The Very Rev Michael J. Pitts
Numbers 21:2-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
You may have been here on previous occasions when I have spoken about the importance I give to the tradition of reading the whole Bible in an ordered fashion through the Christian year and the three year lectionary. You may also have heard my critique of those evangelical preachers who seem to know only about twenty passages of the Bible and who appear to assume that all the rest says the same things. You may have noticed as well, that I also feel it important to preach on all the three liturgical readings of the day, as they have been chosen by the makers of our lectionary to relate to and elucidate each other, as well as to give focus to the particular intention of the liturgical drama of that day. I believe it is the function of the homily to interpret the narrative of the liturgical drama in ways which speak to people involved in the world of the present day and its nooetic atmosphere, sometimes in general, sometimes in more specific ways.
Today I am, as you might, say hoisted on my own petard. I have looked at these readings, especially the Hebrew scripture reading and the epistle, time and time again over the last three or four weeks, and I find very little in the first two which speaks to my faith, or which I believe is helpful for faith today. Indeed, rather to the contrary, I believe we should be morally offended by the opening verses of the Numbers text:
Then Israel made a vow to the LORD and said, "If you will indeed give this people into our hands, then we will utterly destroy their towns." The LORD listened to the voice of Israel, and handed over the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their towns[1]
Nor, despite the rather fascinating story of the bronze serpent, which is, of course, taken up at the beginning of the Gospel reading, does the situation much improve as we continue with the reading. For the theme of the second part of the story is that God punishes the people for complaining, by sending poisonous snakes to bite and kill them. Now I am sure that most clergy at sometime have rooted for the snakes when faced by complaining parishioners, but seriously, the picture we have from this passage is of a God who encourages his people to destroy towns with the men women and children in them, and who then punishes the same people for a relatively minor complaint about food. Is this the sort of God we believe in, should believe in or want to believe in? Well not I, anyway.
In case we were to be tempted to dismiss this problem as an Old Testament problem, and simply skip over this reading, let us look at the reading from the Epistles.
You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.[2]
Admittedly the writer goes on to speak about the way in which the Risen Jesus has brought us salvation from our sinful situation, but does the only way to appreciate the work of Christ within us involve convincing ourselves that we were utter sinners and a travesty of true humanity? Is it not also possible that by concentrating on this type of understanding (and there would be many other passages with a similar theme in the corpus of the New Testament) that we might be tempted to see ourselves as the saved and righteous and despise the mass of the lumpen proletariat as degraded sinners?
It is for reasons like these that I always insist that, first, we must read the whole Bible, and that, secondly, we must interpret each passage against what we can know of its historical, socio- economic and cultural context. This second process is not always easy. In the case of the historical narratives, for instance, do we take the context to be the historical situation in which the story originated, or the culture of the community through which the story passed in oral tradition, or the community in which the story reached its written and edited form? And do we know enough about any of those contexts to help us with the task if interpretation? In the case of Ephesians we do not know who wrote the letter and little about its date and therefore the context in which it was received. Having said all that, there is one important aspect of the general context of our two first readings which they share with much of the whole Bible and which I believe is important. They were written and received by small, minority and often persecuted communities whose beliefs, culture and way of life were either unappreciated or despised by the wider communities in which they lived. In that context their belief of being the special chosen people, who had a duty to look down on the others is understandable, and was probably important for the sake of their identity and their self-preservation.
When we read these texts, most of us in the West read them as members of communities, either secular and religious, which for centuries have been majority communities, which have possessed most of the wealth and power of the world and which have been the dominant force in shaping the culture, society, economics and politics of that world. We simply cannot take most of these texts and apply them directly to our situation. We cannot draw directly from them, moral, political, social or even religious and theological lessons for our own times and churches and societies. Such a process may work for the liberation theologians working with the poor of South America, but even the least powerful in our society are touched by the power of our society as a whole, and this must be taken into account in our hermeneutical method.
So, can our Gospel reading be of any more help? Once again, we are faced with the context question. John is the latest of the canonical Gospel writers. He writes against the background of Diaspora Judaism in the Roman Empire. This means he is part of a small monotheistic community in the midst of a Roman world traditionally polytheistic, but now much affected by mystery cults of Asian and Egyptian origin. The Empire was held together through this diversity by an insistence on everybody worshipping the divinity of the emperor. Everybody, that is, except the Jewish communities whose strict monotheism was, for the most part, tolerated. But in John's day the Christian community is separating from its parent Jewish community and a long build up of mutual distrust is coming to a head. Not only that, but the separation of church from synagogue runs the risk that the Christians will be seen as a feared new religion and will loose the protection of the immunity of the Jews in the Empire. In the light of all this it is not surprising that John is providing a narrative of self identity for the Christian community, and this involves passages which so stress the difference between Jews and Christians, that, read with modern eyes, they can seem anti-Semitic. Indeed, when interpreted out of their original context they have been used, by the church down the ages, to provide support for the persecution of the Jews. Aside from this in a more general way, the well know sentence from our reading,
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.[3]
is often interpreted to mean that only right believing Christians have any hope of salvation. The rest of humanity is doomed. But look how the reading continues:
Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him....And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.[4]
The separation (and this is the root meaning of judgment) between the saved and the doomed is not made by an external judge. John is not a universalist, believing that all are saved whatever we think or do. But he does believe that the separation is something we do for ourselves, and we do it by the way we chose to react to the light we see.
That I believe is an insight which can be very helpful as we struggle in our modern world for moral categories in an often amoral if not immoral society, and for ways of relating, with respect, to those who do not share our faith. It can also provide a hermeneutic tool to help us in deciding between the passages of our scriptures on which we should lay more emphasis in our present cultural context, and those which we can leave aside for other times and cultures.
[1] Numbers 21:2-3
[2] Ephesians 2:1-3
[3] John 3:16
[4] John 3: 17, 19-21
