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DonateJune 13, 2010 Commentary by Paul S. Nancarrow |
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1 Kings 21:1-21a
Psalm 5:1-8
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3
1 Kings 21:1-21a
After the interlude of Elijah in Zarephath, the 1 Kings narrative returns to its account of the evils of Ahab and Jezebel. The lectionary at this point actually skips ahead four chapters to present one of Ahab’s and Jezebel’s worst crimes, the better to set up the atmosphere of personal conflict between them and Elijah in the background of next week’s reading from Chapter 19. In this episode, Ahab wants to expand his personal garden property by annexing the vineyard of Naboth; when Naboth will neither sell it nor trade it, citing the Levitical requirement that ancestral lands stay in the family in perpetuity, Ahab becomes “resentful and sullen”; Jezebel then devises a plot to have Naboth killed so that Ahab can take the vineyard. At Jezebel’s instruction, two “scoundrels” bring false accusations of treason and blasphemy against Naboth, for which Naboth is stoned. Ahab appears to know nothing of the plot Jezebel executed in his name, but he is glad enough to take the vineyard. As Ahab enters the vineyard to take possession of it, he is met by Elijah, who has been sent by God to pronounce judgment on Ahab’s perfidy: “In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood.”
The whole episode, taken on its own, seems singularly unedifying. It presents its various characters in the worst lights: Ahab is seen as sniveling and whining; Jezebel is ruthless and conniving and ambitious, the Lady Macbeth of Samaria; even Elijah, usually presented as a dynamic and intriguing personality, lacks any distinctly personal characteristics, and serves here only as a mouthpiece for one of the more violent sentences of retribution handed down by God. There seem to be no novel aims or routes of occasions that could lead from this crime to any good result. The story only comes into focus, as it were, when it is considered as part of the larger narrative arc described by the lectionary as it moves through the Elijah saga. This indication of just how bad Ahab and Jezebel are is meant to give a greater sense of urgency to Elijah’s sojourn in Sidon in the reading last week, and to his cry of despair “I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away” in the reading for next week. Seen in that larger context, this story serves as a kind of “limiting factor” on the longer-term outworking of God’s will. Since God works with the world as it is to draw it to what it can be, when the world is bad, there is only so much God can do to provide aims that the world be better. Ahab and Jezebel have made their part of the world pretty bad, and that limits what God can do through Elijah to make it better. Even under such limiting conditions, however, God never ceases to work, and those faithful to God never cease to respond to good aims. In that larger view, even a story like this, with little good in itself, can be taken up into the greater stream of influence that makes better occasions possible.
Psalm 5:1-8
The psalm selection is a counterpoint to the 1 Kings reading. The Psalmist asserts that God “destroys those who speak lies; the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful,” as for instance Ahab and Jezebel, and thereby continues the climactic theme of the earlier passage. But the bulk of the psalm is a statement of faith in God’s justice, and in that light a prayer to God to hear and support the speaker. Unlike the wicked, who will not “sojourn” with God, the Psalmist is confident that, “through the abundance of God’s steadfast love,” he will be enabled to pray to God in right relationship (e.g., “I will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you”) and to walk in God’s pathway without stumbling or impediment. The psalm thus serves as a bridge from the wickedness of the first reading to the faithfulness of Paul, Jesus, and the woman of the city in the later readings.
Galatians 2:15-21
Today’s passage is part of a larger argument in Galatians concerning justification by works of the law and justification through faith in Christ—an argument that is central to Paul’s theology, indeed to all Christian teaching, and that has been fiercely debated from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant viewpoints for centuries. From a process-relational perspective, perhaps the most interesting part of the passage is vv19b-20a: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” This statement has sometimes been taken as an indication of Paul’s “Christ-mysticism,” that is, that Paul had an extraordinary experience of intimacy with Christ that should not and cannot be expected of “ordinary” Christians. But a process reading can see this in a different light. In process thought, we live at all because God gives us initial aims for each of the moments of our lives: God proposes combinations of eternal objects which we can embody and exemplify in the actual occasions we co-create with God. God proposed a distinctive set of eternal objects to the moments of Jesus’ life, which gave to him the particular quality of being the Christ. That set of eternal objects constitutes an ideal of human relationship with God, a relationship we symbolize as Jesus being God’s “son.” Because Jesus embodied those divine ideals in his life, his influence is a “field of force” that can predispose other human occasions to embody ideals similar to his own; or, put another way, God can now propose to our human occasions the same objects once exemplified in Jesus. As we entertain those objects God proposes to us, we grow in our ability to embody and exemplify Christly ideals in our experiences and actions—and thereby, as Paul says, Christ lives in us. As the ideals that constitute “Christness” live more and more fully in us, we enter more deeply into that same filial relationship with God that Jesus had. Becoming more like “sons” and “daughters” of God with Jesus means being “justified”: “justification” translates the Greek dikaiosune, which can also (and often better) be translated “righteousness” or right relationship, and the relationship Jesus had with God is the model for all human right relationship with God. Christ living in us through our embodiment of filial ideals is our justification. And this, as Paul stresses, can only come through faith. Right relationship is by definition something that can only be co-created by the two related parties. Right relationship is co-created between God and people as God gives aims, and people do their genuine best faithfully to live out those aims in actual occasions, and God takes into Godself the results of people’s occasions and from them fashions the next generation of aims. That ongoing dialogue of aims and satisfactions requires great trust: people’s trust in God to call and guide, and God’s trust in people to be open to Christly aims. That co-creative trust is the faith in Jesus that justifies. And Paul contrasts this faith to “works of the law” because Paul sees “works of the law” as based solely on human effort, therefore not essentially co-creative, therefore not able to justify or bring into right relationship. On the other hand, such faith is not merely passive, either; it is not intellectually accepting propositions that cannot be proven, it is not blindly believing what scriptures or authorities insist on, it is not a mysterious substance infused into a passive human receptacle by an actus purus God; instead, such faith is a constitutive quality of actively working on building relationship with God, an aspect of “our effort to be justified in Christ” (my emphasis). So far from opposing faith and works, this passage calls for active faith and faithful activity in co-creating ourselves after the model of Jesus proposed to us by God. It is the calling, therefore, of every Christian to say “it is Christ who lives in me.”
Luke 7:36-8:3
There are three levels of significance in this passage, arranged as it were in concentric shells of narrative. At the center is the brief parable Jesus tells to illustrate divine forgiveness. The forgiving God, Jesus says, is like a creditor with two debtors; when they cannot pay, the creditor simply cancels the debt; the forgiveness of the debt removes the barrier to right relationship between creditor and debtors, and the debtors can once again love the creditor, the one forgiven the greater debt loving the forgiving creditor the more. God’s forgiveness of human sin, Jesus says, is God removing the barrier to right relationship between us, God opening the way to a genuine exchange of great love. Notice especially that the creditor simply cancels the debt: the creditor does not arrange to have the debt paid off in manageable installments, the creditor does not arrange to have someone else (e.g., his son) pay the debt, the creditor simply makes up the amount that was lost out of his own treasury. This little parable, along with its counterpart in Matthew 18:23-27, implies a theology of forgiveness far different from the theory of substitutionary atonement that has influenced Christian thinking for centuries and that many today find deeply problematic. This image of a God who removes barriers to relationship out of sheer divine abundance deserves deeper reflection in a process-relational account of atonement.
The second narrative shell is the story of the woman of the city and Simon the Pharisee’s disapproval. Simon invites Jesus to dinner, and though as a Pharisee he is committed to doing all things according to the law, including presumably the law of hospitality, he accords to Jesus none of the usual courtesies of a host to a guest. A woman of the city, usually understood to be a prostitute, comes into the house unexpectedly and anoints Jesus’ feet—ironically fulfilling the duties of a host even though she herself is an outsider and an outcast. When Simon questions to himself Jesus’ allowing this woman to touch him, Jesus is aware of the thought and seizes on it as a teachable moment to tell his parable. According to the image of right relationship in the parable, the woman is here seen to be aware of no barrier to her right relationship with Jesus; she even crashes through the obvious barrier of a private dinner party to do for Jesus the loving thing that should be done. This indicates, Jesus says, that God has removed from her any barrier to love, and that is why she is able to show such great love to Jesus. Divine forgiveness precedes works of love, Jesus asserts, not the other way around, and his two statements “Your sins are forgiven” and “Your faith has saved you” should be understood as more indicative than performative. This is in contrast to Simon, whose self-righteousness prevents him from recognizing what God has forgiven him, what barriers God has removed from his ability to love, and who therefore does not love much. The same free forgiveness is available to Simon as to the woman, should he make the costly decision to turn and look for it. That he remains silent, even after Jesus gives him credit for understanding the parable rightly, is the tragic dimension of this level of the story.
The third and outermost shell of meaning has to do with Jesus and the invitation to dinner that frames the rest of the story. John Dominic Crossan and others draw attention to Jesus’ commensality, Jesus’ practice of eating with all sorts and conditions of people in order to provide an object lesson of the radical hospitality of the messianic banquet and the commonwealth of God. This is usually mentioned in connection with Jesus’ eating with tax collectors, prostitutes, and other “riff-raff” sinners. But here Jesus eats with a Pharisee and his circle; even though Jesus knows Simon is almost certainly hostile to him (in Luke’s narrative Pharisees are always antagonistic, as contrasted, say, with John, where Nicodemus the Pharisee at least begins to get Jesus’ message), he sits at table with him and demonstrates in his own person God’s gracious offer to remove barriers to relationship. The framing story shows that Jesus manifests God’s radical hospitality even to the smug and self-satisfied, even to the punctilious and self-righteous—who, ironically, may be less able to perceive that hospitality for what it is. Many congregations that gather in affluent and self-assured America to hear this reading this Sunday would do well to consider this.
Paul S. Nancarrow is the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, Virginia, where he makes use of process ideas in preaching, worship, pastoral care, and leadership.He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and writes a regular column on liturgy for Creative Transformation.
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