Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 22:24-46  The Urgency of Hope

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It is hard to read this portion of the Gospel without tears coming into my eyes. I think it’s Jesus saying, “Simon, Simon, listen!” that gets to me – it’s so urgent, so full of passion and hope. Jesus knows that he only has a few hours left, and that if his disciples are going to truly hear and understand, he must prepare them. They don’t understand him, not in this moment, but they try to interpret his urgency. Peter thinks that it’s about the coming trial, so he tries to reassure, to comfort. “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” But Jesus’ urgency isn’t about the crucifixion. It’s about the community that will come after, and how people must behave to each other if his death is going to have practical meaning in their lives.  

I feel this same urgency when I think of my daughter. When I suffer, I don’t want her to suffer also. I don’t need her company as I go to my own cross. What I need is the hope that what I’ve tried to teach her will stick, that, despite my many foolish mistakes, I’ve raised her right, in the love and perseverance that will make her a good person and strengthen her relationship with God. If I were in Jesus’ place, and she and I were sharing our own last supper, I would do what he does, and try to get in a few last pieces of advice. I like to think that my prime concern would be for her, a concern born of love, and not for my own suffering, not for my own fear. I am probably wrong about my capacity for this, but it’s what I hope for, and that hope has its own spirit, its own way of forming and leading me.

Jesus’ hope is not for an individual, but for the community he’s been trying to build, a community that is fit to live in the Kingdom of God. He’s already described this community, multiple times. Now he, and the narrative, focus on three things that this community will have to embrace. It will have to be a community of servanthood, where people set aside their own needs and agendas to serve each other with love. It will be a community that is misunderstood and reviled, but also a community that won’t spend time trying to prove its worth to a world that doesn’t understand it, a world that sees it as a community of bandits. And it will have to be a community that stays awake, that doesn’t hide or turn away from suffering, but accepts suffering with the same clear eyes and open heart with which is also accepts joy.

 

Luke 22:1-23 The Last Supper

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The disciples knew, of course, what was coming. For weeks and weeks Jesus had been talking about Jerusalem, and how he would be arrested, tortured, and killed there. He also told them that he would rise from the dead, but that was so strange and mysterious that their minds couldn’t rest on it, but instead focused on the pain and death. Then, when they arrived in Jerusalem, they sat with him in the Temple grounds, and the anger that he caused, the long-simmering conflicts that his presence brought to the surface, were palpable. So they knew. They knew that suffering was coming, and they were afraid.

When I say the words of the Institution Narrative on a Sunday morning, when I lift the bread and say “This is my body, given for you, eat this in remembrance of me,” and when I lift the cup and say, “This is my blood, given for you, whenever you drink this, do this in remembrance of me,” I know that I am speaking into an atmosphere of fear. And I know that those words that I say are the great reassurance. The disciples were afraid that they were going to lose Jesus. And Jesus told them that he couldn’t be lost, that he is present in what we eat and what we drink, in the simplest daily actions of our lives. He offered them a glimpse into his continual presence, but not all of them could see it.

I wonder if Judas had really been listening when Jesus talked about God’s love, and attentiveness, and the possibility of banishing fear. It is clear he never repented, if repentance means being of a new mind. His is the old mind, the mind that believes that it has only itself to rely on, and that it must protect itself by controlling others. His actions make this clear. And they are often our actions. We often choose the silver over the reassurance, security over hope. Yet Jesus eagerly desires to sit and eat with us, and participating in this meal is incredibly simple. Just look for him in your daily bread, in the simple, sustaining actions of your daily life.

 

Luke 21:1-38 Be Unprepared

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We want to be prepared for disaster. We stockpile food and clean water, learn survival skills, build bunkers. Well, I don’t, but some people do. Disaster-preparedness is seen as a positive good in our society, and maybe it is, but it’s worth asking what it costs us. Jesus is very confusing about preparedness in this chapter. On the one hand, we are to be like the poor widow, giving everything away, and when we are dragged before the authorities because we are followers of the way that Jesus is trying to show us, we aren’t supposed to prepare our defense in advance. On the other hand, we are to be on our guard and alert, not dissipated by drunkenness or the worries of this life. Is he saying that we should be attentive, but unprepared?

This passage from Luke parallels similar passages in Matthew and Mark, passages that are known as the “little apocalypse.” The Revelation to St. John is the “big apocalypse” of Christian scripture, but there are Jewish apocalypses, too, such as the Book of Daniel. To quote Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in The Last Week, their book on the passion and resurrection, an apocalypse is “a kind of Jewish and Christian literature that reveals or unveils the future in language loaded with images and symbols.” The word apocalypse literally means “unveiling.” And Jesus’ little apocalypse truly does unveil the future. Within a hundred years of his saying these words, the people rose up in insurrection, the temple was destroyed, Jerusalem itself was destroyed, and the tenth legion camped in its ashes.

The things he predicted came true, and it is entirely possible that some of the apocalypses that are being predicted now will come true. But in this passage Jesus doesn’t advocate circling the wagons and stockpiling provisions. For him, the answer to apocalypse is open-handedness, awareness, and deep trust. The problem, as always, is control. Fear makes us want to control our circumstances, to pretend that we can be protected. But, as always, Jesus isn’t interested in control. He is only interested in love. Love must be our response to apocalypse. It is love that leads us to try to avert apocalypse, and love is the posture that we must adopt when apocalypse comes. We tend to think that our temples, our lifestyles and traditions, are all important, that we cannot survive without them. Yet as soon as they are gone, we find new traditions and lifestyles. It is all right to grieve the past, and to be concerned about the future, as long as we manage to practice love in the present.

Luke 20:1-47 Beware the Scribes

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As Jesus teaches in the temple, many of Luke’s themes of power and control, and the way that these things contrast with the dream of the transformation of the world, come to the fore. It’s no accident that John the Baptist’s name comes back into the narrative. As you’ll remember from the beginning of Chapter 3, it is John who stands against the power of caesars and high priests, whose voice cries out against their abuses. Now Jesus sits within the sphere of their power, and the chief priests with their minions, the scribes, come to dispute with him.

The direction of their attacks tell us much about the spirituality of power and control that they have adopted. Their opening gambit is to attack Jesus’ authority, since they understand authority as something that you inherit due to class or standing in society. In our society, authority is often assumed to adhere to white men, whether they’ve done anything to earn it. Jesus counters with the authority of John, which was not inherited but earned. John had authority because the people followed him. The priests and scribes can recognize that this kind of authority exists, but they don’t except it. They’re afraid to say this, because whether they except it or not, the crowds do.

So they move on to their second attack. Surely Caesar has authority. Isn’t paying taxes a de facto way of accepting a government’s authority? Jesus’ response is a shrug. It is, but that kind of authority matters so little that it really makes no difference whether you pay taxes or not. These forms of authority that the priests and scribes care so much about are illusory. To the mind of God, they do not matter at all.

Finally, the Sadducees show up, and essentially try to mansplain to him about why there can be no resurrection. Their authority is that of the precocious teenager who thinks he’s got it all figured out. They assume that the resurrection Jesus believes in is just a reiteration of this world, that things will continue pretty much like they do now, only better. Of course people will still be married in the resurrection. Won’t all of our social and political structures be pretty much the same?

And it’s here that the strangeness of Jesus’ vision of authority really comes to the fore. For him, authority depends on our closeness to God. In the resurrection, we will all be entirely close to God, almost inseparable from God. And God, who loves everyone equally, will invite us into that love. Our preferences will fall away. The loves we hold now are great training for this – if we allow them to, they will form us in love, increase our capacity for love. But they are a mere glimpse of God’s love, and when we are transformed into pulsations of that love, we will forget the particularities that formed us. Since the priests and scribes and sadducees rely on a different understanding of authority, one based on power rather than love, they cannot understand this. And Jesus warns us to beware of anyone who cannot understand holy love and who resist any formation in it.

Luke 19:28-48 Oppression and Transformation

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There’s a very real way in which Jesus’ actions as he enters Jerusalem are political theater.  He stages an entrance that is very similar to a Roman triumph, when a returning general would parade his troops through the streets and show off his captured enemies.  And the people of Jerusalem were used to these triumphs, having been conquered many times. The Macedonian king Alexander the Great had entered Jerusalem in triumph in 332 BCE.  The Roman general Pompey entered Jerusalem in 63 BCE. And on the same day that Jesus entered Jerusalem, Pilate brought up troops from Caesarea Maritima and processed them through the city.  Jesus’ procession was meant as a kind of protest to this display of Roman Imperial power. Pilate processed as a prince of war. Jesus processed as a prince of peace.

His actions in the temple were also political theater.  The temple was the place where people came to be reconciled to God, which they did by paying for the priests to sacrifice live animals on their behalf.  In this way, the temple controlled access to God. But the temple also collected taxes for the Romans, and stored the records of debt. So the temple was both a bank and a place of worship, and it was presided over by a High Priest who was in the Romans’ pocket.  So Jesus’ driving out of the money changers was an act of protest against this whole system. He didn’t think that we need anything to mediate between us and God, and he protested the system of economic and political domination that the temple had come to represent.

But what, if anything, does political theater have to do with the spiritual life?  It’s often the domain of activists, and while some of them are deeply spiritual people, some are not.  Some are more guided by anger than love. Yet Jesus makes clear that following him includes following him to Jerusalem, a place where oppression and political evil cannot be denied, a place where a once beautiful idealism has rotted.  How can a contemplative, who is driven by a deep affinity with God’s love for the world, encounter and protest oppression without going astray?

Gerald May, in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, which is primarily about Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, has some useful thoughts about this:

Instead of looking into social and political dynamics specifically, Teresa and John keep returning to the experience of the individual soul in relationship to God.  I have found this to be true of other contemplative writers as well. It is not that they are unconcerned with social liberation and justice, but that they are convinced such transformation will happen only through the changing of individual hearts.  The Dalai Lama put it starkly in 1991: “Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way.”

Jesus’ theatrics is not meant to bring the temple system down – he knows that it will fall under its own weight fairly soon.  His actions are meant to bring into question the very suppositions that the temple system is based on. Do we need to purchase God’s forgiveness through sacrifice?  Do we need our relationship with God to be mediated by a religious or political system? When we’re faced with a controlling and dominating person or group, is our only recourse to control and dominate in return?  His actions confront the many assumptions that get in the way of transformation. As long as violence, dominance, and oppression go unquestioned, the world can’t be transformed. But more than that, as long we refuse to question those forces in our spiritual lives, we can’t be transformed, and the transformation of the world depends on our internal work.