The Martyr as Ransomer

Why Did Jesus Die? Pt. 2

Jesus dies as both Witness to and Martyr for his vision of God's Reign "on earth as is in heaven" and very soon his death is seen by followers as having redemptive, "ransoming" power. Where did such an idea come from?

It may seem strange to us today, but in ancient Judaism, martyrdom became associated with ransom and redemption. The blood of the Maccabean martyrs, who died defending faith and culture threatened by an aggressive Greek paganism, had "ransomed" the nation, some said. They saw these martyrs as dying to ‘ransom’, to deliver, the people from oppression, having the same power as the Temple sacrifices for the ritual the sins of the nation. And they were onto something. Both Witness and Martyrdom can save situations and people from danger, ruin, and destructiveness.

As the story in 4th Maccabees, written between the Maccabean martyrdoms and the time of Jesus puts it:

The tyrant (Antiochus Epiphanies) himself and all his council marveled at (the martyrs) endurance, because of which they now stand before the divine throne and live through blessed eternity. These, then, who have been consecrated for the sake of God, are honored, not only with this honor, but also by the fact that because of them our enemies did not rule over our nation, the tyrant was punished, and the homeland purified -- they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sins of our nation, preserving Israel that previously had been afflicted. (4 Maccabees 17:17-22)

Such an understanding of martyrdom—how the martyr’s life and death help “redeem” Israel, and gain him admittance to the highest heaven—may well have influenced the understanding the death of Jesus in the aftermath of the crucifixion.

We don’t use such language, but maybe we should in order to see what Witness really does: Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights martyrs died to ‘ransom’ African-Americans from Jim Crow. The suffragettes who were imprisoned and terribly abused under Woodrow Wilson suffered ‘for/because the sins’ of the nation and helped win the vote for women. And such sacrifices still have the power to move other people into living into more just and compassionate behavior. Just so, the New Testament says that (Jesus) gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. (Titus 2:14)

Causes require martyrs in both senses—witnesses and people willing to put lives on the line in order to change things, whether it be drunk driving, or child abuse or corporate corruption. Many benefits of the world we live in come from the life-blood of the martyrs people who consecrated themselves to a cause to better human life in the world. They ransom people, redeem people, from ignorance, destructive behavior, or worse.

Jesus' willingness to die for his transformational cause, not just the message of resurrection alone, inspired thousands to join the movement: "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," beginning with Jesus himself.

Next post: Jesus' whole ministry as "ransom"

Why Did Jesus Die?

Why did Jesus die? More pointedly, why does Jesus seem to court death in the last weeks of his life? There are of course a whole range of doctrinal answers to that question through Christian history, and I propose in this series of Passiontide blog posts to explore how each can shed some light on Jesus’ last days, based on various New Testament studies.


I. He Chose Be A Martyr

To start with the most obvious: Jesus continually rattled the cage of people in power, in the end courting martyrdom. He was both Witness to the nearness and necessity of God’s justice and love being realized in the human community and a Martyr to the cause of that Message. The Greek word martys, of course, carries both meanings, because bold witness can lead to martyrdom.

He was not killed because of his moral and spiritual teachings. They are very much in harmony with the rabbinical teachings of this day. His disputes about the Law fit into the pattern of rabbinical discussions about what true obedience to the Torah involves.

But he goes further than rabbinical dispute by ‘speaking with authority,’ clearly adopting the mantle of a prophet ("and more than a prophet"). That’s a dangerous move. Means you ‘go from preachin’ to meddlin‘(as we used to put it in the South) particularly in socio-economic matters. Meddlin' and rabble rousin'. He starts what looks like a grassroots movement to change how people relate personally, spiritually and economically. His followers form an extended communal fellowship of mutuality, compassion, justice.

This is a challenge to both the civil and religious authorities who are understandably afraid of Jesus and his movement and on high alert for the Passover Festival. His hinting around about being the expected Messiah, and the crowd's response create a real threat of civil disorder.

Let's be clear. There's no such thing as a “spiritual but not political” Messiah in first century Judea. To claim the mantle of Messiah in any way means challenges the current order of things. Jesus tells the authorities that their regime is corrupt and needs to go. His cleansing of the Temple and confrontation with the High Priesthood seals his fate, especially since there had just been a civil insurrection at the Sukkot festival the previous autumn.

So, finding himself outnumbered and outgunned, Jesus surrenders his fate to God in the faith that his sacrifice will be used for God’s saving purposes. I’m not at all sure he started out to do this. He was sent to gather “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” into a renewed community of love and obedience. But this is the way the ministry has gone, and he struggles to accept it. And understands that his death can have redemptive power? But how did he get the idea that martyrdom itself could be redemptive?

Next post: Martyrdom as "ransom for sin."

The Family of Jesus and his Radical Movement

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 5

....and Mary pondered all these things in her heart. (Luke 2:19)

What if we “post-critical” readers of the Bible considered that the Birth narratives might contain important historical clues about the origins of the ministry and mission of Jesus?

Granted, the stories in Matthew and Luke are heavy with symbolism and are clearly the product of careful, midrashic crafting, and contain amazingly miraculous events. That is not my concern, however. I leave all that aside for readers to consider according to their sense of God and the possible.

What interests me here is hints about the family and people they knew or encountered. Might these stories have deeper historical roots than modern sophisticates usually consider?

What I mean is this. What if Jesus were born into a family that was part of the “third force” in Second Temple Judaism, not part of the establishment of Sadducees and Pharisees who were represented in the Sanhedrin. This was the disenfranchised melange of messiah-expecting, sometimes revolutionary groups that ranged from the Dead Sea Scroll community on the one hand to the Zealots on the other. What if these stories are about a child who was considered, by that family and their co-religionists, a special lad—a ‘child of destiny’—destined for leadership? *

The first century Jewish ‘eschatological’ community

My first clue to this possibility came from pondering the verse in Luke where we’re told that the prophetess Hannah “spoke of the child to all those in Jerusalem who were waiting for the Redemption of Israel” (Luke 2:38). Who were these folks? The extensive scholarship now available about Jewish sects in this period gives a solid historical context to Luke’s comment.

Those “waiting for the Redemption” expected a wide variety of complementary and contradictory “redemptions,” all the way from a military leader like David to the descent in human form of an angelic redeemer; and there’s tantalizing new evidence that one expectation was of a ‘Great High Priest’ after the order of Melchizedek who would offer a once-for-all atonement for Israel’s sins.** The adult Jesus walked into a maze of archetypal images just waiting to be applied to him and his mission.

The stories speak of a mother who “pondered in her heart” some special identity for her son. Is that so implausible? She would hardly be the first mother in history to feel and foster in her child a sense of special identity and destiny—more especially so if she were one of those “waiting for the redemption of Israel.” Nor is it implausible that she dreamt some startling dream about the boy. After all, modern bookshelves are filled with tales of angel dreams, angel appearances, whatever one might think of such phenomena.

Jesus, errant 'wunderkind' of a movement?

If Jesus came from a family that already had a sense of being part of God’s move to turn Israel in a different direction, this would make a lot of sense of the family’s clear distress about the direction Jesus’ ministry takes. They feel he’s not exercising leadership the way they think he should, just as John the Baptist reportedly felt.

His mother is pictured bugging him to make a self-disclosing move at a clan wedding. (John 2:1-11). We’re told a whole party of “his own people” goes off to bring him back by force because they think he’s “beside himself” (Mark 3:21). And the Fourth Gospel pictures Jesus being taunted by his brothers for not declaring himself more openly. Might “they did not believe in him” be better translated “they did not trust him” (John 7:5), that is, to do things right?

Mother Mary, brother James and “the brothers” are certainly right there on the scene in the weeks after the resurrection appearances, and James puts himself forth powerfully as a major leader of the movement’s Jerusalem commune. They seem to have a stake in his movement.

Yes, the stories are patently loaded with theological symbolism, and influenced by who Jesus became and was believed to be. But Luke does claim he consulted “eyewitnesses” who had been with the movement “from the beginning” (Luke 1:1-3). ***

For my money, at least, these speculations make clearer sense of the adult Jesus’ reportedly strained relationship with his family, and demonstrate that, at age 30, he didn’t have a sudden “break” with a more normal childhood and young adulthood, but rather an evolving sense of how he might serve the God he had been told had special plans for him.

And, of course, such “speculations” have the added merit of actually hugging the shape of the Story the first generation of Christians told about the man and his birth.

_____


* In fact, just such ‘child of destiny’ scenario emerged among non-establishment spiritual types in the early 20th century in India. The noted Indian spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo was dubbed a ‘child of destiny’ and groomed to be the Great World Teacher of the Theosophical Movement by leaders like Annie Besant. In adulthood, Aurobindo broke with his handlers and struck out on his own as a less exalted spiritual teacher.

** See Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest

*** Ancient historians were likely more interested in the facts than some modern scholars seem prepared to believe. See the chapter on ancient historiography in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham. See also Margaret Barker, Christmas: The Original Story**

Jesus, Yule and Life-Renewal

Reflections for the 12 Days of Christmas: 4

As we unpacked our trove of Christmas ornaments and placed them, one by one, on the fresh-cut Tree, special moments and people from the past came up from memory to meet me.

This half-eggshell bird’s nest ornament was the gift of a parishioner who crafted her own ornaments as gifts each year. That dachshund in the red Volkswagen with the Christmas tree on top was one of the many annual ornament gifts my wife’s mother began to give annually to her children as they started their own homes. The tiny red bell—broken this year, alas—was “my” childhood ornament to hang on the tree even as a toddler, and had come to me through my mother from her own childhood in rural Tennessee. We have a treasury of ornaments which turn our Christmas tree into a rich tapestry of relationships and remembrances.

No Puritan simplicity desired.....

My appreciation was heightened this year by mild annoyance at a pre-Christmas blog by a Presbyterian minister proudly announcing that “as for me and my house we will abstain from Christmas.” So corrupt, he said, had its commercialization become that there would be no gifts. No Tree. No decorations. Nada. Nothing. How could he give his children gifts when other children in the world were disadvantaged? “How can he send them to school, then,” I wondered, “when so many go uneducated?” In the place of Christmas, they had put to together a “wish list” a bit like John Lennon’s famous “Imagine” when hoped for everything from the abolition of the sex slave trade to world peace.

Couldn’t he have modeled a moderate Christmas, instead? A few gifts and contributions to the causes that serve his “wish list?” Fine. It’s a free country. Do what you wish. But his righteous rant against the “festival” aspects of Christmas—and the wider Mid-Winter Yule Festival which is its seasonal context—only increased my appreciation for being part of a long and deep strand of Christianity that doesn’t shy at adorning fir trees with light and color, enjoying the figgy pudding, rum and all, and relaxing into some general good times in the dark of the year.

Not that my Calvinist dissenter is the first to decry Christmas. The Puritans abstained in pious horror from the clearly pagan roots of the midwinter festivities surrounding the alleged birthday of Jesus. And the patristic Church placed Christmas on the Winter Solstice, hard on the Roman Saturnalia, as a fast day to keep the faithful from frivolity. Only as the power of pagan religion waned (and was suppressed, to be honest) did it become safe to tolerate the blending of the natural human urge to celebrate with lights and food during the cold and dark of the year with the celebration of the Nativity.

Pagan roots, to be sure, but why not?

And a good thing, too, so far as I’m concerned. My spiritual father “was a wandering Aramean,” as the book of Deuteronomy puts it, but the spiritual mother of the mid-winter festival was a European pagan, someone devoted to the rhythms of nature and the more earthy needs of the human soul. The spiritual and psychological genius of the Church Kalendar of feasts and fasts that arose from that covertly interfaith marriage consists in keeping the prophetic witness of the Hebrew tradition in dynamic balance with the nature rooted witness of “earth-based spirituality”.

For me, that glowing Tree in my living room is not only an offering to honor the Babe who carries the “ever-greening” powers of the soul (as Hildegaard of Bingen might put it). Garnished with lights large and small, and in a multitude of creatures represented in the ornaments, it also symbolizes the cosmic Tree of Life itself, that ever-renewing miracle of the life in the universe, where the death of the first stars gives birth the elements that make up everything, including the hands that hung the decorations and the eyes that behold them.

So it’s not hard, at New Year’s, to see it is an entirely apt symbol of the life-renewal, the letting-go of the past and the leaning toward the future, that is also part of the Good News of Christmastide.

Spray Effects

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 3

When Jesus said that the effect of his message would bring a sword of division between family members—and by implication, other groupings as well—he spoke truth.

The this-world effects of the movement that carried his message have, time and again, sparked just such divisions. Sometimes they have been Jesus-followers clashing with each other. The Christian witness to prophetic values has provoked social division and outright hostility to the messengers in every century. And, on occasion, total innocents have been caught in the backwash from the conflicts, or been the outright victims of those thinking they are serving God.

The Christmastide calendar plunges straight from angels and shepherds to the martyrdom of Stephen, takes a breath for the remembrance of John the “son of thunder” (who once wished fire from heaven to descend on a Samaritan village and was imprisoned in his old age), and takes up the theme of conflict again with the slaughter of the Bethlehem innocents on December 28. No breather the next day for the liturgically observant: December 29 remembers the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by henchman of King Henry II—the fall-out from a falling-out of two former bosom buddies who found themselves at loggerheads over the border between church hierarchy and the crown.

Unanticipated consequences

All these are unanticipated consequences from the life of Jesus and the movement he began. Life is like that; there is no great good that happens in this world that does not have unintended consequences, sometimes very evil ones. As a young seminary student recovering from a rigid, black-and-white, good or evil moralistic background, my moral theology professor’s observation that all actions, both good and evil, have an unpredictable “spray effect” was a true word of wisdom. I have never forgotten the lesson. It illumined baffling moments in my own life where a word or deed meant for good had gone sadly awry, and shed light on so many results of historical events, especially those undertaken in the passion of idealism.

The fervently noble, reformist intentions of Prohibition resulted in a social disaster, making the law a joke among the majority of citizens, and opening the city gates to the rise of massive organized crime. When human beings go on all-out crusades against vice and evil the cure can become as bad as the crime. Jesus himself may well have seen this, for he tells us, mysteriously, "do not resist evil" (Matthew 5:3) and reveals his m.o. is to “bind” the Devil and rob his house, not seek to destroy him completely (Matthew 12:29).

And yet, in spite of Jesus’ apparent intention for non-violent divisions, leaving judgments up to God, his life, from the beginning, had a spray effect of violence, at least as the Story is told. No angel asked permission of the Bethlehemites for the heavenly king to be born in their obscure cave-stable; yet blood ran in the streets two years later as the tyrant king sought to eliminate any threat to his power. The crowds flocking to be near the miracle-worker Jesus were so thick on one occasion people “trampled one another” (Luke 12:1). Such crowd pandemonium caused the Pharisees to accuse Jesus of being possessed by the “Lord of the flies” (Luke 11:24-25). More division.

For every action, there is a reaction; and it is not always clear that the actor’s push is purely good and the reactor’s push-back wholly evil. Values clash, and motives are seldom simple. That’s life. Even hermits have to deal with the disagreements and divisions in their own minds.

"The bestial floor"

The message of Christmas—like the message of the Hebrew Bible as a whole—is that God is willing to mix it up with the whole messy business. The underlying, overarching love, wisdom, and goodness out of which the worlds are born chooses not to be aloof the ambiguities that arise in pursuing the Good.

The birth of the Babe of Bethlehem, that “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” as Yeats puts it in The Magi, manifests that the Divine is not divorced from the difficulties and ambiguities we face. And the Babe, indeed all of Scripture, promises that through all the mayhem that even the best actions and accomplishments can provoke, threads of grace are seeking to “work for good” and bring about unanticipated blessings. The Incarnation is into this mess, nothing less. Nor does the Divine seek to escape accountability for its own actions as it participates in the planetary mayhem.

A great spiritual teacher once suggested to me that one of the many sins of humanity that Jesus bore to the cross was the one caused by the spray effect of his birth—the slaughter of the Bethlehem infants.

Whatever else that might mean, I think it shows that their wounds—all wounds—become his. Which is to say the wounds of our inevitable divisions, conflicts and hatreds are carried in the heart of God, who like us, has regrets.

Divinely Human, Humanly Divine

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 2

John, one of the two sons of the fisherman Zebedee—the “sons of thunder” according to Jesus—seems to have been part of the same radical, anti-establishment Judaism that propelled Stephen the deacon to his lynching death. Reportedly a follower of the fiery John Baptizer before he met Jesus, he was a passionate devotee of the dream of the Kingdom, extreme in his judgments and his loves.

The gospel traditionally attributed to him is also the most extreme and passionate of the Four, with its Qumran-like contrasts of light and darkness, good and evil, love and (though it is never named as such) hate. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the Fourth Gospel contains the most passionately exalted assertions about the nature of the man Jesus, who is seen as nothing less than the eternal Word or Wisdom of God, the divine Glory or Shekinah, “pitching its tent” among us—that is, shining from the heart of our very own fleshly nature.

Divinization of the human in pre-Christian Jewish tradition

It may very well be the case that such an exalted view of a Tzaddik, or Righteous One, is part-and-parcel of the “third force Judaism” in which John, John Baptizer and Jesus all moved, distinct from the aristocratic ruling Sadducees or the law-codifying Pharisees, rather than being an import from the Greek world, as many biblical critics have contended. In addition to the startling revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls (whoever imagined Jewish monks, after all, or "unbloody sacrifices" of bread and wine?) more than two generations of Christian scholars have now revealed more fully the apocalyptic and mystical landscape of “inter-testamental” Judaism, in which the “divinization” of great spiritual heroes like Enoch and Melchizedek is a major theme.

The tales about both involve ascending into heaven, clothing with divine glory and enthronement in power and glory, and sometimes return to earth. Enoch himself was said to have returned to earth after his heavenly glorification, cloaking his Glory, to teach the way of righteousness (1). So also, the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel claims to have had a heavenly ascension experience during his lifetime. (John 3:12-13).

According to the newly emergent, but strong, school of ‘early Christology’ scholars, Jesus may have lived in a stream of Judaism quite ready to believe that a human being manifesting such Spirit-power in healing, preaching and moments of spiritual rapture, was nothing less than the earthly presence of a humanly divine and divinely human Light and Life (2). The Jews, unlike the Greeks, were content to assert a paradox like this, rather than trying to figure out the exact relationship between humanity and divinity, a task which led to many later, and perhaps unnecessary, theological headaches.

Beholding with the eyes of love

Which brings me back to John, traditionally believed to be the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved.’ Whatever this may mean beyond ‘his favorite,’ it surely implies some kind of affectionate relationship that opens the eyes of the lover to see the gold at the heart of the beloved in ways others may not see as clearly. Infatuation may indeed blind us to our love-objects faults, but enduring love sees into the soul. Such love is likely to include moments of ‘ordinarily transfigured’ vision when the Beloved is adored and praised—which is to say, worshipped (as in the old English form of the wedding vow: “with my body I thee worship”).

The English mystic and author Charles Williams sees such love, which can appear in deep friendships as well as enduring sexual partnerships, as humanity’s “most common experience” of the Divine Love. For the passionate and 'beloved' John, direct experiences of the earthly form of Jesus as the "tent" of Divine Glory—-the way Jesus smiled, walked and laughed as well as his mighty deeds and powerful words—-may well have been far more important proof of a divine humanity than any stories of Enoch or Melchizedek.

In Jesus’ presence, John had felt the actual embrace of the Divine Glory, “grace upon grace” (John 1:16) He was among the first to know this, but he was not the last, by any means.

____

1. When Enoch was taken into heaven God enthroned him, “set a crown upon his head in the presence of the heavenly family and called him the little lord....his body was turned into celestial fire--his flesh became flame, his veins fire, his bones glimmering coals, the light of his eyes heavenly brightness, his eyeballs torches of fire, his hair a flaring blaze, all his limbs and organs burning sparks, and his frame a consuming fire.” See Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews (online at http://philologos.org).

2. Notable among the ‘early Christology’ scholars (who rattle both the cage of conventional orthodoxy and minimalist interpretations) are: Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament; Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God; The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy; and The Risen Lord: The Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith; Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism.

First Blood

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 1


The white joy of Christmas turns blood red on the First Day after Christmas as the Christian movement remembers its first martyr, Stephen the Deacon. His death at the hands of an enraged mob marks the beginning of wrestling match between the movement Jesus inaugurated with the harsh realities of history—the first, that is, since the Master’s similar death.

The brash young man—surely he was young, being so impetuous—had been chosen to handle the distribution of food among elderly, widowed women in the burgeoning Jerusalem commune created by the people of the Way of Jesus while the men of the commune’s Council—the Twelve—took care of presenting the Message.

But Stephen just couldn’t stick to his assignment and began to debate critics of the movement. One thing led to another and he found himself “speaking truth to power” in a way sure to offend — and was summarily slaughtered by a enraged mob of Judeans not happy to be dubbed, along with their ancestors, the enemies of God’s purposes.

The first blood of the movement had been shed—after the blood of the Instigator. The first blood was followed by more as “a great persecution arose” against the Commune, leading to its dispersal to smaller towns in Judea, Samaria, Galilee and beyond.

Jesus: Movement Initiator

It’s fashionable in many liberal circles to say that Jesus didn’t start a church; but one of the things I think we can be quite certain of historically is that he instigated a movement.

The Jesus movement (according to its own records) was organized enough after his death to receive thousands of new members into its charitable programs. Organized, as in ruling council, codes of conduct, ceremonial meals, financial folks, the whole ball of wax—apparently like other Second Temple era anti-establishment movements, like the Community of the Scrolls at Qumran.

It might be nice to dis-identify Jesus with his movement; indeed, it is one of the most popular themes of some liberal religious scholarship and fantasy—a Jesus free from all that the movement, a.k.a. “the church,” has become in history. Some Christians scholars are have alleged that even the Gospels don’t represent Jesus, but are full of the mis-impressions of his followers and their converts. The “real” Jesus was so much better than that terrible movement, it would seem.

A bit too convenient, this fashion; for it allows the whole idea of Jesus to float in some non-historical hyperspace, vulnerable to fashioning in the image of the beholder. As unromantic as it may seem, the institutionalization of the message of Jesus is actually part and parcel of what Christians call “incarnation” — for institutions are the bodies that ideas wear in history. The message of Jesus had to become institutionally incarnate, or it would just be a set of glittering ideals.

The Challenge of Historical Incarnation

The difficulty the Christian movement has had living into the full implications of what he said simply shows how hard it is for souped-up primates like us to see any further than our own immediate interests. The “failures of the churches” are an inevitable part of any movement that hopes to have an influence on history. Movements always need reforming, refreshing, restoring to a rooting in their original goals. Or else they’re not worth living for.

Or dying for, as so many thousands have through the centuries. The early community Stephen served had its own flaws, and would develop many more. But Stephen had been captivated by the message—Jesus’ vision of what human community could be—and for it he risked his life. In so doing he demonstrated that the lovely birth we celebrate had real-life consequences for Jesus and anyone willing to sign on to his own crazy, daring hope: that humanity might actually turn back from its foolish ways and choose love over hate, peace over war, and justice over oppression. The sort of thing that might just save us from bringing the whole planetary house down around us.