Sarx

Continuing in my reverse order - Eucharist to Incarnation to Trinity (like good labyrinth walkers, we will turn around and come out the other way) - we come to Incarnation, now. The complete menu for this series is located in the sidebar, just below the Peace Cross.

HE EXPERIENCE of the Early Church was that God was doing something in Jesus that God had never done before. This was more than just a Prophet. Something was different.

But it wasn’t the teachings, per se. Most of Jesus’ ideas - save one - are heard in various other parts of the Rabbinic culture of the period. Hillel, Shammai, Gammaliel, etc, all taught things that Jesus taught. There may have been a uniqueness in the constellation of Jesus’ ideas - but not in the ideas themselves. Even in the famous passages of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says “You have heard… but I say…” Jesus’ teachings are within the spectrum of a Judaism that included the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, etc. Jesus’ moral teachings may have been perfectly “normal” for the Judaism of his day. But his other teachings were not. The unique parts of Jesus’ teaching were in his Table Fellowship: he seemed to eat with anyone. He had no conception of ritual purity or impurity. he did know of sin, yes, but this is different from ritual laws. Jesus seems to realise that the ritual purity stuff is based largely on an out-moded idea of God. Ritual purity is, essentially, superstition: a fear ofa God of taboos.

Don’t eat certain meats, shellfish, etc.
Do wash hands before eating bread.

Jesus seems oblivious to all that. He goes around touching lepers and letting menstruating women touch him. He eats bread with strangers - thousands of them! He goes to places where only Gentiles go. He crosses land where there are pigs. He talks - in public - to Samaritans and stays in their houses! He lets prostitutes touch him and even chats with a woman caught in the very act of adultery. And there is no sign that he ever offered a sacrifice - at all - let alone one for purification.

Jesus seemed to show not something new about morality. But rather it was something new about God and about how we should live with God. It was something new about our Neighbour and about how we should live with our neighbour. In fact, Jesus seemed to teach something that was scandalous: somehow, in our neighbour - Jew, Gentile, Ritually Pure or Not - God was acting for our salvation! Further: we were called to be with our neighbour in some way that we had not been previously. The Gospel Parables (as well as the sermons on the Last Judgement) make it clear that that person over there is, somehow, God. Only my sin prevents me from seeing it.

This idea that God was somehow acting in a person, in the flesh, in history was revolutionary. Yes, the Jewish God acted in history - but not in a real presence since the Exodus. Paul says it first: somehow God was in Messiah, acting to reconcile the world to himself. From there the concept develops.

In his unfinished Jew and Greek, Dom Gregory Dix makes the point that, amongst Jews, telling the stories of a Rabbi who would heal the sick, walk on water and raise the dead was not at all abnormal. But to say it out among the Gentiles would lead to discussions about Jesus and Sorcery. In the cultural translation Jesus has to go from being the Human through whom God is acting, to being divine.

In my own head this used to be a matter of scale where, clearly, the modern folks have restored the scale somewhat. Jesus can go back to being the Rabbi God Acts Through and he’ll stop making the rest of us nervous. I no longer see this an an issue of scale, however. It’s an issue of culture. The God-Man-Messiah of Judaism easily converted to the Divine Man of the Gentiles: but culturally it was the same thing. The Guru-as-Divine, not as “Channel” but as Divine in self. “I and the Father are one”. No: this isn’t a Jewish idea. Yes, it is a Jewish Ideal.

We see this in the mystical tradition of Judaism. The world is filled with sparks of divine fire. YES, this idea was later taken over by Gnostics. That’s not the point: the idea that the divine is present in all things (”everywhere present and filling all things”) is a solidly Jewish idea. A man bringing this to manifestation this in his life time, in this world is part of the idea of salvation (making whole) taught by Jewish writers.

And, this Rabbi-through-whom-God-acts was clearly not just that to these people. There’s a reason: The divine (as understood in Jesus day) always acted in ways that preserved the social order. This wasn’t true, of course, in all of Jewish history. God’s actions in Jewish history always upset the social order: Freeing slaves, bringing captives back to Israel. But in the first century, he’d not done that in a long while. And every time Jews wanted or imagined God was acting, it failed: the Maccabees were just another corrupt oppressor. The Herodians, ditto. The Romans? Don’t get me started. Sure, there was a Temple again, but at what price?

The Jews developed two competing sets of ideas: In one set there was the idea that we could overthrow the Romans and set up our theocracy all over again. Most people were sceptical about this - it had failed before. (Point of order, it would fail again in 70AD and again, one final time, in 135AD. This multiple failure is why many pious Jews today think the state of Israel is a blasphemy.) There was always a minority of folks who thought they could just make things happen. We called them the Zealots.

The other set of ideas involved being pious. When we are good enough God will fix things. This idea shows up in both the Pharisees and the Sadduccess. Until the 19th century, this was a common idea in all streams of Rabbinic Judaism. All we need to be is “good enough” and God will fix things. This idea is still common in parts of Judaism (when we do enough Mitzvot, Messiah will come!) and, sadly, in large parts of the non-Jewish world, Christian and not. “What did they do, that God punished them with the Tsunami?” “God has taken away his protection from the USA because of Abortion and Gays.”)

This religious, “good-enough” idea only preserved the social order. It took away a common Jewish focus on communitarianism (feeding all, freeing slaves, etc) and fixated religious life on hand washing and saying prayers timed with an ever-increasing number of “sin sacrifices” at the Temple. God will free us from the Gentiles when we are pure.

But out in the Gentile world, it was clear there, too, that deity preserved the social order - slaves, plebs, proles, patricians. It was all locked in and settled. In fact, it was patriotic (a religious virtue) to leave the social order alone.

And along comes Jesus.

Jesus teaching was revolutionary on one point and one point only - “revolutionary” here meaning “revolt” or “overthrow” - and he said it over and over again: “the Kingdom of God is among y’all.” (In the Greek here, the second person pronoun is plural. This is a construct sadly missing in “proper” English. In Brooklyn one might say “the Kingdom of God is among youse.”) The kingdom is here, now, present, active: you were not good enough, God got tired of waiting. It’s time to change our way of life. Share our goods, sell all that you have, rich people can’t get in.

And the only person who could not on say that, but also make it stick was clearly not just a Great Teacher - God himself had acted and changed things. So this Rabbi-through-whom-God-acted, restoring all things, making all things new: That was God.

There are implications to this claim. In later years they would debate how much that man was God. They would argue over wills and natures and what-all in rather Thomistic fashion. (Then, Ironically, some would condemn Thomism.) They would get hung up on halos and icons and prior existence. I don’t think any of that is important, to be honest. But I’ll get to that in a later post.

Gentiles and Jews who said that this was the messiah lived into a radically new and different social order. They went so far as to say “Jesus is Lord” - an anarchistic claim that over threw the Emperor, making him only a puppet to be uses as needed to keep the peace. (Paul’s appeal to the Emperor was a hat-trick, not a political statement. It was a joke played on his fellow-Jews. It was never repeated in all the history of Christian Martyrdom.) In this Kingdom where Jesus ruled, everyone shared from their wealth. Everyone ate together. The weak and the poor and the disenfranchised were welcomed in. The Roman class system together with the Jewish purity segregation were all overthrown.

And the kingdom was lived neighbour to neighbour. God was acting - God had acted. The Church was the Body of Messiah present in the world and that means so much more than just a cute title. The way Jesus was - overthrowing the social order and making the kingdom happen - that is what the Church was to be. The Church is the continuing act of God’s incarnation. Not in the institution (blargh!) which didn’t exist until Constantine. But in the COMMUNITY: in the feasting together, in the welcoming, in the violently peaceful anarchistic credo that Jesus is Lord.

If this man was not God acting then it’s just more social order: it’s just more counter-revolution. It might as well be just another moral code and a repetition of the Pharisees or the Pythagoreans. Sure, it’s different. But it’s just more. I might just as well be hung up on eating pork or on praying to cows. If it’s just more religion, it’s unimportant. But Jesus is the cure for religion as the Orthodox teach (and they say it without Irony which makes it all the more funny).

It is entirely possible to read Christian history in this revolutionary way - devoid of any theology or traditional Christian moralism. I want to point that out. There are implications to this “God-actinong” idea, though. And I’ll discuss them next time: This essay has gone long enough.

Tags: incarnation, jews, pagans, revelation, revolution, s=tie