God and King

In the first chapter of St. John's Gospel is this remarkable scene: Jesus tells a stranger that He saw him "under the fig tree," signifying a return to the old ways. The stranger replies,

Clearly, they are speaking in a coded language.

In the same Gospel Jesus fulfills Zechariah's prophecy by entering Jerusalem seated on the foal of the donkey, the prophecy which also envisions every man "under his fig tree" (Zech 3:10).

John remembers how the people cried out as Jesus entered Israel:

At the calling of the Twelve in the same Gospel, Jesus had announced restoration of the religion of the Patriarchs:

.... the angels of God, familiars to Abraham and to Jacob, which had been excised from the revised Hebrew Scriptures and banished from the temple cult of the Sadducees.

The Jerusalem which Jesus enters tells the story of two religions. Beneath it, irretrievably, is the ancient foundation of David's City observing the traditions of the Patriarchs. At ground level in the first century, however, is the more recent city, constructed during the fifth century B.C. by Nehemiah, the Governor of Persian Yehud, and in his temple a cult installed chiefly by the scribe Ezra, who had accomplished the interweaving of Babylonian-Persian civil religion into the ancient cloth of Israel.

It is original and authentic Jerusalem on which Jesus has set His eyes. And its foundation legend is the story of Abraham. St. Paul, who as Saul of Tarsus had been inured to the Moses legend, insists on the primacy of Abraham in his letters: to the Galatians, to the Church in Rome, to the Church in Corinth, and to the Hebrews.

The transcendently holy and mysterious book which records this story is our Book of Genesis. In this book God ordains relationship with man — first in an ideal setting in Eden and then later with a solitary man, Abram, who lived in the anti-place, the place opposite God's sanctity and authority: Babylon.  .... personal relationship in Eden with a man, Adam, and with a woman who has a name, Eve, and later with a solitary man, Abram, in personal relationship.

God orders Abram to depart from Babylon. And this fact, second only to Abram's relationship with God, would define his life: he would henceforth be Abram NOT of Babylon. He was to avoid the cities of Cain — first the Ur-city in which he was born, and then Sodom and Gomorrah, places which appear if only to make the point: not here. Abram was to keep to the cleansing wilderness, which is always already the domain of God.

Sisters, I ask you, what would the Hermitage be if it were at the corner of two busy streets in a city instead of on a remote rock in the middle of the ocean in the midst of acres and acres of fruit trees?

He and his descendants would honor the holiness of the wilderness — places where they met with angels or with God Himself. They built altars. They reverenced sacred groves. They erected pillars. From Abraham and Isaac and Jacob proceed the other Patriarchs called after Jacob's other name, the never-before-heard name, Israel.

God promised descendants to Abraham as numerous as the stars in the night. And they would be blessed having intimacy with God. They would sanctify the world with altars and icons, where angels appear everywhere, and the Patriarchs and holy ones venerated in all places. And the people of God will multiply unto the ends of the earth. Do you see this earth bountifully full of God?!

How different is this from the religion of Judah, which sought to confine religious observances to Jerusalem and built synagogues for the sole purpose of promulgating their narrow religion — a cult in harmony with Babylonian-Persian religion. The Kings of Judah would stamp out the religion of the Patriarchs everywhere. And they would destroy the altars built by Abraham and his descendants and remove memorials of their Divine encounters. They would compose a counter-history of Israel in works like Joshua, Judges, and Kings, labeling all religious devotions outside of Jerusalem as "idolatry." And the foundation legend most dear to Judah-ism would be called Exodus. Its name declares, the "Book of Liberation," similar to the liberation which Babylonian Judeans had experienced.

Such that Exodus records "beginnings," they are the beginnings of a religious cult, whose central act is blood sacrifice as was practiced in Babylon, and the beginnings of a society, whose central expression is a code of laws — the hallmark of Babylonian civilization. From Hammarabi to Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonians were the law givers par excellence. Babylon was in their blood. They spoke the Babylonian language (Aramaic), and they saw the world through a Babylonian lens.

The two foundation legends and the books in which they are recorded — the older book, Genesis, and the more recent books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — are nearly unaware of each other. Abraham is mentioned only once in Leviticus. He is mentioned once in Numbers. He is mentioned only nine times in Exodus but only in passing in order to lay claim to the prestige and authority of the Patriarchs: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." By contrast, Moses is named 565 times in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. .... and not once in Genesis.

Following the Return from Babylon, the proper name for the God of Israel, YHWH, would drop out of usage in Judah (see "Yahweh," Britannica). God's Name would be banned in Judah. It would be replaced by the Hebrew elohim — an ambiguous term meaning "my lord." This would have been amenable to their Persian overlords, who addressed their own god Marduk as "bel" which means the same thing: "my lord." Elohim was also used in the Book of Exodus to refer to Egypt's gods, for example.

Can you picture the "political correctness" they had to live under? They had to tip-toe around these subjects. As I have said several times, an ancient inscription tells us that a foremost obligation of the Persian emperor was to ensure the proper worship of god.

The trajectories of Genesis and Exodus could not be more different. Genesis is an episodic drama whose main theme, from Eden in chapter one to the betrayal of Jacob's ultra-virtuous son Joseph in the final chapters, is plainly about the struggle of humankind to achieve moral rectitude before God. While Exodus is about an aloof deity imposing his cult upon an unruly people.

Genesis is about the quest for God, from wilderness to unknown wilderness always seeking, and Abraham putting ever more miles between himself and the cult of Babylon. In his journey to the "antipodes of Babylon," he encounters a mysterious figure, Melchizedek, a Priest-King who does not offer blood at his altar .... but bread and wine — as I say, mysterious.

These are incommensurably holy things to Christians. On the night He was betrayed, Jesus blessed and broke the bread saying, "This is my Body." Likewise, after supper He took the cup of wine blessing it and said, "This is My Blood."

Jesus does not descend in the line of Aaron, whom we meet in Exodus. He has no ties with the Aaronite temple, its altar stinking of blood. He says of this temple, "I will tear it down" (Jn 2:19).

His earthly vocation is fragrant of the rites of Abraham, of Melchizedek, of Heaven:

☦

On this day, He departs from the Kingdom historically called Israel. It is a place detested by the practitioners of Judah-ism, for their control over it is partial. Jesus leaves the freedom of the open skies and the hills He roamed and heads for Judah, the stronghold of a "gospel according to Moses." His disciple Peter rebukes Him, trying to talk Him out of it (Mt 16:21), but He replies by calling him "Satan." The occasion for His journey, His disciple John says, is "the Passover, a feast of the Jews" (Jn 6:14) clearly meaning a feast that is alien to Jesus and His disciples. The Passover celebrated by Jews is the quintessential tale of their First Exodus, which inevitably recalls the event which they called their "Second Exodus" from Babylon.

The historical record reports other ways which this compulsory feast was celebrated in Jerusalem. The Essenes, for example, came to the temple and offered spiritual sacrifice. In the words of Philo (who knew the Essenes)

This is like our religious observance of examination of conscience — when we place before God, formally, our personal conduct: what we have done and what we have failed to do.

Like the Good Samaritan of Jesus' parable (Lu 10:25-37), the holy offering of the Essenes was virtuous life, which Jesus studiously contrasts with the Levite and Priest who are willing to let a man bleed to death on the roadside rather than forego sacrifice in the temple, for fear of becoming ritually unclean.

This is not an isolated phenomenon nor a marginal belief. For this sense of sacrifice hearkens back to the ancient Patriarchs* and will be restored as man's worship before God forever after. St. Peter is explicit:

And perhaps remembering the Lord's entry into Jerusalem, Peter quotes Psalm 117/118:

On this day, the Lord enters Jerusalem sitting astride the foal of a donkey (Zech 9:9) invoking the prophecy of Zechariah, a book which stands out for its frequent use of the Name YHWH (133 times) and which holds aloft the ideal of Genesis:

This, after all, has been God's plan from the beginning and all along: intimate and personal relationship between man and God .... all men and God.

The people throw palms at His feet betokening Eden, the scene immemorial of this sacred relationship. And they shout,

.... recalling chapter one of the same Gospel.

Plainly, they are chanting from Psalm 117/118:

The Hebrew original reads,

.... or according to the oracle of Zechariah,

Says YHWH: everyone will sit under his fig tree, for under soaring skies and over the everlasting hills, the old ways have been restored. The One now before us, sitting astride the foal of a donkey, will see to this. And His promises are sure. For He is the Son of God. He is the King Israel.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.