Our Redeemer

Our Redeemer

The Hebrew word goel or gaal ( גָּאַל) means “redeemer”.  It occurs in the Hebrew text over 100 times.  The most famous use of the term is the story of Ruth and Boaz, where Boaz acts as Ruth’s kinsman redeemer.

The story is a beautiful and romantic tale of love and character and honor (a sort of Rom-Com of the Biblical variety: boy meets girl, girl pursues boy, boy purchases girl (and her mother).  Anyway…

The whole “redeem” part gets lost, I think, in not so much the translation as in the passage of time and the change of culture.  It’s perhaps worth taking a stroll through the ancient near Eastern (ANE) cultural landscape to look for meanings which have been obscured by our modern Western filters.

Life was hard for our ancient ancestors.  Go back even two generations and life was orders of magnitude harder.  Throw in the absence of electricity, running water, sewage, etc. and you have a potentially brutal life.  What made matters worse for anyone was isolation from your community, your tribe, or your family.  Your whole identity was tied up with who you belonged to: your tribe.  This fact of life was true for all cultures in the ancient days, and it was certainly true in the ANE, where Ruth’s story takes place.

There’s a famine in Israel.  Elimelech (his name means “God is the King), a man from Bethlehem, decides to load up the family and move to Moab, like the Clampetts.  He takes his wife Naomi (her name means “pleasant”) and their two sons.  Tragically, Elimelech dies leaving Naomi a widow.  At least, she is not left destitute because she has her two sons to care for her.  Her boys marry Moabite women, outside their own tribe, because that’s all they had around there, and I suppose the Naomi family set up shop in the land of Moab, foreigners in a foreign land.

Then, the wheels come off: Mahlon and Chilion (Naomi’s sons) die.  Now, Naomi has a real problem.  Whatever land or possessions she might have acquired during her family’s sojourn in Moab were now forfeit.  Woman could not own land.  Her only choice was to return to Bethlehem and beg for food.  Surprisingly, both of her daughters-in-law decide to return with her.  Naomi, bereft of husband and sons, and therefore bereft of protection and provision, encourages these girls to stay in Moab.  Orpah decides to stay in Moab, but Ruth makes a profoundly moving alternative decision: “Where you go, I’ll go.  Where you stay, I’ll stay.  Your people will be my people.  Your God will be my God.  Where you die, I will die.”

Did Ruth understand the implications of her decision?  What could have possessed her to express this loyalty?  (All the daughters-in-law everywhere are aghast, no doubt.)  But Ruth is also prophetic in the sense that she truly became entwined into Israel.

But they are two poor widows with no prospects and no protectors.  Naomi is so bitter at what’s happened to her that she says even her name is Bitter (Mara) from now on, not Pleasant.  Hard to condemn her for that: she literally had nothing.  But God the Provider (Jireh) offers unexpected hope for them both through the hands of Naomi’s relative, Boaz.  Read the whole story for context, but here’s the gist.

Boaz and Ruth meet.  Boaz redeems Naomi, his kinsman, by buying Elimelech’s field (Naomi could not own it because of that whole woman-not-owning-stuff rule).  When he buys the field, he buys Ruth, who becomes his wife.  Boaz redeems Ruth (and Naomi).  By law and custom, when a poor relative is redeemed by a rich relative, their relationship changes.  The Redeemed does not become slave, but they “belong” to the Redeemer in a special way.  Not property, but especially close family and in some way beholden to the Redeemer.  So, Ruth “belongs” to Boaz.

Boaz and Ruth have a son they name Obed.  If you’ve been following along, you know that Obed’s son is Jesse, the father of Israel’s King David.  And down through the years, along comes Jesus, the son of David.  Jesus, the Redeemer of mankind.  As we are in the place of Ruth, the redeemed bride, we belong to our Redeemer.

Love Your Neighbor

Love Your Neighbor

We may learn quite a bit about how to answer the famous question, "How then shall we live?", by understanding Jesus in His original context, as a First Century Jewish Rabbi.  Placing Jesus in His historical and cultural context may or may not change your theology -- your beliefs about WHO God is -- but it will certainly take the black and white words of the Biblical text and render them into vivid Technicolor®.

When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, he was being asked to do what contemporary rabbis were often being asked to do: teach me how to live in a way that pleases God and ensures me a place in the world to come.

Anyone who has read the story knows how Jesus answered: love God with all your heart, soul, and might (from Deuteronomy) and love your "neighbor" as you love yourself.  His interlocutor, either a wily lawyer or an inquisitive teacher of the Torah (depending on your predetermined biases about the pharisees), asked Jesus who should be regarded as neighbor.

It seems an odd question.  To our ears, our neighbors live next door or around us.  Of course, we know who our neighbors are.  They are the ones who lend a helping hand or who borrow tools or who come to our cookouts.  Some we like, some we don't.  But we do not need to know who they are, do we?

The cultural stew into which this question was cast makes this a more interesting topic.

The translation of the Jewish Bible being read at the time of Jesus was a Greek translation of the text called the Septuagint.  The Septuagint uses the Greek word “plesíos”, which is derived from “pélas”, a word which means near or close.  The Hebrew text of Leviticus 19 has the word “rey’akha”, which is most often translated as “friend” or “companion.”  This is obviously a different connotation than neighbor, which is someone who lives near you.

So what do we make of this?

The Jewish sages are pretty clear about the implications: Leviticus 19:8 commands the faithful Jew to love his fellow Jews, and only them.  Not so fast.  Jewish teaching on the command in Torah is more nuanced and includes both narrow and expansive interpretations of who our neighbor is.

Which brings us to Jesus and his questioner.  He asked Jesus who is his neighbor, and Jesus tells one of his most famous parables: the story which has come to be known as the good Samaritan. 

Anyone who’s read outside the text knows that the Samaritans and the Jews in Israel inhabited a mutual hatred society.  To the Jew, Samaritans were half-bred pagans whose forefathers abandoned the faith years before, and with the abandonment, abandoned the spark of divinity which lay within every human.  In other words, Samaritans were animals to most Jews, less than human and worthy of contempt.  Some commentators have suggested that a member of either community wandering alone through the land of the other was likely to be the victim of murder.

It is therefore more than remarkable that Jesus chose as his model neighbor a member of the most-hated class of people.  Moreover, Jesus tells us he was more neighbor than the others.

How then shall we live?  We shall live by loving those among us who are the most un-lovable.

Welcome back.

Welcome back.  What's been happening?

So, in the years if hiatus, a few things have changed and a few things have not.  A hotelier-cum-reality show star has become the most powerful man in the world.  Homosexual marriage is now the law of the land.  Celebrity culture dominates the landscape, from every corner of the globe.  Terrorists and their sponsors (same thing) use every means at their disposal to disrupt normal society.  And free speech is now illegal in its birth country.  

But some things do not change.  Unborn babies are still being murdered at an astonishing rate.  Un-hinged gunmen are still shooting up gun-free zones.  And arguments around these divisive topics seem to generate more heat than light.

So why come back to this little, un-visited corner of the blogosphere?  Good question.  Perhaps we need to vent, some place other than Facebook.  Perhaps in a form that requires longer word structures than 140 characters.  Perhaps there is something worth saying which will be said...at least occasionally.

This blog is named for the Second Thief, crucified with Jesus, traditionally known as Saint Dysmas.  Like our namesake, this blog knows his abject humility before God's Righteous Lamb.  He knows he is justly condemned for his crimes, while Jesus is innocent and un-stained.  And like Dysmas, he prays that his Lord will take him up into Paradise at the renewing of the world.

And this Dysmas will have things to say...at least, occasionally.

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

We Protestants seem to be more uncomfortable with Mary the mother of Jesus than centrist Republicans are with Sarah Palin.  We cannot criticize her because that would be risky, but we certainly cannot praise her because that is too close to worship.

Okay, so the comparison breaks down pretty quickly.

But it seems to be the case that we talk to each other about Mary at very specific times and in very specific ways.  We use carefully chose words so as not to cross the imaginary line between “respect” and “worship”.  I read a blog post from a sincere and well-meaning Baptist pastor (I am presuming that he is) about Mary.  He asserts that we should “venerate (or worship) her but that we should hold her memory in great honor” (sic).  This view is not dissimilar from what many of my fellow-traveler evangelicals would also hold.  But it seems to me that a confusion reigns in the minds and hearts of Protestants over this Mary enigma.  Perhaps some discussion is in order.

In the first place, what is the difference between “honor” and “venerate”.  Several versions of a typical thesaurus list them as synonyms, close cousins with “revere”, “cherish”, and such.  What practical difference is there for the believer?

In the second place, why the cautionary tone?  About what are Protestants in a dither?  Perhaps a little reflection on the Great Commandments might be in order.  The LORD gave Israel Torah.  Prominent in Torah are the Ten Commandments, of which we find the first:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  You shall have no other gods before me.

Exodus 20:2-3

Jesus taught that the Shema captured the Greatest Commandment:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Deuteronomy 6:3-4

So, an aversion to false worship is well grounded in our Hebrew roots heritage, and also affirmed by our LORD Himself (Matthew 22:36-40).  And if someone were to worship the created thing (that is, Mary) rather than the Creator (the Almighty One) he would be engaged in false worship (perhaps it could be called “idolatry”, but this would be a loose definition).

But what then do we make of Mary?  How should we regard her, if we want to give her the respect, honor, veneration, etc. she is due, without veering into idolatry?

The reasons for giving this consideration are significant.  Firstly, she is the very model of the humble follower: “I am the LORD’s servant.  May your word to me be fulfilled,” she said, foreshadowing her son’s words in the Garden (“not my will, but Yours be done”).  Her character and submission are exemplary for all Christians since then.

Perhaps most obviously, she is the very first human to be “Christ-bearer”, a calling we are all asked to undertake.  Hers is a literal bearing of the Messiah.  And as such, she is Mother of God. 

This one, I think, gives us Protestants some trouble.  “Wait a minute, Dysmas,” they might say to me.  “Nobody gives birth to God.  He is the uncreated one who existed before all things.”  To which I will answer: was Jesus not born?  And is Jesus not God?  “But Dysmas, she gave birth to his human nature only.”  And I will reply, humbly but firmly, mothers do not give birth to natures.  They give birth to children.  Is Jesus fully God and fully man?  (This was settled way, way back in church history at the Council of Ephesus – yes, THAT Ephesus – when Nestorius’s heresy was refuted.)  Mary is the Mother of God, a role she took on and carried willingly and humbly, perhaps even with the knowledge that He was born to die (Luke 2:35).

So, how then shall we live (with regard to our treatment of Mary)?  I agree with the blog writer who says we should honor her (without the Protestant condescension which seems typical).  And as “honor” and “revere” are really the same, I am going to go so far as to say I will revere her.

After all, Elizabeth gave us the model, when – filled with the Holy Spirit – she proclaimed upon greeting the God-bearing Mary: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!”

Saved from Death, not saved from sin

“Jesus came not to make bad men good, but rather to make dead men live.

This phrase is often said by many Christian teachers (Fr Stephen Freeman, Ravi Zacharias, Rev Robert A Connor, Leonard Ravenhill, etc.).  According to Zacharias, this is a fundamental difference between the Way and other moralizing religions: it is about conquering DEATH (as St. Paul writes in 2 Corinithians: “where is your sting, Death?”).

The Orthodox takes this underpinning a bit further, or rather, carry out the theological implications to their ends.  Our disease is not sin; that is merely a symptom (perhaps the chief symptom).  Our enemy is Death. 

In meditating on this premise, I have been brought to consider the Jewish feasts which Jesus and His followers celebrated year-by-year for all their lives.  As Christians who have been adopted into – grafted into – the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we do not usually keep those Feast Days in any religious way.  And we tend to read about them as facts of history.  Some of us may read of them as symbolic types which have their true fulfillment in Messiah.  Okay.  Good enough.  And I am not writing to complain about “Judaizers who want Goyim to become Jewish” or “anti-Nomians who reject any rules”.  Rather, this is a narrow consideration of the meaning and significance of Passover.

The story of Passover is God’s deliverance from the Angel of Death who afflicted the firstborn of all Egypt (and anyone who did not shed the lamb’s blood and decorate their doors with it).  Passover did not forgive their sins or atone for their sins.  Passover’s sacrifice delivered from Death.

Jesus died on the Cross at Passover as our Sacrifice Lamb.  His shed blood is our escape from Death, just as the blood on the first Passover was Israel’s escape (Israel and anyone who came under their tent).  The angel of Death passes over us because of what Jesus did, as the one perfect sacrificial Lamb of God.

Jesus came to make dead men live.

Nate Pyle over at From One degree to Another has written about the man's responsibility in the lust problem.  Find it here.  He is spot on right.

Authority

How do we know that Scripture is “scriptural”? 

February 9, 2012

Among the range of various local evangelical church’s statements of faith is usually – perhaps even first – some affirmation about the perfection of Scripture.  The National Association of Evangelicals places it first in their list of seven essentials:

We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.

From my own home church, an EFCA body, is this:

2. We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.

These representative evangelical statements both assert the infallibility of the Bible (as long as it is confined to the 66 Canonical books only, and does not include the so-called Apocryphal books).  While the NAE leaves the implications of its statement as inferences one must draw, the EFCA’s draws those implications out more concretely.

Leaving aside the differences in form, function, and priority, I am shocked into a question about the assertion itself.  From whence comes the authority to make these declarations about the Bible?  How do we know such things – how do we dare assert such things – about ancient manuscripts?

To borrow a bit from the ancient Scribes who questioned Jesus: “Who gave this authority?”