Fr. Tony’s
Midweek Message
Contextual
Theology
January
29, 2020
I had a
t-shirt that I wore in the 1990s that I loved: it expressed my commitment to
openness and inclusion and racial fairness.
It read: LOVE SEE NO COLOUR. The
idea was that using race or color as a means of categorizing people was wrong:
discrimination and treating people as if they were mere adjuncts to their race
was antithetical to love and compassion.
Move forward 25 years: now, not
taking into account a person’s whole life situation, including race and color,
is seen as a not-so-subtle way of supporting systems of oppression and white
supremacy. “Colorblindness” was once seen as a positive value: remember Martin Luther King, Jr. saying, “I
have a dream that my children will be judged by the content of their character,
not the color of their skin.” But now it
is seen as a self-deceptive way of turning a blind eye to the very real ongoing
legacy of racial injustice. “I see no
race or color” is usually booked as a micro-aggression against people of
color. What was a positive aspiration
became a negative way of avoiding the remaining hard work of dismantling institutional
racism. The context changed. “Love see no color” remains true when that
means “if you love people, you treat them as people, not as racial examples.” But it is false when it means “Let’s not take
into account all the factors in a person’s life and work to correct remaining
injustice.” A similar example is found
in how we use inclusive language: when
once “brothers and sisters” was seen as a step forward, including women who had
previously been ignored in a male-dominated society, trans-gender and
non-binary people today see it as excluding them.
These are
but two examples of a larger process in human life: when we are faced with a problem, the way we
phrase questions about it determine in part how we see it and respond to
it. Answers that we may find to such
questions themselves have a meaning and value in that context. But once the answer is accepted, a different
set of questions can result. And when we
use for a new question the same words and images that we used as the answer to
a previous question, their meaning changes, in large part because as answers they
bring with them all sorts of implications and inferences never present when
they were used as questions.
We see
this regularly in scripture study and in historical theology, and this is the
main problem, to my mind, with fundamentalist approaches to scripture or
history. “The truth never changes” or “God
is never-changing” miss this point: the
meaning of any phrase or image changes in time just by the virtue of being in
time.
A clear
example is how we understand what Jesus did for us on the Cross. An early Jewish-Christian writing in
Alexandria and using that city’s famed allegorical approach to interpreting texts
sought in the tractate “To the Hebrews” to
explain how in his mind Christianity was superior to traditional Second Temple practice
of Judaism. Jesus, though not a Priest or Levite by lineage,
was seen as analogous Gen. 14’s mysterious figure Melchizedek, Priest of the
Most High God and King of Salem, to whom Abraham paid tithes. Melchizedek has no lineage or genealogy listed,
yet is seen as a priest of sorts. So too
with Jesus. Similarly, the detailed sacrificial
system of the Temple was seen as the way of getting right with God. Though Jesus did not perform any such rites,
his death and resurrection were seen as having the same effects, indeed, as having
better and more lasting results:
“Now even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly sanctuary. For a tent was constructed, the first one, in which were the lampstand, the table, and the bread of the Presence; this is called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain was a tent called the Holy of Holies. In it stood the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which there were a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant; above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy-seat… Such preparations having been made, the priests go continually into the first tent to carry out their ritual duties; but only the high priest goes into the second, and he but once a year, and not without taking the blood that he offers for himself and for the sins committed unintentionally by the people… But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!” (Hebrews 9:1-14)
Thus, to the writer of Hebrews, the Temple and its
sacrificial system is an allegorical type for what Christ did and does for us. His argument is “What Jesus does for us is
like what those sacrifices and blood-shedding in the Temple did for those observing
them.” But when you take this out of the context of
an active Temple cult and the question of “how can you defend the validity of
Christ?” and make it into an assertion of eternal, unchanging truth, “Christ was
sacrificed to drive out sin; Christ’s blood and suffering paid the penalty of
our wrong-doings,” you end up with a gross distortion of what Hebrews
intends. God ends up blood-thirsty and without
compassion, and this most definitely is not what Hebrews intends to say.
As Father Morgan Silbaugh says often, “When someone says, ‘the
Bible says,’ always ask, ‘and what else does the Bible say?’” I would add, “When someone says the Bible or
tradition teach a particular truth, always ask, ‘And what question was this trying
to answer?’ and ‘How does that question differ from the question we are trying
to make it answer today?’”
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
NOTE: This Sunday is
Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple, the
traditional end of the Christmas season.
We will be blessing candles used in Church, and invite you to bring
candles for use at home in the coming year so we can bless them as well. Remember, since it is our Parish Meeting, we
will have only one service at 9 a.m.
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