(This is a second excerpt from chapter 17 of my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount; the first excerpt is here.)
That the Pharisees confronting Jesus [in Matthew 19] don’t believe divorce to be sinful is clear from their belief that Moses commanded divorce. Jesus shows them how far wrong they have gone, and how hard their hearts have become, by linking divorce to adultery. He does the same in the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s instructive to put the two statements together. Matthew 19:9 is straightforward: “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”[1] The man is the guilty party from start to finish. If he divorces his wife unjustly, God will not grant his divorce. Any remarriage on his part is adulterous because it defies the will and purpose of God in creating marriage in the first place. God will not simply accede to our pretensions to set his work aside for our own selfish purposes.Read more→
(As I noted yesterday, though I haven’t been posting here, I have been continuing to work on the Sermon on the Mount book; so while I’m getting other things spooled up, I’m going to start posting excerpts from the manuscript as well. I’m not going to do them in any particular order, just as they occur to me. First up: the opening of chapter 17, “Our Law Is Too Small,” on Jesus’ words regarding divorce.)
The power imbalance between men and women in first-century Jewish culture shows even more clearly when Jesus turns to address divorce. He introduces the subject with the statement, “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’”[1] The use of the word “also” acknowledges the close connection in subject matter between this quotation and his citation of the law against adultery in 5:27. Unlike 5:27, however, the law cited here is not a commandment from God through Moses. It’s inferred from the Torah, not taken from the Torah. In this case, that makes all the difference in the world.Read more→
The last while, obviously, has been a fallow period for me as blogging goes. It hasn’t really been one for writing in general—among other things, I’ve been continuing to work on the Sermon on the Mount manuscript, which is now nineteen chapters in—but it means there are a lot of ideas rattling around in my brain that I haven’t taken the time or place to get down in print for exploration. For the moment, then, I want to capture a few of them (as many as come to mind, anyway) to develop later. These are undeveloped fragments—seeds of thought that have yet to yield a harvest.
Morality is fractal: scale it up or scale it down, the patterns are the same. For a great many people—all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time?—morality is whatever they figure they can get away with. What’s the difference between someone cutting in the school pick-up line, or running a red light, or cheating the grocery store when using the self-checkout, on the one hand, and a politician lying to the media, or giving family members inside information and fake jobs, or trading favors with the rich and powerful? Only one of scale. It’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
Is racism systemic? As someone trained in family systems theory, I have to say, “Of course it is,” because everything intra-human is systemic. The real question is, if racism is systemic, what does that mean? The one thing I can say with confidence is that it doesn’t mean what people assume it does. In particular, it doesn’t mean the way to deal with racism is creating or changing a whole bunch of structures and rules. That has its place, but while it would be overstating the point to say that structures don’t really matter . . . well, structures don’t really matter. They’re important insofar as they amplify or restrict the functioning of human relational systems, but it’s those systems which truly matter. Thinking about racism as actually systemic—as a thing which exists in relational systems as an expression and multiplier of the anxiety of those systems—is a lot harder than arguing about structures. I don’t know where that thought leads, but I definitely want to follow it.
How can we in the church intentionally and intelligently do the work of discipleship and spiritual formation with various types of neurodivergent people? I had an experience recently which opened my eyes to something I had somehow never seen: my repeated failures at practicing some spiritual disciplines are at least in part because those spiritual disciplines were developed by and for neurotypical people. My ADD brain responds to stimuli differently and has different feedback and reward systems than a neurotypical brain; someone on the autism spectrum, to take another example, operates in yet another way. What would it look like to develop spiritual disciplines, or structures for spiritual formation, or tools for discipleship, for children of God with these and other types of neurodivergence? What would it look like to take that seriously instead of assuming that what works for neurotypical folk ought to work just as well for us?
I know there are more things I’ve been pondering that I need to get out of my head where I can look them over and interact with them; whether I add them to this post or put up another one later, it’s time to start putting them down as I think of them so I can get to work.
Oh, the sun runs its course from the east to the west
With the best of our motives illumined,
Then it sinks with a sigh in the dusk of the heart
And our virtue lies worthless as rumor.
You can be what you like if you like what you are—
We reflect but the sum of our creeds;
But we don’t seem to seize on the tenets we hold,
And they slip through the sieve of our deeds.
When we see our mistakes, we ache with regret
And the pain makes a lasting impression,
But we are stoics at heart when the time is at hand
To beat our breasts and make a true confession.
Mark Heard for the win, as usual. The poet laureate of the Christian struggle knew well that human beings are desperately in need of grace, because left to our own efforts and strength, even our best starts will not end well. This is the problem that all human religions try to solve with rules and structures and authorities and consequences; but they cannot solve it, only lessen it, because none of those things can touch the heart. Only God’s scandalous solution can do that.Read more→
Doubt’s an odd thing. It’s a grey area between belief and unbelief—between two different kinds of certainty. It can be paralyzing, leaving us unable to act because we don’t know what to do. It can be liberating, freeing us to let go a false certainty to seek a true one. It can be unhealthy, especially if it becomes obsessive; it can also be healthy for us, reminding us we might not know quite as much as we think we do. It can be dishonest, a pretense to disguise a determination not to believe something—sometimes, to disguise that even from ourselves—but there is also such a thing as honest doubt, and doubt which is truly open to belief and truly seeking understanding can be an important prelude to true faith.
The problem is, true doubt is uncomfortable, like jogging in place on a waterbed. We want a solid place to stand. That’s why some churches treat doubt as a sin, as if believing in Jesus and following him are supposed to be easy—which they aren’t. I think that’s also why, when kids who grow up in the church have their faith challenged hard for the first time, they so often slide into disbelief like Jell-O off a steep metal roof. Doubt is uncomfortable, so our instinctive reaction is not to engage with it but to protect ourselves against it.Read more→
These are a couple by Rend Collective that I’ve been singing lately; they have something to say that I need to hear, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Paying attention to the structure of the Sermon on the Mount can be difficult, because it isn’t linear in its argument, and doesn’t flow the way essays and speeches in Western culture do. As a result, there’s little agreement among scholars on its structure—or even if it has one. Some, like W. D. Davies, go so far as to conclude that it has none at all, but is merely “an agglomeration of sources and even of snippets of tradition.” This allows us to read it as a disjointed jumble of topics with little real coherence or unity.
I believe the Sermon has a strong structure which makes sense if we understand and remember the common literary structures of the Old Testament, and particularly its use of parallelism. Parallelism of various types is common in the literature of the ancient world, both for aesthetic effect and as an aid to memory—which was of great importance in those largely pre-literate cultures. The Old Testament is no exception. Most simply, we see parallelism in individual verses, such as the step parallelism (AB A’B’ pattern) of Isaiah 28:17:
I will make justicethe measuring line,
and righteousnessthe plumb line.
In verses like Isaiah 41:9, we see an AB B’A’ pattern, called inverted parallelism or chiasm:
I took youfrom the ends of the earth,
and from its farthest cornersI called you.
(The word “chiasm” comes from the Greek letter X (pronounced khi); if one draws lines between the parallel elements in these lines, they form an X.)
These basic forms can be extended beyond just two lines into more complex parallels.
This is especially true of inverted parallelism, which scholars like Kenneth Bailey argue is used to structure paragraphs, whole passages, and perhaps even entire biblical books. These larger forms are also commonly referred to as chiasms or chiastic structures; since the original visual metaphor is lost on this scale, however, I prefer the term “ring composition” for these texts. In such literary units, the parallelism serves a purpose beyond the aesthetic or the mnemonic: it also functions in part to shape and reinforce the message and meaning of the text. The climax of the piece typically comes not at the end but in the center section around which it turns. The opening and closing sections are next in importance because they set the theme of the composition and provide the context for its argument.
I believe the Sermon on the Mount is a ring composition, and that understanding this opens up the meaning of the text and helps us make sense of its more obscure parts. Viewed in this way, for instance, it isn’t necessary to say, “The connection of Matt. 7:1–11 (cf. Luke 6:37–38, 41–42) to the preceding context is not easy to discern,” or to conclude that Matthew 7:6 is a “detached unrelated saying,” as David L. Turner does, because the structure shows us the connections.
The Sermon on the Mount as Ring Composition
A 5:1-10 The way of the disciple: already blessed
B 5:11-16 The way of the disciple: marks of a true disciple
C 5:17-20 Thesis: Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets
D 5:21-37 The true application of the law (correcting misuse)
E 5:38-48 Trust in God (contrast with Gentiles)
F 6:1-6 Reward: earth vs. heaven
G 6:7-8 On prayer: trust
H 6:9-13 Lord’s Prayer
G` 6:14-15 On prayer: forgiveness
F` 6:16-24 Reward: earth vs. heaven
E` 6:25-34 Trust in God (contrast with Gentiles)
D` 7:1-6 The true application of the law (correcting misuse)
G“ 7:7-11 On prayer: trust
C` 7:12 Thesis: Jesus summarizes the Law and the Prophets
B` 7:13-23 Two ways: marks of a false disciple
A` 7:24-29 Two ways: already blessed/already cursed
E: God’s character: justice, longsuffering, ḥesed, including his provision for the world
E:` God’s character: his care for us, illustrated by his provision for the world
