HAVING MISSPENT my youth and earlier adulthood on lesser things I am left in my old age as a beginner in understanding of the Scriptures and the wider meaning which it concerns. In that I would think I'd join most of those who did spend their lives in a more concentrated study of them, the size of just the scriptures alone, their poetic inspecificity in many things, their confusing and not always agreeing multiplicity of voices - some of them clearly representing what Brueggemann refers to as the Solomonic-Temple establishment who weren't the most reliable representatives of the Mosaic religion and, I'd point out, that kind of thing is present in the Second Testament too, the Synoptic Gospels and Paul don't always agree and even more so the "Johannine" tradition that some scholars assert is quite a different take on things, well, obviously. The "Johannine community" for or by whom the John Gospel and Epistles and the Book of Revelation are asserted to have been produced is certainly not taken as demonstrated and is disputed by other scholars. But the difference between that Gospel, which is heavily featured in this year's cycle of the Catholic lectionary readings and the other three are real.
I'm going to jump out of this years cycle and go to what Walter Brueggemann said for the Monday after Lent 5 based on the Year 2 readings of Exodus 4:10-31, I Corinthians 14:1-19; Mark 9:30-41.
The Bible is a talking tradition. Its many voices attest that utterance spoken out loud is an effective force that actually does something in the world. In the case of Moses, being able to talk well matters on two counts. Moses must effectively bear witness to his fellow slaves that God can be relied on to see them to liberty. Moses also must witness effectively to Pharaoh that the power of God in the service of emancipation is real power that Pharaoh dare not dismiss. On both counts Moses' speech is effective, eventuating in Miraims dance of freedom.
The matter is very different in the church in Corinth. The capacity to "speak in tongues" was an exhibit of enormous freedom of speech addressed directly to God and propelled by God's own Spirit. Paul, moreover, boasts that he, "more than all of you," speaks in tongues.
I'll break in here to say what Susannah Heschel once asked, who could have stood to live with Paul who had the annoying character trait of always having to outdo everyone else - which I think accounts for some of his less realistic demands for personal behavior and, also, why he was so susceptible to a surprising vulnerability in regard to the appearance of impropriety in things like women speaking to the Church. Paul never claimed he was perfect, he didn't claim that for even Jesus except in so far as Jesus was perfect in being free from sin.
Such speech, however much it witnesses to unfettered freedom, by itself does not build up the body of the church. For that, interpretation is essential. Thus Paul prefers to speak "five words with my mind," that is, five words of meaningful interpretation.
These two texts invite us to reflect on the practice of speech in our social context, about the power of speech and the restraint of speech, about who is permitted to speak and who is regularly reduced to silence, about how dangerous speech may become if it is left uninterpreted, and about who has the authority to interpret. Or more personally we may reflect on the chances we have to bear witness to God's freedom outside the socioeconomic pharaonic restraints of our society or the chances we have to speak in the presence of pharaonic forces that enslave the vulnerable. Five words that make sense might be, "Let my people go free."
I should mention that today's Catholic lectionary on the Monday of Holy Week, leading to Good Friday is all about injustice and doing justice to the innocent, of Susanna and the Elders and the young boy Daniel issuing his first judgement proving the filthy old goats framed her, sending them to their deaths for trying to get her killed when she wouldn't have sex with them. That's a widely used and often abused story of justice for the innocent.
The Gospel is the story that people love to claim is a later insertion that wasn't in the original text of John's Gospel, of Jesus and the woman who was brought to him after she'd been found in an act of adultery. The similarities are obvious as are the differences, Daniel asserts Susanna was innocent, the woman in the story from John was presented as having been caught in the act. Under The Law, she was guilty and the legal punishment for that was a brutal death (interesting that they didn't seem fit to nab the guy she was said to have been found with, maybe we're to assume he got away). Jesus in the story certainly extended justice as found in the letter of the law into a requirement that those who wanted to kill her had to be without sin themselves. I don't know if the "Johannine community" shared Paul's view of the nature of Jesus which would have made him unique in the history of human kind as being the only one eligible to kill the woman but there is certainly a strong implication in the story that he might have been. He, however, says explicitly in the story "Neither do I condemn you." You have to wonder first that if people made up that story about Jesus their understanding of him and his Gospel was consistent with it. You also have to wonder at how, as soon as Christianity gained worldly power and the ability to enforce laws, that this story was immediately pushed to the back as effectively as all other lines of mercy for the clearly less radical and crueler "justice" that it clearly replaced. I don't think people who would have heard that story any number of times in church if not having read it on their own could have been totally unaware of the discrepancy between it and the laws they made and enforced.
I'm tempted to go into how you have to make that leap in generosity to get to egalitarian democracy but will just stop at mentioning that I think it is an important point in making secular governance less than depraved. "Justice" goes to hell without it.
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