Biblical
Words [590]
The
wisdom of God presents people with two Ways, fruitful or barren, blessed or woeful, with faith or without.
This passage in Jeremiah deals
with the human heart. However, it takes a dim view of that organ of
thought and volition. The human heart is
mostly devious, devoted to accumulating wealth, and naturally tends to trust
human goods rather than divine guidance.
This tendency of the heart repeatedly leads people to a choice between two ways of living.
The main part
of our reading (verses 5-8) is a typical wisdom pronouncement, contrasting a
cursed one with a blessed one. (The Hebrew is singular, which most English
translations keep; NRSV
makes it plural, for gender-sensitive reasons.)
The curse is pronounced on the one “who relies on human strength / whose
heart turns from Yahweh” (verse 5, New Jerusalem Bible). Such a one becomes like a twisted and dry
desert shrub. The blessing is pronounced
on the one who trusts in the Lord. Such
a one “is like a tree planted by water,
…in the year of drought it is not anxious, / and it does not cease to
bear fruit” (verse 8, NRSV ). This contrast between the curse and the
blessing sets out two ways for the human pilgrimage.
The wisdom
saying in verse 9 declares pessimistically that the human heart is a very
treacherous thing, perverse beyond all understanding. In Hebrew these words remind the hearer of
the trickery of the ancestor Jacob, for the word for “devious” or treacherous
is ‘aqob, root of the name ya‘aqob, Jacob.
In our total
passage, these wisdom teachings have been given a new context. At the
beginning stands the formula for a prophetic oracle: “Thus said the Lord,” making God (instead of a sage) the declarer
of the wisdom presented here. And even
more importantly, at the end God declares God’s own activity as the only hope
for humans caught in the perversity of their hearts: “I the Lord test the mind / and search the
heart, / to give to all according to their ways, / according to the fruit of
their doings” (verse 10, NRSV ).
There are two
ways: to trust in human things or to
trust in God, and God knows the innermost ways of the heart that chooses
between them.
Psalm 1.
The Psalm reading is, if anything, a more
profound statement of the wisdom taken up in the prophetic passage. Here also there are two ways. One is the way of
the person who avoids the walkings, standings, and sittings of wicked and
scoffing folks, for this “happy” one’s life is saturated in torah
meditation. The other is the way of
those wicked ones and sinners who have no roots, are blown around like chaff in
the wind, and who end up wandering lost in the desert (the meaning of “perish”
in verse 6, NRSV ).
Whereas the
prophetic passage talked generally of the blessed as those who “trust in” the
Lord, the psalm identifies specifically how one accomplishes this trust,
namely, by constant meditation on the Lord’s torah (or Torah). The repetition of the torah day and night
shapes the human heart, directs its thought and volition.
Happy are
those who have the torah as the way of their life!
I Corinthians 15:12-20.
The Epistle reading continues in First
Corinthians 15, where Paul elaborates upon the Christian affirmation of the
resurrection. He has just reviewed (verses 1-11) the
core of the gospel message about the death and resurrection of Jesus and those
who were granted appearances of the risen Jesus. Now he puts the great either-or of Christian faith in terms of the resurrection
of Jesus.
The argument
of the passage is not difficult.
Those who think there is no resurrection in general are proven wrong by
the resurrection of Jesus. The
resurrection of Jesus – the content of the gospel and the personal experience
of the leading apostles – is the given fact.
Without the resurrection there would be nothing. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is
futile and you are still in your sins…. If for this life only [with no
expectation of our own resurrection] we have hoped in Christ, we are of all
people most to be pitied” (verses 17 and
19, NRSV ).
Having
pursued this negative hypothesis, he returns to the faith: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the
dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (verse 20).
The
proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus opens two ways for the hearers: a new life of forgiveness and empowerment
with spiritual gifts, or a continuance of futility and condemnation.
In the Gospel reading Jesus presents two ways now
at work in the world of his hearers.
This is
Luke’s account of the opening of the
great sermon Jesus delivered early in his Galilee
ministry – the sermon which is more famous in its Matthew version as the Sermon
on the Mount. In Luke’s version it is a
Sermon on the Plain, delivered on “a level place” (verse 17, NRSV ).
In both
Gospels this sermon begins with a set of pronouncements concerning the
“blessed,” which later tradition has called the Beatitudes (from the Latin word for blessings). Matthew has nine “blessings,” all except the
last expressed in the third person:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn…” Luke has only four blessings, but these are
followed by four “woes,” each of which is the opposite of one of the
blessings. Also, Luke’s blessings and
woes are addressed directly to the hearers in the second person: “Blessed are you poor, … woe to you
who are rich …”
In both versions
of the Sermon these beatitudes (and woes) stand at the beginning of a much
longer presentation of the new way of life taught by the Lord. The beatitudes stand to Jesus’ teaching as
the Ten Commandments stand to Moses’ teaching at Sinai. (This is particularly clear in Matthew, where
Jesus is presented as a new Moses and the Sermon on the Mount is the beginning
of his work for the new Israel
It should be clear that the Sermon
announces a revolution in the human
condition, and this revolution is the basic content of Jesus’ proclamation
of the Reign of God.
The people are told that, given
the crisis of the time, the fortunate people are the poor, the hungry,
those who have cause to weep, and those righteous ones who are hounded and
harassed by the mighty. These are
fortunate because everything is about to be turned over, revolved from top to
bottom.
Which means that the folks who are
fortunate in the present world are in trouble. Woe is in store for the rich, for the full,
for those who laugh, and for those who have prestige and status. They have already had their rewards, and they
are about to experience first-hand what others have been going through all this
time: poverty, hunger, sadness, and
persecution.
This is the Jesus-reign Manifesto,
the good news prepared for by the prophetic promises to Israel, by the
reforming work of John the Baptist, and by the empowerment of God’s Spirit to
launch Jesus’ mission to the people who have waited – both Judean people and
the peoples of the nations.
Jesus proclaims that people have two ways available to them, but the two are about to be radically interchanged.
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