Jezebel Defenestrated
In
the ninth century BCE, there was born a princess of Phoenicia, the
daughter of a successful and powerful king in a busy port city. She -
as did her people - worshiped Belus, Baal of Tyre, the god of her
hometown. Eventually this princess was married to Ahab, son of Omri,
king of Israel. Her power and influence in Israel grew until she had
persuaded the king Ahab to instigate a nationwide religious reform:
conversion to worship of her Baal from the Israel Yahweh.
As one might guess, this made her fairly unpopular with the worshipers of Yahweh. She was in the position of power, and her side started winning, complete with all the typical oppression and assassination of opposing-religion prophets and priests. Most pious Israelites lived in great fear of the princess, and a palace administrator named Obadiah even began hiding various religious leaders of Yahwheh in caves so as to protect them from her massacre. The Israelite prophet Elijah, who would become a legendary hero of his people for his piety and devotion to his God, was repulsed and angered by injustice and shameful disloyalty of the king Ahab to Yahweh in preference to his wife's deity, a baal (which, unsurprisingly, had become the Israelite word for "false god"). So one day, he marched himself up to the palace of Ahab and Jezebel to challenge their God to an epic duel - again, unsurprisingly, the Israelites record the success of their God and the mocking embarrassment of his Phoenician opponent.
Both the time of Elijah and Ahab come to pass, but Jezebel and her two sons remain on the throne of Israel, incubating the spread of Israel's wretched Baal infection. Inevitably, Jezebel and her cohorts (or so they're presented) continue to present such an offense to the Yahweh cult that Elisha, successor of Elijah, sends a messenger to anoint a new king in place of Ahab's dynasty. And so it was that Jehu son of Jehoshaphat began his bloody crusade throughout all the land, purging the land of God of all evil, injustice, Baal-worshipers, political power, and effective administration.
So that's how king Jehu king of Israel initiated his nation's sad and steady decline into the hands of the Assyrian Empire. He minced some Baal worshipers, made latrines of their temples, and had Princess Jezebel of Phoenicia thrown out of her upper-story window to be eaten by dogs in the street below. But while Jehu's duties to ritual purity had been answered (though, according to the author of Kings, far from satisfied), his enthusiastic sterilization technique seemed to leave him in a fairly ironic position: weak, poor, and much smaller than before. The Moabites, whom Israel no longer had the strength to oppress, were finally saved by their god Chemosh from the religious pressures of the Yahweh cult. It was a good match on both sides, but the win fell to the opposition today. Better luck next time, Israel. May the gods be ever in your favor.
It's an ever-amusing reality that religious systems seem to be equipped with an immune system: what doesn't work doubles up in terrible cramps of ironicopathology until it, usually, either chokes itself back to health or dies. My religious experience has seen many an epidemic of this sort, and most of the Bible seems chock full of descriptions of the cycle. We believe something, but it has limits; our boxes are broken down by the realities revealed to us, and we must reconstruct; we find something true to rebuild ourselves in, and it too is later broken down. It is, firstly, this process of challenge and reconceptualization, and secondly, a deconstruction of the very nature and purpose of God (and of theism as a whole) that I have discovered in the Judeo-Christian narrative and fallen in love with this past semester. The Bible may not be a single cohesive document and it may have many contradictory points of view, but it is in the dialogue between conflicting voices that I have most potently seen that of God reflected in the Bible's various documentations of religious experience.
Most of us take religion for granted - morality, worship, even this basic box-breaking cycle. Depending on your perspective and experience, it's a firmly-embedded cultural fact; it's fundamentally significant to your life (for better or worse); it's a universal system of moral obligation; it's an innate call within every human heart. But if we're to assume that human beings arose as Biology says they did, very slowly and from nothingness - which is what I feel I must do if I'm to take Science at all seriously, and which I will not be explaining here - we must come to the full realization that their various cultures - including religion - all arose in a similar fashion. Theology requires no "foundational presuppositions," as has been suggested by others. It's unnecessary to speak of a faith-reason binary, or of the distinction between revelation and science. I don't like to speak of my hermeneutic on a "Poetic - Synergistic - Dictation" scale, either, because it seems overly simplistic to me. I don't think in those terms. All I feel that I need to assume is that I'm capable of learning about the past, and about the things around me, never believing stuff I'm afraid to subject to too much discernment and intellectual scrutiny. Everything we believe about religion and spirituality and the meaning of the stuff around us was discovered, perhaps invented, over thousands of years as we came to awareness and self-understanding, and there's a reason it did that. I figure that if we find out why, we'll be able to claim the commitment we apparently have for our traditions (whatever they may be) in the first place.
It has been profoundly meaningful to me, both intellectually and spiritually, to gain insight into the formation of religious belief and the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Understanding why and how Christianity came about is of crucial importance in determining its worth to me, revolutionizing - reconstructing - my faith and my love of biblical scriptures. I'd like to show you why, despite my many frustrations with American Christianity, I like and have continued to identify with this religion, by unraveling the Judeo-Christian story as I have come to understand it.
So in the beginning, religion was entirely a means to an end. The worship of ancient barely-historical gods, particularly in the Middle East, was not intended as any kind of God-directed motion. Gods were anthropomorphizations of various things people did and said, oaths people swore, stuff people needed, countries people fought for. There weren't gods for things people didn't need - such deities got faded out of relevancy. And there was no separation between "natural" and "religious" understanding. There was no such thing as religion. There was just stuff, and there were gods that went with it.
But when people worship the anthropomorphizations of things for self-directed reasons, important abstract concepts begin to fall to the wayside. When all that matters is what I need, what I want, what makes me happy, where is the justice? Where are the rules? Are we grounded in anything at all? At some point, pain arose from the lack of abstract things, as well. So what did people do? They made another god to anthropomorphize that.
This is the context in which I have come to read the first Old Testament Biblical literature - what documentary hypothesis calls "Yahwist" texts. God (by which I mean the Israelites' understanding of Yahweh) has developed abstract qualities, and the people have just figured out how to live for the sake of justice and righteousness. The abstract deity they worship also has abstract desires and goals for the Israelites, even if these abstract concepts are still pretty directly linked to the prosperity of their nation.
This incredible step from aesthetic, self-involved religion to a wider, more universal perspective is an incredible progression in the development of the Jewish tradition, and an incredible moment in the development of human spirituality. There is much to learn from their community and what their disagreements with contemporaries said about what was meaningful to them. An exemplary text is the obsessively-studied first two Chapters of Genesis: two completely separate creation accounts written hundreds of years apart. The Yahwist creation account in the second book of Genesis provides a very anthropomorphic, heartfelt explanation of the origins of the world. Reading the text, it is striking that their god - an embodiment of justice, righteousness, provision, and protection - is depicted in such intimate relation to his people. Unlike other similar creation narratives of the sort, it's so peaceful. In the act of creation, there's no squabbling among gods, no ruptures in relationships, no destruction. Their god simply forms them out of the dust, breathes life into them, and then creates a community of people intimate enough that they are "bone of [each other's] bone, flesh of [each other's] flesh." The relationship these people have to the divine seems peaceful and admirable and so endearing. That people had come to think of their relationship to their governing power in this way is an amazing movement toward self-awareness and largeness of perspective to me.
But the second creation account, in the first chapter of Genesis, is remarkably more interesting. Identified as a Priestly text by the documentary hypothesis - so, some of the last Old Testament literature to be written - it was composed during a particularly fascinating time in Biblical history (the Exile, which I'll get to later) when the writers of the text had much exposure to Babylonian gods and the stories and theologies accompanying them. As is typical during times of intense cross-cultural contact, this naturally produced a polemic.
Where the Babylonian creation story in their scripture, the Enuma Elish, involves a massive divine war following a period of primordial chaos and the birth of their patron god, the Genesis 1 account features a single god in the presence of chaos before intentional creation. Where the Babylonian world was a product of the bodies of various gods, emerging Jewish culture and the authors behind Genesis 1 depicted the world as a good, orderly, beautiful place. In the Babylonian text, people are created as servants to the gods; in Genesis 1, people are like the gods, not petty creatures. This very high view of humanity and the world is similar to the approachable, kind nature of the first creation story, and provides an important platform from which to understand the culture's relationship to other nations. Although these two stories were basically written at the bookends of the Old Testament Biblical historical context, they have one very important element in common: a single deity that cared for his people and the place they live.
The thing is, the cycle of prosperity and hardship typical of most national histories tended to result in shifts between Yahweh's promises of unconditional protection and blessing, during times of good fortune, to formal contracts conditional on people's ritual obedience to him during times of instability or national threat - and then it'd return to unconditional blessing again. Since authorship chronology gets complicated very quickly, my intent is not to nitpick over what was written when, but instead to construct a progression of ideas as a simplified expression of the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition as I have encountered. But it's fairly clear that there came a time after the establishment of the Mosaic covenant - perhaps emphasized during the Philistine crisis, when external military threats lead to the formation of an Israeli kingship (1 Samuel - prosperity had returned to a great enough extent that the Davidic covenant emerged, unconditional like the Abrahamic Covenant.
I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men on earth. And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed. Wicked people will not oppress them anymore, as they did at the beginning and have done ever since the time I appointed leaders over my people Israel. I will also give you rest from all your enemies ... When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you ... When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands. But my love will never be taken away from him ... Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.
This comes to us through the haze of the Exilic writers of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings), but it's clear that there's an expectation in basically all pre-exilic literature that God is to be trusted; God is good; God will protect; God is just; God will save us. Especially when David and Solomon are on the throne, things are depicted in fairly glowing light: glorious descriptions of Solomon's temple, glowing reviews of David's character, great hopes for the future of the nation. The presence of God literally dwelled among the people: in the First Temple constructed in the middle of the city where everyone could see it, right there, in the Holy of Holies! The invisible protecting, blessing presence of the national deity. Obviously, things were probably never as perfect as is described by the Deuteronomistic authors looking back on the good ol' days. But the attitude described, one that the next couple movements certainly react to, is certainly that of the Davidic Covenant: the simple, confident faith that Yahweh will unconditionally save his people from any evil that might befall them. In the most intimate of terms, the depth of the connection between God and his people is described. Like a loving parent looking out for a child, God provide for his people; like shepherd protecting their flock, no lions would ever come to prey on the people.
The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing!
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads be beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
But alas - like all good dreams, it had to come to an end. Woe to Israel! The evil that was their demise came from within. The same authors that spoke so glowingly of David and Solomon a minute ago offer scathing reviews of following kings who failed to worship Yahweh as the One Supreme God and began to worship the gods of other nations (which, if you recall, is a moral offense largely because it is a betrayal of the people and its god, which would be at threat to national security). After a couple semi-functional, semi-successful, God-revering kings, the northern tribes of Israel and southern tribes of Judah split, and from there it all seems to have gone downhill.
King after king after northern king in the book of - surprise - Kings would do three key things wrong: firstly, and most importantly, they would worship or have sympathies toward gods other than Yahweh; secondly, they all worshiped somewhere other than the Temple in Jerusalem, which were unclean, unsacred locations that did not contain God's presence; thirdly, the social injustices of their administrations were piling up in evidence of their moral wickedness. Remember that an Israelite king not worshiping Yahweh is inherently an act of treason: Yahweh is the god of the nation, and worshiping other gods means you have surrendered to other nations. Although it can seem strange from a modern perspective that understands religious truths as separate concepts from political realities, kings like Ahab's worship of the Phoenecian Baal would have been like a U.S. president wearing a tie patterned with Soviet flags during the Cold War.
Speaking even from a purely socio-political point of view, then, it's fairly easy to understand how their worship of other gods may really have been a significant contributing factor to the weakening of the Northern kingdom: of course there would be negative consequences to that kind of disloyalty to the god of their nation. In a near comic struggle to deal with cultural disintegration, Northern kings seem to alternate between long periods of tolerance or worship of other gods and brief moments of righteous dedication to purging the land of everything threatening to the purity of Yahweh worship - and here we've caught up to our opening story. This cycle seems to have been the perfect combination of cultural relaxation and huge blows to political governance to make Israel an easy target for Assyrian conquest. The fates make their rounds and crown Israel Assyria's darling Jezebel! And what's more, the god of Israel will soon become her righteous Jehu that dashes her to pieces. (Can you see the dogs tear apart her flesh?)
Naturally, this whole process of decay was great reason for many prophets, priests, and religious teachers to freak out and call fervently for the return of the people's dedication to God, to justice, to righteousness, to repentance. After all, "if one person sins against another, someone can intercede for the sinner with the LORD; but if someone sins against the LORD, who can make intercession?" The chilling call is repeated over and over: Repent, repent! For the day of the LORD has come near. Where the "day of the LORD" had once meant the destruction of Israel's enemies in Yahweh's purging of the impure and unjust, everything is turned on its head as the Chosen People are gradually eaten away by their foes.
Desperate to save their nation and appalled by the brokenness, poverty, and destitute disrepair of their nations, fiercely counter-cultural prophets like Amos and Zephaniah begin to prophesy the decimation of their own people because of the repulsive corruption they saw. To Amos, ritual purity itself had become meaningless: the injustice around him was too much for him to tolerate, and too much for God to tolerate. Zephaniah takes it even further, making the revolutionarily anti-government statement that God was king. Get that - it has become an anti-government statement that God is king! God is no longer an embodiment of the nation or its interests; God is no longer a simple protector of the people. God has a vision for what people should look like that sees no ethnic boundaries. After all, if Israel really has become just like the slew of enemies the've been hating on for centuries, there's no reason a truly just God should spare them.
This is an absolutely incredible leap in the evolution of this system of thought. For even a few individuals to begin to fully realize that the things in life that matter - food, safety, shelter, home, family, order, peace - are not just the realm of desire, or of law (which Amos blatantly dismisses), but of justice, and to say that the god we ought to worship is not simply the patron spirit of our ethnic group but the power behind the creation of a better world is a remarkably wise, selfless, humanitarian idea. Though consistent in many ways with some core motivations behind Mosaic law - protection of the weak, maintenance of order, unity of the people, punishment of injustice - the time leading up to Exile witnesses a huge upheaval in Biblical thought on the correct means to those ends. Something matters more to God than saving your ass, now: God wants to see rightness restored to the world.
Lo and behold, Israel and Judah both got what the prophets thought they deserved. Assyria took Israel in 722 BCE; Babylon sacked Judah in 586. The Temple is destroyed, the people are scattered, the Promised Land has been scratched off of the contract. Gone is beautiful Zion; gone are her riches; gone are all hopes and dreams and security. Children's tongues "stick to the roofs of their mouthes for thirst." The "hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children." Everyone's houses and livelihoods have been torn to rubble. The desperation is nauseating even to read. It's one thing to threaten, usually with the hope that things will take a turn for the better, that the coming of God's justice will entail the destruction of Israel. It's another thing entirely to actually feel it happen. It becomes clear in the Exilic texts, which compound the Amos-Hosea-Zephaniah-type desire for justice with the painful reality of Judah's destruction, that God has not merely abandoned his people. He has made himself and everything he ever was to Israel a cruel joke.
The LORD has become like an enemy; he has destroyed Israel.
He has multiplied in daughter Judah mourning and lamentation.
The Lord has scorned his altar, disowned his sanctuary;
he has delivered into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces.
A clamor was raised in the house of the LORD as on a day of festival!
Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her.
The presence of God? Ha - what presence of God? What is God when he himself has destroyed his own dwelling place and spat upon the people he himself once brought up out of the dust? What kind of sick God have we been worshiping? What did any of those covenants mean - has God forsaken his people completely?
Your prophets, O virgin daughter Zion, have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen for you false and deceptive visions.
The Exile completely rips apart the people of Yahweh. They are in destitute poverty, they are miserable, they are traumatized beyond belief. I find it difficult not to quote the entirety of Lamentations - the pain is just so great. And at this point, to remember the attitude of the victorious Davidic era is simply disgusting. The people's most victorious moments - where, before, they laughed at other nations' demise - have seemed to turn with a mind of their own to mock Israel itself.
Postulate, half-assed answers to some of these questions are thrown around, though none of them soothe the wounds. The Deuteronomistic History was compiled during this time, and it's clear that books like Kings - all that bashing of the Northern kingdom of Israel, all those bitter cries for repentance and the utter stubbornness of the people - contain an overwhelming amount of regret and compounded guilt trips, attempts to rationalize the terrible situation that has befallen the people. Judging by the very curious lack of any recorded Jewish rebellions during the Babylonian Exile, it's evident that the people probably did widely believe that they deserved the torture they were being subjected to, as the scriptures suggest, and that they were trying very hard to be good, so as not to anger God any further. On top of whatever physical pain the Exile caused, it also meant that people had to deeply reevaluate their assumptions about human worth. If God has come to treat his cherished child as dust, perhaps people really are no more than that. Maybe we are just random matter stuck together without any further significance.
The precious children of Zion, worth their weight in fine gold -
how they are reckoned as earthen pots, the work of a potter's hand.
If the "presence of the LORD" were defined as it was during the Davidic era, in terms of prosperity and protection, then it would be clear that the "presence of the LORD" has left the people during the Exile. But other texts slowly begin to creep out of the rubble, and in soft, quivering voice, begin to say, No. It cannot be so simple. Justice still exists! The poor and the weak will not just be ignored. When human rights are perverted in the presence of the Most High, does the LORD not see it? It is not enough to say that we simply deserve our pain. It is not enough to say that God has effectively died. We will not accept that what we thought was gold is simply clay. No. If we really are just clay, it must be that clay is worth gold, and gold is worth clay.
A completely new God emerges from Israel defenestrated. Consider the mind-blowing ironies and revelations in these famous exilic texts in the context above:
The first chapter of Second Isaiah, the part of Isaiah composed in exile, starts with a totally new message from God. No longer has God "dragged me from the path and mangled me, leaving me without help," but he speaks, "Comfort! Comfort, my people! Speak tenderly to Jerusalem - her hard service is over, her sin is paid for. I've given her double the punishment she deserved for her sins." God speaks that all inequalities will soon be demolished, and that this will be the revelation of the glory of the LORD: all peoples will see it together. It's actually not okay that you're experiencing the trauma and destruction you're going through. I care about your pain, says the LORD, and I'm sorry.
Isaiah 42, the third chapter of Second Isaiah, introduces the character of the Suffering Servant. He, a personification of the nation Israel, is described as plain and unworthy of attention - people disliked him, and he was low and pitiable. But he, even in his imperfection, became a perfect sacrifice for the sins of his oppressors. Like Israel in exile, he suffered unjustly despite his innocence, never complaining despite the harshness of his torture. That seems cruel and counter-intuitive at first, like some kind of twisted victim blame where Israel is responsible for the abuses of their oppressors. But this is a fundamentally different idea from substitutionary atonement. Israel is so used to being the victim that that's not the significant part of the message. To the contrary, the message that "out of his suffering, he will see light" is a way to tell the people that, first of all, they're doing a good and honorable job, and secondly, that the pain they're feeling is their oppressors' fault, not their own. Israel is suffering because someone else is doing wrong, not because God hates them.
In a story from Kings, the prophet Elijah feels helpless and abandoned, the only Israelite left that cares about justice or reverence for God, and he's being pursued by Jezebel's flock of religious assassins. He goes out to stand on a mountain, looking for God's presence. Powerful signs - wind, earthquake, fire - rise up before him, calling to mind verses like the one directly following the revelation of the ten commandments, where Yahweh speaks in a booming voice "on a mountain from out of the fire, the cloud, and the deep darkness." But God was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. But then came a gentle whisper, and God finds him there. (It makes me giggle that what God tells him here is to go anoint Jehu and his buddies to become Ahab and Jezebel's mirror image, but hey - the exilic writer had to keep telling the story.)
God tell Jonah to go to this city, Nineveh, to tell them to "give up their evil ways and their violence." And eventually, when he does go, he's super upset when God tells him that he doesn't want to destroy the Ninevites (who have, in the mean time, repented of their injustices) for their evil ways, because they're no longer evil. Jonah throws a hissy fit, and God approaches him like one might approach a toddler: Jonah, it's ridiculous that you're angry right now. Don't you think I should care about this city? There are tons and tons of people there, and tons of animals. Why should you be more important to me than them?
The God of the Exile is not a national god. He is not a retributive god. His power is not almighty because Israel must be protected at all costs, but because even if Israel gets attacked, the god they worship gives an internal strength that is independent of circumstance. This God is not partisan. He is not angry, and he's not coercive, like the pre-exilic Yahweh. This god is the god of the justice and rightness we seek among people. His justice brings peace and relieves the pain of weeping mothers, bleeding soldiers, starving infants. But this "justice" we speak of is an unmoving standard, not an expectation. When we're in exile, in misery, it is from within that we find light. That is the meaning of "justice:" that hope is never lost, and that even in unbearable suffering, what you are feeling is not necessarily a divine whip of judgment on your shoulders. You're suffering because the one inflicting pain is living unjustly. God's will is not with their action; it is in the elimination of injustice. "My justice will become a light to the nations, and my salvation will last forever," says God. "Because my righteousness can never fail."
Thankfully, Babylon too comes to an end and Persia takes over. The Persians seem to have a very different cultural paradigm for dealing with people of other religions and people groups. Overwhelmingly more tolerant than Babylon, the Persian emperor Cyrus and his successor Darius allow the Jews to return to their homeland, even sponsoring the reconstruction of their Temple. Jerusalem is restored to its former glory - in fact, it's more glorious than ever. Judah is still just a vassal state of Persia, but after several generations in exile, they took what they could get. Predictably enough, in the relief and restored security of the Post-Exile period, an overwhelming amount of legalism and socio-cultural cleansing swept through Judah again. Though books like Ruth provide some relief from the racism and cultural prejudice in texts like Ezra-Nehemiah (if you're familiar with those stories), a tradition begins to emerge in the Post-Exile that longs for a return of the traditional "Day of the Lord." This entailed a spectacular, otherworldly, deus-ex-machina style salvation from the oppressing powers.
Though I regret that they had to return to such simplistic legalism again, it's understandable, since they've been so poor and broken for so long. What's more, after the Persians left, the Greeks took over, and then the Romans. Though they're much more privileged than under previous powers, they're frustrated, constantly domineered by everyone else, and surrounded by customs that disagree with theirs. The legalism they return to isn't a win-God's-favor type of deal: it's an impatient hope that God will soon break into history, sending crazy powers and mighty ambassadors - messiahs, or sons of God, of several types (priests, warriors, rulers) - to subvert the present order. Various crazy fantastical things would happen, righteousness would be restored, and the people would live happily ever after. A bunch of different sects sprung up in expectation and religious fervor, preparing themselves for the Day when all uncleanliness would be purged from the land and everything would be vaguely perfect forever.
Around this time, Herod the Great, Roman puppet king of Judah, had been on a bit of a building spree. Jerusalem and the surrounding areas were more cosmopolitan than ever before. Particularly because of Herod's expansion of the Second Temple, the Jews had a cultural center again - with a bit of a dampening twist. Although the new Temple is clearly the pride and joy of the people, its construction was made possible by external powers. The very ground it stands on is occupied by a foreign power that doesn't recognize Yahweh as the one true God, which kind of defies the point of the Temple being the dwelling of a monotheistic deity. This meant a lot of frustration amongst the people that amplified the desire for apocalyptic salvation: A complete reworking of the current order.
Jesus is a regular, fairly poor man from a suburb of Sepphoris, which was the capital of Galilee. Because he was so normal, he wasn't of enough significance for anyone to write about him until decades after his death, so the historical Jesus figure can be a bit cloudy at times. What's definitely fair to say is this: that he was a disciple of John the Baptist, and that his first publicly-remarkable motion was probably his baptism into John's religious movement. John, like many of his contemporaries, is thought to have been awaiting (an) apocalyptic messiah(s), as described before, and was calling the people to a renewed dedication to "justice toward another and reverence toward God," in the words of the 1st-century historian Josephus. John called people to be baptized in the Jordan River as a sign of their repentance, cleansing the body to match renewed spiritual purity. Though the character of Jesus seems to be well-suited to a desire for returned commitment to right living, there came an important distinction between him and his former teacher. In the words of John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University, Jesus turned from apocalyptic to ethical eschatology.
Ministering chiefly in the towns around the Sea of Galilee, Jesus began to stray from this grasping for purity, no longer calling people to repentance for the sake of the coming apocalypse and its messiah(s). Instead of asking the people to anticipate God's salvation, he tells them to bring the Kingdom of God themselves. Though the Gospel texts are clearly influenced by the high opinions of adoring authors writing several generations later, it's clear that Jesus returns to a view of justice and ritual a tad closer to that of Amos, disregarding many of the nitpicky rules upon which his contemporaries placed great emphasis. Jesus and his disciples break the Sabbath on multiple occasions. They don't ritually cleanse their hands before consuming food. Jesus reportedly tells the Pharisees to "let go of the commands of God - you are holding on to human traditions. Nothing that is outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them."
But even with this anti-legalistic stance, he is zealous and provokative in his own way, highly committed to the cause beginning to win him followers of his own. As one story goes, he distances himself from his family, who are apparently calling him a kook, in favor of a spiritual family. When he's told to go meet his mother and brothers while sitting around with his friends and students, he says, "Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."
I'm struck by how mundane this story seems. This is not about nations at war or political revolution, about dragons or eagles or the fiery end of a corrupt age. Jesus' community is 1) informal, 2) inclusive, and 3) founded on a slightly offensive non-ritual call to ethical living. At least, this is his response to the ritually-obsessed, exclusive, hyperformal contemporary religious culture he came from. This is made most clear by what is likely the most intriguing teaching attributed to him, where Jesus basically whittles down the importance of the Law to two commandments - Love God, and love people. Most people stop here, but I find the next part just as interesting. The person he's talking to says that Jesus is right, and that this is more important than burnt offerings and sacrifices. Jesus subsequently says that his answer was wise, and that he was not far from the kingdom of God. What does this mean about the kingdom of God? The coming of a heavenly savior seems less important to Jesus than letting go of old rituals to become a better human being.
Jesus gained a reputation as a miracle worker, an exorcist, a healer - it's unclear how his reputation grew in the early days, but I'm pretty comfortable affirming that these stories started circulating during his lifetime. What was noteworthy about these assignations was not that he performed miracles or could drive out demons - after all, this is a pre-modern era. They didn't believe these things were generally impossible. The point was that great works were coming out of someone of no great status at all - just a Plain Jane Jew from Nazareth. There's a great possibility that many of the Gospels' stories (particularly the more miraculous ones) began circulating after Jesus' death as a well-intentioned attempt to convert new believers, or as a spiritual expression of the significance of his movement, when his actual words and deeds had been lost to obscurity. A great number of the teachings on the End Time, the destruction of the Temple, persecution, the Last Supper, and various squabbles with the Pharisees are likely reflections of the struggles and devotional lives of emerging Christians around the time of the authorship of the text.
To state outright what's probably clear by now, it is obvious to me that the historical person Jesus was not perfect. It is inconsistent with everything I know about scholarship to give the Bible privy access to a status of flawlessness when I see no reason that it should be valued for anything but its brilliant ideas, like all other good books. I read the Bible with a critical eye and try to understand its flaws and biases as best I can, in order to see the message it's trying to communicate. I do not assume the validity of Theism; I do not assume the validity of Atheism. What I do assume is that there are reasons people have gone both ways.
To pick back up with Jesus' story - the moment of his ministry that seems to have gained him the most attention, both politically and otherwise, was a moment of impassioned vandalism at the Temple during the Passover season. The authorities were always on edge during this time just because tons and tons of Jews were crowded in one space, but Jesus' action was received with special attention because of the ethical, theological, and political ramifications of the crime.
On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written, 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it 'a den of robbers!'" The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.
Soon enough, Jesus is arrested for political insurrection. He is crucified as a threat to Roman rule and the authority of the puppet-Roman Jewish religious leaders in charge of the Temple. The space is still every bit as inauthentic to true inclusive spirituality as Jesus accused it of being when was dead as when he was alive. He failed. Everything was over. His followers had abandoned him by the time he was crucified. Jarred and confused, many of Jesus' followers legitimately believed that he might be the prophetic messiah they'd been waiting for that would begin a movement to clear the Romans out of their space. But after just a moment in the limelight, Jesus had been returned to the insignificant status he was born into. It was done. The movement had ended. Jesus' teachings would dissolve into irrelevancy again - perhaps they were never true in the first place.
But some followers slowly begin to creep out of the rubble, and in soft, quivering voice, begin to say, No. It cannot be so simple. Justice still exists! The poor and the weak will not just be ignored. When human rights are perverted in the presence of the Most High, does the LORD not see it? It is not enough to say that Jesus simply deserved his verdict. It is not enough to say that God has effectively died.
I leave that last sentence in this chunk I've effectively copied from my description of the Exile because, in greatest defiance of Roman efforts, Jesus' followers basically exploded into action, making a bit more than just a martyr of him. As people started to realize that Jesus' teachings were not irrelevant, that what he said was true and worthwhile despite his low status, the ideas began to spread. And they caught on, because, honestly, they're a breath of fresh air. As the movement gained power, rumors popped up that Jesus had been taken up by God and was going to come back to finish what he started, as God's one true Messiah. As a symbol of his importance, they began to resurrect Jesus and put him at the right hand of the Father. What kind of story would this be to tell without a conclusion that expresses the fervor and hope that made Jesus' message his message?
Within a couple generations, the story had exploded, scattering the Jesus movement all across the Mediterranean. In this movement, we see a reverse-Exile, an apocalypse in the original sense: the revelation of profound spiritual truth. No longer forced to live among foreign people unwillingly, Christians pop up everywhere from Rome to Spain to Gaul to Egypt. This God - the resurrected Yahweh-Jesus - is not the vindictive, puristic baal of Jezebel nor the vindictive, puristic god of Elijah, and he's not the god of Lamentations or of the Law. That god was thrown out a window, staked to a cross, bruised and crushed and buried. Yahweh is not dead, but he has certainly been resurrected into new form - for now there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, because everyone has been reconciled in Jesus, the messiah. And he's stayed a messiah, despite the fact that no political revolution burst through the clouds. Most of the Christian Church has compatibilized the teachings of mistaken 1st-century hopefuls by making the apocalypse a spiritual End Time, but when I stop trying to coerce the text into something it's not, I see that the idea of Jesus as a messiah is actually mind-blowingly consistent with the strain of Judaism he himself taught. If Jesus is neither a political nor spiritual eschatological messiah, calling Jesus "Christ" means to completely redefine the term.
Jesus is the image of the people, of the insignificant man from the suburbs, of the martyr slaughtered at the hands of an oppressive foreign power. He felt the burden of society's injustices on his shoulders, and he did so despite having spent the entirety of his ministry calling for the peaceful reverence to which his theological rivals would have cried nay. Like the nation of Israel in Exile, it's irrelevant to ask whether Jesus deserved his fate - it's unfathomably painful to even think that it could be just for this profoundly meaningful figure to meet such an ironic verdict. Instead of justice, Jesus' death, and even the very cross upon which he died, was made a symbol of life and hope by the young Christian church: a reminder that God is not the persecutor, but the persecuted.
As the Jesus movement continues to grow, it becomes a tumor to Orthodox Judaism. The Jews are increasingly upset by this sect, because the further they get from the life of Jesus, the bigger a deal they make of him. Now Jesus is not just going to return as the prophesied Messiah; he is the one unique savior that God sent to save humanity from their sins. But wait! - a couple decades later, he's not just a savior, but they're saying he was the very image of God himself. And by the authorship of John, maybe fifty years later, they've made the final, most grievous blasphemy: that this random prophet from Galilee was God himself, Yahweh incarnate.
Though "Christian" seems the best label for my spiritual passions and religious beliefs, I will readily admit that I do not - cannot - worship Jesus. To do so feels outrightly disrespectful to him. But I adore the idea that Jesus came to be revered as divine - just like Jesus being called "messiah" redefines messiah-ship, referring to Jesus as divine redefines divinity. If this ordinary man is divine, what are we? If Jesus sits at the right hand of the father, how can it be that we don't go there with him?
Jesus' divinity makes Jesus' life the perfect bookend to this story, and early Christians seemed to think so, too. It not only concludes the story, it reframes it in its entirety: Jesus is depicted by the Gospels as the perfect metonymical representation of his people. He's born in the Holy Land, and his lowly birth - like the lowly birth of the nation Israel - is gloriously celebrated by God and all his angels. He is exiled to Egypt in his infancy, but grows up in righteousness as a young man in Galilee. He speaks justice, and is captured; he endures unspeakable pain, becoming the Suffering Servant of the oppressing powers, and is risen to immortality of spirit. Reduced to its basic elements, this is a fairly universal story: a cycle of oppression and freedom, of blindness and sight, of dogmatic legalism and openness of spirit. Christ - the symbolic embodiment of the human experience of the Exilic Divine - is everywhere, all around us, as Paraclete, whether we've just been crucified or have finally achieved justice. The Christian narrative subverts all those moments, making "every mountain and hill low": we resurrect all things to meaning of their own, because they all have significance as part of a larger narrative.
The God I worship is not theistic, and yet, not atheistic. God is both dead and alive, both victorious and lost. God needs to be everything he was here for me to grasp the message. The weight and complexity of this story - much of which I've seen mirrored in my own story - is much of what gives me energy to love the people around me and seek to make this place a better world. Because most importantly, God is a God of peace and rightness. He is a conglomeration of ideas that ended up describing the most mind-boggling, but most simple, approachable truths that I have ever encountered.
My hope and my prayer and my challenge is to live every day seeking that of God in others, finding that of God within ourselves; to listen to the Teacher present in the Judeo-Christian story and to see that story extend into my own; to find redemption in suffering and seek justice in places of privilege; to recognize that all joys and all lives will come to an end, but that in their death, we see a resurrection of meaning; that heaven has come before, and heaven will come again.
Peace be to you from God, who was, and is and is to come. May the light within you shine like a lamp for your feet; may that of God be found in all moments and circumstances, and let Love forever brighten your path.
An interesting painting for you to meditate on, in closing: Jezebel V, by some guy named Jonathan Hierschfeld. It seems I'm far from the first to have had this idea.
As one might guess, this made her fairly unpopular with the worshipers of Yahweh. She was in the position of power, and her side started winning, complete with all the typical oppression and assassination of opposing-religion prophets and priests. Most pious Israelites lived in great fear of the princess, and a palace administrator named Obadiah even began hiding various religious leaders of Yahwheh in caves so as to protect them from her massacre. The Israelite prophet Elijah, who would become a legendary hero of his people for his piety and devotion to his God, was repulsed and angered by injustice and shameful disloyalty of the king Ahab to Yahweh in preference to his wife's deity, a baal (which, unsurprisingly, had become the Israelite word for "false god"). So one day, he marched himself up to the palace of Ahab and Jezebel to challenge their God to an epic duel - again, unsurprisingly, the Israelites record the success of their God and the mocking embarrassment of his Phoenician opponent.
Both the time of Elijah and Ahab come to pass, but Jezebel and her two sons remain on the throne of Israel, incubating the spread of Israel's wretched Baal infection. Inevitably, Jezebel and her cohorts (or so they're presented) continue to present such an offense to the Yahweh cult that Elisha, successor of Elijah, sends a messenger to anoint a new king in place of Ahab's dynasty. And so it was that Jehu son of Jehoshaphat began his bloody crusade throughout all the land, purging the land of God of all evil, injustice, Baal-worshipers, political power, and effective administration.
So that's how king Jehu king of Israel initiated his nation's sad and steady decline into the hands of the Assyrian Empire. He minced some Baal worshipers, made latrines of their temples, and had Princess Jezebel of Phoenicia thrown out of her upper-story window to be eaten by dogs in the street below. But while Jehu's duties to ritual purity had been answered (though, according to the author of Kings, far from satisfied), his enthusiastic sterilization technique seemed to leave him in a fairly ironic position: weak, poor, and much smaller than before. The Moabites, whom Israel no longer had the strength to oppress, were finally saved by their god Chemosh from the religious pressures of the Yahweh cult. It was a good match on both sides, but the win fell to the opposition today. Better luck next time, Israel. May the gods be ever in your favor.
It's an ever-amusing reality that religious systems seem to be equipped with an immune system: what doesn't work doubles up in terrible cramps of ironicopathology until it, usually, either chokes itself back to health or dies. My religious experience has seen many an epidemic of this sort, and most of the Bible seems chock full of descriptions of the cycle. We believe something, but it has limits; our boxes are broken down by the realities revealed to us, and we must reconstruct; we find something true to rebuild ourselves in, and it too is later broken down. It is, firstly, this process of challenge and reconceptualization, and secondly, a deconstruction of the very nature and purpose of God (and of theism as a whole) that I have discovered in the Judeo-Christian narrative and fallen in love with this past semester. The Bible may not be a single cohesive document and it may have many contradictory points of view, but it is in the dialogue between conflicting voices that I have most potently seen that of God reflected in the Bible's various documentations of religious experience.
Most of us take religion for granted - morality, worship, even this basic box-breaking cycle. Depending on your perspective and experience, it's a firmly-embedded cultural fact; it's fundamentally significant to your life (for better or worse); it's a universal system of moral obligation; it's an innate call within every human heart. But if we're to assume that human beings arose as Biology says they did, very slowly and from nothingness - which is what I feel I must do if I'm to take Science at all seriously, and which I will not be explaining here - we must come to the full realization that their various cultures - including religion - all arose in a similar fashion. Theology requires no "foundational presuppositions," as has been suggested by others. It's unnecessary to speak of a faith-reason binary, or of the distinction between revelation and science. I don't like to speak of my hermeneutic on a "Poetic - Synergistic - Dictation" scale, either, because it seems overly simplistic to me. I don't think in those terms. All I feel that I need to assume is that I'm capable of learning about the past, and about the things around me, never believing stuff I'm afraid to subject to too much discernment and intellectual scrutiny. Everything we believe about religion and spirituality and the meaning of the stuff around us was discovered, perhaps invented, over thousands of years as we came to awareness and self-understanding, and there's a reason it did that. I figure that if we find out why, we'll be able to claim the commitment we apparently have for our traditions (whatever they may be) in the first place.
It has been profoundly meaningful to me, both intellectually and spiritually, to gain insight into the formation of religious belief and the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Understanding why and how Christianity came about is of crucial importance in determining its worth to me, revolutionizing - reconstructing - my faith and my love of biblical scriptures. I'd like to show you why, despite my many frustrations with American Christianity, I like and have continued to identify with this religion, by unraveling the Judeo-Christian story as I have come to understand it.
Imagine
that you're a simple creature, a childlike being; nomadic,
prehistoric, with no real thoughts on the purpose of your existence
or on the reasons things live. You eat. You sleep. You have sex and
pop out children. You fight. You live. You lose. You die. For
generations. But then a new thought appears: you know you cause
things to happen by impacting them in some way, but other things
simply happen without your control. Sometimes they hurt you, so you
want it changed, and you figure, Hey, maybe these forces and
movements I have no other explanation for are caused by beings like
me that I simply can't see. That would explain how sporadic they are,
and how they seem to impact me in powerful moral ways, as if in
revenge or goodwill. I should ask them to stop the bad things and
give me good things! It really isn't much of a jump to make. And
voila! - you've got some sort of proto-polytheism.
So in the beginning, religion was entirely a means to an end. The worship of ancient barely-historical gods, particularly in the Middle East, was not intended as any kind of God-directed motion. Gods were anthropomorphizations of various things people did and said, oaths people swore, stuff people needed, countries people fought for. There weren't gods for things people didn't need - such deities got faded out of relevancy. And there was no separation between "natural" and "religious" understanding. There was no such thing as religion. There was just stuff, and there were gods that went with it.
But when people worship the anthropomorphizations of things for self-directed reasons, important abstract concepts begin to fall to the wayside. When all that matters is what I need, what I want, what makes me happy, where is the justice? Where are the rules? Are we grounded in anything at all? At some point, pain arose from the lack of abstract things, as well. So what did people do? They made another god to anthropomorphize that.
Enter
Yahweh: the Israelite national god, a god - like most all other gods
- that protected its people. Having noticed like some other ancient
societies that it was to the detriment to societal order to live
without regulations and restrictions on people's interactions and
dealings with one another, they made their god the god of absolute
Justice. Yahweh's laws were something better than simple
self-serving, end-based lawless craziness: Don't kill, don't be
jealous, don't commit adultery, take care of one another, provide for
the weakest among your community. And - wait, what was that? - Love
God.
The Israelites - or, at least their religious leaders - gradually became more and more infatuated with the concept of loving Yahweh above all other gods. Initially, yes, this is for national security - can't have you sympathizing with the anthropomorphizations of rival nations and their values, now can we. But the call to love God and not just respect or obey or fear him (which were certainly all present, especially at first) calls for a deeper, more abstract dedication: you're committed to Israel and its god not just for your own sake, but for the sake of the people - no, not just for the sake of the people, but the very force that protects it and holds it together, that cares for it, that desires it to prosper. You love God because there's something profoundly right about him and about our nation.
The Israelites - or, at least their religious leaders - gradually became more and more infatuated with the concept of loving Yahweh above all other gods. Initially, yes, this is for national security - can't have you sympathizing with the anthropomorphizations of rival nations and their values, now can we. But the call to love God and not just respect or obey or fear him (which were certainly all present, especially at first) calls for a deeper, more abstract dedication: you're committed to Israel and its god not just for your own sake, but for the sake of the people - no, not just for the sake of the people, but the very force that protects it and holds it together, that cares for it, that desires it to prosper. You love God because there's something profoundly right about him and about our nation.
This is the context in which I have come to read the first Old Testament Biblical literature - what documentary hypothesis calls "Yahwist" texts. God (by which I mean the Israelites' understanding of Yahweh) has developed abstract qualities, and the people have just figured out how to live for the sake of justice and righteousness. The abstract deity they worship also has abstract desires and goals for the Israelites, even if these abstract concepts are still pretty directly linked to the prosperity of their nation.
This incredible step from aesthetic, self-involved religion to a wider, more universal perspective is an incredible progression in the development of the Jewish tradition, and an incredible moment in the development of human spirituality. There is much to learn from their community and what their disagreements with contemporaries said about what was meaningful to them. An exemplary text is the obsessively-studied first two Chapters of Genesis: two completely separate creation accounts written hundreds of years apart. The Yahwist creation account in the second book of Genesis provides a very anthropomorphic, heartfelt explanation of the origins of the world. Reading the text, it is striking that their god - an embodiment of justice, righteousness, provision, and protection - is depicted in such intimate relation to his people. Unlike other similar creation narratives of the sort, it's so peaceful. In the act of creation, there's no squabbling among gods, no ruptures in relationships, no destruction. Their god simply forms them out of the dust, breathes life into them, and then creates a community of people intimate enough that they are "bone of [each other's] bone, flesh of [each other's] flesh." The relationship these people have to the divine seems peaceful and admirable and so endearing. That people had come to think of their relationship to their governing power in this way is an amazing movement toward self-awareness and largeness of perspective to me.
But the second creation account, in the first chapter of Genesis, is remarkably more interesting. Identified as a Priestly text by the documentary hypothesis - so, some of the last Old Testament literature to be written - it was composed during a particularly fascinating time in Biblical history (the Exile, which I'll get to later) when the writers of the text had much exposure to Babylonian gods and the stories and theologies accompanying them. As is typical during times of intense cross-cultural contact, this naturally produced a polemic.
Where the Babylonian creation story in their scripture, the Enuma Elish, involves a massive divine war following a period of primordial chaos and the birth of their patron god, the Genesis 1 account features a single god in the presence of chaos before intentional creation. Where the Babylonian world was a product of the bodies of various gods, emerging Jewish culture and the authors behind Genesis 1 depicted the world as a good, orderly, beautiful place. In the Babylonian text, people are created as servants to the gods; in Genesis 1, people are like the gods, not petty creatures. This very high view of humanity and the world is similar to the approachable, kind nature of the first creation story, and provides an important platform from which to understand the culture's relationship to other nations. Although these two stories were basically written at the bookends of the Old Testament Biblical historical context, they have one very important element in common: a single deity that cared for his people and the place they live.
That's
not to say that Yahweh really behaved as one cohesive deity at first.
It took some time to work out the kinks of monotheism, and certain
early stories - the flood narrative in particular comes to mind -
contain character attributions to Yahweh that (quite understandably)
belonged to opposing sides of intense divine wars in contemporary
stories of the like. But what's significant is not the negligible,
temporary inconsistencies or the random "objective" facts
scholars have gone on for volumes about that these texts got wrong.
The take-away is what they do to contribute to (or, to be fair, cause
detriment to) the human approach to the world. As far as I know,
understanding your existence in this world as intentional, important,
good, and with purpose - all things these texts seem to be written to
establish - are beautifully vibrant, healthy psychological places to
be. And this manifested itself in a promise of blessing and devotion
between Yahweh and the people, the Abrahamic Covenant:
I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;
I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
As long as they both shall live, they are committed to one another, and Israel was to worship Yahweh as the supreme God, the God above all gods. But regardless of such promises, it's clear that, like most small nations, the people of Israel would come to suffer greatly at the hands of their oppressors, and their belief in a benevolent god would be an extremely potent idea to grapple with during times of hardship. The exile motif is embedded in their cultural history: the famous folk tale of the pre-history enslavement of Israeli super-ancestors in Egypt would become a foundational element of Jewish life and culture. Their ancestors had endured years and years of exile, away from the Promised Land, toiling under the oppression of a foreign power, always the little one being squashed. As Israel began to emerge as its own unique entity from the watermark of a people group described previously, the laws and regulations they laid down were intimately connected to this folkloric history. The Abrahamic Covenant failed, for obvious reasons, as a way to control the social and legal order of a growing nation-state, so it was fused with these needs and presented as the conditional Mosaic Law. Since the Mosaic Law had to function as a much stricter document, it could use the Egypt story as a way for the people to be coaxed into obedience of the Law.
Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are ... to tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession."
I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;
I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
As long as they both shall live, they are committed to one another, and Israel was to worship Yahweh as the supreme God, the God above all gods. But regardless of such promises, it's clear that, like most small nations, the people of Israel would come to suffer greatly at the hands of their oppressors, and their belief in a benevolent god would be an extremely potent idea to grapple with during times of hardship. The exile motif is embedded in their cultural history: the famous folk tale of the pre-history enslavement of Israeli super-ancestors in Egypt would become a foundational element of Jewish life and culture. Their ancestors had endured years and years of exile, away from the Promised Land, toiling under the oppression of a foreign power, always the little one being squashed. As Israel began to emerge as its own unique entity from the watermark of a people group described previously, the laws and regulations they laid down were intimately connected to this folkloric history. The Abrahamic Covenant failed, for obvious reasons, as a way to control the social and legal order of a growing nation-state, so it was fused with these needs and presented as the conditional Mosaic Law. Since the Mosaic Law had to function as a much stricter document, it could use the Egypt story as a way for the people to be coaxed into obedience of the Law.
Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are ... to tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession."
The thing is, the cycle of prosperity and hardship typical of most national histories tended to result in shifts between Yahweh's promises of unconditional protection and blessing, during times of good fortune, to formal contracts conditional on people's ritual obedience to him during times of instability or national threat - and then it'd return to unconditional blessing again. Since authorship chronology gets complicated very quickly, my intent is not to nitpick over what was written when, but instead to construct a progression of ideas as a simplified expression of the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition as I have encountered. But it's fairly clear that there came a time after the establishment of the Mosaic covenant - perhaps emphasized during the Philistine crisis, when external military threats lead to the formation of an Israeli kingship (1 Samuel - prosperity had returned to a great enough extent that the Davidic covenant emerged, unconditional like the Abrahamic Covenant.
I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men on earth. And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed. Wicked people will not oppress them anymore, as they did at the beginning and have done ever since the time I appointed leaders over my people Israel. I will also give you rest from all your enemies ... When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you ... When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands. But my love will never be taken away from him ... Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.
This comes to us through the haze of the Exilic writers of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings), but it's clear that there's an expectation in basically all pre-exilic literature that God is to be trusted; God is good; God will protect; God is just; God will save us. Especially when David and Solomon are on the throne, things are depicted in fairly glowing light: glorious descriptions of Solomon's temple, glowing reviews of David's character, great hopes for the future of the nation. The presence of God literally dwelled among the people: in the First Temple constructed in the middle of the city where everyone could see it, right there, in the Holy of Holies! The invisible protecting, blessing presence of the national deity. Obviously, things were probably never as perfect as is described by the Deuteronomistic authors looking back on the good ol' days. But the attitude described, one that the next couple movements certainly react to, is certainly that of the Davidic Covenant: the simple, confident faith that Yahweh will unconditionally save his people from any evil that might befall them. In the most intimate of terms, the depth of the connection between God and his people is described. Like a loving parent looking out for a child, God provide for his people; like shepherd protecting their flock, no lions would ever come to prey on the people.
The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing!
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads be beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
But alas - like all good dreams, it had to come to an end. Woe to Israel! The evil that was their demise came from within. The same authors that spoke so glowingly of David and Solomon a minute ago offer scathing reviews of following kings who failed to worship Yahweh as the One Supreme God and began to worship the gods of other nations (which, if you recall, is a moral offense largely because it is a betrayal of the people and its god, which would be at threat to national security). After a couple semi-functional, semi-successful, God-revering kings, the northern tribes of Israel and southern tribes of Judah split, and from there it all seems to have gone downhill.
King after king after northern king in the book of - surprise - Kings would do three key things wrong: firstly, and most importantly, they would worship or have sympathies toward gods other than Yahweh; secondly, they all worshiped somewhere other than the Temple in Jerusalem, which were unclean, unsacred locations that did not contain God's presence; thirdly, the social injustices of their administrations were piling up in evidence of their moral wickedness. Remember that an Israelite king not worshiping Yahweh is inherently an act of treason: Yahweh is the god of the nation, and worshiping other gods means you have surrendered to other nations. Although it can seem strange from a modern perspective that understands religious truths as separate concepts from political realities, kings like Ahab's worship of the Phoenecian Baal would have been like a U.S. president wearing a tie patterned with Soviet flags during the Cold War.
Speaking even from a purely socio-political point of view, then, it's fairly easy to understand how their worship of other gods may really have been a significant contributing factor to the weakening of the Northern kingdom: of course there would be negative consequences to that kind of disloyalty to the god of their nation. In a near comic struggle to deal with cultural disintegration, Northern kings seem to alternate between long periods of tolerance or worship of other gods and brief moments of righteous dedication to purging the land of everything threatening to the purity of Yahweh worship - and here we've caught up to our opening story. This cycle seems to have been the perfect combination of cultural relaxation and huge blows to political governance to make Israel an easy target for Assyrian conquest. The fates make their rounds and crown Israel Assyria's darling Jezebel! And what's more, the god of Israel will soon become her righteous Jehu that dashes her to pieces. (Can you see the dogs tear apart her flesh?)
Naturally, this whole process of decay was great reason for many prophets, priests, and religious teachers to freak out and call fervently for the return of the people's dedication to God, to justice, to righteousness, to repentance. After all, "if one person sins against another, someone can intercede for the sinner with the LORD; but if someone sins against the LORD, who can make intercession?" The chilling call is repeated over and over: Repent, repent! For the day of the LORD has come near. Where the "day of the LORD" had once meant the destruction of Israel's enemies in Yahweh's purging of the impure and unjust, everything is turned on its head as the Chosen People are gradually eaten away by their foes.
Desperate to save their nation and appalled by the brokenness, poverty, and destitute disrepair of their nations, fiercely counter-cultural prophets like Amos and Zephaniah begin to prophesy the decimation of their own people because of the repulsive corruption they saw. To Amos, ritual purity itself had become meaningless: the injustice around him was too much for him to tolerate, and too much for God to tolerate. Zephaniah takes it even further, making the revolutionarily anti-government statement that God was king. Get that - it has become an anti-government statement that God is king! God is no longer an embodiment of the nation or its interests; God is no longer a simple protector of the people. God has a vision for what people should look like that sees no ethnic boundaries. After all, if Israel really has become just like the slew of enemies the've been hating on for centuries, there's no reason a truly just God should spare them.
This is an absolutely incredible leap in the evolution of this system of thought. For even a few individuals to begin to fully realize that the things in life that matter - food, safety, shelter, home, family, order, peace - are not just the realm of desire, or of law (which Amos blatantly dismisses), but of justice, and to say that the god we ought to worship is not simply the patron spirit of our ethnic group but the power behind the creation of a better world is a remarkably wise, selfless, humanitarian idea. Though consistent in many ways with some core motivations behind Mosaic law - protection of the weak, maintenance of order, unity of the people, punishment of injustice - the time leading up to Exile witnesses a huge upheaval in Biblical thought on the correct means to those ends. Something matters more to God than saving your ass, now: God wants to see rightness restored to the world.
Lo and behold, Israel and Judah both got what the prophets thought they deserved. Assyria took Israel in 722 BCE; Babylon sacked Judah in 586. The Temple is destroyed, the people are scattered, the Promised Land has been scratched off of the contract. Gone is beautiful Zion; gone are her riches; gone are all hopes and dreams and security. Children's tongues "stick to the roofs of their mouthes for thirst." The "hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children." Everyone's houses and livelihoods have been torn to rubble. The desperation is nauseating even to read. It's one thing to threaten, usually with the hope that things will take a turn for the better, that the coming of God's justice will entail the destruction of Israel. It's another thing entirely to actually feel it happen. It becomes clear in the Exilic texts, which compound the Amos-Hosea-Zephaniah-type desire for justice with the painful reality of Judah's destruction, that God has not merely abandoned his people. He has made himself and everything he ever was to Israel a cruel joke.
The LORD has become like an enemy; he has destroyed Israel.
He has multiplied in daughter Judah mourning and lamentation.
The Lord has scorned his altar, disowned his sanctuary;
he has delivered into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces.
A clamor was raised in the house of the LORD as on a day of festival!
Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her.
The presence of God? Ha - what presence of God? What is God when he himself has destroyed his own dwelling place and spat upon the people he himself once brought up out of the dust? What kind of sick God have we been worshiping? What did any of those covenants mean - has God forsaken his people completely?
Your prophets, O virgin daughter Zion, have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen for you false and deceptive visions.
The Exile completely rips apart the people of Yahweh. They are in destitute poverty, they are miserable, they are traumatized beyond belief. I find it difficult not to quote the entirety of Lamentations - the pain is just so great. And at this point, to remember the attitude of the victorious Davidic era is simply disgusting. The people's most victorious moments - where, before, they laughed at other nations' demise - have seemed to turn with a mind of their own to mock Israel itself.
Postulate, half-assed answers to some of these questions are thrown around, though none of them soothe the wounds. The Deuteronomistic History was compiled during this time, and it's clear that books like Kings - all that bashing of the Northern kingdom of Israel, all those bitter cries for repentance and the utter stubbornness of the people - contain an overwhelming amount of regret and compounded guilt trips, attempts to rationalize the terrible situation that has befallen the people. Judging by the very curious lack of any recorded Jewish rebellions during the Babylonian Exile, it's evident that the people probably did widely believe that they deserved the torture they were being subjected to, as the scriptures suggest, and that they were trying very hard to be good, so as not to anger God any further. On top of whatever physical pain the Exile caused, it also meant that people had to deeply reevaluate their assumptions about human worth. If God has come to treat his cherished child as dust, perhaps people really are no more than that. Maybe we are just random matter stuck together without any further significance.
The precious children of Zion, worth their weight in fine gold -
how they are reckoned as earthen pots, the work of a potter's hand.
If the "presence of the LORD" were defined as it was during the Davidic era, in terms of prosperity and protection, then it would be clear that the "presence of the LORD" has left the people during the Exile. But other texts slowly begin to creep out of the rubble, and in soft, quivering voice, begin to say, No. It cannot be so simple. Justice still exists! The poor and the weak will not just be ignored. When human rights are perverted in the presence of the Most High, does the LORD not see it? It is not enough to say that we simply deserve our pain. It is not enough to say that God has effectively died. We will not accept that what we thought was gold is simply clay. No. If we really are just clay, it must be that clay is worth gold, and gold is worth clay.
A completely new God emerges from Israel defenestrated. Consider the mind-blowing ironies and revelations in these famous exilic texts in the context above:
The first chapter of Second Isaiah, the part of Isaiah composed in exile, starts with a totally new message from God. No longer has God "dragged me from the path and mangled me, leaving me without help," but he speaks, "Comfort! Comfort, my people! Speak tenderly to Jerusalem - her hard service is over, her sin is paid for. I've given her double the punishment she deserved for her sins." God speaks that all inequalities will soon be demolished, and that this will be the revelation of the glory of the LORD: all peoples will see it together. It's actually not okay that you're experiencing the trauma and destruction you're going through. I care about your pain, says the LORD, and I'm sorry.
Isaiah 42, the third chapter of Second Isaiah, introduces the character of the Suffering Servant. He, a personification of the nation Israel, is described as plain and unworthy of attention - people disliked him, and he was low and pitiable. But he, even in his imperfection, became a perfect sacrifice for the sins of his oppressors. Like Israel in exile, he suffered unjustly despite his innocence, never complaining despite the harshness of his torture. That seems cruel and counter-intuitive at first, like some kind of twisted victim blame where Israel is responsible for the abuses of their oppressors. But this is a fundamentally different idea from substitutionary atonement. Israel is so used to being the victim that that's not the significant part of the message. To the contrary, the message that "out of his suffering, he will see light" is a way to tell the people that, first of all, they're doing a good and honorable job, and secondly, that the pain they're feeling is their oppressors' fault, not their own. Israel is suffering because someone else is doing wrong, not because God hates them.
In a story from Kings, the prophet Elijah feels helpless and abandoned, the only Israelite left that cares about justice or reverence for God, and he's being pursued by Jezebel's flock of religious assassins. He goes out to stand on a mountain, looking for God's presence. Powerful signs - wind, earthquake, fire - rise up before him, calling to mind verses like the one directly following the revelation of the ten commandments, where Yahweh speaks in a booming voice "on a mountain from out of the fire, the cloud, and the deep darkness." But God was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. But then came a gentle whisper, and God finds him there. (It makes me giggle that what God tells him here is to go anoint Jehu and his buddies to become Ahab and Jezebel's mirror image, but hey - the exilic writer had to keep telling the story.)
God tell Jonah to go to this city, Nineveh, to tell them to "give up their evil ways and their violence." And eventually, when he does go, he's super upset when God tells him that he doesn't want to destroy the Ninevites (who have, in the mean time, repented of their injustices) for their evil ways, because they're no longer evil. Jonah throws a hissy fit, and God approaches him like one might approach a toddler: Jonah, it's ridiculous that you're angry right now. Don't you think I should care about this city? There are tons and tons of people there, and tons of animals. Why should you be more important to me than them?
The God of the Exile is not a national god. He is not a retributive god. His power is not almighty because Israel must be protected at all costs, but because even if Israel gets attacked, the god they worship gives an internal strength that is independent of circumstance. This God is not partisan. He is not angry, and he's not coercive, like the pre-exilic Yahweh. This god is the god of the justice and rightness we seek among people. His justice brings peace and relieves the pain of weeping mothers, bleeding soldiers, starving infants. But this "justice" we speak of is an unmoving standard, not an expectation. When we're in exile, in misery, it is from within that we find light. That is the meaning of "justice:" that hope is never lost, and that even in unbearable suffering, what you are feeling is not necessarily a divine whip of judgment on your shoulders. You're suffering because the one inflicting pain is living unjustly. God's will is not with their action; it is in the elimination of injustice. "My justice will become a light to the nations, and my salvation will last forever," says God. "Because my righteousness can never fail."
Thankfully, Babylon too comes to an end and Persia takes over. The Persians seem to have a very different cultural paradigm for dealing with people of other religions and people groups. Overwhelmingly more tolerant than Babylon, the Persian emperor Cyrus and his successor Darius allow the Jews to return to their homeland, even sponsoring the reconstruction of their Temple. Jerusalem is restored to its former glory - in fact, it's more glorious than ever. Judah is still just a vassal state of Persia, but after several generations in exile, they took what they could get. Predictably enough, in the relief and restored security of the Post-Exile period, an overwhelming amount of legalism and socio-cultural cleansing swept through Judah again. Though books like Ruth provide some relief from the racism and cultural prejudice in texts like Ezra-Nehemiah (if you're familiar with those stories), a tradition begins to emerge in the Post-Exile that longs for a return of the traditional "Day of the Lord." This entailed a spectacular, otherworldly, deus-ex-machina style salvation from the oppressing powers.
Though I regret that they had to return to such simplistic legalism again, it's understandable, since they've been so poor and broken for so long. What's more, after the Persians left, the Greeks took over, and then the Romans. Though they're much more privileged than under previous powers, they're frustrated, constantly domineered by everyone else, and surrounded by customs that disagree with theirs. The legalism they return to isn't a win-God's-favor type of deal: it's an impatient hope that God will soon break into history, sending crazy powers and mighty ambassadors - messiahs, or sons of God, of several types (priests, warriors, rulers) - to subvert the present order. Various crazy fantastical things would happen, righteousness would be restored, and the people would live happily ever after. A bunch of different sects sprung up in expectation and religious fervor, preparing themselves for the Day when all uncleanliness would be purged from the land and everything would be vaguely perfect forever.
Around this time, Herod the Great, Roman puppet king of Judah, had been on a bit of a building spree. Jerusalem and the surrounding areas were more cosmopolitan than ever before. Particularly because of Herod's expansion of the Second Temple, the Jews had a cultural center again - with a bit of a dampening twist. Although the new Temple is clearly the pride and joy of the people, its construction was made possible by external powers. The very ground it stands on is occupied by a foreign power that doesn't recognize Yahweh as the one true God, which kind of defies the point of the Temple being the dwelling of a monotheistic deity. This meant a lot of frustration amongst the people that amplified the desire for apocalyptic salvation: A complete reworking of the current order.
Jesus is a regular, fairly poor man from a suburb of Sepphoris, which was the capital of Galilee. Because he was so normal, he wasn't of enough significance for anyone to write about him until decades after his death, so the historical Jesus figure can be a bit cloudy at times. What's definitely fair to say is this: that he was a disciple of John the Baptist, and that his first publicly-remarkable motion was probably his baptism into John's religious movement. John, like many of his contemporaries, is thought to have been awaiting (an) apocalyptic messiah(s), as described before, and was calling the people to a renewed dedication to "justice toward another and reverence toward God," in the words of the 1st-century historian Josephus. John called people to be baptized in the Jordan River as a sign of their repentance, cleansing the body to match renewed spiritual purity. Though the character of Jesus seems to be well-suited to a desire for returned commitment to right living, there came an important distinction between him and his former teacher. In the words of John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University, Jesus turned from apocalyptic to ethical eschatology.
Ministering chiefly in the towns around the Sea of Galilee, Jesus began to stray from this grasping for purity, no longer calling people to repentance for the sake of the coming apocalypse and its messiah(s). Instead of asking the people to anticipate God's salvation, he tells them to bring the Kingdom of God themselves. Though the Gospel texts are clearly influenced by the high opinions of adoring authors writing several generations later, it's clear that Jesus returns to a view of justice and ritual a tad closer to that of Amos, disregarding many of the nitpicky rules upon which his contemporaries placed great emphasis. Jesus and his disciples break the Sabbath on multiple occasions. They don't ritually cleanse their hands before consuming food. Jesus reportedly tells the Pharisees to "let go of the commands of God - you are holding on to human traditions. Nothing that is outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them."
But even with this anti-legalistic stance, he is zealous and provokative in his own way, highly committed to the cause beginning to win him followers of his own. As one story goes, he distances himself from his family, who are apparently calling him a kook, in favor of a spiritual family. When he's told to go meet his mother and brothers while sitting around with his friends and students, he says, "Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."
I'm struck by how mundane this story seems. This is not about nations at war or political revolution, about dragons or eagles or the fiery end of a corrupt age. Jesus' community is 1) informal, 2) inclusive, and 3) founded on a slightly offensive non-ritual call to ethical living. At least, this is his response to the ritually-obsessed, exclusive, hyperformal contemporary religious culture he came from. This is made most clear by what is likely the most intriguing teaching attributed to him, where Jesus basically whittles down the importance of the Law to two commandments - Love God, and love people. Most people stop here, but I find the next part just as interesting. The person he's talking to says that Jesus is right, and that this is more important than burnt offerings and sacrifices. Jesus subsequently says that his answer was wise, and that he was not far from the kingdom of God. What does this mean about the kingdom of God? The coming of a heavenly savior seems less important to Jesus than letting go of old rituals to become a better human being.
Jesus gained a reputation as a miracle worker, an exorcist, a healer - it's unclear how his reputation grew in the early days, but I'm pretty comfortable affirming that these stories started circulating during his lifetime. What was noteworthy about these assignations was not that he performed miracles or could drive out demons - after all, this is a pre-modern era. They didn't believe these things were generally impossible. The point was that great works were coming out of someone of no great status at all - just a Plain Jane Jew from Nazareth. There's a great possibility that many of the Gospels' stories (particularly the more miraculous ones) began circulating after Jesus' death as a well-intentioned attempt to convert new believers, or as a spiritual expression of the significance of his movement, when his actual words and deeds had been lost to obscurity. A great number of the teachings on the End Time, the destruction of the Temple, persecution, the Last Supper, and various squabbles with the Pharisees are likely reflections of the struggles and devotional lives of emerging Christians around the time of the authorship of the text.
To state outright what's probably clear by now, it is obvious to me that the historical person Jesus was not perfect. It is inconsistent with everything I know about scholarship to give the Bible privy access to a status of flawlessness when I see no reason that it should be valued for anything but its brilliant ideas, like all other good books. I read the Bible with a critical eye and try to understand its flaws and biases as best I can, in order to see the message it's trying to communicate. I do not assume the validity of Theism; I do not assume the validity of Atheism. What I do assume is that there are reasons people have gone both ways.
But
even while affirming a traditional infallibility of scripture, the
Gospels themselves don't depict Jesus as the paragon of perfection
until the late authorship of John in the 90s CE. In Mark, the
earliest Gospel (60s CE), from which I have been pulling stories,
Jesus is called "good teacher," and he responds, "Why
do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." It's
intriguing to me that there's such unanimity on the part of
Christians today that Jesus was divine, that he was perfect. Even the
Bible, especially when read with a measure of historical scrutiny,
certainly reveals far more potential Christian doctrines than
one.
To pick back up with Jesus' story - the moment of his ministry that seems to have gained him the most attention, both politically and otherwise, was a moment of impassioned vandalism at the Temple during the Passover season. The authorities were always on edge during this time just because tons and tons of Jews were crowded in one space, but Jesus' action was received with special attention because of the ethical, theological, and political ramifications of the crime.
On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written, 'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it 'a den of robbers!'" The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.
Soon enough, Jesus is arrested for political insurrection. He is crucified as a threat to Roman rule and the authority of the puppet-Roman Jewish religious leaders in charge of the Temple. The space is still every bit as inauthentic to true inclusive spirituality as Jesus accused it of being when was dead as when he was alive. He failed. Everything was over. His followers had abandoned him by the time he was crucified. Jarred and confused, many of Jesus' followers legitimately believed that he might be the prophetic messiah they'd been waiting for that would begin a movement to clear the Romans out of their space. But after just a moment in the limelight, Jesus had been returned to the insignificant status he was born into. It was done. The movement had ended. Jesus' teachings would dissolve into irrelevancy again - perhaps they were never true in the first place.
But some followers slowly begin to creep out of the rubble, and in soft, quivering voice, begin to say, No. It cannot be so simple. Justice still exists! The poor and the weak will not just be ignored. When human rights are perverted in the presence of the Most High, does the LORD not see it? It is not enough to say that Jesus simply deserved his verdict. It is not enough to say that God has effectively died.
I leave that last sentence in this chunk I've effectively copied from my description of the Exile because, in greatest defiance of Roman efforts, Jesus' followers basically exploded into action, making a bit more than just a martyr of him. As people started to realize that Jesus' teachings were not irrelevant, that what he said was true and worthwhile despite his low status, the ideas began to spread. And they caught on, because, honestly, they're a breath of fresh air. As the movement gained power, rumors popped up that Jesus had been taken up by God and was going to come back to finish what he started, as God's one true Messiah. As a symbol of his importance, they began to resurrect Jesus and put him at the right hand of the Father. What kind of story would this be to tell without a conclusion that expresses the fervor and hope that made Jesus' message his message?
Within a couple generations, the story had exploded, scattering the Jesus movement all across the Mediterranean. In this movement, we see a reverse-Exile, an apocalypse in the original sense: the revelation of profound spiritual truth. No longer forced to live among foreign people unwillingly, Christians pop up everywhere from Rome to Spain to Gaul to Egypt. This God - the resurrected Yahweh-Jesus - is not the vindictive, puristic baal of Jezebel nor the vindictive, puristic god of Elijah, and he's not the god of Lamentations or of the Law. That god was thrown out a window, staked to a cross, bruised and crushed and buried. Yahweh is not dead, but he has certainly been resurrected into new form - for now there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, because everyone has been reconciled in Jesus, the messiah. And he's stayed a messiah, despite the fact that no political revolution burst through the clouds. Most of the Christian Church has compatibilized the teachings of mistaken 1st-century hopefuls by making the apocalypse a spiritual End Time, but when I stop trying to coerce the text into something it's not, I see that the idea of Jesus as a messiah is actually mind-blowingly consistent with the strain of Judaism he himself taught. If Jesus is neither a political nor spiritual eschatological messiah, calling Jesus "Christ" means to completely redefine the term.
Jesus is the image of the people, of the insignificant man from the suburbs, of the martyr slaughtered at the hands of an oppressive foreign power. He felt the burden of society's injustices on his shoulders, and he did so despite having spent the entirety of his ministry calling for the peaceful reverence to which his theological rivals would have cried nay. Like the nation of Israel in Exile, it's irrelevant to ask whether Jesus deserved his fate - it's unfathomably painful to even think that it could be just for this profoundly meaningful figure to meet such an ironic verdict. Instead of justice, Jesus' death, and even the very cross upon which he died, was made a symbol of life and hope by the young Christian church: a reminder that God is not the persecutor, but the persecuted.
As the Jesus movement continues to grow, it becomes a tumor to Orthodox Judaism. The Jews are increasingly upset by this sect, because the further they get from the life of Jesus, the bigger a deal they make of him. Now Jesus is not just going to return as the prophesied Messiah; he is the one unique savior that God sent to save humanity from their sins. But wait! - a couple decades later, he's not just a savior, but they're saying he was the very image of God himself. And by the authorship of John, maybe fifty years later, they've made the final, most grievous blasphemy: that this random prophet from Galilee was God himself, Yahweh incarnate.
Though "Christian" seems the best label for my spiritual passions and religious beliefs, I will readily admit that I do not - cannot - worship Jesus. To do so feels outrightly disrespectful to him. But I adore the idea that Jesus came to be revered as divine - just like Jesus being called "messiah" redefines messiah-ship, referring to Jesus as divine redefines divinity. If this ordinary man is divine, what are we? If Jesus sits at the right hand of the father, how can it be that we don't go there with him?
Jesus' divinity makes Jesus' life the perfect bookend to this story, and early Christians seemed to think so, too. It not only concludes the story, it reframes it in its entirety: Jesus is depicted by the Gospels as the perfect metonymical representation of his people. He's born in the Holy Land, and his lowly birth - like the lowly birth of the nation Israel - is gloriously celebrated by God and all his angels. He is exiled to Egypt in his infancy, but grows up in righteousness as a young man in Galilee. He speaks justice, and is captured; he endures unspeakable pain, becoming the Suffering Servant of the oppressing powers, and is risen to immortality of spirit. Reduced to its basic elements, this is a fairly universal story: a cycle of oppression and freedom, of blindness and sight, of dogmatic legalism and openness of spirit. Christ - the symbolic embodiment of the human experience of the Exilic Divine - is everywhere, all around us, as Paraclete, whether we've just been crucified or have finally achieved justice. The Christian narrative subverts all those moments, making "every mountain and hill low": we resurrect all things to meaning of their own, because they all have significance as part of a larger narrative.
The God I worship is not theistic, and yet, not atheistic. God is both dead and alive, both victorious and lost. God needs to be everything he was here for me to grasp the message. The weight and complexity of this story - much of which I've seen mirrored in my own story - is much of what gives me energy to love the people around me and seek to make this place a better world. Because most importantly, God is a God of peace and rightness. He is a conglomeration of ideas that ended up describing the most mind-boggling, but most simple, approachable truths that I have ever encountered.
My hope and my prayer and my challenge is to live every day seeking that of God in others, finding that of God within ourselves; to listen to the Teacher present in the Judeo-Christian story and to see that story extend into my own; to find redemption in suffering and seek justice in places of privilege; to recognize that all joys and all lives will come to an end, but that in their death, we see a resurrection of meaning; that heaven has come before, and heaven will come again.
Peace be to you from God, who was, and is and is to come. May the light within you shine like a lamp for your feet; may that of God be found in all moments and circumstances, and let Love forever brighten your path.
An interesting painting for you to meditate on, in closing: Jezebel V, by some guy named Jonathan Hierschfeld. It seems I'm far from the first to have had this idea.
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