"Not of This World"

Last week on the festival of St. John, we celebrated the Beloved Disciple as Jesus' protégé, a man not of Judea but of Bethsaida (or its near environs) and, therefore, not a Jew but a Hebrew. He famously singles out "the Jews" (i.e., adherents to Judah-ism) as being God's opponents as well as being antagonists to God's Son, Who has come not only to restore the ancient religion of the Patriarchs, but to fulfill its Divine purpose restoring to them (to us) God-with-us, Emmanu-el. Wasn't this the ideal of Eden? As God communed with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day? And this is one reason Jesus was preceded by the man of Eden, John the Baptist.

This week our lectionary continues the theme of conflict between God and the authority figures who prop up a corrupt, hybrid religion of Mesopotamian beliefs and customs laid thinly upon a substrate of revised Hebrew texts. This is the general context in which Jesus' signature teachings on loving one's enemy are framed.

Let us begin, therefore, in the first verse of Luke Chapter Six. Immediately, we are thrust into a conflict between the Son of God and representatives of the Second Temple. Jesus and His followers walk through the fields on a Saturday rolling heads of grain lightly between their fingertips, freeing the grain from its chaff before eating it. With this innocent and barely noticeable action, St. Luke mocks the prohibition against work on the Sabbath and, by extension, the religion of the Law. We can nearly see the Pharisees chasing after Jesus into the field to see if His fingertips are moving, crying, "Unlawful! Unlawful!"

Jesus' reply unsettles them. He cites the showbread on the Temple altar, which was not lawful for man to eat yet was eaten by David. And by invoking David, He implies not only a royal prerogative, but also the only valid line of Temple priests, which is the Royal Priestly line of Melchizedek, King of Salem.

This would have cut the Pharisees to the quick whose own Temple priesthood was not of this line. Jesus magnifies the royal dimension by declaring that He, the Son of Man, is "Lord of the Sabbath" (Lu 6:5). The Greek word underlying "Lord" is Kyrios or king, a word that equates to YHWH in the Greek Hebrew Bible, from which Jesus quoted exclusively (cf. Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Cambridge, MA, 1961).

These trenchant words would have touched a deep nerve. The Hebrew (i.e., non-Judean) opinion of the Second Temple was that it was a counterfeit, a confection of alien beliefs and customs pasted (not very skillfully) onto a spurious Hebrew underlayment. So jealous were the Second Temple authorities concerning their controverted pedigree that roughly a century before Jesus' birth a company of Jewish priests invaded neighboring Samaria to destroy the ancient Hebrew Temple on Mt. Gerizim.

Christians today might ask, But what is lacking in the Second Temple's bona fides? Is not Judaism based on the Law? Is not the Law studied and enforced ceaselessly among these Jerusalem scholars? Has not the Law always lain at the heart of Hebrew belief? Is not Hebrew and Jewish belief the same thing?

Ancient texts discovered during the twentieth century suggest that these questions are not as straightforward as we once thought. As for the answers, they are no less complicated.

In the words of Margeret Barker (King of the Jews (London, 2014)),

Most disturbing, things that did exist, such as the freshly composed Book of Deuteronomy, were not Hebrew Scriptures, but composed as the central piece of a broad-based campaign to consolidate royal power in Jerusalem.

Before Josiah, the religion of Israel had been the Hebrew religion, resplendent with sun and moon and stars and all the hosts of Heaven and, of course, that mysterious Lady, as we find depicted in the Revelation of St. John, which boldly expresses Hebrew imagery and beliefs. Holy places once had sanctificed Israel "from Dan to Beersheba," from north to south — altars, high places, pillars, sacred trees, which God inspired the Patriarchs and their descendents to build everywhere they went.

King Josiah's goal was to supplant this religion of God, scattered through all localities, with civic religion, centralizing control to Jerusalem. Thus was the ancient, rich, diverse, and Divine faith reduced to a single, human dimension: the Law. As Deuteronomy itself, declares,

"Don't worry about Divine life or Heaven or the Sphere of God," asserts the Deuteronomist. "Just follow the rules." As Margaret Barker comments,

So long to Divine Wisdom.

As we press on in Luke's sixth chapter, we find the Evangelist in the midst of a sustained attack against this state religion of rules:

The calling of the Twelve Apostles comes next in Luke's Gospel, covered in five, brief verses. Then, we proceed to the high point of the chapter, indeed, a high point of this Gospel: the Beatitudes on the Mount.

If the Book of Deuteronomy means "Second Book of the Law" (its plain Greek meaning), then the cosmic drama unfolding before us beginning at verse 20 will be the Second Giving of the Law non pareil. Deuteronomy weakly asserts that Moses did not really see God's "back parts" (Exod 33:23), nor did he really hear God's actual voice directly but rather perceived faint words arising from a mist (Deut 4:12).

By contrast, right before a multitude gathered from far-flung geographies, all behold God Himself, standing on a mountain top, seen and heard plainly in all His graciousness, and filling the air with the holy breath and vibrations of His words (Lu 6:20ff).

Whereas, Deuteronomy seeks to distance God, the Son of God now appears before the Deuteronomists — the Pharisees, Levites, and scribes — and confronts their audacious lie with His very Person.

The content of this Second Law, called collectively the Beatitudes, could not be more different from the so-called Mosaic Law Books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. We believe Moses lived during the fifteenth century B.C., yet these books were probably revised nearly one thousand years later, during and after the Judean Captivity in Mesopotamia. Their theme is patent to any casual observer: to regulate all aspects of social life in Israel. Their dimension quite literally is "this worldly." These are not Divine books; these are civic books.

By contrast, the Beatitudes, which we have called the Proverbs of Heaven, are not about this world. Indeed, they cannot be lived in this world except as a Heavenly vision of life on earth. They offer a sweet foretaste of the ways of Heaven articulated by Heaven's King .... Who is always saying, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto ...."

This helps to explain the wide divergence between their content and the actual advice Jesus gives His Apostles .... or the flinty pragmatism often displayed in the Lord's own conduct.

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That these are indeed Proverbs of Heaven is self-evident. For who are the "sinners" that we must not emulate? They are people like you and me living the world. We feel moved to love those who love us. We want to help those who have helped us. When we lend hard-earned money, we expect to be repaid .... though perhaps not asking interest. We might well call these proverbs for life on earth: Do not fail to love those who have loved you! Do not fail to help those who have helped you! The proverbial advice given to Laertes by his father Polonius (Hamlet) — "Neither a lender nor a borrower be." — is slightly amended: When you lend, do so prudently.

Now, is there something wrong with this advice? Do these proverbs counsel evil? Would they lead us into sinful life?

Yet, Jesus equates them to the ways of sinners. What is it then that He counsels us to do?! Nothing less than to live Divine life:

We are to emulate Father God. Francis of Assisi took this counsel to heart, and it destroyed him, for he found himself crushed in the unforgiving torsion between this disjointed world and the Kingdom of God. If we should follow the "little poverello," who followed the Master, we also would be crushed. For you can give all your worldly possessions away without repayment for only so long. And, generally speaking, you can open your home and hearth to bad actors and menacing malefactors only once.

But this is Jesus' point. His Kingdom is not of this world (Jn 18:36). He invites us to forget about worldly life and to become One with Him as He and the Father are One (Jn 17:21). In His Second Law, we are instructed to take our first steps in accepting this Divine invitation .... by placing ourselves in the position of God the Father. For this is the essence of the ancient religion.

The ancient covenants were a series of freely given gifts. The convenant of Eden was given freely having no lease to sign much less clauses for repaying damages. And it was desecrated.

The covenant of the second creation prepared for Noah was given freely without contract. And it was polluted straightaway with father drunkneness and mother incest.

The only contract asked of God in the free spaces of His Creation are the bonds of love. We do not sign a legal document, but our heart moves us to enter relationship in the same spirit it has been offered. When that spirit is God's Spirit, we have entered into rarefied atmosphere to be sure! He raises us up to Heavenly heights!

You see, when we "marry" God, there is not "pre-nup." All is done is a spirit of love and trust.

In stark contrast, Deuteronomy sought to deprecate the Divine casting all in worldly terms. The covenant is no longer a gift of trust, as Margaret Barker points out, but rather a legal contract having consequences:

Jesus understood very well that His Second Giving of the Law was a reply to the book named "Second Law." He stood quite intentionally on a Mount giving His Law to the people repeating the sublime act upon the Mount of Sinai .... as He quite intentionally fed the 5,000 with a few scraps of bread in a wilderness repeating the giving of manna in the Sinai wilderness. The language of the Beatitudes quite obviously reveals His intention. St. Matthew recalls a litany of such oppositions using the formula,

culminating in

Yes, His reply to Deuteronomy was quite deliberate.

By the lights of His Law, sometimes called the "Law of Love," the ways of this world are to be ignored, for they ultimately are meaningless. His Law has a different purpose, a higher and permanent aim: to prepare those with eyes to see and ears to hear for the Kingdom of Heaven. Was not this the purpose of the Advent of God and His three-year ministry? That we should emulate Him? So today He exhorts us to emulate the Father, with Whom He is One: "Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful."

Who, then, are these enemies we must love? They are the lost as so many in first-century Judah are lost. They are the apostate, the ones who have betrayed God, as so many of the Second-Temple party have betrayed God .... and as we have.

Nonetheless, when the Great High Priest ascends to the ancient Hebrew Holy of Holies, which is His Cross, and pours out the only true sacrifice of human history, shedding blood that will cleanse and consecrate the world, He does so praying that the lost will be found, that betrayers will repent and be given a second chance, and that all who have strayed will come home, by the grace and graciousness and kindness of our God.

He is our King. He is the long-awaited Messiah. And His gift to us freely given is to restore the old ways, even to fulfill them — ways that have been forged by God in holy fire and seared forever on to the eternal "tissues" of our souls.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.