Reading politics in the Bible

About the only way I have been able to break open the Bible is to somehow relate it to the urgencies of my own time, to read the Bible and the front page of the newspapers at the same time, as I think Karl Barth once said. Tom Buechele, the Rector at St. John's here in Bisbee, a friend and an Espicopal priest, asked me to serve as leader and speaker at the church this Sunday. I intend to briefly discuss a "political reading" of some of the Lectionary readings of the day. This blog contains the gist of what I intend to say.

Our reading today in Acts 16: 16-34 about Paul exorcising a demon from a money-making fortune-telling slave girl and for his trouble getting dragged before the authorities, stripped, beaten and thrown in jail prompts me talk about similar stories where Jesus’ healing and teaching stirred up political conflict. I’m sure we have all noticed how frequently the Bible is about politics and the authorities. I want to explore this a little more this morning, in the context of the healing stories of Jesus and also his ideas about what he called the Kingdom of God.

The Gospels and the Letters are set in the frontiers of the Roman Empire, including Galilee and Judea and in areas that are now Greece and Turkey and some of the Balkans. The Romans were brutal and skillful conquerors that demanded much tribute, in taxes and in loyalty and worship for the Emperor. Jesus preached to poor peasants in rural Galilean synagogues, open-air communal meeting spaces, places where the communities were governed and where Torah was recited.

I. To begin, politics to Jews was comparing God’s justice and human injustice in Israel. Jesus’ ministry occurred at a time when there were many versions of justice and politics in Israel, many kingdom agendas as someone recently wrote.

Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God was shockingly different than that of the Pharisees, or the Zealots, or the Essenes, all who advocated different versions of a kingdom of the righteous that kept the unrighteous out. Jesus’ vision was of a kingdom that let the “unrighteous” in: the nobodies, the poor, the sinners (the word for non-Jews or non-observing Jews), the tax collectors, the women and children, the sick, the mad, and so forth.

Jesus saw the poor and the unrighteous as victims and as scapegoats and he preached to them specifically: Blessed are you poor. The taxes extracted by the Romans, the Herods and the Temple caste were crushing and the peasant farmers of Galilee had lost most or all of their land and were deep in debt. They were demoralized and divided and at each other’s throat. Their traditional duty to care for each other and strangers was disappearing. They were turning toward violence, listening to the Zealots and other hotheads. A living death ruled the villages and communities of Galilee.

Jesus told parables about the lost sheep, the found coin, and others that celebrated an Israel that had found a new heart and new life by bringing the scapegoats and the excluded back into the tents of Israel.

Jesus preached the strange parable of the Prodigal demanding his inheritance and abandoning the Way, going to the land of the heathen and winding up as a tender of pigs, and then crawling back home, to the great joy of his father. The elder son complained and wanted to make the younger son the goat, but the father said, “[L]et us celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and now he is alive, he was lost, and now he is found.” Luke: 15:24.

The crowds surely heard a story about how Israel had lost its way, had sold its inheritance to the heathen oppressor, and was dead, and now was being given a new life by accepting the excluded and the shamed back into the Kingdom.
 
He told a shocking story about the hated and excluded Good Samaritan as the one who would deliver them from death to life along the side of the road.

Many among the crowds and often even the disciples found Jesus’ kingdom ideas mysterious and even incomprehensible. 

Jesus asked them, again and again: Do you still not see?

II. Second, Jesus preached that the sick and the possessed and the excluded were signs that death reigned in the larger community. The possessed were signs of communities in crisis and collapse.

In Jesus’ first exorcism in Capernaum, reported at Mark 1:23, Jesus was preaching in the city’s synagogue as an unclean spirit suddenly called out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”  The reigning spirits of death were plainly worried that Jesus’ new kingdom might mean that they soon would be out of business.

The story of the man possessed in ‘the country of the Gerasenes” told at Mark 5:1-13, the story of the ‘Gerasene demoniac’ living naked in chains in a tomb is especially rich in political significance. Gerasa was one of the cities of the Decapolis set along former Greek frontier settlements now under Roman rule. The spirit of the demoniac called out to Jesus, asking to be left alone, and to not be sent out of the country. The spirit said his name was Legion ‘for we are many’, an obvious reference to the Roman legions and the military spirit of the town and region.
 
When Jesus approached, the spirits called out and asked that they be sent into a herd of swine, all two thousand of them. The term that Jesus used for ‘herd’ in telling the story was the word for a Roman squadron of soldiers, another not-so-subtle finger pointed at Roman rule and Israel’s response to it. Jesus complied but when this occurred, the swine rushed off the cliff and into the waters below and drowned, recalling the fate of the Egyptian armies and the Red Sea.

The demoniac was healed and happy but the townspeople were not happy; their scapegoat was gone along with two-thousand pigs.  When the scapegoats are released from their possession the whole communal order of oppression starts unraveling. No wonder Paul got thrown in jail.

III. Third, in a world torn with violence, Jesus rejected violence. He was not a Zealot who wanted violence to return to righteousness. When a crowd of 5000 males gathered along the Sea of Galilee he sent the disciples away and sought to quickly leave so as to not provoke calls for violence. For the same reason, Jesus rejected the call to become the King of the Jews, a path that would lead to violence. The Jews had an ambivalent relationship with their Kings.

In our alternate reading for today at Samuel 12:19-24, the people of Israel said to Samuel, "Pray to the LORD your God for your servants, so that we may not die; for we have added to all our sins the evil of demanding a king for ourselves." Jesus urged that members of the community resolve their disputes outside of the courts. 

IV. Fourth, Jesus rejected Judaism based on the Temple and its cult of sacrifice. The Temple was big business. Many among the thousands of priests there were also rich, powerful landowners. Three times a year, tens of thousands thronged to the Temple to offer sacrifices. Some experts estimate that 80 percent of Jerusalem was tied into the Temple which was a giant abattoir, a death factory.

Jesus believed that he and his growing band of followers would be the new Temple of Israel, and that this new Temple of believers would replace the Temple in Jerusalem. In Mark 11:23, after Jesus had left Jerusalem for the night and was returning to the Temple, Mark has Jesus say: "Truly, I tell you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and cast into the sea'---and does not doubt but believes it will transpire---it will be done." 

This has usually been interpreted as a kind of advertisement for the power of faith: faith can move mountains. Jesus may have been referring to Mount Olivet nearby but he was just as likely referring the Temple itself, a massive and fabled piece of public-works construction that was famed throughout the ancient world. The Temple was known as ‘the Mountain of the house.’ Mark was after the Romans tore down the Temple.

V. Why did Pilate send Jesus to his death and ignore the disciples gathered around him?  The Passover crowd in Jerusalem was unusually restive. The Sanhedrin was worried. If the Jews rebelled they would lose everything. Pilate saw an opportunity. As one writer puts it, crucifixion was for the Romans a kind of public service announcement: If you engage in sedition this is what happens to you. Jesus was sent to his death to settle the crowd down. Jesus was made the scapegoat.

Here the scapegoat makes its appearance again, this time from Roman hands. Jesus knew it almost certainly was coming.

VI. But Pilate miscalculated. The last word belonged to Jesus and to God not Pilate. Pilate’s cruel and cynical politics of serving up an innocent victim to placate the crowd backfired on him. Pilate had killed a very different kind of victim. Pilate had killed the victim. He had unwittingly let loose the most powerful message of all on the world: the finger of God, God’s spirit, has stood on its head for all time the politics of victims and oppressors. If the world is to move from death to life, it must let the scapegoat Jesus in; indeed the world must let all our scapegoats go. The world must learn to live without violence, exclusion, and scapegoats.

VII. Earlier, before the trial of Jesus as the Temple leaders debated what to do with Jesus, Caiaphus the High Priest at John 11: 49-51 uttered an unconscious prophecy: “You do not understand. It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation die...and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.”

Caiaphus thought he was talking about Israel; little did he know that he was talking about the new Israel called Christianity.

Comments

[Haley Roland]

HEY!! Someone point out some politics in the Bible for me and quick because I'm writing a paper due Friday...Thank you and bless whoever takes note of this...Haley