Having recently worked my way through the Gospel according to Matthew, I've been spending some time thinking about the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt 20.1-16).
In this parable, Jesus tells the story of a landowner who hires day-labourers to work in his vineyard. The owner hires some workers very early in the day, then he hires some more at the third hour, some more at the sixth hour, some more at the ninth hour, and some more at the eleventh hour. Then, when the time came for the labourers to be paid, the owner pays the labourers in the reverse order — those hired last are paid first, and those hired first are paid last. What is shocking is that the owner pays all the labourers the same wage — a full day's pay. Although this is the wage that was promised to the first labourers hired, they are shocked that they do not receive more, since they worked many hours more than the labourers who were hired later in the day. However, the owner is adamant that he is not being unfair to those hired first; rather, he says, they should not be envious of the generosity that he has the right to show unto others. Jesus then concludes the parable with these words:
So the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
Now, as I have turned this around in my mind, I have wondered about the way we seem to take this statement. Hearing that the “last shall be first, and the first shall be last” makes us think of a reverse ordering. Thus, for example, let's say we have a race where Steve came in first, Mike came in second, Dave came in third, and Adam came in fourth. If the last are going to be first, and the first are going to be last, then we would expect Adam to come in first, Dave to come in second, Mike to come in third, and Steve to come in fourth.
But this is not at all what Jesus is saying. In the context of this parable, when Jesus says that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last,” he means that all will receive an equal share. It's not that the order is reversed, it's that everybody ends up coming in first.
In Jesus' parable, the labourers, who were hired earlier in the day, are offended by the sort of generosity that rewards all people equally. Having spent some years journeying alongside of those on the margins of society, I know that members of our society (both Christians and those of other faiths as well) are, in general, just as repulsed by this approach to equality.
Indeed, our society perpetuates an Equality Myth, in order to sustain inequalities in our day to day life. Now what exactly is this “Equality Myth” that I am talking about? The equality myth that drives our society is the myth that all members of our society are provided with an equal opportunity to “succeed” and live comfortably. If a person fails to attain these ends it must because that person lacks a serious work ethic or because that person lacks integrity (or is simply an evil person). Thus, precisely because we are all equal, I don't have to treat the homeless or the poor as my equals. After all, they are to blame for their poverty, their illnesses, their vices, and their early deaths.
The problem with this Equality Myth is that it is fictional. In our society, we do not all have an equal opportunity. I know many people who possess a strong work ethic, and who have a great deal of integrity — who also happen to be street-involved. I know all sorts of kids who never had a chance or anything close to a chance. Our society is sustained by a great deal of inequalities, a great deal of injustices, but the Equality Myth allows us to ignore such things, and pretend that we don't have to do anything to alter unjust circumstances.
Thus, Jesus' parable of the workers in the vineyard, confronts our Equality Myth and points us to the type of generosity that genuinely does treat all people as equals. Understanding that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last” requires me to treat all people — including the poor and the homeless (or should I say, especially the poor and the homeless) — as my equals. As my equals, I do not treat them as people who are lazy, nor do I treat them as people who lack integrity; rather, I recognize that they are, more often than not, just as hard working, and just as righteous, as I am (and often they are more righteous and more hard-working than I am).
This is the sort of paradigm shift that is needed for Christians to meaningfully journey alongside of those on the margins of society. When the Church becomes a community of radical sharing and shocking generosity, then it will expose the violence created by society's Equality Myth, and reveal the true road to equality.
January Books (a bit late)
So, it looks like I’ll be getting very little cover-to-cover reading done for at least the next three months. I was traveling a bit in January, and I am getting married at the start of March. Plus, I’ve got a couple of speaking engagements coming up, and my thesis is looming on the immediate horizon, so those things always cut into my reading time. Anyway, here are January’s books:
1. Joyful Exiles: Life in Christ on the Dangerous Edge of Things by James M. Houston.
Well, with a title like Joyful Exiles, I figured I sort of had to read this book. Plus, Dr. Houston is the founder of the graduate school where I am studying and he is a prime example of a person who has spent his lifetime pursuing downward mobility (as evidenced most recently by the way in which he as been pushed/allowed himself to be pushed to the margins of the Regent community — as Regent continues to pursue more “secular” standards of success). This book — inspired by the request of one of his sons, who asked him to write out the basic convictions that he has sought to live out over the last eight decades — is written for:
“the ‘exiles,’ those who need the moral courage to move away from the familiar and the conventional and into the dangerously exposed places, to prophetically critique our cultural norms and institutional attitudes… to live ‘dangerously on the edge’ of our culture.”
Sounds good right? Right. And it is good. Houston laments the professionalisation of Christian ministry, the way in which technique has overwhelmed the Church, and the status-seeking of Christian institutes of education, while entering into dialogue with people like Kierkegaard, Dante, Dostoyevski, Herbert, and many more. So I don’t know why this book didn’t resonate more with me than it did. At times it felt a bit scattered, at other times it was too meandering, and when Houston did get to places that excited me (like the subsection entitled “The Obligation to Live in Prison or Exile”) I felt like he either said too little, or what he said had already been said (and said better?) by another author. Still, for those who are unfamiliar with these themes, and for the laity in particular, this book may well be worth reading.
2. An Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger
I didn’t mean to read this whole book. I meant to just read the first essay (“The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” — which I had heard was one of keys to understanding all of Heidegger’s work) but the first essay was so damn promising that I ended up getting drawn into the rest of the book. The entire book, is based upon one fundamental question, which Heidegger believes is the fundamental question. Thus, in his opening line Heidegger asks:
“Why are there things-that-are rather than nothing?” (“things-that-are” is my translation of Heidegger’s rather obscure word [Seiend] which is translated with the word “essents” in the edition that I own)
This fundamental question then prompts a preliminary question:
“How does it stand with being? (“being” = Sein)
The rest of the book is devoted to asking these two questions. Note that Heidegger is not necessarily completely answering these questions, for he believes that the pursuit of the question is more important than the desire to systematically answer all questions. Furthermore, as he asks this question, Heidegger argues that, since the early Greeks, the entire history of Western philosophy has completely botched the realm of metaphysics (well, actually, I think we’re talking about ontology, but let’s not split hairs). Thus, he goes back to the early Greeks and, through a study of linguistics and poetry, delimits “being” from four interrelated spheres: thinking (being is the underlying, the already-there), appearance (being is the enduring prototype), becoming (being is permanence), and “the ought” (being is the datum). Furthermore, Heidegger argues that these spheres are not arbitrarily chosen but belong together through an “inner necessity.”
Therefore, Heidegger concludes that “being” is the basic happening which first makes possible historical being-there (Dasein) amid the disclosure of the “essents” as a whole. Thus, the question of how it stands with being, is the question of how it stands with our being-there in history — and this being-there is only a true standing in history (as opposed to a staggering through history) if it is rooted in the pursuit of the question of being and nothingness. Thus, this key element of being-there (Dasein) is that which leads Heidegger to explore the question through the perspective of being and time — it is time, and not thinking, that is the perspective that discloses the unfolding of being.
So, I hope this doesn’t sound too nonsensical to those who haven’t read this book. Heidegger is a bit of frustrating read because he has this nasty habit of taking words that we think we know, and giving them new meanings. Now, that wouldn’t be so bad but then he goes on to give that new meaning a new meaning, and then gives that new meaning another new meaning. After he’s done doing that, he goes back to using the original word and you’ve got to constantly remember the layers of meaning that he has built of around the word — which can be difficult when you’re reading the book sporadically on night shifts.
All in all, I found this book to be quite stimulating and promising in the first half, but I felt that the second half was a bit of a let-down.
3. Sloth by Gilbert Hernandez
I have come close to giving up on finding another illustrated novel that is comparable to Craig Thompson’s Blankets or Art Spiegelman’s Maus — those are both magnificent pieces that take full advantage of their genre. I read Sloth because it was highly recommended to me by a friend that reads a lot more illustrated novels (and comics) than I do.
The book was okay, I guess. The story was so-so (teens growing up in a small town, it looks like something interesting might happen… but it doesn’t), the art was so-so, and although there is one major (unexplained) plot twist, I’m not convinced it really worked. I don’t know, I’m getting close to abandoning this genre, so if anybody knows any great illustrated novels (because when they’re great, they can be really great), please let me know.
4. The Secret Lives of Men and Women compiled by Frank Warren.
This is another compilation put together from Warren’s postsecret project (cf. www.postsecret.blogspot.com). There are some really great pieces in this book, but it’s the sort of book that you could sit down and read for an hour in the bookstore. If you’re going to buy a postsecret book, buy the first one — they make for fascinating conversation when you leave them on the coffee table.
Prophetic Insecurity
In commenting on Jesus' reference to the scribes and Pharisees as “blind guides” (cf. Mt 23), Stanley Hauerwas makes the following point:
They [the scribes and Pharisees] think their task is to make the life of those they lead secure. Yet a people who depend on prophets can never lead lives of security.
Risk-taking, then, becomes the mark of churches that follow the prophetic tradition, which climaxes in the life and death of Jesus. Churches that abandon their security out of their love for God and God's world are those that are faithfully traveling the road of discipleship. Churches that seek to create a space free of suffering, of challenge, or of risk-taking, are churches that are following blind guides.
I remember when I first began to change my thinking about these things. A few years ago, two of my close friends got married and decided that they wanted to begin to enter into a life that was rooted in the margins of society. So, they began to look for a house in the inner-city of Hamilton — i.e. a neighbourhood known for drug use, prostitution, violence, and poverty. As my friends explored this option, they were surprised to discover that Real Estate agents tried to talk them out of moving into the neighbourhood. One agent told them that the bridge just up the road from the house they were looking at was a place known for sexual assaults. Another agent told them that if they wanted to live in this neighbourhood with some sort of sense of security then they should go out and buy some guns.
This was my friends first step into this sort of lifestyle, and it was a big one. Needless to say, they were a little shaken-up by what they were being told. I remember one of them calling me and asking me for advice. A lot of thoughts flew through my mind as we spoke together. Should I advise the husband of a young, beautiful woman to move into a violent neighbourhood that had a reputation for being a place where sexual assaults occurred? Should I tell him that Christians can't own guns? I mean the risks here are real — I have seen, over and over, the devastation that assault can bring into a person's life. Still, even with these things in mind, I encouraged my friends to make the move into the neighbourhood. Love, I had begun to realize, doesn't always mean removing the crosses from the shoulders of my loved ones. Rather, love is helping to sustain them as they carry that cross. Love means carrying crosses together, not walking away from the cross.
So, I suppose my question is this: What are the risks that you and/or your church are taking? If you are not taking risks, then how do you know you are not following blind guides?
"But should I feel guilty?"
Over the years I have remained friends with the Dean of Students from the college that I attended in Toronto. He was both a friend and a mentor to me during my time in Toronto and so I always try to connect with him when I go back that way. A few weeks ago, I was passing through Toronto, and the Dean, knowing of my plans, invited me to give a guest lecture at a course he teaches on Christian community. I spoke rather anecdotally about rooting Christian community on the margins of society, about journeying into places of exile and suffering there, in order to be God's agents of new creation, and about uniting the confessing members of Christ's body with the crucified members of Christ's body — all familiar themes to anybody who as spent any amount of time reading this blog!
The lecture was fairly conversational, and there was actually quite a good amount of dialogue. However, there was one student who kept pressing me with the same question (he was the first student to ask a question and later, after the lecture ended, he approached me and continued to press the issue). This, in essence, was what he was asking:
“Look,” he said, “every now and again, I hear a speaker, like you, talk about the need for Christians to care for the poor and all that. Then they tell stories, like the stories you've told, and I think to myself, 'I'm not doing anything like that.' So my question is this: Should I feel guilty?”
Take a minute to think about how you might respond to that sort of question.
What I said went something like this:
“Well,” I said, “I don't know you and I don't know the first thing about the way in which you live your life, but let's step back for a minute and take a look at the big picture. The themes I am presenting are themes that I believe need to be at the centre of the identity and mission of the people of God. The people of God, as a corporate body, must be involved in this other-centred movement into dark places so that the victory won by Jesus can be made manifest in the here and now. So, when I tell stories about what my community is doing, I am not suggesting that y'all need to go out and start doing precisely what I'm doing. What I'm saying is that the Church needs to exercise a 'preferential option' for the poor that mirrors the heart of God. Thus, you as an individual within the Church, must discover the darkness that God is leading you into. You might not be lead to journey with sexually exploited people and homeless youth… but maybe you are being lead to journey with seniors, or with people with “disabilities,” or with wealthy children who are completely abandoned and unloved by their parents. Or whatever. There are many places of exile still left in our world and the people of God must be moving into all of those places.”
The student was quite dissatisfied with this response. He really didn't want to hear about priorities within the corporate body of Christ. What he wanted to know was, well, if he should feel guilty. I don't know if he had some sort of Evangelical addiction to guilt, or if he wanted me to let him off the hook. Regardless, he asked me again:
“But should I feel guilty?”
And then I realized why I didn't want to answer his question. So I said this:
“Look, I don't want to say if you should feel guilty or not, and here's why. I don't want guilt to be what motivates you. I don't want you to feel guilty that you don't care for the poor, and then go out and start journeying with the poor out of some sense of guilt or duty. That's not what I want at all. What I want is for you to be so overwhelmed by the wonder of God's love that it overflows out of you and leads you naturally to those who are the most desperate for that love, to those who are, literally, dying without it. If guilt is what motivates you, then the chances are that what you do won't be that meaningful, and it probably won't be something you end up doing for any sustained amount of time. But if love is what motivates you, then I think the world will be transformed and you will be able to remain in hard places because you delight in the company of God's beloved — the 'lost sheep' and the 'least of these.'”
The student still looked sort of unhappy but the lecture and the discussion moved on. After the class had ended, he was the first student to approach me.
“I see what you're trying to do,” he said to me, “but should I feel guilty?”
Living with Exiles
It is a lot easier to pray for the ingathering of the exiles than it is to live with them.
~ an anonymous Israeli, quoted in From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman
I am beginning to believe that it is not the major, one-time sacrifices that make it the most difficult for us to love our neighbours. Rather, I suspect that it is the small scale, ongoing annoyances that really test the depth of our love. The big events can be twisted so easily into either grand epics (if things go well) or romantic tragedies (if things go poorly). The little things, in general, are what they are.
Let me provide an example from my own life. A few friends and I live in a Christian community house in the heart of what is probably Canada’s most notorious neighbourhood. We have decided that loving those who had been abandoned means living alongside of them. We have come to believe that solidarity is not something that can be practiced very meaningfully from a distance, and we are committed to being friends, and neighbours, and lovers of those around us, instead of being social workers, or volunteers, or outreach workers. Furthermore, because of the especial violence and isolation faced by people who are sexually exploited in our neighbourhood, we have committed ourselves to learning how to journey alongside of this specific group of people.
This is the big step. The step that is easy to romanticise or glorify (actually, I am increasingly wondering how I can even speak to audiences about this without automatically being romanticised our glorified into some sort of fiction that is then safely removed from the lifestyle decisions of my audiences). The surprising thing is that, although it takes some courage to make this decision, it turns out that transitioning into our neighbourhood has been surprisingly easy.
However, it has been the little things that have proven most difficult. Little things like choosing to go out at least one night a week to talk to the people in the alleys and the girls on the corners. Sure, that’s exciting for a little while… but then, you know, other things come up, or I get tired, or I get lazy, or it’s just too cold and rainy out so I put it off. Besides, I’m an introvert and sometimes the thought of going around talking to strangers is just too daunting (or so I tell myself).
And then there’s little things like continuing to develop relationships and invite people into our home that are, well, just plain annoying. People are people and we all naturally connect with different types. Some people annoy us… but the thing about solidarity is that we don’t get to choose to just hang out with people that we really hit it off with (unlike the way in which most of us approach Sunday church). Christian community, Jean Vanier reminds us, is about being a family together. It’s not that we are friends, we are brothers and sisters — and, although we choose our friends, we don’t get to choose our family members.
In my work as a “street youth worker,” I can schedule in the times when I hang around with annoying people and I can reserve large chunks of time to myself (i.e. like when I’m at home and not at work). When I live in a Christian community that is trying to be an open community, I lose a lot of that freedom. Now, I’ve got people hanging out with me when all I want to do is grab a book and veg out in my room.
In a way, I think that this experience is comparable to the way that people describe the first year or so of marriage. In marriage, they say, you learn how selfish you are. You realize how much you just did what you wanted to do when you wanted to do it. In marriage you, more often than before, have to do what you don’t want to do when you want to do something else. Living in a Christian community is something like that (and, by the way, that’s why I think marriage is not the end of our journey away from selfishness but is a good first step to learning how to, as a couple, live other-centred lives in the community of faith — instead of, as a couple, just doing what you want to do when you want to do it).
It is developing the daily discipline in the little things, it is living patiently with small annoyances that is the most difficult aspect of this transition. Yes, it is a lot easier to pray for the ingathering of the exiles than it is to live with them. But that is the only option we have. Our prayers for the ingathering of the exiles are mostly meaningless unless we are participating in that ingathering.
I think that our failures in all of these small ways shows just how shallow our love is for others in comparison with the love that we have for ourselves.
Recovering a Theology of Abundance
Abundance,not scarcity, is the mark of God's kingdom. Bu that abundance must be made manifest through the lives of a people who have discovered that they can trust God and one another.
~ Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew
In general, the language of “abundance” and “blessedness” puts me on edge. I tend to associate such language with either the “prosperity gospel” that teaches us that God wants us to have more than we already have, or with the upper-middle-class form of Christianity that assures us that God just wants us to be comfortable and enjoy the blessings that our culture affords us. Thus, when I stumbled onto Hauerwas' words about “abundance” in his commentary on Mt 6, I was a little taken aback. Yet Hauerwas was clearly offering a different sort of approach to abundance than the norm. Generally those who talk about “abundance” don't talk about the need to trust one another. After all, from their perspective, abundance is akin to some sort of extravagant autonomy. Sure, they would say, I learn to trust in God, but the abundant life means not having to trust in others for acts of charity.
So what is Hauerwas doing when he combines the notion of “abundance” with the notion of trusting in (and even depending upon!) not only the charity of God, but the charity of others?
Well, Hauerwas is recovering a proper theology of abundance. A proper theology of abundance results in simplicity. Our assertion that abundance is the mark of God's kingdom does not lead us to live extravagantly; rather it leads us to live simply — it leads us to give away, today, all that we have because we are certain that both God, and his people, will provide for tomorrow. We become so certain of God's overflowing abundance that, instead of grasping and hording, we end up living lives that are increasingly free of the possessions and securities that are, in fact, the marks of worldly kingdoms.
"Pathologies of Hope" or the Perversion of Hope by Positivity?
Barbara Ehrenreich has recently written an interesting editorial entitled “Pathologies of Hope” (cf. Harper's, Feb '07). It begins in this way:
I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer: Think positively! Don't lose hope! … Hope? What about a cure? At antiwar and labor rallies over the years I have dutifully joined Jesse Jackson in chanting “Keep hope alive!”—all the while crossing my fingers and thinking, “Fuck hope. Keep us alive.”
Ehrenreich then devotes the rest of the article to describing, and thoroughly rejecting, the popular American “Cult of Positivity” which is rooted in the marketing of “the power of positive thinking,” “optimisim,” and “positive psychology.” The major problem with this Cult is, according to Ehrenreich, the way in which Positivity requires faith. She writes:
It's not enough to manifest positivity through a visibly positive attitude; you must establish it as one of the very structures of your mind, whether or not it is justified by the actual circumstances.
This then results in the irrationality of “positive illusions,” for this sort of faith is rooted in a denial of that which is actual. Furthermore, Ehrenreich argues that this has ethical consequences because “the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an additional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved.” This results in “victim-blaming at its cruelest” and produces a culture that is “less and less tolerant of people having a bad day or a bad year” (this is a quote that Ehrenreich takes from Barbara Held).
Therefore, following in the footsteps of Camus, Ehrenreich argues that we must be realistic, but not passive or unhappy. Rather, she concludes:
To be hope-free is to acknowledge the lion in the tall grass, the tumor in the CAT scan, and to plan one's moves accordingly.
Like Ehrenreich, I have been inspired by Camus' writings. It is the compassionate atheism of Camus, and not the vitriolic atheism of Richard Dawkins, that I find both coherent and inspiring. Therefore, as I reflect upon this article, let me begin by saying that I whole-heartedly agree with Ehrenreich's critique of the “Cult of Positivity” that exists in America. This “Cult” is premised upon a denial of reality that is, indeed, pathological, and this pathology does genuinely result in “victim-blaming” and what Ehrenreich calls an “empathy deficit.” Thus, Ehrenreich's desire to continue to be active while also acknowledging “the lion in the tall grass” is quite commendable.
However, IMHO, the fundamental flaw in Ehrenreich's article is the way in which she equates “hope” with “positivity.” It is interesting to note that the language of “hope” is rarely employed in the body of this article, and, of the ten references to “hope,” all but two appear in the first and last paragraphs. Ehrenreich simply equates “hope” with “positivity” (the language of “positivity” and “negativity” is employed fifty-five times in the article). Yet Christians can never equate hope with the sort of positivity that is founded upon the denial of very real, and often very terrible, circumstances. Rather, as both Jurgen Moltmann (cf. Theology of Hope) and Jacques Ellul (cf. Hope in Time of Abandonment) have shown, hope can only be genuine when it is rooted honestly and unflinchingly in the darkest places of our world. Indeed, I suspect that Ehrenreich would have a very different perspective on “hope” if she began to read the writings of those like Moltmann and Ellul who stand within long-lasting traditions of suffering and hope, rather than simply allowing hope to be defined by “positive psychologists,” motivational speakers, and self-help gurus. The “Cult of Positivity” is a perversion of hope — and its pathological consequences have nothing at all to do with hope.
Here it is helpful to pick up on the connection Ehrenreich makes with Camus and the notion of living honestly. As we (in the company of Camus) try to honestly examine the situation that we are in, it is helpful to re-examining the theological motif of “hell.” Many theologians have argued that “hell” is not a place of eternal torture; rather hell is the experience of godforsakenness — hell is where God is not. Thus, Camus' “refusal to hope,” is an appropriate expression of his view of the world as godless. Following in the footsteps of Dante, Camus urges us to abandon hope if we are to truly enter into our world. Consequently, the problem with the Cult of Positivity, is that it tries to deny the godlessness of our world — it wants us to call our hells, “heavens.” But our hells are not heavens and so, if we are honest, we are bound to pick Camus over the positive psychologists.
However, what I find inspiring about Moltmann and Ellul is that they, like Camus, do not deny the very real hells of our world. Based upon their faith — in a lord who died as one forsaken by God — they argue that, even in the midst of hell, God is to be found in solidarity with the godforsaken. This then becomes the foundation of a hope that does not flee from reality, but acknowledges “the lion in the tall grass.” Perhaps there is more than the lion hidden there. This hope is not a placebo that removes suffering; rather it is that which sustains us in the midst of suffering.
Thus, it is the affirmation of this sort of hope that has lead me into deeper and deeper levels of empathy with those whose sufferings are ignored by others. While the Cult of Positivity does indeed result in an “empathy deficit,” genuine hope leads us into ever deeper solidarity with those who live in the hells of our world. In response to the Cult of Positivity, hope says “Fuck Positivity. Keep us alive.”
In my journey with homeless youth, drug addicts, and sexually exploited people, I have often encountered the lion — but I have also encountered something that is greater than the lion. The discovery of god in the heart of godless places puts a whole different face on hope.
Mt 9.18-26: Miraculous Healing or Shrewd Insight?
I'm continuing to work my way through Matthew and I was struck by something in Mt 9.18-26.
Basically, in the last few chapters (8-9), Jesus has been performing healings and pronouncing blessings upon unexpected people (the leper, the centurion's servant, the demoniacs who live amongst the tombs, etc.) while simultaneously arguing that those who expected blessing might well be shut out (“the sons of the kingdom will be cast out…”) and challenging a lot of the structures of first-century Jewish society (“let the dead bury the dead…”). Then, right after Jesus finishes saying that you can't put “new wine in old wineskins,” we get a “synagogue official” coming to Jesus saying that his daughter has died, so can Jesus please come and make her live again (Mt seems to want us to read about this event in light of Jesus announcement re: the wineskins). So, Jesus goes to the officials house and sees all the signs of mourning but then pronounces, “the girl has not died but is asleep” at which point everybody starts laughing at him. However, after the crowds are sent out, Jesus takes the the girl by the hand and the girl got up.
Now then, the (admittedly, very few) commentaries I have looked at tend to see this in two ways. (1) Reading Mark back into Matthew, some commentators argue that Jesus actually did raise the girl from the dead (cf. Mk 5). (2) Others take the language of “sleeping” more seriously and think that the girl was not dead but had fallen into a coma. In both (1) and (2) Jesus performs a genuine healing miracle.
However, I have been wondering if a third alternative is possible (especially since I'm a little cautious about reading Mt totally through the lenses of Mk). Could it be that Matthew presents this episode as a time when the rulers tried to trick Jesus? Were the synagogue official and his friends trying to pull one over on Jesus? The language of healing never actually occurs in these chapters. The girl is sleeping and Jesus takes her by the hand, and she gets up. So what is the news that spreads throughout the land (Mt 9.26)? Perhaps it is that Jesus is not so easily fooled.
This reading would seem to fit with the dramatic reversals that are occurring in these chapters — and would also then fit well with the Pharisees (subsequent) accusation that Jesus casts out demons by the power of the ruler of the demons (Mt 9.34). They've realized that they might not be able to trick Jesus, and so they decide to slander him. Thus, the synagogue official and his friends become the old wineskins who are incapable of receiving the new wine — and they are so blind that they even try to make a mockery of the one who brings that new wine.
Any thoughts on this reading of the text?
Followers and Admirers
“I follow Jesus, Clarence, up to a point.”
“Could that point by any chance be—the cross?”
“That's right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I'm not getting myself crucified.”
“Then I don't believe you're a disciple. You're an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you're an admirer not a disciple.”
“Well now, if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn't have a church, would we?”
“The question,” Clarence said, “is, 'Do you have a church?'”
~ From a dialogue in Biography as Theology by James McClendon.
Stanley Hauerwas quotes this bit of dialogue in his “theological commentary” on Matthew in order to further emphasize the difference between Jesus' disciples and the crowds who also gathered around Jesus. The disciples, Hauerwas argues, are those who follow Jesus and who end up suffering with him; the crowds, Hauerwas goes on to say, are those who admire Jesus but, at the end of the day, also call for Jesus' crucifixion.
This is an interesting point to keep in mind, especially considering the observation that most everybody these days seems to profess admiration for Jesus. Yes, we say that Jesus was a good man… but we live lives that are sustained by crucifixions. And the question is, “Do we have a church?” Are we followers or admirers?
Five Propositions on Christian Community
1. Christianity is necessarily communal.
There is no such thing as an individual Christian. Certainly there are times when a Christian can be alone, but to be a Christian is to be incorporated into the body of Christ. In the words of N. T. Wright: “It is as impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable to be a Christian all by yourself as it is to be a newborn baby all by yourself.”
Furthermore, because being a Christian means participating in the mission of God, and because God's mission is rooted in a love that actively pursues reconciliation and shalom, one cannot be faithful to one's Christian identity apart from community.
In this regard it is helpful to look to the ministries of both Jesus and Paul.
In relation to Jesus it is worth asking, “Why did Jesus engage in a three year ministry?” After all, if Jesus simply came to “die for the sins of the world” (or something like that) then why bother wandering around for a few years? Why not just get it over with? We need to realize that Jesus did not just come to die, he came to live — and in that living he intended to found an alternate community — a newly constituted “Israel.” Jesus wants to make sure that there will be a community of faith to continue his work after he is gone.
In relation to Paul it is worth noting that Paul's letters are all written to faith communities, and not to individual Christians. Paul is not so concerned with seeing people develop “personal relationships” with Jesus (although such language should not be dismissed altogether), as he is with developing communities of faith that live subversively in the midst of the Empire. As Michael Gorman says: “the ekklesia, then, is not for Paul an optional supplement to a private spirituality of dying and rising with Christ. Rather, the ekklesia is what God is up to in the world: re-creating a people, whose corporate life tells the world what the death and resurrection of Jesus is all about. This people, the 'Church,' lives the story, embodies the story, tells the story. It is the living exegesis of God's master story of faith, love, power, and hope.”
Indeed, the entire biblical narrative, is the story of a people. Our focus on particular persons — beginning with our Sunday school lessons that focus on individuals — like King David or the Prophet Elijah, or whomever, often causes us to forget that a King is only defined by his role within a nation of people, and that even the prophets lived as communities of prophets within the community of Israel, and so on and so forth. There is no way to live alone within this narrative.
Finally, it is also worth noting that, given the fact that the Christian God exists as a community (Father, Son, Spirit), it is not surprising that humans, who are created to reflect God's image into the world, must exist as a community as well.
2. Therefore, as Christians, we pursue community because we wish to be faithful.
Community is “hot” for a lot of reasons right now. As our culture reacts to the hyper-individualism of modernity, a new “postmodern” tribalism has developed. More and more, intentional relationships, small communities, are seen as the solution to our failures, our loneliness, our fractured lives, and our sufferings. In this regard, the pursuit of community is simply an extension of the cultural pragmatism that continues to be a driving force in the West.
However, Christians do not pursue community because that seems to be the pragmatic thing to do. We pursue community because we want to be faithful to God's calling. It is only being rooted and grounded in this faithfulness that will sustain us when the current fad for community passes. It is only faithfulness that will cause us to remain in communities that fail to solve all our problems (and all communities will fail in this regard). Faithfulness leads us beyond idealism and sustains us in the midst of a reality that is often a lot more hard work, and a lot more miserable (or just plain annoying) that we first thought. Read Nouwen, read Vanier, read the monastics, or any others who have lived and worked within an intentional community and you quickly learn that community is not the be-all-end-all utopian state that we imagine it to be. Faithfulness, and not idealistic fictions, causes us to remain.
3. Christian community is sick unto death if the confessing members of Christ's body are separated from the crucified members of Christ's body.
Mt 18.20 is often seen as one of the central verses upon which the sacramental nature of the Church is founded. Jesus is present wherever two or more are gathered together in his name. Or, stated another way, those who gather together confessing Christ, are members of the body of Christ.
However, although it is generally ignored in this regard, Mt 25.31-46 is just as important to our understanding of the nature of the body of Christ and Jesus' sacramental presence in the world. Within this passage Jesus tells us that whatever we do (or do not do) for the “least of these,” we do (or do not do) for him. This means that Jesus is also sacramentally present within this group of people. Liberation theologians are correct to remind as that the poor are the tangible crucified body of Christ in history. Thus, those who are crucified by the powers of today are also members of the body of Christ.
Therefore, if the Church is to be the Church these two groups, the confessing members of Christ's body and the crucified members of Christ's body, must be united with one another. When these two groups are not united the body of Christ is fundamentally fractured.
Indeed, if these two groups are not united, it is likely that the body of Christ is “sick unto death.” What do I mean by this phrase, “sick unto death”? I mean, on the one hand, that the crucified members are bound to die if the confessing members are not united with them. After all, when the poor are abandoned, they are abandoned unto death — death caused by disease, by hunger, by violence, by addictions, by neglect, and so on and so forth. However, I also mean, on the other hand, that the confessing members who just do ignore the poor may also be sick unto death because of this decision. Indeed, this is precisely the point that Paul makes in 1 Cor 11.17-34. The wealthy members of the church in Corinth were gathering together and celebrating the Eucharist in such a way that the poor were ostracised and (at best) treated as second class citizens. What was the result of this, according to Paul? The result was that wealthy members of the congregation were falling ill and dying! Indeed, living in this way reveals that one is not living under Jesus' lordship but is allowing one's life to be dictated by other lords — wealth, honour, social status, etc. — and all of these lords ultimately serve one lord — death. Thus, when the confessing members of Christ's body neglect the poor they serve the kingdom of death, and not the kingdom of God, and they are, accordingly, claimed by their lord. These are hard words indeed!
Thus, the union of the confessing with the crucified in community is an essential element of Christian faithfulness. As Jean Vanier reminds us, we come to the poor “not just to liberate those in need, but also to be liberated by them; not just to heal their wounds, but to be healed by them; not just to evangelise, but to be evangelised by them.”
4. Consequently, the Christian community must be known as a risk-taking community of suffering love.
The proposition that “love is absolutely essential to Christianity” seems so obvious that it barely registers with us. We read that proposition and think, “well, of course it is,” and then move on. However, given the violence, division, and hatred that is embodied within, and proclaimed by, much of contemporary Christianity, we would do well to pause here.
In particular, it must be stressed that, for as long as the world is broken, suffering is an inescapable element of love. Really it is quite simple: if the one I love suffers, my love causes me to suffer with them. It is the suffering of our love that makes our community — our solidarity — genuine. Any community that seeks to flee from suffering will always be superficial. Alas, too often the Christian community has been presented as that which will lead us away from suffering. In reality, the Christian community is the community of those who sustain one another in the midst of suffering until the day when all sufferings are put to an end.
Furthermore, we must realize that love is about the pursuit of a trajectory, and is not about the achievement of a static state. That is to say, love leads us into ever deeper levels of intimacy with God and with one another. Thus, in my life time, I never come to a place where I can say, “I am adequately loving my neighbour and my God.” Indeed, love itself leads me to discard that way of thinking, for love delights in loving ever more. Thus, like Jesus, we pursue a trajectory of love that leads us to be poured out more and more for others.
Yet this is a hard road, for it must be remembered that it was only on the cross that Jesus was able to say, “It is finished.” Only in the moment of being utterly poured out, poured out unto death, can we say that our love has arrived at the static place where movement ceases. And even then, because Christ has triumphed over death, this cessation of movement is but a pause before our resurrection by love into love.
Thus, Christian love is essentially cruciform. It is shaped by the form of discipleship that is defined by cross-carrying.
Furthermore, this Christian openness to suffering (combined with previously mentioned union of the confessing and crucified members of Christ's body) causes the Christian community to be a risk-taking community. This is the folly of love, for love does not know fear — or at least does not allow its actions to be controlled by fear. This risk-taking folly, this irresponsibility, manifests itself in two central ways.
On the one hand, love leads us to journey into dark places so that those who are abandoned there can discover the presence of God among the godforsaken. Thus, love enters into places of violence and of illness and risks suffering there. Love leads us to walk into alleyways at night and talk with prostitutes and drug dealers, just as it leads us to embrace lepers and share the kiss of peace with those who are infected with various diseases. We do this because we believe that love's infection is stronger than violence and disease. Indeed, even if we suffer violence and illness ourselves we remain convinced that, even in these things, we are more than conquerors (as Paul reminds us in Ro 8).
On the other hand, love leads us to confront the powers who continue to oppress the poor and destroy the earth. As Jim Wallis once said (before he got confused and mistook the State for the Church), “prophets speak hard words from broken hearts.” Thus we speak against government officials who favour the rich over the poor; we speak against police officer who beat, rob, and rape, homeless youth; we speak against corporations that steal the resources and children from other nations. We risk confronting those who are more powerful than we are, not simply because we love those who are oppressed, but also because we love the powerful and long to see them set free.
Thus, our love for the poor leads us to a risky solidarity with the poor, just as our love for the powerful leads us to a risky confrontation with the powerful.
Furthermore, in loving in this way, we do not only risk ourselves, but we allow our loved ones to risk themselves, and sometimes we even risk our loved ones. I do not merely take this risk, we take this risk together — and by taking this risk together we are able to sustain one another when things go ill for us. It is essential that we realize this point within our contemporary context because it is the (supposed) desire to protect loved ones from harm that is the single greatest justification for violence in our world. Christians are those who are willing to even expose loved ones to harm until that day when all violence ceases. More hard words!
5. Finally, Christian community is superficial and largely inconsequential unless it is an eschatological community formed through the practice of counter-disciplines.
To be an eschatological community, is to be a storied community. This means allowing the biblical story to define our existence, and this requires us to live with both memory and hope. Over against the popular desire to “live in the now,” Christians are those who proleptically and hopefully embody the future in the present based upon their memory of God's past actions and promises.
It must be noted that this is a deeply subversive way of living, for it is memory and hope that empower us and encourage us to create transformation here and now. Losing these things, losing our story, leaves us at the mercy of the powers that be and gives their story control over our lives.
Thus, if the Christian community is to be genuinely Christian, it must be a community of discipline. This is true in part because our culture — despite popular opinion — is a disciplined culture. From infancy we are disciplined to desire certain things, we are disciplined to consume, and consume more all the time; we are disciplined to be suspicious of all authorities by ourselves and our own desires; we are disciplined to hope in the State; we are disciplined to hope for very little real change; we are disciplined to have our lives follow the same patterns as everybody else; we are disciplined to pursue distraction; and so on and so forth.
Therefore, Christian communities must exercise counter-disciplines if they are to live meaningfully in our context. Thus, we are disciplined to call Jesus “Lord,” and not Caesar, or the President, or whomever. Thus, we celebrate a liturgy that reminds us of our story and shapes our life by a very different pattern, and we follow the Church calendar, recognising that is is seasons like Advent and Lent that define us year to year — and not holidays like Thanksgiving or Veterans Day or whatever. Thus, we are taught to live simply and compassionately and not extravagantly and selfishly. In this way, we become agents of God's new creation and not members of the status quo.