Sarx

I’m reprinting three essays as part of the “Fear/Faith/Love” Discussion started by Father Peter.

Your trust has saved you; go in peace.
Luke 7:50

This verse contains two of my favourite biblical words.
πιστις (pistis)
σωζω (sozo)

The meaning is what’s on the table tho… in my Complete Jewish Bible rendering of this verse pistis comes out at “trust” and sozo is “saved”. The more traditional way is “faith”/”saved”. But sozo also means “heal” or, better yet, “to make whole”. This saying - “Your pistis has sozo you” - shows up a lot: Jesus talking about healing the woman with a flow of blood, Jesus forgiving sins, etc.

What does it mean to say, “Your pistis has sozo you”? First, I think we need only look at the very tortured renditions in a popular online Lexicon of Biblical words:

Sozo gets this:

1. to save, keep safe and sound, to rescue from danger or destruction
    A. one (from injury or peril)
        1. to save a suffering one (from perishing), i.e. one suffering from disease, to make well, heal, restore to health
        2. to preserve one who is in danger of destruction, to save or rescue
    B. to save in the technical biblical sense
        1. negatively 1b
    C. to deliver from the penalties of the Messianic judgment 1b
    D. to save from the evils which obstruct the reception of the Messianic deliverance

Pistis:

1. conviction of the truth of anything, belief; in the NT of a conviction or belief respecting man’s relationship to God and divine things, generally with the included idea of trust and holy fervour born of faith and joined with it
    A. relating to God
        1. the conviction that God exists and is the creator and ruler of all things, the provider and bestower of eternal salvation through Christ
    B. relating to Christ
        1. a strong and welcome conviction or belief that Jesus is the Messiah, through whom we obtain eternal salvation in the kingdom of God
    C. the religious beliefs of Christians
    D. belief with the predominate idea of trust (or confidence) whether in God or in Christ, springing from faith in the same
2. fidelity, faithfulness
    A. the character of one who can be relied on

One might get a strong sense of either (or both) of the following: 1) The people who wrote the dictionary were coming up with rather tortured renditions of rather common Greek words to read their own theology into the scriptures. We know very little about the biblical definition without reference to non-biblical works to understand what the text is saying in a cultural context.

These are, I think, valid reactions. I mean… do we have any reason to believe that Jesus was saying to this woman, “Your pistis (=a strong and welcome conviction or belief that Jesus is the Messiah, through whom we obtain eternal salvation in the kingdom of God) has saved you.” Or even this: Your pistis (= the religious beliefs of Christians) has saved you.

1.D. is my favourite: belief with trust springing from faith… all three of which would be rendered as pistis in the Greek.

And sozo? Was Jesus really saying (to anyone in the Gospels) Your faith has sozo (= to deliver from the penalties of the Messianic judgment) you. Would this also be said of a man who said he had authority to judge the world - but would not?

1.B is my favourite there, “to save in the technical biblical sense”. What the heck is that? Anything your preacher wants it to be, of course.

Your belief with trust springing from faith (in the religious beliefs of Christians) has to delivered you from the penalties of the Messianic judgment in the in the technical, biblical sense. Go in peace.

Words can have multifarious meanings, a bouquet of thought wrapped in a small package. I think that’s a good thing: it allows us to read in (or out) what is needed in the moment. Ancient languages were vague, nearly artistically so. Not so our modern ones. Our meanings lack subtlety: coming in black or white varieties, but missing all the shades of grey possible in between. As our languages have evolved they have become more exact - words have fewer meanings, generally speaking. And so they must mean X… or not. These words of our Lord - minus the pious definitions made up for them by Biblical scholars - mean all of those things at once. One is healed, made whole, rescued by one’s faith, trust, loyalty: whatever that might mean exactly… go in shalom. No list of doctrines implied. It’s both/and, not either/or.

We’ve done this to the Nth degree even with the faith itself: every council, every synod, make its world smaller - not larger. We have begun doing in the Church what even Jesus didn’t do: cutting off people on the fringes. As our language became more exact, so did our legalistic hair splitting. The Roman Church, for long the province of a general looseness (just like Orthodoxy) published her catechism. Now Catholicism fills up with scriptural fundamentalists who can cite chapter and verse of the catechism: and God help you if you don’t fit in. The same is true in Orthodoxy - with people quoting canons left right and centre from collections available online or in print, where even a century before most would have been illiterate. Now every person can judge for themselves what is or isn’t of the faith. It’s not surprising that most others don’t measure up. There is no difference between these fundamentalists and the ones who quote scripture: save they use a different text.

How do we… um… the phrase would be “put the genii back in the bottle” but the analogy doesn’t work. So let’s mix the metaphors! We need to let things out of the bottle, un-dam the river, tear pages out of the book: we’ve taken the traditions handed down to us and refined them to the sharpest point possible - and used that point in the heart of our brother whom our ancestors would have recognised, but we reject because our definition is so exact.

Tags: communion, essays, eucharist, faith, fear, love, open commuion