Tag Archives: Pharisees

Matthew 16: 1-12 Demanding a Sign or Needing Instruction

By Unknown – Metropolitan Museum of Art, online collection: entry 453683, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32908844

Matthew 16: 1-12

Parallels Mark 8: 11-2; Luke 12: 54-56, 12:1, 11:29

The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test Jesus they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. ² He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ ³ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. ⁴ An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” Then he left them and went away.

⁵ When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. ⁶ Jesus said to them, “Watch out, and beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” ⁷ They said to one another, “It is because we have brought no bread.” ⁸ And becoming aware of it, Jesus said, “You of little faith, why are you talking about having no bread? ⁹ Do you still not perceive? Do you not remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? ¹⁰ Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? ¹¹ How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread? Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees!” ¹² Then they understood that he had not told them to beware of the yeast of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

The Pharisees, the Sadducees and the disciples all fail to understand Jesus in this passage, but there is a critical difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees whom Jesus leaves and the disciples whom Jesus teaches: the openness to the work that has been done by Jesus already. While the Pharisees and Sadducees in the narrative demand a new sign from the heavens the disciples are reminded of the acts of power and the teaching of Jesus to correct their misunderstanding. It seems a little faith can make a lot of difference in the relationship between Jesus and those who approach, and yet even the faithless will not be left without a sign. But the sign which is given will not be a sign easily accepted by the religious leaders who are in conflict with Jesus or the disciples attempting to follow him where he leads. This scene marks a transition in the narrative as the focus intensifies on the disciples and their journey to understanding who Jesus is and what being a faithful one of his followers will mean for their own lives.

The scene begins, presumably in the region of Magadan, with Jesus separated from his disciples and approached by the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees have been in conflict with Jesus throughout the previous eight chapters but this is the first introduction of the Sadducees since their encounter with John the Baptist in Matthew 3. The Pharisees and Sadducees may have been competing for positions of authority and prominence among the Jewish people and they did have theological differences but both groups find themselves in conflict with John the Baptist and Jesus. Jesus seems to have little use for the representatives of these groups other than to confront the way they impede the advance of the kingdom of heaven and lead others astray.

The Pharisees and Sadducees come to test Jesus, and the word for test (Greek piarazo) alludes to the temptation of Jesus where the tempter (Greek piarazon) attempts to challenge Jesus’ identity and one of Jesus’ responses is to quote Deuteronomy 6:17 “Do not put the LORD you God to the test (Greek ekpiarazo– piarazo with he prefix ek attached). The Pharisees and scribes already asked for a sign in 12: 38-42 and received the same answer, no sign except the sign of Jonah, but even more recently Jesus said to his disciples, about the Pharisees, “Every plant that my Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides to the blind.” (15: 13-14) We expect the Pharisees and Sadducees to be unsatisfied with Jesus, but it is worth slowing down to attend to the answer Jesus gives in this scene. Jesus takes their demand from a sign from heaven and shows they are looking for the wrong thing, the signs of the times have been all around them. Most English translations obscure the play on words going on when the Pharisees and Sadducees ask for a sign from the heaven (Greek ouranos) and Jesus replies with the accepted wisdom the “It will be fair weather, for the heavens (ouranos) are brilliant red in the evening, or it will be storms because the heavens (ouranos) are gloomy and brilliant red in the morning. They know how to interpret the face of the heavens (prosopon tou ouranos) but are not able to know the signs of the time. (kaipos-appointed time) They are looking to the heavens, but as Jesus said in 12: 40, the sign of the times they will receive will be, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” The sign they seek will not be in the heavens, but in the earth. They fail to see in all the things Jesus has done the presence of the kingdom of heaven among them, and so Jesus leaves them to attend to the disciples who are open to learning.

The disciples enter the scene unaware of the previous conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees, and we are given the key to their misunderstanding of Jesus in their failure to take bread with them to this new location. When Jesus says, “See and attend to (that) from the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” Most English translations smooth this out to make the focus the ‘yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees’ missing the crucial preposition apo which means from, but this also misses why the disciples may think of bread which is made out of leaven folded into flour. While the kingdom of heaven may be like a woman who fold leaven into three measures of flour, (13:33) what is resulting from the actions of the Pharisees and Sadducees is, in Jesus’ view, decidedly not the kingdom of heaven. Jesus wants his disciples to see and attend to what results from the Pharisees and Sadducees, but they begin discussing the lack of bread they have.

Most English translations of Matthew tend to make Jesus sound angry and judgmental towards his disciples (try to read Jesus’ response to the disciples in a kind manner, it is difficult in English) but the Greek which the scriptures are translated from leaves open a much softer reading. Those who have followed this reading to this point will be familiar with my translation of oligopistoi/oligopistos as ‘little faith ones’[1] but the harshness of the NRSV and other’s translations carries throughout Jesus response. I would modify this to:

And becoming aware of it, Jesus said, “Why are you discussing among yourselves not having bread little faith ones? You don’t understand yet, but rather remember the five bread for the five thousand and how many baskets (of pieces of bread) you received. Or rather the seven bread and the four thousand and how many large baskets (of pieces of bread) you received. How do you not understand (now) that not about bread I spoke to you? But attend to (the things) from the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.[2]

Perhaps, rather than berating the disciples for their misunderstanding of what was said, Jesus interprets for them what he said as he has done with multiple parables previously. The disciples may be ‘little faith ones’ but that ‘little faith’ will enable them to understand, at least in part, who Jesus is and be willing to accept correction when they become stumbling blocks. This faith will allow them to see what has been revealed by the Father in Heaven. As Jesus said earlier, “you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” (11: 25) Now the Pharisees and Sadducees in our narrative are the ‘wise and intelligent’ who cannot see while the disciples, the little faith ones, are the infants who have truth revealed to them.

[1] This term always refers to the disciples of Jesus and occurs in 6:30, 8:26. 14:31, and 17:20 in addition to here.

[2] The punctuation included in NA28 indicates questions in the middle sentences, but like English, a line of questions can be statements leading up to a final question. Otherwise the translation stays pretty literal to the Greek (insertions for context shown in parenthesis.

Matthew 15: 1-20 Piety and Righteousness Revisited

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James Tissot, The Blind in the Ditch (1886-1894)

Matthew 15: 1-20

Parallel Mark 7: 1-23; Luke 11: 37-41; 6: 39

Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, ² “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.” ³ He answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? ⁴ For God said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ ⁵ But you say that whoever tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God,’ then that person need not honor the father. ⁶ So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God. ⁷ You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said:

⁸ ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; ⁹ in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.'”

¹⁰ Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: ¹¹ it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” ¹² Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” ¹³ He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. ¹⁴ Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” ¹⁵ But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” ¹⁶ Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding? ¹⁷ Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? ¹⁸ But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. ¹⁹ For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. ²⁰ These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

Jesus and the Pharisees and scribes, as presented here, have different points of reference as they enter this argument. The Pharisees in the gospel have had a growing list of complaints about the practices of Jesus and his disciples: they eat with the wrong people (9:11), they do not fast (9:14), they pluck grain on Sabbath when they are hungry (12:2), Jesus heals on Sabbath (12:10), in our current passage they don’t wash their hands before eating and in future readings will come questions of paying taxes to the Temple (17:24) and the emperor (22:17) (Case-Winters, 2015, p. 197) All of these visible practices which are not wrong or evil and may even be life giving in the right context (I’m writing on this passage on washing hands before eating in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic) also become ways of judging the righteousness of others or practicing one’s piety before others. These conflicts resonate strongly with Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount which I will discuss below, but also highlight the difference between piety and righteousness.

The Pharisees and scribes that come to engage Jesus’ practices now come from Jerusalem, and this is the first time we have indication, since the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry when great crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Judea, Jerusalem and beyond the Jordan came to Jesus, (4:25) that Judea and Jerusalem and their authorities are aware of Jesus’ ministry predominantly in Galilee. Jesus’ practices, or at least the practices of his disciples in this instance, do not fit within the frame of what holiness practiced by visible actions that demonstrate one’s faithfulness, one’s piety, according to the practices of these Pharisees and scribes. There is a lack of openness to the works that Jesus is doing because they do not fit within the expectations of these leaders who have come to challenge the worker of the acts of power and the teacher of a different understanding of the relationship between the law and the tradition.

Jesus has very little interest in piety, and this is one of the reasons that most English translations of Matthew 6 of dikaisune as piety instead of righteousness misunderstand what Jesus is attempting to state. Jesus in Matthew 6: 1 stated, “Beware of practicing your righteousness (not piety) before others in order to be seen by them;” because the very practices that Jesus is being judged for here are the things that fail to produce changed hearts. Pietas (often translated piety from Latin) was an important Roman concept which the orator and statesman Cicero describes as that, “which admonishes us to do our duty to our country or our parents or other blood relations.” Jesus’ understanding of righteousness is not limited to ‘doing one’s duty’, particularly as it is viewed by others. Central to the language of the Sermon on the Mount were these practices of righteousness done in a way not to call attention to the individual’s practices. The actions of the community of the faithful may be visible, but the individual practices of the disciple will not be. Jesus may not look like he and his disciples are ‘doing their duty’ as viewed by the Pharisees but Jesus does not view them as faithful guides for how a community should practice righteousness.

The practice of washing hands comes from places in the law like Exodus 30: 19-21 (priests washing before entering the tent of meeting), Leviticus 15: 11 (washing after a bodily discharge) and Deuteronomy 21: 6 (where washing absolves the leaders of a community of responsibility an unsolved murder). The tradition of the elders mentioned here would be an expansion of the practices outlined in the law which only become troubling when they become standards for judging the holiness or acceptability of others. Jesus’ response goes directly back to the commandment and the justifications, often religious, that people might use to not fulfill their covenant responsibility to others. As I mentioned in the discussion of the commandment on honoring parents in both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, this commandment is not primarily about young children being obedient to parents but instead older children continuing to honor, respect, and care for elderly relatives. If this practice of dedicating wealth and property to the temple or to the priests in order to abandon one’s responsibility to a family member occurred, it would be masking unrighteousness in the appearance of socially respectable piety.

Jesus may bring about divisions in families and may call his followers to ‘let the dead bury their own dead’ or declare those who do the will of his Father in heaven are his ‘brother and sister and mother.’ But it is important for Matthew to continue to link Jesus as the fulfillment of the intent of the law. Jesus never declares that families do not have value and that family connections are not to be honored; they are simply not ultimate. The Pharisees who would practice this ‘dedication of one’s resources to God’ through the temple or the Pharisees, in lieu of caring for family probably felt they were making the same argument. Eyes opened to faith can see what is at the center of practicing righteousness and how faithfulness to Jesus takes a higher place than loyalty to temple or a religious community. The inability to distinguish between piety and righteousness leaves these Pharisees and scribes as blind guides leading the blind.

Hypocrites is a word that Matthew uses more than the rest of scripture, but its use here connects us both with its usage in the Sermon on the Mount (6:2, 6:5. 6:16, 7:5) and Matthew’s frequent use of the term in the conflicts with the Pharisees in Jerusalem (22:18; 23: 13, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29; 24: 51). As I mentioned when discussing 7:5, when righteousness becomes reduced to piety to demonstrate our own faithfulness or righteousness, we become like the one blind to the log in their own eye while trying to remove the splinter from another’s eye. Our expectations of what piety should look like allow us to pre-judge (where the term prejudice comes from) others and may make us blind to the ways our own practices may lead others astray.

Jesus, like the prophets before him, continually had to remind people that religious practices were not enough. Anna Case-Winters, picking up on the language of the Isaiah quotation, cleverly calls attention to reality that ‘lip-service” is not enough. A heart oriented on God and the way of life God calls God’s people to live is far more central and allows the right intentions to flow out of the mouth and to proceed from one’s hands (washed or unwashed). The Pharisees are scandalized (took offense, NRSV) according to the disciples but Jesus remains unconcerned by their judgments. He views them similarly to the weeds sewn among the wheat (13: 24-30) and as those who in their blindness are leading others in blindness. Like the Pharisees in John 9 who cannot accept the blind man who can now see and become spiritually blind, these Pharisees remain unable to see and participate with the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven’s work and presence in Jesus. Their prejudgment of Jesus makes them unable to properly see the road they are walking down which leads them and others who follow them into a pit.

The Pharisees are not the only ones who have trouble seeing and understanding what Jesus is saying, even the disciples have to ask for clarification. Peter, on behalf of the other disciples presumably, asks for clarification and Jesus explains that it is not what goes into a person, but what comes out of a person that defiles. A clean heart is more important than washed hands, and the actions which destroy community cause far greater harm than the practices of how or what one eats. Yet, Matthew also does not include Mark’s note in the parallel story that “Thus he declared all foods clean.” (Mark 7:19b) Matthew does not discard all the practices that the Jewish people practiced, and many in Matthew’s community may have refrained from eating foods traditionally declared unclean like pork or shellfish. But Matthew also does not allow these practices to give the disciples permission to prejudge others who practice their righteousness in a different way. There will be surprisingly faithful ones among those who were once considered Gentile dogs.

Mark’s Portrait of Jesus and the World He Lived In: Part 3

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Mark’s Portrait of Jesus and the World He Lived In: Part 3 Second Temple Judaism: Pharisees, Sadducees and Zealots, oh my

James Tissot, Reconstruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of Herod, painted between 1886 and 1894

The time of Jesus’ ministry takes place within a time scholars call Second Temple Judaism. Second Temple Judaism is named this simply because it is the time after the destruction of the first temple when the city of Jerusalem is captured and destroyed by the Babylonian empire in 588 BCE and the time after the temple is rebuilt as a part of the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the return from exile of some of the Jewish people beginning in 520-515 BCE. The world would change dramatically for the Jewish people over the 500 years preceding the time of Jesus’ life but with one exception (the time after the Maccabean Revolt (140 BCE). By the time of Jesus, the Jewish people have been under Roman rule (although indirectly ruled by client kings)since Pompey’s invasion in 63 CE. For the time around Jesus’ life you will see some of the religious and political power struggles continuing to play out on the pages of the gospels between Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Herodians and other groups that are trying to figure out how to live out their political and religious philosophies in the context of Roman and Herodian rule.

The Pharisees

James Tissot, Woe Unto You Scribes and Pharisees

The Pharisees and the Sadducees are both political and religious movements that go back to the time of the Maccabean revolt. Both at various times would occupy greater or lesser authority based upon the ruler at the appropriate time, but by the time of Jesus the Pharisees and Sadducees have been in conflict for well over 100 years. The Pharisees according to the Jewish historian Josephus, a Pharisee himself, had more of their support in the common people and probably more in the rural areas, like Galilee, than within the city of Jerusalem itself (although there were certainly Pharisees within Jerusalem). Politics and religion are not separate in the ancient world, so the Pharisees exercise both political and religious authority. The Pharisees were more centered on the reading of the scriptures and the practicing of those scriptures as boundary markers for the people in contrast to the world around them.

The Pharisees are often only looked at from a Christian perspective for their disagreements with Jesus, and they are present from very early in the narrative of Jesus because they are present in Galilee where Jesus begins his ministry. You often see the conflicts with Jesus center around the tabernacle, reading of scripture, and particularly Sabbath and other distinctive practices that served as boundary markers in the Pharisees eyes for the Jewish people from the Gentiles. Both they and the Sadducees emerge from a time of forced Hellenization of the Jewish people under the Selucid Empire and to they hold onto these boundary markers as distinctive practices of every faithful Jew. For the Pharisees they attempt to heighten the religious practice of the people in order to bring about a closer coherence with God’s torah, God’s law. Instead of being focused primarily on the priestly practices of the temple they were focused on the actions of the everyday person to live a holy and righteous life.

The Pharisees did believe in the resurrection of the dead, which is a belief that emerges in the time of Second Temple Judaism. They were not in the positions of power and yet they believed that ultimately God would intervene and set the world right and the righteous would share in this world that God had liberated. With their focus more on individual practices, the reading of scriptures centered around the synagogues and their practice of trying to discern God’s will through the law they would survive the collapse of the temple in the wake of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 70 CE and eventually evolve into Rabbinic Judaism.

The Sadducees

James Tissot, The Chief Priests Take Counsel Together (1886-1894)

There is the old saying that the Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection so they were sad, you see-and while memorable the saying misses the point. The Sadducees, while they didn’t believe in the resurrection, were far from sad. They were predominantly the priestly class that were in a politically and economically more affluent position than their Pharisee counterparts. For the Sadducees, they understood that God was blessing them in their current life and that were the ones charged with maintaining the temple worship and sacrifice to God. For them the center of their life flows out of the first five books of the Bible and they become the cultic leaders of the temple, offering sacrifices and living a holy life in a priestly manner. The Sadducees to maintain their political power do have to maintain relationship with the Roman powers of the day, whether Herod the Great at the time of Jesus’ birth or Pontus Pilate at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. They are accused by the Pharisees of being collaborators at times, but with their focus on maintaining the temple function and sacrifice they see that as their primary task.

The Sadducees do come into Jesus when he enters into Jerusalem because Jesus does challenge the temple as the source of Jewish authority. For the Sadducees maintaining the temple and by extension Jerusalem are at the center of their life. When the temple is destroyed in the First Jewish Revolt against Rome in 70 CE the Sadducees begin to fade away. Without the temple and its worship they lose their reason for existing and do not have the distributed power base or the focal points of the Torah and the synagogue to be able to recast their identity as easily as the Pharisees do.

Essenes

A much smaller group that do not play directly into the story of Jesus but who have come to prominence with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls are the Essenes. The Essenes pulled away in a monastic way from society and formed smaller groups of dedicated disciples who were practicing a more rigorous form of Judaism. There appears to be both and ascetic and mystical side to the Essenes and they consider the temple compromised to the point where the only option is to separate themselves and form a new community of the righteous.

Zealots

Describe by Josephus as the ‘fourth philosophy’ the zealots were those who felt that the Roman Empire was to be resisted by force. The time of Jesus’ life was not a peaceful one and the zealots make their way into the story in a number of ways. In both Mark and Matthew the apostle Simon is known as Simon the Cananaean but Luke he is know as Simon the Zealot and it is certainly possible that among the followers Jesus there were former freedom fighters. It is also possible that Judas Iscariot’s title may refer to the Sicarii, the knife men and assassins who targeted Roman targets. Perhaps it is Luke’s gospel with the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the man is beaten up by the side of the road by bandits (who may well have been freedom fighters-the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was very instable much like the airport road in Bagdad) but many of Jesus’ teachings at the end of his ministry seem to be directed specifically against the revolutionary messages that the zealots were spreading even in his day. Perhaps this could be one reason, although this will never be more than suggestive, why Judas makes the decision to betray Jesus.

Focal Points of Jewish Identity

The Temple by Radojavor@deviantart.com

Throughout the history of the Jewish people they had different focal points of identity and authority (I deal with this more in depth in my posts of The Place of Authority, particularly parts 1-5). Family and tribe, land, the temple, Jerusalem, the Davidic king and the Torah and more broadly the scriptures at various points become the focal point of Jewish identity. Among the groups in conflict in Jesus day there are different variations on these points of identity. For the Sadducees for example the temple is a central point, for the Pharisees it focuses more on the Torah and the scriptures, and for the zealots there is a focus both on the land and the hope for a Davidic messiah that will lead them out of their captivity under Rome. Within the focal points are various practices and beliefs that help center each group and reinforce these beliefs. Judaism had adapted to various situations throughout its life that would enable them to place their focus in different places to maintain their identity. The situation after the destruction of the temple would again be a time where the focus would again become focused on the Torah and on the Hebrew scriptures and the debating on what they would mean for their identity. This was not the first time the Hebrew people encountered this challenge, previously in the Babylonian exile they had to reengage their stories to figure out who they were as the people of God.

Jesus and Jeremiah

Those who have read much in this blog know I spent an extended period of time with the book of Jeremiah, and because of that time there are a number of ways in which Jesus embodies parts of the prophet’s life and struggle. Both Jesus and Jeremiah stand at the edge of a major crisis in their respective times where there are people calling for resistance to the empires of their day, Babylon in the time of Jeremiah and Rome in the time of Jesus. Both would struggle with the temple and its hierarchy that had a vested interest in things remaining the way they were. Both would be considered traitors by their own people. Jesus is seen by those around him as a prophet, that is not to limit his identity to that but he was seen as at least that by most of the people of his time. In Mark when Jesus asks, who do people say that I am the response is , “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” (Mark 8.28) but I found in intriguing that the Gospel of Matthew this is expanded to include Jeremiah specifically mentioned as one of the prophets. Jesus comes into conflict with both the Pharisees and the Sadducees in his day and will ultimately be crucified by Rome under the title the King of the Jews, but the primary reason for his crucifixion in Matthew, Mark and Luke is his opposition to the temple and his challenge to both the Sadducees and the Pharisees sources of authority.

Jesus’ Temple Problem in the Gospel of Mark

The Gospel of Mark dedicates most of chapters 11, 12 and 13 to Jesus’ struggle with the temple and it’s authorities in his time. After the entry into Jerusalem, the following day Jesus curses a fig tree a symbol of the Jewish people and then proceeds to turn over the tables in the temple, quoting Isaiah as the vision for what the temple should be (Isaiah 56.7) and Jeremiah for what the temple has become (Jeremiah 7.11). On the way out of town Jesus and his disciples pass the now withered fig tree and in the text that follows Jesus says, “if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass it will be done for you.” (Mark 11. 23) Jesus is probably not talking about an abstract mountain, but rather the temple mount where they have just come from. Later in chapter 12 after Jesus had warned his disciples to beware of the scribes that devour widows houses we encounter the story of the poor widow who gives the two small copper coins. Perhaps this is simply a parable of the widow’s piety who gives all she haves to live on or perhaps this is a condemnation of the temple which devour all she had to live on. Regardless of how this passage is interpreted in the following passage at the beginning of Mark 13 Jesus must deal with his own followers becoming impressed by the temple structure and Jesus remarks to them that the temple will be thrown down and they are not to place their trust in it, but they are not to become revolutionaries like many others who will be led astray.

Jesus will also struggle with both sets of religious authorities particularly in these chapters which lead up to the crucifixion narrative. Jesus has challenged their authority and they attempt to undermine his authority and shame him or have reason to accuse him of being a revolutionary. Jesus is eventually accused by the high priests and the elders who are assembled of blasphemy, of claiming authority for himself that rested either with the religious authorities or specifically with the God of Israel. Jesus will be a voice struggling within the Jewish people of his day for how people were to order their lives as the people of God and ultimately his vision would not be embraced by the leaders of his day. But for his followers Jesus would in various ways become the focal point of his follower’s devotion to God. As Richard B. Hays argues in his recent work Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Hays, 2014) each of the gospel writers envision Jesus as embodying the mystery of God (Mark), the fulfillment of the hope of the Hebrew Scriptures (Matthew), the one who redeems the chosen people of God (Luke) and the embodiment of the Jewish temple, sacrifice and festivals (John). It is to Mark as an interpreter of the Jewish story that we will turn next.

Images for the Fifth Sunday After Epiphany, Lectionary 5A

The Place of Authority: A Brief History Part 4: Re-establishment, Disillusionment and Germination

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Wojceich Stattler, Machabeusze (Maccabbes) Public Domain Art

I think I need to be clear at this point that while I am doing a historical trek through Israel’s story, I am not trying to do a history of Israel at this point, or even of the Hebrew Scriptures. I am intentionally trying to locate where authority rested within their story. Within key transitions the places of authority do change and how the people react to that authority changes and see how that might inform our current questions of authority. Hence, while it might be interesting to focus in greater detail on particular events, or to spend more time interpreting what is going on within a particular piece of scripture or what the theology of a particular author might be, that will have to be for another time and place as we continue on through the story.

A humorous illustration before we proceed. The Hebrew people remain deeply suspicious of external authorities which exercise authority over them, and so there will remain an antagonism between them and those who come to occupy their land. In another Monty Python reference we have the scene of the French Castle where the French refuse to recognize Arthur’s authority. For this period the Hebrew people will stubbornly resist assimilation by the empires that they are a part of.

Beginning around 538 BCE, during the reign of Cyrus of Persia, there is the beginnings of the return to Jerusalem and Judea. There are at least four major stages of the return which span a period of roughly 80 years, longer than the original period of exile, and even with the final return many of the people choose to remain settled and scattered throughout the empires of the day. The diaspora (the dispersion) those Jewish people scattered throughout the empire continue to at various levels maintain their practices and stories that make them distinguishable from the nations around them, but I will be focusing in on the remnant that returns to the promised land since that is where the final pieces of the remembered story of the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament) come from.

Over the eighty years of re-establishment, many of the people return and their first concern is the reclamation of their land (or perhaps in some cases the claiming of land for their family).Remember that in an agrarian society land is the primary source of wealth and power. It takes a great deal of effort by the leaders and prophets to get the people to focus on the effort to rebuild the temple, and even once it is rebuilt it cannot compete with the memory of the former temple. In the memory of the people it is a shadow of the greatness of their past. Even with the codification of the Torah (law-quite possibly Deuteronomy) by Ezra and the completion of the city wall under Nehemiah, Jerusalem and what remains of the former nation are completely dependent on the will of the nations around them. The temple worship does regain some of its former status as one authority figure, but in the absence of a true monarch-temple authority that has the power to authorize the story of the people, the written and oral set of practices begin to take on a greater and greater role of what it means to be the chosen people.

Internal fault lines begin to emerge, not that they didn’t exist previously, but issues of purity and justice come into conflict with one another. At least, in the remembered story it seems that in the time of re-establishment purity becomes the dominant issue, the removal of foreign influences—even when it means disbanding families—and being a ‘purer’ Hebrew people who worship the one Lord in holiness. This is the mark of a society intent on establishing and maintaining boundaries between the insider and the outsider—and I don’t mean this to sound as critical as it may sound—when one feels the world is out to destroy you it is natural for an us/them (or Jew/Gentile) dichotomy to emerge. Yet even though this seems to be the dominant voice a counter-voice emerges, the prophetic voice that never went away and attempts to refocus the central focus on justice. Although there is a strong presence of the prophetic voice in the collected scriptures, it also never seems to gain the influence to reframe the story to create the type of society the prophets imagine.

Certainly within the prophetic voice, but also within the population there is disillusionment with the way things are. Things are not the way people hoped they would be, the temple is a shell of its former self, different religious groups vie for power and influence among the people, various incarnations of leaders try to rally the people with varying levels of success-but the reality is that for most of this 500 year stretch they are a people under the rule first of the Persians, then briefly under Greece. When the Greek empire splits up into the Ptolemaic Empire (in the South) and the Seleucid Empire (in the North) Jerusalem will find itself firmly at the middle of the struggle for power.

A final defining moment comes in 167 BCE with the Maccabean revolt, an event commemorated by Hanukkah today and remembered in the books named Maccabees, where the pressure of the outside influence to conform to a Hellenistic (Greek) culture causes a religious revolt which for a brief moment grants Jerusalem its independence. It is short lived, but it gives the people a memory of their practices defining themselves as a people who are willing to die for what they believe in. Again this is not universal, there are certainly those willing to accommodate, but there are also those willing to revolt, and that fire will not go out again for some time.

Deep divisions continue to grow within Judaism. They will not be fully in control of their own destinies after the fall of the Maccabees , but the hope for a new king, a new David, a messiah will persist. Religious authority will split between Saducees, who predominantly control the temple and accommodate with the kings like Herod, or whichever government official Rome places to govern Judea. With Herod the Great (who rules from 40 BCE-6 CE) reconstructing the temple in magnificent fashion (at a magnificent cost) the Sadducees are able to operate from a position of privilege. The Pharisees in contrast are more of a people’s movement focused on maintaining their identity through purity and right practice of the Torah. There are other groups, the Essenes who pull away and isolate themselves to remain pure, the zealots intent on driving the foreign influence from the promised land. Herod and Rome have the military authority, the Saducees in partnership with the Roman authorities run the temple and all is in a state of tension at the turning of the ages. We are approaching a great turning point in the story, from one group will emerge two-one that is new and one that will be completely reshaped. It is to the turning of the ages that we turn next.

Sign of the Rose

Searchings: Sacred and Secular