On May 2, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders concerning religion in America.  One created the Religious Liberty Commission, led by Chair Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, and Vice Chair Dr. Ben Carson, a one-time Republican presidential candidate and former Trump administration official.  Despite its broad title, both the leadership and the membership of this commission suggests that it is not actually concerned with the liberty of all religions:

Among the commission’s members are Trump allies, including White House faith adviser Paula White, talk show host and author Eric Metaxas and evangelist Franklin Graham, head of Samaritan’s Purse, along with other faith leaders like Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Minnesota Bishop Robert Barron of the popular Word on Fire media ministry, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and talk show host Phil McGraw.  

Apart from Cardinal Dolan and Rabbi Soloveichik, the commission is dominated by Evangelical Protestant Christians. Its prevailing ethos is clear from “Dr. Phil” MacGraw’s comment at the ceremony establishing the commission: “Mr. President, I can’t tell you, first off, how proud I am to see religion coming back to the White House. God bless you. God bless you.”  Although President Joe Biden was a pious and visibly practicing Roman Catholic Christian, his was apparently not the right kind of religion, and he was evidently not the right sort of Christian.

Mr. Trump’s second executive order established a task force on “eradicating anti-Christian bias,” chaired by Attorney General Pamela Bondi and staffed by government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy.  As Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The Atlantic, this means the government will now rule on what exactly constitutes authentic Christian belief and practice—not a straightforward determination, she argues, nor one that should be entrusted to the administration.⁠
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The executive order creating the task force cites a multitude of examples of what the Trump administration considers to be unacceptable discrimination against Christians, including Biden-era prosecutions of Christian anti-abortion protesters under the Freedom to Access Clinic Entrances Act, the promulgation of a (later retracted) FBI memo referring to radical traditionalist Christians as a potential domestic-terrorism threat, and the designation of Easter Sunday of 2024 as the year’s Transgender Day of Visibility. Conservative Christians may generally agree with Trump’s characterization of those episodes. But determining the authentically Christian perspective on an issue is not always a simple task.”
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For example, the International Transgender Day of Visibility has since its founding in 2009 been on March 31, while Easter is a movable feast whose date is determined by complex calculations (on which Eastern and Western Christians differ).  So, the fact that for Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians Easter in 2024 fell on March 31 has nothing to do with “anti-Christian bias.”

Bruenig argues that the task force (and the Religious Liberty Commission, I would suggest) is actually part of “a broader project to recapture political and cultural ground that Christianity has lost over the past several decades.”

If the task force’s mandate of mere fairness is essentially a pretext for persecuting perceived enemies of the faith, then its real purpose is to restore this past vision of American Christian dominance.
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Perhaps that’s the irony of this new task force: Nobody appears to view Christianity as just another interest group as much as Donald Trump. . . . Christians should as a rule be skeptical of versions of the faith that are informed overly much by partisan politics, which always have something other than Jesus at their core.⁠

As a Bible Guy, I tend to think in biblical terms.  So reflecting on religious liberty and diversity brought to my mind a crucial incident in the biblical account of Moses’ life and ministry  involving Moses’ father-in-law Jethro, a Midianite priest (and not a Jew), detailed in Exodus 18.

That he is called “Jethro” here (Exod 18:1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12; cf. Exod 3:1; 4:18) is suggestive: southern traditions call him Reuel (Exod 2:18) or Hobab (Jdg 4:11; Num 10:29, which says that Hobab was the son of Reuel, may represent an attempt to consolidate these traditions).  Most likely, Exodus 18 belongs to the old northern traditions in the Pentateuch–often called E because of their preference for the Divine title ‘elohim (“God”) rather than the personal Name Yhwh (typically rendered as “the LORD,” in all caps).  While these traditions do use Yhwh after the Name is revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:9-15, they remain reluctant to use it too frequently. So, while the Divine is referred to throughout this chapter as “God” (Exod 18:1a, 4, 5, 12 [twice], 15, 16, 19 [three times], 21, 23), in two places (Exodus 18:1 and 8-11) “the LORD” is used, as these verses recall Yhwh delivering Israel from Egypt–calling the Name particularly to mind.

So, when Moses tells Jethro of the LORD’s deliverance of Israel from Pharaoh, and from the hardships they have faced so far in the wilderness, Jethro rejoices, and declares: “Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods [kol–ha’elohim], because he delivered the people from the Egyptians, when they dealt arrogantly with them” (Exod 18:11 NRSVue). Note that the Name is essential in this verse, as it distinguishes Israel’s God Yhwh from all other gods (‘elohim).

Then, the Midianite priest offers a sacrifice to the LORD, followed by a sacred meal in which Moses’ brother, the priest Aaron, also participates (Exod 18:12).  Many early Jewish and Christian interpretations wrestle with this inclusion, and can only accept Jethro’s role by seeing his confession in Exod 18:10-11 as a religious conversion. In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of Exod 18:6, Jethro tells Moses that he has come in order to convert (Aramaic l’tgyyr’).  Other traditional Jewish sources also regard this as a conversion story: for example, Exod Rab 1:32; Tankha Buber Yitro, 5.  Among Christian interpreters, Cyril of Alexandria and the Venerable Bede also see this scene as Jethro’s conversion (cited by Brevard Childs, Exodus, OTL [Louisville: Westminster, 1974], 332).

On the other hand, Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, Tractate Amalek 3 compares this meal to one served by the great Rabbi Gamaliel:

Pope Francis warns against “a divinization of power” that “emerges in the name of God.  Those who do it are people who construct themselves as God.”  He reflects,

The second commandment [cf. Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28] proposes that you love your neighbor as yourself.  No believer can limit the faith to himself, his clan, his family, or his city.  A believer is essentially someone who goes into an encounter with other believers, or non-believers, to give them a hand (On Heaven and Earth, 21).

Still further evidence that I am indeed older than dirt–I can remember the old “Doublemint Gum” commercials (“Two! Two! Two mints in one!”), with Jayne and Joan Knoerzer, the original Doublemint Twins, singing “Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum.”  That old earworm came back into my head this morning as I was reading Sunday’s Gospel, John 20:19-31, for my devotions.  When I got to the end of the chapter, where the purpose of John’s Gospel is revealed, I was surprised to read,

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name (John 20:30-31, NRSVue)

“So that you may continue to believe“?  I was pretty sure that wasn’t what I remembered.  Sure enough, when I consulted my old Bible, in the now-defunct NRSV, it read, “But these are written so that you may come to believe.”  Intrigued, I turned to the Greek, where I was puzzled to see this:

The Greek grammatical form pisteusete is the second person plural active aorist subjunctive: that is, as the old NRSV had it, “so that (all of) you  [addressing the whole community of  intended readers] may come to believe.”  But the sigma (the Greek letter “s”) is in brackets!  Without it, the verb form becomes pisteuete: the present tense, not the aorist–as the NRSVue now reads, “so that you may continue to believe.”  So, what gives?

In his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (New York: United Bible Societies, 1971: p. 256), Bruce Metzger explained the decision to place the sigma in brackets.  Both readings, he notes, the aorist and the present tense forms, “have notable early support,” so the question was, who is the audience of the Gospel?

The aorist sense, strictly interpreted, suggests that the Fourth Gospel was addressed to non-Christians so that they might come to believe Jesus is the Messiah; the present tense suggests that the aim of the writer was to strengthen the faith of those who already believe.

Being unable to satisfactorily answer that question, “the Committee considered it preferable to represent both readings by enclosing σ in square brackets.”  Two! Two! Two verbs in one!

Of course, translators don’t have the freedom to leave that tension unresolved–they must choose one or the other!  In John 20:31, the NRSV followed the old King James, which has, “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”  So do the ESV, and the NIV (although the NIV footnote on the verse reads, “Or may continue to believe“).  Similarly the CEB, which I have used as my base text in these blogs, has “so that you will believe.”

All of these, like the old NRSV (and for that matter, the RSV before it!), follow the KJV here and assume the aorist form–but then, that was how Erasmus’ Textus Receptus, which had a powerful influence on the King James translators, read.  In favor of that reading (quite apart from the unresolvable question of the Fourth Gospel’s “intent”) is the fact that texts using that form come from both notable Western and Eastern text traditions.  The present tense has more witnesses in its favor, but they come mainly from the same text family–making it a bit odd to me that the NRSVue chose to go with the present tense reading.

This is not the only place in the Fourth Gospel where the editors of the Greek New Testament have made that curious typographical choice.  In John 19:35, the Evangelist claims to be an eyewitness to Jesus’ pierced side, and the flow of water and blood from that wound.  The NRSVue reads:

He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth, so that you also may continue to believe.

Here too, the Greek text reads pisteu[s]ete, which is printed as at once aorist and present tense!  Here, the present tense reading is the one found less often, but in texts from different families, while the aorist text is the majority reading.  But this time, the old NRSV simply skipped over the ambiguous word.

What I really wish is that we could somehow do what the editors of our Greek New Testament have done, and typographically represent both at once!  The good news of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and future coming must of course be proclaimed to those who have never heard it–or whose previous hearing, for whatever reason, was kept from taking hold on their hearts.  But it also needs to be told again and again to  believers, whose faith may have become stale and rote.  Christ is risen, friends!  And whether we are hearing it for the first time or the fiftieth, “ain’ta that good news“?

CORRECTION:

Whoops!  “Two! Two! Two mints in one!” was not a Doublemint Gum slogan.  It was a Certs slogan: Certs is both a candy mint and a breath mint.  Saturday Night Live famously mocked those ads with its own false ad for “Shimmer”: both a floor wax and a dessert topping (a bit that sadly no longer appears on YouTube)!

Laurent de la Hyre. 1606-1656. Paris. Apparition du Christ aux trois Marie. Vers 1653. Louvre.

Ever since I discovered Laurent de la Hyre’s “Christ Appears to the Three Marys” (1606), it has been my favorite Easter image.  I love the joyous surprise on every face–including the face of Jesus!  I love that their hands are not quite touching him as he ascends into glory: radiantly alive, at once in our world of time and space and transcending it.

It is Easter, friends; the day of Christ’s resurrection: a day of untrammeled, rollicking joy!  But this Easter; I am also aware of the melancholy of that garden scene.  Jesus is alive, yes–but he is also leaving.  This joyous hello is also a poignant goodbye.

Perhaps it is because, as I approach my biblical “three score years and ten,” death and resurrection have become less and less a matter of abstract theological speculation for me, and more and more of (relatively imminent) expectation!  But this year, I am reminded that, while in Christ death is not the end, that does not change the fact that, for those left behind, it really is the end–at least, for now.

It is also spring, of course: but this autumn poem by Mary Oliver captures for me at once that Easter hope of resurrection joy, and the reality of grief.  Here is “In Blackwater Woods.”

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Happy Easter, friends.  God bless you.

Apart from its stellar collection of books and journals, and its ever-helpful staff, one of the things I like best about the Clifford E. Barbour Library at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary is the whiteboard by the front desk.  Periodically, someone on the staff posts a whimsical question, usually with a biblical connection (one I recall was, very simply, “Hebrew or Greek?”), to which library patrons are encouraged to respond.  The picture at the head of this blog shows a recent question, relating to the book of Daniel: “Would you rather sit in the lion’s den with Daniel, OR get thrown into the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego [that is, with an eye to Veggie Tales fans!] (Rack, Shack, and Benny)?

In keeping with the whimsy of the question, I said that I’d rather be with Daniel, because “I like kitties!”  But, Bible Guy and professor emeritus that I am, I couldn’t resist adding an exegetical note.  If you have trouble deciphering my purple scrawl, it says,

Also, Daniel’s deliverance is assured in the traditions; the Three go in not knowing if deliverance will come. . .

The ellipsis at the end was very deliberate, meant to indicate an open-endedness to the moment before their (would-be) martyrdom.  Another patron added a note of their own: “meeting God, though?”    So, what happens in this biblical narrative?

In Daniel 3, Nebuchadnezzar invites officials from throughout his empire to the dedication of a huge golden image reminiscent, perhaps, of the king’s dream (see Dan 2). The Aramaic word used here, tselem, is found in an ancient inscription (perhaps 9th or 10th century BCE) on a memorial statue from Tell Fekhariyeh in Syria, where it describes the statue as the “image” of Adad-it’i, governor of Guzan, Sikan, and Azran (cf. A. R. Millard and P. Bordreuil, “A Statue from Syria with Assyrian and Aramaic Inscriptions,” BA 45 [1982]: 135-42). This term is closely related to the Hebrew tselem (“image”), used in Genesis 1:26-27 NRSVue for the creation of human beings “in the image of God.” So, the CEB rendering “statue” is appropriate.  The image is gigantic: six cubits broad by sixty cubits high, or, about 9 by 87 1/2 feet.  We are not told anything about who or what this golden statue was supposed to represent. For the writer of Daniel, all that matters is that it was to be an object of false worship.

Nebuchadnezzar invited officials from throughout his empire to the dedication of the huge golden image. To the assembled crowd of people and dignitaries from across Nebuchadnezzar’s empire, a herald proclaims that, when the music begins, all are to fall down and worship the image.  The herald warns that when the music plays “Anyone who will not bow down and worship will be immediately thrown into a furnace of flaming fire” (Dan 3:6)–or, as the KJV famously reads, “a burning fiery furnace.”

To us, this story may well seem needlessly repetitive. Elements such as the list of seven officials in Daniel 3:2-3, the list of six musical instruments in Daniel 3:5, 7, 10, and 15; the account of the people’s actions upon hearing the music, even the stereotypical description of the furnace as “a furnace of flaming fire” are repeated again and again. However, repetition is an earmark of the traditional storyteller’s art. The stereotyped elements make the story easier to remember and recite, and carry the listener along with a sense of the familiar.  And, as any parent or grandparent who has ever read a favorite story to a child can tell you, audiences of traditional stories anticipate those repeated elements, and will insist on hearing them!

Of course, Daniel’s three friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (see Dan 1:6-7; intriguingly, nothing is said of Daniel himself in this narrative) refuse to bow down. Perhaps envious of the high position the three Hebrews enjoy in Nebuchadnezzar’s court, Babylonian rivals accuse the three before the emperor himself. In a rage, Nebuchadnezzar orders them brought before him.

In Daniel 3:14-15, the three Hebrews are commanded to worship the statue not through a herald, but by Nebuchadnezzar himself. There is no room now for them to claim that they had misunderstood the command, or to otherwise hedge their disobedience. Nebuchadnezzar makes their choice painfully clear. Even now, if they will fall down and worship when the music sounds, all will be well. “But if you won’t worship it, you will be thrown straight into the furnace of flaming fire. Then what god will rescue you from my power?” (Dan 3:15).

To any reader of Israel’s story, Nebuchadnezzar’s proud boast will sound familiar. Similarly, when the armies of the Assyrian empire had come to the gates of Jerusalem in the days of King Hezekiah, Sennacherib the Assyrian king had taunted the city’s defenders, “Which one of any of the gods of those lands has rescued their country from my power? Why should the LORD rescue Jerusalem from my power?” (2 Kgs 18:35). Of course, against all expectations, the LORD did deliver Jerusalem from Sennacherib. So, too, as anyone familiar with this story knows, the LORD will deliver Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

However, the three Hebrews cannot know the end of their story:  they do not know that they will be delivered!  Their refusal to obey Nebuchadnezzar is not rooted in the certainty that God will keep them from harm, but rather in the absolute demand of their faith.  The threat of being burned alive would have been tragically familiar to the audience of this story.  Antiochus’ minions had done precisely that to members of the pious Judean community this book addresses. 2 Maccabees 7:1-42 describes the horrific death by torture suffered by seven Jewish brothers, one after another, who refused to surrender their faith–ending with their being burned alive.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to even attempt a defense. There is no doubt that they are guilty of the charge–they did not bow to the golden statue, nor will they bow to it now. Instead, they take their stand:

If our God—the one we serve—is able to rescue us from the furnace of flaming fire and from your power, Your Majesty, then let him rescue us. But if he doesn’t, know this for certain, Your Majesty: we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you’ve set up (Dan 3:17-18).

“If our God whom we serve is able”?  This statement may come as a surprise. Many older translations, such as the KJV and the RSV, read “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us”–as do the NIV and The Message.  However, the clearest and best translation of the Aramaic would appear to be the one chosen by  NRSVue, and the CEB, printed above.

One might think that this remarkable statement expresses doubt about God, questioning God’s ability to save–but in fact, it is a statement of the purest faith. Whether God delivers us or not, the three men declare, we will not worship false gods. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego do not serve God because it is convenient, or because it brings them benefits. For these believers, faith is not a hobby, or a form of therapy. For them, faith is life, and life without faith is not worth having

Like the martyrs in 2 Maccabees, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego act in accordance with the absolute demand of their faith. Whatever comes next–whether God delivers them or not–they will not worship other gods.

In his book The Alphabet of Grace, Christian author Frederick Buechner wrote of a day when he was driving home from church “full of Christ, I thought, giddy in the head almost and if not speaking in tongues at least singing in tongues some kind of witless, wordless psalm.”  But then, he turned on the radio, and heard a story of horrific child abuse (please take warning if such an account is triggering for you).  To punish a crying baby, its parents had filled a tub with hot, hot water and immersed the child in it, scalding their baby to death.  Abruptly, Buechner writes,

as I heard it reported on the radio on my way back from of all places church and prayed to almighty God to kick to pieces such a world or to kick to pieces Himself and His Son and His Holy Ghost world without end standing there by the side of that screaming tub and doing nothing while with his scrawny little buttocks bare, the hopeless little four-year-old whistle, the child was lowered in his mother’s arms. I am acquainted with the reasons that theologians give and that I have given myself for why God does not, in the name of human freedom must not, by the very nature of things as he has himself established that nature cannot and will not, interfere in these sordid matters, but I prayed nonetheless for his interference.

Of course, that interference had not come–as it did not come for those Antiochus had burned to death; as it did not come for six million Jews marched into gas chambers and ovens by the Nazis and their willing confederates; as it did not come for Jesus, despite his earnest prayer in the garden, “Father, if it’s your will [there is that “if” again!], take this cup of suffering away from me” (Luke 22:42).

Buechner imagines someone asking why, then, he believes?

I believe without the miracles I have prayed for then; that is what I am explaining. I believe because certain uncertain things have happened, dim half-miracles, sermons and silences and what not. Perhaps it is my believing itself that is the miracle I believe by. Perhaps it is the miracle of my own life: that I, who might so easily not have been, am; who might so easily at any moment, even now, give the whole thing up, nonetheless by God’s grace do not give it up and am not given up by it.

We too have no assurance that everything is going to turn out well for us, or even that we will be able to discern a reason for what happens in our lives.

April 20th, which this year is Easter for Western and Eastern Christians alike, is also the day when, according to an executive order issued on January 2oth by the president,

the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.

I wish that I could tell you that it won’t happen–that the Insurrection Act will not be invoked, that the U.S. military will not be turned against American citizens, even legal immigrants and peaceful protestors.  But I can’t.  What I can say is that whatever happens next, our Lord who did not spare himself even the suffering and death of the cross will never abandon us–as the story of the fiery furnace confirms.

In his rage, Nebuchadnezzer orders the furnace fired up seven times hotter than before (Daniel 3:19-23). The three friends are bound, and hurled helplessly into the fire. So fierce are the flames that the people who throw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the furnace are themselves consumed.

But the three Hebrews are not killed! When Nebuchadnezzar looks into the blazing furnace, he sees that though their bonds have burned away, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are themselves untouched by the blaze. Even their clothing remains unsinged!  Further, to his astonishment, the king sees that the three are not the only ones in the furnace:

Look! I see four men, unbound, walking around inside the fire, and they aren’t hurt! And the fourth one looks like one of the gods (Dan 3:24-25).

The Aramaic phrase bar-‘elohin, translated “one of the gods” in the CEB, means literally “a son of god.” In the Hebrew Bible, the expression “sons of God” or “sons of the gods” (bene-‘elohim) is sometimes used for heavenly beings (see Genesis 6:1-4; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7). Nebuchadnezzar’s shout means that the fourth one in the furnace looks like a heavenly being.  However, later Christian interpreters found here a reference to Jesus, the Son of God.

For Christians, there is a definite appropriateness to this idea. Jesus, after all, is the one who promised “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20 NRSVue). Similarly, the writer of Hebrews urged his community to remain faithful in times of trial and temptation, remembering that Jesus, “who was tempted in every way that we are, except without sin” (Heb 4:15), is in heaven interceding for us.  That, friends, is our hope.

AFTERWORD:

I need to report, friends that as of today (April 22–Tuesday of the first week of Easter) the Insurrection Act of 1807 has not been invoked, and it is my prayer that it will not  be.  Still, whatever comes next in these uncertain times, I praise God that, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we will not face it alone: as Jesus promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20, NRSVue).

Today, March 20, marks the Vernal Equinox: the official first day of Spring.  In our new home, situated near a pond, we have been hearing the chorus of spring peepers: a springtime song I haven’t heard since I was a boy.  I just saw three robins hopping through our front lawn, and in many yards and flowerbeds, the first blossoms of spring are determinedly breaking through the soil.

The significance of this day has been marked by our species from our beginnings. Ancient monuments such as Stonehenge in England

and the Serpent Mound in North America

demonstrate the heroic lengths to which our ancestors were willing to go to calculate and celebrate this day.  Indeed, on the equinox the sun sets directly in the west, producing along Chicago’s east-west streets (although they weren’t designed for this purpose) a phenomenon called #chicagohenge.

The reason for our ancient obsession with the Vernal Equinox is not hard to understand.  After the cold and scarcity of winter, the promise of Spring on its way means that soon the air will be warm again, crops will grow again, lambs and calves will be born again.  The message of the Vernal Equinox has always been hope.

Please note, friends, a vital (and often forgotten) distinction here.  Hope is not optimism–and I say that as an optimist!  Optimism means looking on the bright side, and believing that in the end, everything will turn out right–that things are not as bad as they seem.

Hope, on the other hand, recognizes that things may indeed be as bad as they seem–if not worse.  However, to have hope means to  believe in something larger than the present moment: to have confidence that ultimately, the One in whom we place our trust will prevail.

Jeremiah 29:11 is much reproduced, on posters and in memes:

 I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope.

Often, the prophet’s words are read optimistically: God intends nothing but good for believers, who can therefore rest in the confidence that they will be well and successful and happy.  But the context of this passage is vital to grasping its meaning.  It comes from a letter Jeremiah is writing to the exiles in Babylon, specifically to quash any optimistic expectations they might have had that their exile would be short; that the crisis would pass and they would soon be home again.  The prophet’s advice?

Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce.  Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away.  Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare (Jer 29:5-7).

In short: settle down and make a life for yourselves in Babylon,  because you will never come home again.  For those prophets who promise otherwise, Jeremiah says, the LORD has a grim word:

The LORD of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims: Don’t let the prophets and diviners in your midst mislead you. Don’t pay attention to your dreams.  They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I didn’t send them, declares the LORD (Jer 29:8-9).

So–what in the world does that famous passage in verse 11 mean?  What are those “plans” God has?  If the exiles are indeed doomed to die in exile, how can Jeremiah say that they have “a future filled with hope”?

Here is the immediate context of those words:

The LORD proclaims: When Babylon’s seventy years are up, I will come and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. When you call me and come and pray to me, I will listen to you. When you search for me, yes, search for me with all your heart, you will find me. I will be present for you, declares the LORD, and I will end your captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have scattered you, and I will bring you home after your long exile, declares the LORD (Jer 29:10-14).

Seventy years is a long time–and biblically significant.  A generation is about forty years.  So usually, when Scripture wants to indicate a long time, the number is forty: forty days and forty nights for the Great Flood, forty years in the wilderness after the exodus–and of course, Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness,  which our forty days (less Sundays) of Lent now recall.

Seventy years ups the ante considerably!  Seventy is, biblically, about as long as a person can expect to live (see Psalm 90:10)–so the point is that none of those addressed by this letter should expect to see God’s plans realized.  Deliverance will come, someday, but for your children or grandchildren–not for you.

Jeremiah performs a sign act underlining this message, involving a field in his hometown of Anathoth (Jer 32).  When word comes from his cousin that the field is for sale, Jeremiah–at the LORD’s direction–buys it: even though Jerusalem is surrounded by the Babylonian army and on the point of collapse, even though Jeremiah himself is in prison!  The prophet directs his friend, the scribe Baruch ben Neriah, to see to it that all is done legally and properly–and then instructs him to place the deeds of sale in a sealed pottery jar “so they will last a long time” (Jer 32:14).  The purchase isn’t for Jeremiah, who will never see the land he has bought–or indeed for any in his family right now!  But someday, the prophet says,

 Fields will be bought, and deeds will be signed, sealed, and witnessed in the land of Benjamin and in the outlying areas of Jerusalem, in the towns of Judah and in the highlands, in the towns of the western foothills and the arid southern plain; for I will bring them back from their captivity, declares the LORD (Jer 32:44).

Someday, Jeremiah realizes, someone in  his family–his great nieces or nephews–will return, and they will need a place to live, and land to farm.  They will find the jar, and know that their long-dead uncle had hope for their future.

I must confess, friends, that I am having a hard time writing right now.  Every day it seems brings another outrage from the powers that be, against the poor, against immigrants, against racial minorities, against transgender persons–often purportedly justified by Christian faith, and by the Bible that I love.  I confess that, optimist that I am, I am not at all optimistic about our immediate future as a nation.  We were amply warned.  In an important article last November, conservative commentator David Brooks wrote,

[W]e are entering a period of white water. . . .  Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder. But in chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault. These are the times that try people’s souls, and we’ll see what we are made of.

I am not at all optimistic–but I do have hope.  My hope is grounded, not in politics or patriotism, but in my faith that God is at work, even when all seems lost.  I am remembering the words of abolitionist Theodore Parker, famously quoted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice (Theodore Parker, “Of Justice and the Conscience,” in The Collected Works of Theodore Parker 2, 37-57 [London: Trubner, 1879], 48).

Lent, after all, is leading us on the road to Calvary, where even Jesus will give voice to anguish, despair, and doubt: “’Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matt 27:46 NRSVue).  Yet that Friday was not the end; Jesus had not been forsaken!  Sunday would see the power of Christ’s resurrection and victory over death itself.  But let us never allow ourselves to forget that the way to Easter leads through Good Friday–or that our crucified Lord has said, 

All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.  All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me and because of the good news will save them (Mark 8:34-35).

Most of the people we meet in the Bible are grownups.  Adam and Eve may be brand new when we are introduced, but they are born full grown! Likewise, we meet Abraham as an adult, and Paul, and Peter. In the Gospels of John and Mark, that is how we meet Jesus, too.

But there are significant exceptions.  We meet the twins Jacob and Esau in the womb–already at it, hammer and tongs–and watch as their sibling rivalry descends into deception and violence before finally resolving in reconciliation.  We meet Moses as a baby, threatened by Pharaoh, set adrift in his little ark by his desperate mother—only to be found and adopted by Pharaoh’s own daughter, and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, with his own mother as nurse.

Then there is Samuel, who would grow up to become a prophet-priest, anointing both Saul and David, Israel’s first kings.  But first, little Samuel was God’s answer to the heartfelt prayers of his (previously barren) mother Hannah. In gratitude, his parents dedicated their son to the LORD, and he grew up in the temple, raised by the priest Eli–with annual visits from his mother, who made his robes.  The text succinctly summarizes Samuel’s growing-up years: “Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the LORD and with the people” (1 Sam 2:26, NRSVue).

Unlike Mark and John, both Matthew and Luke begin Jesus’ story with an account of his birth.  But after an account of the Holy Family fleeing as refugees from Herod and his son Archelaus, Matthew jumps to where John and Mark begin their Gospels, with the adult Jesus’ baptism.

I am sure you have seen this print of Jesus as a toddler, playing in the sawdust in Joseph’s carpenter shop. In his chubby hand he holds a nail, and his shadow stretching on the floor behind him has the shape of a cross. The point is clear: Jesus was “born to die.”  Certainly, some gospel accounts can be read in that way. In fact, New Testament scholar Martin Kähler famously called the gospel of Mark a “passion narrative with an extended introduction.”

But Luke tells the story differently. Rather than jumping immediately to grownup Jesus, he gives us a bit of Jesus’ childhood, including a story of every parent’s nightmare.

On their way back home from their annual Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph suddenly realize that they don’t know where Jesus is!  They search for him frantically, retracing their steps to Jerusalem.

After three days (three days!) Mary and Joseph find their son in the temple, in an intense conversation with the religious leaders. We learn that even as a boy, Jesus has attained a terrifying sense of his identity and calling: “I must be in my Father’s house” (Luke 2:48).

Luke concludes this account with a summary statement, echoing (although not quite quoting from) Samuel’s story: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). This is typical of the way that Luke uses Scripture.  Unlike Matthew, who quotes biblical passages, Luke alludes to texts, writing in the style of the Greek translation of Jewish Scripture, the Septuagint.

Luke’s account does have ample foreshadowing of Jesus’ death (remember Simeon’s words to Mary when Jesus, only forty days old, was first brought to the temple: “a sword will pierce your own soul, too” (Luke 2:35). Still the way that Luke tells the story—with his echo of the account of Samuel’s growth and maturing—suggests that Jesus’ life, not just his death, matters.

Focusing so intently on Jesus’ death has had sad consequences for American Christianity.  In an interview with NPR journalist Scott Detrow, Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine, described

having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.

Jumping straight from Christmas to Good Friday, we can conveniently ignore Jesus’ teaching and his lived example.  Jesus shows us what being human–created in God’s image (Gen 1:27)–really means.  The International Theological Commission of the Vatican (2004) put it very well:

In him, we find the total receptivity to the Father which should characterize our own existence, the openness to the other in an attitude of service which should characterize our relations with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and the mercy and love for others which Christ, as the image of the Father, displays for us.

If we focus solely on the cross, our faith becomes more about death than life: more about going to heaven when we die than living here and now; more about escaping the world in the Rapture than caring for the world and its people.

Did Jesus die for us? Of course he did.  From the first, Christians have understood Jesus’ death as bridging the gap between God and people, conveying the depth of God’s love and the bottomless reach of God’s forgiveness and grace.  But Jesus was not “born to die.” If all that matters to us about Jesus is his death on the cross, we can (as Russell Moore sorrowfully observes) conveniently ignore the humble servant Jesus of the Gospels, and substitute a macho warrior Christ, largely of our own making.

Did Jesus die for us? Of course he did. But Jesus also lived for us, and indeed lives for us, as Immanuel: God with us.  Friends, the incarnation is a big idea: far too big be restricted to the Atonement alone. As theologian Edwin van Driel writes, “the category of redemption is not rich enough to explain the wonder of his presence” (Incarnation Anyway: Arguments for Supralapsarian Christology [Oxford: Oxford University, 2008], 165).

God’s act of creation already presupposed that God would consequently enter time and space as a creature, in order to enter fully into relationship with us. Rather than our relationship with Christ being merely, or at least primarily, functional (our sin is the problem; Christ’s death is the solution), van Driel proposes that “the intimate presence of God in Christ is the goal of all things,” so that “all aspects of our lives are related to him” (van Driel 2008, 165).

Friends, Jesus lived for us. Empowered by his invincible life, let us resolve to live for him, too–to do those things that Jesus did among us: feeding people, healing people, freeing people, proclaiming the good news of God’s salvation and the completion of God’s creation.

This past Wednesday, January 29th, called Seollal in South Korea and Tet in Vietnam, marked the lunar New Year, celebrated by billions of Asiatic peoples, both in their native countries and wherever else they have found a home, worldwide.  In the Chinese zodiac, this year is the Year of the Snake.

Unfortunately, for many Christian and Jewish readers, the Year of the Snake sounds ominous and threatening.  Often the snake is regarded as a symbol of evil, and specifically of Satan, because of the Garden Story in Genesis 3.

The Garden Story is very well known. Much like the Twenty-third Psalm or the Ten Commandments, it has largely passed out of the hands of the church and synagogue, to become part of the cultural currency of Western, and specifically American, society. Sadly, that familiarity is likely to blind us: as we already “know” what the text says, it may take some effort to see what is actually before us.

Indeed, even those who have never read Paradise Lost are likely to assume John Milton’s plot line—a war in heaven results in the fall of Lucifer, who seduces Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, prompting Adam heroically to embrace her tragic fate—and impose that plot onto the Bible’s very different narrative.

The account of the creation of the world, and specifically of humanity, in Genesis 2:4b-25 is explicitly linked to the Garden Story by the garden itself, planted by the LORD God in Gen 2:8. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the center of Eden (Gen 2:9) is of course the centerpiece of the Garden Story; its prohibition foreshadows this story’s tragic conclusion:

The LORD God commanded the human, “Eat your fill from all of the garden’s trees; but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat from it, you will die!” (Gen 2:16-17).

But another explicit link comes in the last verse of Genesis 2, and the first verse of Gen 3. The author relies on a pun to carry the point. At the conclusion of Gen 2, we are told “The two of them were naked [‘arummim], the man and his wife, but they weren’t embarrassed” (Gen 2:25). Then, in the first verse of Gen 3, we meet the snake: “The snake was the most intelligent [‘arum] of all the wild animals that the LORD God had made.”

Although spelled and pronounced very nearly the same, ‘arom (singular of the plural ‘arummim) and ‘arum come from different roots, with different meanings. The punning parallel between the nakedness of the humans and the cleverness of the snake finds its culmination in Gen 3:7. Enticed by the snaky self-confidence of the serpent, the humans eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and “Then they both saw clearly and knew that they were naked [‘erummim].” Rather than becoming crafty (‘arum) like the serpent, they become, for the first time, shamefully aware of their nakedness (the Hebrew here is ‘erom, from which the word ‘arom in Gen 2:24 is derived).

Later tradition identifies the snake in the garden with Satan: so, Revelation 12:9 says of Satan’s endtime defeat,

So the great dragon was thrown down. The old snake [likely an allusion to Gen 3], who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, was thrown down to the earth; and his angels were thrown down with him (see also 4 Macc 18:7-8; Wis 2:24).

But the text in Gen 3:1 explicitly describes the snake as simply a “wild animal” (Hebrew khayyat hassadeh, “beast of the field” in KJV)—the most crafty of them all, but still an animal. There is no hint here of the later notions of a war in heaven, or of Lucifer’s fall. Indeed, Christian theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “we would be simplifying and completely distorting the biblical narrative if we were simply to involve the devil, who, as God’s enemy, caused all this. This is just what the Bible does not say” (Creation and Fall, trans. John C. Fletcher [orig. Schöpfung und Fall, Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1937], in Creation and Temptation [London: SCM Press, 1966], 64).

In the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero learns of a plant that grows at the bottom of the underworld ocean, called “As Oldster Man Becomes Child” [reminiscent of the Tree of Life in Genesis 2–3].  Eager to claim this prize, Gilgamesh dives into the ocean, weighted with stones to drag him down, down to the bottom of everything—where, sure enough, he finds the plant. He plucks it, rises to the surface, and prepares to return to his city Uruk, there to eat the plant and regain his youth. But on the journey home, Gilgamesh stops to bathe, leaving the plant unguarded.  A snake swallows the plant, sheds its skin, and crawls away renewed. Deeply disappointed, but having learned that he, like all humanity, must die, Gilgamesh decides that Uruk will be his memorial; as king of that great city, his name will never be forgotten. In that way, Gilgamesh will gain immortality after all.

As the Epic of Gilgamesh illustrates, in the ancient world snakes represented new life and rebirth—doubtless due to the shedding of their skins. Therefore in Egypt, the sign of the “divine” pharaohs was the image of a rearing cobra (called the uraeus), said to have been crafted by the creator god Ptah on his potter’s wheel. Further, as Karen Joines notes, snakes were regarded in Egypt as possessors of ancient wisdom (“The Serpent in Genesis 3,” ZAW 87 [1975]: 4-5).

Little wonder then that the Garden Story describes the snake as “the most intelligent [‘arum] of all the wild animals that the LORD God had made.”” (Gen 3:1), or that Jesus urges his followers, “be wise as snakes and innocent as doves” (the same Greek words for wisdom [phronimos] and for snakes [ophios] are used in Matt 10:16 and in the Greek Septuagint text of Gen 3:1). These traditional characteristics figure in the snake’s role in Gen 3, where eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge leads to the loss of the Tree of Life.  Any reader is bound to wonder about this prohibition, and its severe consequences. Did the Lord God really wish God’s creatures to remain in ignorance?  What could the Tree of Knowledge represent, and why is its fruit forbidden?

One approach holds that what the tree signifies is irrelevant: the point is simply that the fruit of this particular tree is prohibited by God. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote,

[God gave Adam] a law as a material for his free will to act on. This law was a commandment as to what plants he might partake of and which one he might not touch. This latter was the tree of knowledge; not, however, because it was evil from the beginning when planted, nor was it forbidden because God grudged it to us—let not the enemies of God wag their tongues in that direction or imitate the serpent. But it would have been good if partaken of at the proper time (Second Oration on Easter 8).

In his novel Perelandra, C. S. Lewis reimagined the Garden Story as unfolding on a watery world in which most vegetation and animal life lived on floating islands.  Here, living on the “fixed land” was the one thing forbidden by God.  There was no reason given for this prohibition–the issue was simply obedience, or disobedience, to God’s word.

John Van Seters proposes that the Garden Story sets religious faith, which involves obedience to God’s commandments, over against the secular pursuit of wisdom: “wisdom was the origin and cause of humanity’s sin and fall” (Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis [Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox, 1992], 125-26). Certainly, the use throughout this conversation of ‘Elohim (“God”) rather than the personal name Yhwh (“the LORD”) suggests abstract reflection rather than relationship. Bonhoeffer calls this “the first conversation about God, the first religious, theological conversation. It is not prayer or calling upon God together but speaking about God” (Bonhoeffer 1966, 69).  Yet faith is surely more than rule-following, and in our Bible, the pursuit of wisdom is grounded in faith: “Fear of the Lord is where wisdom begins” (Psalm 111:10; see also Prov 1:7; 2:5-6; Job 28:28).

Others have proposed that eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil means learning the difference between good and evil, and so gaining freedom of choice.  Before, the humans could only do what God wanted them to do.  Now, having eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they have the capacity to make their own choices, which inevitably leads to their making wrong ones. So, Augustine wrote, “‘The eyes of them both were opened,’ not to see, for already they saw, but to discern between the good they had lost and the evil into which they had fallen” (City of God, 14.17). Jacqueline Lapsley suggests,

In short, eating from the tree enables one to become an interpreter—a moral interpreter—of one’s world. This is what it means to ‘become like God/gods, knowing good and bad’ (3:5; cf. 3:22). This, in the end, will be what distinguishes the human couple from the animals (Whispering the Word: Hearing Women’s Stories in the Old Testament [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005], 15).

In the story as it unfolds in Genesis, however, there is no inkling that God had previously deprived God’s creations of freedom.  The woman’s choice to eat the fruit, as Phyllis Trible observes, demonstrates careful reflection and independent thought:

She contemplates the tree, taking into account all the possibilities.   The tree is good for food; it satisfies the physical drives.  It pleases the eyes; it is esthetically and emotionally desirable.  Above all, it is coveted as the source of wisdom. . . Thus the woman is fully aware when she acts, her vision encompassing the gamut of life (Trible 1979, 79).

Eating from the tree does not convey these discriminating capacities: the Woman clearly has them already. Indeed, since both the Man and the Woman choose to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they are plainly able to make moral choices even before eating this fruit.

That the freedom to choose, and so the potential for disobedience, is given to human being from the first is expressed in Bereshit Rabbah 14. The rabbis observe that in Gen 2:7, where the Lord God creates ha’adam, the word for “formed” is spelled oddly, with an extra yod (wayyiytser).  From this doubling, they conclude that there must have been two formations.  R. Hanina bar Idi says that the duality is bound up within ha’adam: God has created them, from the first, with “two formations, a good formation and an evil formation” (BerRab 14.4, Jacob Neusner translates this as “both the impulse to do good and the impulse to do evil”).

Perhaps the best way to understand the expression “the Knowledge of Good and Evil” is as a merism, like “young and old” or “length and breadth,” referring not just to the two opposite terms mentioned, but to the entire range between them.  This would imply that eating the fruit would convey a godlike knowledge of everything from good to evil.  That is in fact what the snake promises: “you will be like ‘elohim [gods/God]” (Gen 3:5).  Indeed, after the man and woman have eaten the fruit, the LORD addresses the heavenly council:

The LORD God said, “The human being has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” Now, so he doesn’t stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever, the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to farm the fertile land from which he was taken (Gen 3:22-23).

Reading canonically, these references to the humans becoming “like God” are bound to recall to our minds the statement in the first creation account that woman and man are created in God’s image (Gen 1:26-27)–an idea not expressed in this second account, in which “Godlikeness” is a temptation and a problem rather than a promise.  But for the reader encountering these chapters together in their context in Genesis, the connection produces a magnificent irony, not apparent when reading the passages separately.

In L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, the characters all seek from the Wizard qualities that we know, from the story, they already possess: the “brainless” Scarecrow does all the planning; the “cowardly” Lion courageously defends Dorothy and his friends from their enemies, and no one could possibly be more tender-hearted than the “heartless” Tin Woodsman!  Just so, in the final, canonical form of these chapters in Genesis, the Woman and the Man want what they already have: to be like God.  But they do not realize this, and so through disobedience lose the Garden and all that it represents, including the Tree of Life.

To return to the snake: why, if the serpent in Genesis 3 is simply a snake, are the snakes we know so different?  Described when we first encounter it as the most intelligent of all wild animals (Gen 3:1), the snake now becomes the most cursed: set lower than all other animals, wild or domesticated (Gen 3:14). The curse on the snake comes in two parts.  First, it loses its limbs, and its ability to speak:

Because you did this,
    you are the one cursed [Hebrew ‘arur]
        out of all the farm animals,
        out of all the wild animals.
    On your belly you will crawl,
        and dust you will eat
        every day of your life (Gen 3:14).

Why don’t snakes have legs?  Why do they crawl on their bellies?  Why do they keep sticking out their tongues and licking the ground? The short answer, in this ancient story, is that snakes are cursed.  Because of their involvement in humanity’s disobedience, they must crawl on the ground and continually lick the dust–which is also why snakes can no longer talk.

The second aspect of the curse turns to another etiological feature of this narrative: why do snakes bite?  Why are they poisonous? Why do we hate and fear them? The Lord God declares,

 I will put contempt

Some traditional Christian interpreters (Irenaus, Against Heresies 5.21.1; Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 3.4.5) regarded Genesis 3:15 as a prediction of the coming of Christ: the Devil would strike at his heel, wounding him on the cross, but Christ would rise from the dead, and at his return crush the enemy’s head .  But as John Calvin observed in his commentary on this passage,

Gladly would I give my suffrage in support of their opinion, but that I regard the word seed as too violently distorted by them; for who will concede that a collective noun is to be understood of one man only? Further, as the perpetuity of the contest is noted, so victory is promised to the human race through a continual succession of ages. I explain, therefore, the seed to mean the posterity of the woman generally (Comm Gen 3:15).

Calvin realized therefore that this passage was not about Satan and Christ, but about snakes and people:

I interpret this simply to mean that there should always be the hostile strife between the human race and serpents, which is now apparent; for, by a secret feeling of nature, man abhors them (Comm Gen 3:15).

Calvin’s insistence upon close attention to the Hebrew, and to the contextual, historical interpretation of texts, put him at odds with many of his contemporaries.  However, his stubborn insistence on staying with the text remains a fine example for our reading of Scripture.

What is the consequence of eating the fruit for the humans?  The Garden Story says,

the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to farm the fertile land from which he was taken.  He drove out the human. To the east of the garden of Eden, he stationed winged creatures wielding flaming swords to guard the way to the tree of life (Gen 3:23).

Without access to the fruit of the Tree of Life, women and men will now die–just as God had said they would, should they eat from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.  Leaving the garden of Eden behind, the Woman and the Man now enter a world like the world that we know, where life can be brutal and hard, where pain and suffering are sad realities, and where all of us must, sooner or later, die.

But unlike the snake, the Woman and the Man are not cursed: the word ‘arur is not used for them!  The snake is cursed, even the ground is cursed, but they are not.  Indeed, God cares for them, covering their nakedness with garments God makes from the skins of animals (Gen 3:21).  In the end, this story is about God’s desire to be in relationship with us even when we spurn that relationship. We are not cursed, spurned, or rejected by God, even though the consequences of our actions wound our world and one another.

Genesis 3 is not science.  Herpetologists are happy to explain to us that snakes sense the presence of prey or enemies in large part by “tasting” the air and the ground–that is why they stick out their tongues.  They will also assure us of the importance of snakes as predators in the ecosystem. In the story world of Genesis 3, the “snakiness” of snakes is the consequence they suffer for their role in the humans’ disobedience.  But while we should be respectful of any wild animal, most snakes are neither venomous nor aggressive. We need neither hate nor fear them–especially in this Year of the Snake.

This battered crèche was a gift from my Mom and Dad for Wendy’s and my first Christmas together, now forty-three years ago.  It has been unboxed and reboxed time and again, its figures handled by tiny hands or batted by little paws–and indeed, as the unexplained placement of a sheep in the loft shows, our now full-grown mischievous sons still play with it!

One feature of our crèche, and indeed of most if not all that I have seen, is the presence of both a shepherd and the three kings.  The same was true, no doubt, of Christmas pageants all over this past year, with the baby Jesus visited by shepherds in bathrobes and sandals, and by kings in cardboard crowns, bearing their gifts of cigar boxes and shampoo bottles covered with gold and silver foil.

But of course, they do not appear together in our Bibles!  The shepherds are only found in Luke 2:1-19, while only Matthew 1:18–2:23 has the Magi.  Tradition has found a way to fit them together, suggesting that while the shepherds found the baby the night of his birth, the foreign sages came later, a year or two after the child was born.  We have even given each story its own season of the Christian year, consigning Matthew’s Magi to Epiphany!  But the stubborn presence of the wise men in our crèches and our Christmas carols shows that we have never really bought that rationalization.

A closer read reveals that in fact Matthew and Luke tell two entirely different stories.  Not only the shepherds, but also Caesar’s census, Mary and Joseph’s forced journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the angelic host, indeed the manger itself appear only in Luke.  Not only the Magi, but also the star, King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and the flight of the Holy Family are only found in Matthew.

There are of course shared elements in these accounts.  Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus’ parents were named Mary and Joseph.  Both agree that he was born in Bethlehem, but grew up in Nazareth (Mark and John say nothing of his birthplace, but also identify Jesus as being from Nazareth).  Matthew and Luke share the tradition that Jesus’ birth was miraculous, as his mother was a virgin: a truth announced to Mary by the angel Gabriel in Luke 1:26-38 and revealed to Joseph in a dream in Matthew 1:18-25, but mentioned nowhere else in Scripture (although Paul may allude to this tradition in Galatians 4:4; concerning Matthew’s citation of Isaiah 7:10-16, see this earlier blog).

Those common elements regarding Jesus’ birth, however, are woven into two entirely different nativity stories.  In Matthew, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not only because prophecy said that the Messiah must be, but also because Matthew assumes that that is where Joseph and Mary lived.  They leave Bethlehem as refugees, fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous designs (Matt 2:13-18).  Even after Herod’s death, they cannot return to their home, as Judea is now ruled by Herod’s equally wicked son Archelaus, so instead they settle in Galilee to the north, in the village of Nazareth (Matt 2:19-23).

Luke, on the other hand, assumes that Joseph and Mary are from Nazareth.  To get them to Bethlehem, where tradition and prophecy say Jesus must be born, he brings in the Roman government:

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed [Greek apographesthai; better “registered” or “enrolled”].(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)  And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)  To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child (Luke 2:1-5, KJV).

Luke’s account of a Roman census is difficult on several grounds.  First, there is no evidence, outside of Luke, for a universal census ordered by Augustus.  There was indeed a census of Syria and Galilee conducted by Publius Sulpicius Quirinius (“Cyrenius” in the KJV), the Roman military governor of Syria.  In Acts 5:37, Gamaliel recalls the bloody revolt of Judas the Galilean, launched in response to that census, an event Jewish historian Josephus also records (Antiquities 20.5.2).   But Quirinius’ census was taken around 6 CE.  Jesus was born at least ten years earlier, as Matthew and Luke (implicitly; see Luke 1:5) place his birth during the reign of Herod, who died in 4 BCE.  Finally, the whole point of a census is determining where people can be found, for purposes of taxation (as the familiar KJV rendering has it) or of conscription into forced labor or the military: which is why Quirinius’ census prompted such a violent response (compare 1 Chr 21:1-30//2 Sam 24:1-25).  It is difficult to see any point in having people go somewhere else, then.  Luke, it seems, is using the census as a plot device: to get Mary and Joseph from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem.

What can we conclude from this?  First, the gospels are neither histories nor biographies.  They are confessions, aimed at bringing people to faith in Jesus Christ.  It would be a mistake to hold them to factual standards which they do not claim and to which they do not aspire.  Trying to fold their distinct narratives into one another forces each narrative into a mold that does not fit.  Much like the two creation accounts in Genesis 1–3, or the two accounts of the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy, we need to allow each Gospel account of the Nativity its own integrity.

Failing to acknowledge such conflicts forces us to be dishonest about what the Bible actually is.  Claiming that the Bible is inerrant and infallible ultimately means leaving the actual words of Scripture behind, and substituting our own self-consistent, “common-sense” view of what the Bible must say for what Scripture actually says.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, “No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means” (“Our Theatres In The Nineties,” 1930). Certainly, Shaw had a point!  It is far easier, and simpler, to stick with what “everybody knows” the Bible says than to wrestle with what Scripture actually means.

On the one hand, the Bible continually frustrates our attempts to turn it into an end in itself: whether as an infallible witness to history, or as a self-sufficient, internally consistent rule of behavior.  The Bible is far more complex than that, as an honest reading of the text on the page continually reveals. But on the other hand, reading the Bible brings us into an encounter with the living God.  Reformed theologian Daniel Migliore put it very well: “Scripture is indispensable in bringing us into a new relationship with the living God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.”  However, “Christians do not believe in the Bible; they believe in the living God attested by the Bible” (Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Second Edition [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004], 50). The distinction is vital, friends.

One intriguing result of allowing both Matthew’s and Luke’s account of the Nativity its own integrity has to do with those visitors who come to the Christ Child: Luke’s shepherds and Matthew’s Magi.

Luke writes in excellent Greek, for an educated, Greek-speaking, Gentile audience.  Clearly, Luke was well educated, which cost money.  His gospel opens with greetings to Luke’s patron, Theophilus.  Evidently, Theophilus was funding Luke’s travels and research as he wrote his account of the life of Jesus and the growth of the early church.  In sum: Luke comes from money; his project is funded by a patron with money, and he addresses himself primarily to an audience with money.

Yet, a major theme of Luke’s gospel is the community’s responsibility to the poor.  His gospel begins with a song sung by Mary when she learns that she has been chosen to bear the Christ:

[God] has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty-handed (Lk 1:52-53).

So too, in Luke’s version of the beatitudes, we read, “Happy are you who are poor, [rather than, as in Matthew 5:3, “poor in spirit”] because God’s kingdom is yours” (Lk 6:20 ), counterbalanced by “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation (Lk 6:24).  It is no surprise, then, that in Luke’s nativity the birth of the Christ child is announced to the poor: to ignorant, unwashed Galilean shepherds!

The Magi were a clan of priests and astrologers from Persia–our words “magic” and “magician” both derive from “magi.”  Matthew does not tell us how many Magi came–the traditional number three comes from their three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh (Matt 2:11-12). The idea that they were kings from distant lands and races comes from Isaiah 60:1-6, traditionally read as fulfilled in their visit:

Still, there is an appropriateness to the tradition’s reading of the wise men as kings from three continents and three races.  After all, they come to the manger as the ultimate outsiders: not only from outside of Judea, but from outside the Roman empire itself–from the land of the feared Parthians, an armed and unstable threat on the empire’s eastern frontier. They are not Jews, either ethnically or religiously; while Matthew says nothing of their religious heritage, they would have been Zoroastrians.  Yet remarkably, it is Matthew, the most Jewish of the gospel writers, who tells their story. Matthew is the one who records a visit to the Christ Child from gentiles: foreigners and unbelievers, who come, not as enemies to threaten the Christ Child, but as pilgrims to honor him.

It as as though Matthew the Jewish scribe and Luke the urbane Greek scholar were each compelled, in their nativity stories, to recognize that the Christ Child was not the property of people like them.  Jesus has come to, and for, us all.

This year’s Christmas card features a timely piece by Christian poet and novelist Madeleine L’Engle, called “First Coming.”  Merry Christmas, friends, and whatever this new year may bring, may the joy and peace of Christ sustain you.

He did not wait till the world was ready,

till men and nations were at peace.

He came when the Heavens were unsteady,

and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.

He came when the need was deep and great.

He dined with sinners in all their grime,

turned water into wine.

He did not wait till hearts were pure.

In joy he came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.

To a world like ours, of anguished shame

he came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,

to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.

In the mystery of the Word made Flesh

the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane

to raise our songs with joyful voice,

for to share our grief, to touch our pain,

He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

A prayer for Christmas Day, from Revised Common Lectionary Prayers, copyright © 2002 Consultation on Common Texts.:

O Holy One,
heavenly angels spoke to earthly shepherds
and eternity entered time in the child of Bethlehem.
Through the telling of the Christmas story,
let our temporal lives be caught up in the eternal
in that same child,
that we might join shepherds and all the heavenly host
in praising the coming of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.

The Hebrew Bible reading for this fourth Sunday of Advent is  Micah 5:2-5.  The prophet Micah prophesied in the southern kingdom of Judah, in the middle of the eighth century: at about the same time that Isaiah was prophesying in Jerusalem, and near the time when Amos and Hosea prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel.   Micah lived and worked in Morasheth-Gath, a tiny village only 25 miles southwest of the big city of Jerusalem. 

AFTERWORD:

The Psalm for this coming Sunday is Luke’s Song of Mary (Luke 1:46-55), often called the Magnificat after its opening in Latin, Magnificat anima mea Dominum (in the KJV, “My soul doth magnify the Lord;” the Presbyterian hymnal has a lovely and vigorous setting of this passage!).  Mary’s song is a powerful reminder that Jesus would be a very different sort of King!   Here is the whole song:

With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
    In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant.
    Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored
        because the mighty one has done great things for me.
Holy is his name.
    He shows mercy to everyone,
        from one generation to the next,
        who honors him as God.
He has shown strength with his arm.
    He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
    He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    and sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel,
        remembering his mercy,
    just as he promised to our ancestors,
        to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.