Signs of Life. Rick Fabian

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СКАЧАТЬ bluntly overruling the earlier revanchist theology preserved alongside.¹⁶ This is the Hebrew editors’ theology, which formed the Bible we receive; therefore this is the true Old Testament doctrine of God.

      Jesus’s parable is ingenious. It says God fixed things for the tax collector— just as the biblical tsedaqah means: God undoes our enemies and puts us back on top where we belong—whereas the Pharisee went home all unfixed, which is to say, doomed.

      But not because of hypocrisy! Hypocrites pretend to virtues they lack, but the Pharisee reports truthfully that he fasts twice in the week, and gives tithes of all he has. Indeed, both his claims exceed the Torah’s commands. By contrast, the tax collector guarantees no change of life as a claim on God’s love. However he might wish, this tax collector may yet have to add his share to taxes as before, if only to make his living. “Lord have mercy on me a sinner”—period.

      Nevertheless, in the light of Hebrew scripture’s doctrine of God, the tax collector is orthodox, and the Pharisee is not. The tax collector tells the essential two truths that Joel and the Bible’s editors teach: he is a sinner; and God has chesed, the strong love that sticks with people no matter what. (As in “you’ll always be my child, no matter what you do.”) By contrast, the Pharisee tells two lies, which he wrongly if earnestly believes: (1) that his virtues make him “not like others” in God’s eyes; and (2) that God achieved this difference, for which the Pharisee can give thanks; whereas the true God observes no differences among human beings,¹⁷ and God has chesed for all. The tax collector’s truth-telling is all God requires, to put things right for him. God will not work with lies, so the Pharisee dooms himself.

      The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector represents the core of Old Testament Theology, as quoted twelve times around the Hebrew Bible. So the author knows Hebrew scripture more closely than those scholars who fail to recognize his theological allusion. The parable implies more: like the tax collector, its author is orthodox, and his opponents are not. He is loyal to biblical tradition, and they are not. He is the conservative; his opponents are the wrongheaded innovators. Some scholars wonder if Jesus may have been a Pharisee, though of a different stripe than later Judaism would recognize. In any case, if Jesus is the author of this parable—as today’s critics and their opponents styled “conservative” concur—then his dining with impure and unqualified sinners laid his strong claim to biblical orthodoxy. His sign came directly from Hebrew scripture itself, in the prophecy of Isaiah, unlike widespread chaburah practice. And it upheld the well-published Old Testament doctrine of God, in contrast with the puristic new movements of Jesus’s own time.

      Rabbis soon shifted their focus from the purity of the diners to the purity of their dinner foods—and the kosher kitchen was born. Today Jews welcome non-Jews to their tables, while Christians cannot agree formally to eat with each other. Instead, we mimic Jesus’s opponents, with their various chaburoth for diners variously purified. Then in what sense can we call our official closed-Communion policy traditional? Recent essays deploring the Open Table appeal to ancient theologians who indeed required Baptism before Communion, and a few writers side with those for institutional reasons, against Jesus’s radical sign of biblical orthodoxy. Yet not one of those ancient Christian authorities would ever have done so. Their purpose was to follow Jesus fully, and their arguments appeal to scripture first, as every Christian theological argument must.

      “Fashionable liberal” values do but support our practice. Welcome, acceptance, and openness are indeed important to the gospel but the current debate about such virtues’ rightful place within eucharistic discipline sidesteps the main point. It is as though after Jeremiah broke the pot at the garbage dump, the faithful had debated for twenty-five hundred years How God Wants Us to Recycle Trash. (Who should take the trash where? Who may receive it? Who should say what words?) Like the virtue of hospitality, recycling is important: it shows our respect for the environment and our responsibility toward Mother Earth, and may impact our chances for a human future on this planet, but recycling was hardly the point of Jeremiah’s sign. Likewise, welcoming strangers and telling them God loves them, building community, and growing bigger and more effective ministries are all fine things; moreover they yield moving stories about people introduced to Communion for the first time. Sara Miles’s book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion¹⁸ recounts her change from atheism upon first Communion at St. Gregory’s, and how she founded a famous feeding ministry in response. Yet these noble results were not the chief point of Jesus’s sign. His chief point was: God is reconciling people who scarcely imagine how they belong together, and making peace among them—God is doing this everywhere in the world, not just in churches—and if we do not recognize what God is doing, we are headed for disaster.

      Talk of Jesus’s own orthodoxy, and Christian and Jewish inheritance from it, raises the question of faith. Classical theory requires faith for sharing Christian rituals effectually, and both Eucharist and Baptism rites expressly evoke faith. Today’s public exhibit religious diversity such as our forebears barely imagined: not only ethnic immigrants, but many Christian youth pursue other world faiths and spiritualities, and criticize church standards. Indeed, Luther’s Small Catechism holds that the essential action of Baptism is not the water bath, but the progress in virtuous living that follows it, where faith grows. Might we not say the same of eucharistic sharing? What truer faith can we require than the aggressive desire that Zacchaeus¹⁹ exemplifies and newcomers show as they communicate at St. Gregory’s Church for the first time in their lives?

      Forgive Us as We Have Forgiven

      John Patton bases his provocative work Is Human Forgiveness Possible? on many years’ experience guiding people through forgiveness processes. In practice, he finds forgiveness involves discovering that you have forgiven people and given up your desire to be separate from them. From Patton’s perspective we may remark the line in the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (perfect tense in Matthew).²⁰ More radical than Rowan Williams’s well-meant praise for “the meals that Jesus shared with outcasts and sinners to show that God was ready to welcome and forgive them,”²¹ Jesus’s scandalous meals were signs that God has forgiven all humanity and holds no desire to be apart from us. Today when we watch people whom we think unworthy join our eucharistic gathering, instead of our telling ourselves we were mistaken about these folks and should reconsider how they deserve inclusion—we had rather think: these are real, nasty, active sinners, and God sees no difference between them and me. I am just like them. So I hereby quit my desire to separate from them.

      It is not sinners we accept, but the world that God has already forgiven and redeemed. We can embrace Turner’s preferred “theology of redemption” if we recall that biblical redemption means paying off our relatives’ or fellow tribesmen’s compounded debts without their help because they are fiscally or morally bankrupt and absolutely cannot quit them—not because they have reformed and become a better risk now, and should get a second chance. They are not reformed. Neither are you who read this. Let me list some of my own qualifications for this eucharistic feast, which your lives surely mirror. We are a pack of lying, cheating, thieving, treacherous snobs; we are misogynist, misandric, homophobic, racist, ageist hypocrites. You just like me; no changes. Psychology Today magazine says the average North American tells hundreds of lies a day. “Lovely to see you!” “I’m doing just great, thanks!” “I’ll be there in a minute!” At Jesus’s table we liars eat together, offering nothing. Not our repentance; not our frail New Years’ resolutions, which neither God nor Jesus could credit; not our little moral improvements; nothing. God does all that happens there.

      Still the Right Scandal for Our Day

      Today, as in Jesus’s day, the eucharistic table is a sign of what God is doing everywhere, which the world otherwise tragically fails to see. Yet the world offers no other answer, and God’s answer is urgent. No option remains but forgiveness. That is our world, the world God has already forgiven and completely reconciled to God’s СКАЧАТЬ