The Golden Ass

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4.

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Thursday, Day 5:

“Alas, for you blind guides who say, ‘Whoever swears by the Temple sanctuary, it means nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the Temple sanctuary, he is under obligation.’ Fools and blind men! For what is greater, the gold of the Temple sanctuary or the sanctuary that makes the gold holy?...the one who swears by the Temple sanctuary swears by the sanctuary and by him who dwells in it. And the one who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, charlatans, because you tithe a tenth of the mint and the dill and the cumin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law, the judgment and the mercy and the faith; yet these things you ought to have done, while also not neglecting those others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat but drink down the camel.” – Matthew 23: 16-24

From what I understand of the Pharisees’ interpretation of Torah, they had established a hierarchy within it to help them give a proper order to their lives. How do we follow the whole Torah? What does that mean or actually look like? It can be, or at the very least seem, confusing and contradictory. They had thus divided it up between the “heavier” and “lighter” commandments, and so the “heavier” ones “carried more weight” for their lives.

Jesus also criticizes this system of interpretation elsewhere. But here, I hear him specifically naming it as an arbitrary system of meaning by which those in power were able to carve the life they wanted out of Torah. And, I hear Jesus naming the life they wanted as the one where they get the salutations in the marketplaces and the chief couch at meals (see vv. 5-7). They had articulated an interpretation of meaning that established and maintained their own social honor and class hierarchy.

In this passage, I also hear Jesus addressing that and how identity was conferred in relation to the Temple. He who swears by the glory of the gold of the Temple or by the value of the offering he, as one of high social and economic class is able to make, is staking his life on his own ability to contribute to, or even lead, Israel’s Nationalistic hopes in the face of Roman imperial insult and oppression on the ritual purity of the Temple as designated by the arbitrary and ideological system of meaning that he himself had helped to create and maintain!

As such, I hear in these words from Jesus as a warning to us of what’s at stake in “keeping the name holy.” Are we praying a curse on ourselves when we pray “hallowed by thy name” while also making such oaths based on our arbitrary and destructive systems of meaning that we ourselves create or designate for “order of worship”? Pictured here is Donald Trump, on June 1, 202, in the midst of the protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Would Jesus’ implicit warning to the scribes and Pharisees have meaning here for Trump and those who give their allegiance to him?

When I was practicing as an Architect, I remember my mentor referring to the Architectural plan as an act of faith. When an Architect draws that plan up, he is staking his life on it. It’s a kind of oath. And, when he signs a contract with the builder and owner, he is swearing this investment of his life on the imagined building he hopes to see come to fruition. Also when I was an architect, out of my sense of divine calling and mission, out of a legitimately profound sense of meaning and purpose for my life, I tried in my own mind to reconcile my practice of Architecture with worship of the one true God of Israel and of all creation.

But, what I really ended up doing was placing more interpretive weight on the brick and mortar of the buildings I helped design than on the people who make and dwell in them. I didn’t view my profession as a profession of service to and love for my neighbor. But, unbeknownst to me at the time, I practiced Architecture instead as the erection of monuments to my own talent and hoped-for glory. Once, while in the midst of a design-build project, the owner decided – without telling us, as the design team - to change some of the material finishes near the front of the building in order to make it look “more expensive.” When I discovered this change, I was so exaggeratedly furious that I screamed at the top of my lungs to the heavens for a half hour until I lost my voice.

The reason for my fury was, ironically, the building owner’s having placed more weight on an arbitrary system of meaning oriented around material commodificaiton rather than around the system of meaning we had designated around a rhythmic set of “musical” relationships between the resultingly (no longer so) harmonious parts of the building. This became ironic a year later when, in the wake of the economic downturn, I was laid off and, in the processing and confronting of my resulting feelings of pain and loss, shame and unworthiness, I realized that I had been treating “Architect” as a market-driven consumer identity.

I was confronted with the fact that I had tried to reconcile Architecture to worship but had, in the end, essentially been worshipping my own practicing of Architecture. I had established an arbitrary hierarchy of meaning by which I could have my own version of “the chief couch at meals” and “salutations in the marketplaces” in accordance with and oriented around a system of worship by which I had found my identity. I can now hear Jesus saying: “You blind fool! Which is greater, the architecture, or the image of God dwelling in and among it?” And, I can now hear this as Good News, because I am the image of God dwelling in and among it!

I repeated these same dynamics years later. When I got my nursing license in September of 2014, I prayed with my accountability partners that I would not take “Nurse” on as “my identity” in the same way. After struggling for a year and getting fired from my second nursing job in the midst of continuing to strive for an identity in the world, I found myself confronted with the reality that I had again setup an arbitrarily system of interpretation of the world and of my life and thus made “nurse” my identity in and among the marketplace of American desire and consumer choice in my blind fool’s attempt to live out the Way of Jesus.

I thus, a year and a half after having gotten my nursing license, went on to work as a “servant” in a restaurant for a year while diving deeply into scriptures about joyful service in love and into Peter’s texts about his own confrontations with his pride and shame, failures and successes in his discipleship to Jesus the Anointed One. “You blind fool! Which is greater, the nurse’s uniform or the image of God wearing it?” Through actual practice “in my bones” and with my feet as a “servant” – which involved a lot of very difficult and humbling lessons and required a number of confrontations with my shame, my pride, and my economic fears - I again became more readily able to hear that as Good News from God.

And, two years after starting life as a “servant” in a restaurant, I was again beginning life practicing nursing, this time serving families and patients as a hospice nurse and making more money than I ever had while finding my identity and glory in Architectural monuments to myself. Having more fully submitted myself to the Way of Love, I am getting paid MORE to more honestly and truthfully tend to “the weightier things of the law, the judgment and the mercy and the faith.”

This is to say nothing of the arbitrary systems of ideological meaning by which our model Evangelicals who we follow after and are discipled by - such as John McArthur, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr, Tim LaHay, and Ken Ham - articulate interpretations of meaning of Torah that work to establish and maintain our own social honor and class hierarchy around a Nationalistic image of God. In other words, this is to say nothing of the more specific ways that we do the very things Jesus angrily names as what the scribes and Pharisees were doing, to lamentably destructive ends.

Do you stake your life on arbitrary systems of meaning that work towards social ends that are foreign to the vision of shared life, struggle, and endurance into which Jesus calls and invites us? How so? Can you hear the truth of that as Good News that is freeing for you, that dignifies the imago dei that is the very personhood of yourself and those who are not at all like you?