nikowentworth

First Friday: Thessalonians 4:1-8

September 1, 2017September 4, 2017 nikowentworth

Why is the Bible so boring sometimes? Consider today’s first reading. Read as it is written on the page, St. Paul seems to be repetitive, condescending, and platitudinous. This section of the letter seems to say, “You Thessalonians are doing a good job. I want you to keep doing well, and keep improving.” You hardly need St. Paul to tell you that you should try to do good. But, before we write off St. Paul, we might consider if the text has some hidden gems, that we only need the right interpretive key to unlock. In other words, the Bible might be boring sometimes, not because of how its written, but because of how we read it.

We might begin by remembering that this letter, like many if not all of the epistles, was likely intended to be read aloud. Thus, instead of reading it in paragraph form, we should look for certain structures that we would expect in an oral speech of the time period. One of those is what’s called a chiastic structure. A chiastic structure is essentially a “pyramid pattern” where a theme presented at the beginning is repeated in a modulated fashion at the end, often with repeated words; a second theme presented after the first one is then the second to last presented in a similar modulated fashion, and so on so forth. This reversed repetition circles a central theme in the middle. We might visually represent it like this:

This kind of pattern is found throughout the bible as well as other oral works from diverse places and time periods. Here is one from the story of Noah:

Here is one from Beowulf:

Is there one in today’s reading? I actually think there are two. I also think that these chiastic structures, are part of a three part movement including Thessalonians 4:9-12, which together make a larger ABA’ pattern. So, instead of reading the passage in the block paragraph format, let’s try something like this:

‘

Clearly there is a lot here to unpack, and this is only scratching the surface. I also don’t want to pretend this reading of the text is necessarily the best. I am sure someone with more education would find an even better way to read this passage. But for our purposes, this helps us get a sense of how these words may have read to the ancient readers of this text. Not wanting to try to say too much and losing important things in the deluge, I won’t comment on everything I’ve picked out here, but only on some of the key moments of the text.

First, Paul refers to his audience as brothers. This is the same word as Jesus used in Matthew 23:8 when he said to the disciples that they are all brothers in the one Teacher (Himself.) Paul’s use of this term here and elsewhere shows the understanding that by receiving Christ’s word, the newly baptized also share in that brotherhood of Christ. More will be brought out on the use of this word later.

Second, the word used for “conducting yourselves” in Greek literally means “to walk.” So, when Paul is saying “How you should conduct yourselves,” he’s literally saying, “How you should walk.” Keep this in mind as we get to the end of the text.

The center of the first chiasm seems to be “to please God.” Right away, Paul is putting a context around the exhortation he is giving to his readers. We don’t “conduct ourselves” rightly for our own sake, we do it in order to please God; or, as the Greek word literally means “to win God’s favor and affection by being in moral agreeement with him.”

Moving on to the second chiasm, we see the phrase, “This is the will of God, your holiness.” Already, Paul is advancing his argument. In the first chiasm, he said that we “conduct ourselves” rightly in order to please God. Now, he’s advanced his argument by saying, “What pleases God is your holiness.” The word for holiness in Greek, when applied to believers means “being transformed by the Lord into His likeness.” Thus, we’re not just good because God likes it when we are good, and we like it when God is pleased with us. In fact, we are good because being good makes us more like God.

Next, I underlined the phrase “you know how to acquire a wife,” because it’s linguistically interesting. The phrase literally rendered might read something like “to know how to win mastery over your own vessel.” Clearly, this is an idiom of some sort, but there are actually two possible interpretations. The first is the one above, where “vessel” means wife and “win mastery” means acquire. This is certainly possible. St. Peter referred to wives as vessels (1 Peter 3:7) so there is certainly a precedent for this interpretation. However, there is another equally strong interpretation where vessel means one’s body. Hence, Paul is exhorting his listeners to gain mastery over their body. Personally, I prefer the second interpretation, given that the first seems to suggest that Paul is encouraging marriage, whereas in the majority of his letters he seems to promote celibacy as the ideal. However, both interpretations have strong scholarship behind them, and at this point there is no clear scholarly answer as to which 1st century Christians would have taken. It is also possible that Paul was aware of the double meaning here, and deliberately left it vague.

As we near the climax of this passage, we are given a clear contrast between the brothers and the Gentiles. The brothers follow the will of God for holiness. The Gentiles follow their passionate lust because they do not know God. It’s interesting to note that the language here mirrors this contrast. The word for will is θέλημά (Thelayma) and the word for lust is θυμία (Thymia). This similarity would not have gone unnoticed in an oral reading.

Now, having established a contrast between the brothers and the Gentiles, Paul does something interesting. Paul says, “not to take or exploit a brother.” This is striking because of the seemingly limited scope. Are Christians only not to exploit other Christians? How can St. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles as he is called, seem to take such an anti-Gentile position? Keep this question in mind as we get to the end of the text.

Finally, we reach the third chiasm. I highlighted “mutual charity” in purple, the color I used for brothers, because the word used here is, “philadelphias,” or brotherly love. This is important because the sentence reads, “On the subject of mutual charity you have no need for anyone to write you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.” The Greek word used for love here is agape.
Without knowing the Greek, one might think that mutual charity and love are synonymous here, and they might be! Or, they might not. Now, I want to be upfront and say that I have not found any commentaries which support the interpretation I am taking here, so take it with a grain of salt. And, if anyone finds work contradicting what I am saying here, I would certainly be happy to read it and revise my interpretation. But, my take is not that St. Paul is saying, “I don’t need to write to you about friendship, because God has already taught you about it.” Rather, St. Paul is saying, “I don’t need to write to you about friendship, or love among brothers, because God has already taught you a higher love.”

This brings us to our climax of the third chiasm. Paul writes, “Nevertheless, we urge you, brothers, to progress even more.” We’ve heard this language of even more before, in the first chiasm. Taking the interpretation given, Paul has just revealed what he means by “do so even more” or “progress even more.” He is calling them from a brotherly affection with each other into agape love, Christian love, the unbounded love of Jesus Christ.

It is finally at the conclusion where Paul tips his hand. Paul is calling them to live a tranquil life and essentially be good citizens so that they can conduct themselves properly toward outsiders. Here Paul resolves the dichotomy between the Brothers and The Gentiles or Outsiders. Remember, in the beginning we said that “conducting yourselves” can also mean “walk.” Perhaps, this part of the passage ought to be read as a call to live the law of Christ in faith in order to walk toward the outsider. Perhaps, this passage is not meant merely to distinguish between the brethren and the gentile, but to encourage the brothers to bring the gentile into the brethren. Essentially, Paul appears to be encouraging evangelism, first, by moving from a love among brothers to a universal love of and through Christ, and second, by living the law of Christ ourselves.

If this is what St. Paul is asking of us, I think that raises a lot of questions for us today. When we speak of evangelism today in our local parish, do we seem to be following the advice of St. Paul? Do potential churchgoers see Christians living a calm life of service to the community such that they know that our faith impacts the way we work and live? Do we hold ourselves up to the high standards of St. Paul, and thus attract possible converts by living an attractive life? Or do we try to sink to their level in order to be “relevant?”

Conversely, do we live the high demands of a Christian life for the sake of sharing the joy of the Christians life with others, or does our close-knit parish community become a clique separated from outsiders? For example, I remember a parish I was at once that had a meeting on evangelization that was trying to answer the question, “Why don’t we get more newcomers?” When asked what was positive about the parish, the people present said, “We are a small community parish with families that have known each other for ages and we want to keep it that way.” It wasn’t until someone pointed out the dichotomy between this sentiment and the desire to attract new people that those present began to realize the deep messaging problems they were having. These were certainly not bad people! Between them, they dedicated countless hours of service and underpaid employment to the parish out of love for God and their community. Any parish would be lucky to have people like them! However, what St. Paul is reminding us today is that God calls us not just to love our church family, but to love all people, in the hopes, that through our evangelism, all people are led to Christ, and all people are then members of our Church family.

Post by: Niko Wentworth

-References to Greek words in the passage were done through biblehub.com
-Chiastic structures for the Noah and Beowulf passages taken from the wikipedia article for Chiastic Structure
-Main image is “Paul preaching at the Areopagus” by Raphael

The Grotesqueness of the Mass and the Problem of Evil

August 21, 2017 nikowentworth

I would like you to imagine the classic love story. You know the one: The daring knight rescues the damsel in distress from the fiery dragon. The details really don’t matter. All the story needs, seemingly, is a knight, a dragon, and a princess. However, it seems that there is one other element needed in the story, and that is the element of danger. For the story to work, the knight must triumph in the end, but only after a battle in which he might have lost. And this seems to be true, not just from our perspective, but from the perspective of the princess as well.

I mean, if the story is to be believed, the princess loves her knight, and love seems to include a desire for the beloved to be safe from harm. Yet, imagine how the princess would feel if the daring knight, instead of facing the dragon in hand to hand combat, camped a mile away from the castle with a sniper rifle, killed the dragon from a safe distance, and then waltzed in to pick up the princess. A bit anticlimactic isn’t it? Don’t we all feel, as much as we might not like to admit it, that if we were the princess, we’d prefer our beloved risking it all to save us? Don’t we, in a secret place in our heart, want our knight to be scarred?

Now, I’m not going to try to understand the motivation for this desire. I don’t know where it comes from, I only know that it seems true that we have it. But, I do think it has to do with what comes after the knight’s daring rescue. While the knight and princess gallop away on a snow white stallion, isn’t there already a natural bond forged by their shared experience of the dragon? If the knight had faced no danger and suffered no injury in his battle with the dragon, wouldn’t the princess, as much as she loves her knight, feel estranged from him? Wouldn’t she ask herself, “Does he understand what the dragon did to me?”

I have often had that question about my relationship with God. Knowing how much my sin has hurt me and made me despicable to myself, and reflecting on the glory and perfection of God, I sometimes have asked myself, “Does He understand what sin did to me?” The answer God gave me at the cross, and continues to give me every day in the Mass is, “Yes, because sin has done it to me too.” There seems to be a deep psychological reason that the bread and wine are consecrated separately in the mass: We want a God who knows what it feels like to have his blood separated from his body, in the same way that we have spilled our blood living in a broken world. Of course, we want a God who is all-powerful, who triumphs over sin and death, no denying that, but we also want a God who bleeds in the process. We want our God to carry the same scars we do.

That is “the grotesqueness of the mass.” In the mass, as a continuation of the eternal sacrifice of Christ on the cross, God makes himself vulnerable to us, so that He can share in our weakness. Our suffering becomes the point of encounter with God. In the mass, God enters our brokenness, our loneliness, our anger, our numbness. That is the horrible beauty of the Mass and the cross: that the hour of good’s triumph over evil is when good is weakest. It is when God looks most like a man. God suffers with us, in order to make Himself capable of being understood by His creatures who have so long suffered under sin, that they are unable to comprehend a life of love without suffering.

And yet, we know that this is not the end. God chose to suffer not just to meet us in our suffering, but to bring us out of it. We have hope that there is a love that transcends suffering, and though, in our broken human condition, we can’t experience it now, (or at least, our experience of it is limited,) our hope in God is that some day we will. That is why the problem of evil (Why does a good God allow suffering in the world) is not so much a problem as it is a recognition of our broken selves. As fallen men and women, our experience of our own brokenness makes us want others to have experienced our suffering. This is not because we are evil and sadistically want others to suffer, but because we want to know we are not alone. The cross not only gives us that reality, but also the hope for something more: something we cannot fully comprehend now, but something we know we’ve been missing. Evil exists because in our broken state, we need evil to help us recognize the good. In the evil of the cross, we see the ultimate good, and that ultimate good gives us hope for a good without evil, a love without pain, a final victory over sin.

Post by: Niko Wentworth

Main image: The Deposition from the Cross, Bl. Francis Angelico, 1434

First Fridays: Leviticus 23

August 4, 2017August 5, 2017 nikowentworth

“The LORD said to Moses, ‘These are the festivals of the LORD which you shall celebrate at their proper time with a sacred assembly.’”

So begins the Old Testament reading for today. Following this introduction, the reading continues with God pronouncing the major feasts that would make up the Jewish calendar: The Sabbath, the Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the Offering of First Fruits, Festival of Weeks, the Festival of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Festival of Tabernacles. It may seem that this list of Jewish festivals may not appear to be particularly relevant to the modern Christian. After all, we don’t celebrate these feasts; so why did this passage and others like it make its way into our lectionary? What can we take away from them?

One reason why these readings are important to us is the historical background which they provide us about our ancestors in faith and the religious culture into which our Lord was born. The present is shaped by the past, so learning about the lived experience of those who preceded us and how they kept their traditions alive gives us a blueprint for doing the same today. For example, that the Festival of Weeks is a celebration commemorating the wheat harvest in Israel does not seem to be of utmost importance to the modern Christian. However, knowing that the Festival of Weeks was also known as Pentecost because it fell 50 days after Passover, in the same way as the Christian Pentecost follows 50 days after Easter, and that apart from being a harvest celebration, it commemorates the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai, allows us to enter into the liturgical importance of this festival. Understanding the relationship between the giving of the law at Sinai, and the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost allows us to see the gradual fulfillment of salvation history and the slow unveiling of God’s love throughout time.

But for this post, I don’t want to talk about the rich theological insights a close study of each of these festivals would give us. There are others who have done a much better job than I could. Interested readers could do no better than to check out the Berit Olam commentaries published by The Liturgical Press. Rather, I want to focus on the general theme present throughout the entire narrative, (which in the reading is presented in a redacted form.) That is, the elements of time and space, and how they are ordered to the worship of God. If you look at Leviticus 23:1-44, there are several phrases that you would find repeated multiple times. “The Lord said to Moses, speak to the Israelites,” “The appointed festivals” or “sacred assemblies,” “Do no regular work,” and “lasting ordinance for generations to come” and “Wherever you live.” I want to concentrate on these repeated phrases as revelatory of the kind of relationship God wants the children of Israel to have with Him and with each other. Finally, after looking at these, I want to address the seemingly out of place verse of Leviticus 23:22 which I think is central to the passage.

To begin, it should be noted that Leviticus 23 begins a new “section” in the book of Leviticus. The previous “section” dealt with the conduct of the priests, and now we have seemed to move on from that to norms of general conduct for all the Israelites. How fascinating that the first directive God gives to His people is a calendar! Even before the seemingly paramount sections on rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience (Leviticus 26), God gives very specific instructions for when to celebrate liturgical feasts. Furthermore, the passage makes it clear that this is a divine command. “The Lord said to Moses, speak to the Israelites,” is repeated several times, reiterating how the giving of the calendar of feasts comes from God Himself. In fact, the chapter ends with God saying, “I am the Lord your God,” using the divine “I am” with which he first identified Himself to Moses to underline the sacred nature of the festivals just commanded. Furthermore, the repetition of “lasting ordinance for generations to come” and “wherever you live” reflect the universality of these commands. These commands hold true, not just for the small group being spoken to, but for all of God’s people, wherever and whenever they are.

It is because of this that we hear repeated the command to do “no regular work” (in other translations, servile or laborious work). Is this command given because God disapproved of the work they Israelites did? Of course not. God commands that sacred days be days of rest as a reminder that these are not normal “work days.” They are days that we rededicate ourselves to the work of the Lord, that is, prayer. Just as God “rested” on the seventh day after the work of creation, we rest after our participation in that unfolding work of creation to remind ourselves of what that work is ordered to – God.

And that is what I think this passage reveals the most about God and about ourselves. Our work is ordered to our rest, which is itself ordered towards our relationship with God. As human beings, we are transcendent creatures. We have limited needs like any other animal; we eat until we aren’t hungry anymore, we sleep until we aren’t tired anymore, we seek shelter from the elements, and all the other basic necessities. But we also have unlimited transcendent desires. We have a desire for beauty, for companionship, for wholeness, for infinite joy. That is, we have a desire for God. God led the Israelites out of Egypt and he gave them the calendar of feasts not to satisfy their basic animal needs, but their transcendent human needs. God gave the Israelites a calendar of feasts and directions of how to celebrate them even before He finished leading Israel into the Holy Land because it was given to them for the purpose of worship, and so their time in the land and their use of it must be ordered to that purpose.

Do we find this to be the reality in our lives today? Do we order our time and our space to that reality? How often do we find our work encroaching into our time with God? How often are we tempted to skip prayer or even just healthy social activities in order to get work done because we think that is what is expected of us? Could you imagine what kind of a society we would be if our calendars were arranged around preserving the sacredness of the day of rest? Imagine if employers arranged work schedules in a way that not only provided employees with sufficient “days of rest” but also such that they could participate with dignity in community activities (both religious and other healthy communal gatherings.)

It is to that point which I think the, seemingly out of place, verse of Leviticus 22:23 is ordered. “‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the Lord your God.’” This is the “gleaning law” of ancient Israel, which essentially stated that those who owned and worked farmland ought not be so exacting in their harvest that those without land wouldn’t be able to find food should they glean from the field. In a passage about liturgical feasts, why would this command be placed in the exact middle? It’s true, the Festival of Weeks is a harvest festival and so making a point about harvesting is not completely out of place here, but it still seems a little strange.

However, reflecting on the idea that our time and resources are ultimately ordered to the service of God, we might find religious significance in the gleaning law. In some sense, the gleaning law made it possible for the poor to participate in the festival. It ensured that there would be food available after the harvest for those who begged in order to fulfill their basic needs. The poor would not have to worry if taking time off from their job for the festival would impact their ability to fill their needs. Just as a farmer has a right to collect the fruit of his labor from his field but not be so exacting that there is none left for others, an employer has a right to his employees time (for a fair wage of course,) but not to be so exacting in his demands that an employee does not have time or energy left for religious and community oriented activities in a respite from “regular work.”

As a reflection, we might ask ourselves, do we keep the “gleaning law” in our own lives? Do we ensure that every day we have several periods of time protected from the encroachment of our daily demands, our regular and laborious work? Do we use that time to concentrate not on our basic animal needs, but our transcendent human needs? What “mini-festivals” do we have planned in our day in which our focus is on prayer to God and charity towards our neighbor? Is our time away from the office ordered towards these higher things, or is it only a brief respite to prepare for the next day on the job? Essentially, do we work to live, or are we living to work? With these thoughts in mind, thanks be to our God, who takes care of our needs so that we can use this time on Earth to grow closer to Him!

Post by: Niko Wentworth

Main image: The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet, 1857, oil on canvas