It May Be Too Late In The West To Try The Counter-Triad Of Jesus But We're Not Going To Get Anywhere Unless Some People Do

Overlapping with where I left off on the second segments of Walter Bruggemann's Slow Wisdom As A Subversion Of Reality

But I will not linger over that counter-triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty that waits silently for us, because that triad is too outrageous and too remote from our business at hand.

Instead I will consider the counter-triad that Jeremiah and his poetry lines out.  It has a kind of available realism that is lacking in Jesus of Nazareth, a realism that permits people like us to take it seriously.  Jeremiah says, "but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me that I am the Lord that I act with steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the Earth, for in these things I delight says the Lord.  

This counter-triad is rooted in the reality of the Lord the God of Israel who is celebrated as the great deliverer from slavery and the Creator of heaven and Earth. And, says the poet, even in the midst of greedy corruption and external threat, some know.  They are the ones who boast my stuff, they know Me, they have entered into covenant with Me, they have acknowledged my will and purpose, and they understand me, they can factor out the implications of who I am and what I will, and that is what makes the tradition endlessly compelling. They were the ones who gave Jeremiah trouble through the night and buoyancy through the day.  What they know and understand is that I act with steadfast love, justice and righteousness, I delight in those things. And because I delight in those things, this People and this city are under mandate to live them out, out of the deep covenantal tradition of Israel Jeremiah offers a triad of fidelity that stands counter to the triad of control that was destroying Israel.

It is very late in Jerusalem but nobody knows if it is too late. Sometimes the poets like Jeremiah said it was too late, too late for the Ethiopian to change his skin, too late for the leopard to change its spots, too late for the Solomonic regime to repent, too late because of internal corruption.  And other times these same poets thought it was late but not too late. That the urgent task was to move the body politic with its marching armies and its blessing priests and its cunning scribes away from the triad of control toward the triad of covenantal  fidelity and when that move is made then a new historical possibility might yet be available because it is very late.  

You must see the similarities with us, in the United States, our electoral democracy on the ropes, our system based on an idealistic false-front put on our own embrace of the triad of control, our better natures straddling the possibilities we imagine in the triad of control, what those will get us and the false-front which is certainly not in the triad that Jesus embodies but is in an insincere and false personal-national profession of something vaguely reminiscent of the triad of Jeremiah, though more like what the Temple priests and the more pious of the scribes might have articulated - their version of cable-TV religion and corporate media. 

I will note for anyone who finds Breuggemann's knowing use of the passage about the Ethiopian disturbing, that what is offensive about it is right there in the text of Jeremiah 13:23 for anyone who wants to engage with it to face and deal with.  So I'll deal with it.

Can Ethiopians change their skin
    or leopards their spots?
Then also you can do good
    who are accustomed to do evil.

In today's language, is the propensity to do evil a biological attribute like the coloration of our covering?   Clearly no one can change their coloration while Jeremiah is, in fact, telling the People of the Jerusalem establishment and the entire nation that they CAN change from doing evil to doing good.  The inherent racism of thinking an Ethiopian, an African, would somehow improve themselves by changing their race is a dangerous metaphor now, though not necessarily then, not in that context.  It should bring us up short, not because of Jeremiah and the People he was talking to but because of OUR racist heritage, in culture, in commerce, in our Constitution, which might be a triad for us to consider in the same way this discussion does.

Being somewhat taken up with such questions, I will note that the modernist, Darwinist-genetic belief from as soon as Darwin published On The Origin of Species answers the questions, including whether or not we can choose good over evil in the negative because all of them are presented as the results of physical causation that is not changeable, from the earliest development of the theory of natural selection,  that claim of fixed personality was used both to advocate the killing of or sterilization of criminals AND RACIAL MINORITES (eugenics) and as an excuse for why doing the very same things that the criminals did in a limited context for entire societies and nations to do because it was a "law of nature" for them to commit genocide and steal the land and resources controlled by other people IS AN EXPRESSION OF BIOLOGICAL SUPERIORITY AND, THEREFORE GOOD!   And if you want to argue that I'll give you the quotes, the citations and the links to back that up but don't whine at me that I'm going over it again when you do.  If you don't like the metaphor as used in the Bible, the Darwinists and their like don't mean it as a metaphor but as scientific racist truth and scientific racist law.  But you're not allowed to point that out.

I do want to say that I very much appreciate what Brueggemann is saying here, knowing that a world so steeped in ever more intense versions of the triad of control is not going to soon or is even in the foreseeable future going to take the triad of Jesus as an alternative. He advocates for the possibility of something more like the triad Jeremiah articulates in carrying out his career as a prophet.  We do, after all, claim to believe in something closer to that now, the cover-story on our firm embrace of the triad of control.  I do, though, think it is not enough, no where near enough.  Some people have to hold out for what Jesus lived and advocated, if for nothing better than to pressure things past the triad of control.

I don't have the time to go into it but I think this article by one of her friends and colleagues, protesting the advancement of the canonization of the woman who didn't want to be canonized and turned into a harmless cartoon, Dorothy Day, pointing out how her image and name are being used to falsify her life and mind and work by bishops and others strikes me as a good example of someone who tried to live closer to the triad of Jesus and what happens when someone does try to follow Jesus.  St. Francis is used the same way. 

Also, this article about the consequences of racism in the church.