Anyone reading the book of Joshua today (5:9-12) will surely feel their blood run cold. For the Jewish people, it’s a story of their finally occupying the Promised Land. But this also carries with it, as we read on in this ‘epic of salvation’, the story of the bloody destruction of the contemporaneous occupiers of the land, in Jericho and Ai and Lachish, and their commitment to continual war and atrocity for generations. Behind this story of the founding of a Jewish homeland, lies the deeper and far more appalling and tragic story of brutal destruction and war. Images of Aleppo, its lost 1000 year old Souk, and that of the once glorious cities of the Ukraine, cannot but leap to mind.
Living as I do in an island culture, successively moulded by centuries of invasions and intermingling of people, as the message of genetics in the UK makes clear, one can only wonder and express dismay at any glorification of conquest in which the so-called victors could possibly see this as a triumph, a god-given event, and we recall Tacitus the Roman in his down-beat valuation of his father-in-law’s efforts with: ‘You create a wasteland and call it peace’. Just how then can we understand the epic of the Exodus and the finding of the Promised Land? Are we still to see it as God’s gift to Israel, or rather as a terrible warning and the beginning not of possession, be it of land, temple or torah, but rather the invitation to reach out into the beyond, a journey of divesting of all we cling to so compulsively?
This surely is the message of our Gospel. (Luke 15:1-3.11-32) Luke, you will recall, was writing for his great patron Theophilus and his fellow converts from paganism; and as a central part of his presentation of Jesus he enters right into the heart of Greco-Roman society in which knowing your place in the social structure was critical to belonging. There was even a verb “verecundia” for it, related to religious devotion. But Luke knew that Jesus, God the Son, had by his terrible death and resurrection smashed through all those nice borders, be they Jewish or pagan. God’s way, for the cosmos he loved into being and redeems, simply doesn’t have any place for boundaries. So our Prodigal (and the parable was told for tax men – Imperial collaborators and all those who did not keep the Jewish law) breaks every rule in the Book! He treats his father with utter contempt, and the latter, who could have had him killed, complied with his demands and gave him his inheritance, himself breaking the law. Our Prodigal goes off to pagan territory, thus defiling himself, and squanders the fortune on pagan prostitutes; and when a famine comes he takes a job feeding pigs – abhorred by Jews - and even wishes he could eat the pig swill! Returning penitent, his father should have rejected him, but instead runs to embrace the reprobate. Semitic elite men don’t run! He has the son clothed in finest attire and throws a lavish party – law-breakers Inc! But the older brother, who had kept all the rules, is furious and remonstrates with the father and is gently but firmly put to shame. Was Jesus actually pointing to the sundering of the Judaism of his day, which went to such lengths to define right behaviour, dividing law-righteous from ‘sinners’, those unable to keep the law? Did Luke deliberately use this parable of Jesus to challenge the life-style of the converts, many of whom we know were acquisitive and on the make in the cities of the Empire? Was Luke, fully aware of the outrage of the cross, encouraging converts to face up to the meaning of the Christ event and its shattering of all our understandings of the world? ‘Your brother here was dead and has come to life.’
Certainly, for Paul (2 Corinthians 5:17-21) this was the critical feature of Christian belonging: ‘For anyone who is in Christ there is a new-creation, the old creation has gone.’ What a staggering statement for Paul, a Jew, a Pharisee to make! Significantly he says that God, working our reconciliation with himself in Christ, does not hold our faults against us; for all is made new, whole in the self-sacrifice of God the Son. Moreover, every believer now has the task of ‘handing on’ this reconciliation; we are Christ’s Ambassadors, gifted with this collaborative ministry. For Jewish Christians and pagan converts alike, a wholly new relationship with God is brought forth and the outreach of the faith was inclusive, taking in equally slaves and emperors, freed and elite. In this new creation, an entirely new world is brought into being, one not made or directed by us but wholly God’s. What we have to do is work to make that a reality.
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