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. 

THAT LITTLE WORD AGAIN

In my previous post I looked at the prayer that God’s will may be done on earth AS it is in Heaven; today we might glance at the prayer that we may be forgiven AS we forgive others.

It seems, at first, much simpler than the previous AS:  a simple case of do as you would be done by. If you want to be forgiven, the least you can do is do some forgiving yourself. Let’s start with what’s to be forgiven. In all Gospels except Luke it is “debts”;  but many scholars think that the word Jesus used was the Aramaic hoba, which means both debt and sin. If this sounds odd, remember that in both Dutch and German the same word, schuld, is used for a monetary debt and to mean ‘guilt’; and in Dutch, therefore, the relevant line of the Lord’s prayer says: forgive us our schuld as we forgive our schuldenaren – literally our debtors, but in fact those who have schuld toward us. And let’s remember also that only a little over a century ago debt was considered so serious that an inability to pay it sent you to gaol. (Those who borrow from the Mafia are even to this day reminded forcefully of the need to pay both debt and vig.)

Are we God’s debtors? It seems odd: if God is love, and our relation to him is one of love, is it decent to express that in terms of debt? In the Old Testament, God put it very clearly to Israel: if you (plural: y’all) will love and honour me and keep my commandments, you will be my people and I will be your God. If you will not, I will turn my back on you and nasty things will probably happen to you. So it’s in one sense a transaction; and a transaction, agreed to by both sides, creates a debt. If this sounds one-sided, you can still find traces of the other side in the Psalms, when the Psalmist cries “Up, Lord, and do something!” And in Judaism arguing, even indignantly, with God is not considered outrageous.

With the coming of Christ there is a subtle change. It is no longer merely a matter of keeping commandments, but of a relation of profound intimacy with God: with the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit. This is still simple, but where keeping commandments is simple on this side of complexity, the new relationship is simple far, far beyond complexity.

So what does that do to debt and schuld? It transforms it, or is meant to. Just as between great lovers the very thought of “owing” is inconceivable, so in the new relation of love between God and the soul it is (meant to be) inconceivable. Right, says God: but if you accept this, and you also accept that “what you have done to the least of these, you have done to me”, then the thought of “owing” between you and your brother must also become inconceivable.

But. But we still live in a sublunar and greebly world. So in the meantime, in the mean time – the time in the middle between promise and Parousia, the mean and ungenerous time of Auden’s “low and dishonest decade” --, there is forgiveness. It is the way-station to inconceivability. And we learn the HOW of forgiving by looking at the way we hope God will forgive us. Not a mean forgiving, that will go on reminding the forgiven of their nasties and my virtue; not a forgiving accompanied by stern lectures, demanding promises never to do it again; no, joyful forgiving with open arms, with a clean soft garment and a feast of rich veal from the fatted calf.

This takes a bit of learning. Most of the time we don’t even pray for our enemies, let alone forgive them. When did you last hear prayers in church for ISIS and its members? Forgiving is hard; forgiving and forgetting even harder. But the joy it brings is so enormous that the learning is worth every effort. Another of the Joys of Lent? 

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "The Return of the Prodigal Son"   

THROUGH THE DESERT

   I have long been fascinated by the lengthy Psalm 119, that curious love-song to the Law. One of its most striking features is the repetition of certain words: "Law", "commandments", "statutes" and "testimonies". They keep turning up in slightly different contexts, and strongly suggest a formal pattern. When I started looking them up on the Web, I found there are eight in all, and
this useful downloadable PDF lists them in Hebrew, in the usual translation, and gives the places and ways they are used by the Psalmist, as well as his responses to each.
 
   The overall impression one gets is indeed that of a formal song, but a formal song of passionate gratitude to God the Lawgiver: the gratitude of a nomadic desert people for a signpost, for a clear path through the wilderness, a path that shows shifting sands to be avoided, oases where one may rest and be refreshed, and at the end a promised land of milk (protein and fat, hard to come by in the Nefud) and honey (the universal sweetener before sugar, giving energy and pleasure). As so often, it teaches a Christian how absolutely the Old Alliance belongs to his own faith as well. I may believe that there is a new Torah, and that a living guide is even more precious than an Ordnance Survey map; studying such a Psalm in any depth explains why the new Torah in no way banishes or replaces the old but fulfils it: not an iota or punctuation mark of the old shall be eliminated, it keeps its full and glorious value.
 
   Moreover, one thing the Fathers teach us is that beyond studying the Psalms there is another approach:  praying the Psalms. For some psalms, this is both simple (though not necessarily easy) and evident: the Penitential Psalms and the Psalms of Praise, for instance. For others, it is much more difficult. Sometimes it's harder because of the spiritual depth and complexity: Psalm 22, even without its immense Christian resonance, has a range of thought and emotion that takes years to absorb fully into prayer. And what about 119? Its very length and insistence makes it difficult to pray: we tend to think, 'OK, enough already, I get the point, no need to go on and on . . .' The change-ringing of the terms for God's Word is alien to our ideas of both poetry and prayer.

   So how to pray Psalm 119? I think the answer lies in the list I cited above, in the notes on the full range of meanings attached to each term; and in a constant application of all these meanings to one's own life and experience. For instance, simply following and meditating upon the mishpatim, to us almost inexplicably glossed as 'judgements, ordinances', leads us to the insight that such judgements are those that express and echo God's loving-kindness by their justice. And that, in turn, sheds light upon on the one hand Angela Merkel's decision to receive positively the greatest possible number of refugees in Germany, and other hand my wife's decision to go and visit our 96-year-old peasant neighbour who lives a placid old age but is happy to be remembered. If one admits to one's reading of Psalm 119 such background and such echoes, praying  the psalm becomes both possible and a delight.

IMAGINE

If parson lost his senses,

And people came to theirs . . .

Thus began, in the early 20^th century, a moving poem by Ralph Hodgson in defence of mistreated animals. The opening played through my head in reading the news about the Middle East and new anti-terrorist defences. ‘If leaders lost their senses, And people came to theirs . . .’ I thought, what might happen? What might we construct? And in a John Lennon mood, I began to Imagine.

Imagine three great monotheist religions, living in mutual respect and affection. Imagine Muslims and Christians according Judaism the respect due to the Eldest Brother, the one who was first chosen by God, the one who received the Law, the one who, with the self-confidence of his seniority, is still the only one who dares argue with God. Imagine Jews and Muslims according to Christianity the affection due to the Second Brother, the one who dared go further than the Nation and the Law, to extend God’s love to all humanity and summarize the Law as absolute Love. Imagine Jews and Christians according to Islam the respect and affection due to the Youngest Brother, the one who lives a faith summed up in Obedience, who keeps his Ramadan and, with the fire of youth, dares to believe in unadulterated values.

Imagine the nations of a vast region on the planet, recognizing that they all contain these three faiths and their respective grandeurs, and that nevertheless they all have to live in a modern world where many could not care less about religion. The vast reserve of faith they contain acts as a leaven, of respect and affection toward neighbours, and of a consciousness that there is a vertical dimension to life as well as a horizontal one. The respect and affection will furnish one of their peoples’ permanent needs, security. Meanwhile, the vast reserve of ingenuity and honesty released by this peaceful coexistence turns bomb-inventors’ talent to creating clever irrigation schemes to make the desert flower, and sees small-scale financing help the poor into trades both decent and profitable. The peoples’ other great need, modest prosperity, becomes attainable also. The three religions’ values, which tie in quite well with the secular ones of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, are now, combined, so powerful that beyond the borders of the Middle East they restrain the inordinate greed of stock trading and the corrosive political hatred that paralyzes polarized democracies. Bills for the common good get passed, elections take on the cheerful variety of football championships, prayer is no longer seen as a divisive group label but as an act of primary value, all faiths can wear their distinctive attributes openly and be respected for them, and boarding an aeroplane becomes as simple and agreeable as it was sixty years ago.

Imagine – since Christianity is the faith this blog is most concerned with – a Church that is one house with many mansions, that has healed its great schisms, between East and West, between Catholic and Protestant, and that attracts the intelligent young to serve in it. It would have many churches, and many different forms of worship to suit the various temperaments of the faithful. There would be cheerful family churches with guitars, and tall, still churches of awe and Latin beauty; churches that know the Bible by heart and churches that distil the finest points of liturgical symbolism; churches that live in permanent prayer and churches that help and defend the disadvantaged in their daily lives; churches that study the history of the faith and churches that find joy in daily conversation with synagogues and mosques, comparing ways of loving God.

None of this, says the Father we all worship, is impossible.

The image above is take from an article on the House of One, a joint place of worship for the three faiths being built in Berlin.