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DonateSeptember 1, 2002
Commentary by Russell Pregeant |
See also: [2008] [2005] |
Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23,26, 45c
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28
The lectionary readings for this Sunday contain some intriguing tensions that offer rich potential for homiletical exploration from a process perspective. There are elements also that invite critical reflection.
The awesomeness of divine power is displayed magnificently in the psalm and is central to the Exodus story as well. But the latter passage is rich with themes that are congenial to the process notion that God is affected by events in the world and wields a power that is not unilateral but relational. The whole liberation project is traced to God’s empathy: “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt , and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings….” The entire account, moreover, presupposes the need for human cooperation in the task of liberation. God’s power is determinative, but Moses is no merely passive instrument. God ultimately rejects his self-effacing protestation, “Who am I…?” with the promise of divine presence and can also say, “I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth my people….” God thus remains the ultimate power, but works precisely by empowering Moses—a point made abundantly clear as the narrative of the exodus event proceeds.
The story of Moses’ call is a classic text of liberation, a resounding declaration of God’s taking sides with the oppressed. As such, it stands as an important reminder not to let the New Testament calls to humility and suffering, found in both the epistle and gospel readings, play the role of justifying the forms of oppression in which the church through the centuries has all too often been complicit. The Jesus of the New Testament is no less a liberator from suffering and oppression than is Moses, and it is a bitter irony when other-worldly religion obscures this fact. The process perspective, however, encourages the preacher to hold the themes of human empowerment and the call to humility and suffering together in creative tension rather than to reject one in favor of the other. Despite the misuse of the latter themes, they remain an important aspect of the gospel—a theme to which I will return below.
The link that the Exodus passage makes between the divine name YHWH (the LORD) and the Hebrew verb of being seems at base to indicate not God’s sheer be-ing but rather God’s causal power. God, in other words, is the one who brings into being the things that come to pass—a point that is peculiarly appropriate at this moment in the continuing drama of God’s relationship to Israel . God is about to exercise that power specifically through the liberation of the people. The passage therefore functions in a thoroughly covenantal context. Although there are overtones of God’s universality here, precisely in the link to the verb of being, the particularity could hardly be more evident. For the sacred name itself is presented precisely to identify the one who speaks from the bush as “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”
This juxtaposition of nascent, implicit universality with strong particularity is in itself interesting from a process perspective. For process thought, by envisioning God as present and active in every event in the world, holds universality and particularity together in a creative way. The God who is God of all relates to the world not by merely structuring the world in deistic fashion but by virtue of a concrete presence in all moments. Process interpreters thus need not, indeed should not, reject covenantal thought as provincial but need only to broaden it and free it from exclusivist implications. A covenant with Israel need not preclude other covenants, and God’s activity in one historical stream need not rule out other activity in other streams. Indeed, the dimension of particularity that pervades the biblical tradition is a potent reminder that we relate to that wider arena not abstractly but only through the concreteness of the actual neighbor, the actual community, the actual world around us.
The Romans passage, too, is closely linked to covenantal thought. Having completed his rehearsal of God’s historical dealings with Israel, at 12:1 Paul begins his ethical appeal, imploring his readers to present their lives to God as an act of worship. Stressing community in verses 1-8, in 9-21 he turns explicitly to love and elaborates the theme in terms of a number of specifics and closes with a powerful injunction to love even the enemy. The entire set of injunctions is made explicitly against the background of “the mercies of God,” laid out in the preceding chapters both in terms of a salvation-history focused on Israel (9-11) and God’s definitive act in Christ (1-8) as the hinge of that history. It is undeniable, however, that the injunction to love carries an inherent and universal appeal, so that once again strong particularity is found in tandem with an implicit universality.
Scholars frequently identify Matthew 16:21, the beginning of the Gospel reading, as a major turning point in the narrative. The exact same Greek construction, translated as “from that time Jesus began to,” occurs both here and at 4:17. At 4:17 it signals the beginning of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and here it indicates a fundamental change in his focus and message: now he concentrates specifically on the disciples and begins to speak of his coming death and resurrection. Jesus has completed his public ministry of proclamation and is on his way to his crucifixion.
The passage is, however, closely linked to the periocope immediately preceding it—Peter’s dramatic confession of faith in 16:16-20. The latter story ends with Jesus’ charge to secrecy, a fact that gives the teaching in verses 21-28 a particular emphasis. Although some scholars argue that Matthew’s editing of Mark completely erased the theme of the “Messianic secret” (Jesus’ attempt to keep his identity hidden until the nature of his Messiahship becomes unmistakably evident), something of that theme seems still operative at a few points. As in Mark, the teaching about Jesus’ death is directed to the disciples alone, and that teaching seems to play the theme of the suffering Messiah off against that of the savior who is triumphant in a worldly sense. And Jesus’ rebuke of Peter in vs. 23 is clearly intended to undermine the latter conception. So although Matthew gives a triumphant account of post-resurrection events that is lacking in Mark’s more paradoxical and ironical narrative, the ultimate paradox in not missing from Matthew: the Messiah of Israel came in the form of an humble teacher who was put to death on a Roman cross. And this declaration, as in Mark, forms the background of a call to a radical form of discipleship that calls the follower to unremitting self-sacrifice—a call stated in less dramatic but quite parallel fashion in the Romans passage.
Here again we find an interesting juxtaposition of particularity and universality. Jesus supports his call to discipleship by reference to a broad principle: one must lose oneself to find it. This jolting, paradoxical statement invites the reader to reflect on what it is, after all, that constitutes true life and offers the proposition that it is to be found only by transcending one’s individual existence for a greater good. Such a proposition has an appeal in an of itself, but in context it is linked specifically to following Jesus. And it is also supported by the declaration in vs. 27 by a reference to Jesus’ eschatological return. For our contemporary consciousness, however, the inherent appeal of the call to lose one’s life to save it is to some extent undermined by such support. For it can easily lead to the replacement of the moral justification with a merely pragmatic one. This is a point that progressive interpreters in general, and process interpreters specifically, would do well to take into consideration in preaching from such passages. If the eschatological sanction functions as an imaginative way of pointing to the grounding of the call to self-sacrifice in the nature of reality, it can play an important role. If its literal weight is stressed, it can either alienate thoughtful hearers or reinforce an other-worldliness that works against the most vibrant aspects of the tradition—in this case the intuitively-grasped truth of the aphorism about losing one’s life to find it.
Part of the power of an aphorism such as this comes precisely from its paradoxical character. One might say, in fact, that those attracted to it are those whose intuition is such as to grasp what to others is in fact counter-intuitive. Thus preachers would do well to strive to preserve this quality of paradox and not diffuse it with too much rational explanation—sometimes poetry is best interpreted with more poetry. Process thought does, however, offer a conceptuality that can, on a theological level, make rational sense of losing one’s life to find it and also speak to the problem of the misuse of the call to suffering. If God is in fact the all-inclusive being, then one’s true self-fulfillment is found precisely by transcending a narrow sense of self and opening one’s life to the wider world of God’s universe itself. And this way of conceiving the matter seems perfectly in line with the intention of the saying, which is not to foreclose self-fulfillment but actually to enhance it. Those who make the call to sacrifice into a tool of oppression do in fact pervert it, and it is important to make this point from the pulpit from time to time. A particularly powerful way of doing this, one might add, is to play upon the paradox oneself: the self that some persons need to lose is in fact the self-effacing self that refuses to receive God’s empowerment.
God’s need for human cooperation enters into the gospel passage, but in a subtler way than in Exodus. Jesus’ demand that his followers take up their own crosses stands in marked tension with the way in which some theological traditions have dealt with the atonement through the notion that Jesus “paid it all.” Atonement theology is present in Matthew, stated explicitly in 20:28 and 26:28. But it tends to run afoul of Matthew’s emphasis upon the continuing validity of the law (5:17-20) and passages such as 25:31-46, which hint at a universalism that tends to push beyond both christologically-based salvation and covenantal thought itself. It is not universalism that is suggested by 16:21-28, however, but a related theme that in its own way challenges the “paid it all” notion: Jesus’ followers must repeat in their own lives the sacrifice that he has made. To recognize human cooperation in the process of salvation is not to deny the power of God but to understand it as relational.
Jesus’
prediction of his death is somewhat problematic from a process
perspective, seeming as it does to connote a deterministic view of
history. And linked as it is with the atonement motif, it can be seen as
diverting the reader from liberation themes in favor of a cosmic drama of
otherworldly salvation. The more one stresses the role of Jesus’ death
in God’s plan, the less that death appears as the work of oppressive
forces. There are, however, undercurrents in the Matthean narrative that
offer the process interpreter material to bring into contrast with these
aspects. The whole story tends to collapse if the reader does not
presuppose that Jesus was genuinely trying to persuade his hearers, and
passage such as the temptation and the agony in the garden introduce
strong notes of contingency into the plot. The narrative itself, in other
words, invites the interpreter to work creatively with competing strains
of meaning.
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