Recollections

“Instead of complaining that God has kept himself hidden, you will give him thanks that he has made himself so visible. And you will give him further thanks that he has not revealed himself to the wise people full of pride, unworthy of knowing so holy a God.”

— Blaise Pascal

One of the hardest things that Jesus ever says, if we are to judge by the reaction of his disciples, is found in Matthew 19:23: “it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” To my shame, however, that saying never strikes me particularly hard, mostly because I am able to deflect it. It’s easy to tell myself that I don’t qualify as a rich person, even though by global and historical standards I am among the top 1.43 percent of the richest people in the world. And aside from being easy to deflect, verses like Matthew 19:23 also tickle my preexisting political opinions: it’s easy to use the passage as a flail against American Christians who proclaim a gospel of prosperity and laissez-faire theology. It’s easier, in other words, to point out the blindspots in other people’s range of vision than it is to accept that their blindspots might be my own, which reminds of another of the hardest things that Jesus says.

I do have a plank in my own eye, though, that’s not so easy to dissolve. Jesus warns that it will be hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he also warned (implicitly) that it would be hard for adults. And one reason is that adults know too much — or think they do. For that reason, Paul also warns in some of his earliest recorded writing that it will be hard for the wise or the learned to heed the calling of God:

Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe … Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. (1 Corinthians 1:20-26, NKJV)

It will be hard, in other words, for the wise person to enter the kingdom of heaven. It will be hard, James also says, for a teacher to withstand the judgment of God. And that’s a harder camel to swallow than the line about the rich man, for me at least. Although by objective standards I am a rich person, I don’t define myself subjectively by my bank account. That is, I don’t see myself as a person whose aspirations and ambitions are defined by the pursuit of wealth. (I’m an academic, after all, and you don’t get into this business for the money.) To a significant degree, however, I do define myself by the pursuit of wisdom. That’s what I’m inclined to see as my vocation, as “who I am.” And for that reason, wisdom and learning and schooling can be as dangerous to me as worldly possessions, which is also what (in a sense) they are.

I used to think that what Paul meant in this passage to the Corinthians is that it’s hard for the wise to be called simply because their superior minds prevent them from believing. That is, it’s hard for intellectuals to come to faith because of the intellectual problems that faith poses. But I’m seeing more and more that this is also a deflection, a way of making my academic training or my intelligence or my learning a cross that I have to bear. And nothing stinks to high heaven so much as a non-martyr with a martyr complex. Perhaps Paul isn’t saying, though, that the wise have to crucify their intellects because reason poses a unique challenge to faith. The wise must crucify themselves for the same reason that all of us must, which is why the passage in 1 Corinthians also lists a series of other binaries alongside the prominent one of wisdom and foolishness. The cross is not just a goad to the wise, but also to “the mighty,” “the noble,” and, most comprehensively, to “the things that are” (vv. 26-28).

The reality is that wisdom poses roughly the same obstacles to the kingdom of heaven as wealth. In the first place, wisdom — like wealth — easily becomes a baneful source of pride. Pride, ultimately, is what makes the eye of the needle so narrow for the rich and learned alike. And wisdom — like wealth — encourages attachment to the things of this world. My ambitions may not be defined by stock portfolios, but I do have career ambitions that ground me in this world, and more particularly in the world of academia. If asked to give up those ambitions, I become as sorrowful as the rich young ruler who was told by Jesus to give his possessions to the poor. So the wisdom that is according to the world poses the same challenge to the would-be disciple as wealth: it encourages a love for the things in the world. It sets the same snare that everything in the world does: the snare of confusing the lust of the eyes and the pride of life with the will of God that abides forever.

“Then who can be saved?” “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

Rachel (a.k.a. the Velveteen Rabbi) recently posted a very interesting article to Radical Torah, a group blog on Jewish social action to which she also contributes. The article concerned the “harrowing tale” of Nadab and Abihu, two Aaronic priests who, according to Leviticus 10:1-3, were struck dead by God for offering “unholy fire” (or “strange” or “alien” fire) in sacrifice to God.

Rachel notes that this passage is sometimes used by Orthodox rabbis to criticize the efforts of Reform or Conservative Jews to introduce liturgical innovations into prayer and worship. I found this interesting because I have also heard the same text used by conservative Christians to warn against the dangers of “change” in the worship practices of the church. In fact, in the churches that I grew up in, which took very seriously a strict adherence to Scripture, the death of Nadab and Abihu was used (along with other “harrowing tales” like the death of Uzzah, who was smitten for steadying the ark of God with his hand) as if the story amounted to a Q.E.D. in any argument against any alteration in traditional practices or interpretations of Scripture.

It’s odd (to say the least) that conservative Christians would reach into the stories of Torah to argue against “change,” since Christianity itself is “strange fire” if ever there were such a thing. If what Nadab and Abihu did was worthy of death at the hands of Adonai, then we should at least pause at the realization that the liturgical and theological innovations of Peter and Paul were of another order of magnitude altogether. The Christians who seem to like stories like those about Nadab and Abihu and Uzzah seem to be those whose theology is grounded in a deep commitment to “risk avoidance,” a desire to play it safe when it comes to serving God. But this is ironic since to believe that Jesus was the Son of God was the riskiest business imaginable to his contemporaries, something that Peter and Paul at least understood.

Even more troubling to me is the simplistic way that these kinds of “harrowing tales” about the dangers of innovation are represented as though they summarize the true spirit of Scripture, as though the entire meta-story of God’s relationship with Israel can be reduced to a game of gotcha, in which even those (like Uzzah) who seem to be wholly devoted to the Lord end up on the receiving end of a fistful of thunderbolts. The message that these stories are alleged to convey is that change is always bad, that returning to the old paths and sticking to the old ways is the summum bonum of religious life.

To be fair to this view, repentance — which implicitly involves a change that rejects deviation from a norm — is described throughout the Scriptures of both Jews and Christians as a virtue. There is value in returning to traditions, to putting out the alien fires that we introduce into our lives. But it would be a mistake to reduce sin to a synonym for change, especially since an equally resonant theme of Scripture is God’s ability and perogative to surprise and to change. I love a passage from Deuteronomy 8 that underlines this theme by reminding Israel of God’s provision of manna in the wilderness, a kind of food with which “neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted.” It was, in other words, alien food, strange food — but food intended to show the people that “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord,” even words with which neither we nor or ancestors were acquainted.

Stories like the death of Nadab and Abihu are uncomfortable to read, and they cannot be put away simply because of that discomfort. But the “point” they convey — that the old ways are safe, that new fire is “strange” and “unholy” — seems to me to pale in comparison to the larger point of Scripture as a whole, which stresses God’s penchant for doing a new thing, for surprising those to whom he reveals himself with words and bread they had never seen before. It may seem safe to stick only to the words and bread with which we are acquainted (I imagine it took some courage to take the risk of putting that first piece of strange manna in one’s mouth), but that philosophy of “risk avoidance” is not, in the end, the major message of Scripture.

On Easter Sunday morning, while sitting in a pew waiting for services to start, I flipped back to Ezekiel 37, which details the beautiful prophecy that would have leapt to the minds of most Second Temple Jews when they heard of "resurrection." The Spirit of the Lord carries Ezekiel to a grim valley of dry bones, and then proceeds to tell the prophet that these bones, which represent the deathliness of Israel’s life in exile, will one day rattle to life.

That passages comes in the context of other prophecies about Israel’s imminent return to a fruitful land. Chapters 36 and 37 offer hope in a book of prophecy that is often dark and unflinching in its proclamations of judgment. But one thing that struck me about the chapters is the way that Ezekiel describes God’s motivation for restoring Israel. Why did God promise to breathe life back into their bones, to set them again on their hills with their flocks?

An answer that leaps immediately to mind — and particularly to the Christian mind — is that God loved Israel, loved each and every child of Abraham, loved so powerfully that he could not bear to see the valleys littered with their bones. But it is worth noting that this is not the motive that Ezekiel assigns to God’s action.  Instead, God says that he will act out of concern for his name, which has been profaned and blasphemed among the nations.  As long as Israel has been in exile, the surrounding nations have mocked their claims that the God of Israel alone is God. So God resolves to act to restore his name:

Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes. (Ezekiel 36:22-23, NRSV)

Perhaps because I had just been reading this passage before the Easter service I attended, I could not help but notice how often that service emphasized that the Passion and resurrection of Jesus had been all for me. "He did this for you." That was the constant refrain of most of the songs sung and the sermons preached. There is an amazing truth in that, of course.  But there’s also something to be said for Ezekiel’s alternative depiction of why God acts: not for me, but for his name’s sake.

That way of putting it may seem less comforting than saying that God acts "just for me."  But uncomfortable as it might be, that way of putting it struck me as a breath of fresh air.  I wonder sometimes whether the extreme personalization of the gospel that often gets preached in the United States — the idea that God did it all for you — stems more from the culture we live in than it does from the gospel itself.  "He did it all for you" sounds not too different from the "it’s all about you" ethos of the consumer culture we live in.  In such a culture, it is jarring to hear that it’s not all about me; it’s all about God.  It’s not my name, finally, that matters, but his.

But ultimately, the reminder that God will act to preserve the honor of his name gives me a firmer hope than the idea that God will act just for me.  I am a fickle, transient being, whose integrity and consistency are unreliable at best.  But if God acts on behalf of his name, I can be sure of his action and his promises to act, no matter who I am or what I do or how much I profane his name.  He restored Israel, he raised Jesus, not to vindicate me, but to vindicate his name among the nations. He will always act out of concern for his name, which means he will never abandon his promises to rescue. To say that doesn’t diminish his concern for me, or dismiss his love as a motive for action. But it makes it impossible for me to make the mistake of thinking that the universe revolves around me. It revolves around God, and I am important only insofar as God displays his holiness through me in the eyes of the nations. He is concerned for me, but it’s because of who he is, not because of who I am.

P.S. In the New Testament, the Letter to the Hebrews makes a similar point about the grounding of our hope on God’s concern for his name. Because God could find no greater name by which to promise blessings, says Hebrews, he “swore by himself,” which gives us the encouragement to seize the hope set before us. (See Hebrews 6:13ff.)