The Relevance Of Our Irrelevance (And Vice Versa)

by Chris Haw

Contrary to an American Christianity that is more generally ready to use the battles described in Joshua as a blank check to invade other countries, reading these accounts with a nonviolent lens does not seem like a stretch. This is because the majority report on interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures for Christians is that we are to read them through Jesus — a person whose familiarity with Hebrew history and program toward his enemies is quite clear. While I have not utterly resolved this tension between the teachings of Jesus and the conquest narratives, I have found it very important that Jesus’ nonviolence is connected to his theology of land: only the meek can inherit it (not, take it), an echo of the Abrahamic promise.

The Bible — or, more precisely, the people and life-tradition it represented — then came into being through a group of Middle- Easterners in the midst of the major dramas and upheavals of early civilization. The Abrahamic people, however, were marginal, on the bottom of the pile in the midst of neighboring slave-holding, colony plundering, nation-conquering powers.

In fact, though there are Middle Eastern myths far older than the Genesis tale, the biblical account represents the world’s first systematic ideology of resistance to the project of civilization, and it is produced by a people who had front row seats in the historical drama, surrounded as they were by empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia.⁶

How’s that for relevant!? Wow: the first systematic ideology of resistance to civilization. This people’s resistance to images and idols, their exodus from the places of power, and their resistance to the temptations of kings and temples (more on this later) all display the Hebrews’ work to become a people “set apart” from the world for the sake of the world. They, with the inspiration of God, imagined a better, healthier world. It was their peculiarity that marked their blessedness, their difference and irrelevance to civilization that marked their true relevance to the world.

NO KING BUT GOD

The only way Abraham’s descendants participated in “the system,” in “moving world history,” was through situations like a lucky slave getting appointed to a higher position. This is the case of Joseph in Egypt, an empowerment arrangement which eventually dissolved back into a larger enslavement of the whole people of Jacob — that is, Israel. After their crippling enslavement in Egypt they came out of the land of the Nile and Pyramids, like Ur, with a luminous new vision — even joined with new bands of deviants, a “mixed crowd,” joining the Divine Liberation.⁷

These former slaves worshiped a revolutionary God so greatly contrasted with the other local sovereignties that this God was seen as sovereign over all proximate gods. As most anthropologists would tell us, the “gods” of Mesopotamia often correlated with the Powers that be. Kings were deities, idols were parliamentarians, the “invisible hand” of the marketplace was the work of the gods. It was a world enchanted with divine metanarratives employed for the sake of the status quo. Religion bolstered the state. But Israel, in its embodiment of an alternative to them, represented a people of unbelief. They would not bow to the visible gods of the marketplaces and palaces. They looked with disdain upon the accumulated wealth of cities like Jericho — coveting their plunder was considered evil. They regarded the ziggurats of Babylon (portrayed in the tower of “Babel”) as a symbol of arrogant and imperialistic monoculture, an architectural middle finger to God.

This critical distance from the power-centers of Mesopotamia would be echoed later in history when members of the Roman Empire saw Christians as “atheists,” even at times, “haters of humanity.” For some onlookers, Christians were too strange and irrelevant. To all of the “development” and “progress” of mighty Rome that so shocked and awed the world, one might say that the Judeo-Christian community, in the least, “didn’t buy it.” The people of God had no faith in the patterns of Empire. Indeed, pledging allegiance to a human emperor entailed a rejection of the divine Emperor. Which takes us back to ancient Israel. Again, John Yoder writes,

The covenant [between God and Israel] was in its origins an alternative both to the Mesopotamian and to the Canaanite models of ‘kingship,’ as one can see already in Judges and 1 Samuel. Israelite identity was not defined first by a theoretical monotheism, by cult or kaschrut, nor by the Decalogue. It was rather defined by the claim of the tribes to ‘have no king but JHWH/Adonai.’⁸

I suppose this is why the period of Israel’s monarchy is excluded from the constitutional text of the Hebrews (the Torah).⁹ Rather, it is included in their Scriptures only by means of critical reflection of their history. As Yoder stated above, 1 Samuel 8 is one place we see the later Jewish scribes critique the period of Israelite kings. Second Samuel 7 also levels just as harsh of a condemnation of how misguided God considered the austere temple project. This may shock modern Christians, but the temple was a project of “relevance” — Israel emulating the world around it. Building temples to house gods was commonplace in the ancient Near East. Considering that these Bible passages describing the temple project were compiled and edited long after their historical events (likely in Babylonian captivity in the 6th century B.C.), I agree with much of the recent biblical scholarship that we should not read these as cut and dry “history.”¹⁰ Rather, they represent communities of Jews, having lived through the failure of Israel’s project as a nation, retelling and interpreting their people’s history and mistakes, claiming where they had made wrong turns. They would come to see their acquisition of a king and a temple as an affront to God. Their relevancy project had failed, and they, as refugees in Babylon, needed to learn anew to sing Zion’s song by the waters of the Euphrates.

But wasn’t God glorified through wise kingship and temple worship? “God made the best of our compromise,” is much of the spirit of this Jewish history-telling. Take, for example, how God resisted the appointment of a king. As Israel stubbornly insisted on having a king “to be like the other nations,” who undoubtedly seemed more powerful, God “allowed” one — but not without a twist. God appointed a small shepherd who didn’t even make the first cut, one who was considered feeble and weak (David). (Saul, however, in his respectability and strength went insane.)

Power is not gained by warriors and chariots — and the Gideon story (of trimming an army down to nothing) mirrors the pattern of David. These people would live in a political constitution unlike Egypt and Babylon: God will fight for us; we only need be still and obedient. This is a declaration that defies modern logic and fear. It is abandonment to the God of the desert — a refusal to play the game of “shaping world history.” God is most powerful when we are as weak as slaves — this is what the Exodus, Passover, and the Resurrection have in common.

Regarding the temple, as 2 Samuel 7 stated, God didn’t want a house, but would rather make Israel into a “house.” But even as Israel persisted to build one, God said that a warrior cannot build it. Again, God improvises: having spilled blood, David cannot build the temple; only Solomon, a man of peace, could. And later, in Jesus, the temple too is turned upside down when he mingles talk of it with his body (“tear down this temple, and in three days...”). Ultimately, Israel’s temple story is deeper than the piling up of stones; the real and divine temple is not in the ostensible glory and magnificence of a building, but it is in the people of God where YHWH dwells, the Body of Christ.

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Comments

Tim Leonard

My understanding of Jesus is that he was of Israel, the Northern Tribes, not Judah, the southern tribes that insisted upon a King and a temple. Israelites, as I recall, tried to be faithful to the desert, where God was -- exemplified in the feast of Succoth. When he entered Jerusalem on an ass, it was guerilla theater shining a light on the fact that Temple Worship and the corruption of the priests would destroy Israel. Some Jewish friends of mine understand the current State of Israel in the same way.

The Torah, then, written during the period of and within the culture of Judah is an admixture of justice, peace and bellicosity. (Kind of like Irish Catholicism.)

After 75 years of unprecedented peace with the indigenous tribes of Pennsylvania, the French and Indian War broke out, and the Pennsylvania Assembly was under pressure to join in. The Quakers who had dominated the assembly until that time withdrew, and became a people "apart." And yet, they did not abandon their commitment to the gospel, educating girls, blacks, and Indians, and writing tracts that eventually caught the attention of the British Parliament to abandon the slave trade.

Being in the world but not of the world is far from easy. Individuals and communities need to sort out how to resist the Powers -- how to be Israelites, as was Jesus.

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