Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 19:28-48 Oppression and Transformation

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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.

 

Luke 19:1-27 Zacchaeus and Rahab

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Location is everything in this fairly disturbing passage, and the potential for anti-semitism is rife.  So the first thing that must be said is that we should read it an internal critique, a Jew criticizing other Jews, and as we read it we should consider a mental parallel – what if an outsider Christian launched an angry critique against Christianity?  WIth those caveats, it is probably still unsafe to proceed, because there is nothing safe about this passage at all.

Let’s begin with the location.  Jesus and the disciples are on their way to Jerusalem, and they’re just passing through Jericho.  Jericho is significant because it was the first city that the Israelites conquered as they entered the Promised Land in the Book of Joshua.  At the end of the siege of Jericho (ch. 6), Joshua ordered that all of the inhabitants should be slaughtered, except for Rahab the prostitute, who hid two Israelite spies from the King of Jericho back in chapter 2, and then helped them escape by lowering them down from the walls on a rope.  Both she and Zacchaeus the tax collector were social outcasts who decided to help someone named Joshua (Jesus’ name, Yeshua, is just an altered form of the name Joshua). Both stories have the trope of salvation coming through descending from a high place to a low place.

The people of Jesus’ time would have known the story of Joshua and Rahab, and would have been able to understand these similarities when they heard about Zacchaeus.  To them, Jesus seemed like a new Joshua, renewing all of the promises that were made as the Israelites entered the Promised Land, and that were later broken. Many of Jesus’ listeners would have rejoiced at this comparison, because they were seeking renewal.  But their joy must have turned to anger as he got closer to Jerusalem. His followers believed that the Kingdom of God would appear immediately. The parable that he told them must have given them pause. The Kingdom of God might be about to appear, but not everyone was going to handle it well, and there would be cost to pay.

Luke’s version of this parable is difficult, to say the least, which is odd because Luke is usually the funniest and most easy-going of the evangelists.  But he was also a friend of Paul’s, and had been part of the arguments that broke out about baptizing gentiles and bringing them into the nascent church. We’ll hear much more about this when we start studying the Acts of the Apostles.  But Luke’s anger at those who would restrict Christ’s Kingdom is evident here. 

So, as Jesus nears Jerusalem, the long simmering arguments he’s had with Pharisees and Scribes heats up, and his rhetoric becomes sharper and sharper.  He is trying to take the anticipation of the Kingdom of God and make it efficacious in the moment. Shape up now, he says, before it’s too late. Don’t go around thinking that the Kingdom of God lies in the future – it’s here now, and if you can’t live in it now, you won’t live in it then.

 

Luke 18:18-43 The Blind Man’s Calling Out

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A blind beggar calls out to Jesus as he and the disciples are approaching Jericho. Jesus heals him of his blindness. In this story, Luke is telling us that we can only really see when we come into contact with the divine. Sight is not about our eyes but our souls. True sight is seeing through the eyes of God.

Almost all of Jesus’ teaching have to do with stripping away false sight. Consider the camel going through the eye of the needle. Of all of Jesus’ parables, this is the most like a Zen koan. It is not meant to be explained by the rational mind. It is, in fact, impossible, and Jesus’ tells his disciples that it’s impossible. In order to grasp it, and enter the Kingdom of God, the rational mind must be set aside. Why? Because its rational to worry about the future and hoard our wealth as a security against it. It’s rational to stay right where we are and not wander towards Jerusalem and, possibly, our deaths. It’s rational to fear death which might just mean the extinction of our rational minds. Yet all of this rationality doesn’t serve us. It wants us to feel like we’re in control and presents good reasons to hold onto that control. It will never let us become lost in the wild compassion and wisdom of God.

In these chapters, an understanding of the Kingdom of God and eternal life is intimately tied to prayer. Along with joy, forgiveness, and faith, prayer is one of the four great spiritual concerns of Luke’s Gospel. Whenever the disciples are presented with something that seems impossible or that they can’t understand, Jesus tells them to pray.  At first, it doesn’t seem like prayer is present in this passage, but it is. The blind man’s calling out is a kind of prayer, and his restored sight is a kind of prayer. Prayer is the active dimension of the kind of faith that would allow us to give away everything we own to the poor, and leave everything we know to step onto the road that leads to resurrection. Prayer is a reaching out to the divine, an opening of our eyes to divine sight, an entry into the Kingdom of God. It’s not about our comfort and security, but a forgoing of comfort and security. It’s a kind of freedom from the fear that leads us to seek comfort and security. It is sometimes embarrassing and weird, like calling out again and again in a crowd, making our deepest hopes and needs known to everyone, without embarrassment.

 

Luke 18:1-17 Children of Mystery

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Gerald May, in his beautiful book about St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, says this:

When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery.  The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved.  For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment.

For me, this is almost a paraphrase of Jesus’ statement that “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Children are comfortable with mystery and willing to risk failure in a way that allows them easy access to the Kingdom of God. We might pause and wonder why we listen to cultural discourses that wish to convince us to surrender the sense of mystery that we knew as children, and worse, to become suspicious of it.

As adults, we tend more towards the Pharisee than the Publican in Jesus’ parable. The same voice that convinces us to sit in judgement on other people also whispers that we must dominate and control everything. Control allows no sense of mystery. The idea that there is something that lies outside of control’s reach is anathema to the part of us that rejoices that we are not like other people. If we’re comfortable with mystery, we acknowledge that we have no idea whether we’re like other people or not. We know something of ourselves, but not everything, and we certainly don’t know what motivates or drives others. We might be better in some ways and much worse in others. But we have no way of knowing.

It’s easy to understand why Jesus tells the disciples this parable when he does. They’ve just been hearing about the end times, subjected to a description of loss and devastation.  “Don’t lose heart,” he says. “Pray always.” You might feel like you’re being abandoned in your distress, but you’re not. Something is dying. Something is being destroyed. But that destruction brings you closer to God, not further away. It strips you of the sense that you can control the world, that you are a master of the universe, that you are better than anyone else. It opens you wide to mystery, and this only feels like a violation if you lack the mind of a little child, to whom mystery is a friend.

 

Luke 17:11-37 Apocalyptic Being

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When I was in seminary, someone asked why we couldn’t simply get rid of those parts of the Bible that don’t make any sense anymore. After all, if we accept that the Biblical canon was created by people, we should also accept that it can be uncreated by people. The professor gave a very wise answer. She said that we never know how the world will change, and the things that seem meaningless to us now might be rich with meaning a year from now. For a long time, the eschatological parts of scripture have seemed meaningless to me. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, when we were afraid of nuclear armageddon. But then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet bloc broke up, and that fear dissipated and became like a half-remembered nightmare. Even after September 11, 2001, fear seemed manageable to me. Yes, it was possible that I and my loved ones would die in violence, but that’s always been possible – car accidents are violent, storms are violent, even heart attacks are violent. Fear of personal violence wasn’t as bad as fear that the world might end. It’s only in the past few years, when dire warnings of coming environmental catastrophe have grown so loud, that I’ve again become afraid like I was as a child. Apocalypse and eschatology went away as a spiritual concern, and now they’re back again.

I’m trying to decide whether I find Jesus’s apocalyptic discourse comforting or upsetting.  The comfort comes from the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is already surrounding us. God’s great beauty and presence is here, now – it’s not something we need to wait for. We need only pay attention, and learn to peacefully align our minds with God’s mind, God’s compassion. And there is no preparation we can make for anything else – no bunker will keep us safe, we can plan for no post-apocalyptic utopia. Our endings, whether individual or collective, will find us in the midst of life. We’ll be sleeping, we’ll be doing kitchen chores, and then we’ll be gone. If we lose our lives now, giving ourselves up to the praise and love of God, if we allow ourselves to become lost in the vast environment of God’s love, then we already have everything we can or could ever need. Time disappears, and we subsist in the eternal now of the divine, and endings, if there are endings, become unimportant.

I can accept, and even rejoice, in this for myself. I have a harder time accepting it for my daughter. I do believe that I can never lose her, that no matter what happens, I will be with her within the mind of God, outside of time and the fears of the everyday. As John of Patmos says in his Revelation, God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Yet I love the way she’s grown and changed, and am excited to see who she will become. My love of her roots me to time. This is probably what Jesus meant when he said that we must turn away from our loved ones for the sake of the divine. Perhaps he does want us to hold our interpersonal loves lightly, so that we can expand our love for everyone and everything. But I find that I can’t do it. The great loves of my life – my love for my daughter and my wife – root me in this world, this existence, this sweep of time.

Given this, maybe the most that apocalyptic thinking can do for me is to help me focus on the present moment. I don’t know what will become of my loved ones, but if I let my worries for their futures infect my love for them, if I turn from joy to fear in the way that I relate to them, then I will have lost a kingdom for nothing. I cannot hold my love for them lightly. But I can hold my sense of the future lightly.

This is not nihilism. I have no intention of giving up, of despairing of the possibility of averting environmental catastrophe. But my reasons have changed. I believe that God grieves for the species that go extinct. They are part of God’s abundance, and their absence wounds creation. God also grieves for all of those whose lives have already been disrupted or destroyed by environmental change. If God grieves for them, because God loves them, and loves them intimately, then I, if I am truly aligned with God, must grieve for them, too, and try to help them. But my motivation must grow out of this love, this collusion with the divine, and not out of fear.