My Editor's Job

If I had an editor, her job would be to take these articles and arrange them into a palatable and organized sequence.  Sadly, that position has not yet been filled.  Likely because it’s more un-paid internship than actual job; but I digress… 

If I had an editor, she would have put this article first.  As a preface to the introduction of a five week study of who Jesus was with the women he encountered; and who they were because of it.  Then would come the clear assertion of who Jesus was and is; then a quick jaunt through history to recall the context in which we find these women.  And then we could meet each one individually and examine what scripture teaches us about her relationship with Jesus.  And discover what that means for us today. 

I’m still a student.  As such, I’ve had the spectacular opportunity to really dig into God’s word regarding topics I’m passionate about.  A topic that is particularly close to my heart is Jesus’s interactions with women, as found in the gospels.  How the living, breathing Lord acted and spoke around living, breathing women in first century Palestine, with all the cultural parameters of that time.  And what that means for us, as a body of believers, today.  After completing this project, I was surprised, not at what I’d found, but that people outside of school wanted to read my paper.  Why? 

Though, during my research as my spirit was stretching out into this new, wide open space I was discovering, I recall driving home, asking God, “why haven’t I heard this before?”  I could feel Him smile.  And though I can’t give a precise reason, I have a hunch that this topic drove me deeper into His word than I’d been before; and it had me climbing up onto his lap with my books, pointing out passages and talking excited about them to Him.   And I am guessing that He, as I do with my own beloved children, delighted in the time we spent together; relished watching me make discoveries that were not new to Him, nor to many other more mature believers; and thoroughly enjoying my deepening love for Him and His Son.  After I was done, I tucked my newfound discoveries away, sure that I had simply uncovered what everyone else already knew.

And yet…

As I listen to dear friends and trusted teachers, I find my head cocking to the side.  I flip to the passages they are talking about and wonder, “Does scripture really say that; or is that just what we’ve been taught for so long that it’s tradition?”  And I felt the certainty I held so close a few semesters ago slipping into the background.  I felt a pull to share what I’d learned.  To not be stingy and hoard the insights I’d been allowed to discover, but to set these treasures out in front of my friends and family, so each may adorn themselves with the beauty that is the Truth of Scripture.*              

Thus, every Tuesday and Thursday for the next four weeks, I’ll provide an article in this series which will examine the interaction of Jesus and a woman found in scripture.  We’ll put aside what we’ve heard about her before.  We’ll turn off that pastor-in-my-head, and look at the passage with fresh eyes.  We’ll listen to what scripture is telling us, through these encounters, about whom Jesus is; and who we are because of it.  I welcome, or more accurately, I ask for your comments and questions.  Leave them in the comment section below, Facebook them to me, e-mail me, tweet them at me.  Drive by my house and leave them taped to my door.  But join me in taking a fresh look at stories we’ve heard taught time and again; open your hearts and minds to a new work by the Holy Spirit.  Let the accounts of these women draw you closer to Jesus and His Father.  And experience the wide-open space in your spirit that is evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in you.     

I know the title for this series is hardly a catchy one:

The Women Who Knew Jesus,

but, I’ve heard editors help with that, too. 

* And on the off chance that any of this idea gives you pause, let me assure you: I have had more than one set of eyes on this project (one set belonged to a Distinguished Professor of New Testament, and he hasn’t branded me a heretic yet.  Though, this coming semester of Greek may provide that opportunity).  Thus, let me assure you that what I present is very safely within the bounds of scripture.    

Enjoying this study?  Here's a link to other articles in this series: The Women Who Knew Jesus

 

Women, historically

Last week, I attempted to be very clear about who Jesus the man was.  He was a real, live human male.  He lived in first century Palestine.  And he was a practicing, orthodox Jew.  As a final preface for examining Jesus’s interactions with women, as recorded in the gospels, I find it necessary to try to understand the culture in which these women existed.  Particularly as it pertains to them as women.  Because we cannot come to these passages with our Western, one-quarter world ideas and think that we can fully grasp what’s going on.  It would border on negligence to take our understanding of the world, as it is today, in our frame of reference, and apply this knowledge to Jesus’ interactions with these women. 

Yes, scripture is God-breathed.  Yes, it is alive and applicable today.  Yes, we can and should mold our lives to mirror its tenets.  Yet, we cannot mimic a culture from which we are 2,000 years removed.  So must do our best to take off our twenty-first century goggles, and peer back through eons to the time when Jesus walked among humans.

Lynn Cohick, in Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life, asserts that “for most women in the ancient world, and in the majority of cultures today, the home is the primary workplace; [as] tending to children, preparing meals, making clothing, soap, and so many other necessities of life bound women’s lives tightly to the home.”* We cannot read scripture and assume that these women had the opportunity to choose between being a professional or staying home, or even a finely balance mixture of both.  Nor can we assume that they, after weighing all the options, made the best [and therefore generalizable] choice.  They had no choice, home was the only place for them; as soon as a woman married, her father transferred her proprietarily into the household of her husband.  Unless she was unwed and abandoned by her family of origin; in which case she may have been sold into slavery as young as the age of six.  Modern women may not be able to relate to these circumstances, however we must note that neither today nor in the first century did any of this preclude women from participating in religious ceremonies or festivals, nor from daily public life in the marketplace.   

origin

These women were not American citizens with rights afforded us today.  The historian Josephus establishes a Jewish perspective on women in the first century, saying, “the woman, says [Mosaic] law, is in all things inferior to the man.  Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed, for the authority has been given by God to the man."**  Ms. Cohick later notes that scholars are unclear about the exact law to which Josephus refers; postulating instead that this mindset was established much earlier by Plato and Aristotle, and was so ingrained into Greco-Roman society that it assimilated into Jewish culture to the extent that Josephus mistakenly attributes its conception to Moses.  Yet, to this view of women, a lack of formal educated could be attributed.  But, in reality, the primary reason for this discrepancy, Ms. Cohick points out, is the majority’s economic class within this timeframe.  Most people were simply too busy with the daily business of survival.  The few women who had any wealth were legally allowed to manage it independently; though even in the first century both Jewish and Roman documents encourage wealthy women to transfer monetary control to their husbands.***

Thus we can conclude that the women with whom Jesus interacted, the ones whom we’ll look at over the next four weeks, were likely not well-educated.  Some may have been financially secure, though most were probably impoverished outside of daily survival.  Each one was considered inferior to the males of her time.  Yet, Jesus interacts with these women with a great deal of intimacy, respect, and a focus towards inclusion, so that the culturally-held ideas and norms might give way to unity within the coming Kingdom of God.       

Enjoying this study?  Here's a link to other articles in this series: The Women Who Knew Jesus

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*Lynn H. Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life  (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 160.

**Cohick, Women in the World, 83.

***Cohick, Women in the World, 83.

IN-siders and OUT-siders

       Or how, after 2,000 years I have finally got it right.*

Recently, I’ve read quite a few articles bagging on “mega” churches.  In the past few months, I’ve sat in round-table discussions focusing on how denominational representation was absolutely necessary to keep believers from stumbling off into the cult-ish wilderness of quasi-doctrinal belief.  I’ve heard stances on submission, authority, worship, “religion” (yes, I’ll interject here to say how I despise the misuse of that word.  We’re all religious, we only differ in what and how we serve.  And yes, that includes the pagans and atheists and naturalists and Christians and every-blooming-person on the earth.), theology, soteriology, historicity, interpretation, and all manner of topics.

And where I’ve landed, after looking at the Jesus revealed in the gospels, hoped for in the Pentateuch, promised through the prophets, ached for in the wisdom literature, proclaimed in the epistles, and again in the Revelation, is that not a single one of us has gotten it right.  Granted, there were a literal handful of folks in Jesus’ time who saw who he really was.  But even that was through a direct revelation on the Holy Spirit. 

So, 2,000 years later, how can any one of us claim to have cornered the market on Jesus?

Yes, we study the scriptures to discover as much as we can about what he did, who he was, and how to emulate him.  Yes, we beg the Holy Spirit to mold our decrepit and rotten hearts to be more like his.  And yes, we must rely on God’s revealed character as a litmus test against which we measure our findings.  And yes, all of this is best done within the protective boundaries of doctrinally-sound communities.          

Yet, I hurt when I come across Christian-bashing.  By other believers.  Those in the mega-churches saying the liturgical are faithless robots.  The seeker-oriented gatherings bash mega-church attendees as godless zombies.  Those in the liturgical traditions treat their liberal fellows as if infected with anti-Christian-plague.  We, brethren, are the body of the one, true Christ.  We are all outsiders, seeking entrance, through grace, into the glorious kingdom of the Father. 

And not a single, solitary person among us is worthy to be let in.

                But for Christ… 

Jesus loved the outsiders.  Yet, he still found time to minister to the insiders.  He touched Roman and Jew alike.  He healed without care for class or ethnicity.  He rebuked Pharisees and a Syrophoenician with the same authority.  He taught men and women just the same.

Jesus gives each one of us His Truth.  That He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father but through Him.  Jesus allows each of us to decide whether we accept or decline his sacrificial death on our behalf.  And if we do, He expects obedience from us.  Be we Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female.  Our allegiance to His Father requires our submission to His will.  We are to listen for His voice and be obedient to Him. 

And in our obedience, we are to love one another.  Whether the other happens to be our polar opposite or not.  We, as Christ’s followers, are to be known by our love for one another.  Jesus said so.     

Thus, I have to ask: can we look at one another, in love, and strive to live peacefully as far as it is up to us.  And admit that none of us have it exactly right

But for Jesus.



*I say this entirely tongue-in-cheek.  I'll be the absolute first to admit that I, in fact, do not have it all right.

Just so we're clear...

(a type of worship)

Basilica

It is historically documented.  It is intellectual folly to deny that a first century, Palestinian Jew by the name of

     Jesus

was crucified by the Roman government.  There is no scholarly debate: Jesus was a man.  Fully, completely, no-way-around-it, human, male.  This man, worshiped over 2,000 years later, could not then, nor ever have been a woman.

As a man, Jesus was a Jew.  He was raised in an orthodox Jewish home.  He practiced the Jewish religion (yep, I said that Jesus was religious.  Which, in the anthropologistic and historical sense implies that he practiced his religion…, well, religiously).  He followed the Mosaic Law to the letter.  Not one iota was ignored, not one minutia disobeyed.  His lineage was carefully documented to prove that he was the answer to eons of prophecy.  He was educated in the Hebraic traditions and scriptures; and he observed all the festivals and Sabbaths as one who understood their true purpose.  He taught with authority and corrected the misunderstandings of the mortals he came to save.  Of the Israelite leaders, he expected much.  To those on the fringe or outside the faith, he offered a way in.         

Jesus hung out with sinners and outcasts; ate with them, walked with them, talked and laughed and wept with them.  He saved them; he forgave them; he loved them.

                HE WAS NOT ONE OF THEM.

Jesus was Divine.  Before the universe was formed, before humans drew breath, before time began and after time ends he will continue to be always and forever Divine.  One with the Father and Holy Spirit in perfect and complete communion. 

Jesus came to earth, while sinners were sinning, to rescue humans who didn’t know they needed saving.  He died in the stead of every sinner who ever was or ever will be.  But only,
     Only
if the sinner chooses to trade his or her wickedness for Jesus’ all-encompassing righteousness.  To trade their own, impending and eternal torment, for his atoning death on the cross.  This choice is always in the heart of the sinner.  Like a marriage proposal, anyone can accept or reject this love.  Unlike a proposal, this love is offered every moment of every life.  Until the moment when life is over.  Or until that soul grows so hard from scratching out a life in the wilderness of death and constant pain, that Jesus [whom I picture weeping bitterly, as he did over Jerusalem just prior to his crucifixion] says to that sinner, “your will be done.” 

To be completely clear, Jesus was everything the Holy Scriptures say he was.  Jesus, the Promised Savior, the Only Son of the Almighty God, will never be a sinner.  He came to save sinners.  He died to redeem sinners.  He lives to give Love to sinners.  If we would but accept it.    

He was, in a specific and tangible and documented portion of linear time, God housed in flesh.  He was Eternity in temporal form.  He is the Healer of the broken, Redeemer of the damned.  He is the One who loves each sinner so much that He would trade his life, his oneness with the Eternal Almighty LOVE Itself, for the sake of that one sinner to be welcomed into His Father’s house. 

But He is not to be made in our image.  He is not a domesticated kitten, upon whom we may assert our ideals or morals or compunctions.  Our culture does not dictate, any more than the ancient Hebraic or Hellenistic cultures which comprised his earthly context, his will.  Jesus’ will was always that of the Father.  And the Father’s will does not deviate from scripture.  Regardless of what our favorite authors may tell us.  Or how we feel, as one-third-world dwellers.

Jesus the Christ is the Lion of Judah, who will return not as prophet or pacifist, but as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  Robes dipped in blood; Warrior for His Father’s kingdom, who will reclaim all that evil has stolen.   And He will win.

For LOVE, true and honest and just LOVE, wins. 

     For His glory and Kingdom and Power are forever.

Amen.

 

 

Please leave a comment below if you have any questions regarding this theology. 

 I am happy to supply scripture references (as well as secular and scholarly). 

John Mark McMillan's "Death In His Grave"

 

 

Enjoying this study?  Here's a link to other articles in this series: The Women Who Knew Jesus

The gods of our own making

Dogma, origin

What happens when we stay tucked into our familiar comfort-zones, the places and people that look and sound and feel most like us? 

For one, we can stop growing; if we’re not being pushed outside what’s comfortable, we have a tendency towards stagnation.  We can also stop seeing the forest and only see the leafless and wilting branches, nit-picking the theology and practices of those whom we claim as spiritual family.  Or like an inverted nautilus, we can wind more tightly into our own ideas so that our theology begins to more closely resemble the body which developed it than God himself.  This final tendency being perhaps the most dangerous of all.

There is, within contemporary Western Christianity a fascination with Love. With Jesus as not so much as prophet or good-guy-who-had-some-radical-ideas, rather, with Jesus as the ultimate embodiment of Love.  And only Love.  As if the totality of the Divinity of Christ could be so succinctly summed up: Love, and nothing more. 

Yes, God is Love.[1]  Yes, Christ did die for Love.[2]  And, yes, it is by our Love that followers of Jesus will be known. 

Yet we mustn’t forget from whence that very Love comes.  This Love can only come from God: the God of the New and Old Testaments.  The God of Christians and the Israelites.  The God of Love and the God of the Law.  Glennon Melton’s assertion, in her most recent post at Momastery, that Love trumps the Law, due to Jesus’ seeming flouting thereof as “Sinny McSinnerton”[3], is a back-handed rejection of the God from whither the Law first came.  It is the repudiation of Christ’s assertion that He came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.  It is the narrow-minded, Western, one-quarter-world view that all we need is Love. 

What about Justice?  What about Righteousness?  What about Holiness?

Where do those fit in with the nothing-but-Love paradigm that is so flagrant and prolific and, frankly, seductive in our seeker-driven worship?  Because if Jesus (and thus by extension, God Himself) is only Love, then my sins are of no consequence.  My lifestyle, my choices, my actions are meaningless; because by golly, Jesus loves me.  And so long as I in turn love everybody else, all will be right with the world. 

But if my sins (and by extension, the sins of everyone else) are of no consequence, then why did Jesus have to die?  Why kill Love?

I maintain that Jesus had to die, because my sins (and yours and those of every other person ever to live) do matter.  Because my actions, my lifestyle, my human-ness and my very propensity towards sin twists and perverts everything about me and God’s creation, Jesus had to die to fix it.  To redeem it, to yank creation and me back from evil, and say, “Oh, no you don’t; this is mine!” 

Therefore, Christ wasn’t just a guy who loved people radically.  Yes, He did that.  But he was also the foretold Messiah, the Savior of the world.  He wasn’t merely a revolutionary who was also an outcast who loved other outcasts really well.  Yeah, he did that, too.  But the Divine-Incarnate Jesus, as Mrs. Melton posits in her article, could not have come today, or ever, as a black, lesbian teenager.  I do not say this because I agree with John Piper’s teaching that God is inherently masculine, and NOT because I believe Jesus hates anyone because their sexual orientation (I very, very firmly believe that God so loved the entire world—every person of every race and gender and age and worldview—that he gave his only Son not to condemn the world, but to save it; so that all who believe in Christ will not perish but have eternal life); but I say this because Jesus had to be who he was in order to fulfill the prophecies proclaimed about him in the centuries preceding his incarnation.  Jesus was exactly who he was supposed to be.  And he walked the earth at exactly the time he was supposed to walk it.

When we forgot or purposely neglect this, we have in essence forgotten the God who sent his Son to die in our place.  We make the Son greater than the Father.  We bend the Divine human to fit our worldly human desires.  We create a god who looks more like we want him to look than he actually does.

Had Jesus been anything else other than a 1^st century Palestinian Jew, his very existence would have made God a liar. 

And you can call me a stuffy, old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy [or you can pick from other, more colorful pejoratives should you chose; trust me, I’ve both heard and used them before,] Christian.  But I have a knee-jerk reaction when anything we posit about God could be construed in such a way as to make him a liar.  Because doing so makes him not God.  And if he’s not God, then from whom was Jesus sent, and whose kingdom are we proclaiming?  A god of our own making?  

Or the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that seen and unseen, whose thoughts are not human thoughts, and whose ways are not humanity’s ways? 

Then ask yourself: Upon which would you stake eternity?   

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

A. W. Tozer

 

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[1] 1 John 4:8

[2] John 3:14-18

[3] Glennon Melton, “I Think Jesus’d be gay…Or No She Didn’t,” Momastery, http://momastery.com/blog/2012/05/28/i-think-jesusd-be-gay-orno-she-didnt/ 

The Only Ecclesiology that Matters

Ecclesiology:  Theology as applied to the nature and structure of the Christian church

As with so many other things, I am guilty of this myself; and, I truly believe it’s rooted in pride.  I, until very (milliseconds ago) recently, thought I had the lock down on ecclesiology.  I’ve thought this before, in different seasons of my life.  Yet each time I think I’ve got it all figured out, I’ve learned something new, I’ve grown in a different way, and I’ve come into a deeper and more beautiful experience of the grace of Jesus Christ. 

But after reading/listening to yet another Christian-bashing-Christian blog/podcast, I am ever more convinced that neither I nor any other fully-human-and-not-divine person completely understands or practices the ecclesiology of Christ himself.  Nobody has ever expressed the perfect praxis of the gospel that should be the nature and structure of the bride of Christ.  We’re too myopic, too self-oriented, too prideful, too fallen.

Origin

Like ancient Israel, we busy ourselves with the daily preening that comes with I’m-better-than-my-fellows-because-hold-the-patent-on-God’s-truthiest-Truth.  And like the ancient Hebrews, we are very, very wrong.  In our fractured version of the Church, our us-versus-them or me-above-you theologies, we have lost sight of the very tasks to which we have been called.

I doubt that the father trying to hold his child through the tangle of endless tubes and amidst beeps and alarms and the acrid smell of sanitation, will care whether I’m pre- or post-trib; so long as I’ll pray with and for them both. 

I can’t see the mother, racking her brain to think of how she’ll feed her kids their one meal for the day, caring about whether I’m Calvinist or Arminianist or Molinist; so long as I give her children food.

I have a hard time believing that the girl, who is trying to lance her pain out of her very skin, actually gives a rip about whether I’m complimentarian or egalitarian; so long as I walk with her on the road to her healing.

I don’t think the homeless person, who hasn’t showered in months and who hasn’t been called by his name in decades, cares if I’m Catholic or Reformed or Non-demoninational; so long as I look him in the eye, ask his name, and speak to him as though he were a human being.   

I can’t imagine that the boy, whose father has run off and who now lives with his mom’s abusive boyfriend, cares in the least whether I’m fundamentalist or liberal; so long as I can protect him from the hurt. 

In the darkest nights of our souls, these labels don’t matter.

Yes, a well-reasoned apologetic is necessary: to reach the lost and defend the truth.  Yes, sound doctrine is essential: to maintain the gospel and follow the Lord.  And, yes, appropriate theology is crucial: because we can’t love a God we don’t know.  Without these, works are meaningless and faith is dead.  But we have to stop slaying one another over the minutia of human systems and labels. 

Because Christ didn’t become human to give us labels.  He came to remove them.  Christ didn’t die on the cross to divide people.  He came to unite us in him.  Christ didn’t rise again to keep people out of his kingdom.  He rose from death to gather all those who call him Lord into his house, that he may call us friend and beloved. 

That, cherished friend, must be our ecclesiology.  Faith in the Truth and Love in our praxis. 

Exacting Grace

“Grace always shocks.  Grace always stuns.  Grace is always what we need.” 

~Anne Voskamp

In the uncluttering of my spirit, the spring cleaning of my soul, I happened across a memory.  Something long burried in the back of my mind that, with hindsight, I find holds more value than I imagined at the time.  A truth, hidden away when it was too immediate and raw to recognize.  But truth, whenever it is given is always a treasure.  Sometimes one just has to rediscover it.

It had been a dark day.  One of the darker in lengthy memory.  My skin wasn’t racking just yet, calling for the pain to be lanced out of it.  But I was at that precipice.  The swirl of three- day long conversations churning in my mind.  My heart expanding panic, and my spirit tweeking like a meth-freak, unable to sit still, wringing and clawing at the cause of all of this. 

Knowing the conversation had to happen, if I were to ever rest.  Yet more afraid of the other side of those words, the potential of all I stood to lose. 

Barbed Wire Fence in Field, by Paul Mutton

Fences are hard to build.  Necessary to keep what’s important in.  And what’s harmful out.    

I had the conversation.  I swallowed, fear playing Zozobra in my stomach, and said what had to be spoken.  The tread finding purchase on this new road to healing.  Though the path is still entirely uncertain, the journey itself is begun.  Or at least restarted.  If one is honest, it was begun years ago. 

But what is there, after tears?  After boundaries raised, and respected?  There is quiet.  Too much aloneness.

Her e-mail came through, afterward.  These things have a dividing before- and after- effect on the soul.  Like a tornado, when one has lived through enough of them, you can feel them coming through the rain. 

She spoke only of a vivid dream.  “Jesus came to me and told me to email you,” she said.  “He said to tell you, from him,

‘I accept you.’” 

Tender explanation followed, because she couldn’t know that my heart didn’t need one.  “It was this encompassing I accept all of you--accept your heart, accept your belief, accept your love, and I hold it dear-- way.”  She woke and argued, why not “I love you?”  Why just “accept?”  Then she sent the e-mail anyway.  Because love is obedient. 

But he always knows exactly what to say.

The tears returned, though not the searing kind fraught with worry and pain.  These were cool, to wash the wounds of my soul. 

All of me.  Without reservation.  Without even a pause for breath.  The Yes! that precedes even the question. 

                Unconditional.

He knew that is what I needed.  Right then.  And not just from him.  But from a temporal mouth as well.  He does not exist alone; he is always* in loving relationship with his Father and the Spirit.  And we are not to exist alone either. 

His answer to my wounds isn’t just unconditional, all-encompassing love and acceptance, though it is enough; his answer is also a relationship.  A fellow warrior to combat the loneliness; to walk beside me, hurting when I hurt, covering me when I’m too broken, and dancing when I am filled with joy.

                A never alone proposition, straight from his heart and her computer.        

 Grace has many expressions.  But it is always just the right one, for precisely the right time. 

May you, dear one, be open to this surprising grace of his.  And may you have someone who is willing to share it with you, even when its forms seem at first blush less than expected. 

Because his sufficiency is exacting.  And his grace-filled love never fails.  For he can create beauty in even the hard places.

Origin

*The only moment in eternity when this wasn't true, the dividing, before-and-then-after moment when creation cried out in unison, was on cross.  When the Father turned his face away from the Son, and their eternal communion was broken.  For the sake of every soul ever.  So that those who would choose to accept this grace, might be saved.  And live.