FLOWER POWER

 

the lilies of the field (Avalanche lilies)

²⁴No one can serve two lords. For either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be loyal to one and think ill of the other. You cannot serve God and money. So I tell you: do not worry your heart about what to eat or what to drink, nor your body about what to wear. Isn’t the heart more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the sky: they do not sow or reap or store up into barns, and your heavenly father looks after them. Are you not better than they? Which of you can by worrying add even a smidgen to his age? And is anyone worried about clothes? Look at the lilies of the field, how they grow. I tell you that not Solomon in all his glory could overgo even one of them. And if God so dresses the fodder of the field, that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the bread-oven, how much more you, you of little faith? So do not worry, saying what shall we eat, or drink, or put on to wear? that is what the goyim seek; for your heavenly father sees that you need all those things. Seek first the reign of God and his justice/righteousness, and all those things will be given you as well. ³⁴So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow can worry about itself. The day is enough, and its uglies.

This, of course, is a famous and much-loved passage of the Sermon, often cited by critics of capitalism. Yet it does have its difficulties. The whole middle chunk of it sounds very Sixties-ish, as if Yeshua were a hippie guru, telling us all to be La Fontaine’s grasshoppers and stop worrying about stuff. The Ant would know what to reply to that: Kid, you are not a bird in the sky; in any case, the birds in the sky do nothing but search for food; sorry, petal, you are not a flower: the flower may be pretty but it cannot move about or think, and if there is a drought it will swiftly die.   So is that what he is, and is that what he is saying? Only if you slice out that part and look at nothing else. So let’s add the beginning and the end.

            First, no one can serve two lords at the same time. We moderns should not think of this as having two jobs, because lots of people do, and manage fairly well. Think feudal society. Think real service. In feudal terms, serving a lord means being completely loyal to him, preferring him to everyone else, wearing his  badge, being “his man” as they used to say. You cannot, says Yeshua, be that for two lords: such commitment can only be to one. So, if that premise is granted, you cannot serve God and money (mamōn is not a god, just “money”). Therefore – because of that, I am telling you not to worry about all the humdrumlies of daily life.

            This doesn’t mean that you should go swanning about playing your guitar and waiting for someone else to feed and clothe you. It means that you do, responsibly, everything that’s necessary, but that you don‘t let it fill your horizon. As so often, he gives a couple of illustrative images: the birds and the lilies, which are maintained by God – as, in a different way appropriate to being human, are you. What you, as a human and a Jew, should do is understand and follow that difference. What makes you, as a human, different from the bird and the lily is consciousness, both intelligent and religious. What makes you, as a Jew, different from the goyim, the Gentiles, is that you know that you have a heavenly Father who looks after you. And the reason you know this is the Torah. And what does the Torah tell you to do? It tells you – I tell you, because this is what the completed Torah means – to make looking for, seeking, working for, the reign of God on earth, God and His justice, your first and absolute priority.

            And if you do that, if you have your priorities right, then your life has shalom: the order of peace, the peace of due order. And since you have a heavenly Father who loves and cares for you, all those other things will be sorted also. Of course, to seek first the reign of God you have to believe in it: you must not be (and I love this Greek term) oligopistoi, “littletrusters”. As Paul Tillich wrote in Dynamics of Faith, this has to be the basket you put all your eggs in. 

            Finally, in what way does this fit into the pattern of a completed Torah that Yeshua has been establishing? The recurring element has been a converting of outward action to inwardness, from required deeds to the spontaneous doings of a converted heart. In this passage, the argument moves to our capacity for fides, faith and trust both. Only a heart that fully accepts the new Torah can give up on hedging its bets, on being an oligopistos who thinks of God only when all his worldly security has been taken care of. Only such a heart can make the basileia, the reign, of God and of his dikaiosunè, his justice and his righteousness both, its first priority. And then, as the Collect says, "His service is perfect freedom."

 

OH DARK DARK DARK

Ho luchnos tou sōmatos estin ho ophthalmos, ean oun èi ho ophthalmos sou haplous, holon to sōma sou phōteinon estai; ean de ho ophthalmos sou ponèros èi, holon to sōma sou skoteinon estai. Ei oun to phōs to en soi skotos estin, to skotos poson.

²² `The lamp of the body is the eye, if, therefore, your eye is plain/simple/pure, all your body shall be bright,

²³ but if your eye is bad, all your body shall be dark; if, therefore, the light that [is] in you is darkness -- the darkness, how great?

 

This is a curious little interlude in the Sermon, not often paid attention to, but worth examining. First comes the premise: the eye is the lamp of the body. Luchnos here is simply a lamp: what would have come to the mind of the audience is a small lamp with a wick in a little bowl of oil. It is the thing that gives light in darkness. Interestingly, here, the eye is a lamp. We might say a “window”, but of course in Yeshua’s Middle East windows had no glass. Here, the eye is a lamp that lights what’s behind and below it: the body’s interior, imagined as a dark space like a dwelling unlit. And for that space to be properly lit, the eye has to be haplous, a word with many meanings but mainly “clean, unsullied, pure”. If the lamp is in good condition, the wick trimmed, the oil fresh and sufficient, it can light the whole of the body. However, if the lamp is ponèros --- We remember ponèros from the Lord’s Prayer: it was what we pray to be delivered from. And the fact that a lamp too can be ponèros reminds us that we are not necessarily dealing with metaphysical “evil” (though it may mean that in the prayer): here it just means that the lamp’s wick is untrimmed, that the oil is sparse and rancid, and that it smokes. So if your eye is ponèros, the body isn’t lit by it as it is meant to be.

            So if your eye is ponèros, what does that mean? The last sentence tells us, not the manner but the result. It drops the element of the eye and goes straight to a much greater metaphor. “The light that is in you” – right, now we begin to get it. In the terms of Yeshua’s discourse, we can sense what that light is that is in us. It is the light of the Spirit, or rather, of our spirit enlightened in its turn by the hagion pneuma, the Holy Spirit. If our spirit is not so enlightened, if it has refused the light that is offered to it, if it ends up being, not just “dark” but darkness itself --  how great, how impenetrable, such a darkness! It reminds me of a passage in a novel of Charles Morgan’s: Comment vous défendez-vous contre la solitude ? Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même. And at that point, the simple ponèros’s deeper and more frightening meaning rushes back. If we refuse the light that the new, completed Torah offers us, not only will we be lightless, we risk becoming Darkness itself – and we know who is the Prince thereof. 

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

 

¹⁶ `And when you fast, be ye not as the hypocrites, of sour countenances, for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear to men fasting; verily I say to you, that they have their reward.

¹⁷ `But you, fasting, anoint your head, and wash your face,

¹⁸ that you may not appear to men fasting, but to your Father who [is] in secret, and your Father, who is seeing in secret, shall reward you.

¹⁹ `Treasure not up to yourselves treasures on the earth, where moth and rust disfigure, and where thieves break through and steal,

²⁰ but treasure up to yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth disfigure, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,

²¹ for where your treasure is, there will be also your heart.

 

This part of the new Torah is not hard to understand. Just as in prayer one should not show off one’s piety before the world, so in the ancient self-discipline of fasting one should not do so either. The disfiguring of the face may have been an application of mud or a smearing with dust: an outward and visible sign of repentance was the covering of head and face with dust and ashes. 

            It might be useful here to think briefly about fasting, especially as the year moves closer to Lent. Fasting exists as a discipline in many religions: the most visible in today’s Western countries is the Muslims’ Ramadan, which prohibits the taking of any form of food or drink between sunrise and sunset for thirty days, and which is observed far more widely than the forty-day Christian Lent, which mostly leaves the form and intensity of the fast to the individual believer. It is not, of course, practiced for the sake of health or bodily elegance, but to discipline the body in order to subject it more completely to the mind and the soul. It is easier for those whom grief and contrariety put off their feed than for those who eat when depressed and feast when content. The more rigorous and orthodox Christians often make fun of those who “give up chocolate for Lent”; yet they are wrong, because every discipline is an art, and every art needs practice and begins with simple steps. 

            What Yeshua is telling us here is that, whether we are giving up chocolate or living on bread and water like Carthusians, we should keep it to ourselves: it is between us and the Father, and since we are doing it to be closer to Him, keeping it between us and Him is “the way it should be”, i.e. part of shalom. Moreover, this injunction clearly is part of the completed Torah’s emphasis on inwardness: avoid the outward and visible sign and concentrate on the inward and spiritual grace. 

 

            The second part of this text is about treasure. Man is not just a creature that transforms the world – all “work” transforms the world – but a creature that attaches importance to security. True, there are La Fontaine’s grasshoppers, who give never a care for the morrow and thus tend to fall back on their neighbours; but most people try to put away a little nest-egg, an “apple for thirst” as the Dutch say, whether it is in case one loses one’s job, or to put one’s children through college, or against illness or old age. And this impulse can go far, and result in large fortunes passed on, and increased, from generation to generation.

            Yeshua warns against this. In a world where “treasure” was still what our childhood imagined, physically precious objects, whether fine silks, delicately-wrought metals, and gold coin, he reminds us that the silks can be disfigured by moth, the metals by the tinworm, and that the world is full of thieves cleverer than we are. Such treasures are vulnerable. In our modern world, treasure tends to be held either on the stock market or in real estate; yet a financial crash may wipe out the one, and fire and earthquake the other, while cybercriminals may easily make off with anyone’s bank or savings account. All earthly treasure is vulnerable. 

            So what does he suggest? Laying up treasure in heaven. We know this text so well that we often do not really think about it any more; and we feel superior to our medieval forefathers who took it very literally, for instance in the form of indulgences. Yet He speaks to us also; so we owe it to Him to think about it with what intelligence we can summon. How do we “lay up treasure in Heaven”? It displeases us to think of our spiritual life as a sort of divine bank-account; but let us try to think past the image. In contrast to devoting our surplus of time and effort (beyond our basic work in the world) to acquiring more money or objects, we should devote our surplus of time and effort to our life of faith: to our relation to the Father who loves and cherishes us, as much as we let Him. 

            And Yeshua finishes by at once giving us the reason for this injunction: where your treasure is, is where your heart is. And your heart is what matters. If I have a magnificent collection of classic cars, like Jay Leno’s or Ralph Lauren’s, I have to admit it would take up not only much of my time but much of what Keats called “the heart’s affections”; and each of us has only so much of those. If, on the other hand, I spend as much of my time and effort as I can, not on improving my virtue but on the loving bond I have with God and with my brothers and sisters, I may discover to my surprise that in strange and unexpected ways I have become richer, and freer from fear, than I ever thought possible.  

            Once again, I am taught the principle of this completed Torah: the heart is what matters. 

DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW?

 

 

Houtōs oun proseuchesthe humeis: pater hèmōn ho en tois ouranois, hagiasthètō to onoma sou; elthetō hè basileia sou; genèthètō to thelèma sou, hōs en ouranōi kai epi tès gès; to arton hèmōn ton epiousion dos hèmin sèmeron; kai aphes hèmin ta opheilèmata hèmōn, hōs kai hèmeis aphèkamen tois opheilètais hèmōn; kai mè eisenegkèis hèmas eis peirasmon, alla hrusai hèmas apo tou ponèrou. Ean gar aphète tois anthrōpois ta paraptōmata autōn, apèsei kai humin ho patèr humōn o ouranios. Ean de mè aphète tois anthropōn ta paraptōmata autōn, oude ho patèr humōn aphèsei ta paraptōmata humōn.

 

⁹ thus therefore pray ye: `Our Father who [art] in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name.

¹⁰ `Thy reign come: Thy will come to pass, as in heaven also on the earth.

¹¹ `Our bread for the day give us to-day.

¹² `And forgive us our debts, as also we forgive our debtors.

¹³ `And do Thou not force us into a testing, but deliver us from the evil, because Thine is the reign, and the power, and the glory -- to the ages. Amen.

¹⁴ `For, if ye forgive men their false steps He also will forgive you -- your Father who [is] in the heavens;

¹⁵ but if ye do not forgive men their false steps, neither will your Father forgive your false steps.

 

What is there to say about this prayer that has not been said a million times or more? That it is useful to remember that basileia reflects a condition (“reign”) more than a place (“kingdom”); that Greek readers would have read “may [what is] thy will come to pass” rather than “be done”; that they would have read epiousion as a very rare word for “for the coming day”; that opheilèmata are debts while paraptomata are false steps or payment errors; that peirasmos is more a test, an assay, than a seductive temptation; that, once again, ponèron is “bad” or “wicked” rather than “evil”, and that the genitive case after apo, “from” may refer to a person or to a thing: “from the wicked one” or “from what is wicked”.

            On the other hand, it is interesting to put it in the context of the Sermon on the Mount so far. In the immediate context, it is the outcome of the discussion on prayer, and may thus be thought of as a blueprint for what we should murmur to the Father behind the closed door of our inmost room. And yet notice that throughout it is placed in the first person plural: even alone, we are part of the Father’s family, and even our singular prayer reflects our siblinghood therein.

            In the context of the Sermon as the new Torah, the completed Torah, the most salient aspects of the prayer are perhaps its inwardness and its polyvalence. Inwardness, because it gladly recognises our weakness and our dependence, for forgiveness and even for simple nourishment (the daily bread reminds us also of the manna that Israel received in the wilderness); polyvalence, because unlike many prayers in the Old Testament, this prayer is not a request for one specific thing but covers every aspect of our relation to our Father: adoration (hallowing), hope (the reign), obedience (His will), dependence (bread), penitence (forgiveness), weakness (do not test us as Thou didst the great ones like Job), protection (the wicked one, wickedness).

            No wonder that it has remained the prayer for Christians. It was very surprising to a number of us to see Pope Francis’s boldness in changing the wording of the penultimate petition to “let us not enter into temptation”, and doing so in a way that neither restored the original nor made the translation any clearer. In the Greek, the act we ask to be spared is an action by God, not merely a permission by God for an act of our own. It is God who might eisenengkein us to a testing, and roots of that verb are those of “forcing” and “into”. It would have been better for His Holiness to have concentrated on the peirasmos rather than on the verb.

            And for those who thrill to the idea of reading, and hearing, the original words Yeshua pronounced, above is the reconstructed written version in Jewish Aramaic of the 1^st century; below is the transliterated Aramaic text; and a reading can be heard here. 

Abbun d'bishmayya

yitqadesh shmakh

titey malkhutakh

tihey re`utakh

heykhma debishmayya

keyn af be’ar`a

lachman deme’ar`a

hab lan yoma deyn umachra

ushbaq lan chobayn

heykhma de’af shebaqnan lechayyabayn

we’al ta`eylan lenisayuna

ela atseylan min bisha

 

(PIANISSIMO)

 

 ⁵ `And when you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites [lit. “play-actors”], because they love in the synagogues, and in the corners of the broad places -- standing -- to pray, that they may be seen of men; verily I say to you, that they have their reward.

⁶ `But you, when you pray, go into your chamber, and having shut your door, pray to thy Father who [is] in secret, and thy Father who is seeing in secret, shall reward you.

⁷ `And -- praying -- you must not ?babble like the goyim [the ethnikoi, lit. “nations”] for they think that in their much speaking they shall be heard,

⁸ be not therefore like to them, for your Father doth know those things that you have need of before your asking him;

 

The target of Yeshua’s criticism here is a certain kind of observant Jew, most likely a member of the perushim or “pharisee” movement but not necessarily typical of them. The pharisees were liberal in some aspects of their theology but very strict in the minor observances they called “the fence around the Law”. For prayers, they wore on their forehead and their left arm large tefillin or phylacteries containing tiny texts telling men to do that (Deut. vi. 8, xi. 18; Ex. xiii. 9, 16), as well as prayer shawls. The morning prayers or Shacharit were lengthy and had to be recited at the proper time, wherever the observant person happened to be. And all this, combined with human nature, clearly led upon occasion to role-players (hupokritoi) or pretentious men showing off their perhaps quite real piety with unctuous ostentation: “For the hour of the phylacterical prayers being come, their care and endeavour was, to be taken in the streets: whereby the canonical hour compelling them to their prayers in that place, they might be the more seen by all persons, and that the ordinary people might admire and applaud both their zeal and religion. To which hypocritical pride they often added this also, that they used very long pauses, both before they began their prayers, and after they had done them: so that very usually, for three hours together, they were seen in a praying habit and posture. See the Babylonian Talmud” (17^th-century commentary by John Lightfoot)

            In criticising such manners, Yeshua is of course not alone; and when he enjoins us to retire to our most private places and pray in secret, he is reminding us that, as Proverbs 15:3 says, “the eyes of the Lord are in every place”. Again, he is emphasising the movement from the outward to the inward, this time in the act of prayer itself, for Him the most intense and permanent contact with the Father. This inwardness is shown throughout the Gospels when Yeshua himself prays, which most often he does by himself in a place to which he retires from the crowd and even the disciples. 

            He adds a comment on the form of prayer to be avoided, and for this, Matthew the exciseman (or his ghostwriter) used a word found nowhere else in Greek: battalogein. Most translators refer to “vain repetitions” perhaps thinking of Hebrew batel which means “vain” plus the polulogia or much, or repetitious, speaking referred to later. It may denote prayers of repeated incantations, or simply the fact that Jews considered pagan prayers to be a useless babble compared to their own prayers, which their Deity heard at once. 

            What is more interesting is the assurance with which Yeshua ends: the Father knows what we need before we ask. This is both welcome and reassuring; and yet it leaves us with the question, In that case why ask? Why pray? If we know (as we often do) what our child needs before (s)he asks for it, that fact pleases us, and we would rather the child did not ask.

            I think the point he is making is that the Father takes pleasure in our asking for what He wants in any case to give us, because our asking restores the intimacy, the presence of us with Him, that was His joy in creating us and our breaking or ignoring of which is His abiding grief. It is true that we can give Him nothing that He has not already created and provided, but we can give Him back what He gave us in the first place: love and trust. 

FAREWELL THE TRUMPETS

A Zedakah Shofar

6 `Make sure you do not do your justice/charity before men, to be seen/admired by them, otherwise -- reward have you not from your Father who [is] in the heavens;<sup>2</sup> whenever, therefore, you do charity, do you not sound a trumpet before you as the pretentious do, in the synagogues, and in the streets, that they may have glory from men; verily I say to you -- they have their reward!<sup>3</sup> `But you, doing charity, let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing,⁴ that your charity may be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret Himself shall pay you back.

 

This part of Yeshua’s new-Torah discourse seems simple and to a certain degree is so. We are urged not to show off when we are doing the things God has told us to do, but to do them where only God can see them. Those who show off, those who solicit and receive admiration, are already rewarded in the here and now; those who keep it hidden will be seen by God only and rewarded by Him.

            But there are a few details which, when understood, greatly increase our understanding and appreciation of what’s being said. The first is those trumpets. We find it hard to imagine even a flashy nouveau-riche magnate having a trumpeter precede him when he goes to make a gift to the poor. And we are right: that never happened.  Something got lost in translation. The Hebrew word that was translated by “trumpet” is shofar. A shofar is a ram’s horn, blown in Biblical times for religious announcements and on solemn occasions: you can still buy Kosher shofars on the Internet. So the translators thought that was what was meant and, not knowing all the customs, translated it as a trumpet. But the Mishnah tells us that in the Temple there were thirteen shofarot for the collection of alms. These were in fact horn- or trumpet-shaped boxes, broad at the bottom, narrow at the top, where the zedakah or charitable contributions were deposited. And the verb used in this passage was probably leba’avir, “to cause to pass”: “when you do charity, do not call [loudly] for the collection box to be brought to you, in the synagogue or in the street”.  The image that is being evoked, then, is of a showy rich man, in the synagogue or even in the street, calling for a shofar or zedakah box to brought to him so that he might in full gaping view deposit one or more precious gold coins in it. This, obviously, was deprecated, and not only by Yeshua: there was a saying that “he who gives zedakah in secret is greater than Moses”, and in the Temple – and in every city – there was a Vestry of Secret Givers, where alms could be deposited discreetly and respectable people who had come down in life could go for help. It is of such a saying, and of such a practice, that Yeshua is here reminding his audience. 

            And it is interesting that the Matthew’s Greek employs dikaiosunè for the first use and eleèmosunè for the subsequent ones. This shows that the author was sensitive to the shades of meaning in Hebrew (or Aramaic), where zedakah originally meant “justice” but gradually, in Yeshua’s time, was coming to mean “alms” or charity.

            If we now connect this with Yeshua’s “completion” of the old Torah in the direction of inwardness, we see that once again he moves from an emphasis on the act of giving to the mentality of the giver who, if he has fully integrated the new Torah, will do his zedakah discreetly, secretly, not only because ultimately he does it for the love of God but also, if he gives directly, to avoid humiliating the receiver and thus to show his love for that neighbour.

 

 

I am indebted to Samuel Lachs’ A Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament (New York: Ktav, 1987) for much of the information cited above. 

TOTALLY COUNTERINTUITIVE. IRRESISTIBLE.

 `You heard that it was said: Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth (Ex. 21:22-25); <sup>39</sup> but I -- I tell you not to resist the evil, but whoever shall slap thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other;<sup>40</sup> and whoever is willing to take you to law, and to take your tunic -- grant him also your cloak.<sup>41</sup> `And whoever shall impress you one mile, go with him two,⁴² to him who is asking of you be giving, and him who wants to borrow from you you may not turn away.

⁴³ `You heard that it was said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and shalt hate thine enemy;⁴⁴ but I -- I say to you, Love your enemies, bless those cursing you, do good to those hating you, and pray for those accusing you falsely, and persecuting you,⁴⁵ that you may be sons of your Father in the heavens, because His sun He doth cause to rise on evil and good, and He doth send rain on righteous and unrighteous.

⁴⁶ `For, if you love those loving you, what reward have you? do not also the tax-gatherers the same?⁴⁷ and if ye salute your brethren only, what does it profit you? do not also the tax-gatherers so?⁴⁸ you shall therefore be perfect, as your Father who [is] in the heavens is perfect.

 

This passage is, of course, another one we can’t avoid. Let’s take it in the two parts of the original text. First, the Lex Talionis. My first question is: would Yeshua’s audience have thought immediately of the Exodus passage, or would the concept already have migrated into a general consciousness, shedding its specific original context? Christians, certainly, are not commonly aware that the term originated in a passage about two men coming to blows in the vicinity of a pregnant woman and, by the collateral damage of hitting her, causing a premature birth. The rule is that if apart from the birth there is no serious injury, the hitter must pay what the woman’s husband demands and the court corroborates; if there is serious injury, retribution must be specific and appropriate: if she loses an eye, the hitter must lose an eye, etc. It has often been said that the purpose of this rule was to limit the retribution, which might otherwise degenerate into a vendetta; and this may well be true.

            In later years it may well have continued to guard against unlimited vengeance, and thus to be a reasonable law, especially in less painfully physical cases. However, Yeshua again begins, “But I – I tell you . . .“ And now he launches into what becomes a genuinely counter-intuitive response. In some ways, it reminds us of a famous tactic in Oriental martial arts: giving way in the face of a blow so that the adversary may find his momentum carrying him through to a fall. If someone hits you in a moment of anger (and see earlier for that topic), turn the other cheek to let him hit you again. Two questions: what will be the effect, and in what spirit is it suggested? The effect will depend upon the adversary, but there is at least a chance that he will be suddenly and completely disconcerted, and that your reaction will break through his bubble of rage and stop him in his tracks. 

            In what spirit is the advice offered? It might be thought that, as in judo, the suggested action is a tactic the better to defeat your enemy. Clearly, though, that is not what Yeshua is about. Once again, the pattern is that of a general statement – “resist not evil” – followed, in this case, by three examples: the slap, the lawsuit for an item of clothing, and the Roman soldier’s impressment. What do these last tell us? First of all, that the general statement applies to individuals only. It is not a principle for public policy or for geopolitics (although it may contain a hint against the Zealot resistance fighters). Secondly, that for individuals it does not apply only in purely private situations (the slap) but also in the context of a community (the lawsuit) and of society at large (the impressment). In each of the examples, the initial deed is characterised as “ponèros”, which is perhaps not quite “evil” but rather worthless, knavish, malicious or wicked: it lacks the metaphysical extreme that “evil” suggests. If you resist, the first possibility is that you will fail: the slapper may be stronger than you, the person who wants your chiton or tunic may have a better lawyer and so get your himation, your cloak or toga, also, and resisting a Roman soldier’s legal demand would certainly be foolish. The second possibility is that you may be more or less successful; but if you are, your resistance will stir up and/or keep alive a counter-animus that will draw the situation out and create more enmity, so that the only profit may be a brief surge of self-respect i.e. pride.

            Now, what happens if you follow the suggestion? True, you may get slapped again. But the counter-intuitive nature of your response, in all three cases, may well help to create the opposite of enmity – not friendship necessarily, but “peace”.

            At this point, it is necessary to parse the Hebrew word shalom. In its Biblical appearance, it is almost always translated as “peace”. But in fact it is a vast word, a huge word, a cosmic word. It means a state of wholeness and completeness, of equilibrium, of the way things ought to be. “Making shalom” is a characteristic of God, and is therefore enjoined upon human beings. (NB: this casts an even more important light on the Beatitude “blessed are the peacemakers”: the are the ones who make Shalom.) So the purpose of this article of the new Torah is just that: making shalom. Yeshua once again completes the old Torah (which will not be abolished) by a greater inwardness: instead of an act of resistance, which will maintain the inwardness of the ponèros by returning it, we should inwardly make shalom, the outward and visible sign of which will be our counter-intuitive and unexpected reaction.

            And when Yeshua goes on to the second part of our passage, he in fact does explain the general principle. Making shalom in an adversarial situation helps to make us more like the Father, who does not deprive the wicked of sunshine nor the unjust of rain. And I suspect his two clinching arguments of having been said with a smile: even if you only care about your own reputation, well, if you are only nice to those who are nice to you, in what way are you better than those collaborationist quislings you so despise? Hmmmm? Get a life! Shape up!

            And finally, the summing-up. To us it sounds like an outrageous demand. We are to be as perfect as God? Really? Well, once again it is worth looking at the Greek word, which is teleios. And teleios has in it the root of “completing”. So it is more like “perfected, completed, finished” (in the sense that a potter’s pot comes out of the workshop teleios, finished). So it reminds us that we are made in God’s image but that we are a bit out of true. Following the new Torah, which completes the old, will help to complete us, bring us back to what we were made to be: in the image of the Father. Just as shalom restores Creation to what it was created to be: whole and teleios, complete.

Shalom

Claude Lorrain: Port at Sunset

ISWEARTOGOD

 

³³ `Again, you heard that it was said to the ancients: Thou shalt not swear falsely, but thou shalt pay to the Lord thine oaths; (Num. 30:1-2)

³⁴ but I -- I say to you, not to swear at all; neither by the heaven, because it is the throne of God,

³⁵ nor by the earth, because it is His footstool, nor by Jerusalem, because it is a city of a great king,

³⁶ nor by thy head mayest thou swear, because thou art not able one hair to make white or black; (Deut. 6:13)

³⁷ but let your word be, Yes, Yes, No, No, and that which is more than these is of the evil (one).

 

Few people in Western societies in our time are awed by oaths; yet in the ancient world, and in Judaism, they were taken very seriously. Taking an oath to perform something meant that if one did not perform it something serious would happen to one. In the ancient world an oath was not a guarantee of a statement: it was the statement. An oath was not allowed to contravene the Torah – that made it a prohibited oath. What is intriguing is that in both the Jewish and the Roman cultures of the first century CE there was a tendency to invoke something other, and lower, than the deities themselves. Romans began to swear  by the Emperor’s name, still considered holy; Jews on the other hand began to swear not so much by God as by things created by God: the heaven, the earth, one’s head, one’s mother. This was thought to be less risky in case of non-fulfilment, and as such was condemned in several places: to swear falsely was in any case forbidden, and to avoid swearing by the Deity was to insult God.  Yeshua’s position agrees with such condemnation, and in this form aligns itself with that of the Essenes, who refused all oaths. 

            In Yeshua’s case, he thus once again follows the pattern of completion of the Torah in the direction of inwardness: from the outward act of taking an oath he moves inward to the mind of the person swearing. And if such a person is fully committed to the New Torah, no oath he can take will increase his credibility: a simple Yes and No will say everything. 

            Interestingly, here neither Christendom nor even Christianity have followed His rule; and unlike the previous case, this departure happened almost at once. Oaths were such a part of social life and of trust that they were clearly felt to be inevitable. In British and Australian courts, even heathen Chinese were permitted to swear, by a cracked saucer: if the oath was not kept, the swearer's soul, it was thought, would crack like the saucer. Opposition to swearing also remained, however: Quakers would not swear and were permitted to make a simple affirmation in court. Today, in a demystified and often secularised society, oaths have lost much of their necessary solemnity and mystique. This, though, would seem to make Yeshua's point much more important: we need to become people whose word it would occur to no one to doubt. We need that Torah of inwardness, which is more than ever a Torah of trust. 

THE ONE WE CAN'T AVOID

 

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter" (1945)

`Ye heard that it was said: You shall not commit adultery;

²⁸ but I -- I say to you, that every one who is looking on a woman to long for her, did already commit adultery with her in his heart.

²⁹ `But, if your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it away, for it is good for you that one of your members may perish, and not your whole body be thrown into the trash-dump fire.

³⁰ `And, if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off, and throw it away, for it is good for you that one of your members may perish, and not your whole body be thrown into the trash-dump fire.

³¹ `And it was said, That whoever may put away his wife, let him give to her a writing of divorce;

³² but I -- I say to you, that whoever may put away his wife, save for the matter of prostitution, makes her commit adultery; and whoever may marry her who has been put away commits adultery. (Matthew 5)

Yes, well. From Yeshua on Anger, we go to Yeshua on Marriage. No, not (as you might have thought) on sex; on marriage. The first thing one has to know is that in Yeshua’s world adultery could only be committed by and with a married woman: sex between a married man and an unmarried woman was not technically adultery.

Two points, then, are being made in this passage. First a point about inwardness: the old Torah’s prohibition on adultery is completed by Yeshua in the key of inwardness: just as he goes from murder, an act, to anger, a state of mind, so here he goes from adultery, an act, to desire, a state of mind. Since he uses the word “adultery” we may assume that the desire he mentions is for a woman married to another. And he hammers his argument home with two outrageous bits of hyperbole: if you have looked on your neighbour’s wife with desire, dig your eye out and throw it away; if you have touched her, as we say nowadays, “inappropriately”, cut off your hand and throw it away.

I have read many supposed explanations of this passage, but there is no getting around it: Yeshua is perfectly clear. Desire, lust, what you will, in any case for a married woman, is as bad as Anger. Many of us today do have a real problem with that. Why? we say. Desire is not evil: we may see the wife or husband of someone we know or have met and have a coup de foudre; eyes may meet across a crowded room; whoever loved, that loved not at first sight? And Cupid (whose name means Desire) is known to be lawless, so what are you going to do?

Blind yourself, says Yeshua, implacably. Better do that than have your whole body (and remember that Christianity does not believe in the immortality of the soul, but of the whole person, body and soul!) thrown on the Great Trash-Dump Fire.

We still rebel. Why is Desire so bad? Now I have to imagine what Yeshua would reply, because He didn’t specify. So I imagine him saying, Well, look at Anger. You must have been surprised when I said that Anger was as bad as Murder. But the reason it is is because it opens Pandora’s Box. And Desire, my children, does the same. Just as Anger can lead to Cain killing Abel, so Desire can lead to incest and to rape. If Desire is of the kind, and the strength, that it can consider trashing the bonds of marriage, there is no telling how far it can take you; because you are no longer in charge. As anger can turn into rage, Desire can turn into Lust. And at that point, we are very far down the rabbit hole. As Shakespeare knew:

 

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame 

Is lust in action; and till action, lust 

Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, 

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, 

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, 

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had 

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait 

On purpose laid to make the taker mad; 

Mad in pursuit and in possession so, 

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; 

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; 

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. 

    All this the world well knows; yet none knows well 

    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

And since all this is about adultery, and thus about marriage, He gives (as he did with Anger) a specific image. Because someone might have said: OK, get her to be given a divorce. (A woman could not apply for a divorce, but could in some cases demand that her husband divorce her.) At this point we get into the very complex Jewish laws on marriage and divorce, notably the ketubah or marriage-contract and the list of reasons why a man could divorce a woman (the school of Rabbi Hillel held that he could do so if she broke his dishes); but, true to the values of the 1^st-century Middle East, the keys were virginity and sex. 

            But be that as it may, Yeshua relativises it all by going (in His manner) to inwardness again, and saying: if you divorce your wife for any reason other than her sexual act(s) with someone else, you are making her an adulteress. Because if, after such a divorce, she sleeps with or marries another, she is committing adultery. What he is saying is that, in the new completed Torah, divorce can only be valid at all in case of sexual infidelity on the part of the wife. IN NO OTHER CASE. Period. 

            And no, we can’t get around it. We can embroider as much as we like, and historicise till the cows come home, but that’s what He said, and that’s what He meant.

 

So, where does this leave us? Up to and including the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century, churches tried to maintain this ruling while finding certain ways out, like annulment. And on the other hand, as attitudes on sexuality became stricter, they applied the prohibition to all sex outside marriage. Then, after two World Wars that relativised so much and the Fifties that managed temporarily to put some toothpaste back into the tube, came The Sixties or, as the French say, Soixante-huit. 

            Make Love, Not War. Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. Some of us were there; some us are the children of those who were there; and most of us have absorbed a whole new culture of sexuality and marriage. And a permanent trouble in our relation to those words young Matthew the excise-man noted down in shorthand. Let’s be honest. Most of us can no longer follow straight-up what Yeshua says. But let’s be honest about ourselves also, and not repress a few questions – even if we don’t have easy answers. It is worth watching Brief Encounter. How many of us are comfortable about our divorces, even if things turned out well afterwards? How many of us are comfortable about the proportion of what we must now call “single-parent families” in our societies? The general feeling is that that train has left the station. But in the register of a Torah completed in inwardness, we cannot deny that the Pandora’s Box argument exists, and that in that respect at least the parallel with Anger is not fanciful. 

            The final word should, as always, be humility and prayer. Let us not proudly affirm our prejudices; let us pray for discernment and courage; and let us remember that God is, and creates, and maintains, Love. Make Love, not Lust.