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Inspired Part 3
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Jesus doesn't die so that God can forgive. Jesus dies because that's what God's forgiveness looks like. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Jeremy Duncan:Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome to church. My name is Jeremy. And today, we are continuing our series called Inspired. This is a series all about how we read the Bible.
Jeremy Duncan:At commons, we say we want to be intellectually honest, spiritually passionate, and focused on Jesus at the center. And that means that as much work as we do to understand context and history and translation, and as much energy as we invest in singing and praying and pointing our hearts towards God, we are always attempting to bring ourselves back to Jesus as the lens to which we make sense of our faith journey. That means that we are consciously looking for the ways that Jesus is the lord of everything. We're subjecting everything to Jesus, including how we read our bibles. And so we have talked in this series about understanding Jesus as the divine logos, the word of God to us.
Jeremy Duncan:And then last week, we looked at creation and how we read ancient cosmology, ancient stories, how even in the beginning, God is preparing us for what we see in Jesus. Today, we're gonna face into some very difficult passages in the historical narratives of the Bible. We're going to try to make sense of how some of the violence that we see recorded in the text can be understood, how even this needs to be reinterpreted through what we see in Jesus. And so today, we're going to talk about fulfilling and abolishing politics, religion, and reinterpretation. But first, let's pray.
Jeremy Duncan:God of all grace, who comes to us in the Christ, who opens our eyes to see everything in new ways. Our history, our scriptures, the foundation of the world, all of this now, we seen, reinterpreted, reimagined through the Christ. May we understand that everything is pointing us back to you. And when we come to embrace your way in the world, your truth, the life that you impart to us through Christ, it changes everything for us. May we begin to live with the grace and peace that we see embodied in Jesus.
Jeremy Duncan:May we extend that to everyone we encounter in this world. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. K. Today, we're gonna start with Jesus.
Jeremy Duncan:We're going to look at how he uses and interprets ancient scriptures. Often to say sometimes completely new things about God. And then we're going to go back and look at 2 types of violence in the old testament, religious violence and political violence in order to apply a Jesus centered hermeneutic to them. By the way, hermeneutic is just a fancy word for how we find meaning in something, particularly texts like the Bible. But let's start with Jesus.
Jeremy Duncan:And I want to pack a lot in today, so we are going to get right to work. And we're going to start in Matthew 5 verse 17. Here, Jesus is in his Sermon on the Mount and he's just sort of opened his opening salvo. And it's almost like he sees people getting a little uncomfortable with what he has to say. If you remember back to when we talked about the Sermon on the Mount as a church, Jesus begins by saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Jeremy Duncan:This is not a compliment, by the way. You do not want to be poor in spirit. Jesus is saying that even if you don't get it at all, even if you totally miss them or you are blessed because the kingdom of God, the divine commonwealth has come to find you. And so maybe the people are rustling and shuffling and wondering if Jesus is just sort of throwing religion in the trash here. I mean, what are they going to do with even they get to come in?
Jeremy Duncan:And so Jesus says, look. Do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. We've talked about this one before, but one of the most famous rabbis of the Jesus era was famous for arguing that you could not reduce Torah down at all. You couldn't summarize it because every word, every yud, every mark mattered.
Jeremy Duncan:There's even a story in Jewish Midrash. It says that King Solomon once had the text of Deuteronomy edited to give himself license. And that by removing one letter, a yud, the equivalent of an iota in Greek or a jot in old English, King Solomon changed the meaning of a word, removing the prohibition of polygamy, and thus allowing himself to marry as many women as he wanted to. So in the Midrash, Exodus Raba 61, there's this story where it says that at the time, the little yud from the word yarba ascended on high and prostrated itself before the holy one and said, master of the universe, did you not say that no letter should ever be abolished from Torah? Behold, now Solomon has arisen and abolished me.
Jeremy Duncan:Who knows? Today he has abolished one letter. Tomorrow, he may abolish another until the whole Torah be abolished. And the holy one replied, Solomon and a 1,000 like him will pass away, but the smallest mark will not be abolished. And so over time, what we see in this Midrash story is an example of how these terms abolish and fulfill had become synonyms for either getting it or completely missing the point.
Jeremy Duncan:So if you take just one letter out, but that changes the meaning, it's like you've abolished the whole thing. On the other hand, if you understand the story and you live out of it, it's like you have fulfilled the whole thing. So when Jesus says, I've come not to abolish, I've come to fulfill, but the next thing he does is reinterpret Torah. You have heard it said, you shall not murder, but I tell you that that's not enough. You have heard that it was said you shall not commit adultery, but I tell you that's just a start.
Jeremy Duncan:You have heard that it was said eye for an eye and tooth for tooth, but I tell you we have to grow even beyond that. What we are seeing here is Jesus fulfilling the law by understanding where the story is pointing and learning, teaching us how to move with it. On the flip side for Jesus, abolishing the law, missing the point of the law would be getting stuck on the law and not moving forward. So an example here later in Matthew 22, when the religious leaders are trying to trap Jesus and they ask him to summarize the law, he gladly says, love God, love people. And everyone is starting to wonder who this guy thinks he is, who thinks he can summarize Torah just like that.
Jeremy Duncan:And so Jesus pulls out an interesting quote. He goes to Psalm 110, which says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet. Now if you go look that up in the Psalms, it's it's actually a pretty straightforward poem. The poet is actually using 2 different words for Lord. The first is the personal name for God Yahweh.
Jeremy Duncan:The second is a title or a designation Adonai, which is a reference to the king at the time, King David. In other words, God said to the king, sit at my right hand. Be my second in command over Israel. Okay. Fair enough.
Jeremy Duncan:Except that here, Jesus puts the entire introduction into the mouth of David and makes the case that if David once said that the lord said to my lord, we have to ask who was David talking about? Who would ever be a lord over the king? Well, that must have mean the Messiah, which means David saw Jesus coming, which means that Jesus has any authority to fulfill the law as the representative of God, the one above even David. Now what's tricky here is that no one would argue that this is what the writer of Psalm 110 had in mind at the time. And no one would suggest that Jesus is on solid ground interpreting this passage this way historically, but what Jesus is doing is being interpretively creative.
Jeremy Duncan:He is reimagining the scriptures through the lens of his presence now in the world. Things are different now because Jesus is here. What's really interesting here is that while his opponents don't agree with his interpretation, no one actually objects to the idea of reinterpreting itself, because this is an example of precisely how the Jewish people made sense of their scriptures and how they made sure that their scriptures could keep speaking to new moments and circumstances even as the world changed around them. In other words, reinterpretation is how you fulfill the law. So with that as a framework, let's now talk about how we reinterpret our scriptures and our violence contained within them.
Jeremy Duncan:We're gonna do that by looking at 2 types of violence today, political and religious. And we're gonna start with politics because I think if we can get our heads around that it might make it a little easier when we make our way back around to religious violence. One of the most famous expressions of political violence in the Hebrew Scriptures is the genocide of the Canaanites. After the Israelites escape Egypt, they wander for a time, but eventually they enter the land that promised to them. And there, if we are to take the Bible at its word, they slaughter the Canaanites.
Jeremy Duncan:Deuteronomy 20 says, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them. The Hittite and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite as the Lord your God commands you to. First Samuel 15 says, now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them. Put to death men and women, children and infant, cattle, sheep, camels, and donkeys, and these are deeply problematic verses for us.
Jeremy Duncan:Not just for what they mean in the Bible, but for what they mean in Christianity. Robert Allen Warrior, in his paper, Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians, makes the argument that these conquest stories were a key part of the ideology that authorized the extinction of indigenous peoples in North America. So this is not just an academic exercise. This is a really important theological conversation with very real implications for how we live out our faith. And there are basically three ways that these stories have been understood.
Jeremy Duncan:The first is to posit that God uses violence to get to God's ends. The argument here is that God is God, and God can do whatever God wants. And hold on to that, because I happen to believe that, and we're going to need to come back to it later. But I don't think that helps us here at all, because you'd have to assume that God wants to use violence, and that runs counter to everything that we see in Jesus. In fact, in Luke 22, Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and he says, if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and go and buy 1.
Jeremy Duncan:That sounds a little strange to us. 2nd amendment Jesus is a bit of a stretch. But if we keep reading, Jesus follows this by immediately saying, as it is written, he was numbered with the transgressors, and they tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. What is written about me is now reaching its fulfillment. And so what happens here is that Jesus knows he will be treated as a criminal, and he wants to look the part specifically so that he can refuse to play the part.
Jeremy Duncan:In fact, when one of his disciples, Peter, actually tries to use that sword, Jesus immediately shuts him down, or as Joel Green says, the apostles manifest their dullness when they suppose that Jesus now opposes his own extensive and emphatic nonviolent teaching by encouraging them to actually use weaponry. So no. I don't think God wanted to kill Canaanites. I don't think that makes sense of what we see in the light of Jesus. Now the second major approach is that the Canaanites deserved it.
Jeremy Duncan:And the argument here is that the Canaanites were so uniquely wicked that God was justified, God God was even maybe merciful in wiping them out. Maybe that's better. God didn't want to do this, but God needed to do this. Except again, I'm not sure that makes sense in the light of the Jesus who ensures that no one gets what they deserve. But on the cross, while being executed, Jesus says, father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
Jeremy Duncan:And if that is my image of the divine, that does not sound like the God who would wipe out a people regardless of whether we think they deserved it. And so the final way that we deal with these passages is to actually go to the archaeological record. And there, we find some very interesting challenges. First of all, we have a number of these types of proclamations being made in the ancient world. For example, there is something called the Mesha inscription that comes from a Moabite King, who wrote, Israel has gone to ruin, yet is a gone to ruin forever.
Jeremy Duncan:Omri was the king of Israel, and he oppressed Moab for many days. But Chemosh was angry with his land, and I looked down on him and on his house and Israel was sent to ruin. Yes, it is gone to ruin from the earth forever. So we have the Israelites completely destroying the Moabites, and we have the Moabites utterly annihilating the Israelites. And so what we know from these ancient inscriptions is that expressions of annihilation or complete destruction were very common.
Jeremy Duncan:They were an ancient form of political propaganda that helped to galvanize the nations. In fact, what we see is that the more outlandish the claim, often the more of an underdog the writers actually were. Walter Brueggemann talks about this phenomenon. He says that the theme of ancient destruction requires a class reading. This ancient rhetoric is written on the lips of those who have no weapons or power.
Jeremy Duncan:And so we have this small Israelite nation recently escaped from the superpower of Egypt working to gain its footing in this new world, and they adopt the language of nationhood in order to rally their people together. And in fact, we can see this in the Bible because despite the fact that we read about the utter annihilation of the Canaanite nations, we keep meeting more Canaanites. In Joshua and Judges, books that are at the center of the Israelite conquest narrative, we meet Caleb Caleb, sorry, the Kenazite, who becomes an important leader in Israel and is given land. We meet his daughter, Aqsa, who becomes a landowner in Israel. We meet Moses' father, Jethro, a non Israelite, a Canaanite, who is welcomed into the land.
Jeremy Duncan:Then in Judges 121, we read that the Hebrews did not drive out the Jebusites who were living in Jerusalem. For to this day, the Jebusites live there with the Benjamites. In other words, the violence of the ancient world was real and horrific, and the wars that were fought came at great human cost, but the language of this hyperbolic annihilation is more about nation building than it is about objective historical accounting. And when read in the light of Jesus, we can see a story that builds and shapes and prepares the nation of Israel to have a strong enough internal identity that it can begin to welcome the fatherless and the foreigner and the widow. As Leviticus commands, the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native born.
Jeremy Duncan:Love them as yourself for you were foreigners in Egypt once. And this then reaches its culmination in the Jesus that welcomes all peoples to the same table. That brings us to our religious violence. Couple years ago, we did a series in Leviticus. It was fun.
Jeremy Duncan:Trust me. There's some incredibly beautiful stuff in there. But along with the command to love your neighbor as yourself, Leviticus is full of directions on how the ancient sacrifices of the Hebrew people were to be carried out. Now, if you happen to be a vegetarian like myself, fair warning, there is a lot of blood and meat and fat and burning going on in there, so prepare yourself. But there is also some of the foundational ideas that come to shape the Jewish tradition.
Jeremy Duncan:And then by extension, how we as Christians think about our relationship to God. Now, if you ever wanna go back track and talk about all of Leviticus, you can find that series here on our channel, but understand that Leviticus does not call for a sacrifice. It calls for a series of sacrifices that all shape the participant and prepare them for an encounter with the divine. And this is really important. You bring a burnt offering to announce yourself before God.
Jeremy Duncan:You bring a grain offering to show that you remember God's promise. If you'd like to, you can bring an optional peace offering to say thank you to God. You bring a sin offering to ensure you don't contaminate God's space when you enter. You bring a guilt offering if you accidentally touch something holy that you shouldn't have. And all of this outlined in painstaking detail leads you to a community ritual once a year called the day of atonement where the sin of the community is finally sent away.
Jeremy Duncan:On that day, a goat is brought and the priest symbolically puts the sin of the community on that goat and then they chase it out of town as it carries the sins away. This is where we get the term scapegoat from. Now in Christianity, all of these different ideas, all of these aspects of our relationship to God, they are condensed into the faithfulness of Jesus and our trust in him. But all of this remains part of what we call the atonement or the at one ment. This idea that in Jesus, our sins are taken away from us and we are made at one with God.
Jeremy Duncan:But here's the question. Why all of this violence? Why are lambs and bulls and doves being slaughtered? Why are goats being chased away in the name of religious freedom? And for that, we have to understand a couple things.
Jeremy Duncan:First of all, sacrifices weren't just wasted. Apart from the burnt offering in all of the other priest would then eat the rest of what was offered. As a part of this was about how those who dedicated their life to the religious role in the community were looked after by the community. But also, sacrifices like this were a normal part of life in the ancient world. In fact, we know this from the Bible.
Jeremy Duncan:Exodus and Deuteronomy are full of references to the worship practices of the Canaanites, and they're very similar. In fact, in Deuteronomy 12, the text says, break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their Asherath poles in the fire, cut down the idols of their gods, wipe out their names from those places. You must not worship the Lord your God in their way. Instead, you are to seek the place that the Lord your God will choose. To that place, you will bring your burnt offerings and sacrifices, your tithe and your special gifts, what you have vowed to give in your free will offerings, and the firstborn of your flocks.
Jeremy Duncan:For you must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of things detest other words, when God is setting up the Israelite system of sacrifice, In other words, when God is setting up the Israelite system of sacrifice, it is basically the same thing that the Canaanites did, except that God says, look, I understand that this is how you understand worship. Fine. We can work with that, but we're going to need to reform it. First of all, we'll use animals only. No children.
Jeremy Duncan:And second, you can set up your holy place in a tabernacle just like they do, but no idols, no images that link me, God to specific people or people groups. And so what we see even in the earliest passages is God accommodating to the religious expectations of the ancient world. God giving us room to express ourselves before God, but slowly reforming our practices in ways that would lead us to something better. And we know this from the prophets of Israel. By the time of the prophets, God is speaking again, and this time God is saying enough.
Jeremy Duncan:Isaiah 1, I have more than enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fattened animals. I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. Stop bringing meaningless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes.
Jeremy Duncan:Even when you offer prayers, I am not listening. For your hands are full of blood, Wash and make yourself clean. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed.
Jeremy Duncan:Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. Hosea 6. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Acknowledgment rather than burnt offering, says the Lord.
Jeremy Duncan:Psalm 40, my eyes you have opened. Burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Psalm 50 1, you do not delight in sacrifice or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings at all. My sacrifice then, oh God, is a broken heart, a contrite heart.
Jeremy Duncan:This God you will not despise. Then of course, in the new testament, we have the writer of John calling Jesus the lamb of God who takes our sins away. A direct reference to the scapegoat of Leviticus, the one that we drive out away from the community, away from us thinking that could absolve us of our sin. So we have this movement in the bible from sin and violence can only be countered by more death and more violence, which becomes sin and violence has to be countered by radical transformation, mercy, and compassion, taking up the cause of the forgotten, which becomes sin and violence are ultimately undone by the non violence, the forgiveness of Jesus. The one who identifies with those who are abused.
Jeremy Duncan:The one who stands in solidarity with them. The one who allows us to drive him away even to the point of death. See, Jesus doesn't die so that God can forgive. God can do anything God wants. That's what it means to be God.
Jeremy Duncan:Jesus dies because that's what God's forgiveness looks like. The God who absorbs all of our violence. The God who endures our pain. The God who holds our worst up to us and says, you are forgiven. And at every step along the way, God is there leading us here.
Jeremy Duncan:Paul says in 2nd Corinthians 5 that Jesus who had no sin became sin for us so that we might become God's righteousness. And so when we look at Jesus on the cross, we see exactly what our sin looks like. We see exactly what our sin does to us in the world and in that, we are forgiven it. We are freed from it and the possibility of a new way in the world becomes comes real to us. But for all of that to reach its climax in the Christ and the cross, it has to start in the reforming of ancient practices.
Jeremy Duncan:It has to be rearticulated in the witness of the prophets. It has to be embodied, incarnated in the life of Jesus. Also that, at every step along the way, God can be there with us graciously helping us to understand what comes next. Until finally, we reach the foot of the cross and we see God for ourselves. No longer through a glass darkly.
Jeremy Duncan:No longer in our rituals and expectations, but now before us forgiving us. So this is what our story becomes not the violence of the ancient world, not the violence of our religious expectations, But the ways in which God walks us slowly, steadily, always toward Jesus. The one who fulfills the law. May your eyes be opened to new ways today. May your feet be ready for new paths today.
Jeremy Duncan:May your heart become so soft and prepared for the grace of God to flood in through the work of Jesus that you change in new ways this week. And you experience the life of Jesus now in you and through you to the world. Let's pray. God of all grace, who comes to us in the peace of Christ, who comes to us in the witness of the prophets, who comes to us in the sacrifices of the ancient world, every step along the way leading us to Jesus. To that point where you would absorb our violence.
Jeremy Duncan:You would absorb our sin. You would hold it up to us so that our eyes could be opened and you could speak your forgiveness to us. God, might we understand that in Christ we see exactly who you are. The God who loves us so deeply that you would go to any cost for us to know that we are loved. May that story take root in our hearts.
Jeremy Duncan:May it begin to free us from all the ways we are bound to sin and violence and greed and selfishness. May we become the people of Christ, the people shaped in the likeness of Jesus, the people that you created us to be, all because of your grace. Your salvation offered to us through the Christ. In the strong name of the Risen Christ, we pray. Amen.