Canter Bridge

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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When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River, a heavenly voice identifies him as the Father’s beloved son. Paradoxically, he is then led (or, as the gospel of Mark has it, driven or banished) into the desert to be tested by the devil.

While it may still be an open question whether the devil wears Prada, it is an established fact in the gospels’ presentation that the accuser quotes Scripture. His hermeneutic, that is to say his interpretive tactic, is sophisticated but very bad.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you,” and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”‘ Jesus said to him, ‘Again it is written, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”‘ (Matthew 4:5–7 NRSV)

The devil cites the ninety-first psalm. The poem ranks high among the favorites of Bible readers and lies open, almost as a protective amulet, by the bedsides of many sleepers around the world. They treasure its promise that YHWH’s hidden forces, his uncounted angels, are more than sufficient protection for his hard-pressed child who finds himself exposed to lethal invisibilities over which he holds no control.

For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked. Because you have made the LORD your refuge, the Most High your dwelling place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. (Psalm 91:3–10 NRSV)

The satanic way with Scripture is to quote text without context. This simple maneuver ably converts the word of God into the voice of hell.

The devil comes quickly—as contextless citation allows one efficiently to do—to his point. He engages Jesus in a conversation that leaves the best film directors flailing just a bit. The psalm from which he quotes reads in this place as follows:

For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot. (Psalm 91:11–13 NRSV)

It seems a note custom-made for the hungry abandonment of the beloved son in a desert not of his choosing.

Yet Jesus supplies a context that is latent in the ninety-first psalm itself, but visible and explicit in the Torah text that he quotes:

Do not put the LORD your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah. (Deuteronomy 6:16 NRSV)

Jesus is, after all, the beloved son. The devil’s favorite psalm begins and ends with words directed to the faithful and besieged sufferer, who has nowhere to place his trust but in YHWH himself. Their plight is the same one. The devil conveniently overlooks this contextual bedrock, as it suits his purpose to do.

You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’ (Psalm 91:1–2 NRSV)

Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name. When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble, I will rescue them and honor them. With long life I will satisfy them, and show them my salvation. (Psalm 91:14–16 NRSV)

On the devil’s lips, Scripture thus becomes the voice of hell. The threatened believer is turned by demand against his divine Protector. Trust becomes insolent challenge. Scripture is ostensibly honored but in reality debased.

We who are quick with a Bible, craving simplicity, learn too well hell’s pragmatic and horrible hermeneutic.

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The particulars of the Iranian cosmologists who arrive in Bethlehem to pay homage to Mary’s child are surprising. Yet the fact that such characters should appear near the center of events when the biblical God has bared his arm should not surprise. It has ever been so.

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. (Matthew 2:1–4 NRSV

King Herod, tricked up in privilege, self-interest, and a host of counselors enriched with custody of YHWH’s holy scrolls, still manages to stumble about wondering how he might abort redemptive events or, failing this, to profit from them. This, too, has ever been so.

Privilege and legacy are not to be scoffed at. They represent distilled blessing and are capable of making people both wise and strong. Yet proximity to redemptive precedent bears with it the soul-killing dangers of presumption and apathy.

YHWH has always at hand his astrologers, pagan kings, lepers, and tax-gatherers.

He summons them when his chosen ones have faltered with that divine mixture of grief and glee that clings to breakthroughs like skies filled with angels and a child in a feeding trough, squirming, pooping, and hinting at salvation.

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The biblical eye surveys the landscape both retrospectively and prospectively. It discover evidence of YHWH’s intense care for his own in history and in hope.

Even in apocalyptic literature—that tone of voice that continues to speak even as civilization’s lights go out and chaos roams the streets—YHWH is not seen to have failed his own. Indeed the weak and the marginal emerge in such lines as history-makers of a kind. Their Lord shapes events and circumstances to preserve them, to protect them, and—in the literature’s darkest hues—to make sure things do not go so bad for them as they might have done:

Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again.If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.

Jesus speaks here of a time when affliction will be no stranger to his followers. Quite bluntly, he promises them that they will endure a tribulation so great that the world’s bloodstained chronicles can offer no precedent for it.

Yet this dark and future chapter does not rumble on mechanically. Its determinism, its underpinnings of inevitability, are delimited precisely at the point where they might have led to the extinction of the faithful.

Mercy, sometimes, comes down to this: evil, in its heyday, remains an underlord, its pretensions to supremacy snatched from its arrogant hands.

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Surely we are due some credit!

We have labored long, we have wept, we have worked our way to exhaustion and back, we have sacrificed leisure, friendships, even love for a most high calling. We asked very little and have only rarely complained. No one knows the price we have paid—and willingly—for the cause.

Then comes this damned Jesus-story about day-laborers hired at intervals by a landowner. The best and the brightest, the earliest risers, the young, ambitious and hungry have worked their butts off from earliest light to put bread on the table and pay a little ahead on Junior’s college tuition. (more…)

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John the Baptist appears in the gospels as one of those existential purists who gives himself to few causes, but with all-consuming energy. Fearless before the people who trek to the Jordan to hear his fiery rants, he is equally fearless before a profligate pseudo-king. John cannot be bought. John gives the lie to cynical refrain that ‘every man has his price’. Perhaps most do, perhaps nearly all. Not John.

Yet even this passionate martyr-in-the-making must be conceded a space for his doubts. Imprisoned, John wonders not so much about the veracity of his own calling as about his quick identification of Jesus as the one whose emergence on the scene would signal the successful performance of the Baptist’s task.

When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ Jesus replied, ‘Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.’

John had correctly perceived that YHWH’s next move would prioritize the needy beyond all conventional proportion. He had discovered an antecedent, even in his mind a prediction, of his fiery calling in the vocabulary of the book called Isaiah. That prophetic vision had manifestly anticipated YHWH’s healing presence and both his announcement and enactment of transformative good news for those with empty hands and grumbling bellies. (more…)

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The Jesus whom Matthew presents to us sounds positively Johannine for an instant in Matthew’s eleventh chapter.

At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’

These words come fast on the heels of Jesus’ denunciation of those who will criticize any of his Father’s messengers. They will find John the Baptist’s severe austerity equally as off-putting as Jesus’ party-going. Criticism becomes a convenient and effective tool in the hands of those who simply will not hear.

It is in the wake of this negative appraisal that Jesus’ words turn fondly and with a tone unaccustomed in the three ‘synoptic’ gospels towards the ‘little children’. (more…)

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Jesus’ twelve disciples figure prominently in the construction of an alternative Israel, one in which belonging is a function of allegiance to Jesus himself. They are the new patriarchs, sires of a new nation whose procreative dynamic is not physical but spiritual. The twelve-apostles-as-patriarchs-of-New-Israel scheme claims not to supplant the legacy of the age-old nation, but rather to fulfill its deepest promise and most-desired ambitions.

He called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon (who is called Peter) and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

The tradition rolls these names over on its tongue. It savors the memories associated with each man, from notorious and ever-prominent Simon Peter to the little-known Thaddeus. Curiously, little is known of each of them except that Jesus called him. It is Jesus’ selective principle and initiative that alone explain the new-patriarchal identity that each of the twelve assumes. Nothing is said of their fitness or capacities. We know almost nothing of their personalities or promise.

Although one must resume that each was precious to Jesus and that a hard-won camaraderie bent their hearts and hands in time to make common cause and to share the intimacy that alone emerges from shared and sacrificial service, they are to us almost a mere cipher.

About most of them, we know just two things: Jesus called them and each, in his way, said ‘yes’.

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Sanctity is tricky matter.

On the one hand, the summons to ‘be holy as YHWH is holy’ resounds from the earliest pages of Torah or ‘the five books of Moses’. Holiness is among the most condensed and potent ways of abbreviating the nature of the people whom YHWH has called into his confidence.

On the other hand, holiness morphs into pretense and hubris with astounding dexterity. It is not uncommon to discern in this or that person’s cynical glance backward upon the religion he once practiced the sunburnt assumption that it is indeed impossible to be holy. It is a ruse, a caricature, a manipulative tool that hangs from the hands of those who display the ghastliest absence of self-awareness.

Jesus might not have disagreed so strenuously with such a cynical outlook, though he would in time have nudged the conversation in the direction of true holiness. He might join the skeptic in his renunciation of off-putting sanctity while demonstrating through attentive eyes, a merciful touch, and a persistent and love-fueled loyalty that there is, after all, such a thing. (more…)

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