Jesus' ministry is well known for healing diseases and making the unclean clean again. But to appreciate this, we need to understand the Old Testament, levitical context for this. Sometimes we are ashamed of some physical attribute. Some of us are prone to cavities. Others have birthmarks. Some of us are bald. Others are heavier than they'd like to be. Were Pharisees just body-shamers - excluding people arbitrarily for their deafness, their leprosy, or their flows of blood? Was Jesus basically just saying "stop the bullying?" No. Questions about purity and impurity have to do with the spread of flesh and death, as we've been maintaining in these posts. We'll see that the Pharisees falsely manipulated Torah, but this only shows us how God's good Torah was being overtaken by flesh. This is humanity's core problem. War and victory over flesh and death will constitute re-entry into Eden.
If we look closely at the way levitical law treats skin issues, we'll be in a position to appreciate what is unique about Jesus' ministry of cleaning.
The purity regulations all had to do with putting flesh to death. Concern about defilement had to do with flesh's basic propensity to spread and pollute:
"Impurity infects because it is the spread of flesh - menstruation...emission, flesh showing through the skin." (Delivered, 111-112)
Flesh also pollutes:
"Skin disease pollutes when flesh shows through the outer covering of skin (Lev. 13-14). Emissions from the genitals pollute, and Leviticus uses basar (flesh) to describe genitals (Lev. 15:2, 3, 7, 13, 16, 19)...Flesh is not only a static source of defilement. Flesh spreads pollution, so that the woman with a flow of blood defiles any who touch her, and dead flesh spreads death to the entire space where it lies. Flesh is a potency whose power must be controlled and arrested if Israel is to be near Yahweh's house. And every time an Israelite washed away the stains of flesh when he drew near, he was carrying on, in a small way, Yahweh's war with flesh." (Delivered, 100-101)
For this pollution, the levitical law of Torah brought cleaning. Purity rites would clean with blood. "If a priest offers a purification offering, blood is taken into the Holy Place and smeared on the horns of the golden altar of incense. If a common Israelite sins, the blood of the purification is smeared on the horns of the bronze altar." (A House for My Name, 93)
How does blood clean? Leithart says two things. That it isn't magic, but it also isn't arbitrary. It isn't magic in that there isn't some inner natural quality to blood that cleans, but rather it is a given and attributed quality. God has given it that these natural materials used in these ways (levitical law) will achieve a certain effect. But it also isn't arbitrary. Blood contains the life of the flesh: "Any Israelite or any foreigner residing among you who hunts any animal or bird that may be eaten must drain out the blood and cover it with earth, because the life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, "You must not eat the blood of any creature..." (Lev. 17:13-14...nephesh or 'flesh' comes up three times in this passage) Offering up the blood, or the fleshly life of an animal substitute brings the death of their flesh, and is a participation in God's war against flesh:
"By offering up the life of the animal to God, the worshiper expresses both the renunciation of flesh and the faith of Abraham, who abandoned his fleshly future to God to do with what he would - and received a "new son" back in return...The blood of the animal, emblematic of the fleshly life of the worshiper, is spread on the furniture of the sanctuary so that the sanctuary bears the guilt and impurity of the worshiper. Torah's sacrifices enact a ministry of condemnation - a condemnation of flesh for the purpose of transforming it to Spirit. (Delivered, 113)
In Matthew 4:23-25, we see Jesus' mission of healing and cleaning:
"Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them." (Matt. 4:23-25)
What is startling about this is, in light of what we've been saying in this post, is that Jesus is touching people who are unclean: he touches lepers and dead bodies. He touches a woman with a defiling flow of blood. But instead of "contracting their contagious miasma, his cleansing life flowed to them." (Delivered, 138). The lepers were healed of their leprosy. The woman's flow of blood stopped. The dead were raised. Not only did Jesus do this. He taught his disciples to do this.
Jesus' ministry of cleaning recapitulates Torah's ministry of cleaning. He does all the things the tabernacle did. He accomplishes all the healing qualities that God had given to sacrificial blood. As we'll continue to see in these posts, the life of the Spirit is opposed to the life of the flesh. Here, we see that Jesus lives by the Spirit, and flesh doesn't spread to him.
To conclude, it is also worth noting how even though the levitical law was meant to be a soldier in God's war against flesh, the main problem with Israel over the course of the New Testament is that they had become primarily an accomplice to flesh. Nicholas Perrin describes how the temple functioned as Israel's predatory lending bank:
"The windfall income that would accrue to the temple leadership through illegal gain could then in turn be quickly turned around for punishingly high-interest-rate loans to the destitute. By being in a position to leverage usurious, high-risk loans, the temple financiers were then able to foreclose quickly and efficiently on landholders struggling to eke out an existence. Increased temple landholdings eventually meant more wealth for the priestly elite, more wealth meant even more high-interest loans, more high-interest loans meant more foreclosures on the land, and the cycle went on - crushingly so, for those at the bottom of the economic ladder." (Perrin, quoted in Delivered, 148)
In other words, Israel had become Egypt. Just as Egypt enslaved the Israelites in the time of Moses, so Israel was enslaving Israel in the time of Christ. They presented as scrupulous obedience to levitical law what was really an appropriating of the law for their own selfish boasting. They used the levitical law not for putting flesh to death. They used it to set up fortresses to protect their own flesh. This is most pronounced in their exclusion of the unclean. Rather than cleaning them, they excluded them. Rather than relieving their burdens, they added more. This is where the pressure point is. Much as Egypt had trusted in its own gods, Israel trusts in their misappropriation of Torah. And just as God enacted plagues on Egypt's gods in Exodus, God also enacts plagues on Israel's gods in the gospels. But instead of plagues of destruction, Jesus brought plagues of healing:
"Jesus came as a new Moses, and as such he brought "plagues" that destroyed "Egypt's" world of worship in order to make way for a new one. The plagues included eating with sinners; healing on the Sabbath; showing kindness to tax collectors and Gentiles; touching lepers, corpses, and women with flows of blood. He instructed his followers to subvert the world order by returning kindness for harm, blessing for insult, by bearing others' burdens. Jesus came with plagues of mercy that subverted the perverse Torah-regime of the scribes and Pharisees and the brute force of the Romans." (151)
Jesus shows us restored Eden in his touch, in his presence. His life overcomes the pollutant of death. His health overcomes the pollutant of disease. His accusers see in him a sinner who eats with sinners. His followers see a living embodiment of what the tabernacle was meant to be - a hospital for the healing of sinners so that they can be restored to Eden and to God's presence. It's even better than that, because this Jesus-hospital is Eden. This Jesus-hospital is God's presence.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Monday, March 25, 2019
Lent 2019: Thursday, March 21 - Eating
In Matthew 9:9-13, Jesus calls a tax collector to follow him as a disciple (his name is Matthew!) When it turns out that Jesus spent the evening having a meal with Matthew and other "tax collectors and sinners," Pharisees ask why.
Pharisees believed that it was key to program of national redemption that their food not be defiled by the presence of uncleanliness. Tax collectors aided and abetted the primary Gentile enemy - the Roman Empire, both in their daily dealings, and in their livelihood. All of this served to make tax collectors in particular a constellation of uncleanliness for Pharisees.
When Jesus responds, he describes himself as a physician who needs contact with the sick to be able to heal them. He also quotes a passage that says, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." The quote is from the prophet Hosea, who condemns Ephraim and Judah for their faithfulness being as fleeting and temporary as morning dew. Hosea says he desires "hesed" or loyalty, rather than sacrifices. Interestingly, right before Hosea says this, he makes reference to his prophetic words, which cut in pieces and kill. What does this mean? Hosea's words serve a priestly function, to make the unfaithful people into a pleasing sacrifice who are loyal, merciful, and compassionate. The Pharisees problem is not that they focus on sacrifice, but that it doesn't lead to loyalty, mercy, and compassion. In other words, it doesn't lead to table fellowship between God and sinners.
In an earlier post, we described the levitical sacrificial sequence: an animal represents the sinner. The animal representing the sinner is killed. It's blood is displayed. The animal is turned into smoke. The priests eat a meal. We see here that the sacrifice all leads to the end that God can have renewed fellowship with sinners over a meal. Sacrifice allows them real but limited access back into the garden so that they can eat with God at his house and at his table.
That Jesus eats with sinners is a sign of Eden. In Jesus' presence, it is as though we have already passed through the veil of the holy of holies and get to sit in the presence of God. Of course, we haven't crossed that threshold. God has crossed over to us in Jesus. Food is never just fuel. Meal times are communion times. The tables in our homes are micro versions of the table fellowship we celebrate in worship as the body of Christ. Nourishment there can't be measured strictly in calories or vitamins. Just as food shapes the strength of our bodies, so table fellowship shapes the strength of our identity, that who I am is shaped by my communal memberships, and not the other way around. To eat with Christ is not only to be fed by food, but to be fed by him.
Pharisees believed that it was key to program of national redemption that their food not be defiled by the presence of uncleanliness. Tax collectors aided and abetted the primary Gentile enemy - the Roman Empire, both in their daily dealings, and in their livelihood. All of this served to make tax collectors in particular a constellation of uncleanliness for Pharisees.
When Jesus responds, he describes himself as a physician who needs contact with the sick to be able to heal them. He also quotes a passage that says, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." The quote is from the prophet Hosea, who condemns Ephraim and Judah for their faithfulness being as fleeting and temporary as morning dew. Hosea says he desires "hesed" or loyalty, rather than sacrifices. Interestingly, right before Hosea says this, he makes reference to his prophetic words, which cut in pieces and kill. What does this mean? Hosea's words serve a priestly function, to make the unfaithful people into a pleasing sacrifice who are loyal, merciful, and compassionate. The Pharisees problem is not that they focus on sacrifice, but that it doesn't lead to loyalty, mercy, and compassion. In other words, it doesn't lead to table fellowship between God and sinners.
In an earlier post, we described the levitical sacrificial sequence: an animal represents the sinner. The animal representing the sinner is killed. It's blood is displayed. The animal is turned into smoke. The priests eat a meal. We see here that the sacrifice all leads to the end that God can have renewed fellowship with sinners over a meal. Sacrifice allows them real but limited access back into the garden so that they can eat with God at his house and at his table.
That Jesus eats with sinners is a sign of Eden. In Jesus' presence, it is as though we have already passed through the veil of the holy of holies and get to sit in the presence of God. Of course, we haven't crossed that threshold. God has crossed over to us in Jesus. Food is never just fuel. Meal times are communion times. The tables in our homes are micro versions of the table fellowship we celebrate in worship as the body of Christ. Nourishment there can't be measured strictly in calories or vitamins. Just as food shapes the strength of our bodies, so table fellowship shapes the strength of our identity, that who I am is shaped by my communal memberships, and not the other way around. To eat with Christ is not only to be fed by food, but to be fed by him.
Lent 2019: Wednesday, March 20 - Festivity
In Matthew 9:37, Jesus says to his disciples: "the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field."
There is a double-sided quality to harvest in the New Testament. One side conveys a sense of separation, division, and judgment. In this sense, the harvest is what happens at the end times, and wheat is gathered and taken into the barn, and weeds are gathered and burned.
The other side though, is festivity. Harvest itself is an indication of abundance, of rest at the end of labor, of feasting at the end of fasting. In an earlier post, we explored how much of the tabernacle is arranged to show that Israel is God's bride. Meeting with God for Israel has a romantic connotation. Furthermore, the tabernacle is often referred to as a "tent of meeting" or a tent of festivals. The same Hebrew word is used in Genesis 1:14 when God makes lights in the sky that will indicate "sacred times." A list of these festivals is given in Leviticus 23: sabbath, passover, festival of unleavened bread, offering the firstfruits, festival of weeks, festival of trumpets, day of atonement, and festival of tabernacles. These are all "trysts" between the bride Israel and bridegroom God. The tabernacle and all of its rites and rituals communicated the deep purpose of marriage between Israel and God. And this is a picture of Eden, of being restored into God's presence. It is a garden where love blooms.
This is more clear if we look at prophetic testimony about Israel's return from exile: it is consistently presented as a festival time when God will truly re-establish his garden-kingdom in Israel. Amos writes: "'The days are coming,' declares the Lord, 'when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading grapes. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills, and I will bring my people Israel back from exile. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them,' says the Lord your God." (Amos 9:13-15)
When Jesus comes he recapitulates the festival times of the tabernacle. Amos was describing a kingdom yet to come. Jesus comes saying the kingdom has drawn near. Jesus taught his disciples not to be anxious about anything for the body - money or clothes. This is harvest logic. It's a time of abundance. The harvest is here! The kingdom is near! In Matthew 10, Jesus calls his twelve disciples and gives them authority to drive out impure spirits. This has a military connotation, but the battle is not against flesh and blood. Jesus says: "As you go, proclaim this message: 'The kingdom of heaven has come near.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons." (Matt. 10:7-8) Jesus is a warrior for rest, abundance, and festivity.
Jesus is asked why his disciples don't fast. Jesus says:
"How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast. No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." (Matt. 9:15-17)
Peter Leithart writes:
"Jews fasted in anticipation. Fasting meant waiting, and specifically waiting for the feast to begin. But once Jesus has come, the time of anticipation is over; the time of waiting has reached its end. With His coming, everything begins to change. He comes as a man who has authority over the wind and the sea. He comes "before the time" to triumph over the demons. He comes to forgive sins. He comes to welcome tax gatherers and sinners, to heal the sick, and to preach that compassion is better than sacrifice. With the coming of Jesus, the feast of the kingdom has begun. He has come to make all things new." (Jesus as Israel, 195)
Finally, we need to see that this festive community is not just something the disciples go out to create. It is not just a message they proclaim, but something that they already are. It is their community - a new type of people. Throughout the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is forming a new Israel, a community built around 12 new tribes, who will represent a righteousness beyond the scribes and Pharisees. In other words, they won't merely suppress flesh-inspired behavior, but will live in such a way as to overcome the flesh. They don't merely try to control the evil effects of sin and flesh, but go on to seek reconciliation and reunion in love. Jesus and his disciples are a picture of Eden.
There is a double-sided quality to harvest in the New Testament. One side conveys a sense of separation, division, and judgment. In this sense, the harvest is what happens at the end times, and wheat is gathered and taken into the barn, and weeds are gathered and burned.
The other side though, is festivity. Harvest itself is an indication of abundance, of rest at the end of labor, of feasting at the end of fasting. In an earlier post, we explored how much of the tabernacle is arranged to show that Israel is God's bride. Meeting with God for Israel has a romantic connotation. Furthermore, the tabernacle is often referred to as a "tent of meeting" or a tent of festivals. The same Hebrew word is used in Genesis 1:14 when God makes lights in the sky that will indicate "sacred times." A list of these festivals is given in Leviticus 23: sabbath, passover, festival of unleavened bread, offering the firstfruits, festival of weeks, festival of trumpets, day of atonement, and festival of tabernacles. These are all "trysts" between the bride Israel and bridegroom God. The tabernacle and all of its rites and rituals communicated the deep purpose of marriage between Israel and God. And this is a picture of Eden, of being restored into God's presence. It is a garden where love blooms.
This is more clear if we look at prophetic testimony about Israel's return from exile: it is consistently presented as a festival time when God will truly re-establish his garden-kingdom in Israel. Amos writes: "'The days are coming,' declares the Lord, 'when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading grapes. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills, and I will bring my people Israel back from exile. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them,' says the Lord your God." (Amos 9:13-15)
When Jesus comes he recapitulates the festival times of the tabernacle. Amos was describing a kingdom yet to come. Jesus comes saying the kingdom has drawn near. Jesus taught his disciples not to be anxious about anything for the body - money or clothes. This is harvest logic. It's a time of abundance. The harvest is here! The kingdom is near! In Matthew 10, Jesus calls his twelve disciples and gives them authority to drive out impure spirits. This has a military connotation, but the battle is not against flesh and blood. Jesus says: "As you go, proclaim this message: 'The kingdom of heaven has come near.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons." (Matt. 10:7-8) Jesus is a warrior for rest, abundance, and festivity.
Jesus is asked why his disciples don't fast. Jesus says:
"How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast. No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." (Matt. 9:15-17)
Peter Leithart writes:
"Jews fasted in anticipation. Fasting meant waiting, and specifically waiting for the feast to begin. But once Jesus has come, the time of anticipation is over; the time of waiting has reached its end. With His coming, everything begins to change. He comes as a man who has authority over the wind and the sea. He comes "before the time" to triumph over the demons. He comes to forgive sins. He comes to welcome tax gatherers and sinners, to heal the sick, and to preach that compassion is better than sacrifice. With the coming of Jesus, the feast of the kingdom has begun. He has come to make all things new." (Jesus as Israel, 195)
Finally, we need to see that this festive community is not just something the disciples go out to create. It is not just a message they proclaim, but something that they already are. It is their community - a new type of people. Throughout the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is forming a new Israel, a community built around 12 new tribes, who will represent a righteousness beyond the scribes and Pharisees. In other words, they won't merely suppress flesh-inspired behavior, but will live in such a way as to overcome the flesh. They don't merely try to control the evil effects of sin and flesh, but go on to seek reconciliation and reunion in love. Jesus and his disciples are a picture of Eden.
Saturday, March 23, 2019
Lent 2019: Tuesday, March 19 - Curtains
New life and restoration must come from God and not from us. In the Bible, this is often depicted as new life coming from God's house, because that's where God is. As we've seen, the holy of holies is the room of the temple where God lives. So in Ezekiel's vision of restoration in chapter 47, we see that water flows out from the temple. It is a river of life, causing creatures and fish and fruit trees to flourish. It flows into the Dead Sea, but instead of becoming salty, the salt water becomes fresh. New life comes out from the temple. God steps out from the temple, out from the fenced-off place of the holy of holies, and renews the land.
In Matthew 12, Jesus and his disciples eat heads of grain from a grainfield. As they ate it on the sabbath, Pharisees cry foul. In his defense, Jesus makes reference to priests who desecrate the temple on the sabbath day and yet are innocent. As Peter Leithart writes, priests are commanded to do work on the sabbath. Jesus doesn't mean they are breaking the law. For others, it would be perhaps. But not for priests. Working on the sabbath, offering their sacrifices is the way they keep the sabbath.
By the Pharisees light, this is a sabbath-breaking, but what Jesus is in effect saying is that he and his disciples are priests. How can this be? We find this is so because the disciples have a traveling temple with them, the new Jesus temple. Jesus says: "I tell you that something greater than the temple is here." Leithart writes:
"Jesus Himself is that greater-than-temple Something. He is the locus of the presence of God, the place where God dwells in fullness. As long as He's there with His disciples, their work, even if it was work, is legitimate work on the Sabbath. Where Jesus is, there is the temple and presence of God..." (Leithart, Jesus as Israel, Vol. 1, 245)
What does this mean? A few posts ago, we talked about how the tabernacle and temple served to provide Israel real but limited access to Eden. It served to provide hope that God will eventually make a way back to Eden. That is still yet to happen, but we've made a remarkable turn on the way to that happy conclusion: God himself has stepped from Eden into the world. The curse of death separates us from that space. It is guarded by flaming sword and temple veils. It is a holy boundary to protect us from the holy one. But the holy one has now crossed over the veil into the world. He has parted the curtains and moved into our neighborhood. The one who lives perfectly by Spirit has moved into the world of flesh and death.
The gospels show us Jesus doing everything that God was doing from the tabernacle and temple. This will continue to be true. The one change is that it is all out in the open. Peter Leithart writes:
"The one change - the single shift so massive that it changes everything - is that Yahweh is no longer hidden. At Sinai, Yahweh established his home in the midst of Israel, but with Jesus, Yahweh takes a further step into the world of flesh, beyond the tabernacle of curtains at Sinai. And then it becomes clear that the whole sanctuary apparatus, all the purity rules and rites of purification, all the sacrifices, the whole system was a complex type and shadow of Jesus' life and ministry." (Delivered, 137)
All the levitical law of Torah shows us the culture of what it means to live with God in his house. What would it look like if God came out from his house and mingled with sinners without the veil of the temple barriers?
It would look like Jesus.
In Matthew 12, Jesus and his disciples eat heads of grain from a grainfield. As they ate it on the sabbath, Pharisees cry foul. In his defense, Jesus makes reference to priests who desecrate the temple on the sabbath day and yet are innocent. As Peter Leithart writes, priests are commanded to do work on the sabbath. Jesus doesn't mean they are breaking the law. For others, it would be perhaps. But not for priests. Working on the sabbath, offering their sacrifices is the way they keep the sabbath.
By the Pharisees light, this is a sabbath-breaking, but what Jesus is in effect saying is that he and his disciples are priests. How can this be? We find this is so because the disciples have a traveling temple with them, the new Jesus temple. Jesus says: "I tell you that something greater than the temple is here." Leithart writes:
"Jesus Himself is that greater-than-temple Something. He is the locus of the presence of God, the place where God dwells in fullness. As long as He's there with His disciples, their work, even if it was work, is legitimate work on the Sabbath. Where Jesus is, there is the temple and presence of God..." (Leithart, Jesus as Israel, Vol. 1, 245)
What does this mean? A few posts ago, we talked about how the tabernacle and temple served to provide Israel real but limited access to Eden. It served to provide hope that God will eventually make a way back to Eden. That is still yet to happen, but we've made a remarkable turn on the way to that happy conclusion: God himself has stepped from Eden into the world. The curse of death separates us from that space. It is guarded by flaming sword and temple veils. It is a holy boundary to protect us from the holy one. But the holy one has now crossed over the veil into the world. He has parted the curtains and moved into our neighborhood. The one who lives perfectly by Spirit has moved into the world of flesh and death.
The gospels show us Jesus doing everything that God was doing from the tabernacle and temple. This will continue to be true. The one change is that it is all out in the open. Peter Leithart writes:
"The one change - the single shift so massive that it changes everything - is that Yahweh is no longer hidden. At Sinai, Yahweh established his home in the midst of Israel, but with Jesus, Yahweh takes a further step into the world of flesh, beyond the tabernacle of curtains at Sinai. And then it becomes clear that the whole sanctuary apparatus, all the purity rules and rites of purification, all the sacrifices, the whole system was a complex type and shadow of Jesus' life and ministry." (Delivered, 137)
All the levitical law of Torah shows us the culture of what it means to live with God in his house. What would it look like if God came out from his house and mingled with sinners without the veil of the temple barriers?
It would look like Jesus.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Lent 2019: Monday, March 18 - Flood
The flood is a story of verdict and deliverance which serves to illustrate Jesus' work of verdict and deliverance. It illustrates it through similarity and also through distinction. In other words, Jesus' deliverance is like the flood, and in other ways it isn't, but in all these ways, we gain clarity about Jesus' work.
Peter Leithart writes: "God did not send another flood: instead of destroying flesh by destroying humanity, God in Christ targeted flesh and condemned it to death. Jesus brought God's warfare, his prosecution of flesh, to its climax and sealed the case against it." (Delivered, 285)
Indeed, the flood was a unique event in that God set about destroying flesh by destroying humanity. God's preliminary judgment is given in Genesis 6:3 that humanity is totally consumed with fleshly violence and, after a 120 year period to repent, God brings a verdict and judgment on the world in the form of a flood.
We also see judgment in the beginning of Jesus' ministry in the form of John the Baptist. John warns Israel to repent:
"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, 'we have Abraham as our father.' I tell you that God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire." (Matt. 3:7-10)
We see here a verdict that Israel and its leaders were in league with sin, flesh, and the devil. They were back in the land of Israel, but spiritually, they were in opposition to the Lord and his will. The ultimate verdict will come in how they respond to the Lord at his appearing. And Jesus comes to be baptized.
This is interesting because Jesus has not sinned. He comes forward in response to John the Baptist's witness testimony in God's lawsuit against Israel, submits to the baptism that constitutes repentance and deliverance, but he has not sinned. Rather, he submits to baptism for "righteousness' sake." What sort of deliverance will this be?
We have reason here to look back at the imagery from the flood because of the dove. We are told that the Holy Spirit descends like a dove when Jesus is baptized and it is a dove which brings to Noah and his people the sign that waters have receded. We see that the ark, the branch, and the land show us things about the type of deliverance that Jesus will bring.
The ark is interesting for being a boat which is built more like a house. Meredith Kline writes that the ark was:
"a spiritual house of God, which has its symbolic external prototypes in the Creator's cosmic house of heaven and earth and later in Israel's microcosmic Tabernacle and Temple. What is now to be observed is that the design of the ark suggested that it was intended to be a representation of God's Kingdom in this cosmic house form. For the ark, however seaworthy, was fashioned like a house rather than like a sailing vessel. All the features mentioned in the description of the ark belong to the architecture of a house; the three stories, the door, the window." (quoted in Through New Eyes, 170)
This house-ark thus has more symbolic connections to the tabernacle and temple than a mere boat would. It also has symbolic connections to baptism itself. Land often represents Israel in the Bible, while the sea represents the Gentiles, the undifferentiated mass of humanity under flesh and death. Israel is delivered from watery death in the flood and also in the exodus as a way of showing that humanity - through humanity's representative, Israel - will be delivered from death. Baptism is a sign of this deliverance. That Jesus undergoes baptism means that he is a representative of Israel, undergoing baptism for "righteousness," to deliver into from death to life. Jesus is thus the ark, the temple that sails the seas, that carries the righteous to their deliverance. As the ark was filled with animals miraculously living at peace with one another, so the new creation will be filled with animals living at peace in Jesus: "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra's den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." (Isaiah 11:6-9)
We see in Isaiah that the ark is a picture of what the new creation will be. And Jesus is the fulfillment of the ark.
Jesus is also like the branch. Noah and his family sail on the seas. They are saved, but not saved. They are waiting. They send out birds to forage for any sort of sign that things are different, that there is anything other than watery wilderness, that there is any sign of the separating work God did at the first creation of dividing water from land so that the land can be filled. The sign comes when a dove brings an olive leaf. "When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth." (Genesis 8:11) The leaf comes as good news from a far off land that there is a new world, a new order of things. In keeping with the foliage imagery, Isaiah prophesies that deliverance will come in the form of a branch: "A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit." (Isaiah 11:1) And this branch will be the one who lives by Spirit not by flesh: "The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him - the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord - and he will delight in the fear of the Lord." (Isaiah 11:2) Baptism illuminates Jesus to be a new Israel, but also Israel's "strength and consolation," the olive leaf, the branch, that the Spirit brings to nurture hope for deliverance.
And Jesus isn't only the sign of deliverance, but also the great resting place. With regard to the Noah story, he is the land. There is a fruitful, sabbath rest for Noah and his family. Of course, the world becomes broken again. But Jesus is a sabbath rest that can't fail, a land which will always be fruitful. The heavens open at Jesus' baptism. This is a sign that the heavens will reunite with the earth. Jesus is the heavenly man come down who will renew the earth and present it as a bride to the Lord. All the yearning for a promised land, a place to rest, "safe and secure from all alarm" is fulfilled in Jesus.
Peter Leithart writes: "God did not send another flood: instead of destroying flesh by destroying humanity, God in Christ targeted flesh and condemned it to death. Jesus brought God's warfare, his prosecution of flesh, to its climax and sealed the case against it." (Delivered, 285)
Indeed, the flood was a unique event in that God set about destroying flesh by destroying humanity. God's preliminary judgment is given in Genesis 6:3 that humanity is totally consumed with fleshly violence and, after a 120 year period to repent, God brings a verdict and judgment on the world in the form of a flood.
We also see judgment in the beginning of Jesus' ministry in the form of John the Baptist. John warns Israel to repent:
"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, 'we have Abraham as our father.' I tell you that God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire." (Matt. 3:7-10)
We see here a verdict that Israel and its leaders were in league with sin, flesh, and the devil. They were back in the land of Israel, but spiritually, they were in opposition to the Lord and his will. The ultimate verdict will come in how they respond to the Lord at his appearing. And Jesus comes to be baptized.
This is interesting because Jesus has not sinned. He comes forward in response to John the Baptist's witness testimony in God's lawsuit against Israel, submits to the baptism that constitutes repentance and deliverance, but he has not sinned. Rather, he submits to baptism for "righteousness' sake." What sort of deliverance will this be?
We have reason here to look back at the imagery from the flood because of the dove. We are told that the Holy Spirit descends like a dove when Jesus is baptized and it is a dove which brings to Noah and his people the sign that waters have receded. We see that the ark, the branch, and the land show us things about the type of deliverance that Jesus will bring.
The ark is interesting for being a boat which is built more like a house. Meredith Kline writes that the ark was:
"a spiritual house of God, which has its symbolic external prototypes in the Creator's cosmic house of heaven and earth and later in Israel's microcosmic Tabernacle and Temple. What is now to be observed is that the design of the ark suggested that it was intended to be a representation of God's Kingdom in this cosmic house form. For the ark, however seaworthy, was fashioned like a house rather than like a sailing vessel. All the features mentioned in the description of the ark belong to the architecture of a house; the three stories, the door, the window." (quoted in Through New Eyes, 170)
This house-ark thus has more symbolic connections to the tabernacle and temple than a mere boat would. It also has symbolic connections to baptism itself. Land often represents Israel in the Bible, while the sea represents the Gentiles, the undifferentiated mass of humanity under flesh and death. Israel is delivered from watery death in the flood and also in the exodus as a way of showing that humanity - through humanity's representative, Israel - will be delivered from death. Baptism is a sign of this deliverance. That Jesus undergoes baptism means that he is a representative of Israel, undergoing baptism for "righteousness," to deliver into from death to life. Jesus is thus the ark, the temple that sails the seas, that carries the righteous to their deliverance. As the ark was filled with animals miraculously living at peace with one another, so the new creation will be filled with animals living at peace in Jesus: "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra's den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." (Isaiah 11:6-9)
We see in Isaiah that the ark is a picture of what the new creation will be. And Jesus is the fulfillment of the ark.
Jesus is also like the branch. Noah and his family sail on the seas. They are saved, but not saved. They are waiting. They send out birds to forage for any sort of sign that things are different, that there is anything other than watery wilderness, that there is any sign of the separating work God did at the first creation of dividing water from land so that the land can be filled. The sign comes when a dove brings an olive leaf. "When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth." (Genesis 8:11) The leaf comes as good news from a far off land that there is a new world, a new order of things. In keeping with the foliage imagery, Isaiah prophesies that deliverance will come in the form of a branch: "A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit." (Isaiah 11:1) And this branch will be the one who lives by Spirit not by flesh: "The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him - the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord - and he will delight in the fear of the Lord." (Isaiah 11:2) Baptism illuminates Jesus to be a new Israel, but also Israel's "strength and consolation," the olive leaf, the branch, that the Spirit brings to nurture hope for deliverance.
And Jesus isn't only the sign of deliverance, but also the great resting place. With regard to the Noah story, he is the land. There is a fruitful, sabbath rest for Noah and his family. Of course, the world becomes broken again. But Jesus is a sabbath rest that can't fail, a land which will always be fruitful. The heavens open at Jesus' baptism. This is a sign that the heavens will reunite with the earth. Jesus is the heavenly man come down who will renew the earth and present it as a bride to the Lord. All the yearning for a promised land, a place to rest, "safe and secure from all alarm" is fulfilled in Jesus.
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Lent 2019: Saturday, March 16 - Adam
Matthew begins his gospel this way: "This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah..."
The word for genealogy is the same word used in Genesis, at least as it was translated in Greek. A genealogy is a genesis, a beginning. This is not only a lead-in to a description of the generations that lead up to Jesus. It's also a claim about who Jesus is: he is a new beginning. He is a new Adam.
The end of the Gospel of Matthew also alludes to Genesis. We are told in the passage commonly known as the 'Great Commission' that Jesus has received all authority in "heaven and on earth," which echoes Genesis 1, where God creates 'the heavens and the earth'. (Genesis 1:1). In a sense, then, Matthew's gospel tells us that Jesus has brought God's initial creation to its true fulfillment. The heavens and earth, God's raw material for everything, has found its true authority in Jesus.
The end of the Gospel of Matthew also gives us a clue about the way Matthew has organized his whole gospel. Jesus' closing speech bears a striking resemblance to the closing speech of Cyrus, the king of Persia, at the end of 2 Chronicles. Both are royal decrees to go do something. Cyrus' decree is to build the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus' is to go and make disciples. Both also claim authority. Cyrus claims authority over "all the kingdoms of the earth" because "the God of heaven" gave them to him. Jesus also claims authority, but over both the heavens and the earth.
Though 2 Chronicles is nestled somewhere around the middle of our Old Testaments, it concluded the Hebrew Bible, the Bible that Jesus and the disciples would have had. So for Matthew's gospel to conclude with a reference to the conclusion of 2 Chronicles is very suggestive about Matthew's whole project in his gospel. If Jesus' story begins as a new genesis, echoing the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, his story also concludes the same way the Hebrew Bible concludes, with royal decrees and claims of authority. Matthew's project seems to claim: Jesus' story echoes this story. Jesus' story fulfills this story. Jesus' story recapitulates this other story.
It is a story that Adam begins, as he is the father of all mankind. It is also a story in which the failure of Adam is written into every chapter of Israel's history, most of which is recounted in Matthew's gospel. Moses is God's instrument for setting up real but limited access to Eden through Mount Sinai and the Tabernacle, but Israel falls prey to temptation repeatedly in the desert. Matthew 1-7 orients us to see Jesus as a new Moses. Joshua leads Israel into conquest in the promised land, but they don't take full possession. Matthew 10 orients us to see Jesus as a new Joshua. Solomon excels all in wisdom and gives proverbs. Matthew 13 orients us to see Jesus as a new Solomon. Elijah and Elisha create a new Israel within the corrupt older Israel. Matthew 18 orients us to see Jesus as a new Elisha. Jeremiah prophecies the death of exile and the resurrection of return to an Israel unwilling to listen. Matthew 23-25 orients us to see Jesus as a new Jeremiah. Throughout, we see that the story of Israel was not really meant to redeem Adam's fall into sin and death. It was really meant to foreshadow and point to the new Adam, Jesus, who would inaugurate a new era of grace and resurrection.
We'll look at Romans 5 in another post, but we'll close by looking at Daniel 7, which presents us a picture of the world's redemption as a new human, a new Adam. The vision begins with four animals - a lion, a bear, a leopard, and an unnamed fourth beast. They come out of the sea, which is a common symbol for Gentiles throughout the Bible. They are symbols for 'beastly' empires, which hold great clout in this world under the dominion of the first Adam, under the dominion of death. Then a man appears:
"In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed." (Daniel 7:13-14)
In the same way that Adam tamed the beasts in the garden (Genesis 2:20), the new Adam tames the rebellious beastly empires of the world, leading them back into the garden, back into the presence of the Ancient of Days, the Lord.
The word for genealogy is the same word used in Genesis, at least as it was translated in Greek. A genealogy is a genesis, a beginning. This is not only a lead-in to a description of the generations that lead up to Jesus. It's also a claim about who Jesus is: he is a new beginning. He is a new Adam.
The end of the Gospel of Matthew also alludes to Genesis. We are told in the passage commonly known as the 'Great Commission' that Jesus has received all authority in "heaven and on earth," which echoes Genesis 1, where God creates 'the heavens and the earth'. (Genesis 1:1). In a sense, then, Matthew's gospel tells us that Jesus has brought God's initial creation to its true fulfillment. The heavens and earth, God's raw material for everything, has found its true authority in Jesus.
The end of the Gospel of Matthew also gives us a clue about the way Matthew has organized his whole gospel. Jesus' closing speech bears a striking resemblance to the closing speech of Cyrus, the king of Persia, at the end of 2 Chronicles. Both are royal decrees to go do something. Cyrus' decree is to build the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus' is to go and make disciples. Both also claim authority. Cyrus claims authority over "all the kingdoms of the earth" because "the God of heaven" gave them to him. Jesus also claims authority, but over both the heavens and the earth.
Though 2 Chronicles is nestled somewhere around the middle of our Old Testaments, it concluded the Hebrew Bible, the Bible that Jesus and the disciples would have had. So for Matthew's gospel to conclude with a reference to the conclusion of 2 Chronicles is very suggestive about Matthew's whole project in his gospel. If Jesus' story begins as a new genesis, echoing the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, his story also concludes the same way the Hebrew Bible concludes, with royal decrees and claims of authority. Matthew's project seems to claim: Jesus' story echoes this story. Jesus' story fulfills this story. Jesus' story recapitulates this other story.
It is a story that Adam begins, as he is the father of all mankind. It is also a story in which the failure of Adam is written into every chapter of Israel's history, most of which is recounted in Matthew's gospel. Moses is God's instrument for setting up real but limited access to Eden through Mount Sinai and the Tabernacle, but Israel falls prey to temptation repeatedly in the desert. Matthew 1-7 orients us to see Jesus as a new Moses. Joshua leads Israel into conquest in the promised land, but they don't take full possession. Matthew 10 orients us to see Jesus as a new Joshua. Solomon excels all in wisdom and gives proverbs. Matthew 13 orients us to see Jesus as a new Solomon. Elijah and Elisha create a new Israel within the corrupt older Israel. Matthew 18 orients us to see Jesus as a new Elisha. Jeremiah prophecies the death of exile and the resurrection of return to an Israel unwilling to listen. Matthew 23-25 orients us to see Jesus as a new Jeremiah. Throughout, we see that the story of Israel was not really meant to redeem Adam's fall into sin and death. It was really meant to foreshadow and point to the new Adam, Jesus, who would inaugurate a new era of grace and resurrection.
We'll look at Romans 5 in another post, but we'll close by looking at Daniel 7, which presents us a picture of the world's redemption as a new human, a new Adam. The vision begins with four animals - a lion, a bear, a leopard, and an unnamed fourth beast. They come out of the sea, which is a common symbol for Gentiles throughout the Bible. They are symbols for 'beastly' empires, which hold great clout in this world under the dominion of the first Adam, under the dominion of death. Then a man appears:
"In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed." (Daniel 7:13-14)
In the same way that Adam tamed the beasts in the garden (Genesis 2:20), the new Adam tames the rebellious beastly empires of the world, leading them back into the garden, back into the presence of the Ancient of Days, the Lord.
Friday, March 15, 2019
Lent 2019: Friday, March 15 - Recapitulation (A Lengthy Interlude)
In one Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, the little boy Calvin sleds down a snowy slope with his friend Hobbes, a tiger, while conducting a discussion about sin:
Calvin: I'm getting nervous about Christmas.
Hobbes: You're worried you haven't been good?
Calvin: That's just the question. It's all relative. What's Santa's definition? How good do you have
to be to qualify as good? I haven't killed anybody. That's good, right? I haven't committed any
felonies. I didn't start any wars...Wouldn't you say that's pretty good? Wouldn't you say I should
get lots of presents?
Hobbes: But maybe good is more than the absence of bad.
Calvin: See, that's what worries me. (quoted in Rutledge, 180)
We are all like Calvin. However we may feel about our own personal behavior, we worry about whether 'bad' might somehow be more than just falling short of the mark. This whole series of posts is about how Christ's completed work addresses all the bad 'out there' in the world and 'in here,' in ourselves, and changes the whole world.
I mentioned in the first post of this series that two books about Christ's completed work have been constant companions: Fleming Rutledge's The Crucifixion and Peter Leithart's Delivered from the Elements of the World. Both are long-gestating, career-spanning books for their authors:
Rutledge writes:
"When someone asks me how long I have been working on this book, I usually say that I started it when, after twenty-one years, I retired from parish ministry - in other words, about eighteen years ago. In the truest sense, though, it has been the work of a lifetime. When I was about thirteen - that would be 1950 - I was already beginning to wonder what it meant to say that Jesus died for the sin of the world." (xv)
Leithart writes:
"I have described Delivered from the Elements of the World as my Big Red Book About Everything..." (17)
Both write about the public impact of the cross, whether Jesus meant to show the world something on the cross, or if he meant to accomplish something, and if so, what? They also write about what it means when the church fails to convey this. They worry about the cross being ignored or reduced to one meaning apart from many.
Their work speaks to temptations to avoid the cross, and also to overemphasize aspects of the cross. Rutledge writes:
"Most churchgoing people are "Jews" on Sunday morning and "Greeks" the rest of the time. Religious people want visionary experiences and spiritual uplift; secular people want proofs, arguments, demonstrations, philosophy, science. The striking fact is that neither one of these groups wants to hear about the cross." (86)
Rutledge here depicts the ways in both the world and in the church that we avoid the cross. Peter Leithart writes about a certain temptation to think about the cross, but in unhelpful ways:
"We are tempted to flinch at the last moment. We are tempted to retreat from the ambiguities of history into an atonement theory whose mechanism works regardless of whether Torah had ever been given, one that does not depend on the events of Jesus' life or the faithful witness of the founding, firstfruits generation. We are tempted to conclude that Jesus' death and resurrection might effect salvation without the church, with all its failures and imperfections..." (Delivered, 173)
Leithart and Rutledge depict two opposing temptations: one, to avoid the cross entirely, the second, to think a lot about the cross, but in one particular way.
This assumes there are many ways to think about the cross. The Christian tradition has never picked one particular understanding of atonement, which is the word for how God makes things right in Christ.
Traditionally, there are three theories of the atonement: penal substitution, Christus victor, and the moral influence theory. Rutledge covers eight "biblical motifs:" the passover/exodus, blood sacrifice, ransom and redemption, the great assize, the apocalyptic war, the descent into hell, the substitution, and recapitulation.
The apocalyptic war motif and the substitution motif become particularly important to contemporary discussions because one emphasizes sin and salvation as a collective and the other as an individual matter. The trouble becomes keeping them together.
Rutledge describes the substitutionary motif:
"Sin is a responsible guilt for which atonement must be made. It follows that the crucifixion is understood as a sacrifice for sin." (181)
This is well summed up by the hymn Amazing Grace, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me/I once was lost but now am found/was blind but now I see." The emphasis is on the sinner's guilt and on the loving substitutionary sacrifice made for the sinner. This is a helpful motif for those who are overwhelmed by all the sin and evil in here, in my own human soul, because it shows that God has forensically removed all my impurities, washing them in Christ's blood.
The weakness of this model is when it becomes too much of a free-floating theory. In the context of the Bible, the substitutionary atonement conveys God's loving agency: "I've been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. In the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." (Gal. 2:20) However, when the impersonal tone of theorizing is used, it can sound like this: "...sin has to be punished because it deserves to be, because impartial justice requires due penalty, just as it demands reward for virtue." (Robert Dabney, quoted in Rutledge, 496) Now, sin does deserve to be punished. But when the content is no longer embedded in Scripture, but transplanted into a theory, really important things get lost in translation. In this impersonal mode, God can come off angry, the punishment arbitrary, the suffering masochistic. It's plenty of justice and not enough love. Solid biblical motifs, when they are couched in theory language, can prove bewildering. Another weakness is its individualism. When it is the only model at work, "the single individual with his solitary guilt looms over the conceptual landscape, leaving no space for the drama of the cosmic struggle..." (Rutledge, 506)
The cosmic struggle is the Apocalyptic War motif. Rutledge writes:
"Sin is an alien power that must be driven from the field. All human beings are enslaved by this power (Rom. 3:9; John 8:34) and must be liberated by a greater power. The crucifixion is therefore understood to be Christ's victory of the Powers of Sin and Death, commonly called Christus Victor." (181)
This is a helpful motif for those who are overwhelmed by all the sin and evil out there, in the world. All the corruption, racism, structural evil, genocide that is institutional and complex. It tells us that Christ has won a decisive victory over these satanic powers and principalities which rule this world.
The weakness of this model is that it can seem to take place at a cosmic remove, way above our heads. It runs the risk of taking place at such a vast level that it doesn't touch on my individual life at all. Couched in theory language, this motif can lose its tone of prophetic hope, coming off naive instead as it describes a victory that doesn't seem to have made a dent in the world's corruption. It can have the effect of claiming 'all people are saved' without adequately sounding the depths of the Auschwitz's, Rwanda's or other sites of unspeakable cruelty. It's plenty of love and not enough justice. It can work out ethically where one group is more a 'victim' and another group a 'perpetrator' in a way that one group seems more innocent and another group more guilty. In other words, it can sometimes run more on a steam of class warfare than it does on a biblical anthropology. It can seem to give some people a pass. But as Gerhard Forde writes, "Christ's work is and remains always an act in which we are involved and implicated." (quoted in Rutledge 391)
Both these theories let us off the hook to the extent that they become just a math equation we puzzle over rather than a mystery we are caught up in: "God is just. Sin happened. God had to punish it.", etc. When we think of these holy matters as one theory or another, we exonerate ourselves from being personally involved in what is happening at the cross. As I heard one theologian say in an interview, "we are not saved by believing in 'justification by faith.' We are not saved by some theory. We are saved by Jesus Christ."
Meeting Jesus in Scripture is enriched by keeping all the motifs we find and dwelling upon them. Different motifs add to the extraordinary riches, grace, and wisdom of God.
The Letter to Hebrews refers to the apocalyptic war motif in Hebrews 2:14-15:
"Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery" (Hebrews 2:14-15, ESV)
Then, the author refers to the substitutionary motif in the following verses:
"Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted" (Hebrews 2:17-18 (ESV)
Rutledge writes about how the two motifs complement one another:
"First, the apocalyptic drama is the nonnegotiable context for the substitution model and all the others as well. It is the thought-world from which the entire new Testament was written. The incarnate Son arrived not in neutral territory, but in a realm occupied by an Enemy power. Second, the way in which Christ became the apocalyptic victor was through the substitution." (531)
They complement each other in our own Christian lives. The substitutionary motif provides us personal, daily renewal within the larger apocalyptic war motif in which we prayerfully serve our city, country, and world together and with Christ. We find a satisfying, loving, victorious Christ in both. Christ heals us in here so that we can unite with him to serve out there.
Melito of Sardis, an early Christian bishop who died circa 190 A.D. combined at least five motifs in an Easter sermon:
"The Lord...suffered for the sake of him who suffered, and was bound for the sake of him who was imprisoned, and was judged for the sake of the condemned, and was buried for the sake of the buried. So come, all families of human beings who are defiled by sins, and receive remission of sins. For I am your remission, I am the Passover of salvation. I am the Lamb sacrificed for your sake. I am your ransom. I am your life. I am your Resurrection. I am your light. I am your salvation. I am your King. I lead you toward the heights of heaven. I will show you the eternal Father. I will raise you up with my right hand." (quoted in Rutledge, 479)
The challenge, particularly to predominantly white churches, is to draw upon our scriptural resources to address Christ's victory over structural sin. This is articulated well by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
"There was a time when the Church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that they were a 'colony of heaven' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be 'astronomically intimidated.' They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are." (quoted in Cody Cook, The Second Adam)
To the white churches that tended to look at sin and salvation primarily through the lens of their own personal behavior, King might be echoing the words of Hobbes from the comic strip: "...maybe good is more than the absence of bad."
As all motifs can be misused, we can also misuse the substitutionary motif. Seeing it as a mere theory, we are comforted that Christ saves us just as we are, but we are also tempted to believe that Christ wants us to stay just as we are. It is all very convenient for us. Among my hopes with this series is for us to see how Christ's complete work does something to the world as a whole so that, seeing this, we can be galvanized to become the kind of church Martin Luther King, Jr. yearned to see while writing from his jail cell.
It would be extraordinary to do some recovery here, because Christ can give us a far more wonderful word about who we are as a church than we can give ourselves. How can we recover the many meanings of Christ's completed work so that we can benefit in our minds from God's full gift again? I want to say two more things about this. First, while the various motifs and theories about atonement tend to focus solely on Christ's death, Peter Leithart enlarges the focus to incorporate other aspects of Christ's work that are unfortunately often ignored in these same theories, such as the larger history of Israel in the Old Testament, Jesus' life, his resurrection, his ascension, the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost, the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the formation of the Christian church. Freed from having to fit all human history within the three-hour time span of Christ's death, Leithart can stay rooted in salvation history and is less tempted to spin theory. We might also think of it this way. We often say to people, "summarize it for me," "give me the gist of what happened," or "tell me the highlights." We need to resist this temptation when it comes to the saving work of Christ. We need to resist the urge to compress and summarize, and settle in for something more trenchant and ultimately more satisfying. The old slave spiritual puts it best: "were you there when they crucified my Lord?" We want to realize that the answer to that question is, "yes." We want to cultivate a rich, silent meditation upon the cross, and the role it plays in Christ's completed work.
Second, this is why the motif of recapitulation is particularly satisfying. It means "gathering up." It is a motif which, by definition, gathers up all the motifs, helping us to see the ways that all things are summed by Christ in his completed work. By definition, recapitulation resists becoming a typical neat theory, because it describes a tried and true pattern for reading Scripture: it's all about Jesus. He is the alpha and the omega. He is the new Adam, the new Moses, the new David, the new Jeremiah, the new Israel. He is the Passover lamb. He is the temple. He is the priest. He reenacts, rewrites, recapitulates the whole Bible, even all of human history. In many ways, it is the ultimate motif, because it includes the others. Every motif doubles as a recapitulation. For the next nine posts, we'll focus on symbols, people, and events that Christ gathers up in his completed work. We'll focus particularly on the Gospel of Matthew, in which Matthew seems particularly intent on showing us that Jesus is a New Israel.
Calvin: I'm getting nervous about Christmas.
Hobbes: You're worried you haven't been good?
Calvin: That's just the question. It's all relative. What's Santa's definition? How good do you have
to be to qualify as good? I haven't killed anybody. That's good, right? I haven't committed any
felonies. I didn't start any wars...Wouldn't you say that's pretty good? Wouldn't you say I should
get lots of presents?
Hobbes: But maybe good is more than the absence of bad.
Calvin: See, that's what worries me. (quoted in Rutledge, 180)
We are all like Calvin. However we may feel about our own personal behavior, we worry about whether 'bad' might somehow be more than just falling short of the mark. This whole series of posts is about how Christ's completed work addresses all the bad 'out there' in the world and 'in here,' in ourselves, and changes the whole world.
I mentioned in the first post of this series that two books about Christ's completed work have been constant companions: Fleming Rutledge's The Crucifixion and Peter Leithart's Delivered from the Elements of the World. Both are long-gestating, career-spanning books for their authors:
Rutledge writes:
"When someone asks me how long I have been working on this book, I usually say that I started it when, after twenty-one years, I retired from parish ministry - in other words, about eighteen years ago. In the truest sense, though, it has been the work of a lifetime. When I was about thirteen - that would be 1950 - I was already beginning to wonder what it meant to say that Jesus died for the sin of the world." (xv)
Leithart writes:
"I have described Delivered from the Elements of the World as my Big Red Book About Everything..." (17)
Both write about the public impact of the cross, whether Jesus meant to show the world something on the cross, or if he meant to accomplish something, and if so, what? They also write about what it means when the church fails to convey this. They worry about the cross being ignored or reduced to one meaning apart from many.
Their work speaks to temptations to avoid the cross, and also to overemphasize aspects of the cross. Rutledge writes:
"Most churchgoing people are "Jews" on Sunday morning and "Greeks" the rest of the time. Religious people want visionary experiences and spiritual uplift; secular people want proofs, arguments, demonstrations, philosophy, science. The striking fact is that neither one of these groups wants to hear about the cross." (86)
Rutledge here depicts the ways in both the world and in the church that we avoid the cross. Peter Leithart writes about a certain temptation to think about the cross, but in unhelpful ways:
"We are tempted to flinch at the last moment. We are tempted to retreat from the ambiguities of history into an atonement theory whose mechanism works regardless of whether Torah had ever been given, one that does not depend on the events of Jesus' life or the faithful witness of the founding, firstfruits generation. We are tempted to conclude that Jesus' death and resurrection might effect salvation without the church, with all its failures and imperfections..." (Delivered, 173)
Leithart and Rutledge depict two opposing temptations: one, to avoid the cross entirely, the second, to think a lot about the cross, but in one particular way.
This assumes there are many ways to think about the cross. The Christian tradition has never picked one particular understanding of atonement, which is the word for how God makes things right in Christ.
Traditionally, there are three theories of the atonement: penal substitution, Christus victor, and the moral influence theory. Rutledge covers eight "biblical motifs:" the passover/exodus, blood sacrifice, ransom and redemption, the great assize, the apocalyptic war, the descent into hell, the substitution, and recapitulation.
The apocalyptic war motif and the substitution motif become particularly important to contemporary discussions because one emphasizes sin and salvation as a collective and the other as an individual matter. The trouble becomes keeping them together.
Rutledge describes the substitutionary motif:
"Sin is a responsible guilt for which atonement must be made. It follows that the crucifixion is understood as a sacrifice for sin." (181)
This is well summed up by the hymn Amazing Grace, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me/I once was lost but now am found/was blind but now I see." The emphasis is on the sinner's guilt and on the loving substitutionary sacrifice made for the sinner. This is a helpful motif for those who are overwhelmed by all the sin and evil in here, in my own human soul, because it shows that God has forensically removed all my impurities, washing them in Christ's blood.
The weakness of this model is when it becomes too much of a free-floating theory. In the context of the Bible, the substitutionary atonement conveys God's loving agency: "I've been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. In the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." (Gal. 2:20) However, when the impersonal tone of theorizing is used, it can sound like this: "...sin has to be punished because it deserves to be, because impartial justice requires due penalty, just as it demands reward for virtue." (Robert Dabney, quoted in Rutledge, 496) Now, sin does deserve to be punished. But when the content is no longer embedded in Scripture, but transplanted into a theory, really important things get lost in translation. In this impersonal mode, God can come off angry, the punishment arbitrary, the suffering masochistic. It's plenty of justice and not enough love. Solid biblical motifs, when they are couched in theory language, can prove bewildering. Another weakness is its individualism. When it is the only model at work, "the single individual with his solitary guilt looms over the conceptual landscape, leaving no space for the drama of the cosmic struggle..." (Rutledge, 506)
The cosmic struggle is the Apocalyptic War motif. Rutledge writes:
"Sin is an alien power that must be driven from the field. All human beings are enslaved by this power (Rom. 3:9; John 8:34) and must be liberated by a greater power. The crucifixion is therefore understood to be Christ's victory of the Powers of Sin and Death, commonly called Christus Victor." (181)
This is a helpful motif for those who are overwhelmed by all the sin and evil out there, in the world. All the corruption, racism, structural evil, genocide that is institutional and complex. It tells us that Christ has won a decisive victory over these satanic powers and principalities which rule this world.
The weakness of this model is that it can seem to take place at a cosmic remove, way above our heads. It runs the risk of taking place at such a vast level that it doesn't touch on my individual life at all. Couched in theory language, this motif can lose its tone of prophetic hope, coming off naive instead as it describes a victory that doesn't seem to have made a dent in the world's corruption. It can have the effect of claiming 'all people are saved' without adequately sounding the depths of the Auschwitz's, Rwanda's or other sites of unspeakable cruelty. It's plenty of love and not enough justice. It can work out ethically where one group is more a 'victim' and another group a 'perpetrator' in a way that one group seems more innocent and another group more guilty. In other words, it can sometimes run more on a steam of class warfare than it does on a biblical anthropology. It can seem to give some people a pass. But as Gerhard Forde writes, "Christ's work is and remains always an act in which we are involved and implicated." (quoted in Rutledge 391)
Both these theories let us off the hook to the extent that they become just a math equation we puzzle over rather than a mystery we are caught up in: "God is just. Sin happened. God had to punish it.", etc. When we think of these holy matters as one theory or another, we exonerate ourselves from being personally involved in what is happening at the cross. As I heard one theologian say in an interview, "we are not saved by believing in 'justification by faith.' We are not saved by some theory. We are saved by Jesus Christ."
Meeting Jesus in Scripture is enriched by keeping all the motifs we find and dwelling upon them. Different motifs add to the extraordinary riches, grace, and wisdom of God.
The Letter to Hebrews refers to the apocalyptic war motif in Hebrews 2:14-15:
"Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery" (Hebrews 2:14-15, ESV)
Then, the author refers to the substitutionary motif in the following verses:
"Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted" (Hebrews 2:17-18 (ESV)
Rutledge writes about how the two motifs complement one another:
"First, the apocalyptic drama is the nonnegotiable context for the substitution model and all the others as well. It is the thought-world from which the entire new Testament was written. The incarnate Son arrived not in neutral territory, but in a realm occupied by an Enemy power. Second, the way in which Christ became the apocalyptic victor was through the substitution." (531)
They complement each other in our own Christian lives. The substitutionary motif provides us personal, daily renewal within the larger apocalyptic war motif in which we prayerfully serve our city, country, and world together and with Christ. We find a satisfying, loving, victorious Christ in both. Christ heals us in here so that we can unite with him to serve out there.
Melito of Sardis, an early Christian bishop who died circa 190 A.D. combined at least five motifs in an Easter sermon:
"The Lord...suffered for the sake of him who suffered, and was bound for the sake of him who was imprisoned, and was judged for the sake of the condemned, and was buried for the sake of the buried. So come, all families of human beings who are defiled by sins, and receive remission of sins. For I am your remission, I am the Passover of salvation. I am the Lamb sacrificed for your sake. I am your ransom. I am your life. I am your Resurrection. I am your light. I am your salvation. I am your King. I lead you toward the heights of heaven. I will show you the eternal Father. I will raise you up with my right hand." (quoted in Rutledge, 479)
The challenge, particularly to predominantly white churches, is to draw upon our scriptural resources to address Christ's victory over structural sin. This is articulated well by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
"There was a time when the Church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that they were a 'colony of heaven' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be 'astronomically intimidated.' They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are." (quoted in Cody Cook, The Second Adam)
To the white churches that tended to look at sin and salvation primarily through the lens of their own personal behavior, King might be echoing the words of Hobbes from the comic strip: "...maybe good is more than the absence of bad."
As all motifs can be misused, we can also misuse the substitutionary motif. Seeing it as a mere theory, we are comforted that Christ saves us just as we are, but we are also tempted to believe that Christ wants us to stay just as we are. It is all very convenient for us. Among my hopes with this series is for us to see how Christ's complete work does something to the world as a whole so that, seeing this, we can be galvanized to become the kind of church Martin Luther King, Jr. yearned to see while writing from his jail cell.
It would be extraordinary to do some recovery here, because Christ can give us a far more wonderful word about who we are as a church than we can give ourselves. How can we recover the many meanings of Christ's completed work so that we can benefit in our minds from God's full gift again? I want to say two more things about this. First, while the various motifs and theories about atonement tend to focus solely on Christ's death, Peter Leithart enlarges the focus to incorporate other aspects of Christ's work that are unfortunately often ignored in these same theories, such as the larger history of Israel in the Old Testament, Jesus' life, his resurrection, his ascension, the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost, the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the formation of the Christian church. Freed from having to fit all human history within the three-hour time span of Christ's death, Leithart can stay rooted in salvation history and is less tempted to spin theory. We might also think of it this way. We often say to people, "summarize it for me," "give me the gist of what happened," or "tell me the highlights." We need to resist this temptation when it comes to the saving work of Christ. We need to resist the urge to compress and summarize, and settle in for something more trenchant and ultimately more satisfying. The old slave spiritual puts it best: "were you there when they crucified my Lord?" We want to realize that the answer to that question is, "yes." We want to cultivate a rich, silent meditation upon the cross, and the role it plays in Christ's completed work.
Second, this is why the motif of recapitulation is particularly satisfying. It means "gathering up." It is a motif which, by definition, gathers up all the motifs, helping us to see the ways that all things are summed by Christ in his completed work. By definition, recapitulation resists becoming a typical neat theory, because it describes a tried and true pattern for reading Scripture: it's all about Jesus. He is the alpha and the omega. He is the new Adam, the new Moses, the new David, the new Jeremiah, the new Israel. He is the Passover lamb. He is the temple. He is the priest. He reenacts, rewrites, recapitulates the whole Bible, even all of human history. In many ways, it is the ultimate motif, because it includes the others. Every motif doubles as a recapitulation. For the next nine posts, we'll focus on symbols, people, and events that Christ gathers up in his completed work. We'll focus particularly on the Gospel of Matthew, in which Matthew seems particularly intent on showing us that Jesus is a New Israel.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Lent 2019: Thursday, March 14 - Traffic Jam
We have seen that Torah, God's levitical law, is a gift to his people, and to the world. It gives them hope that they will re-enter Eden, they are further enlisted and involved in God's war against flesh and death. God's commitment to kill flesh in one people, the people of Abraham, for the sake of the world, is going forward.
Of course, we know from the New Testament that this picture of the law is much more ambiguous. We find Paul saying to the Galatians: "For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law." Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because "the righteous will live by faith." (Gal. 3:10-11)
What this is describing is the phenomena that Torah, Israel's link to God, has now become the greatest obstacle to Israel meeting with God.
How can this be?
What happened to the tabernacle (and later temple) as a picture of the marriage between God and his people Israel? What happened to the festival schedule as a calendar of romantic rendezvous? What changed between then and Paul's time? How did Torah turn from a means of communion with God to an instrument of torture, driving Israel farther and farther from God.
The best way to capture this is to look at part of that levitical law from the book of Deuteronomy:
"They have made Me jealous with what is not God; They have provoked Me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation." (Deuteronomy 32:15-21)
We see here that Israel has made God jealous with her pursuit of foreign gods and has provoked him. This is a reference to Israel's desire to be like other nations. God's response is to make them jealous and to provoke them. He shows favor to Assyria and Babylon, idolatrous nations in themselves, who bring Israel and Judah into the grave of exile to hope for resurrection. God has to remind Israel again of what he is doing: putting flesh to death, putting death to death. He has to send Israel into the grave of exile because Israel, God's warriors against flesh, have become flesh. God's warriors against the curse of death, have become agents of death. Israel is no longer part of the solution. She has made the problem even more intractable.
This is a problem for the world because the ultimate end and destination of what God is setting out to accomplish is through Israel, to allow all nations to have flesh and death put to death in order to regain entry into Eden. But Israel, supposed to be the leader in this journey, has caused a big wreck, and no one else can get through.
Remember Abraham. The lesson he must learn throughout his life is that God will not bring redemption through the flesh. Everything that God accomplishes through Abraham is life from the grave. He must trust God to fulfill his promises in a way that doesn't reek of fleshly boasting. Otherwise, Abraham is no different than anyone else. In the same way, Israel must trust God to fulfill promises through life from the grave, and not through sinful flesh. This is what circumcision and the rites of the tabernacle are all about.
But flesh has come to dominate even Torah. The very signs that God used to set Israel apart, Israel now uses to revert back to the life of flesh. Peter Leithart writes: "Though many faithful Jews kept the humble faith of Abraham, teachers in Judaism turned Torah itself into a weapon of bondage. Jews came to boast in the absent flesh of circumcision; they used purity rules to exclude other Israelites and Gentiles; they imposed burdens rather than relieving them. Torah was good and spiritual, but in the hands of fleshly Israel it became an instrument of oppressive injustice. In practice Torah did not control flesh but intensified its desires and violence. Instead of combating and overcoming the Edenic and Babelic curses, Israel sharpened those divisions and so came under the curse of Torah." (Delivered, 284)
By reverting to flesh, by not being obedient, Israel not only doesn't resolve the curses, but adds another one to it. Remember that God has given up floods. He isn't engaging in open warfare against flesh and death. Instead, he has chosen a "narrow stream," the stream of Abraham to bring blessing to the nations. And the very law that was supposed to help Israel achieve this mission is now another curse, blocking up the stream. (Delivered, 200)
Until this stream can come unblocked, until the "traffic jam" can be cleared, blessing cannot come to the nations. (N.T. Wright, quoted in Delivered, 198) We see with Paul that, ultimately, Christ will get the stream moving again, and will unclog the roadway:
"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole." He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit." (Galatians 3:1-14)
Until then, the nations are in turmoil:
"...filled with destructive violence, cursed, divided, far from God and separated from one another, dominated by sin and death because ruled by fleshly passions. The nations are formless, void and dark, but God promises to send out his hovering Spirit to nurture the world back to order and beauty."
This leads us to the threshold of Christ. Christ must renew the best aspects of the story that's been told, and bear the brunt of the worst. He must illuminate the dark corridors of the temple again. He must make a new tapestry out of all that's unraveled, so that everything that has come before him will turn out to be merely a shadow of the one light we were meant to see all along.
Of course, we know from the New Testament that this picture of the law is much more ambiguous. We find Paul saying to the Galatians: "For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law." Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because "the righteous will live by faith." (Gal. 3:10-11)
What this is describing is the phenomena that Torah, Israel's link to God, has now become the greatest obstacle to Israel meeting with God.
How can this be?
What happened to the tabernacle (and later temple) as a picture of the marriage between God and his people Israel? What happened to the festival schedule as a calendar of romantic rendezvous? What changed between then and Paul's time? How did Torah turn from a means of communion with God to an instrument of torture, driving Israel farther and farther from God.
The best way to capture this is to look at part of that levitical law from the book of Deuteronomy:
"They have made Me jealous with what is not God; They have provoked Me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation." (Deuteronomy 32:15-21)
We see here that Israel has made God jealous with her pursuit of foreign gods and has provoked him. This is a reference to Israel's desire to be like other nations. God's response is to make them jealous and to provoke them. He shows favor to Assyria and Babylon, idolatrous nations in themselves, who bring Israel and Judah into the grave of exile to hope for resurrection. God has to remind Israel again of what he is doing: putting flesh to death, putting death to death. He has to send Israel into the grave of exile because Israel, God's warriors against flesh, have become flesh. God's warriors against the curse of death, have become agents of death. Israel is no longer part of the solution. She has made the problem even more intractable.
This is a problem for the world because the ultimate end and destination of what God is setting out to accomplish is through Israel, to allow all nations to have flesh and death put to death in order to regain entry into Eden. But Israel, supposed to be the leader in this journey, has caused a big wreck, and no one else can get through.
Remember Abraham. The lesson he must learn throughout his life is that God will not bring redemption through the flesh. Everything that God accomplishes through Abraham is life from the grave. He must trust God to fulfill his promises in a way that doesn't reek of fleshly boasting. Otherwise, Abraham is no different than anyone else. In the same way, Israel must trust God to fulfill promises through life from the grave, and not through sinful flesh. This is what circumcision and the rites of the tabernacle are all about.
But flesh has come to dominate even Torah. The very signs that God used to set Israel apart, Israel now uses to revert back to the life of flesh. Peter Leithart writes: "Though many faithful Jews kept the humble faith of Abraham, teachers in Judaism turned Torah itself into a weapon of bondage. Jews came to boast in the absent flesh of circumcision; they used purity rules to exclude other Israelites and Gentiles; they imposed burdens rather than relieving them. Torah was good and spiritual, but in the hands of fleshly Israel it became an instrument of oppressive injustice. In practice Torah did not control flesh but intensified its desires and violence. Instead of combating and overcoming the Edenic and Babelic curses, Israel sharpened those divisions and so came under the curse of Torah." (Delivered, 284)
By reverting to flesh, by not being obedient, Israel not only doesn't resolve the curses, but adds another one to it. Remember that God has given up floods. He isn't engaging in open warfare against flesh and death. Instead, he has chosen a "narrow stream," the stream of Abraham to bring blessing to the nations. And the very law that was supposed to help Israel achieve this mission is now another curse, blocking up the stream. (Delivered, 200)
Until this stream can come unblocked, until the "traffic jam" can be cleared, blessing cannot come to the nations. (N.T. Wright, quoted in Delivered, 198) We see with Paul that, ultimately, Christ will get the stream moving again, and will unclog the roadway:
"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole." He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit." (Galatians 3:1-14)
Until then, the nations are in turmoil:
"...filled with destructive violence, cursed, divided, far from God and separated from one another, dominated by sin and death because ruled by fleshly passions. The nations are formless, void and dark, but God promises to send out his hovering Spirit to nurture the world back to order and beauty."
This leads us to the threshold of Christ. Christ must renew the best aspects of the story that's been told, and bear the brunt of the worst. He must illuminate the dark corridors of the temple again. He must make a new tapestry out of all that's unraveled, so that everything that has come before him will turn out to be merely a shadow of the one light we were meant to see all along.
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Lent 2019: Wednesday, March 13 - Slip Past the Cherubim
Sacrifice worries us. It can be unsettling to think that God might still have things to teach us through Israel's rites of animal sacrifice. Christ's sacrifice ended all that. And we are happy with that arrangement. Unless we can eat them, we don't want animals to die. And why did God want sacrifices anyway?
Ultimately, sacrifice remains important for us because it is a death that leads to resurrection. We don't need good advice. We need good news that the old realm of death is ended, and the new realm of life in the Spirit has come. It is the only way to true restoration. While it is true that we don't offer animal sacrifices anymore, the vocabulary and symbolism of sacrifice is still the best way to understand our Christian lives today.
There were five stages to safely draw near to God through sacrifice, and catch a glimpse of Eden. First, the worshiper draws near through a substitute. A substitute takes another's place. The worshiper signifies that the animal is a substitute by laying hands on its head. Laying hands on a person's head is a way of giving them a particular job or office. The animals for this 'meal' were cattle, goats, sheep, and some birds. These animals represent Israel, suggesting that Israel herself is God's meal. Second, the worshiper kills the animal as a symbol of the worshiper's death, because sinful flesh cannot enter into God's presence. Third, the blood is collected, and is put on the tabernacle or on some furniture to prove that someone or something has died in the worshiper's place. Fourth, the flesh of the animal is burned on the bronze altar in the courtyard of the tabernacle. Fire turns the animal into smoke, and it mingles with the cloud that represents God's presence over the altar. The fire turns the animal into something new. The animal is translated, purified, transformed, glorified, as it meets the Lord in Spirit. Representing the worshiper, the smoke slips past the cherubim and enters the Lord's presence. Fifth, the worshiper shares in God's meal. (A House for My Name, 89-92)
While it is true that sacrifices speak to us about God's righteous indignation, wrath, and punishment against sin, we see here that God's ultimate goal is to draw us into his presence again.
It encourages the hope of a New Eden. When God expels Adam and Eve from the garden, he places cherubim to guard the entrance. Cherubim are seen in the tabernacle's curtains. They are also built above the ark of the covenant. Therefore, the most holy place of the tabernacle is meant to remind of the garden. A flaming sword guards Eden, and we see in the tabernacle that fire translates the animal into smoke. The animal suffers the death of re-entry on the worshiper's behalf. The gateway to Eden is on the east, and the tabernacle also has a door to the east. The whole sacrificial sequence emboldens the worshipers to hope for re-entry to Eden, that God will provide a substitute.
Worship in this way habituates the worshipers to see what God is really like. The sacrifice represents a gift of the worshiper's own self. The sacrifice is a removal of what would hinder our communion with God. God doesn't need the animal or the food. In fact, he seems to resent it when the Israelites think this from time to time. The prophet Samuel says, "Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams." (1 Sam. 15:22-23) In other words, God isn't in this because he's hungry. He wants to restore his people for communion. It isn't only God's meal, but it is ultimately a shared meal. Eating is a means of fellowship, of shared life. Finally, God himself bears Israel's sin. Introducing these purification rites is risky. Leithart writes: "Purification offerings pressurized Israel's situation: Yahweh's very presence in Israel was a danger, and as the sins, rebellions and impurities mounted on the priest and in Yahweh's house, the danger intensified. Without a mechanism for decompression, it would rapidly become intolerable." (Delivered, 114) God provided a "pressure valve" in the Day of Coverings (Lev. 16), which provided an "annual reboot" for the sanctuary, removal of impurity, and reinvestiture for the high priest. God himself bears the cost of this.
This is all the continuing story of God's war against flesh. God's circumcised people are habituated to see themselves as fellow warriors in God's ongoing battle, as testifying witnesses in God's ongoing prosecution of flesh. Humanity is in league with death and flesh, and are in exile from Eden. God has instituted real but limited access to Eden through the Tabernacle, even taking the burden on himself, all of which nurtures hope that God will one day open his house fully again.
All of this tells us about Jesus, but not only that Jesus turns out to be the true lamb who is sacrificed, the true priest who does the sacrificing, the true Israel who re-enters to meet with God, and the true God who takes the burden on himself. All of that is true, but it isn't quite the whole picture. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes:
"But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that are now already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands, that is to say, is not a part of this creation. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption." (Hebrews 9:11-12)
Think again of the sacrificial sequence. Christ is the substitute, the representative of Israel, and through Israel, the representative of the whole world. His death on the cross is a sacrificial death for his enemies. In his resurrection and ascension into heaven, he presents blood as evidence that the sacrifice has been made, and re-enters Eden, at the Father's right hand. And every time we celebrate the Lord's Supper, we eat our sacrifice again. We feed upon Jesus' body and blood through the Holy Spirit.
God never needed to eat animals. But he gave the sacrificial sequence and its symbolism of gift, love, and communion to nurture the hopes of his people that one day, through Christ, Jews and Gentiles alike would have access to God's house again, to Eden, to share God's good things with him forever.
And this is why our worship services are simultaneously sacrifice-free, and yet full of sacrifices. True, we don't kill cattle, sheep, or birds in our sanctuaries anymore because Christ is the one true sacrifice. Gathering to confess sin, hear God's word, and praise him is all a way of saying "Christ's sacrifice is sufficient." But there are still sacrifices. When we come forward to commune with God, and when we go back out into the world, we do so as living sacrifices, as people who have truly died and risen, died to the flesh, and risen to live in the Spirit. Israel used to have to slip past the cherubim to get a taste of Eden. Now, in Christ, we live there all the time.
Ultimately, sacrifice remains important for us because it is a death that leads to resurrection. We don't need good advice. We need good news that the old realm of death is ended, and the new realm of life in the Spirit has come. It is the only way to true restoration. While it is true that we don't offer animal sacrifices anymore, the vocabulary and symbolism of sacrifice is still the best way to understand our Christian lives today.
There were five stages to safely draw near to God through sacrifice, and catch a glimpse of Eden. First, the worshiper draws near through a substitute. A substitute takes another's place. The worshiper signifies that the animal is a substitute by laying hands on its head. Laying hands on a person's head is a way of giving them a particular job or office. The animals for this 'meal' were cattle, goats, sheep, and some birds. These animals represent Israel, suggesting that Israel herself is God's meal. Second, the worshiper kills the animal as a symbol of the worshiper's death, because sinful flesh cannot enter into God's presence. Third, the blood is collected, and is put on the tabernacle or on some furniture to prove that someone or something has died in the worshiper's place. Fourth, the flesh of the animal is burned on the bronze altar in the courtyard of the tabernacle. Fire turns the animal into smoke, and it mingles with the cloud that represents God's presence over the altar. The fire turns the animal into something new. The animal is translated, purified, transformed, glorified, as it meets the Lord in Spirit. Representing the worshiper, the smoke slips past the cherubim and enters the Lord's presence. Fifth, the worshiper shares in God's meal. (A House for My Name, 89-92)
While it is true that sacrifices speak to us about God's righteous indignation, wrath, and punishment against sin, we see here that God's ultimate goal is to draw us into his presence again.
It encourages the hope of a New Eden. When God expels Adam and Eve from the garden, he places cherubim to guard the entrance. Cherubim are seen in the tabernacle's curtains. They are also built above the ark of the covenant. Therefore, the most holy place of the tabernacle is meant to remind of the garden. A flaming sword guards Eden, and we see in the tabernacle that fire translates the animal into smoke. The animal suffers the death of re-entry on the worshiper's behalf. The gateway to Eden is on the east, and the tabernacle also has a door to the east. The whole sacrificial sequence emboldens the worshipers to hope for re-entry to Eden, that God will provide a substitute.
Worship in this way habituates the worshipers to see what God is really like. The sacrifice represents a gift of the worshiper's own self. The sacrifice is a removal of what would hinder our communion with God. God doesn't need the animal or the food. In fact, he seems to resent it when the Israelites think this from time to time. The prophet Samuel says, "Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams." (1 Sam. 15:22-23) In other words, God isn't in this because he's hungry. He wants to restore his people for communion. It isn't only God's meal, but it is ultimately a shared meal. Eating is a means of fellowship, of shared life. Finally, God himself bears Israel's sin. Introducing these purification rites is risky. Leithart writes: "Purification offerings pressurized Israel's situation: Yahweh's very presence in Israel was a danger, and as the sins, rebellions and impurities mounted on the priest and in Yahweh's house, the danger intensified. Without a mechanism for decompression, it would rapidly become intolerable." (Delivered, 114) God provided a "pressure valve" in the Day of Coverings (Lev. 16), which provided an "annual reboot" for the sanctuary, removal of impurity, and reinvestiture for the high priest. God himself bears the cost of this.
This is all the continuing story of God's war against flesh. God's circumcised people are habituated to see themselves as fellow warriors in God's ongoing battle, as testifying witnesses in God's ongoing prosecution of flesh. Humanity is in league with death and flesh, and are in exile from Eden. God has instituted real but limited access to Eden through the Tabernacle, even taking the burden on himself, all of which nurtures hope that God will one day open his house fully again.
All of this tells us about Jesus, but not only that Jesus turns out to be the true lamb who is sacrificed, the true priest who does the sacrificing, the true Israel who re-enters to meet with God, and the true God who takes the burden on himself. All of that is true, but it isn't quite the whole picture. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes:
"But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that are now already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands, that is to say, is not a part of this creation. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption." (Hebrews 9:11-12)
Think again of the sacrificial sequence. Christ is the substitute, the representative of Israel, and through Israel, the representative of the whole world. His death on the cross is a sacrificial death for his enemies. In his resurrection and ascension into heaven, he presents blood as evidence that the sacrifice has been made, and re-enters Eden, at the Father's right hand. And every time we celebrate the Lord's Supper, we eat our sacrifice again. We feed upon Jesus' body and blood through the Holy Spirit.
God never needed to eat animals. But he gave the sacrificial sequence and its symbolism of gift, love, and communion to nurture the hopes of his people that one day, through Christ, Jews and Gentiles alike would have access to God's house again, to Eden, to share God's good things with him forever.
And this is why our worship services are simultaneously sacrifice-free, and yet full of sacrifices. True, we don't kill cattle, sheep, or birds in our sanctuaries anymore because Christ is the one true sacrifice. Gathering to confess sin, hear God's word, and praise him is all a way of saying "Christ's sacrifice is sufficient." But there are still sacrifices. When we come forward to commune with God, and when we go back out into the world, we do so as living sacrifices, as people who have truly died and risen, died to the flesh, and risen to live in the Spirit. Israel used to have to slip past the cherubim to get a taste of Eden. Now, in Christ, we live there all the time.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Lent 2019: Tuesday, March 12 - Real Though Limited Access
Each Israelite was initiated into God's war against flesh when they were circumcised at eight days old. God's war against flesh is extended through deeper commitment to this Abrahamic people through whom God will save the world. This commitment has to do with, basically, marrying Israel, and moving in with her.
As with any marriage, promises are made. God makes promises and so does Israel. They move in together in the form of a tabernacle. God comes down to live, move, and travel with Israel in the most holy place. The tabernacle, and later the temple, is comprised of three areas: the courtyard, the holy place, and the most holy place. The picture of the tabernacle corresponds to Mount Sinai, where Israel camped at the foot of the mountain (the courtyard), elders waited midway up the mountain (holy place), and Moses met with God at the top (most holy place). Even so, the most holy place contains God's law, the ten commandments, and God himself dwells there in the form of his glory cloud, by which he guided Israel through the wilderness. The high priest would go in to the most holy place once a year on the Day of Atonement.
Now, even in our contemporary marriages, we don't fulfill these promises by our natural strength, but rely chiefly upon the Lord, and also rely upon the community of people around us for help. It's not easy. The marriage between God and his people is no less fraught, because although God is perfectly able to keep his promise, Israel is not. The Israelites may be circumcised. But they are also still flesh, like all human beings. Even though they are initiated into God's war against flesh, they are still prone to the boasting and vanity of flesh. Torah, or God's levitical law, does not make perfect justice. It does not kill flesh. It re-enforces distance between God and his people as much as it relaxes it. But it still allows for a real though limited access for Israel to meet with God.
While the world was already under the curses of Eden and Babel, God built the tabernacle and instituted it under Moses' brother Aaron and his sons. As Leithart writes, "the building of the tabernacle and later the temple did not create the conditions of exclusion and distance. In fact, the sanctuary was a countermovement to the curse of Eden. Yahweh drove Adam and Eve out of the garden; he invited Aaron and his sons in."
Notice the way Leithart links the Tabernacle and Eden. We'll explore this more tomorrow, but yes, the symbolism of the tabernacle and all that fills it conveys a sense of hope that God's people will one day re-enter the garden. The tabernacle is a place of hope, not despair; happiness, not sadness. More Leithart: "For the first time since Adam, holy men walked on holy ground, with only a veil embroidered with cherubim between them and Yahweh. The tabernacle was still holy space, but the boundaries of holy space had become porous. Yahweh expelled Adam from the garden in wrath, and put Adam under wrath. In the tabernacle system, Yahweh went out into the howling waste to find his unfaithful bride and bring her back home. He went outside Eden to give a taste of Eden to Adam's children who lived east of Eden." (95)
Here, we have a sense that the union between God and Israel is already in a sense a vow renewal between God and the bride who had been unfaithful to him in Eden. We also have the sense that the whole tabernacle structure is more about hospitality than it is about intimidation. It is more about granting real access than it is about limiting it. It's double-sided. There is a limiting factor. God imposed purity regulations upon his people. Only clean persons were permitted to enter the court of the sanctuary. This "no" to impurity though, does not reflect God's preoccupation with keeping us out of his presence, but rather reflects his determination to make a way for us to draw near. The ultimate end of the rules is the removal of impurity and the closure of distance.
Ezekiel 16 helps here. Ezekiel 16 is an allegory of Judah's promiscuity and harlotry. As God cares for her, he adorns her with cloth, porpoise skin sandals, bracelets, gold, silver and linen, and feeds her with the goods of the land - flour, honey and oil. This picture of God's care follows an ordination sequence - washing, anointing, and clothing - using tabernacle materials. (see Delivered, 96) The ordination and priestly imagery doesn't follow a symbolism of distance, but rather a deeply romantic symbolism meant to suggest nothing less than marital bliss, the throes of passion and sensuality. Thus Leithart can write: "The tabernacle curtains and adornments were bridal adornments, and the tabernacle was the bridal tent where Yahweh and Israel had their appointed meetings. It was a tent of meetings, a tent for trysts, a place for communion of Yahweh and Israel, not for the self-isolation of Yahweh." (96-97) Holy convocations like the Sabbath, Passover, the Festival of Weeks, and more (Lev. 23 provides a list) were a married couples' schedule of romantic rendezvous.
Once again, the access is limited. Purity regulations teach Israel to distance themselves from flesh, to put flesh to death, in order to draw near to God. This pertains to how Israel was to deal with blood, which animals they ate, childbearing, emissions from the body, skin diseases. Flesh spreads pollution. Sanctuary defilement differs from land defilement. Land defilement can be expelled only by being sent out into the grave of exile to rise again to a new inheritance.
God rigorously and thoroughly excludes the pollution of flesh from his house, so the access of a fleshly people is and always would be limited. But it is real. The blessings and gifts God would convey upon his people will be the blessings to the world. This is because, in his tabernacle, God is giving his people a foretaste of, and giving them a hopefulness for, re-entry into the Garden of Eden.
As with any marriage, promises are made. God makes promises and so does Israel. They move in together in the form of a tabernacle. God comes down to live, move, and travel with Israel in the most holy place. The tabernacle, and later the temple, is comprised of three areas: the courtyard, the holy place, and the most holy place. The picture of the tabernacle corresponds to Mount Sinai, where Israel camped at the foot of the mountain (the courtyard), elders waited midway up the mountain (holy place), and Moses met with God at the top (most holy place). Even so, the most holy place contains God's law, the ten commandments, and God himself dwells there in the form of his glory cloud, by which he guided Israel through the wilderness. The high priest would go in to the most holy place once a year on the Day of Atonement.
Now, even in our contemporary marriages, we don't fulfill these promises by our natural strength, but rely chiefly upon the Lord, and also rely upon the community of people around us for help. It's not easy. The marriage between God and his people is no less fraught, because although God is perfectly able to keep his promise, Israel is not. The Israelites may be circumcised. But they are also still flesh, like all human beings. Even though they are initiated into God's war against flesh, they are still prone to the boasting and vanity of flesh. Torah, or God's levitical law, does not make perfect justice. It does not kill flesh. It re-enforces distance between God and his people as much as it relaxes it. But it still allows for a real though limited access for Israel to meet with God.
While the world was already under the curses of Eden and Babel, God built the tabernacle and instituted it under Moses' brother Aaron and his sons. As Leithart writes, "the building of the tabernacle and later the temple did not create the conditions of exclusion and distance. In fact, the sanctuary was a countermovement to the curse of Eden. Yahweh drove Adam and Eve out of the garden; he invited Aaron and his sons in."
Notice the way Leithart links the Tabernacle and Eden. We'll explore this more tomorrow, but yes, the symbolism of the tabernacle and all that fills it conveys a sense of hope that God's people will one day re-enter the garden. The tabernacle is a place of hope, not despair; happiness, not sadness. More Leithart: "For the first time since Adam, holy men walked on holy ground, with only a veil embroidered with cherubim between them and Yahweh. The tabernacle was still holy space, but the boundaries of holy space had become porous. Yahweh expelled Adam from the garden in wrath, and put Adam under wrath. In the tabernacle system, Yahweh went out into the howling waste to find his unfaithful bride and bring her back home. He went outside Eden to give a taste of Eden to Adam's children who lived east of Eden." (95)
Here, we have a sense that the union between God and Israel is already in a sense a vow renewal between God and the bride who had been unfaithful to him in Eden. We also have the sense that the whole tabernacle structure is more about hospitality than it is about intimidation. It is more about granting real access than it is about limiting it. It's double-sided. There is a limiting factor. God imposed purity regulations upon his people. Only clean persons were permitted to enter the court of the sanctuary. This "no" to impurity though, does not reflect God's preoccupation with keeping us out of his presence, but rather reflects his determination to make a way for us to draw near. The ultimate end of the rules is the removal of impurity and the closure of distance.
Ezekiel 16 helps here. Ezekiel 16 is an allegory of Judah's promiscuity and harlotry. As God cares for her, he adorns her with cloth, porpoise skin sandals, bracelets, gold, silver and linen, and feeds her with the goods of the land - flour, honey and oil. This picture of God's care follows an ordination sequence - washing, anointing, and clothing - using tabernacle materials. (see Delivered, 96) The ordination and priestly imagery doesn't follow a symbolism of distance, but rather a deeply romantic symbolism meant to suggest nothing less than marital bliss, the throes of passion and sensuality. Thus Leithart can write: "The tabernacle curtains and adornments were bridal adornments, and the tabernacle was the bridal tent where Yahweh and Israel had their appointed meetings. It was a tent of meetings, a tent for trysts, a place for communion of Yahweh and Israel, not for the self-isolation of Yahweh." (96-97) Holy convocations like the Sabbath, Passover, the Festival of Weeks, and more (Lev. 23 provides a list) were a married couples' schedule of romantic rendezvous.
Once again, the access is limited. Purity regulations teach Israel to distance themselves from flesh, to put flesh to death, in order to draw near to God. This pertains to how Israel was to deal with blood, which animals they ate, childbearing, emissions from the body, skin diseases. Flesh spreads pollution. Sanctuary defilement differs from land defilement. Land defilement can be expelled only by being sent out into the grave of exile to rise again to a new inheritance.
God rigorously and thoroughly excludes the pollution of flesh from his house, so the access of a fleshly people is and always would be limited. But it is real. The blessings and gifts God would convey upon his people will be the blessings to the world. This is because, in his tabernacle, God is giving his people a foretaste of, and giving them a hopefulness for, re-entry into the Garden of Eden.
Lent 2019: Monday, March 11 - Circumcision
Immediately after the tower of Babel, God calls Abram. God's whole plan, it turns out, is now going through Abram. We know this because the two great promises God makes to Abram - land and people - correspond to the two great curses. The land promised to Abram will be a new Eden, a land "flowing with milk and honey." (Ex. 3:8) Also, the people that will descend from Abram will break the curse of Babel and its divided people. The people are a "seed" that will fertilize the land. What God will do with Abram is what Jacob sees in his dream - a ladder between heaven and earth, a new Eden, a true gate to God that will be a true Tower of Babylon (which means "gate of God") No more floods. No more open warfare against the violent flesh of the earth. God will grow the redemption of the earth through one particular stream - the stream of Abram. The curse will be broken through Abraham and his 'seed.'
But as we've seen, humanity under the power of death lives by boastful flesh. Flesh, again, is Paul's word for sinful humanity. It isn't our bodies. Those are good, very good. Flesh is a fear of death that goes all the way down, which manifests itself in us through works of strength, boastfulness, and self-sufficiency. How will flesh be put to death in Abram? The answer is circumcision. It is the sign of God's promise and covenant with Abram.
I want to pause for a moment. This Lenten series is about the public impact of Christ's cross, about how it actually changes the world. Initially, it seems that in talking about circumcision, we move away from the public aspects of our lives and move into the most private aspects of anyone's life - their sexuality. Perhaps I need to confess some of my own boastfulness. I want to say something important in this blog! And let's face it - writing about circumcision is embarrassing. But if the curse of sin is all about building bulwarks against our vulnerability to death, then childbearing and the sexuality that leads to it is one of the best God-replacements we can find. That the sign of the covenant is a subversive mark on a sexual organ is a sign that this is where our greatest sinful boast against death resides. This is where we think we can find immortality. This is where we think death can't get us.
We must first see circumcision as a parody of other civilizations. To ensure their future, ancient civilizations made religious symbols of sexual prowess and conquest. Naked worshipers bore phallic statues through Greek rituals of worship. Peter Leithart writes: "Sexual potency and procreation are paths to immortality, two of flesh's main strategies for overcoming the fear of death." (Delivered, 89) And it was all about the men. Civilizations valorized male flesh and male members. Trying to compensate for fleshly weakness and vulnerability to death, they boasted in male virility and strength. Their society was structured likewise. Women and slaves were impure and unclean. The new society God builds in Abram is a parody of these other societies. Where they ensure their future by boasting in male flesh, God's new people in Abram have only circumcised men, with cuts in their flesh. They are a civilization devoted to denying the flesh. Any future they have will not come from their own virility, but will come from God alone.
This is a parody. Parodies are stories that find humor in patterns, tropes, and commonplaces by retelling them with exaggeration. A joke appears in Reader's Digest: "A priest, a rabbi, a nun, a doctor, and a lawyer all walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this? A joke?" This joke is a parody of other jokes. Priests, rabbis, nuns, and more often turn up in jokes. Here, they all appear. They appear in a bar, a common setting for jokes. The punchline is only funny if you've heard a lot of these jokes to the point where you understand how they work.
Circumcision is a parody on the flesh-obsessed world. The joke is on them. It exposes them (pun intended). Flesh teaches all the world how to compete, how to conquer, how to be virile, how to win, how to stay alive at all costs, how to defend your life, your family, your tribe at the expense of all others. Flesh teaches this, but God's plan is to teach his people how to kill flesh. This will shape everything about Israel's worship, their sacrifices, and their ethics. It is all a parody. And it is all grounded in what circumcision means: subverting the boasting and vanity of flesh. Israel will still gain victories. God will give them everything that flesh seeks after - life, happiness, safety, family. All the good things of life. But it will only come from denying the flesh.
All their victories will be circumcised victories. When Gideon comes out to battle in the Book of Judges with 32,000 men, God keeps reducing his ranks until he has only 300. This is a parody. The only victory the Israelites will win is a circumcised victory. It is a victory they would never have won unless the Lord fought for them. When the Philistine giant Goliath is defeated by a small boy David, it is a circumcised victory. A circumcised victory is like a resurrection from the dead, a battle of certain death which only the Lord can win.
After circumcision, Abram is now Abraham. He is not of the flesh. He lives by God's Spirit. But this is a lesson Abraham continues to learn. The promises will not be fulfilled by the flesh. God promises Abraham and Sarah a child, but they are old and Sarah's womb is "dead." (Rom. 4) God's promise must be fulfilled by resurrection from the dead. When God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, it is like another circumcision. For a world under the power of death, having children is a way for us to have immortality. Abraham must trust his son, his 'flesh', to be put to death, and that God will still find a way to fulfill his promises. God intercedes and an animal substitute is killed instead. God needed to know that Abraham was willing to live by the Spirit and not by flesh.
Solomon's great temple will eventually be built on Mount Moriah, the same place where Abraham obeyed God with regard to sacrificing his 'flesh.' In Abraham, in Isaac, and in the whole sacrificial system that is eventually built around them, we see that God is finding a way to put flesh to death without killing people. Death itself is being put to death without people having to die. This will overcome the curse of Eden.
Finally, we see that Christ's cross is a type of circumcision:
"Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead." (Col. 2:9-12)"
Ultimately, what Jesus accomplishes is the true and final death of flesh. Then, we see the quintessential Christian approach to all our pedigrees, victories, and accomplishments in Paul's words:
"If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ." (Philippians 3:4b-7)
Paul's accomplishments are fleshly boasting, which are put to death in Christ's cross. So he denies them. He keeps putting them to death. We see ultimately that the rich symbolism of circumcision throughout the Bible points us to consistent pattern for this world, and for all Christians, of death and resurrection. To echo the Thursday, March 7 devotion, we were under the power and curse of death. We lived by flesh, and were in league with death in rebellion against the Lord. This death, this flesh, is put to death by the true circumcision of Christ's cross so that we live by God's Spirit alone, boasting not in our accomplishments, but in him alone.
But as we've seen, humanity under the power of death lives by boastful flesh. Flesh, again, is Paul's word for sinful humanity. It isn't our bodies. Those are good, very good. Flesh is a fear of death that goes all the way down, which manifests itself in us through works of strength, boastfulness, and self-sufficiency. How will flesh be put to death in Abram? The answer is circumcision. It is the sign of God's promise and covenant with Abram.
I want to pause for a moment. This Lenten series is about the public impact of Christ's cross, about how it actually changes the world. Initially, it seems that in talking about circumcision, we move away from the public aspects of our lives and move into the most private aspects of anyone's life - their sexuality. Perhaps I need to confess some of my own boastfulness. I want to say something important in this blog! And let's face it - writing about circumcision is embarrassing. But if the curse of sin is all about building bulwarks against our vulnerability to death, then childbearing and the sexuality that leads to it is one of the best God-replacements we can find. That the sign of the covenant is a subversive mark on a sexual organ is a sign that this is where our greatest sinful boast against death resides. This is where we think we can find immortality. This is where we think death can't get us.
We must first see circumcision as a parody of other civilizations. To ensure their future, ancient civilizations made religious symbols of sexual prowess and conquest. Naked worshipers bore phallic statues through Greek rituals of worship. Peter Leithart writes: "Sexual potency and procreation are paths to immortality, two of flesh's main strategies for overcoming the fear of death." (Delivered, 89) And it was all about the men. Civilizations valorized male flesh and male members. Trying to compensate for fleshly weakness and vulnerability to death, they boasted in male virility and strength. Their society was structured likewise. Women and slaves were impure and unclean. The new society God builds in Abram is a parody of these other societies. Where they ensure their future by boasting in male flesh, God's new people in Abram have only circumcised men, with cuts in their flesh. They are a civilization devoted to denying the flesh. Any future they have will not come from their own virility, but will come from God alone.
This is a parody. Parodies are stories that find humor in patterns, tropes, and commonplaces by retelling them with exaggeration. A joke appears in Reader's Digest: "A priest, a rabbi, a nun, a doctor, and a lawyer all walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What is this? A joke?" This joke is a parody of other jokes. Priests, rabbis, nuns, and more often turn up in jokes. Here, they all appear. They appear in a bar, a common setting for jokes. The punchline is only funny if you've heard a lot of these jokes to the point where you understand how they work.
Circumcision is a parody on the flesh-obsessed world. The joke is on them. It exposes them (pun intended). Flesh teaches all the world how to compete, how to conquer, how to be virile, how to win, how to stay alive at all costs, how to defend your life, your family, your tribe at the expense of all others. Flesh teaches this, but God's plan is to teach his people how to kill flesh. This will shape everything about Israel's worship, their sacrifices, and their ethics. It is all a parody. And it is all grounded in what circumcision means: subverting the boasting and vanity of flesh. Israel will still gain victories. God will give them everything that flesh seeks after - life, happiness, safety, family. All the good things of life. But it will only come from denying the flesh.
All their victories will be circumcised victories. When Gideon comes out to battle in the Book of Judges with 32,000 men, God keeps reducing his ranks until he has only 300. This is a parody. The only victory the Israelites will win is a circumcised victory. It is a victory they would never have won unless the Lord fought for them. When the Philistine giant Goliath is defeated by a small boy David, it is a circumcised victory. A circumcised victory is like a resurrection from the dead, a battle of certain death which only the Lord can win.
After circumcision, Abram is now Abraham. He is not of the flesh. He lives by God's Spirit. But this is a lesson Abraham continues to learn. The promises will not be fulfilled by the flesh. God promises Abraham and Sarah a child, but they are old and Sarah's womb is "dead." (Rom. 4) God's promise must be fulfilled by resurrection from the dead. When God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, it is like another circumcision. For a world under the power of death, having children is a way for us to have immortality. Abraham must trust his son, his 'flesh', to be put to death, and that God will still find a way to fulfill his promises. God intercedes and an animal substitute is killed instead. God needed to know that Abraham was willing to live by the Spirit and not by flesh.
Solomon's great temple will eventually be built on Mount Moriah, the same place where Abraham obeyed God with regard to sacrificing his 'flesh.' In Abraham, in Isaac, and in the whole sacrificial system that is eventually built around them, we see that God is finding a way to put flesh to death without killing people. Death itself is being put to death without people having to die. This will overcome the curse of Eden.
Finally, we see that Christ's cross is a type of circumcision:
"Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead." (Col. 2:9-12)"
Ultimately, what Jesus accomplishes is the true and final death of flesh. Then, we see the quintessential Christian approach to all our pedigrees, victories, and accomplishments in Paul's words:
"If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ." (Philippians 3:4b-7)
Paul's accomplishments are fleshly boasting, which are put to death in Christ's cross. So he denies them. He keeps putting them to death. We see ultimately that the rich symbolism of circumcision throughout the Bible points us to consistent pattern for this world, and for all Christians, of death and resurrection. To echo the Thursday, March 7 devotion, we were under the power and curse of death. We lived by flesh, and were in league with death in rebellion against the Lord. This death, this flesh, is put to death by the true circumcision of Christ's cross so that we live by God's Spirit alone, boasting not in our accomplishments, but in him alone.
Friday, March 8, 2019
Lent 2019: Saturday, March 9 - Divided Flesh
Peter Leithart describes the whole history of redemption this way: "From the moment of the fall, (God) began his ages-long war against and prosecution of flesh." (Delivered, 283)
We see moments early in the Bible as God makes evaluative claims against flesh. In describing the flood, Leithart describes how "Yahweh's Spirit wearies of the struggle with flesh (Gen. 6:3) and grieves over the damage to creation (Gen. 6:6-7), the violence that flesh invariably produces (Gen. 6:13). In the flood, Yahweh wipes the world clean of all flesh (Gen. 6:13, 17; 7:21). (85)
Noah represents a re-creation of the whole world, a new start in a world in which all the flesh, death, and violence of the world has been put to death. Indeed, Noah plants a garden of his own - a vineyard. Noah's name means "bringer of rest." Perhaps he has brought the world from violence to Sabbath peace. However God's post-flood evaluation of humanity as inclined to evil from youth (8:21) is ultimately confirmed in the great fall that takes place at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 where humanity is divided.
To appreciate the Tower of Babel, it will help to meet up again with our Jewish traveler.
The Jewish traveler we met in yesterday's post is part of a fictional travelogue which allows us to in-dwell an ancient sacrificial culture. In three separate accounts, the traveler encounters an Egyptian, a Babylonian, and a Greek. Here are his reflections upon entering Babylon:
"My fathers were here," I mused as I wandered the dusty streets of Babylon. They had been captured and transported to this very place. Perhaps the palace where Daniel had served Nebuchadnezzar was still standing, or the place where the king had set up his great image and commanded all in Babylon to bow to it. Perhaps this square was the place of the great furnace where the three children sang as they stood in the fire with the son of God.
"The temples of the land between the rivers are very impressive. As I have traveled along the Euphrates, I have seen great houses of the gods, some standing strong like fortresses, some in ruins. Some structures rise up above the landscape like mountains made by human hands, with a temple at the top that seemed to scrape the edge of heaven. They must have been one hundred cubits tall.
"I spoke to an old man who sat by the gate of the city. Temples, he said, were the main elements of worship in Babylon. They are divided into three main areas, a babu, a gate, and then the bitu, the house of the god itself, and the inner sanctuary is the kissumu, the dark room, the place that knows not daylight. He told me that the man-made mountains were called ziqquratu, which meant a place highly built. The temples were called the "bonds of heaven and earth," or the "highly built house." I could almost hear Sennacherib's great boast at the walls of Jerusalem, and the boast of the king of Babylon of which Isaiah told. (Isaiah 36-39). The temples of Babylon and Assyria are there to puff up the pride of kings." (Delivered, 49-50)
This account helps us to understand the Tower of Babel. The tower is built not just to earn fame, but to be a temple, to connect heaven and earth. It is to be a dwelling for Babylonian gods. Though in exile from God's presence, this clan descended from Noah's son Shem wants to "re-establish the Garden." (A House for My Name, 59) God's evaluation is two-fold: 1) although the mandate to Noah was to fill the earth, the Babylonians don't want to be scattered. As a result, they'll be scattered more widely than they were to begin with. 2) They want to make a name for themselves, but the name they receive is "Babel" which means confusion. (A House for My Name, 60)
We see in this transition that there is a uniting power of flesh in the building of the Tower which is dissipated after God's judgment. Post-Babel, the division and fragmentation are institutionalized and part of what flesh does is separate itself from other flesh.
Paul would later describe the works of flesh in this way - that it produces "enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissentions, factions, envying. (Gal. 5:20-21) Flesh is still stronger than ever after Babel, but God's war against and prosecution of flesh goes on. He is building the case. We will see with Abraham that God now sets about creating a community that is radically devoted to opposing flesh at its very root, a community that will not exist for its own fleshly boasting, but will be God's means to reunite the world. God will undo the curse of division from Babel, even as he undoes the curse of death from Eden. Re-entry into Eden for the exiles. Re-gathering of God's scattered, fragmented, Babel people.
We see moments early in the Bible as God makes evaluative claims against flesh. In describing the flood, Leithart describes how "Yahweh's Spirit wearies of the struggle with flesh (Gen. 6:3) and grieves over the damage to creation (Gen. 6:6-7), the violence that flesh invariably produces (Gen. 6:13). In the flood, Yahweh wipes the world clean of all flesh (Gen. 6:13, 17; 7:21). (85)
Noah represents a re-creation of the whole world, a new start in a world in which all the flesh, death, and violence of the world has been put to death. Indeed, Noah plants a garden of his own - a vineyard. Noah's name means "bringer of rest." Perhaps he has brought the world from violence to Sabbath peace. However God's post-flood evaluation of humanity as inclined to evil from youth (8:21) is ultimately confirmed in the great fall that takes place at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 where humanity is divided.
To appreciate the Tower of Babel, it will help to meet up again with our Jewish traveler.
The Jewish traveler we met in yesterday's post is part of a fictional travelogue which allows us to in-dwell an ancient sacrificial culture. In three separate accounts, the traveler encounters an Egyptian, a Babylonian, and a Greek. Here are his reflections upon entering Babylon:
"My fathers were here," I mused as I wandered the dusty streets of Babylon. They had been captured and transported to this very place. Perhaps the palace where Daniel had served Nebuchadnezzar was still standing, or the place where the king had set up his great image and commanded all in Babylon to bow to it. Perhaps this square was the place of the great furnace where the three children sang as they stood in the fire with the son of God.
"The temples of the land between the rivers are very impressive. As I have traveled along the Euphrates, I have seen great houses of the gods, some standing strong like fortresses, some in ruins. Some structures rise up above the landscape like mountains made by human hands, with a temple at the top that seemed to scrape the edge of heaven. They must have been one hundred cubits tall.
"I spoke to an old man who sat by the gate of the city. Temples, he said, were the main elements of worship in Babylon. They are divided into three main areas, a babu, a gate, and then the bitu, the house of the god itself, and the inner sanctuary is the kissumu, the dark room, the place that knows not daylight. He told me that the man-made mountains were called ziqquratu, which meant a place highly built. The temples were called the "bonds of heaven and earth," or the "highly built house." I could almost hear Sennacherib's great boast at the walls of Jerusalem, and the boast of the king of Babylon of which Isaiah told. (Isaiah 36-39). The temples of Babylon and Assyria are there to puff up the pride of kings." (Delivered, 49-50)
This account helps us to understand the Tower of Babel. The tower is built not just to earn fame, but to be a temple, to connect heaven and earth. It is to be a dwelling for Babylonian gods. Though in exile from God's presence, this clan descended from Noah's son Shem wants to "re-establish the Garden." (A House for My Name, 59) God's evaluation is two-fold: 1) although the mandate to Noah was to fill the earth, the Babylonians don't want to be scattered. As a result, they'll be scattered more widely than they were to begin with. 2) They want to make a name for themselves, but the name they receive is "Babel" which means confusion. (A House for My Name, 60)
We see in this transition that there is a uniting power of flesh in the building of the Tower which is dissipated after God's judgment. Post-Babel, the division and fragmentation are institutionalized and part of what flesh does is separate itself from other flesh.
Paul would later describe the works of flesh in this way - that it produces "enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissentions, factions, envying. (Gal. 5:20-21) Flesh is still stronger than ever after Babel, but God's war against and prosecution of flesh goes on. He is building the case. We will see with Abraham that God now sets about creating a community that is radically devoted to opposing flesh at its very root, a community that will not exist for its own fleshly boasting, but will be God's means to reunite the world. God will undo the curse of division from Babel, even as he undoes the curse of death from Eden. Re-entry into Eden for the exiles. Re-gathering of God's scattered, fragmented, Babel people.
Thursday, March 7, 2019
Lent 2019: Friday, March 8 - Taste Not, Touch Not
In a series of encounters with Gentiles, a Jew converses with an Egyptian in the ancient world. They talk of their sacrificial systems. The Egyptian says:
"We are most scrupulous for cleanliness," he was saying. "We believe that purity is necessary if we are to please the gods. We drink from cups of bronze and rinse them out every day. We wear garments of linen that are always newly washed." He gestured elegantly at his robe, which was indeed dazzling white. "We priests - we are called wab because we are purified - we shave ourselves all over our bodies every other day, so that no lice or any foul thing comes on us. We wear only linen, and sandals of papyrus. We wear no wool in the presence of the gods. We wash ourselves in cold water twice a day and twice in a night, in the sacred lake near the temple. Before we enter the temple, we have to chew natron to cleanse our breath and we have to fumigate ourselves with incense. We must keep ourselves from women during the days before we are to serve the god. We have countless services to perform for our gods, so they will be favorable to us." (Leithart, Delivered, 44)
The same Jewish traveler in Greece makes observations about a statue of Athena:
"In one hand she held a spear and in the other a shield depicting the Athenian slaughter of the Amazons. Another battle, between gods and giants, was depicted on the inside of her shield, and her sandals were decorated with scenes of the war between the Lapiths and the centaurs. The rest of the building was decorated with other scenes of the tale of Athena - her birth from the head of her father Zeus on the east pediment. Their temples are temples to gods of battle, but I wonder if the Athenians are not more worshipers of their own strength than the strength of the gods. I wonder if they do not boast more in their own flesh than in their gods." (Delivered, 58)
We sense here in the Jewish traveler the dubious sensibility that this is all a charade, which caused Jews and Christians to nearly do away with sacrifice entirely:
"Christianity entered the world, after all, announcing the end of sacrifice. The letter to the Hebrews contrasts the multiple, yet impotent, offerings of the Levitical system with the once-for-all offering on the cross, which has power to save forever. Deviating from both Judaism and paganism, most Christians gave up animal sacrifice entirely and introduced a nearly unthinkable religion without temples and altars, without blood, fire, and vapor of smoke." (Leithart, quoted from First Things magazine)
This traveler is mindful that the sacrificial systems of the ancient world operated in sham purity and cleanliness rituals. Established to hold death at bay, they keep entire societies in thrall to death. Christianity puts an end to all sacrifice. Nearly. It nearly does this, but not entirely. Because sacrifice is still important, not because we need many rules and policies to govern purity and cleanliness. Christ has taken care of that. We need sacrifice because death needs to be put to death. And for that to happen, "flesh" needs to die, and the old "elementary forces" need to end.
Paul describes the way Christ has dealt with flesh in Colossians 2:8-23:
"For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead." (Col. 2:9-12)
Flesh as it is expressed here, is not referring to our bodies of flesh and bones. That flesh is good. Flesh, as Leithart writes, is a "master metaphor to describe the condition of humanity following the fall." (Delivered, 78)
Another key phrase from Colossians 2 is what Paul describes as the "elements:"
"See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ." (Col. 2:8)
"Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" (Col. 2:20-21)
Our Jewish traveler encountered people living under the elements according to flesh. No one will ever pass into Eden this way. Paul is telling us in these passages that Christ's death allows people to cross over death, to pass into Eden, without actually dying. As they participate in Christ's death through baptism, they are not literally put to death, but are able to pass into the "Christian era", so to speak, where they are able to live by a different physics that is not according to flesh and the elemental spiritual forces of the world. Flesh is killed. So are the elemental spiritual forces.
A "taste not, touch not" ethic like we've encountered here leaves its participants as children and slaves. Christ's sacrifice, in putting flesh to death, allows for growth and maturity, so that we don't do away with sacrifice, but enter more fully into Christ's sacrifice.
"We are most scrupulous for cleanliness," he was saying. "We believe that purity is necessary if we are to please the gods. We drink from cups of bronze and rinse them out every day. We wear garments of linen that are always newly washed." He gestured elegantly at his robe, which was indeed dazzling white. "We priests - we are called wab because we are purified - we shave ourselves all over our bodies every other day, so that no lice or any foul thing comes on us. We wear only linen, and sandals of papyrus. We wear no wool in the presence of the gods. We wash ourselves in cold water twice a day and twice in a night, in the sacred lake near the temple. Before we enter the temple, we have to chew natron to cleanse our breath and we have to fumigate ourselves with incense. We must keep ourselves from women during the days before we are to serve the god. We have countless services to perform for our gods, so they will be favorable to us." (Leithart, Delivered, 44)
The same Jewish traveler in Greece makes observations about a statue of Athena:
"In one hand she held a spear and in the other a shield depicting the Athenian slaughter of the Amazons. Another battle, between gods and giants, was depicted on the inside of her shield, and her sandals were decorated with scenes of the war between the Lapiths and the centaurs. The rest of the building was decorated with other scenes of the tale of Athena - her birth from the head of her father Zeus on the east pediment. Their temples are temples to gods of battle, but I wonder if the Athenians are not more worshipers of their own strength than the strength of the gods. I wonder if they do not boast more in their own flesh than in their gods." (Delivered, 58)
We sense here in the Jewish traveler the dubious sensibility that this is all a charade, which caused Jews and Christians to nearly do away with sacrifice entirely:
"Christianity entered the world, after all, announcing the end of sacrifice. The letter to the Hebrews contrasts the multiple, yet impotent, offerings of the Levitical system with the once-for-all offering on the cross, which has power to save forever. Deviating from both Judaism and paganism, most Christians gave up animal sacrifice entirely and introduced a nearly unthinkable religion without temples and altars, without blood, fire, and vapor of smoke." (Leithart, quoted from First Things magazine)
This traveler is mindful that the sacrificial systems of the ancient world operated in sham purity and cleanliness rituals. Established to hold death at bay, they keep entire societies in thrall to death. Christianity puts an end to all sacrifice. Nearly. It nearly does this, but not entirely. Because sacrifice is still important, not because we need many rules and policies to govern purity and cleanliness. Christ has taken care of that. We need sacrifice because death needs to be put to death. And for that to happen, "flesh" needs to die, and the old "elementary forces" need to end.
Paul describes the way Christ has dealt with flesh in Colossians 2:8-23:
"For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead." (Col. 2:9-12)
Flesh as it is expressed here, is not referring to our bodies of flesh and bones. That flesh is good. Flesh, as Leithart writes, is a "master metaphor to describe the condition of humanity following the fall." (Delivered, 78)
Another key phrase from Colossians 2 is what Paul describes as the "elements:"
"See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ." (Col. 2:8)
"Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" (Col. 2:20-21)
Our Jewish traveler encountered people living under the elements according to flesh. No one will ever pass into Eden this way. Paul is telling us in these passages that Christ's death allows people to cross over death, to pass into Eden, without actually dying. As they participate in Christ's death through baptism, they are not literally put to death, but are able to pass into the "Christian era", so to speak, where they are able to live by a different physics that is not according to flesh and the elemental spiritual forces of the world. Flesh is killed. So are the elemental spiritual forces.
A "taste not, touch not" ethic like we've encountered here leaves its participants as children and slaves. Christ's sacrifice, in putting flesh to death, allows for growth and maturity, so that we don't do away with sacrifice, but enter more fully into Christ's sacrifice.
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Lent 2019: Thursday, March 7 - Death as a Power
Adam and Eve were not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge under the threat that if they were to do so, they would die. When they eat, this is the curse of Eden that falls upon them and upon the creation, that though they were dust, they would also return to dust in death. The way back into Eden is cut off from them by sword and flame, meaning anyone who tries to enter will be killed, but before they leave, God makes garments of skin for Adam and Eve, meaning an animal was killed.
The imagery of death abounds, in ways that both reflect the curse of death, but which also begin to show us the role death plays in God's redemptive plan. Death expels Adam and Eve from the Garden. But death is also their only way into the presence of God, and the only way that Adam and Eve can ever make it back into the garden. Peter Leithart writes: "From Adam on, if anyone wanted to enter the presence of God, he would have to pass through the sword and fire of the cherubim. No man could return to feast in the presence of God unless he first died. Yahweh performed the first sacrifice by providing animal skins for Adam and Eve, and from that point on no one could approach God's presence unless he were clothed in an animal. He could return to life, feasting and the presence of God only by passing through death." (Delivered, 77)
The death of Adam and Eve must be put to death. The drama is this: how can this be done without actually killing us? How can we be put to death without actually being put to death?
What is death anyway? From the perspective of Christ's completed work, Paul reflects in his Letter to the Romans on the nature of death as a "power." He writes: "...death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come." Again, Paul later writes, "...death reigned through that one man" just as grace and righteousness reign through Jesus. And finally, Paul writes, "...just as sin reigned in death," grace also reigns. (Rom. 5:14-21) Paul is telling us that death under the first Adam and grace under the second Adam, Jesus, are two opposing reigns, two opposing kingdoms, two different realms or aeons. His point ultimately is that Christ has put the old reign to death.
But we must stop to appreciate that death is a power. It is its own kingdom that governs by its own rules. It turns a harmonious, orderly cosmos into chaos, under its own twisted order. Leithart writes: "Flesh is not only a motivating power for individuals but also a principle of religious life and social organization. It is a "power" in the Pauline sense, a transpersonal reality that dominates and may enslave human beings." (82) Fleming Rutledge writes: "Paul's preferred way of identifying the occupying Enemy is in its various manifestations as Sin, Death, and the Law - or alternatively, as principalities and powers, as kurio (lords), thrones, authorities, and other designations." (Rutledge, 378) Rutledge elsewhere invokes the fiction of Cormac McCarthy for powerfully conveying this. "In (McCarthy's novel) The Crossing, we meet one of (McCarthy's) enigmatic sages: "The old man (said that) the wolf...knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there." (Rutledge, 202) Notice that death has agency in this line. It put something there. This gets at the ways that Satan orders these things to impose his rule over this age. Think of the authority Satan claims in the temptation passages with Jesus in the Bible.
Finally, it is important for us to see that if death is a power, if it has agency, then all humanity are active in bondage to it. Philip Ziegler writes: "To be lorded over by Sin is to have been engaged to be its representative, "member, part, and tool."...In our very existence "we are exponents of a power which transforms the cosmos into chaos," our lives actually "making a case" for the power that possesses us and in whose service we are enrolled. This is why Paul characterized the guilt of Sin not in terms of ignorance, but rather in terms of "revolt against the known Lord." (quoted in Rutledge, 179)
Two things are important to note here. First, we're part of the mess. Ignorant or not, we remain in revolt, in league with Death, sworn enemy of the Lord. Hiding this fact, that we are in bondage to death, we try to push death to the margins of our lives as much as we can. We hide from it. We protect ourselves from it. We deny it. We fear it. We puff ourselves up, because we don't want to be afraid. Leithart writes: "Vulnerability to loss, lack, death and damage leads to fear, and fear produces protectiveness, protectiveness produces violence and aggression." (80) It is a type of boasting. A deeply ironic one to be sure, because so much of our displays of strength are just our attempts to hide this core vulnerability. All human boasting, prowess in battle, sexual prowess, public debate, etc., all greed, cruelty, rivalry between genders, rivalry between races, even religions - its all fleshly boasting. Leithart again: "Flesh is good. Even mortal flesh is not evil in itself. Flesh becomes a motivator of sin and evil when human beings seek to compensate for finitude, mortality, weakness, when they refuse to accept their vulnerability and trust their Creator for all good gifts." (81-82)
Second, we can see that we are helpless to do anything about this. If sin, death, and the devil were just behavioral dispositions in each of us, maybe we could develop some better habits and improve things. But when Death is a power, a rival kingdom, its another story. But this frees us to see what it means that Christ's reign doesn't come from within this reign of death, but from outside. It is a revelation. It is a disclosure. It is "an electrifying bulletin from somewhere else, over against and independent of anything, religious or otherwise, that we human beings could ever have dreamed up or projected out of our own wishes." (Rutledge, 140) In other words, Christ's reign doesn't come as good advice, but as good news.
The imagery of death abounds, in ways that both reflect the curse of death, but which also begin to show us the role death plays in God's redemptive plan. Death expels Adam and Eve from the Garden. But death is also their only way into the presence of God, and the only way that Adam and Eve can ever make it back into the garden. Peter Leithart writes: "From Adam on, if anyone wanted to enter the presence of God, he would have to pass through the sword and fire of the cherubim. No man could return to feast in the presence of God unless he first died. Yahweh performed the first sacrifice by providing animal skins for Adam and Eve, and from that point on no one could approach God's presence unless he were clothed in an animal. He could return to life, feasting and the presence of God only by passing through death." (Delivered, 77)
The death of Adam and Eve must be put to death. The drama is this: how can this be done without actually killing us? How can we be put to death without actually being put to death?
What is death anyway? From the perspective of Christ's completed work, Paul reflects in his Letter to the Romans on the nature of death as a "power." He writes: "...death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come." Again, Paul later writes, "...death reigned through that one man" just as grace and righteousness reign through Jesus. And finally, Paul writes, "...just as sin reigned in death," grace also reigns. (Rom. 5:14-21) Paul is telling us that death under the first Adam and grace under the second Adam, Jesus, are two opposing reigns, two opposing kingdoms, two different realms or aeons. His point ultimately is that Christ has put the old reign to death.
But we must stop to appreciate that death is a power. It is its own kingdom that governs by its own rules. It turns a harmonious, orderly cosmos into chaos, under its own twisted order. Leithart writes: "Flesh is not only a motivating power for individuals but also a principle of religious life and social organization. It is a "power" in the Pauline sense, a transpersonal reality that dominates and may enslave human beings." (82) Fleming Rutledge writes: "Paul's preferred way of identifying the occupying Enemy is in its various manifestations as Sin, Death, and the Law - or alternatively, as principalities and powers, as kurio (lords), thrones, authorities, and other designations." (Rutledge, 378) Rutledge elsewhere invokes the fiction of Cormac McCarthy for powerfully conveying this. "In (McCarthy's novel) The Crossing, we meet one of (McCarthy's) enigmatic sages: "The old man (said that) the wolf...knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there." (Rutledge, 202) Notice that death has agency in this line. It put something there. This gets at the ways that Satan orders these things to impose his rule over this age. Think of the authority Satan claims in the temptation passages with Jesus in the Bible.
Finally, it is important for us to see that if death is a power, if it has agency, then all humanity are active in bondage to it. Philip Ziegler writes: "To be lorded over by Sin is to have been engaged to be its representative, "member, part, and tool."...In our very existence "we are exponents of a power which transforms the cosmos into chaos," our lives actually "making a case" for the power that possesses us and in whose service we are enrolled. This is why Paul characterized the guilt of Sin not in terms of ignorance, but rather in terms of "revolt against the known Lord." (quoted in Rutledge, 179)
Two things are important to note here. First, we're part of the mess. Ignorant or not, we remain in revolt, in league with Death, sworn enemy of the Lord. Hiding this fact, that we are in bondage to death, we try to push death to the margins of our lives as much as we can. We hide from it. We protect ourselves from it. We deny it. We fear it. We puff ourselves up, because we don't want to be afraid. Leithart writes: "Vulnerability to loss, lack, death and damage leads to fear, and fear produces protectiveness, protectiveness produces violence and aggression." (80) It is a type of boasting. A deeply ironic one to be sure, because so much of our displays of strength are just our attempts to hide this core vulnerability. All human boasting, prowess in battle, sexual prowess, public debate, etc., all greed, cruelty, rivalry between genders, rivalry between races, even religions - its all fleshly boasting. Leithart again: "Flesh is good. Even mortal flesh is not evil in itself. Flesh becomes a motivator of sin and evil when human beings seek to compensate for finitude, mortality, weakness, when they refuse to accept their vulnerability and trust their Creator for all good gifts." (81-82)
Second, we can see that we are helpless to do anything about this. If sin, death, and the devil were just behavioral dispositions in each of us, maybe we could develop some better habits and improve things. But when Death is a power, a rival kingdom, its another story. But this frees us to see what it means that Christ's reign doesn't come from within this reign of death, but from outside. It is a revelation. It is a disclosure. It is "an electrifying bulletin from somewhere else, over against and independent of anything, religious or otherwise, that we human beings could ever have dreamed up or projected out of our own wishes." (Rutledge, 140) In other words, Christ's reign doesn't come as good advice, but as good news.
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Lent 2019: Ash Wednesday, March 6 - Fleshly Impatience
Ash Wednesday reminds us that we all will die. While this feels morbid, the beginning of the Bible tells us is that we should have taken death more seriously, and that I'm very likely hide the fact of my death from myself. It isn't pathological to attend to death in this way. In fact, it's one of the healthiest things we can do!
When God first created the universe, he made a garden where he placed the man and the woman he had created. However, there is a rich symbolism that underlies the garden. When God creates the world, he creates skies, land, and seas to be a type of three-story house. He divides things on the first three days to create these spaces, and then on the second three days, he fills these places with other things - stars, birds, animals. To be precise, the sky has two parts - the highest heavens and the firmament. He divides up the land and makes a garden within the larger land of Eden. The garden serves in the role of a sanctuary where God would meet with Adam. Adam's priestly work was in the garden, protecting it, while his kingly work was in Eden, working. The garden, the land of Eden, and the outside lands all correspond to a picture of the world and of heaven, in which there is no division between the religious sphere of our lives and the secular sphere of our lives.
When we read Genesis 1 and 2 and ponder an existence before the fall, we wonder what that would be like. Given that our lives are so often driven by the worry that something could go wrong, its hard to imagine a flawless world and not think it would be a little boring. It would not have been. Adam and Eve, as with all of us, were created in God's image. God says on the sixth day: "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals." (Gen. 1:26) We see that humanity are made in God's image. First, this means that all of creation is in some way a sign or symbol of God. Second, this means that humanity are the ones who recognize this and participate in this process. James B. Jordan writes: "God has been presented as one who determines, creates, evaluates, names, takes counsel among Himself, etc. These things are what man uniquely images." (Through New Eyes, 31) This also suggests something extraordinary about this world that we often forget. Just because things change doesn't mean things get worse. Adam and Eve were commissioned to have dominion in the world. They were to garden and cultivate, to bring latent potentialities and possibilities out of the creation. Peter Leithart writes: "Even before Adam sins, it is not easy to rule creation. Animals need training, trees are tough to cut, the earth is hard to dig, and rocks are hard to break." This work is to make the world useful for Adam, but not only for Adam. It should become more pleasing to God. More Leithart: "God does not want Adam simply to have children; He wants Adam to have faithful, godly children who worship and serve Him. God does not want Adam to use iron to hurt other people; He wants Adam to use iron to make useful tools and musical instruments. Adam is the king of the world, but he is always a servant to a higher King. If Adam subdues the world as God commands, he will be building a house for God within the house that God has built for him." (Leithart, A House for My Name, 51-52)
All this shows us that Adam and Eve were to grow and change. They were to have experiences. They were to sweat and toil. They were to have children. They were to mature and grow ever-more into the dignity and image in which they were created. Part of this has to do with freedom, with learning to say yes, and also learning to say no. God wasn't going to force feed them the Tree of Life. And he wasn't going to fence off the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It wouldn't always be off limits. What role it played, it played within the economy of God's equipping. Leithart writes that Adam was a "child" who was destined to be elevated to kingship. The tree of judgment would signify "his eventual entrance into mature kingly wisdom." (Delivered, 76) Much as we would perhaps learn the lesson of gravity, Adam is placed under a curriculum. Adam, taste not. Touch not.
Humanity in their original, created dignity were not superheroes. They weren't sinners, but they were still vulnerable. Leithart writes: "Adam and Eve were created as flesh - limited, weak, vulnerable, touchable, woundable. That was good, very good. They might have accepted their vulnerability and the precariousness of their fleshly life, trusting the Father to care for them. Adam might have been content to wait for the Lord to open his hand to satisfy his desires, might have trusted his Father to give him his full inheritance when the Father saw that he was ready. Eve might have rejoiced in fleshly weakness and trusted her Father to supply whatever strength she needed." (Delivered, 76)
We'll treat the judgment for eating of the forbidden fruit tomorrow. For now, we emphasize Adam and Eve's impatience with their own flesh. They wanted to transcend the vulnerability, weakness, and limitations they knew in their humanity. The vulnerability they wanted to escape now becomes cursed, a type of prison. They leave the created dignity of vulnerability. They leave the Garden and the Tree of Life. But we already know from the end of the Bible that the redeemed in Christ will find the Tree of Life again. (Rev. 22:2) Eden must stay before our eyes throughout the Bible. The yearning for Eden is there on every mountain top, in every sacrificial encounter with God mediated through priest and tabernacle, in every wedding, in every scene of flourishing in the broken world. Whatever Christ will do must have to do with breaking the curse of Eden and gaining re-entry for those cast out. And the restored humanity will be like that which Adam and Eve cast off - a vulnerable, touchable, weak humanity with emotions and senses, images of God, yet part of the world.
What we find today on Ash Wednesday, and what we'll explore tomorrow is how much death defines so much of the broken reality of this life. Death is the quintessential mark of the Enemy-occupied world. It is the devil's greatest tool to gather all of us up, to shape all of our decision-making so that we are complicit, bound up together in corruption. Christ's victory over the devil allows Ash Wednesday to sober us, to extinguish our fear of death with the cool baptismal water which tells us that we belong to Christ, that he will usher us through death to eternal life, that he alone is the one who can lead us back to Eden.
When God first created the universe, he made a garden where he placed the man and the woman he had created. However, there is a rich symbolism that underlies the garden. When God creates the world, he creates skies, land, and seas to be a type of three-story house. He divides things on the first three days to create these spaces, and then on the second three days, he fills these places with other things - stars, birds, animals. To be precise, the sky has two parts - the highest heavens and the firmament. He divides up the land and makes a garden within the larger land of Eden. The garden serves in the role of a sanctuary where God would meet with Adam. Adam's priestly work was in the garden, protecting it, while his kingly work was in Eden, working. The garden, the land of Eden, and the outside lands all correspond to a picture of the world and of heaven, in which there is no division between the religious sphere of our lives and the secular sphere of our lives.
When we read Genesis 1 and 2 and ponder an existence before the fall, we wonder what that would be like. Given that our lives are so often driven by the worry that something could go wrong, its hard to imagine a flawless world and not think it would be a little boring. It would not have been. Adam and Eve, as with all of us, were created in God's image. God says on the sixth day: "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals." (Gen. 1:26) We see that humanity are made in God's image. First, this means that all of creation is in some way a sign or symbol of God. Second, this means that humanity are the ones who recognize this and participate in this process. James B. Jordan writes: "God has been presented as one who determines, creates, evaluates, names, takes counsel among Himself, etc. These things are what man uniquely images." (Through New Eyes, 31) This also suggests something extraordinary about this world that we often forget. Just because things change doesn't mean things get worse. Adam and Eve were commissioned to have dominion in the world. They were to garden and cultivate, to bring latent potentialities and possibilities out of the creation. Peter Leithart writes: "Even before Adam sins, it is not easy to rule creation. Animals need training, trees are tough to cut, the earth is hard to dig, and rocks are hard to break." This work is to make the world useful for Adam, but not only for Adam. It should become more pleasing to God. More Leithart: "God does not want Adam simply to have children; He wants Adam to have faithful, godly children who worship and serve Him. God does not want Adam to use iron to hurt other people; He wants Adam to use iron to make useful tools and musical instruments. Adam is the king of the world, but he is always a servant to a higher King. If Adam subdues the world as God commands, he will be building a house for God within the house that God has built for him." (Leithart, A House for My Name, 51-52)
All this shows us that Adam and Eve were to grow and change. They were to have experiences. They were to sweat and toil. They were to have children. They were to mature and grow ever-more into the dignity and image in which they were created. Part of this has to do with freedom, with learning to say yes, and also learning to say no. God wasn't going to force feed them the Tree of Life. And he wasn't going to fence off the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It wouldn't always be off limits. What role it played, it played within the economy of God's equipping. Leithart writes that Adam was a "child" who was destined to be elevated to kingship. The tree of judgment would signify "his eventual entrance into mature kingly wisdom." (Delivered, 76) Much as we would perhaps learn the lesson of gravity, Adam is placed under a curriculum. Adam, taste not. Touch not.
Humanity in their original, created dignity were not superheroes. They weren't sinners, but they were still vulnerable. Leithart writes: "Adam and Eve were created as flesh - limited, weak, vulnerable, touchable, woundable. That was good, very good. They might have accepted their vulnerability and the precariousness of their fleshly life, trusting the Father to care for them. Adam might have been content to wait for the Lord to open his hand to satisfy his desires, might have trusted his Father to give him his full inheritance when the Father saw that he was ready. Eve might have rejoiced in fleshly weakness and trusted her Father to supply whatever strength she needed." (Delivered, 76)
We'll treat the judgment for eating of the forbidden fruit tomorrow. For now, we emphasize Adam and Eve's impatience with their own flesh. They wanted to transcend the vulnerability, weakness, and limitations they knew in their humanity. The vulnerability they wanted to escape now becomes cursed, a type of prison. They leave the created dignity of vulnerability. They leave the Garden and the Tree of Life. But we already know from the end of the Bible that the redeemed in Christ will find the Tree of Life again. (Rev. 22:2) Eden must stay before our eyes throughout the Bible. The yearning for Eden is there on every mountain top, in every sacrificial encounter with God mediated through priest and tabernacle, in every wedding, in every scene of flourishing in the broken world. Whatever Christ will do must have to do with breaking the curse of Eden and gaining re-entry for those cast out. And the restored humanity will be like that which Adam and Eve cast off - a vulnerable, touchable, weak humanity with emotions and senses, images of God, yet part of the world.
What we find today on Ash Wednesday, and what we'll explore tomorrow is how much death defines so much of the broken reality of this life. Death is the quintessential mark of the Enemy-occupied world. It is the devil's greatest tool to gather all of us up, to shape all of our decision-making so that we are complicit, bound up together in corruption. Christ's victory over the devil allows Ash Wednesday to sober us, to extinguish our fear of death with the cool baptismal water which tells us that we belong to Christ, that he will usher us through death to eternal life, that he alone is the one who can lead us back to Eden.
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