CRUMBS!

This very peculiar painting of the unpaintable is by Domenico Fetti (1589-1623). Baroque, indeed.

7 Do not condemn, that you may not be condemned.

² for with the same judgement with which you judge, you shall be judged, and with the same measure you measure with, it shall be measured to you.

³ `And why you look at the crumb in your brother's eye, and the beam that [is] in your own eye you do not even notice?

⁴ or, how will you say to your brother, Let me take out the crumb from your eye, and look, the beam [is] in your own eye?

⁵ Hypocrite, first get rid of the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to get rid of the crumb out of your brother's eye.

The theme here, is of course a variant of “do as you would be done by”. It urges the hearers to look at themselves before looking – crossly, judgementally – at their brothers. [The usual translation of the opening verb is "judge", but "Matthew"'s Greek word would, for its first readers, have had a thoroughly negative overtone, and a connotation of taking to court and/or condemning.] It reminds us that we tend to see small faults in others more clearly than large ones in ourselves. As such, it is neither very original nor very complex. And yet. In the first place, it is much easier said than done. We do tend to be more indulgent with ourselves than with others, and expend great ingenuity in finding good excuses to do so. 

            Secondly, the injunction goes much deeper in its implications. To begin with, who is my brother? Well, that one was answered in the story of the traveller and the Samaritan. But then, of what part of the Torah is this an example? Well, it takes us, the hearers, back to “eye for eye and tooth for tooth”; and thus it takes us back also to the way that equitable rule was contested, or rather, “completed” by Yeshua. And thus, also, to the question of inwardness.

            We have seen inwardness to be the root of Yeshua’s completion of the Torah. If, then, we look here, we see not the spirit of observing a proper distinction and, if necessary, a proper sanction of a brother’s fault, but a self-questioning, a confrontation of self with self without illusions or excuses. In fact, an inwardness. And that inwardness, if it takes place, completes the Torah by fulfilling one of the Great Commandments: loving my brother as myself. 

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."

 

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. 

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. 

A VISITOR FROM EVERYWHERE

His visits are rare. Always wished-for, hoped-for, longed-for, asked-for; and when he comes, there is a sudden sense of more light in the air, of ambient sound becoming a harmony, of one’s own terrestrial weight lessening. How long he stays depends on his welcome, and on the lodging he is given. 

This morning he arrived, unannounced, at the moment I awoke, and in my mind there was the sudden image of the first half of a bridge, arriving from somewhere and touching down just in front of me. And a flooding sense of pure joy. Lightness of being. It had been such a long time since he was last here!

You will have guessed who he is. He has various names: Ruach HaKodesh, Pneuma Hagion, Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Ghost. It feels impossibly presumptuous, imagining that one is receiving a personal visit from the Third Person of the Trinity; and I am quite prepared to be told, and to believe, that the one who came today is “merely” an angel sent by the Ruach. On the other hand, we are told that we may ask for his presence, and that that is one prayer almost certainly answered; and we even learn that if we manage to prepare a suitable dwelling, he and the other two Persons will come and live there full-time. 

Why is such a thought even possible? Because the God who is the collective name for the Trinity is (as the medieval Liber XXIV philosophorum puts it) “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. Because he is both intimate and ubiquitous, holding the Universe in the hollow of his hand and meeting me with absolute love wherever I am and go (Psalm 139). This is conceivable only by learning to unite one’s faith in a Creator with the experience of prayer in one’s inmost closet. It is perfectly and stupendously expressed in the Third Collect for Morning Prayer: “O Lord our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day . . .”

It is at such moments that Theology becomes experience, that Divinity becomes real. Up close and personal. Utterly surprising. Especially if one is not a seasoned mystic, a Benedictine hermit, a San Juan de la Cruz, but an ordinary homme moyen sensuel in a French farmhouse in the Age of Bannon. Surprising, and yet not: completely natural, just also completely festive. 

How to react? I think, by deep down letting go – for the time being, letting him occupy the driving-seat and getting on with the day in a quiet and attentive way, peacefully but minutely attuned to where he turns the wheel. And keeping alive the festivity with an astonished giving of thanks.