"And no one after drinking old wine desires new…"
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
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.
The Pharisees bring up a good point in Luke 5.27-39: of all the things that Jesus could be doing with sinners, why is he eating and drinking?
Presented 28 January 2018
Christians are to be marked out, says Jesus, by the way in which they love each other, not only by their confession that “Jesus is Lord.”
Bruce K. Waltke, “My Philosophy of Christian Education”
The Hebrew writer begins the Faith Hall of Fame with Abel, of whom he says, “He being dead yet speaks.” The image of dead Abel speaking reminds us of what God told Cain in Genesis 4, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” The Hebrew writer is being a little clever with us and reminding us, subtly, that the Faith is no easy thing. If you’re Abel, it gets you murdered.
The Hebrew writer slowly abandons this subtlety as he reminds us that the patriarchs “all died in faith” and that Moses chose “to be mistreated with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.” He quickly crescendos from there, reminding us of “Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets–who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.” The Faith is not for the fainthearted.
But if those verses are a crescendo, what follows is a trumpet blast, a full-on assault:
Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated–
You get the picture. The Hebrew writer has circled back to Abel’s experience with the Faith: sometimes it gets you murdered.
The Hebrew writer pivots to his next point by reminding us that the faithful dead are still with us, saying, “…we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses….” What are they witnessing?
They witness to us that the Faith is hard, that it is full of trials, suffering, even death. Anyone who wants to take up the mantle of “Disciple of Jesus” must count the cost, as Jesus himself warned:
Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” (Luke 14:27-29)
They witness against the world. Jesus says that faithless men were responsible for murdering all of God’s righteous prophets, from Abel to Zechariah, and that the blood of the prophets was on them and their descendants (Matt. 23:29-36). Likewise, the Hebrew writer tells us that “the world was not worthy” of the faithful people that it killed.
Finally, the faithful dead witness us, their descendants in faith. They do this because they continue to speak in an entirely different sense than we have considered heretofore. Yes, metaphorically, they continue to “speak” through their example, our memory of their words and deeds. But if we believe Jesus–and what else can it mean for us to belong to the Faith?–then we believe that they literally speak, because they are still alive.
The faithful dead are a cloud of witnesses all around us in the fullest sense then. They confront us both with their past life and with our present life. Their faith often highlights our own shortcomings, so we seek to imitate them as they imitated Christ (1 Cor. 11:1). Beyond that, we have confidence that they still live, that they are still part of the Church, because the Church spans space and time and unites the living with the dead. I suspect that those who have gone before us are watching us and rooting for us. So let us take courage and endure.
Hebrews 11 calls us to consider our own legacy as we consider these Heroes of Faith. What will we be leaving behind for our children in the Faith? Will they think on us and take courage? Will they see in us the patience of Job? The humility of Moses? The wisdom of Solomon?
The Hebrew writer finishes by urging us to consider the Founder and Forerunner of our shared Faith, Jesus of Nazareth, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.” The writer chides his audience, saying that, unlike righteous Abel, “you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.”
They had not. Have you?
The Good Wine 