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Jesus heals: Matthew 8

January 25, 2011 by David Baer

When the gospels abbreviate Jesus’ work, they include healing diseased people as a constituent aspect. Jesus healed, often, regularly, purposefully. It is not only an act of compassion on his part. It becomes evidence that his proclamation of God’s kingdom breaking into human experience has credibility.

In the light of this consistency of activity, each of the three snapshots of human healing that Matthews sews together is remarkable for its idiosyncrasy.

When Jesus had come down from the mountain, great crowds followed him; and there was a leper who came to him and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.’ He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. Then Jesus said to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’

The leper’s euphoria is tempered by Jesus’ unanticipated emphasis on process. Jesus insists that the man subject the joy he must have felt to the religious and social mechanics of the community’s equilibrium.

The experience of healing is undeniably about him. Yet, at the same time, it is not.

This, at least, is the plausible comment that routinely comes to this passage. It may be entirely adequate. One wonders, however, whether Jesus also glimpsed an opportunity to shape the man’s persona in a way that pivoted not on personal suffering or ostracism but rather on the wider health of his people.

In this light, the generic observation that Jesus heals falls short of the particular touch that he brings to each of his counterparts.

When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, appealing to him and saying, ‘Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, in terrible distress.’ And he said to him, ‘I will come and cure him.’ The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, “Go,” and he goes, and to another, “Come,” and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this,” and the slave does it.’ When Jesus heard him, he was amazed and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ And to the centurion Jesus said, ‘Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.’ And the servant was healed in that hour.

Here the interplay between Jesus’ generic project of healing and his particular attention to the unique contour of a human being’s life takes shape as a variation upon a developing theme.

The centurion’s analogy—I trust you to heal, Jesus, for I understand both authorship and agency—claims Jesus’ attention. The man who might have exercised a barely ornamental function in the vignette comes vocally to the center. Not only does the man come to be visibly admired by Jesus. He is also designated a model of faith and a precursor of a worldwide family of followers of Jesus who respond to Israel’s Messiah as he has. Though Bible readers do not know his name, they rehearse his story to this day, and try to find trust like his.

When Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying in bed with a fever; he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she got up and began to serve him. That evening they brought to him many who were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with a word, and cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.’ (Matthew 8:1–17 NRSV)

One hesitates in a gender-obsessed day to make the simple observation that many women—not least in traditional societies that have not known strong winds of change—find deep honor in serving domestically and in hosting. It would not surprise that Peter’s mother-in-law should fit this pattern.

Yet she is bed-ridden and fevered, unable to lift a hand when Peter’s master and his entourage turn up at her door.

Jesus heals her, as we might expect a serial healer to do.

Yet Matthew captures the detail which the reader trained by his text might now come almost to expect: she becomes in the story an individual, active, fulfilled, and contributing to a cause larger than and beyond her self.

Jesus heals, yes. But the gospel wants more from us than generic observation and much more than sloganeering.

Matthew presses hard with his lines: Jesus heals this one. That one. And me.

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note: Jordan D. Rosenblum, ‘Cities of the Sea: in search of כרמי הים’ (Hebrew Studies, LI)

January 24, 2011 by David Baer

The abstract of this article reads as follows:

In this essay, I attempt to inscribe the mysterious location known as ‘the cities of the sea’ (כרמי הים) onto the map of rabbinic scholarship. Classical rabbinic authors look toward this mythic locale for three reasons: (1) to discuss tales of sin (and sometimes salvation); (2) to offer definitions and clarifications of obscure words; and (3) to explain halakhic exceptions. Through an examination כרמי הים in the classical rabbinic corpus, I argue that ‘the cities of the sea’ should be understood as a locus of rabbinic pedagogy and not necessarily viewed as an actual, mappable location.

Rosenblum argues suggestively, if on necessarily slim evidence, that ‘the cities of the sea’ in rabbinic discussion is a ‘pedagogical space’, serving a ‘discursive site for pedagogical purposes. It is meant to be turned toward for instruction, and not necessarily to be located on Google Earth.’

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note: Nitza Ben-Dov, ‘The Dead Do Not Praise the Lord’: Alter’s Psalms, Agnon’s ‘Tehilla’, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (Hebrew Studies, LI)

January 23, 2011 by David Baer

The abstract of this article reads as follows:

Life in this world is the only life, according to the ancient biblical belief. Robert Alter (Uri) in the introduction to his translation of the book of Psalms (2007) explains why he sometimes chose one word and not another to remain faithful to the biblical belief of Psalms, and discarded here and there the excess baggage of belief in the world to come, which throughout the generatins has clung to certain words and expressions that appear in the psalms. Two texts from Modern literature, one Hebrew, the other Russian, exemplify in this article the tension between belief in this world and belief in the world to come of two female protagonists, independently of each other. The last part of the article relates to a personal event that illumines something about Robert Alter, the man and the translator.

The author’s poignant tribute to the great Robert Alter’s method and legacy highlights Alter’s option for shedding the ‘baggage’ attributable to Christian quotation, doctrine, and eschatology in favor of the concreteness that is arguably native to the Hebrew psalms themselves. Ben-Dov’s development of two moments in literature in which the protagonists found it necessary to negotiate ‘this-worldliy’ and ‘other-worldly’ reception of the psalms frames Alter’s choice of the former in the introduction to his celebrated translation of the biblical psalms.

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unimpressive prophets: Matthew 7

January 20, 2011 by David Baer

It is too easy to imagine that God is in the fire.

He is often absent there.

Though it is wrong to fear the extraordinary, it is equally misguided to crave it. We lust after raised voices and clenched fists when our nourishment comes cradled in whisper and caress.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15–20, NRSV)

Jesus routinely follows precedent in biblical wisdom by privileging simple, steady obedience over its ambitious alternatives.

Prophets will come, he warns his followers. No doubt they will be impressive, disturbing, and spiritually invigorating. Such prophetic voices, raised in anger or illumination, are for Jesus a dime a dozen.

‘Show me their fruit’, he says, reducing their appeal to that feature of human behavior that is most difficult both to produce and to reproduce: righteous deeds.

One must not forget that Jesus and the tradition that treasures his words and brings them to our ears revere, to name just one, a John the Baptist. Jesus and his earliest witnesses are not opposed to sizzling flame on the tongue of a prophet. Indeed, they tell us, one must not dare the mistake of ignoring such a heavenly torch.

Yet if simple righteousness is absent from their conduct, they are like a fruitless tree. Fire goes there, but not the spoken, impressive kind. Just fire. Consuming fire. No glory there.

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note: Christopher B. Ansberry, ‘What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? The moral vision of the book of Proverbs and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’ (Hebrew Studies, LI)

January 20, 2011 by David Baer

The abstract of this article reads as follows:

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics serve as a more useful heuristic model for understanding the moral vision of the book of Proverbs than Socrates’ ethical theory. While Socratic ethics provide a general guide to portions of the sapiential material, Aristotle’s emphasis on the organic relationship between the moral and intellectual virtues as well as the role of character in ethical decisions accounts for the variegated materials within the book as a whole. In the view of the differences between Aristotle and Socrates’ ethical theory and their relationship to the book of Proverbs, Aristotle’s ethics illuminate the moral dimensions of the document. Similar to Aristotle, the sages present the collaboration of character and intellect as the acme of moral development: character proves the constitutional base for the appropriation of wisdom and determines the goal of virtuous activity, while wisdom identifies the means for achieving that goal in a particular situation. This teleological thesis captures the fundamental features of sapiential ethics.

Ansberry discerns in ‘virtue ethics’ or ‘character ethics’ an amenable spirit vis-à-vis the Old Testament’s sapiential materials. Yet the author finds Aristotle’s emphasis upon character in knowing and doing right to be closer to the biblical Proverbs than the more purely intellectual approach of Socrates. Socrates—arguably over against not only Aristotle but also biblical wisdom—is more sanguine about the path from knowledge to virtue, since—per a Socratic axiom—virtue is almost equivalent to knowledge.

When the full range of Old Testament proverbial wisdom is taken into account, knowledge does not per se produce wisdom. Rather, a virtuous disposition is required for that alchemy to have its way in the cultivation of moral activity.

Particularly in the ‘sentence literature’ is the close relationship of moral virtue and intellectual virtue placed in evidence. Socrates’ dictum that no one willingly does evil is here called into question. For both Aristotle and the biblical sages ‘unethical behavior is not simply the product of ignorance’.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, according to Ansberry, moral virtues are cultivated by both habituation and instruction, a two-fold path to virtue that finds echo in the Proverbs. So too does the importance of perception keep virtue in both texts from becoming a mere set of universal principles. Sensitivity, contextualization, and shrewd judgment are required for the human actor to act righteously. Though Aristotle’s ethics do not required divine disclosure, they agree with biblical wisdom in these respects (but see also approaches to the biblical proverbs as ‘secular’ material).

Whereas Socrates usefulness as a heuristic model for understanding the biblical proverbs is distinctly limited, Aristotle’s ethics excel by comparison.

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sufficient trouble: Matthew 6

January 14, 2011 by David Baer

Everywhere, we are told to plan for the future. This is no idle counsel. Tomorrow relentlessly and suddenly becomes today.

Yet Jesus’ radical counsel removes the demands of the future from the licit objects of our fretting. Tomorrow? Fuggedaboudit.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing?

Such teaching exercises upon us an influence that oscillates between great release and immense frustration.

We want to live carefree. Yet we cannot. We know neither the language nor the rhythm of such trust.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

Jesus bring us closer, here, to the engine of such existential ease. Indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

Here, at least, our need is legitimated. We are not fools to imagine that we require these things.

Foolishness is banished to the space occupied by worry about them. It is there that we are not to stand, there that our feet and hands find themselves unfit for an alien task, there that we stumble over obstacles we cannot see. But our heavenly Father knows, thus we can rest.

Jesus’ summons is not to mental relaxation for its own sake. We are not relieved of effort. Rather, we are directed to marshal our energies towards a particularly focused project.

What we are to abandon is not the irrefutable, economic sine qua non of life on earth. That would be gnostic self-deception. Rather, we are to trust our heavenly Father with all of that, if Jesus is to believed, while we bend our shoulder to this.

But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

Jesus does not here call his own to self-abandonment or an excessively other-worldly state of mind. In fact, with stunning realism, today is defined in terms of its freight of trouble.

Jesus calls us to focus on the one thing we can do something about. Remarkably, it is a project that, in bearing his Father’s own name, seems as though it might have been the one thing that lies beyond our reach: the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

Before us lies one of the Christian story’s great reversals. We are told that the one thing we might be reasonably expected to accomplish—providing for our future—lies outside our control and in better hands than ours. Jesus’ Father and ours has that one covered. Paradoxically, the matter toward which we are to give ourselves heart and soul is owned entirely by God, in fact named after him: his kingdom and his righteousness.

Things are—ever, always—not as they appear.

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proper warehousing: Matthew 6

January 9, 2011 by David Baer

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
(Matthew 6:19–21 NRSV)

Jesus appears to have exercised a utilitarian view of wealth. He had little of the stuff we use to define the term and appeared not not to miss much what he did not possess. He was also severe about the ability of wealth to distract, detour, and corrupt.

‘How can this be?’, one asks in a world where accumulated resources feel as though they’re the important bulwark against calamity.

For starters, Jesus seemed to find the greatest beauty in what his Father himself had created. Not to make a romantic naturalist of him, he found in the lilies and birds of the field not only beauty but also a bit of instruction.

And then Jesus appears to have found the little he needed, when it arrived, to be gift rather than achievement or prerogative.

The twice-used phrase (do not) store up for yourselves treasures and the following—third—reference to treasures (Greek θεσαῦροι) probably points to excess rather than modest provision against hunger and the evil day. Yet this observation does not relieve the would-be follower of Jesus from asking how much that might be.

One is faced down here with a conventional division of reality into ‘heaven’ and earth’. Unconventionally, we are asked to invest our productive capacity in the former, because it endures. The world, we read, makes a poor investment for our limited and precious energies because it is so impermanent.

Only a fool would stock up on perishables that are surely to be rotten long before the anticipated need of them has been exhausted.

Appearances as to what endures and what is most real savage us with their persuasive deception.

‘Find heaven’, Jesus might tell us, ‘and do not mess around with diversifying your portfolio beyond that rather expansive category. Your enthusiasm will follow your allocation like a well-loved puppy. Trust me.’

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lethal folly: Proverbs 1

January 7, 2011 by David Baer

If it is true that folly for a season fills life up with irrefutable pleasures, it soon manifests its nature as a lethal disease.

Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices. For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster. (Proverbs 1:29–33 NRSV)

Folly lacks one of the constituent elements of wisdom: it does not self-correct.

Wisdom has a governor, to speak in mechanical terms. Wisdom is self-critical. It thrives on a feedback loop that provides the tools for subtle course corrections and, for that matter, radical ones.

Folly lacks this sophistication. It is bound to proceed in the direction of its own logical extremity. One begins to enjoy its delicacies but finishes the night gorged and puking.

The biblical proverbs understand this dynamic and instruct those who would learn with the most realistic of voices.

The variants of folly kill and destroy.

Wisdom, as we it and its voice personified in the first chapter of Proverbs, turns normal descriptors on their head. ‘Ease’ is often in the prophetic and sapiential currents of biblical literature, associated with facile wealth, corruption, and foolishness. Here, in what becomes almost a hymn to wisdom’s virtues, it is those who listen to Wisdom who will be secure and … live at ease.

Wisdom’s pleasures require a long growing season. They are not quick, indeed they are nearly always the product of long waiting and a chosen patience.

When they ripen, they are very sweet. By then, the fool has met his destruction, his name barely remembered.

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the simpleton’s passion, the fool’s rage: Proverbs 1

January 6, 2011 by David Baer

We do not often marry matters of wisdom and folly to those of love and hatred.

The biblical proverbs do not suffer this hesitation.

Not only does the Book of Proverbs rather daringly personify both wisdom and folly as appealing women in the street, calling out to passersby. It also sketches out the young man’s choice in terms of the strongest emotions of the heart.

Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: ‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.’ (Proverbs 1:20–23 NRSV)

Biblical wisdom understands that its alternative is, in the short term, both attractive and rewarding. It is quite normal for the simpleton—the one who will neither take the time nor invest the energy required to discern right from wrong and health from disease—to love his immediate gratification. The simpleton’s life does gratify. Wisdom makes no bones about this.

Likewise, Lady Wisdom knows the personal buzz that the scoffer enjoys as well as the tight-knit kinship that bonds together those who thrive on what has lately been called ‘ironic detachment’. Such a life is, within the limits of its own myopias, a good life. For the moment, it satisfies deep needs.

Not without reason do scoffers acquire an aura of coolness about them. To claim it does not exist or fails to allure is, in its own way, a virtuous but misguided blindness.

We learn also, if we accept Wisdom’s plea to listen to her words, that fools hate knowledge. Theirs is no dispassionate choice in favor of self-entrancing ignorance with no offense intended towards the wisdom they passed over. The affections of the heart are very much in play when we choose a path that over the long run hollows out our soul and cripples our community.

Wisdom and folly are no white-bread choices from among a menu of options, none of which matters terribly.

Our choice does matter, and terribly, no less than love and hatred which ignite the bones and fire the soul.

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fates and prayers: Psalm 5

January 6, 2011 by David Baer

We blanch at the clarity of suffering.

If we have not experienced direct attack on our lives, our livelihoods, our family, or our faith, the slashing verbal knives of those who lament seem uncivilized, unsafe, and awkward. When we read, we skip over such language, whether our audience be our children, our congregation, or ourselves.

Truth be told, the clarity of the besieged is not a perspicuity that works well in all contexts. We understand that reality and human hearts are too complex and nuanced to fit into a good guys/bad guys bifurcation of our race. Wasn’t it a voice as suppressed as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s that taught us where the line between good and evil lies?: not between peoples or even people but through the heart of every human being.

Yet we must not quiet the voice of the martyrs or the cries of those who find themselves vulnerable to a painful and unjust end. Even if self-interest is the highest motive we can muster, one must remember this: I may one day need these words.

For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction;
|their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues.
Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels;
because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you. (Psalm 5:9–10 NRSV)

The poet has known enough of suffering to place a pungent prayer on the lips of those who have lost all recourse except YHWH himself.

The fifth psalm, as so many of its peers, cries out for ruin to be the fate of those who pound its author’s life into the ground. For the duration of his lucid moment, the pray-er knows his persecutors to be rebelling against God himself. He knows what ought to, what must, what—please, God, do it!—cannot but fall upon the heads of such assassins, whose fingers are stained with my life’s blood.

At the same time, the faithful lose their limp, their homely frailty, their vulnerable lips so capable of hypocrisy, their hearts so wandering, the seed of evil that germinates in their soul and but for YHWH’s providence and a long accrual of small, righteous decisions should place them quickly on the other side of life. Of this prayer.

But let all who take refuge in you rejoice;
let them ever sing for joy.
Spread your protection over them,
so that those who love your name may exult in you.
For you bless the righteous, O LORD;
you cover them with favor as with a shield. (Psalm 5:11–12 NRSV)

The definition of this fortunate population is the definition of the sufferer himself. Like him, they take refuge in you.

In desperation, they are family. The clarity of the suffering not only profiles with uncommon sharpness the silhouette of one’s enemy. It also labels this one ‘brother’, that one ‘sister’, this child ‘m’ijo’, this aged lady ‘abuelita’.

The psalmist wishes for his kin not only the protection that is obviously needful. He wants more.

He wants laughter. Deep, joyous, exultant, belly-rocking laughter.

In the clarity of unjust affliction, one prays with no footnotes: Make these ones wander alone like living dead. Make these, in safe and tear-stained embrace, laugh until they can hardly remember why.

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