The Golden Ass

18 In the morning, when he returned to the city, he was hungry. 19 And seeing a fig tree by the side of the road, he went to it and found nothing at all on it but leaves. Then he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once. 20 When the disciples saw it, they were amazed, saying, “How did the fig tree wither at once?” 21 Jesus answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. 22 Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.” - Matthew 21:18-22

A Dead Fig Tree

This week's scripture reading is Luke 13: 10-17. Jesus heals a woman on the Sabbath. The synagogue ruler angrily tells the people to heal on different day other than the Sabbath. Then Jesus unabashedly insults him in front of everyone. With exclamation marks, lol.

At first, I found Jesus' insults confusing and disquieting. "That's not very nice, Jesus," I was kinda thinking. Lol. "Isn't he one of the ones you were sent to rescue?"

I find this helpful in my confusion, from Alisdair MacIntyre in After Virtue:

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"We honor others, [Aristotle] says, in virtue of something they are or have done to merit the honor...

It is important to notice that the concept of honor in the society for which Aristotle was the spokesman - and in many subsequent societies as different as that of the Icelandic sagas and the Bedouin of the Western desert - just because honor and worth were connected in the way Aristotle remarks...In many pre-modern societies a man's honor is what is due to him and to his kin and his household by reason of their having their DUE place in the social order. To dishonor someone is to fail to acknowledge what is thus due. Hence the concept of an insult becomes a socially crucial one and in many such societies a certain kind of insult merit's death. Peter Berger and his co-authors (1973) have pointed out the significance of the fact that in modern societies we have neither legal nor quasi-legal recourse if we are insulted. Insults have been displaced to the margins of our cultural life where they are expressive of private emotions rather than public conflicts." - p. 116

A few pages later (p. 122), MacIntyre further clarifies the social makeup, meaning and context of honor and insult in ancient "heroic" societies:

"Every individual has a given role and status within a well-defined and highly determinate system of roles and statuses. The key structures are those of kinship and of the household. In such a society a man knows who he is by knowing his role in these structures; and in knowing this he knows what he owes and what is owed to him by the occupant of every other role and status. In [multiple such ancient languages] there is originally no clear distinction between 'ought' and 'owe'...

But it is not just that there is for each status a prescribed set of duties and privileges. There is also a clear understanding of what actions are required to perform these and what actions fall short of what is required. For what are required are actions. A man in heroic society is what he does. Hermann Frankel wrote of Homeric man that 'a man and his actions become identical, and he makes himself completely and adequately comprehended in them; he has no hidden depths...In [the epics] factual report of what men do and say, everything that men are, is expressed, because they are no more than what they do and say and suffer' (Frankel 1975, p. 79). To judge a man is therefore to judge his actions. By performing actions of a particular kind in a particular situation a man gives warrant for judgment upon his virtues and vices..."

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So, let’s look at the story in Luke 13…

10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

If what MacIntyre says of “heroic” societies or of pre-modern societies in general is at least mostly true of the story in question in Luke 10, we can take a few things from it:

1. Both Jesus and the synagogue ruler thought each had done something that infringes upon God’s social order. The synagogue ruler thought Jesus had broken God’s law by working on the Sabbath. Jesus thought otherwise. This is a story in which questions of whether particular actions are honorable or dishonorable are presented and contested.

2. The respective responses to the actions of both Jesus and the synagogue ruler, in one way or another, are “due” to them “by reason of their having their DUE place in the social order.” In other words, this is a story of Jesus and the synagogue ruler actually making competing claims for their proper places in the social order by reason of what’s due to them in accordance with their public actions and words. So, then, Jesus’ healing in the first place – before the insult ever happens - is implicitly his claim to not only have the authority to interpret Torah with greater authority than the prevailing interpretation but also a claim to a social status and identity over and above the synagogue ruler, who is the current Torah interpreter. This means that this story has echoes of Jesus’ claims to being the Messiah or, in MacIntyre’s language, the “hero.”

3. Jesus’ insults are not expressions of private emotion. They are the content of public conflict. Further, Jesus’ insults have legal weight, as they are over contested interpretation of Torah.

4. This is a public conflict with a social figure head. In other words, the synagogue ruler is a man at the top of the social ladder on whom the whole social order crucially hinges. The conflict between these two competing public figures, then, also has legal weight. As MacIntyre said it, “an insult becomes...socially crucial…and in many such societies a certain kind of insult merit's death.” In other words, the whole social order depends on one’s status, and so an insult upends the very life of the social body. This means the following. Either the whole point of Jesus’ insult was that the synagogue / village ruler’s actions and words merit death, or Jesus’ insult merits death in the eyes of the synagogue / village leader. Or both. This begs the question of what the synagogue ruler did so wrong as to merit either death or a contest to the point of death in the eyes of Jesus? Why was the synagogue ruler such a threat to God’s order of things in the eyes of Jesus that his death would be a revelation of his role in the social order?

5. If it’s true that “[b]y performing actions of a particular kind in a particular situation a man gives warrant for judgment upon his virtues and vices," then the instructions of the synagogue ruler and insults by Jesus amount to judgments of one another’s’ character. It becomes fitting that and readily apparent why Jesus dies the death of a rabble rouser.

Though Jesus ends up dying the death of a criminal at the hands of the Powers, note that Jesus makes implicit references to the Exodus in his response to the synagogue ruler. For Jesus, Pharaoh takes on the literary role of Satan (Luke 10: 16). Secondarily and more immediately, Jesus’ is then painting the synagogue leader as the figure of Pharaoh, or of Satan! If we could imagine Jesus being sarcastic for a moment, I suppose it’s almost as if Jesus is saying to the “ruler of this age”: God forbid we free people from being bound to an overwhelmingly powerful and enslaving curse on the day we generally rest as a sign of the reign and peace of God who rescued us in an Exodus from binding to an overwhelmingly enslaving Power.

No wonder Jesus thought the synagogue ruler worthy of drowning the Red Sea. I suspect that the synagogue ruler didn’t actually give a shit about that woman, who was “bent over and…quite unable to stand up straight.” Just as Humana apparently doesn’t give a shit that the burdens they place on the backs of their employees in order to obtain their bottom line (my company was recently bought out by Humana, and my whole team has been struggling under the weight of it). And, just as Trump doesn't give a shit about kids dying in cages. The synagogue ruler was a Cain figure. He didn’t “care” for or about the woman who couldn't stand upright.

The pic above is of a dead fig tree of public significance in a town in Scotland called Ormiston. According to the interwebs, people are sad that it's dead - after a lot of efforts to preserve it. In Matthew 21: 18-22, Jesus seems to indicate that, in some way, God's time of patience and preservation was up. The cursed fig tree represented Israel.

Apparently love and justice aren’t always “nice.”

So, Alisdair MacIntyre very much helps me understand better what JESUS was up to in Luke 10. He doesn’t exactly, however, help me to understand what it means FOR ME. If the church is fulfilling her calling, she will inevitably clash with the Powers. But, what does that really mean and look like?

I tend to respond to Cain and Pharaoh with self-righteousness, impatience and self-assertion. I tend to think that, even though he wasn’t “nice,” my self-centering wasn’t what was going on with Jesus. How does Love respond to Cain and Pharaoh, to injustice, to not only a lack but the opposite of a shepherding-like care for people? "“Truly I tell you, if you have trust and do not doubt..." How do we embody and enact that?