Biblical
Words
[613]
Amos 7:7-17;
Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14;
Luke 10:25-37.
The judgment of God can mean
the death of a nation, though God’s will is for the compassion of the Good
Samaritan.
After some
weeks on Elijah and Elisha, the Lectionary selections from the prophets move to
Amos and Hosea. These prophets
spoke the word of God against Israel
about a hundred years after the times of Elijah and Elisha. The words they brought were the judgment of
God upon a mercenary and faithless nation.
Amos 7:7-17.
This
Sunday’s Amos reading begins with an announcement of doom on the kingdom
of Israel, and specifically on the dynasty of Jehu, now headed by Jehu’s
great-grandson, Jeroboam II (reigned over the northern kingdom approximately
786-746 BCE). This announcement of doom is delivered at a
major sanctuary of the northern kingdom, Bethel,
called “the king’s sanctuary” (verse 13), and was probably delivered at the
time of a great festival-assembly at that ancient holy place.
Amos intended
to get the attention of masses of people from all over the kingdom. When he began to succeed, the head priest of Bethel,
Amaziah, pronounced that “the land is not able to bear all [Amos’s] words”
(verse 10, NRSV). After reporting Amos’ treasonable oracles to
the king, the royal priest commanded the prophet to return to his provincial
town in Judah
and never approach the royal sanctuary again (verses 12-13).
So, Amos
had delivered God’s condemnation of Israel. If there is a prophet anywhere who is truly
a doom prophet, with only words of condemnation and disaster, it is
Amos. There is one add-on passage at the
end of the scroll that portrays a glorious future for David and the land (Amos 9:11-15), but otherwise the scroll is
unrelenting doom for Israel. Amos in his own time, announced, in several
powerful speeches, the death of Israel. (We will look more closely at this death
announcement next week.)
Two points
of enormous importance may be simply stated, without much development.
First,
Amos itemizes at length the reasons for God’s condemning Israel
to death. The reasons are the
repeated and ingrained violations of social justice. Israel
will die because they “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair
of sandals” (Amos 2:6). It is a time of
prosperity and the well-to-do are engrossed in luxuries, busy denying justice
to the less powerful, and ignoring the plight of the truly poor. The existence of a nation is weighed in the
divine scales of justice and found wanting.
The nation will go.
Second,
Amos is the earliest voice in a world-wide development of human
spirituality. By insisting that Yahweh,
the God of Israel, can cast away this chosen people, the God who spoke through
Amos rose above a religious life based on racial, ethnic, and geographical
roots.
Amos
delivers the first affirmation of a God who transcends the tribal and
national orders of the human world.
Amos
delivers the first word of what some historians and philosophers call “the
Axial Age,” the historical period (roughly 800 to 200 BCE)
in which there emerged the great universalist religions and wisdom traditions
that still define the main global communities of faith. (See more in the discussion of the Gospel
below.)
This, of
course, is not Amos’ way of expressing it. He was a man who, in the wilderness of Tekoa,
saw visions, heard words, and found himself sent from behind the flock to
deliver God’s overwhelming word of justice to Israel
(verses 14-15).
But his
intensity for justice was driving toward a vaster vision for humankind.
Psalm 82.
The Psalm
reading also has to do with divine judgment.
Psalm 82 is
set in the heavenly council of the gods, the standard religious cosmos of
Mesopotamian and Canaanite religious institutions and traditions. God the Lord is in fact delivering judgment
upon the divine council itself! (Later
Jewish and Christian traditions understood these to be angels, or even earthly
princes and judges.)
God indicts
the lesser divinities, the members of the Cabinet, if you will.
How long
will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?
How should
they be using their heavenly powers instead?
Give justice
to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the
destitute.
Rescue the
weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked. (Verses 2-4, NRSV.)
The word of
judgment that Amos delivered to the prosperous in Bethel,
God delivers in person to the other mighty powers of the heavenly world, who
are understood to influence and direct the affairs of their favorites on
earth.
And what is
the conclusion of this judgment?
You are gods,
children of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless,
you shall die like mortals,
and fall like any prince. (Verses 6-7.)
Just as the
elect people Israel
may be condemned to death on earth, so God the Lord can do without these
unreliable heavenly beings. This psalm
virtually announces the death of all heavenly powers except God the Lord. (These powers would, of course, return later
as various kinds of angels and those “elemental spirits” to be heard of in this
month’s Epistle reading.)
The
absolute scale on which heavenly beings also would be weighed was justice and
compassion, for the poor and powerless.
These, the poor and powerless, are truly the people of God.
Colossians 1:1-14.
As the
prophetic readings have shifted to different books, so the Epistle readings for
the next four weeks are from a different letter of Paul – or, perhaps, a letter
written under Paul’s name.
Colossians
is one of the letters that many historical scholars think were not written
by the real Paul, the Paul of Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans. For an overview, and my personal conclusion, see
the Special Note below on “Letters from the Paul Movement.”
In our
reading we have a thanksgiving (verses 3-8) and a report of prayer on
behalf of the Colossian community (verses 9-14).
The writer
thinks easily in terms of the Pauline faith-love-hope trilogy. Thanks are given for “your faith in Christ
Jesus,” for “the love that you have for all the saints,” and for “the hope laid
up for you in heaven” (verses 4-5). The hearers
are given a sense of being a part of a vast world movement. “Just as [the gospel] is bearing fruit and
growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from
the day you heard it” (verse 6).
What is
prayed for in the present:
·
That you may be filled with the
knowledge of God’s will (verse 9);
·
That you may lead lives worthy of
the Lord (Jesus), fully pleasing to him (verse 10);
·
That you may endure everything
with patience (verse 11).
Giving
thanks for your (past) salvation:
·
To the Father, “who has enabled
you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light” (verse 12);
·
who “rescued us from the power of
darkness,”
·
“and transferred us into the
kingdom of his beloved Son,”
·
“in whom we have redemption, the
forgiveness of sins” (verses 12-14).
The letter is addressed to an
apocalyptic community, who know they have been separated by an act of God to
live as followers of Jesus. As such
followers, they will be included in the divine kingdom
of Jesus when all the rest of the
evil world goes down in the judgment.
Their challenge in the present is to maintain their loyalty to Jesus’
teachings and to “endure” what goes along with that.
(If the letter was sent in the period 70-90 CE, the Lycus valley assemblies would have been in their second generations. The initial enthusiasm may have been cooling some and they may have been more open to new novelties of faith, as things later in the letter suggest.)
Luke 10:25-37.
The Gospel
reading continues Jesus’ “journey” toward fulfilling the Reign of God.
Luke places
here an incident that other Gospels put in Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem: It is the lawyer who asks the question about the
greatest commandment. In Luke’s
adaptation, Jesus and the lawyer reach a common mind about the two great
commandments, but then Luke adds the lawyer’s question, Who is the
neighbor? This addition gives us the
parable of the Good Samaritan.
The parable
is too well known to go over here. Let
us focus on two phrases. The Samaritan
comes down the road and sees the victim of the mugging, and “he was moved with
pity” (NRSV)
or “he was moved with compassion” (New Jerusalem Bible). And after the parable is complete, the lawyer
says that the neighbor was “the one who showed him mercy” (NRSV). The God whose reign Jesus is preparing for in
his journey to Jerusalem is a God
of compassion and mercy.
Karen
Armstrong has characterized the Axial Age in human history as turning
decisively on a heightened sense of compassion in the development of the
great religious and wisdom traditions.
Here is one of her summary statements of that theme.
In the cities
and empires of the Axial Age, citizens were acquiring a wider perspective and
broader horizons, which made the old local cults seem limited and
parochial. Instead of seeing the divine
as embodied in a number of different deities, people increasingly began to
worship a single, universal transcendence and source of sacredness…. [As social injustice became more obvious to
sensitive leaders], prophets and reformers arose who insisted that the
virtue of compassion was crucial to the spiritual life... [Emphasis added.]
In this way,
during the Axial Age, the great confessional faiths that have continued to
guide human beings sprang up in the civilized world: Buddhism and Hinduism in India, Confucianism
and Taoism in the Far East; monotheism in the Middle East; and rationalism in
Europe [Greece]. Despite their major
differences, these Axial Age religions had much in common: they all built on the old traditions to
evolve the idea of a single, universal transcendence; they cultivated an
internalized spirituality, and stressed the importance of practical
compassion. (Emphasis added.)
(This quote
is from The Battle for God, 2000, p. xii [p. xiv in paperback ed.]. Ms. Armstrong has elaborated this “Axial Age”
perspective at greater length in The Great Transformation, 2006.)
The Good
Samaritan – the neighbor – was a person who practiced practical compassion.
Special Note: Letters
from the Paul Movement.
Jesus,
following John the Baptist, initiated a Kingdom movement in Galilee
(with some covert allies in Judea). The climax of that movement carried him to Jerusalem
and death, though the Kingdom movement itself was barely shaped by that
time. The disciples evolved the Kingdom
movement into the Jesus Movement, transformed by experiences of the
risen Jesus. The coming of the Kingdom was no longer the whole thing; they were
now expecting the return of the Risen Jesus as the Son of Man. The Jesus Movement went forward in different
directions, some in Semitic speaking environments, some in Greek speaking
environments.
Paul
gave shape to one of the directions in which the Jesus Movement developed. In his early years as an apostle he worked
around Syria
and southeastern Asia Minor (Galatians 1:21), but after breaking with Peter,
Barnabas, and the Antioch church (Galatians
2:11-14) Paul gathered new
co-workers and founded assemblies, mostly of non-Judean believers, in western Asia,
Macedonia, and Greece. (This work is described by Luke in Acts
16-20). These churches, founded between
49 and 58 CE, became the foundation of a Paul Movement.
In Paul’s
lifetime it seems clear that he expected Jesus’ imminent return in power at any
time (seen early in I Thessalonians 4:17, around the year 50; still expressed
in Romans 13:11-12, around the year 58).
The “churches” were charismatic apocalyptic sects during their first
three decades or so.
As time
passed, more enduring arrangements for the leadership of the assemblies became
imperative. When Paul was gone, there
were still those who had labored with him and knew his views and his spirit
intimately. These associates continued
with the churches for the next several decades – as they passed through the
destruction of the churches in Judea, the increased
separation from Judaism, the growing influence of the Roman church, and the
sporadic persecution of the churches by imperial Rome.
Thus, as
the Gospels contain collections of traditions from the Jesus movements made
well after the time of Jesus, so the whole collection of Paul’s letters
contains several items written in Paul’s name but actually coming from Timothy,
Titus, Phoebe, Tychicus, Epaphras, or others – with Mark and Luke somewhere in
the mix (Colossians 4:10 and 14).
Naming
Names in the Movement. The end of
the letter to the Colossians gives us an unusual glimpse into the people of
this “Paul Movement.” The long section
sends greetings to some and names others who have been around Paul (4:7-17). The list starts with evangelists and
leaders: Tychicus, who is delivering
this letter; Onesimus, the slave spoken of in the letter to Philemon;
Aristarchus, a fellow prisoner of Paul; Mark, identified as “the cousin of
Barnabas”; and Jesus Justus – all of these were Judean-Christians,
Judeans by birth serving the risen Messiah in spreading the gospel to the
nations.
Greetings
are also sent from some non-Judean colleagues: Epaphras, who originally brought the gospel
to the cities of the Lycus valley (see below); Luke, “the beloved physician”;
and Demas, who later gets a bad press in II Timothy 4:10.
The “Paul”
of this letter also sends greetings to the other churches of the Lycus valley, Laodicea
and Hieropolis, besides Colossae. (These three cities were near each other, about
a hundred miles east of Ephesus,
the capital of the province of Asia.) He instructs these churches to read each
other’s letters from him (4:13,
16). A cryptic message is sent to
“Archippus”: “See that you complete the
task that you have received in the Lord” (4:17)
– and we have no idea what that “task” was.
The Paul
Movement was certainly a historical fact, starting with Paul himself but
extending several decades after his death.
Eventually it produced the collection of Paul’s letters – all of them. The first collection did not happen much
before 100 CE, with the letters to Timothy and Titus being added later, perhaps
as late as 140 CE. By the middle of the
second century, Paul’s letters were being read in the churches along side the
four Gospels. This was no longer Paul’s
Movement; it was the Christian movement!
My Take on Colossians and Ephesians.
My personal experience is this: several sections of Colossians are
unusual (if not strange) compared to the main letters, but looking at this
letter only I could see it as a letter by Paul.
The problem is the great similarity of Colossians to
Ephesians. The thick, lugubrious
language of Ephesians 1-3 is so different from the main letters that I cannot
conceive them as coming from the person who wrote Romans, even at a later time
in Paul’s life. And it is exactly that
kind of Ephesian language that appears in several sections of Colossians.
(The point
is the very different style. If you can
tolerate the long circular unending sentences [which the English translations
break up into several readable sentences], it has a brilliance and excellence
of its own. It’s thought is very
powerful for the Pauline churches in the 90’s of the Christian era.)
As Ephesians goes, so goes Colossians. One of Paul’s followers with special interest
in the three churches of the Lycus valley (a hundred miles east of Ephesus)
wrote it, probably between 70 and 90 CE.
The author of this letter was confident that he/she could speak in the
voice of “Paul,” could dictate to the scribe the spirit of Paul as Paul would
have faced very new circumstances among the churches. He/she understood the Colossian community in
the second generation of its life and spoke with the fervor that he knew well
from his/her long work with Paul.
Colossians is an impressive piece in its own right, but, as
we have it, it was not dictated by Paul.
