NOT KING DAVID?

On many occasions in the Gospels, we are told that Yeshua travelled the length and breadth of the country preaching the eu-angelion, which in Greek means “the good message” but which, as Joseph Ratzinger has reminded us, can also mean something like “the authoritative message”, being used for messages from the king. I wonder how often we stop to consider what the content of that message might have been. 

   For later writers, the authors of the Gospels and the Pauline epistles, the answer seems obvious: the evangelium is Christ Himself. But what, at the time, was the content of His preaching? A hint – a very large hint – is given in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, which may in fact be the conflation of several preachings. It has to do with His relation to the Old Testament commandments, which are not to be abandoned but ‘fulfilled’: internalized, as the Ten Commandments are fulfilled/internalized in the Two. 

   This ‘matter’ of the Sermon is profound and of the greatest possible importance; but is it ‘good news’? I can imagine hearers going home having heard it, in a reflective frame of mind as they apply what they have heard to what they had been taught and then to their own lives; but do they go home rejoicing or, as the modern French Psalm translation puts it ‘quivering with joy’?

   I was led to this meditation by reading all the Old Testament, and particularly the Psalms’, mentions of ‘rejoicing’, ‘shouting and dancing for joy’, and comparing them to the behavior of most believing Christians I know, who tend to live their faith with a profound happiness perhaps but on a daily basis tend to be sober, slightly austere, somewhat worried, and more apt to say ‘Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief’ than to quiver with joy.

   Yeshua, of course, wrought miracles of healing almost constantly; yet it often strikes me that he doesn’t seem to consider it central to what his does. He frequently tells those he has healed to keep quiet about it, which in anyone but him would seem disingenuous but which in him seems sincere; on several occasions he forgives the patient his sins and only when challenged about that does he heal him, as an outward and visible sign comprehensible even to the dolts who disputed him.  When Yochanan the Baptist sends to know if he is really the Meshiach, he lists the miracles as evidence – again, not as the core of meaning but as outward and visible signs comprehensible to anyone. 

   So if the healing is the outward and visible sign, what is the inward and spiritual grace? It can only, I think, be the message that the long-awaited Meshiach, the Anointed – both king and priest – has now come; that He is here, in the here and now; that the anxious, hopeful but occasionally almost despairing, waiting is over.

   This must itself have caused a great deal of confusion as well as joy. After all, the general view of the Meshiach was that he would be a new King David, a great political and military leader who would liberate Israel from Roman rule; and here was an itinerant preacher with a small band of disciples, who heals the blind and the lame and comes from Dogpatch, claiming to be Him! Where are his divisions? Where are his battalions? Yet that seems to have been the reaction mainly of the Establishment: the crowds that followed him around the Sea of Galilee appear to have taken this redefinition of Messiahship in their stride. We know that part of his teaching – as in the Nazareth synagogue – was an explanation of his actions in terms of the Book of the prophet Isaiah, which would have at least in part made clear to his hearers that this new and real Meshiach was a king of humility, come to serve rather than be served, and who would not confine liberation to freeing Israel from the Romans but extend it outward to include all nations and deepen it to free people not from political oppressors but from the tyranny of sin.

   Once that sinks in, we can see the healing for what it was: a by-product and an outward and visible sign. What matters is that the Meshiach, who is the new Torah, is here, and that anyone who believes and trusts in him is, as Henry Lyte’s hymn wonderfully puts it, ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. That is a matter for quivering with joy – almost unimaginable for reasonable and worldly adults living in a world that oscillates between catastrophe and cynicism. That is what we should meditate upon and ponder. It is eu-angelion: good news from an authoritative source. The ultimate good news from the ultimately authoritative source. Blow your mind.

early image of Christ from the Nunziatella Catacomb, Rome

(?3rd century AD)

NOT SO TEMPTING

Oscar Wilde said “I can resist anything except temptation.”

In composing the universal prayer he would later teach his disciples, Yeshua had dealt with forgiveness; now he came to closure. Should he let the prayer trail away with just one more petition, reinforcing a downward movement from the grandeur of the Name? Or should he let it climb to a final and different height, a second peak? The daily bread petition was about trust; the forgiveness petition created a parallel of responsibility. Where now? What was the line?

He decided not to pursue the “as we forgive” implication but to continue the theme of trust and need. The opening grandly affirms God’s power; the petitions show our corresponding weakness and our dependence on the gifts of his love. We need, and trust him to provide from day to day, the basics of our life; we need forgiveness, as well as the capacity to forgive. What else do we need?

And suddenly, Abraham swam into his mind. Not the one who welcomed angels; not the Friend of God; the Abraham who was told to cut his only son’s throat and obeyed, up to the very end. Yeshua shivered, as always when he thought of that trial. And look at Job: there the Father himself had allowed Shaitan, the eternal Adversary, by way of a test of faith to have his way with a favoured human almost beyond bearing. There were giants in those days, he thought.

Looking at his brothers, at Ya’akov, Yosef, Yehuda and young Shimon, he knew that they could not stand up to such commands; and the next petition wrote itself. “Do not,” he prayed with great intensity, “force us – little ones, no patriarchs or Jobs -- into [such a] trial”, and almost automatically there followed, “but deliver us from the Adversary”. For ever since Job, it had been he, the fallen angel, who subjects men to the unbearable; he it had been who crows and rejoices when they fall, and receives them gleefully with outstretched claws. His dream of revenge is never-ending; his understanding is cosmic and his wiles devastating. Merely obeying God’s commandments and praying does not put men beyond his reach: only the Father himself, by an active intervention, can deliver the wretched human race from that vile intelligence.

Image: Laurent de la Hyre, "Abraham Sacrificing Isaac" (1650)

WHAT ROUGH BEAST

France, where I live, is currently caught up in an extraordinary political crisis: the Yellow Vests. Triggered by the announcement of a sales tax jump on diesel fuel for cars – billed as an ecological move but mainly to help out the budget --, a protest movement went super-viral on Facebook and Twitter, and quickly spilled into the streets. Wearing the yellow safety vests mandatory in French cars, the protesters began blocking roads, motorways, traffic circles and toll-gates; and, as French protests will, it all culminated in monster demos on the Champs Elysées in Paris. Uniquely, though, this movement has no structure and no leaders, and therefore no one the government can talk to. Moreover, its demands are as varied as its makeup: they quickly went beyond fuel prices to anything anyone feels mad about. Lower prices, lower taxes, higher minimum wage, ecology, all the way to the resignation of President Macron. And there is such a general disgust with “politics” that anyone in the movement who proposes actually talking to the government to negotiate something immediately receives death threats. Obviously, the parties of the extreme right and left who would love to co-opt the Yellow Vests are being told to get stuffed. It’s an extraordinary moment of universal rage (75-85% of the French support the movement, at least in the comfortable anonymity of opinion polls) that combines real anguish, especially economic, with nihilism; while the big demos are being briskly and gleefully taken over by the “Black Blocks” and other violent urban-warfare and pillage instigators.

I’ve written this long introduction to set the scene for what really strikes me in the whole affair: the complete silence of the Church and the churches. Christians have for years felt a little uncomfortable about St Paul’s exhortation to treat legitimate government as a gift from God. In Holland during WW II, as the German occupiers put the boot in, the Dutch sarcastically sang the German hymn’s adaptation of the Pauline text: Die Obrigkeit ist Gottes Gabe. And both the Dutch, fighting against Spanish King Philip II’s legitimate but tyrannical rule, and the French, creating their iconic revolution and beheading their elites, have proved that they are not slavishly obedient by nature. However, in a time when smartphones and social networks are threatening to destroy every sort of social cohesion and sending the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, there should be no ambiguity at all about a Christian reaction to a nihilist tsunami.

Christ made it clear that his kingship was not “of this world”, and that the radical life he proposed considered social and political change not as a goal but at most as a natural result. He left social and political structures intact, telling his followers to pay Caesar’s taxes and, if they owned slaves, to be good masters. The conversion he envisaged would change individuals, and thus make certain kinds of behavior unthinkable. Meanwhile, almost any form of social structure can be made to work decently if the human beings operating it are filled with the love of God.

This said, though, Churchill was right in saying that democracy was the worst possible form of government with the exception of all the others. In creating modern democratic society, the Enlightenment has played as great a part as Christianity, and the rational safeguards democratic institutions present against wickedness (and sometimes even against stupidity) represent a treasure not lightly to be put at risk. In no way are they perfect: among today’s great challenges are the equitable incorporation of ecological change, the curbing of financial mega-greed, the encouragement of citizen initiatives and volunteer projects, and the management of communication. But in all these areas the Church and the churches ought to be leaders: not by making themselves into yet more NGOs but by insisting on the position of each individual in relation to God. Can you, John X Doe, look the Meshiach who died for love of you in the face and behave as you are behaving, speak as you are speaking and tweet as you are tweeting? He loves you and needs you to help fix this gravely ill dot in the galaxy. He is standing at your door and knocking: are you making too much noise, or reading too many texts, to notice? Or care?