The Gospel According to Banksy

He does have a way of provoking conversation, doesn’t he?

Attributed to Banksy in 2005, the original painting belongs to British rock musician Robbie Williams.

Let me say this first:  I am in favor of the existence of a safe and secure State of Israel.  That said, I have a lot of appreciation for Banksy’s Christmas card, even if I don’t agree with every agenda item of If Americans Knew, the organization that is selling the cards this year with this image. 

Plenty of comments on blogs that display a reproduction of this picture point out that since Mary and Joseph were Jewish, they would have been free to travel through the checkpoint at the wall.  I can understand the resentment of those who object to the artist appropriating the role of Christians’ favorite Jewish family to illustrate the plight of contemporary Palestinians.

I invite you to think of this painting from another slant.

It reminds us that the story Luke and Matthew tell of Jesus’ birth is not some sentimental fairy tale separated from our world.  Jesus was born into a dark and messed up world.  He was born as a member of a community divided and oppressed because of race and religion.  Bethlehem was not some idyllic utopia of deep and dreamless sleep where all the shepherds were virgins and all the sheep were above average.  It was a place under occupation; a place where military power had been used to confiscate the land of people who had owned it for generations.

Luke’s account of the Bethlehem birth tells us of an emperor who requires people to travel in order to count them so they can be more efficiently taxed.  The taxes will pay for the soldiers who, by the time Luke wrote, had burned the temple to the ground.

The Prince of Peace grew up to oppose this occupation through non-violent confrontation, turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, walking out of court naked (Matthew 5:39-41) Disciples came to recognize the cross as an expression of God’s way of reconciling the world; not through destruction, as in the story of Noah, or through confusion and division, as in the story of the tower of Babel, but through an act of submission.  Strength through weakness does not come naturally to human beings.  Taking on human flesh in the form of a baby, then refusing to resist the violence of crucifixion–it did not appear to be a winning strategy.  Jerusalem fell.

The reign of God among us preached by Jesus, where peace and justice reign, seems to have taken a hit.  Nations still rage.  Violence, terrorism, and brute force remain the weapons of choice by oppressors and liberators alike.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. stand as notable exceptions in the 20th century.  Mandela achieved liberation for his people by declining to renounce violence until the government that imprisoned him also renounced violence.  Malcolm X famously advocated liberation using Sartre’s phrase, “by any means necessary.”

It is so easy for me to advocate non-violence.  I live in relative safety and security.  Would I practice the non-violence of Jesus if somebody threatened my family, my children, my grandchildren? I have to admit to some cognitive dissonance.

The question:  do you think that non-violent confrontation in the style of Jesus’ sermon on the mount or MLK Jr.’s civil rights campaign, could change things in the Israel/Palestine conflict?  Who should adopt it first?  Does it matter?

Roadrunner Cartoons, Sisyphus, and the Virgin Birth

One Christmas years ago, when our middle children were 3 and 4 years old, my family and I visited my parents for a few days.  I slept late on Saturday morning (I was on vacation) and awoke to the sound of the television, my daughters’ giggles, and my father’s very loud guffaws.

I went downstairs to find my children snuggled up with their Grandpa watching a Roadrunner cartoon.  I sat down.  Wile E. Coyote set a trap using Acme products.

Roadrunner didn’t fall for it.  Wile E. Coyote checked on the trap to see what was wrong with it

and it blew him up.

All four of us laughed.

“It’s the myth of Sisyphus, don’t you think?” Dad said.  “But lots funnier.”

“I was thinking it’s a commentary on our dependence on technology,” I said.  “He’s a coyote.  Why can’t he just pounce on that sucker and eat it instead of using all the Rube Goldberg Acme products?”

“Shhhh,” said the children.  They loved the colors, the action, the explosions.  They couldn’t read the signs Roadrunner held up, but they still laughed.  Not just because we did, but because it looked funny.  Philosopher, naturalist, and young children, Roadrunner spoke to all of us.

So.  What does this have to do with the virgin birth narrative?  Here goes:  The Gospel writers Luke and Matthew both wrote to diverse audiences.  Their original hearers (the Gospels would have been read aloud to groups in a culture where books were so expensive to produce) were diverse in age, but also in their backgrounds.

1. Some of the Jews would have known the Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) in Hebrew.
2. Others (a. Jews who had been raised in a Greek-speaking culture and  b. Gentiles who had attended synagogue) would have known the same Scriptures from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.
3. Finally, there were Gentiles who had come into the Christian community without any background in Judaism and little or no knowledge of the Scriptures in either language.

In the story of Jesus’ birth, Matthew cites, and Luke alludes to, the prophet Isaiah who told a nation under siege that the forces of evil would not win:  “Look, the young woman (Hebrew almah) is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel (God with us.)”  The Greek translation of this passage reads, “Look, the virgin (parthenos) is with child . . .”

Either way, Isaiah’s point, in 701 B.C., was that God had not abandoned Israel.  The king to whom Isaiah spoke, Ahaz, was a royal screw-up.  The people had every reason to believe that the siege of Assyria and Ephraim, teamed up together, would succeed.  Isaiah’s declaration gave hope beyond the immediate failure; that the child about to be born and called Immanuel, “God With Us,” would show the nation that God had not abandoned them.

So, what does this mean for Matthew and Luke?  And what does it mean for us?

Matthew, in his inimitable heavy-handed way, says, “Look!  We’re going through the same thing with this damned Roman occupation that God’s people went through with the Assyrian occupation in the time of Isaiah [700 years before.]  God was in charge then, provided a child, Immanuel, God with us (Good King Hezekiah) who saved God’s people.  God is still in charge, despite the brutal occupation of Rome, and is saving us through a child, Immanuel (God with us) named Jesus (God saves).”

Luke employs more subtlety, but he tells the story in a way that will call his original audience to remember God’s faithfulness and recognize it in the birth of Jesus.

And that is Luke and Matthew’s point:  God is faithful still.  Whenever you oppose tyranny and oppression, even when it feels like you are losing, you are not alone. You are doing the Lord’s work.  Whether you read Hebrew (almah, “young woman”) or Greek, (parthenos, “virgin”) does not matter to Luke and Matthew; they want Jew and Greek both to understand this.  What matters is that you know you are not alone when you suffer under Roman occupation, or apartheid, or tribal warfare, or addiction, or whatever evil haunts your life.  God has entered the world in Jesus, Immanuel, God with us.  We are not alone.

So, here’s the question:  When you have witnessed or experienced extreme injustice in the world, have you sensed God’s presence, or God’s absence?  Do you have a specific story you can share with us?

Megyn Kelly wins the &%#@ Idiot Award

One of these days, I’m going to start another blog and call it The &%#@ Idiot Award.  Every day, I will accept nominations, let my readers vote, and at the end of the week hand out the prizes.  This week, however, there is simply no competition.  Congratulations, Megyn Kelly.

Just to set the record straight:  The myth of Santa Claus has its origins with Saint Nicholas, who was Turkish.  Jesus of Nazareth was from, well, Nazareth.  If you want to know what color Jesus and Saint Nicholas were, get out of the studio and go make friends with some people from Nazareth and Turkey.

He just doesn’t look that white to me.

And now, I will do my best to put my evil snarky twin back behind the filter and return to my usual pastoral self.

Reza Aslan, author of Zealot, makes a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of contemporary Christian movements.  He points out (with a smile) that the Jesus of history, being Galilean, would have looked like a Galilean; that is, the same hair, eye, and skin color as Reza Aslan.  The Christ of Christian movements, however, looks like whatever a particular Christian culture projects upon him.  In China, Jesus looks Chinese.  To Guatemalans, Jesus is a migrant worker, and to many white American suburbanites, the Christ of the prosperity Gospel is an affluent white man.

And, Aslan says, that’s O.K.

I have to disagree.  There is a third way.  Whereas the search for the historical Jesus has focused on the man from Nazareth who stands behind the scriptures, and the malleable Christ of culture takes the shape of wishful thinking of Christians, the Christian scriptures describe Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (Christ) with specific and uncompromising theological claims.  Whether those claims are believable or not, they are not malleable.  My agenda here at The Bible Is My Crazy Uncle is not to talk anybody into agreeing with any of these theological claims; rather, my agenda is to discern what those claims are and state them clearly.

My boredom with the quest for the historical Jesus, from the Jesus Seminar to Reza Aslan, grows out of its speculative conclusions.  While it would be fascinating to travel back in time to the first century, shoot a lot of video, audio, and photos, maybe take a selfie with Jesus and a few of the disciples, that’s science fiction.

Once we move upstream from the collection of manuscripts we have inherited, we have to make a huge leap to get back to the historical Jesus.  Though there may be only 30 years between the earliest Christian texts (1 Thessalonians, for example) and the death of Jesus, those 30 years incubated a radical transformation.  A small community of Jews who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah transformed into a multicultural community of Jews and Greeks and North Africans spread out over a huge geographic area.

The New Testament authors wrote to particular communities of Christians with particular concerns about how to live and die as disciples of Jesus.  None of the New Testament authors wrote with the agenda of describing what Jesus looked like, or describing accurately or exactly by contemporary standards what Jesus did, or even exactly what he said.

Here’s the question of the day:  Do the words of the historical Jesus, to the extent we can discern them, hold more importance for you than the words of New Testament writers?

The Crazy Uncle Examines Mary’s Virginity

Thanks to those who commented on this post from my Facebook page; I’m still figuring out how to make the comments from FB available to all readers of the WordPress blog.  If there’s a way to make them migrate, maybe somebody will take pity on this tech-challenged crazy uncle and let me know.  For those of you who don’t know me on Facebook, I’ll figure out today or this weekend how to make these blog posts and their comments public on my FB page.  Or, just friend me.  Neill Morgan is my real name.

Here is an authentic photo from the first century of a Roman soldier.  Great resolution for the time, don’t you think?

Roy put forth the hypothesis that Mary’s pregnancy was the result of a rape by a Roman soldier.  To fill out this hypothesis a bit, a New Testament scholar would point to the Roman occupation.  Rape by soldiers was common and unpunished; that is, the soldier was not officially punished for his crime.  The girl or woman who was known to have been raped, especially if she became pregnant, would have received dishonor, insult upon injury from at least some of her community.  So would her family.

If it is the case that a rape haunts the historical backdrop of Mary’s pregnancy, we would have to assume that Luke expected his first readers to understand his subtext.  The theological claim in this context is consistent with Luke’s explicit agenda:  that God takes the power of evil and oppression (especially the power of the Roman government) and turns it against evil.  The crucifixion leads to resurrection, the destruction of the temple leads to the spiritual temple of Jesus’ resurrected body and the spread of the good news to every corner of the world.  A rape by a Roman soldier leading to the conception of God in human flesh fits in nicely with Luke’s theology of the cross, of God taking injustice and, in a kind of spiritual jujitsu, turning it into a powerful good:  “We are getting what we deserve,” says the criminal crucified next to Jesus, “but this man has done nothing wrong.”

Ultimately, however, I am skeptical.

I’m partly skeptical because I don’t want to do unto others what I would not want done unto me.  I don’t buy it when someone else begins with his or her own theology and works backward into the text.  If I do that to someone else, someone who does not share my theology, it will feel forced, like retrofitting:  “If God didn’t mean for us to have iPhones, God wouldn’t have given us thumbs!”

I’m also skeptical because I can’t find any textual evidence that Luke intended in this story to address the issue of the rape of Jewish girls and women by soldiers.  Luke explicitly places his story in the context of the Roman occupation, when Herod was the puppet king, Augustus was Emperor, and Quirinius was governor of Syria.  He often addresses the issue of the confiscation of property and injustice perpetrated by Herod’s puppet regime.  But, he never addresses the rape issue.  Luke can be subtle, but he’s never opaque.   

Primarily, I’m skeptical because I don’t see any evidence that plausibility was a priority for Luke.  The historical explanation of rape by a Roman soldier, or a scientist’s explanation of natural parthenogenesis, reach for plausibility.

 Luke’s agenda was not plausibility, but meaning through mystery.  

Christine’s comment, “Why does everything have to be about science?” gets to this issue.  I love science.  Science helps me make sense of this world.  Evolutionary Science has helped me eat healthier and find an exercise program that works for me.  Medical science saved my life at least once.

But, I don’t think Luke, even though he was a physician according to legend, had a scientific world view.  He lived in a pre-scientific age.

The crazy uncle approach to scripture attempts to understand the biblical writer’s agenda by entering into his or her context to the extent that we can.  That’s where I’m going in my next post, taking a look at Luke’s historical, cultural, and literary context.  From there, we will have a clearer view of the meaning of Luke’s theological claim in this story of Jesus’ conception and birth.

Here’s my question for you:  To what extent does it matter to you whether Luke intended to tell the story of Jesus’ birth as an accurate historical account, or intended to tell this story as it was shaped by his experience of faith and his desire to share that faith with his readers?

The Crazy Uncle Declares War on Christmas Pageants

I had this dream in which a grumpy prophet crashed our Christmas pageant rehearsal, raving like a lunatic.  “I’m the ghost of Advent past!” he screamed.  Dressed in camel’s hair, leather belt, and munching on locusts dipped in honey, he gave off the smell of John the Baptist, but his beard had more of a Carl Jung metrosexual trim to it.

 He stormed into the sanctuary, scaring all the shepherd children in their bathrobes and fake beards.  Toddlers in their sheep costumes bleated and ran to their parents.  An athletic girl from the church rugby team, (our church has a rugby team?  Where in my subconscious did that come from?) recruited for the part of the innkeeper, stood in the lunatic’s path and recited her line:  “There’s no room for your kind here, Mister.”

“Then who will set you straight?” he boomed.  “I’ve seen enough of these Christmas pageant travesties! It’s time to set the record straight.”

We three adults who thought we were in charge just looked at each other and shrugged, as if to say, “Record?  What record?”

The shape-shifting prophet peeled off his beard, revealing the face of Antonin Scalia.  He grabbed a Bible from a pew rack, whacked it with his fist and yelled, “STICK TO THE *#@%ING SCRIPT!”

Our Director of Christian Education, with director’s clipboard in hand, wouldn’t take any guff from anyone, not even a Supreme Court justice.  “A strict constructionist, are you?” she spat out the words as an epithet, eyes narrowed.

“What other kind is there?” he said, taking the form of Woody Allen.  “Places, everybody,” he said.  “You, children, yes you.  Take off those beards.  Shepherding was a child’s job, not an old man’s.  Remember King David before that business with Goliath?  He was a child, he was a shepherd.  It’s what children did.  Be yourself, be children.”

He turned to the beautiful rugby captain, looked her up and down and said, “I have bad news and good news.”

She arched an eyebrow.

“The bad news is you don’t have a part in this pageant.  There is no innkeeper.  There is no inn.”

She stood taller, towering over Woody.  She jabbed at the text in his hand, “It says right there in Luke 2:7, Mary ‘laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.’”

“Yes, well, that’s an unfortunate translation influenced more by the English culture of King James in 1608 than the actual Greek word.  Look at it.”  He pulled from his pocket a little blue New Testament in Greek.  “Kataloumai, it says,” and he slammed the book shut as if to say, “That settles it.”

He looked around at the quizzical expressions on each face and looked up to the rafters and whined, “God!  Doesn’t anybody know Greek anymore?  What happened to teaching classics in school?”  The prophet shape-shifted again; no longer Woody Allen, but my grandmother, who just happened to have been a high school classics teacher, back when there were lots of them in Texas.

“Kataloumai,” she explained, now with the patience of my classics-teaching librarian grandmother, “means literally ‘upper room.’  In chapter 22 of Luke, your English translation renders the same word ‘guest room,’ to describe the large room upstairs where Jesus and his disciples ate the last supper.

“So who sent them to the stable since there wasn’t a place for them in the guest room?”

“It was Joseph’s family.  Think about it.  Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to pay the tax because it was Joseph’s home town.  They wouldn’t have stayed in somebody’s Bed and Breakfast.  They would have stayed with family.  But, here’s Luke’s point in telling the story this way:  Joseph’s family took him in, prematurely pregnant wife and all, but told them, ‘There’s no place for you in the room reserved for honored guests.’  He started out life disrespected by his own family.  It will take another twenty chapters before he makes it to the upper room, and it will be his very last meal before the Roman government puts him to death; the same government that made Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem for the census.”

“So, what’s the good news?” Ms. Rugby captain asked, “You said there was good news.”

Morphing back into the raving prophet, our visitor said, “You only need one stage set! There was no stable either!”  He shook the posts that held up the cardboard rafters.  “That’s a medieval convention imposed on the story long after Luke wrote it.  Animals were kept in the house on the ground floor.  There would have been a raised platform made of stone where Joseph and Mary slept, and an indentation near the edge where the animals could get hay was the only manger.  That wooden contraption–no need for it.  Cut it to pieces and throw it in the fire!”

With a sweep of his arm, he burned down the set.  Everything vanished except the people.  “This is all you need,” she said, again taking the form of my grandmother.

“Tell a story,” she said.  “Tell a story of a newlywed couple who come home to the groom’s family to celebrate a glorious event, the birth of their first child.  Tell a story of their struggle to stay connected to parents, aunts, and uncles and cousins and friends who do not understand them; who reject them for stepping outside the laws and conventions of sexual behavior.  After all, do you think anybody believed Mary’s claim of Jesus’ conception by the Holy Spirit?  Of course they didn’t.  They whispered among themselves, ‘Back in my day, we stoned adulterers to death.  Hmmf.’  Tell us the story of God’s love for them, God’s plan for them, when their own people refused them the guest room even when it was time for her to give birth.”  The teacher gazed out over the empty pews, soon to be filled with pilgrims who want to hear the story, though they have heard it many times before.  “You don’t need to tell them what it means,” she said.  “Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, those who have ever felt rejected or discounted, will find themselves in this story.  And they will hear what they need to hear, in the words of the angels, good news, great joy for all the people.  All.”

If You Break the Sabbath, God Will Punish You. And Everyone Else, Too.

The week before his ninth birthday, my father realized something terrible, awful, and almost unbearable.  The next installment of King of the Texas Rangers, a serial western, would open in his home town movie theater on his birthday.  The unbearable part? “I realized,” he told me, “my ninth birthday would fall on a Sunday.”

Here’s Dad, in 1988, telling us a story.

In the Morgan household of my father’s generation, Sabbath law held an iron grip.  Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy translated into Thou shalt not do anything fun on Sundays.  So, Dad said, “I came up with a plan, a pretty smart plan for a nine-year-old; or so I thought.”

At this point in the story, Dad would open his Bible if it was nearby and point to the verse:  “I decided to take Jesus’ advice and ‘count the cost.‘  Seeing the next installment of King of the Texas Rangers on the day it arrived at The Texan Theater was worth getting a whipping.  In fact, it would be worth two whippings, and I knew my father well enough to know that’s what I would have to pay in addition to the dime it cost to get into the movie.”

On Monday, with six days to go, Dad popped the question to his father.  “After church next Sunday afternoon, since it’s my birthday, could I go to see the movie with my friend Joe?”  Joe’s parents were heathens, so there was no question that he could go.  Sure enough, my grandfather gave my father a spanking with his belt. “Just a couple of whacks,” Dad said.  “Definitely still worth it.  It quit stinging by Wednesday.”

And Wednesday, he asked him again.  “Dad, I know it’s Sunday, but it’s my birthday, too, and I think God would be O.K. with me going to the movie if I listen real careful in church.” His father narrowed his eyes.  “You do, do you?”  This time, Dad had to go cut a switch off of the pomegranate tree.  “Getting whacked with a switch hurt worse, but I just kept thinking about how great the movie would be and eventually my bottom would quit stinging.”

On Saturday, still having a hard time sitting down because of the last whipping with the pomegranate switch, Dad made his final gambit.  He told his father, “I would like to observe the Sabbath on Saturday this week, like Jesus did.  I’ll just stay in and rest today, and go to church tomorrow like the first Christians did.” His father narrowed his eyes again and Dad worried for a few seconds that his plan had failed.  “And then, I suppose,” Grandfather said, “you’ll want to go see the movie after church.  Just like the first Christians did.”

“When he cracked a joke, I knew I had him,” Dad said.  “I just had to smile appreciatively and then wait.”

“I guess,” Grandfather said, “if you want to go to the movie on Sunday, it will just have to be between you and God.  If you can live with that, I’ll let you go just this once.  But you’ll have to walk.  Don’t expect me to drive anywhere but church on a Sunday.”

After church on Sunday, Dad turned on the radio in the car, despite the fact that listening to entertainment on the Sabbath was generally frowned upon.  But, there was no entertainment on the radio that day, December 7, 1941.  “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by air,” the radio announcer said.

As the implications sunk in, and the announcement continued, that President Roosevelt would declare war, Grandfather’s words echoed in my father’s nine-year-old mind, “It will just have to be between you and God.”

“I knew,” Dad said, “that I was guilty.  God punished the whole country for my intent to break the Sabbath and go to a movie.”

“And that,” Dad said, “is why the attack on Pearl Harbor was all my fault.”

Dad would have turned 81 years old today.  I still miss him, I still hear his voice every time I remember one of his stories.

Some people say there’s some resemblance. I can only hope to tell a story as well as Dad.