Standing Under the Scriptures
March 9, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this week are,

Ezekiel 37.1-16:  Since an early age this passage, the valley of the dry bones, has put me in mind of the Episcopal Church.

John 11.1-54:  Jesus brings Lazarus back to life.  I confess that this passage has always been difficult for me.  But last Sunday’s class brought me closer to an understanding of John 9 than ever before, and this Sunday’s may do similarly.

Last Sunday we did well, I think, not to linger over our Old Testament reading (1 Samuel 16.1-13, Samuel’s anointing of David to be king in place of Saul) so as to have sufficient time for our Gospel (we took the whole of John 9, Jesus opening the eyes of the man born blind).  But the Samuel reading, in addition to being a great story, has further significances which ought to be brought out.

In particular it relates to the ambivalence of the Old Testament about kingship and thus about civil government in general---an ambivalence to be found in the New Testament as well.  To be sure, the anointing of David is presented as ordained by the Lord.  And the line that David established became the basis of messianic expectation.  But there is also an earlier passage, in chapter 8, warning Israel against instituting a monarchy.  Nor should it be imagined that once David became king Israel lived happily ever after.  The so-called Court History (2 Samuel 7 to I Kings 2, approximately) contains a remarkably lucid, and candid, account of David’s kingship, notably the rebellion of his son Absalom as well as his own foibles (sc. Bathsheba)   And under his successor, Solomon, things began to fall apart, leading to the division of the kingdom and eventually the Exile.  The problem is that the nation, or nation-state, with its worldly power is tempted to regard itself as self-sufficient, and tempts its people so to regard it.  And this constitutes idolatry.  The crunch came in the time of the pre-Constantinian church, when the Roman empire explicitly deified itself in the form of emperor-worship.  The early Christians of necessity bore witness against this through their martyrdoms (the Greek word martyrein means basically to witness).  Interestingly, in the end it was the church rather than the empire which prevailed.

The 20th century (and before) also saw deifications of the state, especially in Nazi Germany.  Tragically, the “German Christians,” the great majority, failed to testify against this, their theology having been vitiated over the preceding century by the infiltration of values from the surrounding culture.  The exception was the Confessing Church in its Barmen Declaration of 1934, inspired particularly by Karl Barth.  In fact his massive Church Dogmatics is in large part a protest against this infusion of cultural values.  The connection with our contemporary church situation was brought out in my commentary of January 2005 on the Anglican Communion Network’s theological charter, itself a distinctly Barthian document.  I am attaching it in case anyone wants to look at it.

The foregoing is relevant, actually, to our other reading, John 9 (we looked at the entire chapter).  It begins with Jesus giving sight to a man, a beggar in fact, born blind.  This leads to skepticism on the part of his neighbors and acquaintances and to hostile, for the most part, interrogation by the Pharisees: of the man himself, of his parents, and again of the man.  Through all of this the man, though not his parents, stands his ground, refusing to be talked out of what he knows to have happened to him and the conclusions to be drawn from it.  And gradually he develops an awareness of who Jesus is.  This results in his being thrown out of the synagogue, in effect being excluded from his community, which is no light thing.  In his destitute state Jesus encounters him and confirms his own identity as Son of Man, which the man had almost grasped.  Finally, St. John tells us, “he said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped him” (verse 38).

We too are born blind, in that on account of the Fall we have inherited original sin, which necessarily affects our vision, spiritually if not physically.  And it is Christ who can and does open our spiritual eyes.  But there is more to the story, however sublime, than this.  One of the premises on which our class operates is that in order to understand fully what the Scriptures mean for us, we need to know what they meant for the community which first read or heard them.  In the case of John’s Gospel, scholars have posited the “Johannine community,’ out of which it came and for which it was recorded.  This would have existed as late as the second century, in Palestine or some other place where there were strong Jewish communities.  And conflicts would have arisen between these and the “Johannines,” whom they would have considered to be deviants; John’s Gospel contains especially sharp controversies between Jesus and “the Jews” (whom we may take as the religious authorities).

Whatever one thinks of this hypothesis, it does make sense in terms of the present chapter.  What the man born blind might well have brought to the minds of our Johannines is a member of a Jewish community who had found in the Christian gospel an opening of his spiritual eyes.  This would have put him at odds with that community, at least with its leaders.  There is direct evidence of this in verse 22b: “the Jews had already agreed that if any one should confess him [Jesus] to be the Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.”  This fits with the situation that we have hypothesized in a way that it does not with the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  It would have brought to the Johannine minds also the persistence of such a person in these new insights, despite the opposition which his expression of them aroused, to the point of eventual conversion.  In this he would have been a martyr, in the sense of bearing witness without regard to the cost.  And Jesus’ coming to him in his destitution was reminiscent of his sustaining of those who bore witness even at the cost of their lives, of which there were many under the Roman empire, as we noted above.

The implication of this for us, having had our spiritual eyes opened by the gospel, is that we should hold fast to the insights which it has given us, in the face of opposition in the culture around us and even in the church, in the steps of the Confessing Church in Germany.  And however costly this may prove, Jesus will not fail to sustain us.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted