Frances Flatman's Reflection on the Readings for next weekend.
I have just finished reading for the third time, Peter Brown’s wonderful ‘Through the eye of a Needle’. It charts the ways in which Late Antique Christians gradually shifted their behaviour in relation to the world around them, and the Church understanding of what it meant to live in the expectation of eternal life with God. There were considerable shifts in understanding between the 4th-6th centuries. All in some way or other were interpretations of the scriptures, and of course such valuations have guided belief among Jews and Christians long before this period and subsequently. Are financial outlays to such institutions as synagogue or church simply what decent believers do as part of belonging to society, or is one ‘buying’ one’s place in heaven? And of course, this relates more widely to the whole of our behaviour too.
Leviticus (19:1-2.17-18, note the jump) is part of the long Holiness Code which fills what we have as chapters 17-26 of this biblical work. Our section is part of that great list of behaviours which made human beings ‘righteous’ or God-fearing. Israelites understood the divine as infinitely superior, and of course when this document was written some time after the Exodus much of it is not about union with God but rather how one lived decently in ways which held together this developing society, with its cities and towns as well as agriculture. It’s about how we ensure families gel together. Much of Leviticus is therefore XX proscriptive and we must understand all this as relating to a period long before any belief in eternal life with God, so God is Lord of the universe and we obedient underlings within his world, if we want to grow and thrive. Infringements brought severe punishment, anything from illness to invasion and enslavement by foreign powers.
Jesus however, (Matthew 5:38-48) understood things quite differently, for for him we human beings are destined to share the life of God eternally in heaven, indeed, he saw us as becoming ‘like’ God himself. This must have been thought a shattering presumption by many Jews, which is why Matthew frequently uses the word ‘scandal’ in relation to their reaction to Jesus, and why the leaders frequently accused Jesus of healing by demonic power. Those infinite barriers between us and God have been taken down in God’s act of sending his immortal Son to share human life, and so live it out that he, utterly unthinkable in Jewish belief, becomes completely vulnerable to the malice, hatred and thoroughly rotten behaviour of which we are all capable, simply to draw us into the life and being of God as he is, ‘full of grace and truth’. This is why Jesus dies on the cross, for him there is no last minute reprieve, no ram caught in a thicket to take his place, he is utterly destroyed by the world and, absolutely different, yet by his total submission redeems the world and makes us capable of salvation.
Jesus’ Beatitudes and his burrowing into their meaning which we have followed over the weeks develops and makes relevant the Levitical code as it brushes up against contemporary society. Here we find Jesus exploring the very ancient ruling of Hammurabi, a ruler of the Fertile Crescent who sought to prevent what we call honour killings and their seemingly endless generation of violence. Originally the king simply decreed equal harm to be done to perpetrators as the fair but brutal end of serious disputes. But Jesus was not into simply making us nicer and society more stable, even if that were ever possible. He came to be the one from God and his equal whose purpose was to live out the life of the divine amidst fallen humanity. Palestine at his time was occupied by the Romans, a brutal conquering people building a huge empire. Might enabled them to bully and terrorise the local inhabitants, and as we might expect, this frequently led to riots, revolt or murder and the disappearance of enemies.
Jesus does not offer means of compromise with the occupying forces, but insists on total submission, something we shall encounter this Passiontide as we see him falsely accused, tortured and crucified. So Jesus does not offer sensible negotiation as the solution to Israel’s issues with its occupiers, but the pattern of the life and death of God the Son. Jews at this time lived in a world where they might be robbed or forced to labour for the Romans; Jesus simply advocates full submission. He insists on not hatred for enemies, the commonly accepted behaviour, but rather the more radical love and prayer which will be his own behaviour at his passion. Clearly any Jew, following Leviticus, would have thought Jesus simply out of his mind and totally impractical; but it appears that, as the Beatitudes have continued, Jesus’ interpretation of them has become increasingly radical as he takes us out into our intended relationship with the Father, showing what our journey to godlikeness embraces. ‘You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ We’ve come a long way from even Our Lord’s teaching on divorce or avoidance of law suits, and have entered the scandalously, the crazy difference between us and God, with Jesus’ own conviction that becoming like the Father is precisely God’s choice for each of us. The life of grace is not a soft option, nor something whereby we just get a bit nicer, it’s about our being made divine which is ultimately why it’s not about us and our choices.
This is the reason why Paul (1 Corinthians 3:16-23) speaks to the Church in Corinth where they seem to mess up continually, ‘Didn’t you realise that you were God’s temple and that the Spirit of God was living among you?’ He goes on…. ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God.’ We fail to appreciate the stunning power of Paul’s claim where for pagan or Jew, temples were sacred space, totally other and entered at one’s peril! Something very different is going on here. He is not simply rejecting the various philosophies of the city, but, as we see, even the divisions within the church; and as we saw last week he relies only on the cross of Christ which runs quite counter to everything we take as important as we consider how we should act, and consider what reasoning people should do. Throwing oneself away in Christ, as he has done to the Father in utter trust and adoration and submission, can only ever be a very different act of surrender from those we make, be it giving up chocolate for Lent or even working for the good of the planet. Our choiced actions can only ever be a tinkering at the edges of our cosmic meeting with God who is utterly different, yet who deigned to meet us in the human person of his Son.
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