exactly matches that of Moses when he received the Ten Commandments on Sinai (Ex 34:28). It seems that Jesus is serving not only as a new Israel, but also as a new Moses. And when Jesus walks up to a mountainside and begins to teach (similar to Moses, who ascended a mountain to receive the law), the connection is complete.

All this leads into the Sermon on the Mount, which the rhetoric of the narrative has prepared the reader to listen to, not as an historical account of something Jesus once said, but as the New Law given by a new Moses to a renewed Israel. Matthew is essentially retelling the story of the people of God for the new age, and Jesus’ teachings transcend the narrative in which they are located to address everyone who considers herself a disciple of Christ.

Jesus’ words are both related to and different than Moses’. Moses received tablets written upon by God, but Jesus is able simply to speak from his own mouth: “You have heard . . . but I say to you” (5:21f, 27f, 33f, 38f, 43f). Also, Jesus describes his own relationship to Moses by claiming to fulfill the law that Moses gave (5:17). Although Jesus isn’t replacing the law here (as some folks would claim), he is presenting an interpretation of the law that lays claim on its hearers and readers. Immediately after the Sermon we are told that Jesus spoke to the crowds as one with authority, and I am arguing that his words hold that same authority for any reader who would be a disciple.

If any doubt lingers for the reader as to the authority or application of Jesus’ words, Matthew closes the Sermon with three teachings to pound home his point: only a few will find the narrow road leading to life (7:14), the true disciples of Jesus are only the ones who do the will of the Father (7:21) and bear good fruit (7:17), and the wise person who hears the words of this sermon will put them into practice (7:24). Much as the law in Deuteronomy 28 included blessings and curses for those who obeyed or disobeyed, Matthew also includes blessings (5:3-12) and curses (7:13-27), the latter explicitly according to obedience.

The point of all this is, even though Jesus surely said many of the things that are in the Sermon on the Mount, the more important point for the church should be that God put them in Scripture for us. So if we want to understand the Sermon historically, it may be more worth our time to figure out what it meant for Matthew’s readers in roughly A.D. 85 than what it meant for Jesus’ hearers in A.D. 30.