October 28 , 2007
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See also: [2004] [2001] |
Commentary by John B. Cobb, Jr.
Joel 2:23-32
Psalm 65
2 Tim 4:6-8, 16-18
Luke 18:9-14
The two passages from the Christian Old Testament raise the question of the relation of God and the natural world. The psalm celebrates the wonder of the normal cycles of weather as they bring forth harvests and provide food for animals. Joel sees the hand of God in the terrible destruction worked by locusts and also in being saved from this destruction.
We process theologians strongly oppose the idea that God is in control of everything that happens, an idea that may lie behind both of these passages. This idea is often connected by Christians with that of divine omnipotence, but even in Joel we can see that God does not have all the power. The positive promise in the passage selected for today results from the repentance of the people. That they repent is their decision, not God’s. They have some power, too.
This way of viewing the relation between divine power and human action is far from an isolated instance. Indeed, it is a common pattern. Israel is threatened with destruction because of its sins. The people are called to repent. If they do so, they are spared. If they do not do so, destruction comes upon them. Here the threat is a natural one. In other places it is more often from human enemies.
Few of us today believe that this simple pattern actually characterizes either history or the relation of human beings to nature. But we process theologians, at least, do affirm and celebrate the emphasis on the interactive relation between human beings and God. Furthermore, we do believe that in general and overall positive human responses to God generate better consequences for human beings. This does not mean that a wind will always blow the locusts away if people repent. It certainly does not mean that victims typically deserve their victimization. But there is some positive connection between collective and individual virtue on the one side and collective and individual well being on the other.
Today we know that many factors are involved in the abundance of production that the psalm celebrates. When we see this abundance, we, too, are filled with gratitude. Before we partake of our meals, we thank God. Sometimes, our language. like that of the psalm, gives the impression that we think God alone is the direct cause of all that for which we are thankful.
Probably the psalmist also knew that God’s causing of plenty is quite indirect. However, it is likely that the psalmist attributed wind and rain more directly to God’s causation than would we. But the psalmist knew as well as do we the importance of human husbandry of the land.
Many modern people assume that God has nothing to do with what happens in nature. In the early modern period, they would have acknowledged that God originally created the world of nature and established laws to determine what happens. But by the twentieth century, nature seemed to most secular people to be completely self-contained. Even many Christians thought it better to think of God’s relations to the world as limited to the human sphere. Praising God for providing the people with grain makes no sense in this modern context. That in the church we continue the kind of thinking that gives rise to this just shows, for many modern people, how out of touch the church is with responsible scientific thought about food production and the natural world generally.
Does it make any sense at all to see God as present and at work in the natural world, to be grateful to God for the beauty and fecundity of nature? Process thinkers believe it does. We argue for this by a reversal of the move made by “modern” thinkers as a result of the demonstration that human beings have evolved from simpler organisms.
The modern thinkers believed that nature is best understood mechanistically. When it was shown that human beings are part of nature, they drew the conclusion that human beings are also best understood mechanistically. Form their point of view, our subjective experience is a strange anomaly, and the task of science is to show that it plays no role in what goes on.
Our view is that this move was quite mistaken. We think that the mechanistic model never worked well for understanding living things and certainly not in the subatomic world. We think that the fact that human beings are a part of nature shows that nature is much richer than the matter in motion to which modern thought reduced it. We think that our feelings and desires, our thoughts and our purposes, all affect our action, and we think that the behavior of other animals is also affected by their subjective experience. Indeed, we think that every indivisible entity has some kind of reality for itself as well as acting on others.
Nature, then, has its existence and its value, in and for itself as well as for us. And just as we believe that God participates in all of us all the time; so God participates in the whole natural world. Apart from that participation there would be no life, and even the inanimate world could not continue. We do have profound reasons to thank God for the beauty and fecundity of the world. But God does not influence, except very remotely, the direction in which the wind will blow. We will not interpret a drought, or a plague of locusts, or even an attack by our enemies as the sign of God’s anger.
In Joel alongside the gratitude for God’s saving the people from the locusts is a vision of the future that stands quite on its own. It has little to do with God’s role in the natural world. It promises instead a future in which people of every social status will have ecstatic experience. Early Christians claimed the fulfillment of this prophesy at Pentecost and in their congregations. The twentieth century saw a great revival of these phenomena in the astoundingly successful Pentecostal movement and the quieter charismatic one. Like so many religious beliefs and practices, those prophesied here are riddled with ambiguity. Paul tried to sort out these ecstatic experiences and to give them a real but limited place in the assemblies of believers. Over the years, these practices largely died out in the churches, but their powerful renewal in the twentieth century shows that they respond to a real human need.
However we may appraise this vision of the future, it is certainly preferable to the one that follows in the Joel passage. “The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood.” Yet even in that dreaded and dreadful context, we are told, those who call on God will be saved. Perhaps we can take some comfort from this passage in a context in which global disasters grow ever more imminent. Perhaps even in that context there can be salvation in some sense for those who truly love and serve God.
Our lectionary readings include another parable in Luke. This one, at least superficially, is easier to accept. Because of the negative way in which Pharisees are portrayed in this parable and elsewhere in the gospels, we have become accustomed to thinking about them in a negative way; so we are comfortable with the outcome. But if it does seem right to us, this shows that we have not heard the parable as its first hearers did.
Let us try to hear it in its original context. To this day Jews think highly of the Pharisees. Paul was a Pharisee, and Jesus was closer to the Pharisees than to any other Jewish group. The hearers of the parable as originally spoken would have greatly admired the Pharisees.
In general people thought they should follow all the laws or commandments but simply could not do so. The one group that at least came close was the Pharisees. They were the truly good people. On the other hand, tax collectors as a group were those who were willing to work for and with the Roman conquerors. Further, the method of collecting taxes encouraged gouging for personal profit.
There is no reason to suppose that either of the men were praying to be heard by others. Apparently both spoke honestly. The Pharisee correctly affirmed that he avoided gross sins. For this he did not assume all the credit. Instead he thanked God. The tax collector correctly acknowledged that he broke a lot of laws. He asked God’s mercy.
We should notice that there is no indication that this tax collector did what Zacchaeus did. We are not told that he repented or promised to make amends for his sins or even to change his ways. Zacchaeus gives us a model of one who genuinely repents in the sense of changing directions as well as regretting past sins. If that were the lesson of this parable, Jesus would have said so. But it is not. The tax collector is justified for one virtue alone, humility. He is humble. He remains unrighteous. The righteous man remains righteous, but he is not justified.
Thus this parable is like the other two. One teaches shrewdness. The second teaches persistence. The third teaches humility. We expect stories told by preachers to teach virtue or righteousness. None of these do.
How are we to understand this? It seems that the divine commonwealth Jesus wanted his listeners to enter was not characterized by what an existing society, even the Jewish one, could recognize as moral virtue. Success by any social standards bound one to the society in which one had succeeded. Only those who failed to measure up were open to this radical redirection of their lives. Jesus’ parables, including this one were designed to shock his hearers out of their accustomed, socially formed, ways of valuing. This is as true today as it was then. If you are not shocked, you have not heard the story rightly.
~John B. Cobb, Jr.
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