OUR THORN. mold insofar as he spoke out against the oppression and mistreatment of the people of Israel

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "OUR THORN. mold insofar as he spoke out against the oppression and mistreatment of the people of Israel"

Archibald Paul
5 years ago
Views:

1 OUR THORN Ezek. 2:1-5; 2 Cor. 12L2-10; Mark 6:1-13 Jewish and Muslim scholars generally accept Jesus as a prophet. He certainly fits the mold insofar as he spoke out against the oppression and mistreatment of the people of Israel by the ruling classes of his day. He taught people to see their impoverishment and subjugation not as God s will but as the violation of God s will that there should be justice. He challenged the religious establishment and defied the Roman Empire and spoke truth to power. Generally speaking, the prophet s duty is to afflict the comfortable when being comfortable is indifference to the suffering of others. The eighth century BCE was a time of great prosperity for Israel. It was also a time when the divide between the rich and the poor in Israel was the greatest it had ever been. It is in this context that the major prophets of Israel arose to speak. Contrary to popular opinion, the biblical prophets do not foretell the future. The most common term for prophets in the Hebrew Bible means one who is called to speak in the name of God against injustice and unrighteousness and generally to speak this message to those in political power. The goal is to effect change in the society so that all may have access to the fullest fruits of life. This historian Josephus reports that around the time of Jesus birth the Roman military crucified some 2000 people in the Galilean city of Sepphoris as punishment for rebelling against Roman rule. This occurred only a few years before Jesus birth and only a half day s walk from Nazareth, where Jesus lived. At such a time, in such a place, it would be very unlikely if Jesus 1

2 did not grow up with a deep sense of horror of Roman oppression, which was an everyday fact of life in Israel. We get little encouragement in the New Testament to think about the influences on Jesus life and the sorts of events and relationships and movements that would have affected him when he was growing up. As I have said to you many times, the Gospels are not a biography of Jesus, and reading them, you would never know that he grew up under a brutal political regime as the colonial subject of Rome. The New Testament does, however, reflect the fact that there were only two classes in the Israel of Jesus: a tiny upper class and everyone else, who were largely working poor. A major cause of Jewish poverty was the Roman tax structure, which was compounded by the taxes paid to the Jewish priestly hierarchy. There was widespread indebtedness in the society, and the failure to pay back one s debts could result in the debtor being tortured and made a slave. Jesus prayer, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us might better be translated as release us from our debts as we release those who owe us debts. It is virtually undeniable that Jesus and everyone he knew were people who were impoverished and exploited peoples both by Rome and by the religious establishment. And it is virtually impossible to imagine that Jesus life was not shaped by these factors. But the New Testament does not encourage us to think about this, and in the history of the church, we mostly don t. The tendency in the church has been to think of Jesus almost exclusively as a spiritual leader with no interest in social and political issues, interested only in changing individual morality rather than immoral social and political structures that make for human misery. This effectively keeps Christians asleep to the significance of Jesus for what is going on in the wider 2

3 world. But be this as it may, Jesus was crucified for sedition, for challenging Caesar s reign over Israel with faith in the sovereignty of God over all things. Let us not forget the Roman emperors were considered gods, and Jesus was crucified for his allegiance to the God who was not Caesar. (The Politics of Jesus, Obery Hendricks, Jr.) All of this brings us to the question, what sort of prophet was Jesus? He indicates in our Gospel that he sees himself as a prophet and observes that prophets are better appreciated at a distance. It is easy enough to suppose that his rejection as a prophet in his home town was because he was just a local. That is what folks saw when they encountered him, and it seems that nothing Jesus said or did could get them to think of him as anything other than a local. And as a result his teaching and mission couldn t get any traction in his home town. This failure is all the more predictable if Jesus was saying dangerous things, things that might attract the notice of the authorities and bring their wrath down upon the people of Nazareth. Paul writes to the Corinthians that he suffers a thorn in his flesh. There has been much speculation about what this thorn might have been, perhaps malarial fever or some eye trouble or epilepsy. But I want to suggest something else. The thorn in the flesh of Paul was Jesus. This may seem an odd thing to say, since we know that Paul was a great lover of Jesus though he never met him. But we also know that St. Paul was a Roman citizen with benefits that Jesus could not have dreamed of having. Paul s home town of Tarsus was an important trading center that received special protections and privileges from Rome, including an exemption from taxation. Paul did not grow up with or live with the kind of insecurities and fears that were part of the life of Jesus in rural Galilee. Paul never speaks of the injustices that his people suffered, and the consequence of this is that his view of Jesus is very one-sided and seems to miss 3

4 entirely the prophetic side of Jesus. Moreover, Paul believed that the world would soon end and therefore there was no need to transform society. God would do this from on high. The result was that Jesus proclamation of the realm of God as justice on earth as in heaven is absent in Paul s thinking about Jesus. But back to the thorn in Paul s flesh. The Jesus who is a thorn in Paul s flesh is the Jesus who is for the poor and the oppressed, the Galilean peasant who was crucified for standing up to Roman and Jewish authorities. This was not the Jesus that received Paul s attention. Paul followed Jesus in his own way, spreading a view of Jesus he could live with. But there was also the nagging presence of the prophet Jesus whom we meet in the Gospels. I have no evidence for the suggestion that Jesus was the thorn in Paul s flesh other than that the church Paul did so much to found seemed to prefer a domesticated Jesus to the revolutionary Jesus that emerges out of the Gospels. This is understandable. It is, after all, safer as well as being more comforting and reassuring to follow a domesticated Jesus than the prophet Jesus. But that is not the entirety of Jesus, not by a long shot, and we should feel the stab of the prophet Jesus, not to make us feel guilty, but to make us care for justice in the face of terrible inequality and oppression in the world. On this Independence Day weekend the prophet Jesus reminds us that the Founding Fathers of this nation crafted documents that disenfranchised half the population women, African slaves, Indians. And the legacy of this exclusion persists some 240 years later. May the thorn that Jesus is keep us from being too elated about our accomplishments as a nation. There s a long way to go. Amen. Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 5,

5 5

PAUL OF TARSUS: AN APOLOGIST FOR THE STATE. Perhaps the central preoccupation of Jews living under the pagan leadership of

Cicirelli 1 PAUL OF TARSUS: AN APOLOGIST FOR THE STATE Perhaps the central preoccupation of Jews living under the pagan leadership of Greece and, later, Rome was the extent to which this foreign rule ought