don't resist an evil person: theology and stuff from my husband

Me: What do you think Jesus is trying to tell us when he says, “Do not resist an evil person”?

(I showed Kris the passage: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matthew 5:38-42 NIV)

Kris: Well, of course, Jesus often hyperbolized.

Me: Yeah, but even if he is hyperbolizing here, his meaning is still along the lines of what he’s hyperbolizing about. I mean, hyperbole’s just an emphasizing tool; it’s not like irony, where you’re saying the opposite of what you mean. What’s he trying to tell us?

Kris: Well, you could take him literally, of course. Then he’d be talking about pacifism to the point of not even defending yourself from an attack. Like not responding to Pearl Harbor. (Kris always goes to history in his responses to my questions about scripture. History, for him, is the primary repository of knowledge. For me, it’s personal experience.)

Me: That’s not what I’m wanting to do. Take it literally. What I’m trying to figure out is what Jesus is wanting me to take away from all this.

Kris: Well, Jesus himself wasn’t all that much of a pacifist. He turns the tables over in the temple on two occasions. He constantly offends people, calls them broods of vipers and not Abraham’s children. He says they’re fit for hell. And, you know, his disciples keep asking him, “Don’t you know you’re offending these people?” but he keeps on doing it. And, you know, Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek,” but he was hardly meek himself. After he has offended the Pharisees on more than one occasion, he slips away. And Jesus says it’s bad to call people “Raca,” but he calls them worse than that. He says people are evil. He says, “Woe to you.”

Me: (I can’t remember what I asked him here; I was too busy transcribing Kris's response.)

Kris: No. I think Jesus is saying, in a given situation, we should respond first with generosity, not anger and violence. That, in the end, we’ll be measured by the same measure we use, so we should respond as we would want to be responded to.

Me: So, you’re saying, it wasn’t wrong to respond to Pearl Harbor?

Kris: Well, pacifists—like the Amish and the Mennonites—might say it was. But, you know, they have some pretty severe punishments. Like shunning and exiling people.

Me: (I said something here. Don’t know what.)

Kris: Well, as I say, Patty. That panel discussion I went to years and years ago, when I was an undergraduate, about religious views on war, violence, was it justified? And there was this Mennonite on the panel. He wasn’t a typical Mennonite, I guess, because he was a theology professor or something and I don’t think Mennonites even have theology and stuff. Anyway, he thought that war was wrong in general, but that, in his opinion, some wars were justified. In the end, though, he said, “When we go to war, we should do it with great regret, with a heavy heart, and as a last resort.” But he also said, when we go to war, we should do it brutally and inhumanely. Because that’s what war is: killing people.

 

if anyone

Honesty time: Today I am not in the mood for another one of these “You’ve heard it said some sort of extreme way things are to be done, but I say some even more extreme way things should be done.”

Just can’t hear it. Resistance. Irritation.

 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well” (Matthew 5:39-40 NIV).

And if some guy wants to hold you up at gunpoint and rape you, let him; &c.

I can’t think about this today.

swearing by almighty god, the searcher of hearts, &c.

Jesus little dissertation on how we shouldn’t make oaths—not by God or heaven or earth or Jerusalem or by the hair of our heads—is pretty straightforward. The “You have heard it said…but I say” construction he uses here and many other times in his mountainside sermon establishes the degree of perfection God expects of us. Soon he’ll sum up this sentiment by saying, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48 NIV)—a charge that points up the impossibility of its fulfillment. We should strive for such perfection, but we will fail.

That said, I’ve never much had the urge to make oaths. I have, on occasion, said an intention-empty (and regrettable) “I swear to God.”

The only situation in which I can imagine even undertaking an oath of any kind would be if I were asked to put my hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God in court as they do in TV court dramas. Which got me wondering, does that really happen anymore and how—this country having been established by some pretty legalistic Bible devotees—did it ever get started in the first place?

So, I did some research and discovered the following:

The phrase about telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing has been standard trial language in Britain since the Middle Ages, and the Puritans brought it with them to the New World. In his 1787 essay “On Test Laws, Oaths of Allegiance and Abjuration, and Partial Exclusions from Office,” Noah Webster both referenced the phrase and, if I get his meaning at all (which I may not: I struggle, in this passage, with the legal or moral or philosophical ramifications of the word new), more or less dismissed its demands: “An oath creates no new obligation. A witness, who swears to tell the whole truth, is under no new obligation to tell the whole truth. An oath reminds him of his duty; he swears to do as he ought to do; that is, he adds an express promise to an implied one. A moral obligation is not capable of addition or diminution.”

Nevertheless, both the language and the practice of swearing on the Bible made it into John Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, the first wholly American, as distinguished from British, dictionary of legal terms and practices, published in 1839. Bouvier defined an oath as “A declaration made according to law, before a competent tribunal or officer, to tell the truth; or it is the act of one who, when lawfully required to tell the truth, takes God to witness that what he says is true. It is a religious act by which the party invokes God not only to witness the truth and sincerity of his promise...”

Bouvier went on to say “It is proper to distinguish two things in oaths; 1. The invocation by which the God of truth, who knows all things, is taken to witness. 2. The imprecation by which he is asked as a just and all-powerful being, to punish perjury. 3. The commencement of an oath is made by the party taking hold of the book, after being required by the officer to do so, and ends generally with the words, ‘so help you God,’ and kissing the book, when the form used is that of swearing on the Evangelists.”

There were, according to Bouvier, various other forms that such an oath might take that I found enlightening—both about the habits of our early country and about oath-taking in general. He details two variations—“the witness or party promising holding up his right hand while the officer repeats to him, ‘You do swear by Almighty God, the searcher of hearts, that,’ &c., ‘And this as you shall answer to God at the great day’” and what’s referred to as an affirmation, when “the officer repeats, ‘You do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm, that,’ &c.”

(I would like to get in the habit of using &c instead of etc., by the way. Looks so oldfashiondy-nice.)

Bouvier was also careful to stipulate that “The oath, however, may be varied in any other form, in order to conform to the religious opinions of the person who takes it.”

Though the habit of putting one’s hand on a Bible to swear an oath has survived into modern times, Quakers have been objecting to since the country’s early days—citing, according to an excellent Slate article I read, not Jesus in his mountainside sermon but his brother James’s more emphatic encapsulation of it: “Above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. All you need to say is a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Otherwise you will be condemned” (James 5:12)—and it’s now possible, as Bouvier suggests it may in theory always have been, for you to use a different book or, I’m guessing, none at all.

That’s what I guess I’d do, upon all this consideration, if I had to testify in court and were asked to put my hand on the Bible or say "so help me God."

“No thanks,” I’d say. “I don’t swear oaths on God or books. But yeah, I’ll tell the truth, to the best of my memory. That'll have to be enough.”

victims of adultery

It’s astonishing to me how quickly after establishing the big matters of faith—the nature of true contentment, the call for us to be salt and light to one another, the role of scriptural commands in salvation—Jesus turns in his mountainside sermon to what seem like fine points of Christian life. I guess what he’s saying is, “Here’s how to live in general. Now let’s look at how that’s likely to play out in the day-to-day.”

First he takes up our tendency, from earliest childhood, to get mad at one another. For this oh-so-common everyday offense, reconciliation is the only answer. Being salt and light to one another.

Then he takes up how we make victims of those around us through our infidelities to those whom we ourselves committed to love and cherish—specifically through lust, adultery, and divorce. Jesus tells the crowds around him that “anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5:32 NIV).

This is, nowadays, hard teaching. So many of us are divorced or have married someone who is divorced. And we live in such a hypersexual society that lust, adultery, and divorce seem too normal to be all that serious. Close to half of all high school students in the U.S. report having had sexual intercourse. Our society’s various lusts—for porn, for hook ups, relationships outside of our primary relationships—are fueled and facilitated by the immediacy of the internet. Porn statistics are all over the place; suffice it to say it’s ubiquitous. Somewhere between thirty to sixty percent of all married Americans will be unfaithful at some time in their marriage. Half of Americans who marry these days divorce. Infidelity of all kinds is so much a part of our culture that we don’t even see it. And yet, according to Jesus, though, infidelity is serious business—so much so that even just fantasizing about it merits being “thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29).

Even in Jesus’ own times—judging from the consternation Jesus’ listeners seem to display on the subject of divorce, though, as well as from accounts like that of the woman with five husbands that Jesus meets at the well—infidelity was probably pretty widespread and normal-seeming. Jesus speaks, then as now, right past the normalcy of infidelity to the problem at its root: it makes victims of everyone concerned, not only the adulterer’s spouse but the person who may later marries him or her and most especially the children of all the marriages involved, who are not only emotionally and relationally but economically damaged by divorce. Even adult children of divorced are very often deeply distraught when their parents divorce.

These victims, I think Jesus is saying, are the ones we need to be concerned with, not ourselves and our desires—or, as we like to say these days, our needs. He doesn’t offer any sort of counsel on infidelity beyond that word victim. Think of your victims, he seems to be preaching.

 

stupidhead

Next up in Jesus’ mountainside sermon is anger, which he says is tantamount to murder, one of the ten worst sins referenced on Moses’ stones.

He starts with what is seemingly the tamest case—“anyone who is angry with a brother or sister” (Matthew 5:22 NIV)—and renders it even tamer sounding in the concrete: “Anyone who calls a brother or sister ‘Stupidhead!’” (Matthew 5:22, my paraphrase). The potential punishment, though, is anything but tame: being subject to God’s judgment, even hellfire.

Sounds harsh. If you grew up with siblings or watched your own children closely, however, you are familiar with the secret ferocity of the rage he’s talking about—how, though it begins in earliest childhood, it truly is akin to murder. Indeed it would be murder more often, I think, if small ones were more adept in their violence. When I think back on the wraths of my own childhood—I remember, especially, an instance involving a handful of my or my combatant’s hair, ripped out by the roots—I see what Jesus is getting at. I honestly can’t remember whose hair it was, my own or my sister’s, but I remember the spongy pink underside of the scalpskin and, beneath that, the rage. It’s not merely the severity of the action, Jesus is saying; it’s the intent, the attitudes and feelings, that merit eternal punishment.

Also those without siblings are subject to anger on occasion. Rage spans our lives, beginning on the playground and ending in court. We fume against our parents, our employers, our spouses, our children, our closest friends. Even the total strangers who ring up our purchases in stores can kindle our annoyance, frustration, impatience—all synonyms for wrath. Anger is, hands down, the most common symptom of most mental illnesses. It is, on occasion, every person’s sin.

It would have been nice had Jesus iterated, here, what we believers know to be true: that we can’t escape our angry selves, that the only way to avoid hellfire is through genuine shame and acceptance of Jesus’ sacrifice to pay for our murderous rages. But, of course, Jesus hadn’t yet made that sacrifice that day on the mountainside, and the sermon he preached is less about the next life than it is about this one—how we might live better, happier lives while we’re still here.

There is a cure for the inevitable rages of this life, and it is this: conciliatory heart.

Jesus is uncommonly clear about this. “First go and be reconciled,” he counsels (Matthew 5:24). And again, “Settle matters quickly with your adversary” (Matthew 5:25). Reconciliation is not only the wisest solution—you can’t win against someone else’s anger, he argues—but the best one, from God’s point of view. Even church attendance isn’t as important as getting along.

Such a simple cure, and yet so difficult to learn and do. To be reconciled. To settle matters when someone has it in for us. To give in.

Jesus’ gargle of a curseword, raca—“Fool!” but meaner sounding—sums up all sin, it seems to me. It is my father’s growl of annoyance that I have inherited. It my daughters’ arrogance, inherited from me. It is my certainty, in every situation, that I am right and whoever else is wrong.

And, in this early sermon, Jesus seems to be saying it’s up to me to do something about it.

joshy

At my conference, someone directed my attention to a postcard featuring a photo of one tattooed man embracing another from behind with the caption, “Mexico: Where ‘Jesus Loves You’ takes on a whole new meaning.”

That got me to thinking about how, in English at least, even Jesus’ name has lost almost all of its original meaning. For one thing, it has lost, as most names (both in the Bible and out) have, its meaning as a regular word—in this case, as a diminutive form of the Hebrew name Joshua, which once meant Jehovah saves.

I don’t know how common Jesus was as a name in Jesus’ time. Apparently not nearly as common as Simon or Joseph or Judas or even Joshua, since the Bible offers many with these names but only one person named Jesus. (A magician mentioned in Acts 13 who was blinded for trying to pervert a new convert from the faith comes close with Bar-Jesus, or “son of Jesus,” but he may have intentionally taken on the name in order to cash in on Jesus’ reputation, as another sorcerer named Simon the Magician, mentioned in Acts 8, tried to do.)

For most people today, though, the name Jesus isn’t really even a name in any normal sense. Few (with the important exception of Spanish speakers) would even consider naming their son Jesus. It is a name reserved for one and only one person who lived here over two thousand years ago: Jesus of Nazareth.

All of which I find interesting. That God chose a diminutive form of Joshua—that is, a nickname, along the lines of Joshy!—as his son’s name. That no one else in the Bible gets called that. That Spanish speakers name their sons after Jesus, but virtually no one else does.

jesus at barnes & noble

I just now read this passage of scripture aloud to my daughter Charlotte in which Jesus says, first off, that he has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, not to abolish it.  

“I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that passage,” Charlotte interrupted before I got any further.

“Why’s that?”

“I thought it said Jesus says I didn’t come to break the commandments but to fulfill them. That’s what my professor of my C. S. Lewis class said about that place where the stone table breaks when Aslan dies.”

"Well, it goes on to say that whoever breaks even the least commandment and teaches others to do the same ‘will be called least in the kingdom of heaven’ but that those who do the commands ‘will be called great in the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 5:19 NIV).

“Here’s the part I don’t get, though,” I told her. Jesus finishes up by saying, ‘For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:20).What does he mean by that, do you think?”

“I don’t get whether Jesus thinks the Pharisees and teachers of the Law are in the first group of those who don’t follow all of scripture or those who do.”

We tossed that around a bit, getting nowhere. Are there two groups (lawdoers and lawbreakers, of which the former comprise the righteous) or are three groups (lawdoers, lawbreakers, and the righteous)?

Then my husband Kris joined us and the three of us fought about it a bit. We landed, hesitantly, on there being two groups: the lawdoers and the small lawbreakers, both of which will have a place in the kingdom, apparently. None, however, are righteous. In other words, whether or not you do all the law or just part of it will not determine whether or not you will enter the kingdom but merely your place in the kingdom once you’re there.

Of course, we know what does determine entrance into heaven, but Jesus doesn’t explain that quite yet. Or, only obliquely references it. In some very confusing statements about scripture adherence. I wonder if anyone at all got it.

inside my mother's uterus

Every year I attend the biggest professional conference in my field of creative writing, and, on the first day of the conference last Thursday—didn’t manage to post that day or yesterday, sorry—I attended one of the two scheduled sessions (out of some 500 sessions) on writing as it relates to faith. It was about teaching students who want to write about matters of faith, a big interest of mine since I teach a course called “writing from faith” every fall.

As usual with faith-related sessions at this conference, two of the four panelists prefaced their presentations with the announcement that they themselves are atheists and a third claimed agnosticism (although he did say that the best he could do was hang as tightly as he could onto Jesus, which, I would say, is the best any of us can do).

Anyway, the fourth guy, a believer, led the session, God love him, and gave a really wonderful little talk on the difficulties presented by the language of faith: that it’s hard to talk about the supernatural, that the best we can do is talk about it in terms of the natural world. Thus, just about all the language of faith starts out as metaphors. He used the example of breath, the metaphorical source of our word spirit in the ancient languages of scripture. (Arguably, if life and spirit are synonymous for you, then you  might think of the connection between breath and spirit as literal, not metaphorical, but the guy didn’t get into that.)

After a word's genesis as metaphor, though, it usually stops meaning that way—that is, it loses its link to the original natural world word it was derived from—and starts to just be what we call that thing when we talk about matters of faith. So, spirit mostly isn’t thought of as breath or even breathlike. It has lost its referential nature and becomes, in a crucial sense, meaningless, merely a label.

I totally agree with this assessment. I love to go back to the original meanings of the words to refresh my faith language in my writing, and I recommend doing so as a way to avoid “Christianese,” as I call it, to my students.

Along the way in the guy’s presentation, he mentioned how much he liked the story of Nicodemus—which comes early in John’s biography of Jesus and is thus where I am in scripture in my chronological progress through Jesus’ life—because Nicodemus’s response to Jesus’ explanation that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3 NIV) is so insistent on the real words of Jesus’ metaphor.

“How can someone be born again when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” (John 3:4).

I love this passage too, and for pretty much the same reasons. in discussing it with my students, I like to go even further into referentiality, past even the Bible translators’ Christianese.

“When was the last time you used the word womb not in the context of faith?” I ask them.

When no one raises a hand to give an example of talking to a friend or a gynecologist or a parent or a professor about a womb, we go on to talk about the word they’d actually use in any such conversation: uterus.

“How would your understanding of Nicky’s question be changed, honed, if he asked it that word in English—which is precisely the way he asked it in Greek?”

They titter, consider, discuss. For many, even the word uterus makes them uncomfortable when used in the context of faith—which, I tell them, is good.

“Just as it’s good to be uncomfortable when Jesus says he wants you to eat his body. If that statement makes you squirm, it means you’re really taking in those words. Really hearing them. Really thinking about them.”

taste good; be bright

Context is everything, as they say. The next little clump of mixed metaphors in Jesus' mountainside sermon—“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house” (Matthew 5:14-15 NIV)—seems to resay the salt one and is easier to follow. It also has a built in explanation: “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

Good move, Jesus.

So, so far the sermon goes: Seek me, and I will fulfill your longing. I have made you salt—the most essential of flavorings—and light in a dark world. Your job is to go out and show what it’s like to be filled: to go out and taste good and brighten the darkness.

Note to self on plane flight today and for the next few days among strangers: Taste good; be bright.

nackle

After establishing the States of Blessedness in that early mountainside sermon, Jesus next characterizes us blessed, or happy or fortunate, ones who long for God as the “salt of the earth” and make the first of many demands this long sermon makes of believers: not to lose our saltiness because, if we do, how else will we be made salty again?

“You are the salt of the earth," Jesus tells his listeners. "But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot” (Matthew 5:13 NIV).
 

Forgive my blasphemous critique of Jesus’ rhetoric here, but to me this makes little sense. Bear with me.

First off, it doesn’t work as a metaphor. As I often have to explain to my students, metaphors are made of two parts: the tenor (the thing we’re talking about) and the vehicle (the comparison that is supposed to help us see or understand the tenor better). For an effective metaphor, both sides have to work. Here, the tenor is “you” and the vehicle “salt of the earth.” All is good.

However, if the metaphor develops beyond the simplest x = y comparison, both sides need to keep on working. In the next stage of the metaphor, the salt of the earth becomes salt that has lost its saltiness—an impossibility except hypothetically, because, as far as I know from my extensive experience as a cook and as a frugal saver of even the oldest condiments, the only way salt can lose its flavor is if it stops being salt. The entire substance of salt—which means everything that makes its salty taste—is NaCl. (Which is what, by the way, the weirdos in my family refer to it as, pronouncing it "nackle," as in, "Pass the nackle.")

Anyway, as usual, I read around about the verse and found,  also as usual, all sorts of science-defying rationalizations about the salt of Jesus’ time and region, how it could in fact lose its saltiness, and so on. Sorry. I’m not buying it. Salt is salt. And, indeed, the sheer zeal of biblical experts to say it's not evidences, to me, the insolubility (pardon that pun!) at the core of this metaphor, which is, in effect, saying, “You are salt, but if salt stops being salt, then it won’t be salty anymore and is thus worthless.”

Then I got to thinking about salt. About how, as Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, was saying in an interview on NPR the other day that there are “as many as 40 types of salt that are manipulated, created, sort of reformed and shaped in order to maximize the allure—or what they call in the salt world the flavor burst.” Salt’s shape, in other words, can intensify or reduce its saltiness. That helped a bit, giving me the idea of dissolved salt being useless—in which case, however, it’s not really trample-able. So that was a dead end.

“Um,” I would ask if a student had written this passage of Jesus’ sermon, “what happened to your tenor? If I’m salt, what am I in this hypothetical instance of not being salt anymore? What does that even mean? It’s nonsense at best. At worst, a tautology.”

“That’s just it,” I can imagine that student arguing in the metaphor-maker’s defense, surrounded as I am by the once-saved-always-saved. “It’s an argument for the eternal security of the believer! Jesus was telling those people that believers can’t stop being salt.”

“I never would have gotten there without that explanation” would be my answer. And, as obtuse as Jesus often is, I always struggle to believe he was intentionally setting out to buffalo his listeners and me. Certainly he doesn’t seem to be in this sermon, anyway, in which he clearly sets out to teach the fundamentals of faith.

Trusting Jesus to at least mean to make sense, my next attempt to solve the riddle was to look at alternative translations. Most English translations said about the same thing: if salt loses its saltiness or taste or savor…. (Luther’s early German translation says if salt becomes dumm, as in deaf and dumb, but I don’t have time to research whether dumm had some other use back then or was, God forbid, a mixed metaphor to boot.)

There was one translation that, I thought, sought to make the whole thing work, and that was good old Wycliffe’s of 1382.

“Ye be salt of the earth; that if the salt vanish away, wherein shall it be salted?” he wrote (employing what could be understood as unclear pronoun reference implicit in the passive construction “be salted”). “To nothing it is worth over, but that it be cast out, and be defouled of men.”

If the salt vanishes—by dissolving, for example—in other words, how’s anything going be salted? The “it” might, as Wycliffe suggests, refer to whatever’s being salted, and not to the salt itself.

That’s as far as I have the energy to consider this salt business tonight. Maybe I’ll get enlightenment overnight.

 

for theirs is

I sat down this morning with thinking to select the blessing I’d most like to have out of all those Jesus offers in the Beatitudes.

What would I most like to have? I wondered. Heavenly tenure, comfort, inheritance, or justice for wrongs I have suffered? To be filled with righteousness or to be shown mercy for my unrighteousness? Would I rather see God or to hear God to call me Daughter? So hard to choose.

It occurred to me that Jesus’ message is this: Seek me, and I will fulfill your deepest longing. Or longings, I hope. Because, as I say, I can’t choose.

poor in spirit

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus preached from the mountainside, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3 NIV). Who these poor in spirit are—the first and, by that placement, seemingly most important blesseds in Jesus’ poem that opens his mountainside sermon—has always intrigued me.

It’s such a weird turn of phrase, used nowhere else in Jesus’ teaching. And, however central to the overall message of the Beatitudes its initial placement in the poem may make it seem, none of the many writers who rehashed Jesus’ teachings in the letters and accounts that make up the rest of the New Testament ever repeated this expression. What, exactly, does it mean to be poor in spirit?

Not poor in the usual sense, obviously—although that’s how Luke puts what he remembers  Jesus teaching. “Blessed are you who are poor,” he has Jesus starting off an analogous sermon—this one preached on “a level place” (Luke 6:17) rather than a mountainside—“for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). Luke’s rendering notwithstanding, I don’t think it’s the poor in money or poor in housing or poor in opportunity who are at issue here, although such poverties often plague the poor in spirit. Indeed, for many, it is through the related desperations of socioeconomic poverty—through drug or alcohol addiction, through imprisonment, through messed up relationships—that they eventually find themselves in a state of spiritual impoverishment. Poor in spirit. Poor in—to tap the Greek and Hebrew incarnations of the word spirit—breath. Lacking the breath, that source of life that comes to us all from God, the spirit necessary to keep on living.

On some level, I’ve always felt I knew, intuitively, who the poor in spirit were—perhaps because, not to claim holiness where none is merited, I spent a good part of my adult life spiritually deprived. Having lost my faith as a teenager, I spent the next couple of decades on my own, spiritually speaking. I wanted to believe—I wished I could pray and feel heard as I had as a child and was jealous of those I met who seemed confident of God's existence—but I couldn’t seem to get there, couldn’t convince myself that any of what I had known as a child was true, and thus I perceived myself to have been abandoned by the God I no longer believed in rather than the other way around. I was, in those years, indisputably poor in spirit, and I knew it.

If there was one belief in those years I still carried with me from my childhood faith, though, it was this: Faith itself, if it was real, had to come from God.

This was not something I was ever taught. Indeed, the Church’s and the Bible’s and even Jesus’ own messages about the source of faith often seem to say quite the opposite. People are encouraged to have faith throughout the Bible and in every Christian church, and even Jesus himself complains, again and again, about the miniscule faith of even those who follow him. The belief that faith comes from God came to me, I think, entirely experientially. I never believed in God because I chose to—not as a child and not since. Nor did I believe because I was told to. We never really spoke of matters spiritual in my family, though we were taken to church every Sunday. Even at church, even in the catechism classes of my childhood, I was never commanded or persuaded to believe the good news that God had sent Jesus to us. Or, if I was, I have no memory of it.

Instead, faith just seemed to inhabit me, effortlessly—the way that, later, love for my daughters would. The way genuine thanks does on occasion or deepfelt forgiveness or remorse. Believing was never a choice for me. I just believed. And then I didn’t.

Still, I never perceived the ability to believe as a divine gift until it left me.

Losing my faith was like what I am finding the gradual loss of sight to be like as I grow older, but more sudden, less fixable, more devastating. As with eyesight, I was utterly unappreciative of the gift of faith till I lost it. But by then, I secretly grieved, it was too late. God was gone.

The poor in spirit, I think, are those of us who come to a point of longing, of desperation, for God’s restorative, revitalizing breath—whether as the result of losing track of God, as I did, and misperceiving my inattention as abandonment or as the result of other miseries and poverties, other traumas and terrors.

Once, during one of those many unbelieving years ago when I was teaching English in China, my assigned mentor teacher—unbeknownst to me a Christian—offered to make me a calligraphy as a going away present.

“Find a little line of poetry you like and I will translate and paint it,” he told me.

I couldn’t think of a snippet of poetry small or meaningful enough to suit me, so I borrowed a King James Bible from my Mormon neighbors and leafed through it and immediately, having never really read the Bible before, lighted on two that seemed to speak for me: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither” (Job 1:21) and “Bow down thine ear, O Lord, hear me: for I am poor and needy” (Psalms 86:1).

As a foreigner in China in those days, I was regarded by all I met as amazingly wealthy, and I knew this assessment to be true. Unlike many I met and heard of—not least the famous calligrapher father of my mentor teacher, who was taken from his family and made to suffer unspeakable miseries for having been an intellectual and an artist—I had everything I needed in life. Not just food and money and opportunities but the freedom to enjoy them.

And yet, in the most elemental sense, I was poor. Needier than my mentor teacher, certainly. Indeed, utterly bereft, the very breath of me plundered and lost. And, though it would be years before I fully rejected my lot and let God's breath fill me again, somehow—thank God!—I knew it.

blessed are those who never had children, etc.

I was reading around about the Beatitudes and came across this statement that the Greek word that ends up translated as “Blessed” in virtually all translations is actually more accurately Happy.

I sort of liked that idea, so I looked Blessed up in my exhaustive concordance with the goal of seeing how the same Greek word, μακάριος (makários), was translated in other passages, which is how I generally make up my mind in such matters of translation. Here’s the breakdown of what I discovered: of the 50 uses of μακάριος, 44 were translated in the 1984 NIV as blessed, 4 as good, 1 as fortunate, and 1 as happier. So, I concluded, while “Happy are the…” (or“Fortunate are the …” or even the synonymous “Lucky are the …”) might be a useful way of jerking ourselves out of our usual nonthinking about what the Beatitudes are actually saying, it probably wasn't any more correct.

 

That said, in case you want to be jerked out of your usual nonthinking about the passage, here’s how it might sound with a different word than Blessed:

Fortunate are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Fortunate are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Fortunate are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Fortunate are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Fortunate are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Fortunate are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Fortunate are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Fortunate are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Fortunate are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. 
(Matthew 5:3-12 NIV with the word Blessed changed to Fortunate)

While I was researching μακάριος in my concordance, I got sidetracked into perhaps a better way of reseeing the States of Blessedness. Have a look at all the others that Jesus identifies as μακάριος— that is, as blessed or or happy or fortunate—elsewhere in his teaching:

Blessed are the poor (Luke 6:20).
Blessed are the hungry (Luke 6:21).
Blessed are those who are crying (Luke 6:21).
Blessed are those who never had children (Luke 23:26-31).
Blessed are those who never got to see the One God Sent in person but who nevertheless believe in him (John 20:26-29).
Blessed are those who pay attention to what God tells them to do and then do it (Luke 11:28).
Blessed are those who accept from God the power to recognize him as God (Matthew 16:16-17).
Blessed are those who look for the One God Sent and actually see him, who listen to him and actually hear him (Matthew 13:16 and Luke 10:23).
Blessed are those who aren’t offended by or embarrassed about the One God Sent (Matthew 11:6 and Luke 7:23).
Blessed are those who, as he does, lower themselves to serve others (John 13:12-17).
Blessed are those who love the unloveable (Luke 14:12-14).

To find out why Jesus considered such people fortunate—how, in other words, their current situation rewards them—you’ll have to look up the passages yourselves (which is why I went to the trouble of citing the passages I paraphrased). Have fun!

the states of blessedness

Jesus’ mountain sermon begins with a cheery little poem we call “The Beatitudes,” or “The States of Blessedness,” so called because all but the last of its ten lines begins with “Blessed are” (or with “Blessed be,” depending on whether or not the translation wants that verb to be in indicative or subjunctive mode).

I call it a poem because the repetition of Blessed and the stringent parallel structure of the lines—Blessed be…for…”—make it sound poetic. It also seems to be spoken forth as one would a poem. Before delivering “The States of Blessedness” to the crowds surrounding him, Jesus first climbs a mountain, presumably for better acoustics. Then—in the original Greek as in most early and some contemporary translations—Matthew goes out of his way to draw attention to the speaking itself with reference to Jesus’ mouth as well as three verbal communication verbs: “And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying…” (Matthew 5:2 KJV).

The Beatitudes are a formal proclamation of exactly what Jesus, reading from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue, has already said is the reason God sent him to us in the first place: to preach the good news to the poor and miserable. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he told them, and is promising them now, “to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18). These poor sufferers are the very ones surrounding him, who’ve heard of his miraculous healings and come after him with their own griefs.

And into this suffering and longing, Jesus preaches the good news.

I love Matthew's reference to Jesus’ mouth. He didn’t just teach or speak, that day on the mountainside. He opened his mouth and delivered forth blessing upon blessing, word upon word.

people everywhere

Me: Babe, d’you know what the Decapolis was?

Kris: No.

Me (surprised: Kris knows everything there is to know about history, modern or ancient, but, apparently, not this): I looked it up. It means The Ten Cities and refers to these ten cities in what would now be the Jordan area that amounted to the main Greek and Roman cities in that area in the early Common Era. That means the non-Semitic cities.

Kris: What about it?

Me: Well, it says in Matthew’s gospel that, when Jesus started going around healing, people from not only Galilee and Jerusalem and Judea followed him but also people from the Decapolis. That's Greeks and Romans. Right from the beginning. That's, like, people from far away.

(I went and got my Bible and showed him: “Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him” (Matthew 4:25 NIV).

Kris: Yes, we tend to think Jesus healed people to help them, but actually he did it so that  people everywhere would believe.

Me: But he told a lot of the people he healed not to tell anyone, so he couldn’t have healed them to spread the word.

Kris: No, he healed those ones out of compassion.

Me: Ah.

word for word

I’m just about to start studying the Jesus’ mountain sermon recorded at length in Matthew the way Pericles’ speeches are in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, written five or six hundred years earlier.

Something that has always worried me, from a credibility perspective, about both Jesus’ mountain sermons and Pericles’ speeches is their perfectness. That the writers in each case somehow, without any recording equipment besides their brains—and afterwards, perhaps, pen and papyrus—managed to capture what was said so convincingly word for word.

Without being too there-really-is-scientific-proof-of-a-man-swallowed-up-and-vomited-out-live-by-an-enormous-fish about the matter, though, I have to remind myself that, even absent miracles, such a feat of documentation is possible. Back in the early days of my acquaintance with my husband—then this weird farmer guy, a star of our University of Arkansas MFA program who was looking for a wife—I happened to sneak a glance at the notes he took in class one day and discovered what looked like the script of a play: names of people in our workshop followed by direct quotes of what they had said and how others had responded, seemingly word for word as each person had said it, only clearer and more impressive than I remembered. 

I’m saying here I’m married to a Matthew or a Thucydides.

temple tantrums

Okay, so all four of the accounts of the good news that God sent Jesus are arranged seemingly chronologically with respect to Jesus’ earthly life. It’s true they don’t all start in the same place. Matthew and Luke start with his birth, whereas Mark and John start with his baptism by his cousin John. Nevertheless, all four of the gospels use decidedly sequential language to link the episodes from Jesus' life they recount.

For example, “The next day…,” the gospel of John begins after the introduction of John the baptizer (John 1:29 NIV). Then Jesus enters the story, and a few lines later John writes again, “The next day…” (John 1:35). Often the sequential information is quite specific, as in this instance just a few sentences later: “So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon” (John 1:39). Reading the gospels, I generally have a clear sense of when each event happened with respect to what happened before and after.

That said, although each gospel sounds unambiguously chronological, the same stories told in several accounts often come at crazily different times in Jesus’ last years.

Take Jesus’ famous temple tantrum.

(Sorry. Just can’t resist. It’s either that pun or else an analogy to a similar—though admittedly less virtuous—anger episode of my own, which my daughters refer to as my “closet fit” because it took place in their closet. But temple fit just doesn’t sound as good as temple tantrum.)

Anyway, all four gospels recount this event, but whereas John’s telling happens very early on in his account and early on—just after the wine miracle in Cana—in Jesus' three years of preaching and teaching, in the tellings of Matthew, Mark, and Luke the anger episode comes very close to the end of Jesus’ life.

This really bothers me, I’ve got to say. What bothers me more, though, are the efforts of theologians to smooth my irritation over with tidy explanations, such as that Jesus had more than one temple tantrum. Or that the events are rearranged in John for stylistic or theological reasons and that the chronological references are at best rhetorical and at worst meaningless. I don’t want them tidying God’s story. I want it the way it really is. I want to have to deal with it.

And if this sort of thing happened just this once, it wouldn’t vex me too much—or, anyway, not any more than any other seeming glitch of scripture vexes me. I believe in a holy write that's 100% God-authored but also 100% humanly produced—and thus no more contradictory than Jesus himself. And human-authored texts are rife with contradictions. And errors.

But such chronological misalignments and mismatched tellings don't happen just once. They happen over and over and over again. There are three accounts of the woman who dumps perfume on Jesus’ head and rubs it in with her hair, to give just one example, and each one is different. And again, historians and theologians rush to account for the differences with multiple-story theories and rhetorical arguments. But how could it possibly be that more than one woman ever did that to Jesus?

I take  some comfort in one repeated story: the feeding of the hordes. In one account it’s four thousand, in another five thousand. In one there’s a boy’s lunch of bread and fish, in another there's no boy mentioned. In total, there are six separate accounts of the feeding in the gospels. But what fixes things in my mind is that Matthew and Mark each include both a four thousand and a five thousand story, so they’re themselves asserting, in effect, that there were multiple feedings of the multitudes. And these assertions get at, for me, the crux of what might be going on (apart from a millennia-long game of telephone, in which a story gets passed down through so many mouths that it becomes unintelligible).

Here’s what I think: the same things did keep happening over and over again, just as those theologians and Mark and Matthew themselves say. And just as the same things keep happening over and over again in our own lives.

As I was telling my creative writing students this afternoon, people, in real life, repeat themselves. It’s what defines them as individuals—that they always do this or that. That they routinely make these gestures, say these phrases, throw this sort of party, tell this sort of story.

I like to go to funerals, for example—even funerals of people I barely know or don’t know at all. Something about a funeral makes me feel God’s presence especially clearly. I like to pray-worry about the widows and other loved ones left behind. I like to be part of the community supporting them by my own presence. I like the ritual and pomp of it all. And, at every funeral I go to, I run into the same people—other locals who, like me, attend all the funerals and study the corpses and shake hands with the family members and probably sense throughout God’s hovering presence. We repeat ourselves. Repeat one another.

All this to say I’ve come to accept that Jesus probably had more than one temple tantrum. The same irritating stuff kept happening in those days at church. And he kept on getting fed up with it. And every so often he went in and flipped out and flipped their tables over. (Relax: I'm not going to use the word flipping again.) And the more Jesus does the same thing over and over again, the more real he becomes in my mind, the more believable.

Which is to say, accepting multiple temple fits helps me do God’s work, because isn’t that what Jesus said the work of God was: “to believe in the one he sent” (John 6:29)?

 

why he came

I have heard Jesus called a great doctor. (The great “physician,” actually, but I can’t stand puffed up words like that—like attorney in lieu of lawyer, purchase in lieu of buy, in lieu of instead of instead of). And I’ve heard him called a great teacher. But I’ve never heard Jesus referred to as a great preacher.

Which is odd, seeing as how that’s what he came to do. Or anyway, that’s what he tells Simon and his buddies:

          “Jesus replied, ‘Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.’
          So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons. (Mark 2:38 NIV)

Matthew writes that, after John the baptizer was imprisoned for badmouthing Herod, “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matthew 4:17).

I guess you could argue that such preaching was teaching—that preaching and teaching are six of one, half dozen of the other. But Matthew actually goes out of his way to differentiate the two actions: “After Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in the towns of Galilee” (Matthew 11:1).

He taught (διδάσκω, didaskō) and preached (κηρύσσω, kēryssō). (And also “instructed” his disciples, for which Matthew uses a different verb—διατάσσω, diatassō—which means something more along the lines of giving directions or training.)

So why not call Jesus The Great Preacher?

 

Certainly he was successful at it. “Everyone is looking for you!” Simon and his friends tell him (Mark 1:37), and from then on, when people found out he was in town, “They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them” (Mark 2:2).

Maybe we don’t call Jesus The Great Preacher because the word preacher has so much negative baggage. One preacher preaches one thing, another another. And there are false preachers. And scandals involving preachers.

And when we speak of preachers we mean those who tell us about Jesus, whereas what Jesus preached, early on, was largely the message of the whole Bible. Repent. And he preached from the Bible—literally reading forth what was written there and adding little to it besides “Heads up! This prophecy is happening right now” (Mark 4:21, my paraphrase).

Nevertheless, we’re told—although he soon made them so mad they wanted to toss him off a cliff—initially, at least, they were impressed with his preaching: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips” (Mark 4:22). That must have been some sermon!

I think we think that Jesus came to Earth pretty much exclusively to die for us. And maybe, secondarily, to explain some spiritual stuff to us that we’re too stupid to figure out on our own. I think he also came, though, simply to preach the word. To tell us, in person, with his own mouth, the good news of himself.

i'll take my scripture neat

Mark jolted me this morning out of mere dutiful scripture reading—in order to make my daily posting for Lent that I’ve committed myself to—into genuine puzzlement and absorption. A guy with leprosy comes to Jesus, drops to his knees, and begs, “If you are willing, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40 NIV).

Elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus commends as faith such expressions of trust in his power—in which the speaker acknowledges that Jesus’ will is synonymous with his ability to perform miracles. The guy doesn’t say “If you can…,” as another guy does who makes Jesus respond angrily, “If I can?!” (Mark 9:22-23). Instead, the guy with leprosy seems confident that, if Jesus is simply willing to heal him, his leprosy will go away.

In this instance, though, rather than commending the guy’s faith, Jesus responds quite differently:

Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” (Mark 1:31 NIV).

Why in the world was Jesus indignant? I wondered as I read.

I should point out here that, as is typically the case when I come upon such counterintuitive moments in scripture (of which there are many), the verse is a point of contention among translators and biblical scholars and even, apparently, among the ancient scribes who made the manuscripts from which biblical translators work. Most other versions of the passage go with the more sensible and utterly unsurprising of the two antonymous Greek words the ancient scribes here used for Jesus’ response, choosing σπλαγχνισθείς (splancnisqei, to have compassion)

over the weirder ὀργισθείς (ojrgisqei, to become angry or irritated). So, in just about every English translation besides the newest NIV (even the 1984 NIV disagrees with the 2011 NIV), Jesus is either “moved with” or “filled with” compassion or pity at the man’s request, just as he is in two other of Mark’s accounts in which Jesus responds with splancnisqei to a request for healing (6:34 and 8:2).

All this to say, I have no idea which word is more apt to describe Jesus’ response or why, contrary to almost all other English versions of scripture, the latest NIV translators opted for the less predictable one. But I like to go with the more difficult choice, the one that doesn’t need to be smoothed over by some expert or tethered into predictability. I like my scripture neat, not watered down.

Also, I checked to see how Martin Luther had translated the passage back in 1545, and he seems to have gone with the angrier response: Und es jammerte Jesum. If the German verb jammern back then meant what it means today, Jesus griped at the guy right before he healed him.

And I know this: that guy, for all his faith in Jesus’ power to heal him, is annoying.

I mean, you’d think someone who’d just been given miraculous health after a period of suffering would want to comply with the healer’s request, “‘See that you don’t tell this to anyone’” (Mark 1:44).

But no. According to Mark, “Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news” (Mark 1:45). The guy was, in other words, a blabbermouth.

Just like me, I have to confess. (I’m suffering this weekend from one of my frequent bouts of ruing having said things I shouldn’t have said.)

Jesus probably knew the guy was an bigheaded blabbermouth—or sensed it from some flamboyance of gesture or boasting tone in his voice—and was ticked off by him before the guy ever knelt in the dirt and made his request. And yet, Jesus went ahead and healed him anyway.

Just as he healed me.

And keeps on healing me.

Daily.

 

alone with you

In Capernaum on day—having spent the night at the house of brothers Simon and Andrew, who apparently lived together, along with at least Simon’s wife and family, if not Andrew’s— Jesus snuck out “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark . . . and went off to a solitary place” to pray (Mark 1:35 NIV).

The night before, according, “The whole town [had] gathered at the door” (Mark 1:32) for Jesus to heal their sick ones and rebuke their demons. Surely he was all prayed out by the next morning. I know I would have been. That he snuck out before dawn and chose a solitary place indicates to me, though, a different kind of prayer that what I usually think of when I use the word prayer. Not praying for something to happen or not happen. Not praying words that others will hear and possibly judge. Not praying words at all, but just being alone with God.

It’s an odd expression, an oxymoron: to be alone with someone. If you’re alone, that means no one else is there. But we use this expression often to mean sharing pleasurable time with someone.

“I just want to be alone with you,” I might tell my husband or a close friend. Occasionally, I enjoy being alone with one of my daughters—not just away from others (especially the other daughter) but having fun with just her. We are like different people when we're alone together. And, unless something goes awry on one of these dates (as, sadly, often happens), being alone together is magnificently therapeutic. All the ills of those other times we spend together, or apart, seem to get washed away by our being present to each other.

When I just want to be alone with someone, I have no other motivation than to be in that person’s presence. No motive or goal. No memory of some planned thing I want to say. No memory at all. No plan. No duty.

Being alone with God in this way, I must confess, is a new kind of praying for me. The “I just want to be alone with God” prayer. Not wanting anything from him. Not searching my mind for things I should be praying about. Not remembering any particular prayer-need of anyone else or even myself, perhaps. Just being with God, by myself.

That’s, I learned the other day, what meditation is. Or can be. Not emptying my mind of every thought—an impossibility, as it has always seemed to me—but just being present, by myself, with God. Available to him. Having no more holy purpose than to say, “I’m here.”

I’ve been doing this twice a day for coming up on a week, now, as part of a 40-day “defunking” project of my yoga class. We're supposed to meditate for five minutes every morning and every evening.

I was against it, at first. Strangely put off by—afraid of, even—the idea of not thinking, not doing something. Afraid of just being alone.

When I admitted this fear to my yoga class, my teacher said, “It’s not any different than praying. It’s just committing five minutes to being present to God. Available.” She gave me that language and, with it, not only a way to meditate, to get the job done, but a whole new approach to prayer, one of the great conundrums of my spiritual life.

And, while I can’t say anything has happened worth reporting on, this new way of praying has been curiously satisfying.

I make sure that Kris is occupied with some task or taking one of his 20-minute showers. Then I set the oven timer for 5 minutes, plus 10 seconds to get myself settled. (I’m rather pharisaical, as you can see, when it comes to following instructions.) I sit myself cross-legged on the livingroom floor and consciously breathe, the way I’ve been taught, tightly and loudly in through my nose and then shoot it back out, watching the tubular breaths in my mind as they move from outside of me to inside of me and back out.

“I’m here,” I breathe. In. Out.

Soon, I’m no longer seeing breaths or saying mind-words but just being.

Here.

In.

God’s.

Presence.

And then the timer shrills, almost immediately, it seems to me.

“The timer went off!” Kris calls from wherever he is, then rushes into the kitchen to turn it off.

And just like that it’s over and I’m alone again with just me.