Category: 14th Ave Church of Christ

Through the Eye of a Needle

Andy Warhol’s final completed commission was a series of over 60 variations on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous The Last Supper (1496). Warhol is best known for his pop art, which often includes commercial images, such as Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962). The above variation on The Last Supper combines two of Warhol’s greatest fascinations: American commercialism and Jesus of Nazareth (Warhol was a Ruthenian Rite Catholic).

This particular variation is too deep to cover sufficiently in this space, so I want to focus on the way Warhol relates the two sets of elements in the painting: the colorful commercial images–a red “59ȼ” advertisement, two pink Dove soap logos, and a blue General Electric logo–superimposed over an austere black-and-white outline of Jesus and the apostles taking the Supper.

We are intimately familiar with both sets of elements. Da Vinci’s The Last Supper is one of the most identifiable pieces of art in the world, and it represents one of the centerpieces of Christian worship. How could we not recognize our Lord revealing to the twelve that one of them would betray Him? Likewise, how many of us would fail to recognize the logos for Dove or for GE? How often have we seen “value prices” advertised in shop windows?

What shocks us is the way in which Warhol combines these otherwise familiar elements. We do not expect to see a bubblegum pink Dove logo hovering over the Lord’s right shoulder. But that is precisely the point. By shocking us in this way, Warhol is opening our eyes, that “seeing, we may perceive.”

The piece’s commercial elements do two important things: they obscure Jesus and the apostles, and they distract from Jesus and the apostles. They do both of these jobs so well that Warhol challenges us to identify the piece’s true subject. Is this a depiction of the Last Supper, like da Vinci’s original, focused on Jesus of Nazareth sharing the Passover seder with his apostles? Or is it about something commercial, essentially an ad for Dove soap or for General Electric? By making us ask these questions inside of the artwork, Warhol invites us to take them outside of the artwork and into our own lives.

Brands and their advertisements dominate modern life. This is what one means by “commercialism” in the cultural sense: that we live and experience the world predominantly in terms of profit-making mechanisms, such as brands, logos, and ads. Answering simple questions like “What shall we have for supper?” inevitably involves a parade of brand names, whether we choose to eat out at Chick-fil-A or McDonalds or to stay in and pull out some Johnsonville brats or DairyPure milk from the Frigidaire. Brands, logos, and ads are so ubiquitous that we don’t even bat an eye at them. We hardly notice them–and the incredible worldly wealth they represent.

Jesus exclaimed after the sullen departure of the rich young ruler, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Our wealth, like the logos in Warhol’s The Last Supper, distracts us from the Lord and from the inspired teachings of the apostles. It obscures what ought to be clear and plain to us about God and the life eternal.

Branding is merely repackaged materialism. It is the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life wrapped in cellophane. And it depends entirely on you thinking of your life in material terms: what shall I eat? what shall I drink? what shall I wear? Your life consists of more than these things. Turn your attention instead to Jesus and what the Supper teaches us. He gave His body and blood for us, so we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.

May God always rouse us when we sleepwalk into idolatry.

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The Beatitudes

The Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6.20-26) differ in some important ways from the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (Mat 5.2-11). Why does Luke have Jesus speaking in economic rather than spiritual terms (e.g., “Blessed are the poor” instead of “Blessed are the poor in spirit”)? Why does Luke’s account include a parallel set of woes?

Presented 11 February 2018

“Is It Legal?”

The following was published in the 14th Avenue Church of Christ bulletin on 11 February 2018.

At the beginning of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Darth Sidious instructs Trade Federation Viceroy Nute Gunray to land his invasion force on the planet Naboo. Gunray asks, “My Lord… is it… legal?” Sidious cynically responds, “I will make it legal.” This exchange, like most of The Phantom Menace, is over-the-top. The Trade Federation is obviously acting in bad faith against Naboo, and Gunray’s question is pragmatic rather than ethical or moral. He is not concerned with doing right but rather with getting away with it.

Our moral failings are usually not so obvious as Nute Gunray’s, but that doesn’t make us immune to his mode of thinking. Rather than thinking of our behavior in terms of “Should I?” we think of it in terms of “Can I?” The Bible teaches us through many examples that this type of thinking is morally disastrous.

In Daniel 6, King Darius’s advisors plot to use Daniel’s faith against him. They convince Darius to require everyone in the Empire to pray through the king. The advisors know that Daniel will disobey, so all they have to do is wait. Sure enough, Daniel refuses to break faith by praying through the king, so the advisors bring their accusation against him. The law forces the king to condemn Daniel to the lions’ den, but God delivers Daniel.

The king’s advisors do not fare so well. It was common in the law codes of the Ancient Near East to punish false witnesses by giving them the sentence of the person they had accused. Such happens to the king’s advisors at the end of Daniel 6. The king casts them into the lions’ den, where they die.

But wait–were the advisors false witnesses? Their accusation against Daniel was true; he was breaking the law. And the law was very clear: any man who did not pray through the king was to be put to death. Here we see Gunrayism on display: the advisors told the truth, but they were not honest; they kept the law, but they were not just.

In Luke 20, the scribes, the chief priests, and the Sadducees are in a bind. They want Jesus dealt with, in the same way that the Mafia deals with people. Unlike the Mafia, the Sadducees and their sycophants are too “scrupulous” to do the dirty work themselves. Rather, they are too cowardly. Luke tells us that “they feared the people” (Luke 20.19). They would also have feared the Romans, who enforced a monopoly on capital punishment. “So they watched him and sent spies, who pretended to be sincere, that they might catch him in something he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the [Roman] governor,” i.e., to be put to death (Luke 20.20).

The Sadducees take a crack at catching Jesus in His words with a question about levirate marriage and the Resurrection (Luke 20.27-33). The Sadducees, of course, don’t believe in the Resurrection. They claim to follow only the Torah. They ask about the Resurrection because they think that their question may get Jesus hanged (see Dr. David McClister’s lecture, “‘Now there were seven brothers…’: What Was So Dangerous About This Question?” for an explanation). Jesus turns the tables on them in His response: “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him” (Luke 20.37-38). Whereas the Sadducees thought to catch Jesus in his words, Jesus has now caught the Sadducees in their words: if they say that they follow only the Torah, then they must confess the Resurrection.

Ultimately, though, Jesus gives the chief priests what they want. After searching fruitlessly for false witnesses to accuse Jesus of a punishable crime, the frustrated high priest gets up and says to Jesus, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” Jesus Himself utters the words that will get Him hanged: “You have said so” (Mat 26.63-64). The priests then deliver Jesus over to Pilate, and He is hanged, and their hands are clean. Everything is nice and “legal.” But these false witnesses bear the penalty on their own heads, for “whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Mat 10.33).

Gunrayism is a specific kind of legalism. All legalism seeks to reduce the broad moral character of God’s Law to a narrow set of rules to follow. Legalism makes the Faith into a checklist. If I do this thing and that thing (or five things), and if I don’t do this, that, and the other thing, then that makes me faithful to God. I have done what is legal. So did King Darius’s advisors. So did the scribes, the chief priests, and the Sadducees. But in the end, they all faced the Lion. And so shall we.

Tales of Helplessness and Hospitality

The following was published in the 14th Ave. Church of Christ bulletin on 4 February 2018.

Today we consider three hospitality tales in the Hebrew Scriptures. Our first tale takes place in Genesis 19, where righteous Lot “entertains angels unawares,” to use the the Hebrew writer’s phrase. Lot insists that the strangers spend the night in his home rather than in the town square, and we soon discover why. The men of Sodom want to take advantage of them because they are foreigners.

Lot enrages the men of Sodom by refusing to turn over his house guests. The Sodomites accuse Lot of being an uppity foreigner and tell him that he will suffer a fate worse than a foreigner at their hands.

The Lord had already decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah before this episode, but this is the icing on the cake. Lot has shown the strangers mercy and hospitality, so the Lord shows him mercy. The cruel Sodomites, on the other hand, see an opportunity to have their way with some hapless foreigners, so the angels destroy them.

Lot’s daughters, having fled into the hills with their father, realize that he is in trouble: he has no heir, no wife to give him an heir, and no prospects for getting a wife. Their “creative” solution is to get their father drunk and make heirs for him themselves. Thus they bear Lot two son: Moab and Ben-ammi, the fathers of the Moabites and the Ammonites. (By the way, note the irony here: Lot’s daughters have taken advantage of him in the same way the men of Sodom sought to take advantage of the angels.)

Our second tale takes place several centuries later. Abraham’s descendants are sojourning out of Egypt toward the promised land, and they come upon the lands of the Moabites and the Ammonites, Lot’s descendants. Far from welcoming their kin hospitably as Lot welcomed the angels, Moab and Ammon fear Israel and seek to destroy them and curse them (Num 21-22).

This complete lack of hospitality is revisited upon Moab and Ammon after Israel settles in the promised land. The Law commands, “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation. For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you.” (Dtr 23.3-4).

The third tale takes place generations after the Exodus, during the time of the judges. An Israelite, Elimelech, sojourns to the land of Moab with his wife and sons. Elimelech dies, leaving his family to fend as foreigners in Moab. The sons marry Moabite women, then also die, leaving behind three widows: Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth. Naomi, unable to live as both a widow and a foreigner, turns back to Israel. She tells her daughters-in-law to return to their fathers, because they will be both widows and foreigners if they travel with Naomi to Israel.

Ruth decides to stick with her mother-in-law and to take the God of Israel as her God. She predictably faces starvation in Israel. The Law compelled Israel to care for widows and foreigners, but each man in Israel was a law unto himself in those days.

Naomi’s kinsman, Boaz, shows Ruth incredible care. He goes above and beyond the Law’s requirements, allowing Ruth to drink from the workers’ water, dine with him, and glean more than her due (Ruth 2.9, 14, 15-16; cf. Lev 23.22; Dtr 24.19). Ruth recognizes his great favor, exclaiming, “Why have I found favor in your eyes, that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner?” (Ruth 2.10). Beyond all this, Boaz marries Ruth–again, above and beyond the requirement of the Law.

These three stories about Lot and his descendants give us three angles on the plight of the foreigner and what it means to be hospitable. Ruth shows us how dire the plight of the foreigner can be, uprooted, a stranger. The Moabites show us that our fear of the foreigner isn’t an excuse for hatefulness. Lot shows us that hospitality is a saving grace that bears its own reward; Lot thought that he was saving some strangers, but they ended up saving him!

Of course, we must remember where this all heads: Ruth is the great-grandmother of King David, whose lineage gives birth to Jesus of Nazareth. This same Jesus commands us, His followers, to live up to the Law like Boaz did: to consider the plight of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner; to protect them and provide for them; and to include them rather than holding them at arm’s length. The alternative is to be like the Sodomites or the Moabites.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Heb 13.2).

Header image: “Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab,” William Blake (1795)