Lectionary Commentaries for September 27, 2020
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew highlights Jesus’ authority as a central, albeit contested issue throughout the Gospel (for example, Matthew 7:28-29, 9:32-34, 12:24, 28:18).¹

Matthew is not content, however, with the simple claim that Jesus possesses divine power, nor even that his power surpasses that of worldly leaders. Matthew focuses instead on the nature, source, and consequences of Jesus’ power. He aims to demonstrate not only that Jesus is more powerful than the world’s powers, but that his power is of a different kind, a power that produces healing and reconciliation rather than alienation and violence. From the moment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, Matthew focuses ever more insistently on the assertion, demonstration, defense, and finally the affirmation, via the cross and resurrection, of Jesus’ authority.

The story of Jesus’ initial encounter with the most powerful leaders in Jerusalem follows soon after Jesus’ triumphal entry and his cleansing and occupation of the temple. As the second day of Jesus’ occupation begins, the various groups that oppose Jesus inaugurate a series of five challenges (Matthew 21:23-32, 22:15-22, 22:23-33, 22:34-40, and 22:41-46), all of which aim at undermining his authority, in order to dislodge him from the temple. Although we customarily break the story that begins in Matthew 21:23 into discrete units, this first challenge does not formally end until 22:14, making this by far the longest single controversy/challenge story in the Gospel. These stories are all “zero-sum” contests in which the winner gains honor—and power—at the loser’s expense. If Jesus were to lose any of these challenges, his occupation of the temple would cease, his challenge to the authorities in Jerusalem would end, and the leaders would regain control of the temple. If they win any of these challenges, there is no need to crucify him.

In this first, long challenge, Jesus’ adversaries are chief priests and elders of the people. The political legitimacy and authority of the priestly leaders in Jerusalem, who ruled at Rome’s pleasure, was itself widely questioned. Both the elders, who were wealthy elites, and the chief priests controlled large parcels of land in Judea and beyond, making them virtually identical with the rich, powerful landowners who are the frequent targets of Jesus’ parables, as in Matthew 21:33-46. “Elders of the people” is an ironic ascription; it soon becomes clear that the chief priests and elders do not represent the people; instead they both fear and seek to manipulate the crowds to carry out their will (21:26, 46; 26:3-5; 27:20). 

The challenge posed by the chief priests and elders focuses on two closely related, yet distinct questions: “By what authority (or what kind of authority) are you doing these things (i.e., cleansing and occupying the temple)?” and “Who gave you this authority?” The first question is about the nature of Jesus’ authority, the second about its source (see also Matthew 9:34, 12:24). Because Jesus currently occupies the temple, he has the upper hand, and can set the conditions for his reply. Before he will answer them, they must tell him about John’s baptism: was it from heaven or merely human? This question puts them in a bind. They know that a denial of the legitimacy of John’s baptism will not play well with the crowds, whose support they need. On the other hand, if they affirm that John’s baptism came from heaven, he will ask them why they did not submit themselves to it. Their answer—“we don’t know”—is only two words long in the Greek; we should imagine these words being delivered under their breath. They have lost.

With this exchange, the challenge itself is formally ended, but Jesus will continue to occupy the temple and to defend his authority to be there until he is ready to leave of his own accord (Matthew 24:1-2). Jesus, however, is not yet done with the chief priests and elders of the people. He extends his challenge to their authority by speaking in parables (21:28-22:14). The first of these is a version of the “two sons” tradition (similar to Luke’s parable of the prodigal and his older brother). The two sons tradition itself begins with Cain and Abel and includes Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Aaron and Moses, and David and his brothers—a tradition laden with motifs of envy and betrayal, struggles for power, and sometimes reconciliation. Because this parable is relatively short, we may miss the multiple points of resonance with Israel’s foundational stories. Jesus calls the sons in this parable “children,” just as Israel was often identified as God’s (sometimes rebellious) children. The vineyard is a stock symbol in Jewish tradition for Israel. Jesus is, therefore, not asking his adversaries to comment on random, fictitious brothers, but to locate themselves within Israel’s foundational and continuing stories.

The distinction between the two brothers turns on action versus word. Jesus and his adversaries agree that only one son does the will of the father, the son who says “no,” but goes nonetheless into the vineyard to work. Actions speak louder than words. Jesus uses this exchange to expose what the leaders really thought about John. The chief priests’ and elders’ failure to believe and respond to John reveals the truth about where they stood, and thus which brother they actually represent. Jesus’ authority, in contrast, is affirmed by the integrity of his words and actions, as well as by its outcomes: gathering and restoration, healing and cleansing, release from demonic powers, restored sight, table fellowship with sinners, and preservation of the least ones—all examples of the “fruit” of repentance.

Apparently, “believing” entails making a decision about what kind of power is legitimate, Jesus’ power or that of the Judean leaders. Only Jesus manifests a form of power that requires us to change our minds about the source, nature, and fruit of true power. Can we discern the nature and source of the powers that hold us in thrall? Can we distinguish the fruit of divine power in the midst of all that the powers of this world promise us?

Notes

1. Commentary first published on this site on Oct. 1, 2017.

“The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”¹

We may never have eaten a sour grape or know exactly what it means to have our teeth set on edge, but we get the gist of the proverb: children suffer the consequences of their parents’ actions. The proverb was probably used by the exiles to exonerate themselves of responsibility for their situation: they are not in exile through any fault of their own but rather are suffering for the sins of their ancestors.

Certainly Ezekiel has pointed to Israel’s long history of rebellion against God, beginning before they even left Egypt (Ezekiel 20). Yet through a long legal disputation that challenges Israelite conceptions of intergenerational guilt and punishment, Ezekiel argues that righteous children do not suffer for their parents’ wickedness; nor do wicked children benefit from their parent’s righteousness. Somewhat surprisingly, Ezekiel’s audience does not willingly give up their predictable calculus of guilt and punishment. The real riddle of this reading is why the people prefer their proverb, and not God’s offer of life.

In an earlier study of this text, I followed the lead of most commentators, who suggested that the problem was not the proverb but its use by the exiles to exonerate themselves of guilt. It’s hard to find fault with the truism that children usually do suffer from their parents’ mistakes. Ancient Israel embedded its own communal experience of intergenerational guilt and punishment in its understanding of God’s justice, which “visits the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 34:7). Although we no longer attribute children’s suffering to the hand of God, we do recognize the impact of family violence on subsequent generations. After all, it’s the stuff of southern novels and the bread and butter of psychotherapists.

But when God rejects the proverb, the issue is not how it’s used, but that it’s used at all. Against the fated inevitability of inheriting and suffering from a parent’s guilt, God proposes an alternative understanding of the nature of justice by grounding it in his identity as the sovereign creator of life. Just how that conviction breaks the inevitable cycle of sin and punishment, however, remains an open question, since it remains tightly bound to a strict doctrine of retribution: “Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die” (18:4).

Although 18:5-24 are omitted from the lectionary reading, these verses are an important stage in the argument leading to the final appeal of 18:25-32. In a series of legal rulings describing the deeds of a righteous father, his wicked son, and the righteous grandson, Ezekiel breaks the basic premise of the proverb. A wicked son does not benefit from his father’s righteousness, nor does he jeopardize his son’s chance at life.

As the argument proceeds, it becomes clear that God’s greater concern is the preservation of life, not the strict application of justice. If, for example, the righteous grandchild is free to change course once he sees and understands the consequences of his father’s wickedness, what about the wicked themselves? Are they doomed to suffer punishment for past wickedness? No, says Ezekiel: even the wicked may turn from their wickedness, change course, and live. Because all life belongs to God, even the lives of the wicked, the future remains open, not only for children of bad men, but also for the bad men themselves.

Somewhat surprisingly, the exiles protest: “The way of the Lord doesn’t add up!” (NRSV: unfair; 18:25). NRSV’s “unfair” partly conveys the notion of divine arbitrariness, but it does not do justice to the Hebrew verb, tkn, whose root meaning is to weigh, or measure (Job 28:25; Isaiah 40:12; 2 Kings 12:11). God “weighs” or measures human thoughts (Proverbs 16:2; 21:2; 24:12), but one cannot “weigh” or understand the spirit of God (Isaiah 40:13). What the exiles say about God’s way is, in a sense true, since the ways of God are always beyond human understanding. Certainly in the situation described here, in which God’s commitment to human life makes the future possible, there is an unaccountable mystery at work. Who could have known, at the darkest moments of exile, that God preferred life?

However, God’s reaction to the exiles’ remark shows that it was the wrong thing to say. God throws it back at them: is it not your ways that don’t measure up? By what calculus would human beings prefer a fixed destiny of suffering to the freedom of being able to repent, to change course, and thereby to gain life? Although the exiles don’t get to answer that question, we can guess that the argument in chapter 18 forces them to acknowledge their own culpability. They want to see themselves as innocents, children suffering for parents’ sins. If that perception gives them the freedom to remain victims of others’ actions, it also renders them helpless to move into new patterns of life.

But in Ezekiel’s case law, the child who suffers is not innocent, while the other, the righteous grandchild, does not suffer. This is a very strict theory of retribution, and while we might otherwise seek a little more leeway, its purpose here is to lead the exiles to acknowledge their own complicity in the events that have landed them in exile. Ezekiel’s argument should shatter their self-perception and lead them to repentance. That it does not; that they should choose a fatalistic proverb over life makes no sense at all. To God who delights in life, such a way is quite literally unfathomable.

Nevertheless, God’s offer of life stands. The chapter closes with the remarkably sweeping statement in God’s own voice: I do not take pleasure in the death of anyone! This declaration is stunning in its universalism, and we can imagine the author of Jonah playing with this idea as he pens the final verses of his book. “Should I not have pity on Nineveh?” (Jonah 4:11). No, God does not desire the death of Babylonians or Assyrians, innocent or wicked.

Yet God leaves it up to human beings to choose the way of life over the way of death. Perhaps we can understand the final words, “Turn, then, and live!” as words that echo across the testaments, into Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard, and into our own time. Perhaps we do not express our fatalism in the same way that the exiles do. Ours is more advanced, because more scientific, rooted in what we know about the genetic code and environmental conditioning. But perhaps this scientific explanation of our destiny is no less a threat to our well-being. Why would we choose scientific explanations for our frailty and limitations over the indeterminate freedom of God’s grace? Why don’t we turn, and live?

Notes

1. Commentary first published on this site on Sept. 25, 2011.

Road trips are never easy. This is something that Moses learned the hard way while journeying with Israel in the wilderness.

Exodus 17:1-7 is one of a series of wilderness narratives situated between Israel’s departure from Egypt and its arrival at Sinai. On the first leg of the journey, Israel departs from the Sea of Reeds, journeys through the wilderness of Shur (Exodus 15:22), and arrives finally at Marah, where God sweetens the bitter waters (Exodus 15:23-26). From Marah they travel to Elim, where they find twelve springs of water (Exodus 15:27). From Elim they travel to the wilderness of Sin, where God first provides manna (Exodus 16:1-36). And from the wilderness of Sin they travel to Rephidim, the setting for today’s text (Exodus 17:1-7).

The wilderness narratives in Exodus share a number of characteristics in common. First, the accounts happen while Israel journeys from Egypt to Sinai. Second, the central conflicts revolve around resource scarcity, perceived and otherwise. Third, the people blame the leadership of Moses (and sometimes Aaron) for their troubles. Fourth, God hears the grievances of God’s people and responds to them by providing resources that directly address their needs.

In Exodus 17:1-7, the issue is water: “The whole Israelite community set out from the Desert of Sin, traveling from place to place as the LORD commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink” (Exodus 17:1). The first thing to note is that they undertake this journey under God’s leadership (“as the Lord commanded”). Presumably, this refers to the pillar of cloud and fire which guided the Israelites on the various legs of their journey (Exodus 13:20-22). God’s presence was with them, not only in the form of verbal promises, but visually and tangibly. In addition to God’s visual presence, the Israelites also had the daily reminder of God’s caring provision in the form of manna, which arrived six days a week. Signs of divine activity were everywhere.

And yet, with parched mouths, the Israelites lash out against Moses: “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?” (verse 3). The decision to blame Moses points to the central problem in this story. Israel had still not learned a crucial lesson: where God leads, God provides. God had secured victory over the Egyptians, enriched Israel with the wealth of their former captors, made a way through the Sea of Reeds, and provided regular supplies on their journey through the desert. If the wilderness narratives demonstrate anything, it is that God provides in every situation.

But before we pillory the Israelites too severely, we should note that they are not only on a journey through the wilderness, they are also on a journey of the soul—being transformed from an earlier existence as an enslaved people to that of an independent nation. Unlearning the habits of domination—reinforced by Pharaoh’s extractive and cruel system of slavery and subjugation—is difficult, painful, and patient work. It is the work of generations. Accepting kindness and generosity when all one has known is violent exploitation was never going to be a quick or easy process. Israel had been subjected to a brutal existence under the yoke of Pharaoh. But they suddenly find themselves free of Pharaoh’s chains and the recipients of God’s kindness and mercy. Few would disagree that one of the Bible’s most difficult commands is the call to “trust.” This is especially true when the world teaches you that your survival depends upon distrust and skepticism. These wilderness stories demonstrate just how difficult it would be to transform a formerly enslaved people into a trusting nation.

In response to Israel’s murmuring, God stages a miracle, accentuated with a small amount of political pageantry: “The LORD said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink’” (verses 5-6).

The inclusion of Moses’ staff is a significant detail. The story begins in Exodus 4, when God turns this ordinary shepherd’s implement into a sign of divine power by transforming it into a snake (Exodus 4:1-5). The staff was designed to convince the Israelites that the God of their ancestors had heard their cries and had sent a deliverer. But it also did something for Moses, who had expressed concern that nobody would believe his story (Exodus 4:1). God’s promise was attached to this concrete thing—this “sacrament”—that gifted both Moses and the Israelites with confidence in the trustworthiness of their God.

Even more significantly, however, is the fact that Moses’ staff was used in Exodus 7 to turn the life-giving Nile into a death-dealing canal of blood. According to 7:21, the bloodied Nile produced such a horrendous odor that “the Egyptians could not drink its water” (emphasis mine). In Exodus 17, the Israelites needed a similar miracle, but in reverse. Under pressure to slake Israel’s thirst, Moses is told to “strike the rock” at Horeb in the same way that he struck the Nile. Water came forth and the people were able to drink. The crisis is averted by divine generosity.

The wilderness narratives are a treasure trove of insight, especially for congregations experiencing disruption, transition, or adversity. These texts have the profound capacity to mirror back our own community dynamics, showing how we also struggle to believe that where God calls, God provides.

It never ceases to amaze me how a person’s capacity to review the contours of their life decisions can adjust how they perceive the past, understand the present, or discern how to make good decisions in the future.¹

In this Psalm, the writer engages in a poetic reverie punctuated by reflections on the nature of God and recognition of human nature. It is a prayer that starts with trust in God and an abiding hope in the capacity of God to impact one’s life for the better. It ends with an affirmation of God’s essence as being good and upright.

Threaded between the beginning and end is a dance of human living in the presence of God. Good decisions are mixed with bad. Trust lines and marks from a lack of trust flow back and forth across the text like a Giacometti drawing. It is sometimes difficult to see which line leads to which conclusion. How does a decision shape a future line that could either be in accordance with the will of God or counter to it? Yet, collectively they form the image of what has been or what is present.

The Psalmist’s prayer entreats God to be a teacher, guide, and instructor who can provide insight about what makes a life worth living. The prayer massages an enduring emotional legacy of guilt and shame for past misdeeds with words of comfort and hope. What the exact nature of the guilt or shame is left undefined and perhaps that aids the hearer or reader in empathizing with the writer. They fill in the story with their own story so that the Psalmist’s prayer can become their own.

The Psalmist’s poem also sounds like that of one pleading to find a way out of their dire predicament or from what may be occluding their vision of what makes for a good life. What the Psalmist was facing isn’t clear, but the emotional experience seems familiar. Those who have experience with the consequences of bad decisions know how they can impact the mind and emotional outlook on everything around them. Those who have looked at the possibilities and implications of difficult situations and decisions know from life experience that bad things can happen if a decision is made incorrectly, and bad things can just happen.

Those who have experience with driving a car know that car accidents happen. In my experience, they happen when you least expect them. For example, while driving our car on a tree-lined country road a deer sprinted directly across our path. My wife and I discovered quickly that our gentle Mother’s Day ride had developed into something quite different than we had expected. The same could be said for the deer. Sometimes layers of instruction and miles of experience cannot avoid a collision. Bad things can happen.

The writer’s poetry swirls through words like a dust devil picking up themes and ideas from one place to have them land in another. The desires of a student to learn are commingled with God as teacher who can provide that which is desired and will bring about a fullness of life. The impact of a teacher on one’s life cannot be overstated. People often state that the most influential persons in their life stories are a parent, sibling, or teacher. The writing suggests an awareness of the impact that good teaching can have on one’s life. The Psalmist is entreating God to be their teacher so that their life journey might be worth living.

Show me, teach me, and guide me are English translations of the Hebrew text. Great teaching has a capacity to do all three. In order to graphically show what it is that teachers want students to learn, contemporary classroom teachers frequently use concept maps in their lesson planning and in their teaching practice. They are visually graphic ways to illustrate what it is that they are trying to teach students to learn. They use them in classrooms to help students see the correlation of ideas better. They break down ideas and show students the various pieces of an overall argument so that they can better connect them to key concepts and ideas. They visually depict correlations between ideas so that the ideas themselves can be grasped better and linked to other ideas so as to create stickiness in the student’s learning process.

The teaching process then ties what is shown to the student so as to arrive at the desired goals of learning. This learning then can provide the foundation for subsequent learning of increasing complexity of concepts and ideas. In addition to the illustration of ideas and the process of instruction, teachers routinely engage in mentoring students toward greater depths of understanding. There is a guiding process that occurs along the way in concert with one’s education that helps cement the pieces of learning together so that they become part of the structure of one’s life and life decision-making.

The Psalmist regards God as teacher to be the only teacher who can guide him toward that which will bring about a good life. There are theological affirmations threaded throughout the Psalm that describe God as teacher who can be trusted, who has a capacity to stop powers that would undermine one’s life, who can illustrate the ways and paths that lead to a life worth living, and who is good and upright.

Perhaps at its foundation the Psalm writer is wrestling with a question of formation. What is it that leads to a life worth living? What are the things that would impede a life worth living? How can one be guided toward that which is worthy and away from that which would be less than helpful for living?

Here the writer’s answer seems to be one that sloshes back and forth between what denudes life and what helps a life to flourish. On one side there is treachery without cause, sin, and rebelliousness toward the ways and on the other side there is a cognizance of what God has already provided to the people of God. The Pentateuch has shown what God would regard as good and right for living and they are rooted in the law of God and the creator’s designs for the flourishing of life.

Notes

1. Commentary first published on this site on Oct. 1, 2017.

The Indonesian national motto is Bhineka Tunggal Ika, the Malaysian motto is Kesepanduan dalam Kebelbagaian, and the United States’ motto is E pluribus unum.

All call us to “unity in diversity.” But how do we live that out? What does this unity in diversity look like? Differences are the reality of life, and the rhetoric of unity can often become a way of silencing different voices, dissenting opinions, and of subjugating them into sameness masquerading as unity.

Churches today have to deal with racial differences, economic differences, theological differences, and so on. How do we navigate these very real differences? Should we see them as a threat to the church? Should we burn people at the stake like what Christians did in the past in order to maintain unity and theological purity? Should we worship in a different space in order to accommodate these differences and perpetuate the reality of 11AM Sunday as the most segregated hour in America?¹

The early church in Philippi apparently faced just such a problem. The clash between Euodia and Syntyche in 4:2 is probably just the tip of the iceberg. We do not know the exact nature of the clash between these two women because we only hear from Paul about them. Euodia and Syntyche might have described the situation very differently. In any case, this interpersonal conflict seems to concern Paul in this letter.

Paul insists that he would like to see the Philippians being “of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (2:2). Such rhetoric in itself can be problematic because it seems as if Paul is erasing their differences by subjecting them to the same mind. However, the idea of being of the same mind is not the end of the story in this letter. The next two verses are crucial to how we understand what is going on.

Paul writes, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (2:3-4). The same mind, same love, full accord, and one mind of which Paul speaks in 2:2 cannot be about erasing differences because he immediately urges them to regard the other as more important. Verse 4 clearly places ta eauton (yourselves) and ta heteron (others/differences) side by side. The self is not a negation of the other, and vice versa. Paul demonstrates that a self-other binary should not be the measure or model of human social relations.

It is important to note that the regime of sameness is always self-centric. As Emmanuel Levinas has demonstrated in his book Totality and Infinity,² totality is about absorbing others into the self, into the same. It is subjugating others into the likeness of the self, putting others in the box of the self. It does not let the other be the other. In a sense, the totality is the absolutization and totalization of a particular. In many predominantly white churches, people who come from other cultural backgrounds are often forced to “behave white”— to speak white language, to sing white songs, to dress like whites, and so on. In such churches, unity seems to be practiced as uniformity. Paul’s statement on unity in verse 3 has to be understood not as a call for uniformity, but as making a space for others, as opening oneself for otherness. It is about being hospitable.

About 400 years before Paul wrote this letter, Aristotle published his Politics, which became one of the most important political treatises in the history of western thought. There, Aristotle likewise wrestles with this issue of unity and diversity in Greek polis. According to Aristotle, the wellbeing of the whole must take priority over the wellbeing of individual members. The polis exists prior to the individual. Thus, in this sense, unity is more important than diversity. Why? Aristotle uses the analogy of body to argue for his point. Just like a hand or foot cannot be a hand or foot without the body, so too when the body is destroyed the foot and hand will not exist.³

Paul seems to flip this Aristotelian argument. Paul tells the church in Philippi to prioritize others, to put others first. This move to prioritize others is the key that unlocks Paul’s overall rhetoric here, particularly in his Christological argument. Joseph Marchal has correctly demonstrated that the use of idealized slavery as the image of humanity in this so-called “Christ hymn” (2:6-11) is indeed problematic. “The use of this imagery encourages acceptance of the system, instead of change,” writes Marchal.⁴ In spite of this problem, Philippians 2:3-4 still has the potential to break Paul’s rhetoric of imitation and obedience from within. That is to say, the absolute obedience and imitation is impossible to project in light of the others, in light of prioritizing others. Philippians 2:3-4 opens the door for what Jacques Derrida calls “absolute hospitality,”⁵ which means that when the other knocks at the door, one does not even need to ask the name or the origin of the other; one simply opens the door to welcome the other in.

What does the church need to do when these “others” come, when they do not speak English, when they dress differently, smell differently, worship differently, sing differently? Will your church look not to their own interests but to the interests of the others? Will your church open its door to otherness? Paul’s discussion here is a serious challenge to us as the church today. Unity in diversity is almost an oxymoron, but unity without diversity is oppressive. Diversity gives us a way of destabilizing the rhetoric of unity in order to make sure that the others are not erased and subjected to the regime of sameness.

Notes

1. “‘11 A.M. Sunday Is Our Most Segregated Hour’; In the light of the racial crisis, a Christian leader assays ‘the structure and spirit’ of the nation’s churches, and asks some probing questions.,” The New York Times, August 2, 1964. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/02/archives/11-a-m-sunday-is-our-most-segregated-hour-in-the-light-of-the.html

2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).

3. Aristotle, Politics, 1.1.11.

4. Joseph A. Marchal, “Expecting a Hymn, Encountering An Argument: Introducing the Rhetoric of Philippians and Pauline Interpretation,” Interpretation 61, no. 3 (July 1, 2007): 245-55.

5. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25-26.