Jesus, ISIS and The West by Herb Montgomery
For this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.—Jesus (Matthew 26.28)
What did Jesus mean when he told his disciples that his blood was being poured out for the forgiveness of sins? We must not answer this from our perspective today, but from the perspective of those to whom these words were originally intended.
To first century Jews, who were longing to be free from Roman oppression, the phrase “forgiveness of sins” did not mean that God would forgive their moral infractions and let them into heaven when they died. No, no! “Forgiveness of sins” within the Jewish context that Jesus used this phrase meant that their time of captivity to foreign powers—and most presently, Rome’s presence in Jerusalem—would be reversed and the hope of Israel would be restored.
Jesus’ blood being poured out through his unjust crucifixion, and the reversing and undoing of that deed by God through the Resurrection, according to Jesus, was not to produce changes in God toward us, but rather radical changes in both the Roman Empire and the Jewish nation that would lead to radical redistribution of how life on Planet Earth is arranged.
Much is missed when we don’t recognize the characters in the story and who their modern-day equivalents are.
Remember, Rome was the superpower of its day—and Jerusalem was a region that resented Rome’s presence. There were even radical, fundamentalist Jews who thought the only way for Jewish voices to be heard by Rome was through barbaric, violent, militaristic terrorism on their part. Those who subscribed to these methods were called Zealots.
What Jesus was demonstrating through the cross, and what God was endorsing through the Resurrection, was that the way to heal the world was not for the Jewish people to resort to barbaric violence to bring about Israel’s liberation and restoration. Rather, it was through forgiveness and love for their Roman enemies, and a desire to awaken the hearts of the Romans’ compassion and win them over through nonviolent direct actions coupled with unconditional enemy love—having their own blood shed rather than staining their hands with the blood of others.
Now, let’s back up and see if we can plug in modern-day equivalents. Rome was the then present superpower of the Jesus story. Zealots were the fundamentalist Jews who were using barbaric violence to try and remove the Roman presence from Jerusalem.
What does the Jesus story say to us if we were to place America in the place of Rome and ISIS in the place of the fundamentalist Jewish Zealots?
ISIS is a barbarically violent, militant, fundamentalist sect—much like the Jewish Zealots of Jesus day—who felt the only way throw off the Roman presence in Jerusalem was through terroristic means. The majority of the Jewish people of Jesus’ day did not feel that the Zealots rightly represented Israel just as the majority of Muslims today do not feel that ISIS rightly represents them. The Zealots, although barbarically violent, and using terrorist tactics, did not feel they were terrorists. None of the Zealots saw themselves as terrorists. They saw themselves as defenders of Israel against a foreign presence. They saw themselves as freedom fighters, and they did not regard their tactics as in any way acts of terrorism. This is exactly how ISIS feels today, not against a Roman Empire, but against the presence of the American Empire in their home. ISIS today sees themselves as mujahedeen (warriors for the faith defending an Islamic State against foreigners). The parallels between ISIS and the Zealots of Jesus day cannot be missed. What we must also take notice of is that it was with these Zealots especially that Jesus would plead to use nonviolent enemy love as their means of arriving at the social changes they desired in relation to Roman oppression. If they would continued on the path of using their present methods, Jesus warned repeatedly, then Rome, being much stronger, would respond, and it would end in gehenna—Jerusalem’s destruction by Rome at the end of the three-year Jewish-Roman War in A.D. 70.
Just as the Jewish nation resented Roman occupation and felt oppressed by Rome’s presence, today those who belong to ISIS resent and feel oppressed by America’s presence in their region as well. What this requires of a Jesus follower is, first, not to look at the present situation as an American but as a Jesus follower. And as Jesus followers, we are not give in to fear or scapegoating, but rather compassion—even for those who others deem as evil and beyond redemption—trying to first understand what would make the members of ISIS feel that the only way to remove the presence of the West is through such barbaric violence.
We must first and foremost look at the situation from the perspective of someone who is being oppressed. ISIS is not the enemy. Matter of fact, labeling someone as enemy, drawing a hard line in the sand that demarks an “us vs. them” is the very first step away from the path that follows Jesus. So let’s first ask the question: What would Jesus say to ISIS today?
It’s the same thing Jesus would say to the Jewish Zealots of his day in the Jesus story. Jesus would say to those who feel oppressed by the West’s presence in their region to choose the way of a nonviolent direct action, coupled with enemy love and the power of truth, to overthrow injustice, violence and oppression rather than simply responding with greater violence. And that if they did not heed his call to nonviolent means of change, the only end in sight was their own gehenna at the hands of their Roman equivalent: America.
Jesus’ call to ISIS would be to seek to liberate themselves from Western occupation through a cross rather than a sword.
There are others who have been oppressed who have discovered Jesus’ way of peace:
“Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.”—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Remember that Gandhi, in using methods learned from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, successfully removed Britain’s presence from India. King picked up these same methods and changed the face of civil rights in his generation in America.
So Jesus would first say to ISIS that there is a better way, and warn them of what the superpower they are going up against will end up doing to them if they reject this better way.
But here is MY question.
As a citizen of a modern “Rome” (the USA), whose foreign presence in a modern “Jerusalem” (the Middle East) is resented by those for whom that place is their home, what is Jesus also saying, not just to ISIS, but to the WEST?
Jesus would say to America what he would have said to Rome in his day. We cannot miss this!
1. Don’t use violence to protect your position of privilege and oppression.
Using ISIS’ barbaric violence to justify a greater presence and a greater show of force, in a region that possesses resources you may want to control, may be good for the Western economy, but it’s not just toward those for whom this region is home. It’s a contemporary form of disguised colonialism at best. If we think ISIS is the enemy that can’t be reasoned with, which leaves us with no other option than to crush it out of existence, we are no different than Rome in how she viewed militant, fundamentalist Jews of the first century.
2. Don’t use nonviolence to preserve your position of privilege and oppression either. Rather let go of the pyramid of privilege that, by definition, produces both oppressors as well as those who will continue to be oppressed.
Jesus is not telling America to use nonviolence to defeat ISIS. Jesus is telling America to relinquish her grip on her position at the top of a political pyramid. As a superpower, to co-opt the cross, using Jesus methods to defeat ISIS and gain control of that region is a gross misapplication of what Jesus would say to Rome. Jesus would call upon ISIS to use nonviolence, as he did with Jewish fundamentalist Zealots. But Jesus would call upon America (modern Rome) to abandon the power to kill, and choose the power of compassion, putting herself in the shoes of opponents by asking herself whether there is good reason to. Nonviolent direct action (NVDA) by America will not work as long as NVDA is merely a tactic whose ultimate goal is to establish a greater American presence and oppression in a part of the world only desired out of a felt need to control resources native to that region—again, a region that others call home. (America really doesn’t care about spreading “justice” and democracy in areas where oil fields, or other American interests, don’t exist.)
3. Don’t scapegoat ISIS as “enemy,” as Rome did with the militant Jews of Jerusalem in the first century to Rome’s citizens.
Reject fear and choose compassion. Choose to see the humanity of those who feel participation with ISIS is the only option they have at their disposal to have their voices heard. Start by providing space for those voices (as well as their concerns) to actually be listened to. Make it easier for members of ISIS to believe that the way of nonviolence might actually work by taking the initiative to demonstratively listen and respectfully respond to concerns of those feeling oppressed by the West’s presence in their homeland. Even if this costs the West its control of commodities it covets as precious, remember that these are commodities that really belong to those who live there. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated if they stormed into your homeland seeking to instill their favorite form of government through violent means for what could be ulterior motives.
Again, we must look at these events, first and foremost, not as Americans who blindly feel America can do no wrong. We must look at the present events through the lens of the Jesus story as followers of Jesus himself, who calls us to be makers of peace.
As a follower of Jesus, we are called not to side with a kingdom of this world in crushing a threat to that empire’s safety. We are to be ministers of reconciliation, calling on ISIS to not resort to barbaric violence but to believe there is a better way, all while calling on the West to relinquish the pyramid of privilege and oppression and to not make members of ISIS feel the only way they can be heard is through such barbaric violence.
As a Jesus follower, you are neither pro America nor pro ISIS. You are pro peace; you are a follower of the Prince of Peace. And within the pyramid of privilege and oppression, which we have discussed in so many eSights previously, we are to call upon those at the top to dismantle the entire pyramid for a better way. We are to stand in solidarity with those who are being oppressed at the bottom of the pyramid, honoring their hunger and thirst for justice while also pleading with them to choose a better way than barbaric violence.
This does not justify ISIS’ use of barbaric violence. That, no doubt, is horrifically evil. But this doesn’t justify America either. It refuses to take a side, calling both sides to follow Jesus. We place ourselves in the shoes of those who feel oppressed, pausing to reflect on what it must be like for them to feel like they are standing against the biggest bully on the planet, and not being able to believe (just like the Zealots in Jesus’ day) that if they use nonviolent means the West will actually hear them.
Yes, Jesus’ call to ISIS is to lay down the sword. But Jesus’ call to the West is also to relinquish its place as biggest bully on the hill, and to stop, listen and give hope to ISIS so that they don’t have to use barbaric violence to be heard. Jesus’ call to his followers is to not allow fear to rob you of compassion. And above all, Jesus is calling to all three parties to avoid just rushing to violent means of solving conflict between those who feel oppressed and those in the position of privilege and oppression.
Jesus calls us all to see both the West and the members of ISIS as, remember, not us vs. them, but as siblings of the same Divine Parents who are going to have to eventually learn how to sit around the same family dinner table again.
Will this come without losses? No, there will be many losses on both sides. There will be losses on ISIS’ side if they should choose to use NVDA to awaken the hearts of those in the West to listen. And there will be losses on the West’s side (in relation to the West’s position of privilege) if those in the West choose to listen and begin treating those in the Middle East the way they would like to be treated if the roles were reversed.
It’s time for humanity to let go of fear of scarcity and an addiction to monopolizing positions at the top of the pyramids. It’s time for humanity to embrace a worldview of abundance, enough for everyone’s need but not their greed—with cooperation and sharing rather than anxiety, competition and violence.
Jesus is calling.
There is a conversation that is said to have taken place between Lord Irwin and Gandhi, where Lord Irwin asked what Gandhi believed would solve the problems between Great Britain and India. The story states that Gandhi reached over and picked up a Bible from off of the desk, and opened it to the Gospel of Matthew’s chapter five—the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Gandhi then said, “When your country and mine shall get together on the teachings laid down by Christ in this Sermon on the Mount, we shall have solved the problems not only of our countries but those of the whole world.”
There is only one “Savior of the World.” It’s not America, with her military might. It’s the nonviolent Jesus.
HeartGroup Application
- This week I’m not going to ask for you to contemplate any passages from the Gospels. I’m going to ask you, every day for a week, to pray for both ISIS and America, that both will follow Jesus instead of the course they are presently on so that this world would be healed (John 3.17) and that what will be enlarged through all of this will be Jesus’ Kingdom rather than simply yet another of this world’s empires.
- Journal what Jesus shares with you about the West and about ISIS as you pray.
- Share what Jesus shares with you with your HeartGroup this upcoming week.
Wherever this finds you this week, choose love and not fear, and choose compassion over violence, until the only world that remains is a world where Christ’s love reigns.
I love each and every one of you. And remember, God does too.
See you next week.
The Footsteps of the Prophets by Herb Montgomery
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”—Jesus (Matthew 5.11)
Luke’s version is even more pointed:
“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets” (Luke 6.22–23; emphasis added).
The first question I’d like to ask is why were the prophets also treated this way?
The Prophets
Take a moment and look at what the prophets actually said and the reasons they were reviled becomes disturbingly clear.
In his judgment of Israel, Amos said:
Thus says the LORD:
For three transgressions of Israel,
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
and push the afflicted out of the way . . .
in the house of their God [the temple] they drink
wine bought with fines they imposed (Amos 2.6–8; emphasis added).
Isaiah spoke these words about Judah and Jerusalem:
Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom!
Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!
What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.
When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. . . .
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean. . . .
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow (Isaiah 1.10–17; emphasis added).
And Jeremiah spoke thus against evil kings:
Thus says the LORD: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place. . . . But your eyes and heart are only on your dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood, and for practicing oppression and violence (Jeremiah 22.3, 17; emphasis added).
For Jerusalem, Ezekiel and Micah had these words:
As I live, says the Lord GOD, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16.48–49; emphasis added).
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice,
and to love mercy [rather than sacrifice],
and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8)
What were the prophets known for?
Defending those who were oppressed from those who were in a position of privilege.
The prophets spoke against New Moon festivals, Sabbaths, the Temple, and sacrifice, and they spoke up for those who were oppressed by the religiously pious. This vocal opposition would be enough to get anyone in trouble.
In short, the prophets abandoned their own positions of privilege within Israel and Judah and made room for the voices of the oppressed to be heard. The prophets called those who practiced “holy” or “sacred” oppression, injustice, and violence to listen to the stories of those who were trodden upon. In His sermon on the mount, Jesus calls his followers to do the same.
The question we have to ask next is who was it, do you think, who reviled, persecuted, uttered all kinds of evil against, hated, excluded, and defamed the prophets?
The Privileged Who Feel Threatened
The answer is the same in every era. When men and women speak up for those who are oppressed, those in positions of privilege, practicing their “sacred” oppression, will treat these prophets who give a voice to the oppressed this same way.
The cross and resurrection prove throughout eternity that God stands not in solidarity with those religious systems that crucify others religiously, politically, or economically, but rather with those who are suspended shamefully upon crosses.
This is God. This is the God revealed through Jesus.
Persecution
And as Paul so eloquently wrote, “all who want to live a godly [god-like] life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3.12).
Make no mistake. If others persecute you, it does not always mean you are doing the right thing. You may just be obnoxious. Persecution does not equal being on the right path. But being on the right path does equal persecution.
The world we live in is comprised of those on the top and those on the bottom, the underdogs. And when you choose to stand in solidarity with the underdogs, you will be targeted by those on top. Again, experiencing persecution doesn’t mean you are doing everything right, but if you are not persecuted, you may need to ask yourself why. Are you fitting in too neatly with those at the top of this world’s pyramids of oppression?
Do not think that you are to go and seek out or try and produce persecution. No, no. But we should abandon our own positions of privilege and call out for the voices and stories of those who are oppressed to be heard. This act alone will ensure that persecution ensues.
This week, when you witness someone being oppressed, whether it’s someone who is poor, or someone who happens not to have the right color of skin, or someone who does not have the “correct” anatomical appendage, or someone whom society has deemed as possessing a non-normative orientation, stand up for them. Call for their stories to be heard, and then get out of the way and let those stories be told.
What will be the result? Ultimately, the result will be a world changed by Jesus. But along the way, you will be, according to Jesus, reviled, persecuted, hated, excluded, and defamed and have all kinds of evil spoken about you by those who have not yet abandoned their own positions of privilege, those who have not yet heard for themselves the stories of those who have been so grossly mischaracterized and wrongly depicted.
It will be scary at first, but have courage. You will quickly find you are not alone. You stand in a long line of those who have gone before—a line filled with martyrs, apostles, and prophets, at the beginning of which stands Jesus of Nazareth.
Peter Gomes
The following paragraph is from Peter Gomes, an American preacher and theologian, about whom it was said that he was, “one of the great preachers of our generation, and a living symbol of courage and conviction.” (Harvard Gazette. 1 March 2011) Peter understood what it meant to walk in the shoes of those who are oppressed for he belonged to at least two communities that experience oppression in our societies—one because of his race, the other because he was gay. Pay close attention to his profound recapturing of Jesus’ Kingdom.
“Good news to some will almost inevitably be bad news to others. In order that the gospel in the New Testament might be made as palatable as possible to as many people as possible, its rough edges have been shorn off and the radical edge of Jesus’ preaching has been replaced by a respectable middle, of which “niceness” is now God. When Jesus came preaching, it was to proclaim the ends of things as they are and the breaking in of things that are to be: the status quo is not to be criticized; it is to be destroyed.” (The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus)
Enemy Love
Lastly, I would be amiss if I did not close with this reminder.
Right after Jesus pronounces a blessing on those who will create many enemies because they follow Him, Jesus says:
But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful (Luke 6.23–36, #mercyratherthansacrifice).
Remember, we are not called to defeat those who benefit at the expense of others. We are called not to defeat them, but to win them. We are called to put on display the beauty of a world changed by Jesus. We are called to recognize where Jesus’ Kingdom is already at work, whether in principle or by name as well, and honor it. We are also called to inspire those who have not yet encountered and embraced Jesus’ revolution of justice, mercy, and love to rethink everything. We are to call for a reevaluation of the scripts we have been given and by which we currently play the game of life. And, lastly, we are called to challenge oppressive, unjust, and violent ways of seeing God, ourselves, and everyone else around us.
It’s what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called winning the “double victory”:
“I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. . . . But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory (Martin Luther King Jr., A Christmas Sermon for Peace on Dec 24, 1967).
THIS is what it means to follow in the footsteps of apostles, prophets, and Jesus himself, according to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Certainly there is more at the heart of following Jesus, but there is most definitely not less than standing up for the oppressed.
The time is now. Don’t wait for there to be an easier time, for that time will only come when you are no longer needed. Won’t you take a stand, too?
“If you’re neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Desmond Tutu
HeartGroup Application
- Spend some time this week contemplating the following words of Jesus:
“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Then he said to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” (Luke 9.22–25)
- As you sit with Jesus this week with this passage, write down what insights, thoughts, questions, challenges, fears, or hopes Jesus may share with you.
- Share what you discover this week with your HeartGroup.
Wherever this finds you this week, may you—and may we all—stop striving to ascend to our own positions of privilege and begin, rather, speaking up for those for whose stories have yet to be heard. Till the only world that remains is a world where Christ’s love reigns.
I love each and every one of you. And, remember, God does, too.
See you next week.
Mercy Seeds by Herb Montgomery
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” (Matthew 5.7)
It’s back-to-school season for most this time of year. And on our morning drive to drop off the kids this past week (I have three kids of three different ages being dropped off at three different schools this year) we’ve been batting back and forth different ideas concerning the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve had some good discussions, as we’ve tried to take the Beatitudes out of the economical context they were originally spoken in and apply their principles to the context of elementary, middle, and high school. What we’ve found is that the principles are pretty universal. Everywhere you find an underdog, or those being marginalized, the Sermon on the Mount becomes exceptionally pertinent.
From listening to my kids, too, I’ve come to the conclusion that there may be no better testing ground for the ethics of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, no greater context to experiment with the truth value of these teachings, than high school. But that’s a side note.
What I want you to see in this week’s focus text is the intrinsic “reaping what we sow” principle, especially in the context of mercy. The previous verse spoke about hungering for justice. The justice Jesus taught was not retributive, but restorative—not punitive, but redemptive. And the mercy we are to practice is not out of harmony with this kind of justice, and it does not need to be brought into harmony with this type of justice. Restorative justice and the mercy we are talking about this week are simply two sides of the same coin. They are both expressions of the same thing: love.
Let’s take an example from Jesus’ cultural context first. Many people miss the economic context of Jesus’ words today. Let’s say we have a wealthy creditor in the first century and a debtor who has defaulted on a loan. The creditor has every legal right to foreclose. But Jesus asked creditors to stop and look at the circumstances of their debtors and to choose a more economically rehabilitative and restorative option than foreclosure.
Let’s look at it from the perspective of the debtor now. Let’s consider those that are being oppressed by an economic system that they can never possibly recover from. (Think of the global debt crisis between superpowers and developing countries around the world today.) The temptation is violent revolution, something to reset the scales of capitalism. A “year of jubilee” by force, if you will. I’m reminded of Gandhi’s words: “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” Jesus is calling us to change the world through mercy.
What the Sermon on the Mount makes clear is that a new world (the Kingdom) is coming; and, in fact, it has already arrived. Jesus is Lord. And this new world is going to be a world where life is arranged very differently than the way it has been. This world, under the reign of love, is a “blessing” to those the present arrangement oppresses, and it will be a “blessing” to those who stand in solidarity with, and give a voice to, those who have been oppressed. Jesus is, in this week’s statement, giving us a way to this whole new world, this new creation—and that way is mercy.
For those who are being oppressed: set in motion mercy. I’m reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words in my favorite sermon ever preached: “So, if you’re seeking to develop a just society, they say, the important thing is to get there, and the means are really unimportant; any means will do so long as they get you there—they may be violent, they may be untruthful means; they may even be unjust means to a just end. There have been those who have argued this throughout history. But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree” (A Christmas Sermon for Peace).
That may be the thing many revolutions miss. We are seeking to plant trees of justice without sowing the proper seeds: the seeds of mercy. For mercy awakens mercy, and mercy is the mother of justice.
For those who are in a position of privilege, even unknowingly: practice mercy. Don’t justify injustice. Practice mercy and this new world, along with all the changes it will bring, will go much easier on you. Remember that the Sermon on the Mount is a blessing for some, but a curse for others (see Luke 6.24–25). This is the sermon that changes everything.
My kids are looking for the underdogs presently in each of their schools. Looking for those whom they can stand with, be an ally for, and make space for their voices to be heard. This week, whether it be in matters of economics, gender, race, social status, orientations, and/or normativity, I want to encourage you to be on the lookout for those disadvantaged by the present arrangement. I wonder whom Jesus will draw your attention to this week, whom you will get the opportunity to practice mercy toward, rather than sacrifice. And if you are oppressed, I know this part is the most difficult to believe, but the way to a world rooted in restored justice is not to passively enable continuation of the present injustice, but rather to direct restorative mercy that awakens in the hearts of those advantaged, and to listen to the voices of those who are not.
A new world is coming. It has already begun. Let’s go enlarge the Kingdom this week together.
HeartGroup Application
Whether you are in a position of privilege this week or a position of disadvantage, practice mercy. Experiment with it. Start out small and see what happens. As a person of privilege, it may open your eyes to a whole new world; I know it has for me. And I am very much still in that process. I can testify that the Sermon on the Mount has radically changed the way I see God, myself, and those—I’m ashamed to admit—that I used to condemn simply because they were different from me. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount has changed everything for me. It has changed my life. I’m quite sure it has the power to do that for you, wherever it finds you, as well.
The oak tree is in the acorn. A just world is contained in the seeds of mercy, for the merciful will receive mercy.
1. This week, step outside of your normal routine and find an opportunity to practice mercy in a way that you wouldn’t normally.
2. Journal what happens as a result. If nothing happens, keep experimenting with it. If something beautiful does happen, write it down.
3. This upcoming week, share with your HeartGroup the stories of your experiments with Matthew 5.7 and the way of mercy.
Wherever you are right now reading this, keep living in love, loving like Jesus in the way he taught us to love, until the only world that remains is a world where Christ’s love reigns.
Next week, we’ll be looking at Matthew 5.11. And you won’t want to miss it.
I love each and every one of you. And remember, God does too.
See you next week.
God of the Oppressors Vs. God of the Oppressed and the Sermon on the Mount by Herb Montgomery
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5.1-11)
After ten days in Kapolei and two weekends with the HeartGroup there, I’m sitting on a plane, flying back home—unable, once again, to escape my introspections. This time I’m reflecting on the Hawaiians of the Hawaiian Islands, a beautiful culture with rich narratives that I have just been privileged to taste a small part of. I’m also contemplating the Maoris of New Zealand that I had the privileged of briefly learning about this summer while I was in Christchurch. Almost a decade ago now, I remember discovering the warrior people known as the Caribs and the peace-loving Arawaks during the time I spent giving a series of presentations in Trinidad and Tobago. I’m thinking today about American and British colonialism as well as European and American capitalism. My mind then jumps to the Jewish people of the first century under Rome and then further back to the exiled Jews, taken captive and ruled over by the superpowers of their day, such as Babylon and Greece. What about the Hebrews, who served as the sweatshop workers of their day under the Egyptians? Lastly, I think of Abel under the raised fist of Cain.
There has always, for as long as anyone can remember, been a top. There has always been a bottom. There has always been a conqueror and a conquered; always an oppressor, always an oppressed. The schools I attended taught me the historical narratives of those who had “won.” But I can’t help thinking that those who are on the bottom, those who have “lost,” have their narratives too. And if the narratives of the Abels, the Josephs, the Jobs, the Hebrews are whispering anything to us, they are calling us softly to listen to the stories of those who have been conquered, those on the bottom, those not in positions of privilege.
The resurrection, as God’s response over against the unjust crucifixion of Jesus on a Roman cross, testifies that—although Jesus’ God loved both oppressor and oppressed and was seeking to restore them both—this God seeks to accomplish this “restoration of all things” through standing in solidarity with the oppressed over against the oppression carried out by those in positions of privilege.
Yes, the Egyptians had their gods, and so did the Babylonians. And the Greeks had their gods, who would become much more violent versions with different names under Rome. But these were the gods of the conquerors. These were the gods of the people on top. Let me try to make this clear. With the exception of when Israel rebelled by wanting to have a king, the God of the Hebrew narrative is a God not of the superpowers but of the oppressed, the wanderers, the nomads. Historically the European conquerors, too, had their god, just as America has hers. But here is the catch, and I don’t know if you even caught the switch.
A slight of hand has occurred.
In the fourth century, something mysterious took place. But there was nothing truly magical about it. It was a charlatan move, much like the actions of those who stand on stages, waving trick wands and pulling rabbits out of hats. Christianity was subverted by a Roman emperor and wedded to the empire. And I’m not sure we realize what really happened with this. Overnight, the God of the oppressed became the god of the oppressor. The Hebrew narrative of the God who stands in solidarity with those who suffer at the hands of others was subverted. This narrative was now replaced, eclipsed rather, by a god with the same name but of a very different disposition. Now God stood on the side of Rome and conquered, oppressed, and violated through Rome. Think about how those who are oppressed today by the American Empire see America as a “Christian” nation.
The lens you use when discussing “God” makes a difference. Are you contemplating God as the one who is standing in solidarity with the oppressors or the oppressed? When you enter into ontological debates about God, are you asking questions about the existence of the god of the conquerors or the God of those being conquered?
We don’t want our God to be the God of the conquered. We want a strong God, one who is never defeated! But here is where we often miss the point. The God we find in the Jesus story is a God who stands in solidarity with the losers of the “war games” we humans play.
This is a point that many (not all, thank you, Ryan Bell!) of my atheist friends miss. What I’ve encountered, without exception, in every one of my atheist friends is that their atheism is really rooted in a deep concern about matters of justice. Their atheism is simply the expression of a much deeper revolt within themselves against injustice (and the “god” of those who perpetuate injustice). And this must be recognized, acknowledged, and honored! As a Jesus follower myself, I find this hunger and thirst for justice by my atheist friends to actually be in perfect harmony with the ethics I have found taught by the Jesus of the Jesus story (see Matthew 5.6). Yet what many of my atheist friends miss is that most of their arguments against “God” are built on a foundational assumption that the God of the Jesus story is the god of those on top. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “God” and Gandhi’s “God” looked very different from the European-American “Christian” god many of us wrongly believe is really out there. Let me make this clear. I think the atheists are right. The European-American god who stands in solidarity with the superpowers of this planet does not exist. That god is not out there. Saying that doesn’t make me an atheist. I simply agree that the god my friends say isn’t there, really isn’t. It is no wonder that the fruit of the god of the West, the god of the European conquerors, the god of America, given enough time, leaves people hungering and thirsting for justice and wanting nothing to do with god.
The God that we find in the Jesus of the Jesus story is a Divine Parent of us all, oppressed as well as the oppressor. This God is a radically inclusive God who loves all and is seeking to restore all, yet a God who does this through standing in solidarity with those on the bottom of our systems of oppression, seeking to awaken the hearts of the oppressors and to inspire them to escape their systemic injustice and stand in solidarity with the oppressed as well. (This is the story of Saul of Tarsus.)
Let me also say a word about monotheism while I’m here.
Monotheism—within the context of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who are endeavoring to conquer others—looks very different when it champions the supreme and only god of the oppressors than when it portrays the one and only God who stands in solidarity with those being oppressed or conquered. Monotheism (and I also have many friends who are not monotheists) can be one of the most destructive “isms” in the hands of those on top. But for monotheism to be properly evaluated as intrinsically harmful or not, we must ask whether we are talking about a monotheism in the hands of the conquerors who say no other god exists but theirs or a monotheism in the hands in those being oppressed, which gives hope to those being oppressed whispering that what the oppressors call their god is really no god at all. This not about theistic debates; it’s about the god/gods the oppressors are claiming is on their side over against the God those who are being oppressed believe is the only true God, who is actually standing with them even in their position of being oppressed. Today it is pointless to argue about the superiority of your religion or “god” over another person’s if both these religions worship the god or gods of the oppressors.
This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the “Christian” god of the conquering West is not the God we find in the Jesus story. The “Christian” god that many of us have worshipped all our lives really doesn’t exist.
Again, believing this does not make me an atheist. I simply see a radical difference in the god of the oppressors and the God the Jesus story claimed was really out there and who was actually standing in solidarity with the Abels, the Hebrews, the Jews, the first-century Christians persecuted by both Judaism and Rome, the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, Hawaiians, Caribs, Arawaks, Maoris (even against the colonial missionaries who carried crosses), native Americans, African Americans, women, the poor, and anyone considered non-normative today.
I also want to add one last thing that I think many people miss. Whatever your theistic beliefs are, I as a Jesus follower have to remind myself continually in our work against injustice that I am not striving for a world where room is made at the top of a pyramid of oppression for more people—people who were once oppressed themselves. No, the God of the Jesus story is not asking those at the top to make room for others at the top. This God is calling those at the top to abandon their positions at the top in order to stand in solidarity with and give a voice to those at the bottom. This God is calling for the entire pyramid of oppression to be disassembled one human heart at a time. This God is asking for the entire edifice to come crumbling down as human beings begin to see that there is no “us” and “them”—only us, sitting side by side around a shared table, brothers and sisters once again.
For those who are interested, I’ve included a few of my thoughts on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount this week too. This is the sermon that changed my life. It’s the sermon that I believe has the power to heal the world.
At the end of these brief comments I want to try to lay out a project I’m working on. I know that at this stage it is oversimplified and very incomplete. I’m opening a window into my headspace for those who have the courage to take a look inside there. It’s not just our ideas about God that are affected when we see God through the resurrection, standing in solidarity with the oppressed. The gospel, too, is radically impacted. The gospel preached by the oppressors—the powerful, the privileged in European-American colonialism and capitalism—is significantly different from the gospel we find the Jesus of the Jesus story teaching. I’ve included a few blank spaces for you to make your own comparisons. This is a work in progress. In other words, this is not a completed product. It’s not finished. It’s ongoing, and this is a very rough draft. If you have some comparisons that you feel should be added, shoot me an email. I would be most interested in hearing those and possibly adding them to my list.
For those who have already been reading long enough, I’ll sign off.
Keep living in love and loving like Jesus till the only world that remains is a world where Jesus’ love reigns.
I love each of you, and remember that God does too.
My Musings on the Sermon on the Mount
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5.3)
The poor in Jesus’ day were one of the groups who were considered to be living contrary to the Torah and who were therefore being punished by God. The poor were oppressed and marginalized by the rich. Rather then feeling compassion for the poor, those who were better off simply felt morally superior. Why else would God be blessing them economically while withholding blessing from others? To be poor in spirit simply meant to stand in solidarity, in spirit, with the poor, those who were economically oppressed. This kingdom Jesus had come to establish would readjust how life operates on planet Earth in a way that would be especially good news to the “poor” in the present arrangement. (Jesus’ kingdom of redistribution of resources would be impossibly difficult for the wealthy to accept, but it was good news to the poor.)
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. (Matthew 5.4–7)
This kingdom Jesus had come to establish would bless those who were mourning because of the present distribution. The meek were those who had been trampled on by the powerful and privileged in the present distribution. Those who were hungering and thirsting for justice are those who were being oppressed by the powerful and privileged class.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. (Matthew 5.8,9)
The pure in heart are those who do not allow what they’re suffering at the hands of the powerful and privileged to cause them to resort to impure methods of redistribution. The peacemakers are those who participate in Jesus’ nonviolent way of establishing justice once again on earth.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. (Matthew 5.10–11)
Those who stand in solidarity with the oppressed—whether in matters of economics, gender, age (both young and old), race, or orientation—will be persecuted, hated, reviled, and spoken against as evil by the powerful who feel their position of privilege being threatened by Jesus’ kingdom.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5.12)
The prophets have always called for injustice, oppression, and violence on earth to be made right.
“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58.6)
“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an eternal flowing stream.” (Amos 5.24)
God of the Oppressors God of the Oppressed
| The gospel is first and foremost that “God loves Me” (Me meaning those in a position of privilege). | The gospel is the entire Jesus story, which climaxes in the revelation that “this Jesus, whom the oppressors crucified, God has raised back to life, and this Jesus is Lord.” |
| The gospel is about post-mortem assurance about things like getting to heaven or escaping hell, keeping those who suffer oppression passive looking forward to “bliss” in the afterlife. | The gospel is about Jesus’ egalitarian kingdom being restored on earth here and now, healing the world, puting all injustice, oppression, and violence to right (Matthew 6.10). |
| Focuses on proving the historicity of story details within the Jesus story. | Focuses on demonstrating the intrinsic value of the ethical teachings of Jesus. |
| A private, personal relationship with God that is inwardly focused | An ever deepening encounter with God that focuses one outside oneself toward the present restoration |
| Hierarchical authority structures | Mutual egalitarian community |
| Justice is punitive and was satisfied by Jesus on the cross. | Justice is restorative and was initiated, begun, started, commenced, instituted, launched, set in motion, established, founded, brought in, ushered in, introduced once again, and inaugurated on earth by Jesus through the power of his death and resurrection over against the powers of injustice, violence, and oppression. |
| Has an aversion to justice and focuses on mercy, grace, and forgiveness instead | Deeply focused on justice, the restoration of which is promised for the oppressed |
| Justice is seen as standing in opposition to mercy and love. | Justice is the natural expression of mercy and love. |
| Mercy, grace, and forgiveness are things that we receive from God and that give us post-mortem assurance. | Mercy, grace, and forgiveness come from God but are what we are called to show our fellow humans who are oppressing us. |
| Eschatological focus on the destruction of the world and being a part of an elite, special, privileged group that escapes. | Eschatologically focused on a renewed and restored heaven reunited with a renewed and restored earth. |
| “Fire” is punitive and retributive | “Fire” is restorative. |
| Evangelism focuses on the threat of hell, the reward of heaven, and the love of God in saving humanity from God’s imposed punishment. | Evangelism focuses on putting on display the beauty of what the world changed by Jesus and his teachings actually looks like, recognizing and honoring this beauty already at work in some, while endeavoring to inspire those in whom this beauty is not present to join the revolution. |
| Focused on enemies getting their due (vengence) | Focused on enemies being won and restored along with the restoration of justice to the oppressed. |
| Violence is an acceptable means of maintaining and preserving a position of privilege. | Nonviolent direct action rooted in enemy love is the means of saving even our oppressors from systemic injustice. |
| Salvation means being allowed into heaven by ontological certitude (being certain of what exists and is true and what doesn’t and is not). | Salvation is seen as the healing and restoration of this world, which all are invited to participate in. |
| Human suffering is a huge philosophical problem for a God who is in control. | Human suffering is a tangible and formidable enemy that God is at work bringing to an end. |
| A God who desires sacrifice rooted in sociological scapegoating | A God who never desired or required sacrifice but desires us to follow the way of mercy instead (Mathew 9.13; 12.7) |
| God is love (means something very different for the oppressors) | God is love (means something very different for the oppressed) |
HeartGroup Application
1. Spend some time this week sitting with Jesus and contemplating the above chart.
2. Journal what Jesus brings to your mind—other passages, questions, stories, thoughts, and insights.
3. Share with your HeartGroup what Jesus shows you this upcoming week.
The Non-normative Jesus
His disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.” (Matthew 19:10-12)
This week I want to consider Jesus’ words to his disciples in Matthew 19. But to understand why these words are relevant, we have to go all the way back to a seemingly bizarre statement Moses makes in the book of Deuteronomy. When you see the connection between Deuteronomy 23 and Matthew 19, you will be blown away, just as I was.
“No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.” (Deuteronomy 23:1)
I’ll bet you didn’t think we would be looking at this verse in this week’s eSight! But this verse is not random, and it’s not marginal. When we explore this verse together with Jesus’ words in Matthew 19, a new and beautiful understanding of Jesus begins to emerge.
The “assembly of the Lord” refers to when Israel assembled for religious ceremonies. Eunuchs (men who had been castrated or were otherwise unable to reproduce) were considered non-normative within this society. Among the Hebrews, the carrying on of a man’s name through his male offspring was the only way to ensure that his name and nation would endure forever. Passing that name down through generations was the ancient Hebrews’ idea of eternal life.
What about the women? When it came to reproduction, ancient Hebrew culture considered the woman little more than an incubation chamber for the baby that was being passed down from the male. I know, I know, extremely patriarchal! At this stage they didn’t have the faintest idea about the zygote being the combination of the female ovum and the male sperm. For the Hebrew, the male seed contained everything needed for a human to be produced. All that was required was the fertile soil (the woman) for the seed to planted in and to grow. It’s no wonder that many women in this culture were treated like dirt!
Being a eunuch within Hebrew society, by birth or otherwise, placed a man in the “non-normative” category. “Normative” simply refers to that which has been established by the majority in a society as normal, or standard. The opposite of “normative,” academically speaking, is the word queer. Today, “queer” too often is used in an offensive and negative sense, typically as a slur toward someone who is non-normative in matters of sexuality or gender. But in an academic sense, the term “queer” carries no negative connotation. It simply refers to something that is non-normative or non-majoritive. For example, in a world designed for right-handed people, left-handedness (a trait my eldest daughter possesses) is non-normative. In matters of dexterity, left-handed people might labeled as dexterously queer. All of this is to say that eunuchs in Hebrew society during the time of Moses were considered non-normative, and therefore were not admitted to the assembly of the Lord. (Maybe my left-handed daughter would have been excluded from the assembly as well!)
Notice what Moses has to say about normativity in this passage from Leviticus.
The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to Aaron and say: No one of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the food of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles […] that he may not profane my sanctuaries; for I am the LORD; I sanctify them. Thus Moses spoke to Aaron and to his sons and to all the people of Israel. (Leviticus 21:16-24)
What’s fascinating is to observe in the book of Isaiah how God begins to change everything, moving Israel further along a trajectory from where they have been toward what we are about to discover in Jesus.
Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, “The LORD will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord GOD, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered. (Isaiah 56:3-8)
Here is the question I want you consider. How is God going to give the eunuchs an everlasting name when that, within a Hebrew context, can only be accomplished by producing a long line of male children?
Let’s listen in on a private conversation Jesus had with his disciples and see if we can find the answer.
His disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.” (Matthew 19:10-12)
Who is Jesus referring to when he says, “There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven”? In this context, voluntarily becoming a eunuch did not refer to self-mutilation. Jesus is referring to young Hebrew males who chose to abandon the patriarchal expectations of their society — taking a wife, having children, and propagating the nation of Israel through male offspring — to embrace a life of celibacy instead. Who had done this? Who is Jesus referring to? He was standing right in front of them! Jesus is referring to HIMSELF! He included himself in the eunuchs’ “tribe,” saying, in effect, “I’m choosing to stand in solidarity with you, voluntarily becoming one of you!” The eunuchs would now have an everlasting name, a name that would never be cut off. Moses had excluded them, but now they were being made holy by Jesus’ solidarity with them.
Celibacy is still considered “non-normative” in many of today’s hetero-normative cultures. The cultural pressure for a single person to marry and have children is often immense. But according to Jesus, whether a person is a eunuch by birth, is made so by others, or has simply chosen to live a life of celibacy for the Kingdom’s sake, they have been made not merely acceptable, but holy, special, unique. They have been given a place at Jesus’ table alongside everyone else by virtue of Jesus’ embrace of them…by Jesus’ becoming one of them.
As a side note for those who are non-celibate, you’re included, too. No one is left out. Jesus is quick to say that choosing a life of celibacy, while still non-normative, no longer holds negative connotations; after all, Jesus was celibate, too. Celibacy is to be strictly voluntary, according to Jesus. Further, only those who have been given the spiritual gift of celibacy are called to be celibate. For those who have not been given this gift, Paul would say, “if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” (1 Corinthians 7:9)
But let’s get back to this non-normative eunuch, Jesus, who, standing in the prophetic lineage of Isaiah, calls for the radical inclusion of those once excluded under Moses.
Radical inclusion is a trend in Jesus’ ministry. Speaking to Israel, Jesus announces that the favor of God is now available for the Greeks as well. (Luke 4:25-29) Addressing the Jews, Jesus calls for the inclusion of the Romans. (Matthew 5:43-48) With the Pharisees, Jesus calls for the inclusion of Jews not living according to the Torah (i.e., “sinners,” Luke 19:7-9). Addressing the rich and healthy (wealth and health being socially constructed indications of “God’s favor” in Jesus’ day), Jesus calls for the inclusion of the poor, the blind, and the lame. (Luke 14:13-14; cf. Luke 6:20, 24) Addressing men within a patriarchal society (and women with a Stockholm-syndrome like support of partriarchy), Jesus calls for the inclusion of women. (Luke 10:39-41) Jesus calls to all who are benefiting from society’s arrangements to make room for those who are being oppressed. It was this radically inclusive nature of Jesus’ kingdom that led his early followers who were circumcised to begin including the uncircumcised among them as well. (Acts 10:47)
What I want you to ponder this week is what it must have meant for those non-normative eunuchs of Jesus’ day to be embraced by Jesus, to be called His new “tribe.” Just imagine it: after years of being excluded from the “assembly of God,” they were not merely accepted by their long-awaited Messiah; he had actually chosen to live as one of them. This is the non-normative Jesus, choosing the life of a eunuch as a Hebrew male and Rabbi who refused to marry and have children. This non-normative Jesus chose to stand in solidarity with a group considered non-normative in his day. What did it mean to them that Jesus, through his identification with them, could give them a name that would now last forever?
It is no accident that the first individual conversion story Luke records in the Book of Acts is that of an Ethiopian eunuch. Luke purposely chooses to tell the conversion story of a person who, under Mosaic law, would have been excluded from the Hebrews’ religious assemblies. Luke knows exactly what he is communicating when he begins the many individual conversion narratives of Jesus’ Kingdom with Philip’s baptism of a eunuch.
He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. (Acts 8:38)
Societies today, ours included, can still be divided into the normative/majoritive and the non-normative/non-majoritive. There will always be a majority and a minority. (Again, think of my left-handed daughter.) But when those considered “normative” fail to recognize those considered “non-normative” as their brothers and sisters in Christ, every bit as deserving of a place at Jesus’ table, something monstrously un-Jesus-like is being perpetuated — something that looks very different from the example we are given in the non-normative Jesus. When normativity is wedded to exclusivity it produces hierarchical privilege for the normative and, by definition, an oppressed minority composed of anyone non-normative. When the preservation of normativity is the Moral concern, rather than the deeper non-objectification, non-dehumanization, and anti-degradation of those who are considered non-normative as the Ethical concern, in the name of “standing up for what is right,” the non-normative minority will always be objectified, dehumanized and degraded, becoming themselves the recipients of attempts at being purged from society by the normative majority. This is exactly the opposite of what we see the non-normative Jesus doing with the eunuchs of his day.
HeartGroup Application
1. The early followers of Jesus embraced the radically inclusive nature of Jesus’ kingdom. I’d like you to spend time this week with Jesus, contemplating Paul’s words in Acts 17:24-31.
“The God who made the world and everything in it, this God who is sovereign of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is this God served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since this God gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and God allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for this God and perhaps grope for this God and find this God—though indeed this God is not far from every one of us. For ‘In God we [all] live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are God’s offspring.’ Since we [all] are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now God commands all people everywhere to [rethink everything we have assumed about God, ourselves and the world around us], because this God has fixed a day on which [the injustice, oppression and violence of this world will be put to right] in justice by a man whom this God has appointed, and of this God has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
2. As you contemplate this passage, journal what Jesus reveals to you through these words.
3. Share with your HeartGroup what Jesus shows you this upcoming week.
Till the only world that remains is a world where Jesus’ love reigns. Keep loving like the sun shines and the rain falls, restoring one human heart at a time.
I love each and every one of you. And remember, whether in today’s world you are considered normative or considered non-normative, God loves you, too.
I’ll see you next week.
The Demoniac, the Crowd and the way of Mercy rather than Sacrifice.
Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” (Mark 5:9)
I must confess that this is one of the most bizarre and difficult sections of the four Jesus narratives. In our naturalistic worldview, most of us struggle to entertain this story long enough to perceive and understand its point. The demonology framework prompts kneejerk reactions in those whose outlook is more scientific. But don’t chuck the story yet. Demonology certainly is present in this story. It points to this story having a very early origin in the Jesus revolution of the first century. When we understand the point of the story and its early dating, we gain a window into what the early Jesus community was really about. It calls us to rediscover this point again for ourselves today. Let’s jump in. This story is found in both Mark 5:1–20 and Luke 8:26–29. We’ll look at Mark’s version.
They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an evil spirit came from the tombs to meet him. This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills, he would cry out and cut himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of Him. He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name, don’t torture me!” For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you evil spirit!” Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”
We cannot miss three details if we are to understand what has taken hold of this man.
1. No one was strong enough to subdue him.
2. He cut himself with stones.
3. Its name was Legion.
Let’s start by putting the puzzle pieces on the table and turn to point number 2 first. This man cut himself with stones. Scholars have seen this as what they call auto-lapidation. Lapidating is the act of pelting or killing someone with stones. What cannot be missed is that the gospels always attribute this activity to a crowd stoning a victim (Matthew 21:35, 23:37; Luke 20:6; John 8:7, 59, 10:31–33, 1:8) What this man does to himself is auto-lapidation or self-lapidation. Self-stoning. Why would this man do this to himself? The answer is found in point number three. Whatever has taken over this man, its name is “Legion, for we are many.” This story fits perfectly with the pattern running through the gospels that it is always the many—always the majority, always the crowd—that engages in this form of capital punishment, in which a group throws stones at a person until the victim dies. This man embodies the crowd’s collective violence. The crowd, the many, is embodied in one person. And this story in front of us is how Jesus delivered this man from legion.
Before we can move on, we must understand point number 1, too. Legion, the crowd, the many within this man, cannot be subdued. It might help to realize that what is true of the crowd many times in the gospels is also true of this man right now. This man embodies the crowd or legion, so in order to understand what’s going on inside him, we have to pause and ask how crowds or the many actually work.
The Mechanics of the Crowd/Many/Legion
Throughout history, societies have faced moments that threaten their coherence and unity. Scholars have observed that, to keep society from coming apart at the seams in the times of conflict, a strange phenomenon often takes place. A society will regain its unity and solidarity by finding a common enemy around which to unite in blaming for its struggles. The many historically have managed their societal rivalries, competition, and disunity, not by turning their violent tendencies on one another, but by coming together and transforming what would be their violence toward one another into collective violence against an Other. In short, a society finds unity in finding a common enemy.
Collective Violence
Violence in a society becomes collective when it chooses someone all its members can come together against. They find unity in agreeing on who they are against. If violence is not channeled together and directed toward a common enemy (which is the way of sacrifice), the violence will turn on the society itself and will destroy it. More on this in a moment.
The Demoniac
This man is the embodiment of the crowd (i.e., legion/we are many). And whatever it is inside of this man cannot be subdued. It cannot be bound or chained. Yet again, this man simply contains “the crowd” within one individual. The violence of the crowd cannot be overcome. A crowd can never collectively free itself from its own violence. It can manage, or direct that violence, but it needs someone outside of that community to set it free. A society, in all actuality, only has three options: a) The society can allow the violence to escalate until it tears apart the society; b) The society can unconsciously but collectively direct its violence against a minority whose absence would least diminish the overall whole, thus restoring unity in action against this minority; or c) Someone from the outside the society (in this story, Jesus) can intervene and remove the violence from the society one person at a time. This makes perfect sense when laid along side of what we just said about number 2. While the crowd can collectively redirect its violence against an Other,this man is alone, there is no Other, so the crowd inside of him turns the violence on itself. (This is why we see this man cutting himself in auto-lapidation. We’ll see this more clearly in a moment when we get to the pigs.)
To illustrate how we, in following Jesus, become free of this mechanism within our society is exactly why we have this story. What many miss is that what is going on inside this man happens on a larger scale between this man and the society in this region. (Think of the medieval icons of angry mobs carrying pitch forks and flaming torches against a monster.) This region manages its societal rivalries, competition, and disunity (a) not by turning its violence on one another but by coming together and transforming its violence into collective violence against this man (b). Jesus came to create a new humanity (a new crowd, so to speak) that united around mercy (c) instead of sacrifice, mercy and love toward enemies (or Others) instead of common hatred. Jesus came to end humanity’s paradigm of us vs. them. And He began His work of saving this society, turning this region away from the way of sacrifice to the way of mercy, by first rehumanizing (I know that’s not a word; I just made it up) the one the crowd had sacrificed or purged. In this case, the demoniac. Jesus’s actions cause them to fundamentally reassess their entire way of life.
Let’s proceed through the rest of the story and see if we are on the right track.
And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area. A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” He gave them permission, and the evil spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man—and told about the pigs as well. Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.
In this mostly Greek region (Gentile with very few Jews), pigs were a farming commodity. But why do we have this bizarre detail about the pigs running off a cliff? The pigs (animals) become infected with the legion/crowd and the violence that had just been in this man, and with no one against whom to turn that violence (they are just pigs), the herd runs and hurls itself off a cliff. It is self-destruction. It is the crowd/legion that comes out of this man, and goes into these pigs, and throws itself off the cliff. The point? If people are not freed from that which lies at the heart of this demon, the crowd which temporarily finds peace and unity by purging a victim from its homogenous society eventually runs itself off a cliff, just like these pigs. The same demon that causes the crowd to throw stones at others stones/destroys itself if it does not find a victim for the crowd to come together against instead. If not remedied, that which drives the crowd to collective violence against a minority destroys that society in the long run.
Now let’s finish the story.
How did Jesus begin to turn things around in this story? Jesus began with restoring the one within this narrative the crowd had been collectively against. When Jesus restores this man they had been sacrificing and reintegrates him into society, He threatens the unity and peace the society had found by coming together against this man. He, in effect, turns their way of life, their stability, their worldview, their “sacrifice” on its head. They are forced to see the one they had collectively been sacrificing as a fellow human being, like themselves. Jesus un-objectifies the man. Jesus de-dehumanizes him. Jesus de-degrades him. Jesus lifts this man up and returns him to a place of belonging within the very society that had found unity and coherence by purging him. Jesus challenges the entire arrangement of this society, calling its members to no longer find unity in the practice of societal sacrifice but in coming together in the way of mercy (cf. Matthew 9:13, 12:7; Hosea 6:6).
Do they follow this Jesus? Do they follow this radical social revolutionary?
Sadly, no. Now, they simply find a new sacrifice. They need a new person to purge. They need a new victim through which to find unity by being against. Whom do they choose? You guessed it. Jesus Himself. The way of sacrifice is so ingrained in them that they unconsciously, without missing a beat, simply switch victims, putting Jesus in the place of the man, and go on as if nothing ever changed. They purge Jesus now, instead.
As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy [as opposed to sacrifice] on you.” So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed.
The man is sent back to teach this society about the way of mercy, rather than sacrifice. Set free from legion himself, perhaps he can help his society get free of the same demon. It could be said that the only thing that was wrong with this man was that he had become infected with the crowd. He had allowed how the crowd defined him to become the way he defined himself as well. And when he, inside of himself, got free from what was also inside the crowd, he could now go back, “rehumanized,” to lead the community in a better way, the way of mercy.
When people get free of collective violence toward a non-normative minority, (whether in themselves toward others, or within themselves toward themselves) they are not becoming possessed by demons but, in a very real sense, they are being freed from them. THIS is the point of the story. Embracing someone (or a group) that is accused by the crowd of being demon possessed isn’t to become possessed oneself. It’s called “following Jesus.” And it is becoming free from the demon (the demon of scapegoating) that is actually possessing the crowd (legion) which was seeking to purge or sacrifice the minority to begin with.
This is my story. I am both the demoniac and the crowd, all in one. As the crowd, I have seen the humanity of the ones I once sacrificed, and it has turned my world upside down. As the demoniac, I have been set free from the legion, or rather, the crowd—the collective violence at the heart of the crowd’s unity—in order to follow the way of mercy instead. I wish I could claim some credit for this transformation, but I did not go looking for it. It was done to me, and for me, by others. Now, I, humbly and repentantly, simply want to bring others with me. The way of mercy truly is the better way. In fact, it’s the way of God.
What would happen if we saw the ones placed on society’s altars as our brothers and sisters? Maybe this is where Jesus starts with all societies that find unity in collective violence against minorities. If this is true, then Jesus’ work today is no different than it was in the gospels. Jesus today calls us to once again see those whom we have labeled indecent, different, other, non-normative, deserving of being purged from within our circles as . . . human. He calls us to embrace the reality that they are our brothers and sisters and have a place beside us at the table, too (cf. Luke 19:9).
“[In the story of the demoniac,] we’re witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence.” — Rene Girard, When These Things Begin, Conversations with Michel Treguer
“If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.” — Jesus, Matthew 12:7
HeartGroup Application
1. Where are you still participating with the crowd in sacrificing others? Spend some time this week with Jesus in contemplation of this question, and ask Him to show you if you are sacrificing or scapegoating someone. My 11 yr old daughter recently confessed to my wife Crystal, that she caught herself speaking poorly of a third person to become friends with another. “I think I might have been ‘scapegoating’ mom, and I don’t want to do that.”
Who might it be for us? Maybe it’s another family member we must join in and be against in order to fit in with the rest of the family. Maybe it’s someone at the office whom everyone hates, and we feel we must join in the collective disdain and ridicule. Maybe it’s at church where, in order to fit in, we feel pressured to label someone as less than a child of God, less than our fellow brother or sister. Or maybe it’s someone within society who we feel deserves retribution, not redemption. People we feel deserve punitive justice instead of justice that restores to them a humanity of which, in our hearts, they have been deprived. Whoever it is, ask Jesus to show you, and He will.
2. Ask Jesus to show you how He thinks and feels toward those being sacrificed. Invite Him to help you see them the same way He does, and then ask Him to give you the courage to follow the way of mercy, rather than sacrifice.
3. Share with your HeartGroup what you experience this week.
Till the only world that remains is a world where love reigns, where love is shed as indiscriminately as the sunshine and the rainfall. The new creation has come. Let us enlarge its radically inclusive and restorative perimeter one human heart at a time.
I love each and every one of you, and God does, too.
See you next week.
Part 3 of 3 – Jesus and the Living Water
Jesus and the Living Water
Part 3 of 3
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” (John 4:16)
Stop, and consider.
A woman comes for water every day in the middle of the day, instead of the early morning when she would be with the rest of the women in her town.
Why?
In a society where women found their place beneath men, some women found themselves lower still. This woman was held in lower esteem than even her female peers. Why? This woman had a story.
She had been married five times. Try to consider this not from the perspective our gender-egalitarian culture today but from the patriarchal social constructs of her time. Remember that marriage then was in some regards similar to marriage today, but within first-century Judaism, the social construction of marriage was significantly different. Women belonged to their husbands as little more than property. This was most apparent in divorce. Women could not divorce a man, but men, in this male-dominated hierarchical construction of marriage, could divorce a woman, under the Torah for any reason they so choose. Granted, a woman could not be passed back and forth between husbands, but her present husband could pass her to another if for any reason he deemed her no longer desirable (for faults as simple as burning the food or being less desirable than younger options).
This woman whom we find this day at the well had been sent away by five men. She had been told five times, “You are not desirable. You are not wanted.” We are not told what her present arrangement was, but suffice it to say, she was with a man now simply so that she could have some type of existence in that culture that required her to be connected to a man.
Jesus does not hold her responsible for any of this. There is no “go and sin no more” talk between then. There is no “love the sinner hate the sin” mantra that Christians today are so famous for touting. There is simply the understanding that this woman has been the victim of a marriage institution gone completely wrong. Yes, it was monogamous, but it was no more than serial monogamy. The kind of marriage this woman had experienced only served to objectify, dehumanized, and degrade women to a status lower than men.
Next, we encounter Jesus’ offer to her of “living water.”
What Jesus offers this woman would answer her heart’s desperate cry to love and be loved: a water that would so satisfy her basic, inmost needs that it would not only fill the deep void insider her but overflow into a beautiful force toward others, flowing from her as a source of healing for others.
However, there was a catch. When she responds favorably and asks Jesus for this water, He cannot simply give it to her. No, the water Jesus offers this woman can be only experienced within the context of complete honesty and authenticity. She must come to a place where she is herself, regardless of what the other Torah–observing women might say. If she is going to truly experience what Jesus extends to her, she must be given a safe space with Him to be who and what she is, no longer hiding, even if that means facing her past of begin repeatedly told, time after time, there was something wrong with her.
Jesus draws her into this safe space.
“Go get your husband.”
The woman scrambles. ‘My husband?’ she thinks. ‘There’s something different about this man in front of me, yes, but the last thing I want this strange Jewish man to know is how many times I have been rejected, labeled as unwanted, sent away by one man after another. I know what I’ll say.’
“I have no husband,” she says.
Jesus, with a look that subtly tells her that she can trust Him, says, “I know. I know you’ve been married five times, and the man you’re with now is just keeping you around.”
There is something different that she sees in this man’s eyes.
She changes the subject, though. Jesus will bring it back around.
What is Jesus saying to this woman?
The same thing He is saying right now to you, too.
“My love is not blind. I know everything about you there is to know. My love is not diminished by this knowledge. I love you AND I already know everything there is to know about you. Honestly, I knew you before you even did—even the things you are still in denial about. I know everything there is to know about you, and My offer to you is still on the table.”
We do not need water that will leave us thirsty (conditional love). We need the living water for which we were made. We must not settle for less. We must have the water that satisfies the deepest human thirst. We need Jesus’ living water of unconditional love, a love in which we are simultaneously fully known and fully embraced, loved and accepted. A love that knows all there is to know about us and loves us all the more still.
Who are you reading this right now? What are you hiding? What are you not being honest about, not with others but with yourself and possibly with God? Would you like this living water, too? Then it is time to enter the dangerous honesty of this radically inclusive Kingdom Jesus came to bring. Whatever you are hiding, He won’t turn away from it, and He won’t turn you away, either. You might feel like you have to come to the well at midday to protect yourself from others’ opinions, but you don’t have to with Jesus. As a matter of fact, He is already at the well right now, waiting for you to arrive.
In the past two decades, I have met many people who have come to a place where they can be honest with God about who they are. Some I find to be still hiding. Others are very much on this journey of deep introspection. All these stages are okay. What Jesus would have us all know, first and foremost is that, regardless of who we are, we don’t have to hide from Him. His love is unconditional. He already knows, even before you do, and His offer is still on the table. His hand still extends to you a cup. Are you thirsty for this water? Come. Drink. You will never be the same again.
The lady at the well did not fit in well with the religiously valued, normative social constructs of her day, either. Look at how Jesus relates to her. If you hear nothing else, hear Jesus’ words to you right now:
“My dear daughter, my dear son, I already know everything about you there is to know. And I’m still here. I won’t abandon you. I love you. I’ve come to extend to you, too, the invitation to a world where worship on ‘this mountain’ or ‘that mountain’ is irrelevant. I’m offering you a way into a radically different world, with a river of living, wet, soul-thirst-satisfying, radically inclusive love, not just for you but also, through you, to all those around you who were made for this kind of water, too.”
Do you have the courage to be honest with Jesus?
The first step is to believe that Jesus really does give us space to be honest without the fear of losing Him. The next step is to believe what Jesus said to Philip: “If you have seen Me, you’ve also seen God” (cf. John 14:7–10).
HeartGroup Application
1. This week, I want you to spend some time in contemplation with Jesus. What might you be hiding? Consider if there remains in you a door to that most private room of your heart that you have kept locked.
2. Invite Jesus into this, whatever it is. Watch what He does next. Journal what He shows you.
3. In the context of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at Jacob’s well, share what Jesus shows you with your HeartGroup this upcoming week.
Keep living in this love. Allow it to also flow out to others around you until the only world that remains is a world where Christ’s love reigns.
I love you guys.
See you next week.
Part 2 of 3 – Jesus and Women
“Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman” (John 4.27).
Last week we looked at Jesus and the “Us vs. Them” paradigm of the Jews and the Samaritans. This week, I’d like to take a brief moment to notice the breathtaking way in which Jesus related to women, especially within a first century Palestinian patriarchal culture.
The disciples return and find Jesus speaking with a woman. John tells us that the disciples were astonished at this. The question I’d like you to ponder is why were they surprised?
Treatment of Women in the first century.
Last month in the eSight entitled Jesus Stops a Lynching, I made mention of the double standard that existed within the Torah concerning adultery. Adultery was not defined as a male engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage, but as a married woman engaging in such. In other words, if a married man had an affair with an unmarried woman it was not considered to be adultery because the woman did not belong to another man. A man could only be committing adultery if the woman was married to another man. The adultery laws of the Torah were not concerned with marital fidelity per se, as much as they were protecting the property rights of husbands to whom their wives belonged. Remember, women in this culture were looked upon as being the property of their husbands. In John 8 we have a married woman about to be punitively punished for her unfaithfulness to her husband, and Jesus breathtakingly comes to her defense, disarms the crowd, siding with the woman about to be turned into a scapegoat, advocating for this woman against the religious male leadership.
The second example I’d like us to consider is the question about divorce put to Jesus in Matthew 5. Remember, divorce laws in Jesus’ day were another example of male-dominance law. Women could not divorce their husbands. A woman was her husband’s property. But, a man could divorce his wife. What is remarkable is that under the Torah, a husband could divorce his wife for something as simple as burning his dinner, becoming less sexually attractive as she aged than the new younger options, or literally any reason for which the husband was no longer pleased with her. This is how it was under Moses. Jesus comes to women’s defense stating that, in the Kingdom, there is no reason for treating a woman unjustly. You may be able to justify sending her away under Moses, but not so within the Kingdom that Jesus was coming to establish. Let me say a word about Moses. Moses was an improvement from where the Hebrews were in their unjust treatment of women (See Deuteronomy 24). But, that was only as far as that culture could walk, at that time. It wasn’t far enough. Jesus takes protecting women from injustice within marriages within a patriarchal culture to a whole new level by stating that the only reason a woman could be divorced was if she herself was martially unfaithful. This was to protect men from being taken advantage of too, but notice that Jesus’ strict words about divorce arise from the backdrop of abuse of women in a marital context within a strictly patriarchal culture. There was no egalitarian treatment of women within marriages during His day.
We could discuss the woman who was bent over that Jesus called forward into the males-only section of the synagogue to be healed on the Sabbath, or the woman, healed and then affirmed by Jesus, who violated the Torah and touches Jesus even though she has an issue of blood; but, what I want you to notice about all of the examples is the gender pyramid that existed in Jesus’ day and Jesus’ engagement with it.
I’ve spoken elsewhere about the economic pyramid structure that Jesus came to overthrow (see Luke 6.20-24). I’d like you to consider the gender pyramid structures that existed in Jesus’s day as well. Jesus had come to turn social pyramids upside down. Those at the top of pyramids, in the places of privilege, would find themselves removed from these privileged positions. While those at the bottom of these pyramid structures, who were slaving away to benefit those at the top of the pyramid, would find themselves liberated. When it came to the gender pyramid in Jesus’ day, men were at the top and women were at the bottom. In the Kingdom that Jesus came to establish, all of this was to be turned on its head, “upside down” as they said in Acts 17.6, where women and men would now be valued and treated equally.
Consider the story of Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus. Martha, who is slaving away at the bottom of the pyramid domestically that day, notices that she hasn’t seen Mary in quite a bit. Wondering why Mary has left her to do all the “slaving” alone, she walks into the room to find Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus. What makes this appalling for Martha is that this was a place reserved for men only. Anyone could be in the room listening to Jesus, but women were typically at the back; then there were the men, and then, if you were a man who was aspiring to become a Rabbi, there was a special spot reserved for you. Your place, as an aspiring Rabbi, was at the feet of the Rabbi who would be teaching that day. Remember, being a Rabbi was a men’s only club and, therefore, the “feet of Jesus” was a place that would have been reserved only for men. And yet, Martha finds Mary, abandoning her domestic place at the bottom of this social pyramid, and seated at the top, right there with Jesus. What Martha is telling Jesus is that He should put Mary back in her place. Jesus says, “Leave her alone.” In Jesus’ Kingdom, women would no longer be relegated to a lower place than men. Mary had chosen what was best, and she would not be denied based on her gender.
The parallels between the Genesis narrative of the fall and John’s narrative of the Resurrection also cannot be missed. Both narratives take place in a garden. Both narratives involve a woman. But, where the Genesis narrative places the woman as the first to be deceived, the Resurrection narrative places the woman as the first to be enlightened. She is then sent as an Apostle to the Apostles. She is the first person to proclaim the risen Lord; she is the first to proclaim that a whole new world has begun. As followers of Jesus, we do not live in the narrative of an old fallen creation where the woman was the first to be deceived by the serpent. Our story is the narrative of the Resurrection where the woman was the first to believe in the risen Lord. The Female Narrative within the Hebrew culture has been redeemed through the Resurrection. Woman is now first into the new world! Surely, the last (bottom of the pyramid) has become the first and the first (top of the pyramid) has become the last.
Some will try and use Paul to overthrow the Jesus story. But, this is a misunderstanding of the subversive nature of Paul’s use of the word “submit.” Paul told Jesus-following slaves to “submit” to their unbelieving masters, not because he believed in slavery, but as a subversive way to win over their masters so that they could become Jesus followers too, so that, once converted, the relationship between slave and master would be undone. Paul uses this same word, “submit”, in relation to the kingdoms of this world as a subversive way to overthrow those same kingdoms, winning over the nations and the kings of the Earth so they would bow down as well to the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And lastly, Paul speaks of women believers “submitting” to their unbelieving husbands (and vice versa) as the subversive way of winning unbelieving spouses to becoming followers of Jesus as well, where hierarchical authority structures even within marriage would be abolished for the egalitarianism of the Kingdom.
Now, let’s return to Jesus. Jesus is not afraid to refer to the “maternal” nature of God, even within his own patriarchal culture. Yes, Jesus did speak of God as Father the majority of the time, speaking within His own male dominant culture, but at appropriately subversive and controversial times He also took care to speak about our Mother God as well. (Matthew 23.37; Luke 13.34)
There are undeniably two streams within the scriptures that Jesus followers hold in high regard. While there is a clear patriarchal stream, there is another, very clear, egalitarian stream as well. (Galatians 3.28) Jesus followers must discern whether Jesus is moving us away from the egalitarian stream to the patriarchal stream, or whether Jesus is moving us away from the patriarchal stream to the egalitarian one. Which direction is the Jesus story moving us in?
Again, we can’t allow other sections of scripture to embolden us to ignore Jesus’ treatment of women. Jesus simply stepped over the gender boundaries of his own day, ignoring them. For those who claim to be following this Jesus, the question we have to ask is are we following Him too? This is not becoming more like the world. It’s simply that the world has been listening, in this regard, to Jesus’ spirit, more than the church has. If this is true, it would not be the first time. And I’m sure, before the time of all things being restored, it won’t be the last.
“They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman.” Why? Because Jesus refused to place women beneath Him. Instead, Jesus believed God viewed, as well as treated, women with egalitarianism and Jesus was going to do so as well. After all, if you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen the Father. (John 14.7-10, cf. John 5.19)
HeartGroup Application
1. This week I want you to spend some quiet time with Jesus contemplating what a world would truly look like in which women were treated the same as men. Where people are evaluated on the value God places on them. Where voices are heard based on content, not gender. And where service is based on giftedness rather than gender. Remember, we are called to put on display what the world changed by Jesus looks like and to give witness to the Resurrection that this new world has begun.
2. Ask Jesus to show you how you can put this new world on display in your own life, within your own sphere of influence.
3. Share with your HeartGroup what Jesus shows you.
Wherever this finds you, keep living in love, loving like Christ, until the only world that remains is a world where Christ’s love reigns.
I love you guys,
See you next week.
Part 1 of 3 – Jesus and the Samaritans
The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) (John 4.9)
This week I want to begin a three part contemplation of the scene in John’s gospel that took place at “Jacob’s well.” There are three ways we can approach this story. The first thing to note is the cultural context and meaning within which Jesus was associating with the Samaritan. The second thing to note is that Jesus was speaking, not just to a Samaritan, but to a Samaritan woman. The third thing is how Jesus relates to someone, regardless of who they are, someone who might have a sketchy past by which they define themselves and feel ashamed. We’ll look at each of these over the next few weeks, but for now, let’s begin our contemplation with the first way to approach this story.
Who were the Samaritans in the First Century?
Original Split
The history of the Jews and Samaritans is a complex one, much like a divorced couple giving two different stories. But one thing is for sure: their history is rooted in schism. Samaritans claimed to be descendants of the tribe of Ephraim and Manasseh (as well as the tribe of Levi). After the death of Solomon, the Kingdom split into two parts: the Northern tribes of Israel whose capital was Samaria, and the Southern tribe of Judah with its capital at Jerusalem.
Return From Exile
The schism continues within the narrative of the Jews returning to their land and being given permission to rebuild their temple. When the Samaritans (remnants of the Northern Tribes after the dispersion of the Assyrians) heard that the temple was being rebuilt, they, as kinsmen, wanted to help. “They approached Zerubbabel and the heads of families and said to them, ‘Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of King Esar-haddon of Assyria who brought us here.’ But Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest of the heads of families in Israel said to them, ‘You shall have no part with us in building a house to our God; but we alone will build to the Lord, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus of Persia has commanded us’” (Ezra 4.2-3). Zerubbabel, discerning that the Samaritans’ worship of Jehovah had, over time, become a syncretistic religion, worshiping Jehovah as well as other gods of the surrounding nations, considered these descendants of the Northern Tribes no longer “Israelites” and thus not “fit” for helping in rebuilding the temple.
Maccabean Revolt
The last straw was during the Maccabean Revolt, when under Antiochus Epiphanes a holocaust of the Hebrew people was attempted in an effort to Hellenize his entire kingdom. During this time the Samaritans, desiring to be spared, repudiated all connections of kinship with the Jewish people. They were spared and this, above all, was the source of hatred by the Jewish people in the days of Jesus. Jesus over and over refers to this history within His ministry (see Luke 4). Jesus not only wanted to teach the Jews to love their historical enemies the Seleucids (Sidon/Syria), He wanted the Jews to learn to forgive and embrace their Samaritan brothers and sisters as well.
Due to their rejection during the time of the temple’s reconstruction in Jerusalem, the Samaritans had built their own temple on Mount Gerizim.
Mount Gerizim was the original place of the binding of Isaac by Abraham, and possessed a rich tradition of worship within the history of the Hebrew people.
“When the LORD your God has brought you into the land that you are entering to occupy, you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal.” (Deuteronomy 11.29)
The Samaritans, like the Jews, in the time of Jesus believed in One God, Yahweh, the same God recognized by the Hebrew prophets. They taught the Torah as it was given by God to Moses. Yet they worshiped on Mount Gerizim which they believed was the true sanctuary chosen by Israel’s God, rather than the sanctuary at Jerusalem which was associated with Judah’s God. It is true that in Jesus’ day, the Samaritan religious belief systems had become a hybrid of the worship of Yahweh combined with beliefs associated with the worship of other Gods.
In the time of Jesus, both Jewish and Samaritan religious leaders taught that it was wrong to have any contact with the opposite group, and neither was to enter each other’s territories or even to speak to one another. Josephus also reports numerous violent confrontations between Jews and Samaritans throughout the first half of the first century.
What we have to recognize and be confronted by is that Jesus ignores all of this. He sees Samaritans as children of God just like Himself and treats them accordingly. This is why the Samaritan woman was so shocked:
“The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)” (John 4.9)
Jesus repeatedly confronted the tensions between the Jews and Samaritans. He told the story of a good Samaritan, whose actions were so at variance with Jewish religious leaders. Jesus’ story describes a Samaritan leper who is the only one of ten lepers (the other nine being Jews) to say “Thank you” and worship Jesus. He rebukes James and John for wanting to call down fire on the Samaritans and destroy them. Jesus did not relate to Samaritans according the script He had been handed by His Jewish culture. He rejected the rules He had been handed on how to play the game.
Notice, the woman reveals how the Samaritans still claim to be descendants of Abraham, still followers of Moses.
“‘Are you greater than OUR ancestor Jacob, who gave US the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’” (John 4.12, emphasis added)
To continue the dialogue.
“Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain [remember the Hebrew people originally worshiped on Mt. Gerizim before the temple was built in Jerusalem], but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know [Both the Jews and Samaritans had been influenced by Hellenization by this time, so this was not a jab at the “hybrid” nature of the Samaritan worship. The Jews too contained some level of “hybrid” from Greek influence. Rather the Samaritans believed the Messiah would come from the lineage of one of the Northern Tribes of which they believed they were descended]; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews [the Messiah was to come through the lineage of Judah and thus the Jews, yet be for all people]. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4.20-24, emphasis added)
Let’s unpack this a bit.
First, Jesus says the hour “is coming.” By is now here he is saying that shallow outward signs rooted in space-time debates such as which mountain they worship on would not distinguish true worshipers. True worshipers would, through Jesus, worship God in Spirit and Truth.
Let’s look at what Jesus meant by Spirit first. Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ use of “Spirit” here in John 4 is seen in 2 Corinthians 3 where he distinguishes between the Spirit of the Law with the Letter of the Law. The original Hebrew people formed a community, centered in the teachings of Moses, to which certain promises had been made. One did not earn a position within that community by following all the teachings of Moses. One simply had to demonstrate a desire to join the community by endeavoring to follow its teachings. Jesus comes to create a new human community, rooted in the Jewish community, but now centered around His own teachings. Today one does not earn a place in Jesus’ new human community by following His teachings, but we do demonstrate that we desire to be a part of this community, and a part of this new world Jesus is creating, by endeavoring to follow the teachings of this Jesus in whom this new world is centered. Jesus’ teachings are found in the Sermon on the Mount. And although they are of the same “Spirit” of the “Law and Prophets,” Jesus’ ethical teachings are deeper, broader, and even more demanding at times, than Moses’ ethical teachings ever were. Jesus’ teachings are a fuller revelation. At times, following the Spirit of the Law in Jesus will be a deeper expression of the Letter found in Moses (see Matthew 5:21-28). Sometimes following the Spirit will be a direct contradiction to the Letter found in Moses. (See Matthew 5.38-43, as well as the woman of Luke 8, the woman of John 8, and the accusation of the early Jesus followers as being “lawless” according to the book of James.) Which leads me to the next identifier, Truth.
John too contrasts the law that came through Moses with the Truth that came through Jesus. What are we to make of this? It is true that both Jesus and Moses belong to the same moral trajectory. Yet God through Moses was leading them as far as they could possibly be led in that time. The Torah of Moses still included nationalism, polygamy, slavery, lex talionis (eye for an eye), the way of sacrifice (Matthew 9.13; 12.7), and violence against one’s enemies. Jesus moves us further toward an understanding of God and the truth about God that eliminates all of these. John states that you can have the Torah, yet still not truly see God until you meet Jesus (John 1.17-18).
There are some things between Moses and Jesus that are the same. Yet there are some things within their teachings that are radically different. (In much in the same way I am teaching my 6 year old not to talk to strangers while I am teaching my 17 year old how to talk to strangers effectively. Am I the same parent? Yes. Are these contradictory rules? Yes. Are my children in different places in their development and thus need different rules at different stages? Yes.)
What Jesus is telling this woman is that He has come to initiate a new human community which would no longer be distinguished by external arguments over the Torah or the teachings of Moses (Do we worship on this mountain or that one?), but rather that this community would be centered around Himself, His teachings, which are from the same Spirit of the Torah, but offer a much Truer revelation of God, how God sees ourselves and how we are to see everyone else around us.
The woman finishes with:
“‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to US.’ “Jesus said to her, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you.’” (John 4.25-26, emphasis added)
Jesus said the time is Now! This new community would no longer be defined by arguments over how to observe the Torah. This new humanity would be centered around a new way of seeing God, ourselves, and others who inspire us to live according to the ethical teachings of Jesus found in His Sermon on the Mount.
Time is coming and Now is!
Christians, Jews, Muslims and Samaritans have all fought over this well, historically dug by Jacob. Each has taught that it is wrong to associate with the opposite group. They have continued in the worship, not of the God of Jesus, but of the God of “us vs. them.”
Today, we must squarely face this first revelation of Jesus talking to this Samaritan at Jacob’s well to confront us. Today we have Christians with different theologies who all claim to follow the same Jesus. We are told many times that it is wrong and even dangerous to associate with the “them” instead of just our “us.” A list of doctrinal truths and lifestyle behaviors has become the test of which ones are truly following God and who are not. Today Jesus would say to this: “Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem, but My ethical teachings in My Sermon on the Mount.”
Today we have multiple world religions. Critics ask, “If all religions teach peace than why can’t they get along?” They each teach, to varying degrees, that it is wrong or dangerous to associate with those who are of a different creed. A creed has become the test of who are following God and who are not. To this Jesus would say again, “Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem but My ethical teachings in My Sermon on the Mount.”
Today, we practice dividing the world between Jews and Samaritans by nationality. Consider the West’s attitude toward the Taliban: anyone who disagrees with this view is “sympathizing with the enemy” and probably a terrorist. Such disagreement must be met with violence. Anything less is unpatriotic or treasonable. Tribal loyalty has become the test of who are following God and who are not. To this Jesus would say, “Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem but My ethical teachings in My Sermon on the Mount.”
Today we practice dividing the world between Jews and Samaritans by economics. Whether it is the refugee who appears at our border, or the foreign worker who threatens our jobs, we respond with territorialism rather than hospitality, self-interest instead of sharing. Fidelity to capitalism has become the test of who are following God and who are not. To this Jesus would say, “Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem but My ethical teachings in My Sermon on the Mount.”
Today we practice dividing the world by race. It is appalling that any group bearing the name of Jesus would still practice segregation. We all drink from the same “Cup.” But some denominations still say that it is best for everyone not to integrate. In some areas, the complexion of one’s congregation is still the test of who are following God and who are not. To this Jesus would say, “Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem but My ethical teachings in My Sermon on the Mount.”
Today we practice the way of dividing the world between Jews and Samaritan in matters of gender. I know of religious communities that teach that women should not be permitted to be in a position to teach men. They say it’s morally wrong to place women in an egalitarian position with men. One’s position on gender in religious leadership has become the test of who are following God and who are not. To this Jesus would say, “Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem but My ethical teachings in My Sermon on the Mount.”
And lastly, we see this way of dividing the world between the heterosexual majority and the homosexual minority. Protestors carry signs that proclaim “God Hates Fags!” “Love the sinner Hate the Sin!” “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” It is argued that “they” must be opposed or “they” will corrupt “our” children. One’s position on gay marriage has become the test of who are following God and who are not. To this Jesus would say, “Neither this mountain nor Jerusalem but My ethical teachings in My Sermon on the Mount.”
In all the ways that we divide each other, ways that cause us to see others as “the enemy,” ways that echo the First Century’s divisions of Jews and Samaritans, we have forgotten the first teaching of Jesus: We are all children of the same divine parents. On the inside, we are all the same. Jesus died and was resurrected to save us all from the ways of Cains against Abels. These divisions will one day cease. One day we will all, once again, sit at the same table. It’s this table practice that Jesus put on display in His ministry, and it was this table practice that got Him killed. I know we are addicted to our exclusive clubs, but Jesus is offering us the privilege, in our present age, of putting on display what the beautifully restored inclusive age to come will look like. We are called upon to show how the world will look when transformed and restored by Jesus.
If Jesus were alive today, He would tell the story of the good Catholic (if He were among protestants, or the good Protestant if he were among Catholics, or maybe the good “both” if he were among Eastern Orthodox). He would tell the story of the good Muslim, the good Hindu, or the good Buddhist. He would tell the story of the good terrorist, the good immigrant, the good “welfare recipient”. He would tell the story of the good ordained woman priest or female preacher, the good gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer.
I know what your thinking. You’re thinking “But, but, but, but . . .” Whatever is wrong with the “other” group you are having a problem with, remember, the Jews had persuasive arguments, rooted in the Torah, against the Samaritans as well, and yet Jesus ignored all of that and extended His invitation to them as well.
Whomever our “them” is, whomever we have labeled as “the enemy,” we are going to have to confront Jesus going into Samaria, stopping by the well to talk with this Samaritan, and inviting her to embrace Him as her Messiah. He broke every “us and them” rule that existed that day, and the question we followers have to ask ourselves is, do we?
Jesus is seeking to create a new humanity, centered in Himself, comprised of people of all our present ways of dividing ourselves. Are we helping Him, or are we standing in His way? It is Jesus and His new world rooted in His Sermon on the Mount by which this new humanity will be defined. Nothing else, and nothing less. I have a sneaking suspicion that we choose to dived ourselves by these periphery standards to give us a sense of assurance in the midst of the fact that we are all, to a large degree, hiding from the fact that we find Jesus ethical teachings too radical to follow. We are not following the Sermon on the Mount, so we have to come up with lesser things to distinguish others as different than ourselves by. The very first teaching of Jesus is that we are to stop this way of dividing ourselves. We are all in a process. And as we are in this process, we must remember that we are all children of the same God and that Jesus is seeking to restore and reconcile us all to Himself and to each other. It was Jesus’ radical inclusivity that got Him killed. We must be careful or we may one day see that the hammer and the nails are once again being raised, and in hands that belong to us.
HeartGroup Application
1. This week I want you to spend some time with Jesus. Ask Him to show you whom your own “Samaritan” is that you feel should be excluded, shunned or simply not associated with.
2. Ask Him to show you what these people look like through His eyes rather than your own.
3. Journal what He shows you and share what you discover with your HeartGroup this upcoming week.
Next week we’ll look at the shocker: This wasn’t just a Samaritan, but it was a “woman” within the context of First Century, Palestinian, Jewish, patriarchal standards.
And the week after that we’ll look at Jesus’ relation to her, not as a Samaritan, nor as a woman, but as simply a human being with a past she felt ashamed of.
Stay with me over the next few weeks.
It’s a beautiful picture of God, a beautiful picture of how God sees each of us, and a beautiful picture of how we too are to see each other. The picture will emerge, but we first have to fit together all the pieces of the puzzle.
Wherever this finds you, keep living in love, loving like Jesus, till the only world that remains is a world where love reigns.
I love you guys,
I’ll see you next week.
The Scapegoating/Betraying of Jesus at Bethesda
“Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, ‘Do you want to get well?’ ‘Sir,’ the invalid replied, ‘I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.’” (John 5.1–8)
This week, I’d like to revisit the story of John 5. Even if you are familiar with this story, I want to encourage you to give it a fresh look and see if you don’t see what I’m seeing here.
Let’s dive right in.
At first, the story appears to recount another run-of-the-mill healing by Jesus on yet another Sabbath day. But there is something else going on that a surface reading won’t catch.
Follow the story carefully.
“At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.’ But he replied, ‘The man who made me well said to me, “Pick up your mat and walk.”’ So they asked him, ‘Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?’ The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.” (John 5.9–13)
It should be remembered that in Jesus’ day, those who were crippled, blind, or lame were not looked upon with compassion or viewed simply as less fortunate than others. This was a culture built on the assumptions of Deuteronomy 28, which states clearly that if you obey, God will bless you, and if you disobey, God will curse you. So if you are crippled, if you are blind, if you are a paralytic, you must be a sinner! What else could explain your current condition?
It should also be remembered that in Jesus’ culture, “sinner” was a very different term than it is today. Today, Christians are taught that we’re all sinners. “All have sinned,” Paul says. But before Paul and the early Christian movement developed the view that everyone is a sinner, this was not the case. The Jews belonged to a community to which certain promises had been made. And although you did not follow Moses’ teachings in order to earn a place in that community, you did follow those teachings, as well as the rules of the community, in order to put on display your decision to be a part of that community. The term “sinner” was a label used for Jews who, despite belonging by birth to the covenant community, lived contrary to the Torah and rejected their place in that community. In short, the term “sinner” was not applied universally.
If you were a paralytic, in addition to suffering from your condition, you bore the stigma of being a sinner, for why else would God be punishing you? Being a paralytic (or anyone with a disability) in the time of Jesus carried with it the stigma of moral inferiority, the stigma of being a “sinner” and all that included for a Jew.
This is why the first thing Jesus says to the paralytic in Matthew 9 is that his sins are forgiven. Jesus sought first to relieve the guilt/stigma that accompanied being defined as a “sinner” in contrast to everyone else.
In John 5, Jesus heals the man. He sets him free! This freedom involves more than just the ability to walk. It is simultaneously a liberation from the “sinner” label. And what happens next? The man bumps into some fellow Jews who question him regarding why he is carrying his “burden” on the Sabbath day. Do you see what’s happening? He had just become free of the “sinner” label, and his new status is immediately threatened! He is at risk of being classified once again as a “sinner,” and he panics. He throws Jesus under the bus, saying, “The man who healed me . . . it’s His fault!” But the man cannot give his accusers a name, so the matter is dropped.
This next part is where things get interesting.
“Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, ‘See, you are well again. Stop sinning [hamartia] or something worse may happen to you.’” (John 5.14)
What the Greek actually says here is, “Behold you have been made healthy! Be guilty of wrongdoing no more or you will become something worse than a paralytic!
I want to remind you of John’s “Sin no more,” which we covered in our study on John’s use of hamartia in the eSight/podcast just a couple weeks ago. You can find it here if you need to refresh your memory: https://renewedheartministries.com/Esights/06-02-2014/
John uses hamartia differently than some of the other New Testament authors. He uses the term to refer not simply to the behavior associated with sin, but also to the guilt that comes from defining yourself as a sinner.
This man in John 5 had been a paralytic for 38 years. According to the Intervarsity Press New Testament Background Commentary, “The man had been sick there longer than many people in antiquity lived.” This means that although the man was not a paralytic from birth, he might as well have been. He had become a paralytic sometime during infancy—so there is no way this man’s own sin caused him to be a paralytic. Jesus isn’t saying, “Listen, last time you sinned, this is what happened. Now go and sin no more, or next time, something worse might happen to you.” It wasn’t the man’s personal behavior that brought about his disability. He was an infant, for crying out loud. What Jesus is doing for this paralytic is exactly what He did for the paralytic in Matthew 9. He is seeking to set him free from the moral stigma to which paralytics were subjected.
“Go and be guilty of wrong no more.” (John 5.14; Mounce’s Greek Dictionary)
Jesus is setting him free, asserting that he no longer has to define himself as a “sinner”! You don’t have to define yourself according to the way others have looked at you, Jesus is saying. But if you don’t stop defining yourself this way, if you don’t stop allowing others to determine how you see yourself, your fate will be worse than that of simply being a paralytic. What is that fate? What is that something worse? It’s in the very next verse.
“The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.” (John 5.15)
Why would this man betray Jesus—the man who had just healed him—to the very people who had accused him of breaking the Sabbath?
The answer has to do with the nature of scapegoating. When a person is scapegoated the way this man was—both for being a paralytic and, afterward, for presumably breaking the Sabbath—that person becomes desperate. There are two ways enemies become friends. The first is to identify a mutual/common enemy (see Luke 23.12). The second is to cultivate forgiveness and reconciliation. The first is very similar to how scapegoats seek to escape being attacked by the crowd. When someone is being picked on, they will instinctively endeavor to deflect the negative attention onto someone weaker than themselves. The result is that now, rather than being picked on, they have gained their oppressors’ acceptance by joining them in picking on someone else.
This is the “something worse” about which Jesus was warning the paralytic. He could be free from the “sinner” stigma in two ways. He could embrace the new identity Jesus was giving him and no longer define himself the way his religious community had. Jesus would become that which defined this man and gave him a sense of worth. Alternatively, he could convince his community to scapegoat someone else—and join his community in the practice of scapegoating. And who would this man choose to scapegoat? Who would he choose to throw under the bus? Who would he encourage his own oppressors to view as the real “sinner”?
He does exactly the opposite of the blind man in John 9, whom Jesus healed and whose story John is contrasting with this man’s. The man in John 5 chose the worse path. In an effort to be accepted by the crowd, he chose to betray, or scapegoat, the very Jesus who had just healed him.
“So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.’ For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” (John 5.16–18)
I want to draw attention to one more issue before we close this week. In response to the man’s attempt to divert the accusers’ scapegoating mechanism onto Jesus himself, Jesus does not refute the accusation, but embraces it. If he deflected the accusation, he would run the risk of turning the accusers’ attention back on the paralytic man. Jesus accepts the label of Sabbath breaker to save the man who had just betrayed him. He doesn’t deny that he broke the Sabbath. He doesn’t claim that “healing” is not a violation of Sabbath observance. On the contrary, Jesus quotes the Sabbath commandment of Exodus 20, in effect confessing that He was “working.”
In Jesus’ confession “I too am working,” the Greek word translated as “working” is ergazomai. It is the same word used in the Septuagint translation of Exodus 20.9: “Six days you labor [ergazomai] and do all your work.” Jesus is virtually saying, “Yes, I was working on the Sabbath, just as the commandment says not to.”
Just so you can get the truest sense of what Jesus is doing here, take a look at the way ergazomai is used in other New Testament passages.
Matthew 21.28: “What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work [ergazomai] in the vineyard today.’”
Matthew 25.16: “The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded [ergazomai] with them, and made five more talents.”
John 6.27: “Do not work [ergazomai] for the food that perishes . . .”
Acts 18.3: “And, because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them, and they worked [ergazomai] together—by trade they were tentmakers.”
1Corinthians 9.6: “Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living [ergazomai]?”
2Thessalonians 3.8: “And we did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked [ergazomai] night and day, so that we might not burden any of you.”
Revelation 18.17: “For in one hour all this wealth has been laid waste! And all shipmasters and seafarers, sailors and all whose trade [ergazomai] is on the sea, stood far off.”
And not only does Jesus embrace the role of scapegoat here, He actually drags God into it with Him.
“My Father is always at his work [ergazomai] to this very day, and I too am working [ergazomai].”
In John 5, God in Christ becomes the scapegoat to end all scapegoats. He, the innocent, embraces the label of “sinner,” of “Sabbath breaker.” Why?
The answer is found in the story of the unjust death and resurrection of God in Jesus. The resurrection proves that God is not to be found within the scapegoaters (whether political, economic, or religious). God is to found in the one hanging shamefully on the tree at the hands of those who put him there. This way of finding unity among ourselves by finding a common enemy and then justifying it by labeling them “sinners,” this way of organizing human societies around a common “evil,” this way of “making peace” among ourselves is capable of killing even God Himself.
We do it today. We do it economically with immigrants and foreigners. We do it politically with the Taliban. We do it religiously with the LGBTQ community. When are we going to stop? What we are doing led in the past to the unjust execution of God. We don’t see what we are doing. It is time for us to wake up.
When will we learn to abandon our preoccupation with “us” and “them”?
We are all children of the same Divine Parents. Jesus died for all of us. We are all God’s favorites. When will we learn that we don’t need to throw others under the bus to secure our place in this world?
HeartGroup Application
What does it mean to you that Jesus embraced the label of “Sabbath breaker” within a community that defined itself according to those who kept the Sabbath and those who didn’t?
In John’s contrasting story in John 9, the Pharisees say, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath” (9.16). When I was at the impressionable age of fourteen, I joined “God” in being “against” Sabbath breakers too. I was this paralytic, looking for the acceptance of God. And instead of receiving “acceptance” as a free gift, I found it in identifying a “common enemy.” God forgive me, not just for my gross ignorance of what God is like, but for my “baptizing” the way of the “accuser” rather than following the radically inclusive way of Jesus.
1. Sit with Jesus this week on the subject of scapegoating and defining others by their level of Torah observance. Jesus inaugurated a new community, centered on Himself. If there is any evaluation to be made, it is of one’s heart orientation toward Jesus. But what saves us from now scapegoating others because we feel they lack a heart orientation toward Jesus? The answer is twofold: (1) only God really knows the heart, and (2) even if another person’s heart is not oriented toward Jesus, Jesus Himself commands us to love as indiscriminately as the sun shines and the rain falls (Matthew 5.45). And in so doing we will be like God. Yes, there are those whose hearts are turned toward Jesus, and there are those whose hearts are not. But we are called to love the latter just the same. No distinction. No scapegoating allowed. There is no us and them. The sunshine proves it. The falling rain testifies to the truth of it. We are all children of the same Divine Parents. And it’s time to learn the way of love once again. Defining others by “the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” produces violence, bloodshed, death. It’s time to find our way back to the tree of life, which, remember, is for the healing of nations (Genesis 3.6 cf. Revelation 22.2).
2. Journal about what Jesus shows you as you sit with Him on these themes during your time in contemplation.
3. This upcoming week, share with your HeartGroup what you discover.
Till the only world that remains is a world where love reigns. I love you guys. See you next week.
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