The Bible -- A Mixed Bag
2nd Sunday before Advent, 16 Nov. 2008
Choral Evensong, St. John’s Cathedral Hong Kong
CoE Year A Lectionary Readings appointed for additional Sunday Services
1 Kings 1.15-40; Revelation 1.4-18
God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)
You have to be struck by the great variety of material that is found in what we call the Holy Bible. There are legal codes. There is religious history and the retelling of legends (sometimes multiple retellings of varying forms of the same story). There are chapters of genealogical tables of kings long dead, as well as of what appear to be legendary forerunners of humanity. In the Psalms, you find poems clearly meant to be recited in rituals of the Jewish Temple. There are also personal laments and prayers. There are stories—stories of noble people following God at great sacrifice, but more often, of typical ordinary people whose behavior falls far below even the minimal standards of “niceness” in today’s society. There is even an erotic poem, albeit one that the compilers of the collection later took to be religious allegory, the Song of Solomon.
The morality and faith expressed in differing parts of this hugely diverse collection of writings also varies widely. Frankly, we can on occasion be shocked at what we sometimes find there, even apart from the evil deeds narrated and clearly condemned by the narrator.
In the Old Testament, the holding of women and children as chattel to be used as one chooses is seen as normal and acceptable to some biblical writers. Genocide is portrayed as “holy” war required by God by another. Polygamy and concubinage by the forebears and great kings of Israel and Judah are seen in some texts as signs of prosperity and power—evidence of God’s favor. Other texts preach xenophobia and exclusion, if not outright hatred, of foreigners. The New Testament is not itself innocent here: some of its passages teach as a standard the subordination of women and slaves, and see both groups as chattels in part of a God-ordained order. Some of the four Gospels seem to seek to paper over Roman responsibility for the death of Jesus by blaming this example of the most Roman form of execution on the Jewish religious authorities; one even seems to apply this blame it to all subsequent Jews. None of these texts are examples of our best values at work.
Even in the Psalter, the poetic collection we Christians tend to see as devotional and use in our morning and evening prayers, contains some pretty harsh stuff. Psalm 137 says, O Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who pays you back with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your babies and dashes them against the rock!” (vv 8-9). And each time I hear the exquisite Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, I am jolted by the mean-spiritedness of the line “you spread a banquet table before me—while my enemies have to stand there and watch it!”
But there are moments of bliss and ecstasy in this collection as well, and great moments of unswerving and unsparing moral clarity. The very fact that it is other biblical authors who condemn the values held by some of them is evidence of God’s work in the world, and in the production of this collection of ancient writings. Throughout the biblical record, there is trust in a God who acts and approaches his people at whatever pathetic level they may be. There is hope in ultimate intervention by this God to change what is wrong in the world, and make things right. The New Testament Gospels tell the story of what they see as God’s definitive act to do this: the life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus after his death. Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels routinely condemn fear and hatred of the foreign, legalism and the use of religion to oppress others, and tell again and again of a loving God who pours out his love and grace upon all, regardless of their condition or origin.
When we read the whole of this baggy, loose, and at times contradictory collection, it becomes clear that it impossible to say that each and every statement in scripture reflects God’s will for us.Some sayings, passages, or teachings there, though perhaps originally intended to express what the author thought was God’s will, are within the context of the whole collection clearly preserved as bad examples, or reassurance that even God’s people can be seriously flawed.
Others, in contrast, show with great clarity what God’s intention is: the parables of Jesus, the profound hope of the second half of the book of Isaiah, the stories of grace, love, and faith—like Ruth, or Job—within the larger context of human tragedy and horror. The stories of scripture, and the great variety of emotions expressed in the poetry of the Bible, tell us that it is O.K. to be human, but not O.K. to refuse to listen to God’s call to be something better than we are. Sometimes the change is immediate, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, sometimes a gradual process, like the gradual historical effects of God’s interaction with his people over time in terms of their belief systems.
Martin Luther talked about the need for a “canon within the canon,” when it comes to interpreting the Bible and applying it to people in present circumstances. What he means by this is that we need a sense of what books and passages should be given priority in interpreting the whole so that we can sort out and make sense of such inharmonious, if not downright contradictory doctrine and ethics that one finds in the Bible. Luther never would have argued this had he believed simply that all parts of the Bible were equally God’s word.
Scripture thus is not so much God’s thoughts written down, as they are the field notes of God’s people over the ages. They establish a dialogue with believers of all ages. It is in this sense of the Bible as a work of the believing community inspired and led by God, despite their weakness and occasional detours, that we, the believing community that produced and is also the product of the Bible, can affirm with the English reformers that the Holy Scriptures contain all things necessary for salvation.
When you look at the two readings this evening, we find two good examples of this diversity of writing style and theological framework. I’m sure that some of you while hearing them read wondered at their apparent randomness and seeming irrelevancy. Who cares about the court intrigues of a petty middle-Eastern king who reigned about 3,000 years ago? And what possible importance to us can the visions and dreams of a seer living under the persecution of the Roman Emperor Domitian at the end of the first century C.E. have?
But a common theme ties them together—God’s role in human life and history. It is an issue that remains important for us today. One has only to think of what a fix the American television evangelist Pat Robertson got himself into in 2001—trying to follow the OT prophetic model of diving God’s intention and purposes in events around us, Robertson said that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were punishment meted out by God on an immoral and hedonistic America. Public reaction was swift and unsparing. How could a man of God say that something so evil as deadly attacks on unarmed civilians be something that God had done? Robertson had to apologize within days, but one wonders whether he ever understood the bad theology behind his interpretation of events. More recently, I have heard some of my compatriots express their belief that the election of Barack Obama was, variously, either an act of God or the first move of the anti-Christ.
My point is that people still want to see God’s hand in history, but are very divided about how to determine where God’s hand is, and what God’s intention is.
The two scriptural texts we read this evening provide two very different examples of ways that believers in the past have answered the question “what is God’s role in history?”
Nathan, Bathsheba, Solomon and Abishag at David's deathbed. Late Medieval Bible miniature.
Needless to say, this view has some problems with it—sometimes bad things happen to good people and cannot be explained. The wicked can prosper, and the righteous be oppressed and die unjust deaths. But this is the moral view taken by the Deuteronomistic History nonetheless, because in the author’s world, most religions believed there was little connection between one’s worship of a god—any god—and the need for one to follow ethical prescriptions. Religion in large part was ritual or magic, and the Deuteronomic History’s view God will bless you if you do what’s right and curse you if you do what’s wrong—though it may appear at times naïve to us and overly simple—was an important step in the historical development of ethical monotheism.
In the parts of the Deuteronomistic History dealing with David and Solomon, a major measure of the religious health of the nation is the centralization and standardization of Yahweh worship in a single location—the Temple in Jerusalem that Solomon was to build. This is seen as important to separating the worship of Yahweh from that of the various fertility and wealth deities of ancient Palestine. So the story about Solomon’s accession to the throne at David’s death was religiously very important to the author.
It is a story of court intrigue, hidden factions, and royal glory to the winners and death to the losers. To understand it, you have to go back up a bit and read the whole story.
David, at the height of his power, succumbed to his impetuous and lustful self by imposing himself on the young wife of a junior officer—a foreigner—in David’s army. Her name is Bathesheba, his Uriah. When Bathsheba becomes pregnant by David, David arranges for the death of Uriah and then marries Bathesheba. The prophet Nathan then condemns David for his adultery and murder, predicting that David’s reign would henceforth be plagued with bloodshed and disaster. The baby dies, and David repents. Bathsheba then becomes pregnant again, and gives birth to Solomon. He is clearly a minor son, child of a lesser wife. But as the narrator says, “The Lord loved him” and Nathan comes to name the child.
David’s proper heir is a man named Amnon, who in the telling of the story has all of David’s faults—impetuosity, lust—and none of his virtues. He rapes one of his half-sisters, Tamar. Her brother is another son of David named Absalom. Absalom plots revenge for two years, then kills Amnon. After a short exile, he is reconciled to David, and becomes David’s designated heir. But he can’t wait for David to die, and rebels, causing a civil war in which he himself is killed. David is sorrowful, because he loves Absalom, but causes a near mutiny among his own general staff when he is too loud in expressing his grief. His general Joab, who has done most of the dirty work in killing David’s opponents over the years, half shames and half threatens David into hiding hide his grief from his troops who have just fought a war against the dead rebel.
At the beginning of tonight’s reading, David is pictured as a dottering old man who is given a young woman as a caretaker. His impotence as king in his old age is reflected in the story by his not taking advantage of the caretaker sexually. Adonijah, Absalom’s younger half brother by another father, lays claim to the throne, gathering key people in David’s government to his side, the General Joab and the Priest Abiathar.
Nathan, the prophet who condemned David for his adultery and murder, goes to Bathesheba and encourages her to “remind” David that he had promised to give Solomon the throne. The way the story is told, it looks like the two may be reminding a half-senile old man of something that had never taken place.
The story doesn’t say why Nathan does this, but presumably it is because Adonijah, like Absalom and Amnon before him, is not “a man after the Lord’s own heart” like David. In contrast to these, Solomon is loved by the Lord according to the narrator. Again, remember that it is Solomon who will end up building the single Temple in the center of the country that the Deuteronomistic Historian wants to see putting an end to mixed and localized worship.
Nathan and Bathsheba succeed. David orders the Priest Zadok and Nathan to anoint Solomon king. That is where the reading ends.
King SolomonWhat comes in the next two chapters is the bloody tale of Solomon consolidating power. Finding legal and religious pretexts at first, and then abandoning even these, Solomon puts Adonijah to death, deposes Abiathar from the Priesthood, and kills the General Joab, despite his taking refuge in the sanctuary and grasping the horns of the altar of Yahweh. He continues on until all of his possible opponents are dead or unable to cause him problems.
To be sure, the story is told from the point of view of the winner. If Adonijah or his people had narrated these events, I’m sure the story would have read quite differently. It is by no means balanced history. And its theology is flawed as well. The Deuteronomist always wants there to be a quick moral to the story-- a direct link between success and blessing and righteous living (or at least working effectively for what the narrator considers the right religious side). But in life there is no such direct link. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. That is what the Book of Job is all about.
Suffice it to say that the despite all these problems of the narrative, the Deuteronomistic author sees faltering, imperfect human beings as being used by God to accomplish his purposes. A major part of this is that they—despite adultery, fratricide, sacrilege, even murder—want to know what God’s will is and try to do this. In a word, both Solomon and David are men “after the Lord’s own heart” (1 Sam 13:14), despite all the weaknesses that become so evident in the horror of these chapters.
So what can we make of the story that is positive or spiritually uplifting? I suppose it is this—despite the wrongs of David, despite the wrongs of Solomon, both kings were able to maintain a good relationship with God, though they paid the natural price of their bad behaviors. Grace is hinted at here. God’s providence is clearly implied. There may actually be hope for people like you and me.
William Blake, The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns Before the Divine Throne.
Pen and Water Color. 1803-05,
They are the product of times of serious religious persecution. They know all too well that bad things do happen to good people, sometimes for the very reason that they are good. They seek to explain God’s ultimate justice by a variety of means—the doctrine of a life after death where one will be rewarded or punished for one’s acts, good or evil, the doctrine of a day of judgment or wrath at the end of the world when all accounts will be settled justly, and the doctrine of this ultimate moral order breaking in on the current unjust world and through cataclysm and war washing it away.
Apocalyptic books are written in a code of puzzling and extravagant images so that their message can be hidden from the secret police of the day. For example-- during the 3rd century B.C. persecution of Jews under the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes IV, openly saying that the Hellenistic kingdoms were rotten to the core and that you hoped God’s kingdom would come and destroy them could get you boiled in oil or worse. So the Book of Daniel, written at that time but set dramatically in the much earlier Babylonian exile, makes this same point by saying that the world kingdoms in history before the time the book was written are like a big statue., one with a gold head (Babylon), silver chest (Medes), bronze waist (Persia), iron legs (Alexander the Great), and feet of clay mixed with iron (the Hellenistic successor kingdoms) that would be smashed to bits by a rock “cut without hands” (hopefully the Jewish kingdom to be restored by Judas Maccabee’s revolt against the Seleucids) that would come rolling from the mountains, getting bigger and bigger until it filled the whole earth (Dan 2: 36-45). While the book’s hope for Maccabean success was fulfilled, its hope that this would be the perfect kingdom of God that would make all things right in the world clearly was not. It was ultimately this problem with apocalyptic hope that spelled its doom—Christians reinterpreted it in light of the life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus—seeing in Jesus the ultimate resolution of wrong in the world and fulfillment of all hope. After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 by Romans trying to suppress a political rebellion based in Apocalyptic hopes and claims, Jews stopped paying attention to Apocalyptic and started focusing almost exclusively on interpreting and following the Law.
Contrary to a lot of popular belief, Apocalyptic books are generally about what was going on at the time they were written, and try to make ultimate sense of what at the time seems senseless and tragic. They are not predictive programs of “events to come” thousands of years in the future of those who wrote them.
The reading tonight is from the first vision in the Revelation of John, and sees the resurrected Jesus in Glory as the primary means of God’s righting of wrongs and realizing the hopes of the prophets and the writers of Apocalyptic. In this sense, it sees that the ultimate act of God in history is in the person of Jesus. But it also seeks to reassure Christians suffering under the horrible persecution of the Roman Emperor Domitian by adapting the literary form and code-language of earlier Apocalyptic. Angels fly from the presence of God; seals are broken; scrolls of the events by which God will solve all these problems are unrolled. In the end, the wicked do not prosper, and the unjust suffering of the saints is repaid. Applying this to us, I’d say we need to have faith and persevere in doing what’s right, regardless the cost and whatever problems this may cause us.
So what of the question of God’s acting in History?
We Christians believe that the definitive act of God and revelation of God occurred in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We also believe that we must have a believing heart to recognize the grace of God, to recognize the call of God, to recognize the judgment of God, when it occurs in our life.
But we also have a lot of experience over the centuries that makes us wary of facile claims about any of these things by others. It is easy to claim that one knows the will of God; it is not so easy to actually know God’s will. It is easy to claim that God is on your side in a dispute or conflict; it is not so easy to actually be right in this claim. Kings and princes have, from ancient times, always known that getting a prophet or a seer on your side as part of your propaganda team was essential for ruling a country or winning a war. It is easy to blame your suffering or someone else’s on some wrong previously committed, and see it as punishment. But this does not make it so.
Jesus was once confronted with a question, as it were, from the front pages of the newspaper: “What do you think about those Galilieans—countrymen of yours I believe—whom Pilate’s soldiers killed in the Temple so that their blood mingled with that of their sacrifices? Jesus did not flinch at the question, but added another “newstory” of his own, “And what do you think about the 18 people killed here in Jerusalem when the Tower of Siloam collapsed and crushed them to death?” His answer on both was clear-- "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? Or that those eighteen were worse than all the others so God made that Tower collapse on them as punishment? “ “NO.” He says. They weren’t any worse than other people, and it wasn’t necessarily punishment. “BUT, we should take a lesson from these stories. Unless we repent, we are certain, sooner or later, to suffer just as badly, or perish just as suddenly as they did.”
For Jesus, God’s hand in history primarily touches the human heart and the way we behave toward others. It beckons to us, one and all, to see how hopeless and helpless we really are, and tells us to surrender to God and learn from him how to amend our lives. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
In the name of God, Amen.
