Process & Faith: 26 October 2008

Lectionary Commentary

See also: [2005] [2002]

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 99:1-6, 13-17
I Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

The readings assigned in today’s lectionary each make sense as continuations from previous Sundays: Deuteronomy as concluding the history of Moses we’ve been tracing in the First Testament; 1 Thessalonians as another installment of the in-course readings from this epistle; Matthew as the culmination of a series of controversy stories. It is more difficult to see consistent connections between the readings. One thread that runs through them, however, is an effort to contrast, yet also to coordinate, earthly and divine aspects in the situations they address. What looks like death or disruption or paradox from one point of view looks like fulfillment or continuity or self-transcendence from another point of view. Each of these readings turns in some way on the recognition that human events are embedded in a divine milieu, a divine society, which brings into play wider fields of meaning and greater possibilities for action than would be discernible from a human point of view alone. This is a fundamental insight of panentheism, the theory that all-is-in-God and God-is-in-all. In a panenthestic view, every occasion has its worldly aspect and its divine aspect, and the two aspects are inextricably and irreducibly involved in a single reality. Perceiving this panentheistic two-aspect reality is the key to recognizing and realizing divine ideals in the concrete terms of human experience and action.

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
The account of Moses’ death marks the end of the life-saga begun in Exodus 2, as well as the conclusion and closing of the divine instruction given through the Torah. The passage contains a fitting encomium on such a remarkable life, noting that Moses lived to a full age of 120 years, that “his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated,” and “never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.” Yet along with these praises of the uniqueness and superiority of Moses are verses that embed Moses in a larger context, a larger sweep of divine history and purpose. Moses’ vision of “the whole land” from the top of Pisgah is both a connection back to the land of promise of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and a look forward to the extent of the kingdom that will be founded on God’s yet-to-come covenant with David. Moses does not stand alone in the unfolding of God’s intentions for the people; and the covenant mediated through Moses is but one part, along with the promises to the patriarchs and matriarchs, and the covenant with David, of God’s larger process of deepening relationship with the people. A similar point is made on a smaller scale with Joshua: Joshua can succeed Moses as leader of the people because he “was full of the spirit of wisdom,” which came to him “because Moses had laid his hands on him.” The “wisdom” by which Moses led was not simply his own accomplishment or attribute, but was a sharing in divine wisdom; and that sharing in divine wisdom is a larger divine society in which Joshua can participate as well. Finally, the seemingly small detail that Moses’ burial place is unknown leaves a kind of open-endedness to the story: Moses’ grave cannot become a place of veneration or pilgrimage, so that the memory of Moses must be carried actively in the people, as a pattern of ideals for reenactment in their own lives. The death of Moses must be seen, then, in two aspects, as the close of the most important formative period in the history of the covenant people, and yet at the same time as part of a larger movement of God to introduce divine ideals into human societies.

Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
Psalm 90, especially the opening verses, is steeped in the awareness of the tension between human viewpoints and the divine perspective, expressed here particularly in terms of time. “Lord, you have been our refuge from one generation to another”; the sweep of God’s intentions for the people transcend any particular generation or time period. But God is not the environing reality of human history alone: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or the land and the earth were born, from age to age you are God”: God provides the ultimate social milieu in which the entire cosmos is harbored. And while time is fleeting from a human viewpoint—“we fade away suddenly like the grass”—in the divine perspective the past is held as presently experienced—“a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night.” But God is not simply lofty and aloof from the smaller world of human concerns. It is because God transcends and includes the world that God is able to sustain the people through their worldly trials and tribulations; it is because there is a divine aspect in all human occasions, and that divine aspect is unchangingly oriented to justice and peace and richness of experience, that the psalmist can say “Satisfy us by your loving-kindness in the morning; so shall we rejoice and be glad all the days of our life.” The two aspects of panentheistic reality are brought together in a vision of divine action and human action co-acting for good as the psalm concludes “May the graciousness of the LORD our God be upon us; prosper the work of our hands; prosper our handiwork.”

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
In this passage Paul weaves together skillfully the human and divine aspects of his ministry, referring to the same sets of actions as both what he has done and what God has done in and through him. Though Paul and his companions “had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi,” they still “had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God”; the courage of proclamation was not only a human response to opposition but was also a movement of divine creative energy in them. Paul’s preaching is not motivated only by human desire—especially self-centered desires for “deceit or impure motives or trickery”—but by divine approval and trust; and therefore the desired result of Paul’s preaching is not just to “please mortals,” but within a larger sphere of reference “to please God who tests our hearts.” Finally, Paul’s gentleness with the Thessalonians, “like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children,” was enlivened not only by his own affection, but by the love of God loving through him, as the “gospel of God” which is bound up with Paul’s very self. Paul’s preaching to the Thessalonians, his ministry among them, and his affection for them are all seen as having two aspects, both Paul’s human action and God’s guiding and sustaining divine action. God’s overarching intention to bring relationship in Christ to these new faithful is the larger social environment that harbors and empowers the occasions of Paul’s ministry.

Matthew 22:34-46
This passage concludes a series of controversies Jesus has with various parties as he teaches in the Temple at Jerusalem. Having already silenced the Pharisees and Herodians about the coin (vss. 15-22) and the Sadducees about the resurrection (vss. 23-33), Jesus faces one last question from a Pharisee lawyer, and in turn asks the Pharisees a question of his own. The two questions comprised in this passage seem poles apart: one of them is perhaps the most famous question directed to Jesus, while the other is seldom quoted and fairly obscure; one of them represents a theme repeated throughout Jesus’ teaching, while the other turns on what seems to us an arcane bit of biblical literalism. Jesus’ challenge-question about the Messiah relies on a couple of assumptions about the biblical text that were commonplace in Jesus’ (and Matthew’s) time, but that seem under-critical, or even naïve, to us today. Jesus asks the Pharisees whose son the Messiah is, and they provide the standard answer: “David’s.” Jesus then refers to Psalm 110:1 as evidence that David calls the Messiah “Lord,” and that the Messiah therefore cannot be David’s “son.” This interpretation takes David as the actual author of the psalm, a traditional ascription that historical scholarship would tend to deny. It also takes David as a prophet whose spiritual sight reveals the Messiah, thus assigning a specifically messianic meaning to the psalm, a meaning that, again, would be explained by historians as a later interpretive development added long after the psalm was written. I suspect that one of the reasons preachers and theologians have much less to say about this half of the pericope than the other is that we today do not like to think of Jesus’ approach to scripture being more ahistorical or naïve than our own! Within Jesus’ interpretive community—although not within David’s, or the psalmist’s, or indeed our own—Jesus shows that the psalm presents a time-paradox: that David recognizes the Messiah as prior to and superior over himself, even though the Messiah is expected to be born as the heir of David’s royal line, and therefore dependent on and lesser than David. Jesus thus sets up an apparent paradox in the very notion of “Messiah” that cannot be resolved in the Pharisees’ logic. Jesus shows that the Messiah must be thought of in two aspects: not simply as the earthly heir of David who will inherit David’s covenant relationship with God, but also and more so as one who has his own unique and more intimate relationship with God. The apparent paradox of the psalm can be resolved by seeing the Messiah as having both human and divine aspects; or, to put it in our process-relational, panentheistic terms, that the life of the Messiah is a series of occasions harbored in both earthly and divine social spheres. The Messiah is indeed dependent on David in terms of family identity; but the Messiah is also David’s “Lord” in terms of relationship with the divine and exemplification of divine ideals. Indeed, Jesus argues, the Messiah cannot be understood at all without recognizing this panentheistic, two-aspect reality: what the Messiah does in life and ministry is God’s creative power (or “lordship”) exercised in human societies of occasions.

This two-aspect panentheism is also the key to understanding Jesus’ answer to the lawyer’s challenge, what we now often call “the Summary of the Law.” To love God and to love the neighbor are not two separate commandments, or even two serial commandments—e.g., love God first and express it by loving neighbor, or love neighbor first and thereby discover what it means to love God. The relationship between the two commandments—that the second is “like” the first, equal to and inseparably involved in the first—is that they are two aspects of a single commandment to love. That love which is characteristic of the divine enters to some degree into all occasions that take place within the divine sphere of influence, which is to say, panentheistically, all occasions. Occasions of human love represent that divine love more or less fully, within the scope available to a human occasion. When we strive to love our neighbors in human society, that is the love of God being made manifest in and through our human love. Therefore loving God and loving the neighbor are two aspects of a single reality of human participation in God-in-all and all-in-God.

Jesus in these final controversies of chapter 22 not only silences his critics by insisting they see divine aspects where before they’d seen none; he also thereby invites us into deeper realizations of our own participation in God.

Paul S. Nancarrow is rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, VA, and co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World. His research interests are process approaches to sacramentology, liturgy, and science and religion.

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