Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit

"Blessed are you who are poor ... woe to you who are rich."
"Blessed are you who are hungry now ... woe to you who are full now."
"Blessed are you who weep now ... woe to you who are laughing now."
"Blessed are you when people hate you ... woe to you when all speak well of you."
(Luke 6:20-26)

The Gospel of Luke is easy to love. In social justice-oriented contexts, Luke's is the go-to gospel because it so clearly portrays a Jesus who is deeply concerned about the social and material circumstances of the poor and the marginalized. It's the natural source for a Christian theological call for justice (assuming we're ignoring all the Hebrew Bible prophets, which as Christians we probably are. Thanks, supersessionism!). In Luke's rendition, the Beatitudes are a pretty uncompromising set of eschatological reversals, "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable," as we bleeding-hearts like to say.

Matthew, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. I've never heard anyone say that Matthew was their favorite gospel. Matthew is fussy and literalist to the point of being nonsensical, as when he tries to fulfil a Hebrew Bible prophecy by having Jesus enter Jerusalem riding two donkeys simultaneously because he's never heard of hendiadys. And look at what Matthew does with the first Beatitude:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
(Matthew 5:3)

For starters, note that Luke's Jesus is addressing the poor directly (as well as the rich, whom Matthew doesn't mention), whereas Matthew talks about them as though they are absent or even abstract. The most glaring difference, though, is that Luke's "poor" have become for Matthew "poor in spirit." It seems like a pretty clear-cut instance of Matthew softening the call for justice in order to avoid upsetting the wealthy and to accommodate the status quo.

I think there is potential for a more generous and more interesting reading of Matthew 5:3, though, and it arises from the question: what the hell does "poor in spirit" mean anyway?

Historical-critically, or with respect to the author's intentions, your guess is as good as mine. The reading I'm proposing has nothing to do with source criticism, the historical context in which Matthew's Gospel was written, or the nuances of the Greek terminology. It's just a reading I think is interesting, challenging, and kind of cool.

Luke's Jesus says: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." It's a promise of straightforward reversal: those who currently lack resources and comfort will receive abundance

Matthew's Jesus: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." If this is also a reversal, Matthew is clearly not using "kingdom of heaven" in quite the same way Luke is using "kingdom of God." Neither the reward nor the affliction are material in nature.

What does "poor in spirit" mean? I suggest that we can read it quite simply, as the reverse of "the kingdom of heaven": the poor in spirit are those who lack a certain sensibility, which for want of a better term I call "religious." Not those who do not believe in God, who have no use for that hypothesis -- it's perfectly possible to be religious without believing in God -- but those who have no sense for, well, whatever you want to call it: the transcendent, the liturgical, the impossible, wonder, the perhaps. Something precarious, something humbling, something greater than oneself. The people with the shallowest, most mean-spirited view of what humanity can be (I'm sure we can all think of examples, including some who call themselves religious and believe in God) are blessed. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

This is no way replaces Luke's vision of material abundance for the materially poor, but it's a thought-provoking supplement. For someone like me, steeped in leftist academia and liberation theology, "blessed are the poor" is normative, but "blessed are the small-minded" is a real challenge.

We The Pharisees

The second dictionary definition for "Pharisee" is:

( lowercase ) a sanctimonious, self-righteous, or hypocritical person.

I've heard a lot of sermons in my time that seem to take that as the primary, if not only, definition. It's a lazy form of Gospel exegesis I've heard in both mainline and evangelical settings: the Pharisees are the Bad Guys, hating on Jesus because he challenges their legalistic, strictly-regimented worldview with his unprecendented message of ~love and grace~. Last week, the Pharisees were scandalized when Jesus broke their needlessly inflexible Sabbath rules, because he just loves so much more and understands God so much better than they do. This week, the Pharisees invited Jesus to dinner solely for the purposes of catching him out, because they're unnerved by his popularity as a demagogue and they're looking for any reason to come down on him like a ton of bricks.

This reading bugs the hell out of me.

For a start, the careless conflation of "Pharisee" (definition 1) with "pharisee" (definition 2) is emblematic of the thoughtless antisemitism that pervades contemporary Christianity. If you think that Jesus had a completely new message of a fuzzy-hugs-and-puppies God that radically contrasts with an angry-and-smiting "Old Testament" God, well, you're not very good at history, Hebrew Bible, or New Testament, and you're casually perpetuating deeply embedded anti-Judaism to boot.

This week in particular, note also that the notion that the dinner invitation was solely a trick to catch Jesus out – a "keep your enemies closer" maneuver – is only one possible reading, and not a very generous one. Luke 14:1 only says that the Pharisees "were watching [Jesus] closely." I have a lot of sympathy with that. If I were dining with Jesus, I would certainly be watching him closely, because – as most people, Christians and non-Christians alike, agree – he is a very interesting person.

Which brings me to my main point. It's kind of an obvious one, but it's not emphasized nearly enough in the church settings I've experienced (perhaps because we Christians tend to be wedded to our mostly-nonsensical persecution complex). It is this:

We are the Pharisees.

We – by which I mean myself and many of my friends: clergy, students of religion, Christian bloggers, pretty much anyone in the US who ascribes to and actively supports the faith that dominates the cultural and political landscape – shouldn't be finding our own faces in Jesus or his disciples or the people he heals when we read the Gospels. When we read stories of Jesus' encounters with religious authorities, we should recognize ourselves as the religious authorities, because we are. We are the ones with doctrine and dogma. We are the ones with strict rules about when and how things must be done (seriously, have you ever seen a congregation's reaction to even minor changes in liturgy? I myself am guilty of losing my shit because one Sunday someone I didn't know sat in my pew). We are the ones who preach the radical love of the Kingdom of God while continuing to participate in and perpetuate indefensibly corrupt and unjust systems. We are the hypocrites.

I think we're reading these stories all wrong. For far too long Christians have been identifying with Jesus and his followers, feeding our self-righteous persecution complex by imagining that our weekly churchgoing somehow challenges power structures and explodes exclusivist dogma. It's demonstrably the other way around.

Reading the Pharisees as ourselves offers a double-edged redemption. First, by sympathizing with the Pharisees, we can begin to redeem them from their ignominious history of being synonymous with cartoonish villainy in casually anti-Jewish Christian discourse. Second, by finding their flaws in ourselves, we can ourselves be censured by Jesus' critiques.

He's been telling us what we're doing wrong for nearly two thousand years. It's about time we listened.

Muggle Jesus

[A Potterverse/Jesus crossover fic. JKR owns the Potterverse. Nobody owns Jesus.]

Prologue

“Jesus! Jesus!” Breathless and starry-eyed, the tousle-haired boy raced toward his cousin. “Look!” He thrust the parchment at the other boy and grinned expectantly.

“You know I can't read that,” said Jesus, not putting down his hammer. He did stop pounding, though, and scrutinized John's face. Written characters may have been chicken-scratchings to Jesus' eyes, but human faces and bodies sang to him more clearly than the temple cantor. He knew John's next words even before John had drawn breath to say:

“I got in! It's my acceptance letter.”

Jesus positioned the nail with painstaking precision, and struck it one sharp blow with the hammer. Only then was he able to look up again, a warm smile of genuine pleasure beaming forth from his face, and say, “That's great, John. I'm really happy for you.”

John beamed back, and for a moment the two boys dwelt on the shared understanding. Then the grin faded from John's face, and gravity entered his eyes. Jesus hastily turned back to his work, pounding nails into the smoothly sanded wood.

“You, uh...?” John asked awkwardly, over the pounding. Jesus shook his head without looking up. He had had a long time to get used to the idea that this day would come eventually. His mother was a muggle, and he could hardly have been unaware of the cloud of rumors that had been swirling around his patrilineal parentage since his conception. As his childhood progressed, and he had witnessed the little outbursts of uncontrolled magic from his cousin, while himself consistently failing to produce anything at all unusual, he gradually came to reconcile himself to the self-evident facts.

John was a wizard. Jesus was a muggle. That was just the way it was.

He had known that, rationally, for many years now; and yet a part of him, he now realized, had never stopped hoping deep down that perhaps the letter from Jerusalem would arrive after all, that perhaps he was a late bloomer, that perhaps he and his best friend wouldn't have to be separated, even before the age of manhood, by miles and ability and social standing. Today that fragile hope was entirely quenched.

He drove the nails into the wood, trying to quell the tightness in his chest. “You'll be a great wizard, John,” he said firmly. “The greatest.”

Twenty Years Later

The Chief Wizard gazed down on the rooftops of Jerusalem. “The trouble began,” he murmured, “with John, and I had hoped it might end with him.”

The members of the Wizards' Council exchanged glances, but no one dared speak.

“You have all, I think, heard the rumors. A muggle who can do magic – a plebe, a Galilean – stealing magic from pureblood wizards and giving it to lepers. Running around the country with his merry band of muggles, squibs, and fisherfolk, walking on water and curing blindness, and filling their simple minds with all manner of seditious mendacity. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Fishermen are better than priests. Muggles are better than wizards.”

The Chief Wizard whirled around to face the Council, fury contorting his features.

“Filthy lies! The man couldn't cast a Wand-Lighting Charm if his life depended on it. He's nothing more than a cheap trickster, preying on the weak-minded with his pathetic illusions and his disgusting lies. Demagoguery, sleight of hand, and a credulous populace are his only magic.”

He glared around at the Council, as if daring them to contradict him; but still nobody spoke. Presently the Chief Wizard continued, in a more level tone:

“In isolation, he would perhaps be no more than a mild nuisance. However, in the wake of that unfortunate nonsense with John, I am forced to conclude that the Galilean is a threat to the very fabric of society. Those who were fool enough to believe that a sane man would willingly and knowingly reject his magical heritage, in order to voluntarily live the pitiful half-life of a squib – the followers of one dangerous lunatic have simply pledged their allegiance to another. The muggle leaders report talk of revolution. This man is a danger not only to the general order of society, but to the delicate coexistence of the wizarding and muggle worlds.”

At last the oldest member of the Council, wizened, white-haired, and sunken-faced, cleared his throat. “You wish to have him dealt with.”

“No,” said the Chief Wizard. “Not in the usual fashion. That would accomplish nothing, except to create a void for the next silver-tongued malcontent to fill in turn. The Galilean must be made an example of. Publicly.”

“Ah,” said the old man. “I see. Discourage imitation. And if he is a wizard, he will save himself, no harm done.”

“He won't,” the Chief Wizard said coldly. “He's not a wizard. He's the biggest muggle I ever saw.”

Open The Book

“And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Except they did say something to someone – we're reading it. By existing, the last sentence of Mark contradicts itself.

Mark's Gospel ends on the Greek particle gar. That's not grammatically sound. You don't end a sentence on gar. The sentence is not over.

They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid; then, evidently, because this text exists and you are reading it, they mastered their fear and said something to someone. Something: this text, Mark's Gospel, the empty tomb. Someone: you, the recipient of this text. You have to deduce the rest of the sentence – “then they mastered their fear and said something to someone” – for yourself. The ending of Mark's Gospel makes you finish the sentence. It makes you carry on the story.

If there's one message to be gleaned from all of Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition, it is this:

Keep interpreting.

Genesis opens with two non-identical creation accounts. The New Testament begins with four non-identical gospels. Throughout the Bible, as in rabbinic midrash and churches' teachings, there are doublings and recapitulations, glosses and rewrites, the same story told over again but differently. You can't reconcile the differences between alternate versions of the same story. You aren't supposed to.

The ambiguities, the discrepancies, the omissions: they're there so that you can interpret, and keep interpreting. What you must never do is stop. If you declare one particular interpretation to be singularly authoritative and let it rest there, you leave the text lifeless in the tomb. A text lives as long as you interpret it – as long as you read it and retell it and explore it and criticize it and learn from it. If you are afraid to let the text live – afraid to open yourself to the possibility that the text might change you – you will have nothing to say to anyone, and you may as well have left the book unopened.

Keep reading. Keep telling the stories. The stories will change, and the readers will change. This is good. This is the point. Keep interpreting.

Master your fear. Say something to someone.

Slow Down Your Neighbors: Universalism, Semiotics, and Rob Bell

The semiotics of sitcoms - there's a blog post there.

This one pastor chappie, Rob Bell, has been causing a ruckus in the Christian blogosphere with his new book, Love Wins. In it, I'm told, he argues that there is no such thing as eternal damnation, but after death non-Christians will still have the opportunity to repent, and, faced with direct and immediate evidence of eternal life in ever-loving God, they all will. It's a position known as universalism: everyone gets saved. And it's a position excoriated by conservative evangelicals, among whose numbers Rob Bell has been pleased to rank for the duration of his career.

Now the evangelicals are not happy with Mr. Bell. In this 10,000-word takedown, one such Christian calls the book inaccurate, indefensible, naive, muddled, blasphemous, and – horror of horrors! - liberal. In many mainstream Christian circles, it seems, there is no greater insult than the l-word. (No, the other one.) (No, the other one.) (No, the other other one.) Dearly beloved leader of the free peoples of Shorelandia John Shore has written several articles in response to readers asking questions like “Is the Devil Making Me Believe in a 'Liberal' God Who Isn't the True God?”, “Does the Holy Spirit Vote Republican?”, and, in 2008, “Will God Forgive Me if I Don't Vote for McCain?”.

The assumption that Christianity and conservatism go together like Charlie Sheen and incoherent bragging has always baffled me. To me it's self-evident that, in the words of another dearly beloved leader of the free peoples, Stephen Colbert, “reality has a well-known liberal bias”. And maybe my third-world upbringing gave me too much of an affinity with Liberation Theology, the Latin American Christian movement of the 1970s that condemned oppression and gave a theological voice to the poor, but it's equally self-evident that God has a liberal bias.

I could proof-text this. I could point to Old Testament passages that demand welfare provision for poor and vulnerable groups in society; to the Psalms' many strong words about God's hatred of injustice and concern for the oppressed; to the way Jesus hung out with people on the lowest social rung, and told people to pay their taxes and keep church and state separate; even to the passage in Acts where the early Christians practiced – yes, they did – communism. But proof-texting is a peculiarly evangelical tactic, and so, having availed myself of a rhetorical device of which Cicero would be proud, I will move on.

The problem with proof-texting – the problem with conservative and evangelical Christianity as a whole, really – is that it privileges one's own reading of the text, to the exclusion of all others. To return to that gargantuan panning of Love Wins, you'll notice a severe insistence that “[b]oth sides [of the universalism debate] cannot be right”, and a constant appeal to both traditional Christian orthodoxy and what the Bible “clearly” says. If you can't understand why “it's tradition, so it must be right” is a specious argument, you're clearly not cut out for critical thinking; but it's the appeal to Biblical authority that bothers me more.

I know that I have been steeped in semiotics for some months now, and that it is a difficult and obscure field, but I really think more conservatives need to engage with it on a fundamental level. I've talked before about my uncertainty as to whether any text, the Bible included, has meaning independent of what we read into it; in fact, I'm rather hoping to make this the topic of my prospective post-graduate studies; and I believe that all interpretive truth-claims need to be approached with a healthy barrel of skepticism. A poem doesn't 'mean' one single thing; its meaning lies in the tension and harmony of all the different interpretations that can possibly be laid on it by its readers. The same is true of all writing. Even something most people would consider should be unambiguous, such as a legal document, bears this multitude of meaning – that's what lawyers do all day. When I consider the interpretive ambiguity of a sign that reads

SLOW DOWN

YOUR NEIGHBORS

it seems completely absurd to claim any single “correct” interpretation of a text as dense, complex, even perhaps self-contradictory as the Bible.

Whether that leaves us in a chaotic, Crowleyesque free-for-all of wanton eisegesis, I'm neither sufficiently advanced in my hermeneutic studies nor intellectually arrogant enough to judge. However, in the absence of external referents, I maintain my skepticism toward interpretive absolutism; and I ask, along with arguably the world's first semiotician, “What is truth?”