N. T. Wright on Terror, Joy and Easter

"In our fear of terror and joy we have forgotten the purpose of tears. We have become embarrassed by them-- and with good reason, since they are a God-given reminder of the truth which our culture, as much as any communist propaganda, has done its best to make us forget: that we are neither naked apes nor trainee angels, but humans, made in the image of God. Which God? The God who stood and wept at the tomb of his friend; the God who fell down and sobbed in the garden of Gethsemane. We have deemed tears to be childish when in fact they are childlike; and Jesus told us to be childlike. We have allowed or proper dislike of emotionalism to deceive us into trying to ignore our emotions. But if Good Friday and Easter don't stir our emotions, then the tyrant has indeed enslaved us. We have become like a garden paved over with stone slabs. Many people live like that; God help us, many of us choose it, rather than face the terror and the joy of our own hearts, let alone of Calvary and Easter."

N. T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994): 58.

Mary, Martha and the Good Share

Last night before we went to bed, my wife told me about this news article. It describes the recent "family law" that Afghanistan's president has reportedly approved for the Shia minority in his country. Apparently the law will, among other things, make it illegal for Shia women to refuse to have sex with their husbands, have custody of their children, or leave the house without permission. Canadians have expressed astonishment and outrage at the possibility that all our risk and expense and sacrifice in Afghanistan might unwittingly result in this kind of government-sanctioned women's-rights abuse.

Canadians are asking "was this what we were fighting for?"

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon is seeking clarification from Afghan cabinet minsters.

And I'm thinking of Mary and Martha.

Do you have a flannel-graph vision of this story haunting your childhood, too? Jesus visits two sisters. As the practical-minded Martha makes busy in the kitchen, preparing the meal, the spiritually-minded Mary sits at the Lord's feet, hearing his word. Finally fed up with doing the housework alone, Martha asks Jesus to tell Mary to give her a hand. But he gently affirms Mary's choice: she has chosen "that good part which shall not be taken away from her."

If you're like me, you grew up with the impression that the point here was to contrast Martha's hustle and bustle with Mary's serene contemplation. "We need to learn to have a contemplative, Mary-spirit in a bustling, Martha-world."

Not long ago I read an article by N. T. Wright that sheds some pretty piercing light on what the "better share" that Mary chose might really have been. Wright points out that the obvious and scandalous thing here for a first-century reader (and, perhaps, a reader in places like Afghanistan today), is that rather than keeping to the back rooms with the other women, Mary is sitting at the Rabbi's feet in the male part of the house. He suggests that this is the source of Martha's indignation. Mary has cut clean across one of the most basic social conventions. To help you feel the scandal of what Mary has done, Wright asks you to imagine you'd invited him to stay the weekend at your house and, as it got around bedtime, he went and set up a camp-bed in your bedroom. In Mary's culture, there are certain places a woman just did not go. And sitting at the feet of a rabbi--the place where you trained to be a rabbi yourself-- was emphatically one of those places.

Martha isn't just asking for Mary to lend a helping hand. Mary has quite brazenly flouted a socially-coded gender role, by seeking a place as a rabbi-in-training under the Master. Martha is asking Jesus to put Mary back in the place where, as a woman, culture says she "belongs."

She's asking Jesus to ratify her society's gender code. And this is exactly what Jesus will not do: Mary has chosen the "good share" of the work, and it won't be taken from her.

Wow.

In calling Mary's choice "the good share," Jesus has spoken good news for the men and women of Afghanistan. And for the men and women of Canada, too. Because Jesus refuses to rubber-stamp a gender code that functions simply to keep women "in their place." Instead he invites them to find their place, discovering what it really means to be a "biblical" woman, sitting together with biblical men, in training at his gracious feet.

On Preaching the Historical Jesus

Further OCE thoughts. I wrote this reflection on preaching and history for a pastoral theology class in 2007:

Last summer (2006) I faced the task of preaching at a Bible camp having just read N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, a book that offers an interpretation of Jesus in relation to his historical context. Though Wright’s reading of the “historical Jesus” was illuminating, even edifying in its explanatory force, it left me floundering as I turned to preach a “historically grounded” gospel in a context where the timeless, faceless, “ask-Jesus-into-your-heart” fare was the order of the day. The throes of this experience still lingering in my memory, I was intrigued by Barth’s general skepticism towards “history” in preaching. In response to Barth’s advice that preachers must practice a restraint that respects the intellectual limits of historical criticism, I wonder if the “historical Jesus” has any place behind the pulpit. To what extent should our preaching attempt to situate the Word within a historically tenable narrative about the actual life, teaching and mission of Jesus of Nazareth? If for instance, historical inquiry suggests that Jesus’ parable about the “house built on sand” was actually a cryptic reference to the Temple and a prediction that Rome would bring it crashing down if Israel didn’t turn from the "wide gate” of revolutionary zeal, should this at all influence our preaching of Matthew 7:24-29? For the sake of the wounds I’m still nursing from this summer, I’d like to agree whole-heartedly with Barth, that Christianity must be a “present eschatological experience,” and that historical methods cannot uncover its claims because they “transcend history.” And indeed, if preachers of “the historical Jesus” must content themselves with painting drab portraits of a generic “holy man” behind the pulpit (a lá Marcus Borg’s “man of Spirit”), then let those with ears heed Barth’s claim: The Cross and Resurrection have irrevocably “shattered history,” dooming the quest for the “historical Jesus” to failure. Perhaps. But Jesus did come into Galilee proclaiming that “The Kingdom of God has drawn near”; and, unless we are prepared to settle for a docetic, less-than-fully-human Christ, that message surely meant something specific in its original context. Perhaps historical inquiry into this “something specific” can make our preaching less a matter of fitting a generic “god” into our own individualistic, self-centered stories, and more about being taken outside ourselves and fit into the story that God is telling through his act in and as Jesus of Nazareth.

Meeting Mr. Wright

In the spring of 2006, I took a course on the Gospels that deeply impacted my heart and mind for ministry. It was in this class that I was first introduced to the work of N. T. Wright, slugging my way through Jesus and the Victory of God with wonder and determination. As I discovered new lenses there for understanding the life and mission and Kingdom-proclamation of Jesus, I've never read the Gospels, or the rest of the Bible for that matter, the same way since.

Still studying for my OCE, I came across this review of one section of Jesus and the Victory of God that I wrote for that class:

Wright examines what a Messianic identity would have meant for Jesus and his contemporaries given his historical context, stressing that the title “Messiah” did not connote a “divine or quasi-divine figure” in first-century Judaism. Historically the Messianic mantle was a relatively elastic one that could be tailored to fit the figure of the claimant who donned it. Wright points to three themes common among the disparate Messianic movements of Jesus’ day: Israel’s return from exile, the centrality of the Temple, and the victorious battle against Israel’s enemies. Jesus’ self-understanding as the Messiah is evident, then, in the ways the praxis, stories and symbols of his mission both relate to and radically redefine these themes. In regarding himself as Messiah, Jesus saw himself as the one who “summed up Israel’s vocation and destiny,” the one “in and through whom the real return from exile would come about.” Wright understands the Temple action, for example, as Jesus’ symbolic enactment of his Messianic role as the Temple’s reformer and rebuilder. Similarly, he reads the discourses following the Temple action as “messianic riddles” that function cryptically as Jesus’ explanation of this action and implicitly as a Messianic claim. Wright’s uses this portrait of Jesus’ Messianic identity to explain the details of Jesus’ trial: the importance of the temple accusations, Caiaphas’s question about Jesus’ Messiahship, and especially Jesus’ reference to the Son of Man as a prediction of his own vindication.

Some questions we might ask about Wright’s portrait of the historical Jesus include:

1. Wright’s explanations of the so-called “messianic riddles” are often built around polyvalent readings of allusions to a variety of different texts. At what point do such intricate explanations stretch interpretation beyond plausibility by depending on layers of literary meaning that may or may not have been immediately accessible in the oral context in which these “riddles” were uttered?

2. How can Wright’s portrait of Jesus’ “non-transcendent” Messianic identity be historically continuous with the more “incarnational” Christology that seems to have developed relatively quickly in the early Church (such as we see in Colossians, Hebrews and the Gospel of John)?