The Time of Our Lives: November 2010 Lectionary
An inescapable poignancy arises at the heart of our experience from the fact that the passage of time both brings us to those rich occasions in which we have “the times of our lives,” and then inexorably whisks them away. The is the poignancy that moved Isaac Watts, in paraphrasing Psalm 90, to write, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.” We are all the children of time that bears us into this world and then bears us away.
The lectionary readings for the last four Sundays of the Liturgical Year raises these issues in ways that are peculiarly poignant for whose sensibilities are shaped by the biblical tradition. If people in all times have pondered the mystery of the stream of time, different cultures have imaged this mystery in different ways. To sharpen our appreciation of the biblical poignancy, it will be helpful to begin with Israel’s older relatives in the ancient Near East.
As commonly observed, the nature-oriented religion of Israel’s neighbors experienced time in terms of the rhythms of the seasons and the processes and events that give them their respective character and meaning. And their regular recurrence (despite the irregularities of storms and droughts, of plagues and accidents) gives time itself a cyclical character. Over innumerable generations, a “template of temporality” is laid down in the human psyche, a sensibility in which time moves from a beginning in planting, through a process of growth, to an end in reaping; from a beginning in conception, through a process of gestation, to an end in births. When God promised Abraham that “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son” (Gen 18:10), time could be experienced as carrying that couple from beginnings in potential and promise entertained in hope to endings in realization and fulfillment celebrating with joy (compare Genesis 21:6-7; Isaiah 9:3).
But the template of temporality does not move only from promise and hope to fulfillment in joy. As the ancients also knew, long before Isaac Watts, “there is a time to be born and a time to die.” In his study of Mesopotamian religion, The Treasures of Darkness, Thorkild Jacobsen discusses “the dying gods of fertility” as exemplified in the myth of Dumuzi or Tammuz. In this myth, Dumuzi the divine shepherd courts divine Inanna and eventually wins her hand. At the wedding they are attended by a farmer, a fowler, and a fisherman. From their generative union spring the fruits of nature and the human community. Then in the dry season, when all vegetation withers, Dumuzi dies and it lamented with terrible unassuaged and unresolved wailing. In the following year the cycle is repeated. It not that death is succeeded by new life. The narrative tape is , so to speak, simply “rewound” and played again to it dead end (like the all-but-interminable plot in movie Groundhog Day).
There is ample evidence that Israel shared much of this temporal sensibility. One need think only of Genesis 8:22 with its promise of the recurrent cycles of “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.” There is something profoundly reassuring in the rhythms of natural recurrence. Even where all other signs of regularity are eclipsed by sudden chance and intentional violence, the mother’s rhythmic crooning comforts the crying child, and even the wailings of lamentation and grief are marked by a rhythmic repetition that affords the mourner a measure of consolation.
But over the course of centuries, this cyclical “temporal template” came to be overlaid, in Israel’s case, by another sense of time, shaped by and oriented toward the people’s historical destiny. The “overlay” of natural-cyclical with historical-linear time-consciousness is graphically illustrated in the way Israel took various agricultural and pastoral festivals and gave them a historical meaning associated with one or other of its founding events-exodus from Egypt; covenant at Sinai; entry into the land; the founding of Davidic kingship. Now, just as the turnings of a wheel can carry one along a straight path toward an intended destination, the deep, un-erased cyclical rhythms of nature, moving from their own seasonal promises toward their seasonal fulfillments, could be experienced as reinforcing, and even at time, renewing, Israel’s historical hope (Jeremiah 33:19-26).
When Israel’s centuries-long story ended in exile, it generated Israel’s own form of lamentation, in the book by that name. But the story also generated expectations that a coming “Day of the Lord,” patterned on the original founding events, would ensure a historical sequel in which the hopes of the people and the intentions of God would converge in an ultimate realization. In this way a fundamentally cyclical temporal sensibility was augmented by an increasingly linear one. Time was not simply “unto death,” but “toward God’s final future.” As Jacobsen puts it, “Israel created a concept of history as purposive-one in which basic essentials still govern conceptions of meaningful historical existence.” In its own way, the Christian church has inherited from ancient Israel the practice of celebrating in liturgy and lectionary the signal historical events on which its faith and its hope are based.
But what is the state, in our own time, of such “conceptions”? In a celebrated study, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode analyzes the shape of the modern novel as signaling the breakdown of a sense of “history as purposive.” The happy ending (as, for example, in Jane Austen) is increasingly viewed as contrived and sentimental, what Freud would call the triumph of our wishing over our sense of reality. Increasingly, the novel ends on a downer, or in ambiguity-or simply breaks off. The sense of an overarching shape to history, the sense of “one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves” (the concluding lines in Tennyson’s In Memoriam), has given way in many quarters to the conviction voiced by Macbeth in his soliloquy on the battlement at the dawn of a modern era:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
…and be these juggling fiends no more believ’d
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope
The question in our day, as in Macbeth’s –and indeed, as in the day of Ecclesiastes- is why we should any more believe the “word of promise: arising in the “yesterdays” of Scripture. Year after liturgical year, we “hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” (as the Anglican collect puts it) what the lectionary offers us, in the form of a narrative that begins in hope (Advent); celebrates the realization of that hope in a birth (Christmas) that promises light to all the world (Epiphany); descend into themes that end in death (Lent and Holy Week); and then, in what Tolkien calls a “eucatastrophe” come to an initial denouement in resurrection (Easter) that foreshadows a General Resurrection; and this is followed by a long green summer season that leads to All Saints Day and in some traditions to the Feast of Christ the King. But where are the signs of this Kingdom? Are we any nearer than we were two millennia ago? Does the actual shape of texture of the time of our lives not in fact “break” (the world of promise) to our hope? With these issues in mind, let us review the lectionary for the last four Sundays of the Liturgical Year.
Proper 26 (31)
Habakkuk 1: 1-4; 2: 1-4
2 Thessalonians 1: 1-5, 22-2:2
Luke 19: 1-10
Habakkuk, like the speaker in Psalm 119, is “consumed” by “zeal” for God’s promises and righteousness as embodied in the Torah. But the nation is wildly at odds with what the Torah calls for. If the barometer of covenant loyalty is the welfare of the orphan and the widow (Isaiah1: 17), Habakkuk’s “cry for help” arises as the voice of that who suffer violence and wrong at the hands of the powerful: “How Long?”
God’s first response is more bad news: the rapacious onslaught of the Babylonian (Chaldean) tyrant (1:5-11). Habakkuk shifts his “how long” to this new threat: “Is he to keep on …for ever?”(1:12-17). Refusing to let God off the hook, he stations himself like a watchman to see how God will respond (2:1). God’s response reassures Israel in its conviction as to God’s faithfulness in the affairs of history (2:2-4; compare Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38-39). Buoyed by this vision, Habakkuk first prays, “in the midst of the year, make your work known” (3:2), and then, recalling God’s former acts of deliverance in founding the nation (3:3-15), resolves to “quietly wait”(3:16) for what the vision promises, and to rejoice in anticipation of God-even absent the seasonal regularities of nature (3:17-19)
Zacchaeus seems to have given up waiting, settling for simply “getting ahead.” Living in Jericho, a city drenched with historical meaning (Joshua 5-6), he is a tax collector for the Roman occupation, reminiscent of Achan (Joshua 7) in his preoccupation with personal wealth. But something in the encounter with Jesus draws him back into Israel’s story; for with alacrity he repents and enacts Torah solidarity in his concern for the poor and fair dealings with others. What is that something? “I must stay at your house today.” Does this awaken in his deep memory the story of those who sought hospitality in the house of Rahab (Joshua 2), a woman who for this hospitality was “saved” when the city was taken? (Joshua 6:22-25) And does it awaken in him a hope that this Jesus (yeshua in Aramaic) is the new Joshua (Yahweh saves)? This much is clear: “I must stay at you house today: becomes “today salvation has come to this house.”
Proper 27 (32)
Job 19: 23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5, 13-17
Luke 20: 27-38
Robert Frost once wrote, “Two fears should follow through life. There is the fear that we shan’t prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man-the fear that men won’t understand us and we shall be cut off from them.” Job is a man who understands himself to have lived justly toward others and devoutly before God, but whose afflictions subject him to the false accusations of his friends and –he fears-also of God. Will death obliterate the truth of his life? (Job 16:18) How can this be? How is it possible for the truth, any truth to be destroyed by what is false? A world in which that can happen would be sheer madness. Surely truth will out. There must be vindication. In blind trust he affirms the existence somewhere, sometime of a go’el-like the kinsman who buys one out of slavery for debt, or who avenges one’s death, or who raises up children with his widow to bear his name- a go’el who will clear his name and, somehow, restore him to God’s presence.
Like Job’s friends, the Sadducees are “strict constructionists” in their reading of Torah. If the friends read it in terms of strict reward and punishment, the Sadducees read it as providing no basis for hope in resurrection. To explode the notion of resurrection, they tell a story of repeated childlessness. But the story they choose amounts to a forgetting and a denial of the founding story of their faith. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a God who works repeatedly with barren couples to bring life out of sterility. And when the human crisis shifts from sterility to political oppression, the same God brings their descendants out of the deadly oppression of Egypt into the new life of covenant justice in a new land. Jesus says that, if you know how to read the Scriptures of Genesis 12-50 and Exodus 1-24, you will know that this same powerful God can also bring new life out of the sterility of death. One who knows how to read the Scriptures may hear a deep resonance between the blind, inchoate trust of Job and the affirmation of Jesus.
Proper 28 (33)
Isaiah 65: 17-25
2 Thessalonians 3: 6-13
Luke 21: 5-19
The exilic prophet we can Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55) divides time into two eras, marked by “the Former Things” and “the Latter Things.” The relation between them is complex. The Former Things are in essence a template of the Latter Things; yet the Latter Things will display distinctive features and will “outshine” the Former Things. Today’s pericope, in “Third Isaiah,” opens by echoing Second Isaiah who said, “Remember not the former things” (Isaiah 43:18-19). Why not? Does resonant familiarity with the Former Things not encourage one to hope for God’s new promises, and provide a lens to see and recognize them? Yes; but don’t make “remembrance of things past” (Proust) a nostalgia trip, a hankering after the good old days (compare Ezra 3:12). “What’s past is prologue” (Shakespeare). Let the energy of nostalgia re-direct itself toward Eden of the future (65:25; compare 51:1-3), where the very boundaries of death are challenged and the serpent’s aggression (Genesis 3:15) will cease. The eschatological vision offers a new temporal template for the Israelite deep consciousness.
Some in Jesus’ day may have though of the “second temple”(Luke 21:5) as part of the Latter Things. Jesus warns his hearers not to fall for such a “realized eschatology,” not to let their nostalgia for the future make them gullible targets of the trumpeters of “end times today.” The call (as in Isaiah 43: 9-12; 44:8) is to be ready and willing to “bear testimony.” To what? Simply, that history is in the hands of the God of Former Things and Latter Things who alone knows the “times and seasons” (Acts 1:7), the God whose reign is manifest on the cross, in the empty tomb and in the Spirit’s gift of wise speech (compare Stephen in Acts 6:5 and Acts 7). Like Baruch in the time of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 45), Jesus’ disciples are called to be faithful in hard times and so to “gain their lives.” Ever if some (like Stephen) will dies for their witness, “not a hair on your head will perish.” In God’s realm, utter risk in God’s name and in the Spirit of Christ does not comprise utter safety.
Proper 29 (34)
Jeremiah 23: 1-6
Colossians 1: 11-20
Luke 23: 33-43
Let us cut directly to today’s Gospel. This is the Reign of Christ? The denouement of time as history, time as God’s story? Leaders and soldiers scoff at the notion: “If the Christ, the King of the Jews,….save yourself.” One criminal derisively uses ouchi, a negative that in a question normally anticipates an affirmative answer: “Sure, you’re the Christ-so save yourself and us!” Later, on the Emmaus Road, the couple will sorrowfully say to the stranger, “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” This is not how the story was supposed to end. Yet this is the ending to which the lectionary brings us, before beginning all over again in Advent.
Do we, then, like the devotees of Dumuzi simply rewind the tape and play it again? Is the Gospel, the “good news about human history,” in fact a broken record? In Luke’s account, opponent and disciple alike see the crucifixion as a dead end. So what dies the stranger on the Emmaus Road do? He does what the church will do in Advent: “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (24:27). In a redemptive echo of the first criminal’s ouchi, he asks “was it not (ouchi) necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (24:26) The question as to whether the church is caught in a karmic “Groundhog Day” turns on whether we have learned to read the story aright. The two-testament Christian canon, elaborating the temporal template of Second Isaiah, fosters the art of reading the relation between Former Things and Latter Things as the art of seeing the Reign of God manifest in today’s pericope.
Why is Jesus crucified between two criminals, “one on the right and one on the left?” The Romans and the Jews know their royal protocol and its iconography: a ruler is flanked by attendant servants. (The scene in I Kings 22: 19 is typical.) The positioning of Jesus between two criminals is meant to mock his Messianic pretensions. The redemptive irony is that his is indeed his enthronement. The God “enthroned upon the cherubim” (I Samuel 4:4), who spoke to Israel “from above the mercy seat, from between the cherubim” (Exodus 25:22; Numbers 7:89), speaks in the Jesus who says, “Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do.”
The power of God ruling in history-taking us past Groundhog Day, holding and drawing history on its course toward God’s future-is the power of forgiveness. The reign of God is manifest wherever that power is enacted (Act 7:60) and experienced (1 Corinthians 15: 8-11). The second criminal, drawn like Zacchaeus back into Israel’s story, calls out, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” Like Zacchaeus, he hears a word of salvation today. The Gospel of the Reign of Christ visits us with salvation in the darkest of our “today’s,” to encourage and empower us to live in time as God’s time toward God’s final denouement.
