I'm Almost Back

NOT A VERY EXCITING week, no thrills or danger (except of insolvency)  just tests and nothing conclusive.   Not As Seen on TV.

The Unmovable Moral Bedrock That Other Moral Positions Rest On And The Difference

I'D INTENDED to get right back to Louis Boudin's Government by Judiciary this morning but that will have to wait, perhaps as long as a week, I may be out for several days, maybe longer, a health issue has sprung up and it may either be relatively minor or major, we'll see.

I would highly recommend that if you have access to the two volumes of his study, it is more relevant today with the out of control, Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court about to send us back to the very period which Boudin knew if not something far worse and, as it is clear, the Constitution not only doesn't have any controls on the out of control, unelected, lifetime appointed tyrants in black robes, there is no legal mechanism for even forcing them to not be openly dishonest crooks and nest featherers.   We do something to change that on the most basic levels or things are going to go entirely to hell.

-----------

It was the farthest thing from my mind to write something so internal to the Catholic Church this morning but this passage from the National Catholic Reporter by the very erudite Michael Winters touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately, the modernist trap of moral relativism that might be more dangerous than the other traps of convention and orthodoxy that it was invented to counter.  The issue, a letter written by some of the worst Catholic hierarchs complaining about the German Conference of Bishops, most of those named by Winters are men I have little to no respect for and several who I rather despise but he concentrated on one of the signatories to the thing that he has some respect for but who I know nothing at all about:

At the meetings of German Catholics earlier this year, the synodal body publicly voted for a document calling for women deacons and for involving laypeople in the selection of bishops, as well as calling for a relaxation of the rule of celibacy for the clergy and for some kind of blessing of same-sex unions. Previously, the bishops of Scandinavia voiced concerns about "the direction, the methodology and the substance" of the German consultations as did the president of the Polish bishops' conference.

Last year, when some of the preparatory documents for the German meetings were released, Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila issued a 15-page criticism. He was one of the signatories of the current letter as well. And most of the other signatories are not surprising: Cardinal Raymond Burke; Cardinal Francis Arinze; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco; two retired archbishops, Charles Chaput and Joseph Kurtz; and various other prelates. Several of the names coincided with the lists of bishops who voiced support for disgraced former nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò when he called on Pope Francis to resign. That was a much graver issue than this letter to the German bishops.

One name on the list of signatories jumped out at me: Bishop Michael Warfel of Great Falls-Billings, Montana, who was at the meeting of bishops and theologians in Chicago last month, and whom I always think of as a pastor first and foremost, without any special ideological baggage.

I wrote to Warfel and asked why he signed it. "As I've read about the Synodal Path and the Fundamental document produced from it, concerns surfaced," he replied in an email. "From what I have read, there is an indication of a desire to change Church discipline and doctrine. While there are ample disciplines that may be adjusted, e.g., mandatory celibacy, doctrine is a different matter, especially when the delegates of the Synodal Path indicate irreformable doctrine."

Warfel said he was worried about the German process sowing confusion. "There is one statement in particular that caught my attention and caused a bit of heartache: '…there is no one truth of the religious, moral and political world…' This comes from the Fundamental Text document. To me, it sounds a lot like, 'Well, that may be your truth, but it is not my truth.' This can easily lead into relativism."

As I said above, I have come to view moral relativism as an extremely dangerous thing, one of the things that is driving us into a plutonium dark age in which even the truth is held to be both meaningless and not worthy of any protection against the most degenerate and dangerous of lies - which might get me back to the Supreme Court and its decisions but I'll forego that for now - but, really?

The list given by Winters of signatories to the attack by North American, Australian and other bishops on those in Germany is telling; Cardinal Raymond Burke; Cardinal Francis Arinze; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Charles Chaput and Joseph Kurtz, who Winters notes were "vocal in their support of disgraced former nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò when he called on Pope Francis to resign." 

A number of those men openly supported Republican-fascism and Donald Trump, the flower of modern moral relativism - a better name for which would be the denial of the existence or importance of morality, even as they wanted to use a pantomime of morality as a political, social and economic tool against other People.   There has been no act of moral relativism of more serious consequence than such putative religious figures supporting the amoral degeneracy of Trumpism.   And there is no Archbishop living today who is more of an embodiment of relativistic moral degeneracy of that kind than Carlo Maria Viganò,  his ersatz moralistic and superstitious politicization of Putin's invasion of Ukraine in his war against Western politicians, especially the second and, I assert, most Catholic president in American history, President Biden, have been so extreme that even many on the Catholic far-right have broken with him.  

The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops has more than enough to reform about its own moral relativism, in full operation right now and for all of its history.   They could start with practicing truth and real honesty.   I suspect that, Winters' respect for him aside, Bishop Michael Warfel of Great Falls-Billings, Montana is barking up the wrong tree in going after the German bishops.  It doesn't say just which issues the German bishops have spoken on that got his back up but I suspect it is the typical ones for U. S. bishops, communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, the ordination of Women, LGBTQ rights - especially LGBTQ rights and marriage equality - which he sees as unacceptable moral relativistic change.  Until JPII made his dodgy declaration that the issue of Women's ordination was a closed one, I suspect he may have not included that one on such a list - the issue of such declaration by even a pope who got himself canonized but not in the formula of so-called infallible teaching reminds me of nothing so much as the hijinks of the U. S. Supreme Court.  Usurped powers are seldom usurped for doing the good.

I think it's notable that there is a moral issue, a moral absolute that is behind those contentious items in the conservative bishops' agenda that is as basic to the entire monotheistic tradition that Catholicism is a part of and that is equal justice under God, not under artificial, humanly created "law".  The rights of Women, of LGBTQ People to live their lives, exercising their own ownership of their bodies, their own right to act in full moral and political equality and under the same commandments of justice and love and to follow any calling they perceive to ordination or marriage as anyone else is an unmovable rock.   

I can't speak for Women but I can speak out of the experience of being a gay man.  It is as possible for consenting, adult, gay men to use sex and sexuality as morally or as immorally as anyone else.  I have, repeatedly argued against the irresponsible practice of many gay men in promiscuity, sexual acts which have a high risk of spreading disease and causing harm, of using sex to encourage and practice inequality, sexual practices based on abuse and pain, promoting feelings of superiority and inferiority, sex which was not an aspect of faithful, committed love and the practice of treating other people with love, both in a committed relationship and as a part of the wider society.   I have condemned writers who discourage that as they promote the immoral and, perhaps worse, amoral use of sex in selfish and transactional terms, denying the ability of, gay men, especially, to form honestly faithful and committed marriages.  

Children cannot give real consent to sex.  Their sexual abusers have no legitimate right to the support of anyone, LGBTQ or straight.

Certainly the priest-sexual abuse scandals prove that the Catholic Church hierarchy, in reality, with the full knowledge of those up to and including Popes, has contained the reality of widespread sexual immorality among the all-male priesthood.   We now know that there was widespread criminality as well as merely knowing retention of criminal child rapists within the active priesthood, assigned by bishops and Archbishops to rape again in new assignments sometimes without even other priests being informed, certainly none of the parishioners were.  We can be quite certain of that, it is impossible to imagine, even in the pre-Vatican II period that the laity would have put up with a known child rapist acting as a priest, probably not even in a parish far distant from them.   

NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY DENY IT, THAT IS SOMETHING WHICH CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM THE VICISSITUDES OF A "CELIBATE" ALL-MALE PRIESTHOOD and the shrinking numbers of those willing to take up that profession.   Those Catholics who have pointed to other denominations with married clergy who have also sinned as a defense of the unmarried, all-male priesthood can't change the fact that every aspect of the Roman Catholic priest-sexual abuse scandals is intimately related to the rule of all-male "celibacy" for its clergy.   And, I would say, it's what you can expect of ANY institution when it's dominated by an all-male, exclusive power holders with an interest in keeping things as they are.

And we know from the released, often pried loose, documents concerning the scandal that that situation was no secret among the hierarchy.  In the article linked to it says:

Asked if sending such a public rebuke really fit the definition of synodality, Warfel replied, "I actually view the open letter more as frank dialogue. Pope Francis has emphasized the need of dialogue." He added, "I think a confidential or private letter would not garner much attention from the German bishops. I also do not believe a confidential of private letter would remain so for very long. As [former Vatican nuncio] Archbishop [Pietro] Sambi said to me long ago, before I was appointed to Great Falls-Billings and had heard about the appointment before he called me, 'It's hard to keep a secret in the Church.' "

They were certainly able to keep some secrets from the wider public, if they were secrets they really didn't want to get out.  They also know how to leak as well as any other holders of power do. 

That is something which all of these orthodoxy-supporting hierarchs, those who have acted with moral responsibility as well as those who should have been indicted and convicted of aiding and abetting child rape choose to be a part of, even now.   There is no group in the Catholic Church which has earned the distrust of the public more than those who hold the most power in it.  The all-church Syodality effort by Pope Francis is, I am certain, his attempt to broaden the power base, opening it up to the laity, Women too.  Which is one of the real reasons that a lot of the bishops have opposed, thwarted and monkey wrenched it.  The letter which is discussed in the article looks like part of that reactionary effort, to me.

It would seem that the German Bishops are among those who have heard and taken the wider voice of The People of the Church into consideration, which accounts for why their agenda might seem terrifying to the conservatives among the Bishops.  

The U. S. Bishops, like the members of the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court can choose to ignore even the most vital issues for people they lord it over but who they aren't directly concerned with.  American "democracy" full of anti-democratic features is truly bizarre and increasingly unworkable.  In the Senate, that makes them value the anti-democratic atrocity of Senate Rules more than they do democracy, what leads the Supreme Court to its even less democratic and anti-democratic holdings and why so many of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are so entirely out of touch with the lives of Catholics, especially when those Catholics want the bedrock of justice within the very real reality of their own lives.   An Archbishop, even one who might have the respect of Michael Sean Winters might understand the problem of seeming moral relativism but he misses that what seems relativistic to him is actually resting on that bedrock of justice and respect for individuals and their real lives, something that even those who wrote the scriptures might not have understood in their world in their times and customs but which the ongoing Creation has revealed to us, today.   Maybe you have to be a LGBTQ member to sense the moral bedrock that should govern your actions while someone outside of it only sees what shocks and scares them.  Enough gay men seem to be unseeing about that, but you can say that about any group.  Straight men aren't universally aware of it either.

Easter - We Live In A More Complex Reality Than Fits The Rules Those Rules Don't Produce The Common Good

Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,  and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.  Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

1 Corinthians 15:1-8  NRSV 

THE EARLIEST information we have about Jesus being raised from the dead is in the letters of Paul which, clearly, also indicate that Paul taught the earliest Christian converts he convinced those things before he felt it necessary to repeat that in letters to them.   And he indicates that he was also taught that, almost certainly when he met with Cephas (Peter) and James, almost certainly the brother of Jesus and to other people he knew and, by his testimony, through his own encounter with Jesus raised from the dead.  No doubt Peter and James and the others who had known Jesus before his execution taught him many other things that he didn't otherwise know.   

It's not out of the question that the earliest witnesses to the Resurrection, Mary Magdalene, the other Marys mentioned in the Gospels, Salome, Joanna, etc.  might have talked about that with Paul but he doesn't say, maybe he didn't trust the women's testimony or maybe he figured he shouldn't bother to mention them because the people he wrote to wouldn't figure that their testimony was trustworthy.  

Just what the Resurrection that is mentioned means is a mystery.   The accounts of even Paul with the risen Jesus are clearly not like you'd encounter someone else, it's in this world but not described as being like something you'd expect in this world.  If that makes it more or less believable to anyone is as it is but one thing it means is that, as described, naturalistic, materialist-scientistic deductions won't dismiss it on any other than a choice to not believe what's said.  The ol' Second Law of Thermodynamics ploy that I got pulled on me when I said that - probably most of those pulling it couldn't tell you why they might believe that would apply - doesn't suffice to answer the claims. 

You're free not to believe it, if you pressed me on exactly what it means I will freely tell you I can't tell you because I don't know.  Catholics are, maybe, more comfortable with admitting that there is a lot about life which is mysterious at its least mysterious and this is something that is entirely mysterious, not even the skeptics agree on the basic terms of what's being argued.  I don't think naturalistic arguments are all that good at really explaining much of anything, not even the observable motions of the simplest and most safely generalized movements of physical objects - even the definition of what physical objects are is problematic when you try to get to absolute knowledge, not to mention their actions and what causes those actions.

We live in a more complex reality than fits the rules the mockers want to insist we play by.  And even they don't want to play by those rules, themselves as they pretend they do.  

"Liberal Christians" is a term that has about as much use as "conservative Christians," which is not much.  You have to define your terms.  Which "liberals" and which "conservatives" do you mean?    As in political ideology, the problem with "liberal" is whether you mean those who try to approximate the radical justice economics of the Sinai tradition of the Prophets or the even more radical economics of love to the point of abandon and trust that Jesus taught or do you mean the materialist "liberalism" of 18th century and later scientism?   I believe in the earlier form of liberalism, I am entirely skeptical about the second one.  Science should be a. kept within what its methods can legitimately tell you about, b. always be admitted to, by design, exclude morality and its consequences and so is useless to do what you must accept moral laws in order to achieve, a good and decent life on the basis of equality and common good.  Science might get you some products but it will never produce the common good.  

Abandon and trust out of love, what Jesus taught was not easy to take, it certainly isn't for the affluent, not even in the relative affluence of the American middle-class.   It's what got him killed, it's the motive behind 18th century "liberal" rejection of religion, the wealthy didn't want to get nagged about having to give away their hoarded wealth in church.  That's also what's behind the pseudo-Christian heresy of the prosperity-gospel which is one of the most dangerous lies you can hear from pseudo-Christians from FOX and the Republican-fascist party, the worldly clerics of the Catholic Church to Putin and the incumbent Patriarch of Moscow as he follows the Czarist trappings of state nationalism which are rampant there. 

Do you have to believe in the Resurrection to have that?  I don't know, it sometimes seems that those who profess that belief less are better at putting some of that into practice.  You have to believe the teaching authority that asserts that pretty strongly to put it into practice and it's clear even those who proclaim the Resurrection the loudest don't believe it enough to even try. I doubt that we're going to see the billionaire and millionaire backers of pseudo-Christianity sell all they have, give the money to the poor and take up their cross.  If there's one thing you can say about the alleged religion of such "christians" on the basis of authoritative definition, it is "by their fruits you will know them."  The man they claim to believe is God gave that rule, though they have no intention to live by it.

Do I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus?  Do I believe in the theology of that developed by Paul, especially in Romans, and the other writers of the New Testament and the earliest Christian theologians that Jesus is the first and we will follow to eternal life?   I certainly hope it's true, especially if the universalists are right that all will be saved.  I reject it's known to not be true or possibly true as those under the influence of the musty, cobweb encrusted positivism will insist,  and reject as an irrational insistence that any questioning of their framing is "meaningless."  That's a trick no one should fall for because it's just bullying, not a matter of logical consistency or necessity. 

Rather than belief, I can give a definite answer that I have a hope that it's true because the possibility of that looks like a way of life and not a way of death.   I hope that hope is enough, if it isn't I hope for definite belief.  If you want to reject that as a choice and not an argument, everything anyone is ever going to have on this - short of an experience like Mary Magdalene's or Peter's James', etc, or Paul's - is a matter of choice because there is nothing else to put that off on to. 

Lamentations of Jeremiah for Holy Saturday

 

You Have To Choose - There Is No "Objective" Mechanism You Can Put That Off On To

IN THE ATHEIST FAD OF THE OO's I shocked some people online when I pointed out that in many cases history is capable of producing some far less conditional and ambiguous facts than even physics can.   I gave the example of the date when the Nazi government invaded Poland, which any rational person looking at the documentary evidence would acknowledge to be certainly and reliably known.  That wouldn't, possibly, keep liars and the willingly gulled from denying that evidence but such deniers would have, even then, I assumed, rightly be seen to have discredited themselves for any honest, rational consideration.   At least the kind of honest, rational consideration that used to be the milieu in which serious adults operated in most of their lives.   That assumption has undergone extreme revision in witness to the Trump phenomenon and the journalistic and judicial handling of its blatant lies.  Now the treatment of many I once had some respect for of Putin's lies.

I still hold that that is one of the potential strengths of history, especially when that is an honest, non-ideologically controlled view of and analysis of what primary documentation there is of what is being studied.   

Of course, history being something created by People, it is vulnerable to all of the practices and procedures, for good and bad, that humans will bring to it.   There is nothing in human culture, even the most exact sciences that is not vulnerable to human folly, weakness and dishonesty and, most of all, our limits.   About history as an academic study, we are allowed to admit that, about the sciences, we are generally required to deny that, especially in the milieu of modern intellectualism. But anyone who looks at the historical and continuing record of retractions and scandals in the scientific literature and the fact that even physics and chemistry sometimes undergo minor and, periodically, major revisions of even some of its most basic current holdings can't rationally hold the naive, ideological faith that science produces absolute truth about some of the simplest, most reliably generalized phenomena of the physical world.  And much of what is included in "science" is nowhere near as possibly rigorous as physics and chemistry. Some of it is, I would assert, less rigorous than the best of history.

I think the rigorous methods of history can do, sometimes about some things, what science never could about extremely complex phenomena of human experience, produce absolutely reliable knowledge.  But not about everything.  In order to get on with that you have to maintain a level of faith in the reliability of the evidence of history and that evidence has to be subjected to a rigorous evaluation as to its reliability, though there is never going to be an absolute and objective means of doing that.  NOTHING IN HUMAN CULTURE IS POSSIBLY REMOVED FROM THE LIMITS OF HUMAN MINDS THAT PRODUCE THAT.  The idea that there is any such thing as "objective truth" is a myth created by ill-considered and non-rigorous thinking about whatever is under discussion.   

It was one of the great achievements of modern physics that it finally admitted that the act of human observation could not be removed from the science of physics as a major and necessary component of its results.   I think that is something which will, actually, withstand any level of future testing because it is a basic, foundational condition under which any science, history, philosophy, religion, political behavior, etc. will ever be done.  We can't escape our own limits and our own necessity of acting and thinking from our own location and times and experience, at least not while we're confined to physical bodies with the limits that physicality imposes on us.   If those who believe that the soul continues on are right, perhaps we will, then, enjoy a freedom to find absolute truth that is impossible for us now. 

The complaints about what I've been writing about during Holy Week impinge on the question asked by Pilate in the Passion story as told by John, 18:33-38

 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him,  Are you the King of the Jews?”  Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”  Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”  Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”  Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” 

NRSV

It's easy to hear Pilate drawl that question in the tones of a bored, cynical, college-credentialed, modernist.  When those like Richard Dawkins and his fellow atheists rail against the "post-modernist" skepticism about the declarations of science, especially the imprecise sciences such as so many of them are high-priests of, if they had more discernment they'd know that comes from the same place they pioneered in their materialist-atheist-scientistic dismissal of so much of non-science.

Jesus does not answer the question but he did.  He testified to the truth.  Pilate didn't have the prerequisites that would allow him to understand it.  There is no easily or quickly given answer and none that won't be accepted by those who don't want to believe it. 

Having started in on Luke Timothy Johnson's book The Real Jesus - which I honesty had not intended to use as much as I suspect I will, now that I've re-read it - in Chapter 4, The Limitations of History,  he starts by pointing out something seldom taken into consideration:

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the spate of Historical Jesus books is their authors' assumption that "history" is unproblematic.  They apparently think there is no need to define what is meant when the term "history" is used since none of them bothers to do so.  The confident contrast made, without any further explanation, between "faith" and "history" assumes a shared understanding of those terms. 

In fact, however, the nature of history and the historical is deeply problematical.  It is not clear how aware the authors of these books are of the problems.  What is clear is that they are trading on popular rather than critical understandings.  In popular usage, the term "historical" is often opposed, for example, to the mythical with the assumption being that one refers to "what really happened" and the other to "something that is made up."  In popular usage, the historical can likewise be opposed to the fictional, with the same implied contrast between what is "real" and what is "made up."  In short, casual usage bears within it the implications that "historical" equals "true" and "nonhistorical" equals "false."  The Jesus Seminar exploits this popular distinction when it speaks of its historical deliberations delivering "the real Jesus" in contrast to the "Christ of faith," who is by implication somehow less than "real." 

It is important to sort out some of these claims.  A good start is to consider in a straightforward way what the business of history is,  what its problems and possibilities are, and how these apply generally to the study of early Christianity.  Then we shall be in a better position to think more clearly about "the historical Jesus."

And that, my friends, shows that the book is worth the time spent reading it and re-reading it.  He goes on in the book to investigate just how problematic the problems are and that the methods of voting on what experts think doesn't really do much to mitigate those problems.  Those problems we will always have with us.

Johnson's book is a quarter of a century old, now, as is the product of The Jesus Seminar,  it was written just at the start of the widespread use of the internet, the e-mail debate I linked to a couple of weeks or so ago among Johnson,  John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg may have been one of the earliest such debates I've come across.  It wouldn't have fit on Twitter or been tolerated on most third-party blogs I was aware of.  Such is the popular degeneration from even those more  promising uses of the internet.

I think a lot of what Johnson assumed about the sophistication of even those on the PhD level, distinguishing between history and fiction was naively complementary of the educations of those within our "educated class" because it was one of the most shattering discoveries of interacting with even sophisticated academics online that a dangerously large number of them either can't or choose not to discern those distinctions on a routine basis, especially when the topic is a matter of ideological polemics.  

I found out that many people with such credentials regularly believed that overtly fictitious books and movies were historically reliable, even in the case of Shakespeare in Love when you could produce the quote by the author who admitted that every single thing in his screen play was fiction, in the case of The Crucible when the age of the characters made it clear that Arthur Miller's story proved he hadn't done much in the way of research - unless he wanted us to understand his hero was a child raping pedophile, for which there is no historical evidence - you can find some brawls about those and  me mocking the historical credulity of the college-credentialed such as I've encountered online.  Perhaps my feeling that Biblical Studies and, especially, theology are conducted at a somewhat more rigorous level of self-doubt than much of the rest of academic life, these days is somewhat accurate.   Like the scientific study of psychic phenomena, they always know they're facing against strong headwinds and conduct their research accordingly.  At least sometimes.

I don't remember which historian of philosophy once summed up the 19th century as "the century of ideology" but I don't see any evidence that the 20th or 21st century escaped that through "analysis."   I think it's possible that the adherence to rigid ideological loyalties and preferences is as bad as that ever was.   And a lot of it doesn't even rise to the level of the ideological but is more like a tribal identity than having even the intellectual rigor that the debased adherence to an ideology requires.  

This meditation on Pilate's question is more random than I'd intended it to be because the longer I go on the more complex it is.  I think that's what you get when you try to find absolute truth on the basis of logical analysis of evidence, I think in the end, you have to make a choice.  You have to choose.  That's a choice as old as Deuteronomy 30:15-20, the choice of the way of life and the way of death.  You are free to make the choice, there isn't any way you can foist that off to some alleged oracle of "objectivity."   You can choose the truth and it will set you free or you can choose something else, fiction, make-believe, being fashionable, being "more popular than ever," nationalism, racism,  etc. and it is the way of death.  

I have to admit that it was about the time that I read Johnson's book that what I'd gained by reading Crossan's The Historical Jesus was shaken, though the choice I made from reading it didn't change.  I will say that one of the earlier problems I had with it came from me reading a translation of The Gospel of Thomas which I'd had hopes for from reading Crossan's evaluation of it.  Reading it didn't do much for me.  The idea that it was not, as Crossan claimed, based in what might have been among the earliest traces of the literature but a later production influenced by the canonical Gospels made sense to me.  I haven't gone into Johnson's skepticism over Crossan's claims about an "earlier version" of the apocryphal gospel of Peter to support his entirely unevidenced claims about what became of the body of Jesus.   I do remember wondering what Crossan based his unequivocal declarations about that on.   I believe it was hearing him make the declaration that "the dogs ate it" on a talk show even before reading his The Historical Jesus, that I wondered what evidence he had for that and found, on reading the book, that he had no evidence at all.

I say that while saying I still respect Crossan's scholarship more than I do a lot of what gets out there.  I just don't believe a lot of what he concludes or claims based out of that assumption.  Like I've said about someone I respect far less, Carl Sagan, when he's based solidly on factual evidence, he's very good, when he goes much farther than that, not nearly as good.  I remember that I was at first very hostile to Luke Timothy Johnson when I first encountered what was written about him because I thought he was unfair to the Jesus Seminar, but then I read him and I had to admit I found him persuasive on many points, especially because he was so honest about what he believed to be on the basis of faith, something which the more would-be scientific academics seldom if ever admit to.

Lamentations of Jeremiah For Good Friday In English

 

Here is part of it chanted in English from St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church in Houston, Texas. 

 

The chanting of the Lamentations on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday is a very old tradition.

Holy Thursday Chant In English - The Lamentations of Jeremiah For Holy Thursday

THE TRAD-CATHOLICS have ruined the posting of Latin language music for me, I wouldn't want to risk doing anything that encourages that atrocious misuse of the venerable musical tradition that used Latin texts, reducing that to oligarchy-funded Catho-fascist political pantomime.

Here is an English language chant for the Lamentations of Jeremiah for Holy Thursday.  If I can find the translation being used online, I might post that later. 

 

Complaints, Complaints Complaints, that's all I get! - Hate Mail Before The Triduum

The Director's voice vibrated with an indignation that had now become wholly righteous and impersonal - "If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum,  I shall ask for your transfer to a Sub-Centre- preferably to Iceland."

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 

I USE THAT spelling of "antisemite" because it was recommended by the fine historian of antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt.   I'd used variant spellings of it in the past but figured I'd go on her authority even though we have serious differences on just what it is and what it isn't.  As to the rest of that, see the comment I broke my Lenten resolution to post yesterday.

I write for public posting despite the fact that I have vision difficulties and have a very hard time reading what I write without great magnification, sometimes I can't get complete passages on the screen as I'm editing so I can see it all at once, it's not unusual for parts of sentences to get cut out and not put back during editing.  

The spelling, I'm indifferent to the standard spelling of English, I said before if they'd make it even more approximately phonetic so as to cut out the absurdities of the standard spelling I might care enough to conform to it but the snobs with the knack for visual memory and the majority of those who cravenly pretend to, have control of academia and the media so nothing so rational and humane is going to happen, not within my lifetime, at least.  So screw it.  

The spelling of names is so variable that anyone who was a grownup would get over someone misspelling their name, anyone who is offended by that should be advised to grow up.  I find it amusing when someone calls me "Andrew" or even funnier "Andy." 

Let's see, what else have people been whining about?

I make no apology for saying the forbidden, what makes the lazy, college-credentialed middle and upper-middle class and above furious.  The name on the masthead indicates you can expect that if you come here.  In my case the forbidden isn't the safe, conventional, bourgeois,  pseudo-transgressive and thrilling (for the stupid and lazy) stuff that is pretended to be forbidden but which never has been forbidden.  I mean things like telling the truth about scientific and other racism, bigotry, the encouragement to selfish, stupid, indulgent, childish bad behavior, it's what's really a thought crime in late 20th, early 21st century English speaking and "Western" "civilization" advocating equality, democracy, the truth and noting that if we don't suppress lies and unprivilege corporations and level the ultra-rich to levels where they are not a clear and present danger to us all, we are doomed. 

The college-credentialed class are as apt to kick down as the rest of cowardly humanity, they're afraid to take on the rich and so powerful.  That's why they were such suckers for the "anti-political-correctness" bullshit when that started in the 1970s. And when they're not doing that they're doing the lazy slacker version of Don Quixote, tilting at pretend windmills that they don't even have to risk getting on a horse to go at.  Christianity is their safest target for that kiddie's game.   You want something that'll get you in trouble, try going after the Warren and later courts' "free speech-press" rulings that have been such a boon for the fascists and neo-Nazis and Republican-fascists that they're the biggest fattest fans of those these days.   Play-lefties are the biggest suckers on the planet. 

Update:  When I cited Luke Timothy Johnson a few days back I didn't intend to harp on what he said, but I did and then I went back and re-read his book The Real Jesus and he's on my mind now.   

He made an interesting statement once, that he'd rather have lunch with the heretic Anglican Bishop John Spong with whom he had enormous differences on issues important to him about religion than he would some televangelist who professed to believe many of the things that Johnson believed in, as I recall he mentioned the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, etc.   That's because for many an orthodox Catholic who believes in those will, from reading the Gospel, Paul, the Prophets, etc. will find themselves to be far more of a political radical for equality and justice on the basis that they believe those are stated to be the will of God as taught by Jesus, Paul and the Prophets of the Jewish Bible.    I have never been more of a radical than I am today and I was considered a flaming radical for more than a half a century, even when I professed to be an agnostic.   Though I'd just as soon not have had lunch either with Spong or the televangelists.  I really wouldn't have wanted to have lunch with any of the EWTN crew, especially that nasty nun who started it.  

"Liberal" "conservative" the conventional meanings of those don't work.  I'm a lot more interested in if someone really believes in equality and the common good, those are the real radical positions.   I am a workers-own-the-means-of-production socialist, I am, in almost every case, opposed to the government owning,  as I am shareholders owning those.  I think when shareholders control wealth egalitarian democracy is endangered if not doomed.  Capitalism is unillegalized theft, state capitalism is just the capitalists getting direct control of the government as well as the wealth.  That's what "socialism" devolved into meaning, which is why the word is useless for anything productive, now.

Hate Mail

IT STRIKES ME AS MILDLY SAD that Julian Lennon can't think of anything more original and meaningful to contribute to the cause of support for the People of Ukraine than to intone his old dad's old, old, old, thread-bare, tuneless, vapid, dreary dirge.  I'd imagine you know which one just by that description.   

But I have a policy to not comment on the relationship of children and a parent who abused, neglected and belittled them.  It strikes me as sadder than Frank Sinatra jr. used to seem to me.

I wish the kid had found his own voice.   

Other than that, no, you're right,  I don't care about it.  

Aren't you glad you got me to say it? 

Friendly Commentary And Hate Mail

RMJ HAS A  much more informed commentary on my posting about John the day before yesterday.   As I said, I'm not even a beginner and these issues have a huge body of scholarship with so many points of view it's hard to imagine anyone really mastering it as a topic.  Good information of where to go with the topic, too.

It's worth noting that there are Jewish Christians today,  it's not something that ended c. the second century or even the forth century.    Being sort of Catholic Plus, that's what I'm most familiar with.   As I've noted here before, there have been Jewish Popes, certainly Peter and Evaristus would have been considered Jewish.  I'm convinced that's how they probably saw themselves.   There have been powerful converts in the clergy and even high in the hierarchy, Juan de Torquemada, the uncle of the infamous Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada was a Cardinal elector, was from a family of conversos, was something of a Pope maker in several papal elections who used his influence to shield other Jewish converts from discrimination.   His nephew obviously had power and used it for other ends. 

In the modern period the late Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger was Jewish, he left instructions to put up an inscription in Notre Dame where his body is in the crypt there along with other Archbishops of Paris:

Je suis né juif. J’ai reçu le nom de mon grand-père paternel, Aron. Devenu chrétien par la foi et le baptême, je suis demeuré juif comme le demeuraient les Apôtres. J’ai pour saints patrons Aron le Grand Prêtre, saint Jean l’Apôtre, sainte Marie pleine de grâce. Nommé 139e archevêque de Paris par Sa Sainteté le pape Jean-Paul II, j’ai été intronisé dans cette cathédrale le 27 février 1981, puis j’y ai exercé tout mon ministère. Passants, priez pour moi.

A translation of the relevant sentences would be. 

 I was born a Jew.  I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aron.  Became a Christian by faith and baptism, I remeain a Jew as the Apostles remained Jews.  I have for patrons, Aaron the Great Priest, Saint John the Apostle, Sainte Mary, full of Grace.  .  .  

When he was made an Archbishop he said:

I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.

The Chief Rabbi of Paris said he went to the Synagogue to recite Kaddish for his mother who was murdered by the Nazis. 

He was prominent enough that he was considered a credible candidate to be Pope after JPII died. 

Though he was a very conservative Catholic, when he was named Archbishop the vile Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre spoke out against it, antisemitism and even Holocaust denial has found a home in Lefebvre's schismatic sect,  The Society of Pius X.  Which I like to think means that such people don't find the Post-Vatican II church, even its most conservative part, a comfortable home for them.   Even the conservative two most recent popes wanted to leave that as a sin of the past.

I will admit that in church politics and politics in general, I find one of the Bishops Lustiger, JPII and Benedict XVI came down hard on, Jacques Gaillot, to be entirely more admirable.  One of a number of liberals he had a hand in sandbagging.  He was a conservative and, if you want to consider me a Catholic, I'm on the far left.  Though I don't think those labels help much if accurate description is the goal.

There was another recent Jewish Auxiliary Bishop, Jean-Baptiste Gourion, who among other things was assigned to advise the movement of Hebrew Catholics who I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually gain the status as an official Rite of the Catholic Church, with their own distinctive liturgy, tradition and hierarchy.  

And there are figures such as the martyr St. Edith Stein whose work I'd like to know more of but there's only so much time to read.  

I don't have any right to comment on how Hebrew Catholics view themselves, that's their right and their place to do that.  They're Catholics as much as anyone in my family ever was.  I don't know much about Protestant messianic Jews so I won't comment on that.  I like the idea of Catholics who keep The Law,, or at least take it seriously enough to try to, worship and pray in Hebrew, etc.   I like that a lot more than the trad-Catholic stuff with its idolatry of the Tridentine mass- or, rather, their comprehension of it as a talisman of their neo-fascist politics.  

Now, aren't you glad you made me say it?

Notice

TO LET YOU KNOW I'm intending to continue with excerpts from Louis Boudin's Government by Judiciary after Easter because the Supreme Court is out of hand, lawless, corrupt and solidly in the hands of increasingly brazenly partisan Republican-fascists and the defective Constitution has no real means of constitutionally forcing them to behave ethically or morally or even lawfully, they are, in fact, a collection of life-time petty monarchs who are a law unto themselves.

The dangers of the Court to equality and even unequal electoral democracy are as serious a danger as the United States has ever faced and part of that serious danger is the fact that alleged liberals and leftists are suckers for what has created that danger and I see no reason to believe that the media will ever alert people to it even as it gets worse and, in fact, deadly.

The media may bewail the part that lies have played in this but their self-interest leads them to discount or ignore the fact that if we allow the mass media, the corporate media to lie with impunity, there is no way to protect equality or democracy as long as the media can lie with impunity.  That is how we got here, starting with the election of 1968, there is a direct line between where we are now and the election of Richard Nixon that year and a line back from the Nixon win that year and the Sullivan Decision of 1964.   The decision that gave the media permission to lie with impunity.

Yet Again The Always Needed Commentary On John's Extremely Troublesome And, Variously, Valuable Gospel

BEING LESS THAN A BEGINNER in this sort of thing, I have to admit that I find the scholarly writings about the Gospel of John some of the most confusing and confounding aspects of looking more deeply into the Scriptures.   The disagreements over the often fraught, confusing text, sometimes at odds with the synoptic Gospels (which also have odds among themselves) is enough to make you throw up your hands if, as beginners will, you expect to find one final, convincing description of it.  I will tell you one thing I have learned conclusively, we don't have access to that one final, convincing point of view on it.   On any of it.   So that is typical of all human texts dealing with just about anything of any more real life complexity than pure mathematics.

Of course when the cycle in the lectionary comes to the year that concentrates more on John for the end of Lent and into the Easter time,* the troublesome use of the word "Jews" in that particular Gospel forces us to contemplate the origins and long-standing sins of antisemitism, antisemitic murder and genocide, discrimination and stereotyping, much of it derived from readings of the Gospel of John, ignoring the fact that John is as explicit as the other Gospel writers and those who wrote the rest of the Second Testament in noting that Jesus was a Jew as were all of his closest followers, those who are presented as being saved or, at least, had expectations of being saved as well as those who play the role of villains in his narrative.  

In noting that Creation didn't stop when Paul expected it to but has gone on for two millennia and that along with that change, which is the ongoing act of creation, it's certain that today, after the genocides of the mid-20th century, many of the variant understandings of  the Gospel of John in those approximately 1900 years was not only wrong, they were malicious and evil.   Out of the several papers I've read online on the topic, this one by Reverend Lawrence E. Frizzell, D.Phil. of Seton Hall University, goes into great detail, noting the very different uses of the word "Jews" throughout the text and how later writers such as Jerome and John Chrysostom exacerbated through their misunderstanding,  the very complex and often confounding text of John, trying to tease out of it meanings that are certainly wrong.   Frizzell presents a lot of variant readings of John's Gospel to show that what he used one word for, "Jews" means at times the Temple Priesthood and its functionaries, other definable groups of Jews who were not included in that elite, all of the Children of Abraham, and how what is said in the Gospel is likely indicative of the complex late First Century relationships between Jewish believers in Jesus who were being expelled from synagogues - most of whom, if not all of whom, considered themselves to be Jews and how events such as the Bar Kochbar revolt, the attitudes and beliefs about him among various groups of Jews in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and other extremely complex issues that most later writers and commentators may well have known nothing about.   

In one of his lectures Luke Timothy Johnson points out that we probably know more about the First Century Middle-East than was even known to the best of scholars at the beginning of the 20th century.  And with that knowledge should come an appreciation that a lot of the most fraught issues of New Testament interpretation and the role that later,  often quite ideologically interested commentary had in creating some of those fraught conditions that a more informed reading of the texts - APPRECIATING THE COMPLEXITY REVEALED BY THE CONTRADICTORY LITERAL READING OF THE TEXTS WITHOUT THAT BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE.  

In Frizzel's paper he admits that some, maybe much of what John says is more of a reflection of conditions in the late 1st century, several very turbulent decades after the death and Resurrection of Jesus and the passing of the generation who were there to witness his life and ministry, to testify to his Resurrection.  He specifically says that we can't rely on the Gospel of John to come to a view of "the historical Jesus" while admitting the value of much of it.  Having so recently written again about the story of The Woman Taken in Adultery and have written about the account of Mary Magdalene as the first witness to the Risen Jesus, the one Jesus ordained with the role of Minister to the Apostles, I certainly don't reject the MEANING of everything in it as I will admit that it is one of the most difficult books of the New Testament and is undoubtedly cited by those who interpreted it maliciously in the past two thousand years.  

I would note this passage, Chapter 8: 21-59 because it contains just about all there is to be seen in the problems of John's inspecificity when talking about "the Jews" in a context that probably has more to do with the hostilities among various factions of Jews, those who believed in Jesus, those who didn't, the, no doubt, different factions within those two categories, keeping in mind the tendency of groups to internally hold some of their most violent and inflammatory talk for those within different subsets of the set of all Irish (some of the stuff said about those accused of pro-Brit sentiments is hair raising), French (those who claimed to be involved in the resistance [an ever expanding number] to those accused of collaboration) and Americans  (as someone online recently said, the Republican-fascists really do want to disenfranchise us, and that's not counting tens of thousands of those who want to kill us) . . .  Note that as the argument continues and gets more heated, they even accuse Jesus of being a Samaritan, from what I understand it would probably have been like an antisemite calling someone "a Jew" today.   Perhaps even the author of John's Gospel shared in that prejudice. **

That later Roman and Greek gentile commentators had no knowledge of or appreciation for the complex background against which the Gospel of John and, to an extent, the other books of the Bible were written is to be taken for granted. Whatever insights they may have had on some things that seem to still be of value, they're worth taking into consideration.   But much of what they said was out of ignorance and out of sin.  

That passage from Chapter 8 noted that Jesus said that salvation would come to those who followed his word, not lying and, certainly, following his commandments to love not only those who were your family and friends but those who opposed you.  

Those commandments are some of the ones that Christians have hardly taken as binding while they investigate the sex lives of other people with such minute scrupulosity and look for the least sign of infidelity with their own, entirely sectarian codes and rules and creeds.  

If Jerome, Ambrose and Chrysostom had been careful to keep that stuff out of their commentary, if John had been more careful to designate just who he meant when he abbreviated their identity to "the Jews" (I wonder if he did that in the way of early scribes because paper was rare and expensive, something that should always be kept in mind) centuries of evil could have been avoided, perhaps.  People do have such a habit of being able to find their way to doing that, which we should all confess and keep in mind to avoid.

*  The paper notes that the post-Vatican II Catholic lectionary has used the Gospel of John a lot less than previously.  

The Fourth Gospel is not proclaimed throughout the three-year lectionary of the post-Vatican II Roman rite in the same way as the Synoptics.  Certain passages of John are introduced sporadically in "Ordinary Time.  John 4:5-42; 9:1-41 and 11:1-45 are chosen for the third, fourth and fifth Sundays of Lent in Year A.  These dramatic passages are used as well in the two years when catecumens are progressing through the revised Rite of christian Initiation for Adults.  . . .

He goes on to note that any use of the Gospel should be accompanied by rigorous instruction that prevents an anti-Jewish understanding of them, no doubt on the basis of that potential being proven in the whole history of their misuse and the evil that has come of that.

That said, it's never been my experience that antisemites, other racists, misogynists, queer-bashers take the teachings of Jesus that seriously, the commandments to love opponents and even enemies, those who say mean things about us, etc.  I've never noted them to be especially pious and, in the several experiences of threat and violence I've experienced from them, they are quite willing to take The Lord's name in vain,  blasphemy is the dialect of their mother tongue, which is lying.

** For Christians of any age to grasp the message of John, they must be imbued with a deep understanding of Jewish worship in the Second Temple Period. 

In other words, hardly any but a few rare specialists in such topics will really be able to get a lot of what John wrote.  I will note that if this is true then the author of John and his intended audience must have been Jews because he would certainly have written it differently if he didn't expect his readers to get the distinctions and subtlties that he'd never have expected gentiles to get. 

Perhaps the single most devastating statement about "the Jews" in the Fourth Gospel is the Accusatory dictum summarized as "Your father is the devil" (8:44).  In this text (or the tradition behind it) the background for the phrase "synagoge tou satana" (Apoc 2:9, 3:9).  Rather than showing an appreciation for the Jewish heritage of Jesus and his Gospel, the Church Fathers (especially Ambrose and John Chrysostom) and later generations of Christian teachers used this image of the diabolical to describe the synagogue and Jewish prayer in their own times.

In reading the whole argument that Jesus is having with a specific group of People - no doubt they were the ones he was making admonitions to, not "the Jews" as the whole nation, as later antisemites would read it.  As I said, I think John almost certainly would have considered himself to be a Jew, maybe one who was sore about having been kicked out of the local synagogue.

These [later Christian] preachers and writers did not realize that the intense pitting of life against death, truth against falsehood, God against Satan in John was a literary approach that derived from polemics between Jewish teachers of the age.  They must have understood that the reprimand of Jesus to Peter "Get behind me satan!" (Matthew 16:23) was an admonition rather than a declaration of definitive rejection.  Unfortunately, it suited their purpose to construe this debate among Jews being the children of God and of Abraham so that Jesus seemed to be making an eternally valid condemnation of all Jews of all periods of post-biblical history, except those who converted to Christianity.

We should now explain that, like the prophets of earlier times, John the Baptist and Jesus exercised the function of mokeah, "admonisher" to their peers as teachers of the ordinary people.  Name-calling was a method commonly used to shake those judged to be complacent leaders into a realization of the effect of their instruction  Sometimes a title, such as "guides to the blind" would be reversed (see Romans 2:19, Matthew 15:14; 23:16, 19, 24) to startle the opponents into a reflection on their work.  Because misinterpretation of Scripture could be attributed to the devil (see Matt 4:6) erroneous teachings might be wittingly or unwittingly diabolical (see 2 Cor 11:14-15).  Scandals or obstacles to the faith of the "little ones" must be avoided at all costs (see Matt 18:6-10).  But, on the other hand, in situations of conflict or disagreement, people should harken to the advice of Gamaliel:  "Any group of human origin will break up of its own accord,  but if a movement comes from God you will not be able to destroy them,  but you might find yourselves fighting against God" (Acts 5:39).

I doubt that Ambrose and Chrysostom and almost all later commentators on this would have had much if any understanding of that background.  We, on the other hand, have access to a level of knowledge of the necessary primary texts, many in their original languages, many in English and other translations, so many of the modern commentaries on it which take those as a more reliable guide than late Classical, medieval - even some current traditionalist commentators on them, are likely far more accurate.  It's not unlike what I've found with studying other controversies I've gone into, Darwinism and its relationship to eugenics, the U. S. Constitution.   It's one of the tragedies of the internet that with all of that so available that so much of what else is put on it is sheer evil, some merely banal in its evil, much of it far worse. 

Note:  Reading through this, again before posting it,  I have to point out that, just as John's use of "the Jews" is, the word "antisemtism" is extremely problematic in itself.  The word has radically different meanings depending on what AND WHO it's used to describe.  

The "antisemitism" of those who want to convert Jews to Christianity is certainly not the same thing as the biological-eugenic antisemitism, the antisemtism of someone like Voltaire who attributed malign stereotypes to Jews based on their biological inheritance or the later, materialist, "enlightenment" forms of that as found in German romanticism and pseudo-scientific linguistics, Darwinist eugenics (English as well as Nazi-German and other) and on to the post-WWII genetic neo-Nazism which has found a home both in English language neo-Nazism and in evolutionary psychology on an academic level.   

There is all the difference in the world as to whether someone wants to convert you and, if you choose not to convert,  to leave you alone, or someone who wants to kill you whether or not you convert to Christianity, especially to those who also reject Christianity.   I've noted before that the German antisemite who invented the term to make his hate more sciency, the bizarre Wilhelm Marr,  hated Christianity as "the new Judaism" which he dis-credited with bringing Judaism into the gentile world.  

To call all of those wrongs the same thing is anything from confusing to unhelpful and in many of the uses of the word, now, for many things which are not remotely anti-Jewish, unjust.   And far worse than that, when it is used to label People. 

Witness To Crucifixion

THE CONTINUING NEWS of the Putin invasion of Ukraine,  Russian's support for it (apparently we can forget any dreams of them overthrowing his gangster mob rule), resurgent Republican-fascism, the fondest dream of Putin for us, the "free press" freed to lie and propagandize promoting it, the New York Times doing to Democrats in the mid-terms what it did to Hillary Clinton even as it made a pantomime gesture of endorsing her, the perfidy of Manchin and Sinema in the goddamned Senate, the Republican-fascist Roberts Supreme Court proving what Louis Boudin said about government by judiciary more than any court since the Taney Court, lower courts and alleged prosecutors hampering any attempt to bring Trump and his thugs to justice, the media and the comedians playing their role in that and a hundred other things that could be named has made this one of the most difficult Lent's in my experience.  

Now we're at Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week with evil closing in all around us.   

That's how I'd be going on if I were going to write a post but I think instead, something that might be more worth while is to recommend Sr. Mary McGlone's weekly column on the Sunday Liturgy:

Today, we begin the most solemn, liturgically charged week of the year. When we recite the creed, we bow at the memory of the Incarnation, and this week reminds us that the ultimate effect of the incarnation of Christ is that human nature participates in God.

While that can be said simply, the church’s prayer this week leads us to realize that it happens through a long and difficult process of watching Jesus be stripped of human power so that we can learn something about what divine power is.

Luke, like Matthew and Mark, tells the story of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life as if it were the opening of a theater production with a well-prepared script. We could say that Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem had been in process since the moment described in Luke 9:51 when, shortly after the Transfiguration and the conversation with Moses and Elijah about his “exodus,” Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” Now, with carefully chosen vocabulary, Luke tells us that Jesus was “ascending” to Jerusalem.

Before arriving, Jesus sent disciples to a nearby village to bring him a colt whose owner simply accepted the mysterious explanation that “the master” had need of it. The disciples set Jesus on a borrowed beast as if on a pauper’s throne, and Jesus entered the holy city to the chanting of people acclaiming him as the king coming in the name of God. Their singing echoes that of the angels at his birth (Luke 2:14).

Luke’s narrative draws us into a liturgical drama. Preplanned and carried through with obvious references to ancient prophecies, Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem signaled the beginning of the final act of his earthly ministry, the baptism he said he had to undergo (Luke 12:50).

His meal with the disciples, prepared with the same mysterious precision, announced the immanent arrival of the reign of God, the realm where he would eat and drink with them after going through his own Passover.

Luke’s depiction of Jesus’ Passover supper adds to those of Matthew and Mark and even reflects John’s. In Luke, Jesus tells the disciples, “Do this in memory of me,” a phrase only he and Paul put on Jesus’ lips (1 Corinthians 11:23-25). By emphasizing that phrase, Luke teaches that all who share the “supper of the Lord” are called to do what Jesus did: consecrate their lives for one another and for the salvation of the world.

To remind us how challenging it is to share this communion of life with Jesus, Luke tells us that at the very table of the Last Supper the disciples got into an argument about who was the greatest. In response, Luke quotes Jesus as teaching in words what John portrays in gesture when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples: “I am among you as one who serves.”

That becomes the key to interpreting everything we hear in today’s Gospels, from Jesus’ humble and peaceable entry into Jerusalem through his last prayer for others, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

I've probably already given more than I should have, the whole of it is worth reading.

Witnessing the undeserved suffering of People today, in Ukraine, around the world, Nature, the flourishing of evil is going to make Good Friday a lot nearer to our experience than usual.  Covid continuing, the flourishing of lies,  it turns everyday experience into a meditation on the execution of Jesus by the Roman Empire and the local powers who held power by cooperating with it (Luke's account is being read today during Mass) is as fresh as the daily news.  Especially seeing what's happening to The Least Among Us. 

How Can A Christian Be For LGBTQ Rights? - Hate Mail - See the By The Way at the end

IN HIS PREFACE to his book The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson says:

When I was a PhD student in New Testament studies at Yale University in 1972, I wrote a paper for Professor Wayne Meeks on The Quest For The Historical Jesus.  Meeks thought it mediocre and commented on the cover sheet that I seemed strangely detached from the issue, as though it were not my problem.  As a Roman Catholic and (at that time) as a monk of the Benedictine tradition,  I agreed.  I did not think the historical Jesus was a problem for me or for my tradition.  I thought then that this was a peculiarly Protestant problem.  Well, Professor Meeks, here is the second draft.

When I read that, I understood just what he meant and it has everything to do with the place that Scripture holds in the Roman Catholic tradition and, I would assert, to an extent, the Orthodox tradition.  

While Scripture is held to be authoritative as a record of revelation, it isn't possibly understood in a literal or fundamentalist manner, it is respected, it is used to challenge, to upset, to shatter, to inspire and a means of salvation but it isn't the whole record of revealed truth and it isn't perfect.  And revelation didn't stop when the last word of the last Book in the canon was put on paper.  Creation continues, change continues.  The experience of those who wrote the Mosaic Holiness Code (for the priestly class) or the Pauline letters of the world is not our experience today.  While Paul certainly believed the end of time was coming on fast and he was eager for as many People as possible to be OK for the Kingdom, which is why I'm convinced some of his most troublesome passages were written, he didn't think fixing those ephemeral and tangential problems were what his commission was about, we know that Creation went on two thousand years past then.  What he said is something I value but not more than the experience of good and evil in the world I see now.  

That's something that you have to be honest about, every single person who reads Scripture now, does so out of the unofficial hermenutic of their own experience and their chosen loyalties, it's the same way that Paul read the Jewish Scriptures which he cited and used and modified according to his own experience of grace and about which he said some pretty shocking things, especially for a Pharisee such as he confessed himself to still be.  His view of The Law was certainly not the mainstream view of it among those who took it seriously.  His experience of the Risen Christ and what he learned from the Apostles who knew Jesus and witnessed his ministry, perhaps even from his family members, certainly led him to come to some rather unorthodox terms with the tradition he still professed to be a part of even as he held himself to be outside of it.  And if you can make those two parts of Paul's textual legacy cohere, be my guest.

There are many parts of Scripture (and, as a Catholic, tradition and the Magisterium)  which are problematic, many parts which are contradictory, many parts that no one could possibly make logically cohere with other parts of it and it is in no way a part of the further revelation of truth as Creation continues and human experience of that changes.  

While I think the Protestant reliance on "Scripture alone" is a very sometimes thing (as the Catholic Church fails to live up to its confessed faith, too) the general trend in its relation to Scripture would make such historical-critical practices of modernism far more shattering for Protestantism than for Catholicism.  Maybe that's why Biblical Fundamentalism is a peculiarly Protestant and not a Catholic thing, indeed, traditional Fundamentalism was as motivated by its hostility to Catholics as it was the modern world.  

One example of that Protestant ability to ignore Scripture when they want to is that there is not all that much taking seriously the words of Jesus on the prohibition on remarriage after divorce in most Protestant denominations and there could be nothing plainer in scripture.  And compared to that the order to sell everything we've got and give the money away to the poor and pick up our cross is taken even less seriously. 

That said,  there is nothing that has influenced me more than the writings on Scripture by some great Protestant scholars and theologians.  I don't think there is a Catholic or Orthodox writer who has had the impact on me that Walter Brueggemann has, or several others who could be named.  Before the Second Vatican Council most Catholics would have felt themselves to be morally or, more through a sense of fidelity to "our side" to not even read them.  Though that's not really as true as I'd have believed it at the time.  When I read that Pope Pius XII praised the theology of Karl Barth as being on the same level as Aquinas's I was shocked.  

This is a long introduction to a passage from an essay that Luke Timothy Johnson wrote about why he believed that LGBT relationships are compatible, not with the literal word of the Scriptures but in the extension of those and the foundational morality behind the moral codes through our human experience as Creation continues.   I think it's pretty close to what I think about that issue.

I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.

Implicit in an appeal to experience is also an appeal to the living God whose creative work never ceases, who continues to shape humans in his image every day, in ways that can surprise and even shock us. Equally important, such an appeal goes to the deepest truth revealed by Scripture itself-namely, that God does create the world anew at every moment, does call into being that which is not, and does raise the dead to new and greater forms of life.

Our situation vis-à-vis the authority of Scripture is not unlike that of abolitionists in nineteenth-century America. During the 1850s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding, and the exegesis of Scripture played a key role in those debates. The exegetical battles were one-sided: all abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments, which gave every indication that slaveholding was a legitimate, indeed God-ordained social arrangement, one to which neither Moses nor Jesus nor Paul raised a fundamental objection. So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong?

The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery and its horror came home to the popular conscience-through personal testimony and direct personal contact, through fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, of course, through a great Civil War in which ghastly numbers of people gave their lives so that slaves could be seen not as property but as persons. As persons, they could be treated by the same law of love that governed relations among all Christians, and could therefore eventually also realize full civil rights within society. And once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.

Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists-and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.

For me this is no theoretical or academic position, but rather a passionate conviction. It is one many of us have come to through personal struggle, and for some, real suffering. In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of one of my four daughters, who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner-a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren. I also trusted the many stories of students and friends whose life witnessed to a deep faith in God but whose bodies moved sexually in ways different from the way my own did. And finally I began to appreciate the ways in which my own former attitudes and language had helped to create a world where family, friends, and students were treated cruelly.

I'm thinking that sometime I might go through some of Luke Timothy Johnson's book mentioned above because I think he's quite a fair though thorough critic of someone who has been very influential on me, John Dominic Crossan and his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar.  I've said that Crossan's book The Historical Jesus and what he wrote about Paul was very important with my adult conversion from lazy, superficial agnosticism to chosen Christianity.   I agree with Johnson that Crossan, among those who are associated with him, is a couple of cuts above most of them and I still find some of what he said inspiring though I reluctantly have come to agree with Johnson's critique of some of his more basic stands on things like the dating of books in and outside of the Scriptural Canon.  His presentation of the general milieu of first century life as it was known to those who wrote the Scriptures informs my imagination of that background.  I will credit Johnson for pointing out something I admit I missed while reading Crossan, JDC was honest and explicit about having a theological agenda in his reconstruction of an "historical Jesus" and his handling of the texts.   The temptation of his critics is to point that out while not admitting that unless you are constantly on guard you cannot avoid doing exactly the same thing, whether it's out of belief or a choice of sides or of a rejection of it.  Mocking atheists do the same thing and they never, in my experience, admit that they do what they do, too. 

BY THE WAY: 

I should have pointed out this excellent post by RMJ on Creation, I was thinking of posting a link to it yesterday entitled

I Need A Little Easter Right This Very Minute

But I took an allergy pill and it made me too goofy to post anything.

One More Footnote On The "open, glaring and scandalous tissue of lies" Issuing From "the Slaveholding wing Of the Supreme Court"

WHEN I FIRST said that I suspected the reason the Taney majority in the Dred Scott decision made the unprecedented and outrageous claim that they could overturn the thirty-seven year old Missouri Compromise Act by fiat of the unelected Supreme Court, something we know they knew was an outrageous innovation through the dissenting opinions of Curtis and McClean which they certainly read before the ruling was issued, I said that I thought they meant to outlaw abolitionism and to crush it everywhere in the United States, nullifying state laws abolishing slavery in those states where it was abolished, by declaring that slave-owners could bring their slaves, as slaves anywhere they wanted to and to rent them out as the enslaver of Dred Scott and his family had done in what was supposed to be the free territories in the North.  

I hadn't, yet found contemporary confirmation of my suspicion but I fully expected that that contemporaneous evidence would be there and it is for anyone to have read.

Fredrick Douglass certainly knew that was what the Taney Court was up to when they made that extraordinary claim of extra-Constitutional power, in his 1857 address on the Dred Scott decision he said it exactly as I suspected it to be:

This last settlement must be called the Taney settlement. We are now told, in tones of lofty exultation, that the day is lost—all lost—and that we might as well give up the struggle. The highest authority has spoken. The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience, saying peace, be still.

This infamous decision of the Slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court maintains that slaves are within the contemplation of the Constitution of the United States, property; that slaves are property in the same sense that horses, sheep, and swine are property; that the old doctrine that slavery is a creature of local law is false; that the right of the slaveholder to his slave does not depend upon the local law, but is secured wherever the Constitution of the United States extends; that Congress has no right to prohibit slavery anywhere; that slavery may go in safety anywhere under the star-spangled banner; that colored persons of African descent have no rights that white men are bound to respect; that colored men of African descent are not and cannot be citizens of the United States.

You will readily ask me how I am affected by this devilish decision—this judicial incarnation of wolfishness? My answer is, and no thanks to the slave- holding wing of the Supreme Court, my hopes were never brighter than now.

I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies as that decision is, and has been, over and over, shown to be.

I would note that this speech was given thirty-seven years before The Lessons of the Hour,  wondering if he expected the court-power invented to do such evil would be definitively rejected and that slavery would be definitively abolished through changing the law and amending the Constitution.  The court-created power to both nullify laws passed by the Congress and to amend the Constitution as a fact by their rulings played a very large role in thwarting those idealistic expectations.  

The Roberts Court is sending us back to something that is closer to what the aged Fredrick Douglass experienced than I'd have thought was possible in the early 1970s though by 1980 with the changing Supreme Court, the media promotion of Republicans (just as they are now in their sinking of Joe Biden)  I was already beginning to understand that changing the law wasn't enough, it would have to be protected from both the imperial Court and the media that the court had freed to lie on behalf of the oligarchs.  There is no way to stop the imperial Court doing it unless Republicans don't win at the polls and the media are doing everything they can to make sure they will win. 

Update:  I should have recommended reading Fredrick Douglass's Dred Scott speech because it contains a concise catalog of the lies contained in the majority decision in the Dred Scott case, easier to get through than the dissenting opinions and fuller.   A lot of what can be said about the dishonesty of the current court, when they deign to give an excuse for their decisions, is contained in the criticism of the Taney Court.  I'm always impressed when I read Fredrick Douglass and am always reminded of what Lincoln said, that he was "the most meritorious man" he'd ever met.   

He also notes how even those who had been opposed to slavery were corrupted by subtle means of influence and by habituation to how things were, it's a remarkable act of understanding of the minds of the privileged class and how even their moral insights were able to be corrupted by the indigenous form of American fascism then, certainly that's the same now as it ever was.