Learning How To Cook
Reflections on the Lectionary for May 12th
One of my favorite analogies about biblical interpretation comes from the late scholar Jonathan Z. Smith. Smith compared the interpretation of a canon to the practice of cooking food. Most of us only eat a few dozen different foods; we don’t eat all of the world’s edible things. We limit our diets, but the creativity and joy of food comes from the infinite ways those few dozen foods can be combined, prepared, and experienced. The limitation of our diets is like the limitation of a canon, Smith argued, and the same dynamic is true for the interpretation of a canon. Once we have decided on a limited selection of books or texts—a canon—and committed to reading those books or texts in a special kind of way, then creativity can flourish. Think about how many different ways there are to eat an egg, or a tomato, or a potato. The fun comes not from the limitation of a canon but from the exercise of creativity within that limited canon.
A lectionary is kind of like a canon within a canon. It begins with the Bible, which is already a severely limited kind of collection that leaves out vastly more than it includes. Then the lectionary makes selections from within that collection, and the lectionary too leaves some things out and includes others. Lectionaries also juxtapose things that don’t appear anywhere near each other in the canon, sort of like adding clams to a pasta dish or sprinkling sea salt on asparagus. The result is kaleidoscopic, with every turn offering a new view and a new understanding.
This week’s readings in the Revised Common Lectionary are a great example of that. On the surface, I’m not really interested in any of these texts…none of them are very compelling to me. (Maybe this week’s texts are like if all the grocery store had was rutabagas and mushrooms…it might work for some of y’all, but not for me). But even when the texts themselves are not that interesting to me, I can find interesting new ways to think about them, and I can put them together with each other and see what new flavors emerge. Sometimes you’ve got to cook with the ingredients you have, and see what you can make of it.
Take the first passage, Acts 1:15-17 and 21-26. Right away, notice what’s not on the menu this week: verses 18-21. This is what the lectionary does; it selects some things and omits others. This can happen for a lot of reasons, and in this case it’s likely because the stuff in the middle is a little unsavory, with its narration of Judas’s gruesome death. “Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness,” verses 18-21 read, “and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the residents of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their language Hakeldama, that is, Field of Blood. For it is written in the book of Psalms, ‘Let his homestead become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it,’ and ‘Let another take his position of overseer.’” At the end of the day the lectionary is an oral medium, designed to be read aloud in community, and I am guessing that this gory tale was simply too much to imagine pronouncing on a Sunday morning, just after the second hymn. It might be too visceral—literally—to fit comfortably in a worship service. This might be especially true when this reading happens to fall on Mother’s Day.
But there are long and proud culinary traditions based on foods that nobody really wanted—traditions of preparing the parts of animals and plants that sometimes got discarded or sold off cheaply. If you’ve ever had sausage, or pigs’ feet (which my father loved), or a summer salad, or even a good broth, you know the gifts of working with what you’ve got. This passage about Judas is really part of the larger narrative of Acts that the lectionary is asking us to think about, and the larger passages doesn’t make as much sense without it. This is especially true when you notice that the gospel text for the week includes a line—John 17:12—that seems to be a reference to Judas too. (I am honestly a little surprised that the lectionary doesn’t shoehorn in Matthew 27:3-10, an alternative account of Judas’ death). If I’m looking at these ingredients together—the story of the disciples electing Judas’ replacement, the omitted story of Judas’ death, and Jesus’ prayer in John where he acknowledges that he only “lost” one person during his life, “the one destined to be lost,” which literally says “the son of destruction” in Greek—then I’m thinking about cooking something up that has to do with Judas and his place within Jesus’ circle and in the larger drama of salvation.
Why do the disciples feel the need to replace Judas in the Twelve? You can start to add some ingredients to this text to come up with something. Perhaps they had in mind the tradition of the twelve tribes of Israel, and they had a sense that since the twelve tribes represented God’s people on earth, there should always be twelve representatives of Jesus on earth. Maybe it had to do with verse 17, where Acts talks about Judas’s “share in this ministry,” and they felt the need to have someone inherit that share. Maybe it was something else—a secret ingredient—that we don’t know about. The point is not to arrive at a correct answer, any more than the point of cooking is to arrive at the one absolutely correct way to prepare a squash. The point is to try different combinations of things together and see what happens. The fun is in the experimentation, and the creative results come that way too.
If we add in the passage from John 17 in the lectionary this week, some new flavors emerge. John 17 is a part of a long prayer, prayed by Jesus, on behalf of his followers. This prayer is pretty typical of the Jesus we find in the second half of the Gospel of John: lots of words, long speeches, and lots of reflection on the nature of Jesus by Jesus himself. Where the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (and even the first half of John) is characterized by stories of healings and miracles and parables, the Jesus of the second half of John is very self-referential and concerned with explaining his own identity. This prayer fits right in with that.
What connects this long prayer to Acts 1, and what makes them complement each other interestingly as two ingredients in a recipe, is the concern with what happens after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. Acts’ passage was worried about this in an immediate sense: how to fill the hole left by the betrayal and death of Judas. But John’s Jesus is looking ahead in this prayer, trying to ensure that when he has finished his mission on earth, God (who Jesus calls Father in this prayer) will continue to look after Jesus’ followers and protect them.
Both passages likely reached their final form decades after the events they described, and neither is anything like a transcript taken down in real time. This is important to remember, because it helps remind us that these are both visions of the post-Jesus Jesus-follower community as seen from the post-Jesus future of Jesus-followers. These are the ways the followers of Jesus imagined people planning in the past for the future they were living in. With hindsight, they were seeing the ways both Jesus (in the prayer in John 17) and the apostles (in Acts 1) were anticipating them, the late-first-century Jesus movement, and ensuring that they would be safe, that they would have a place to belong, and that they would be well-led. There’s a flavor of care and concern that runs through both of these passages. (I’m stretching the metaphor too far).
My takeaway from this week’s lectionary is perhaps subtle. I still don’t come away especially liking any of these passages; I would not be too excited to preach or teach about any of them. Almost everyone has some foods that they just don’t care for, and I’m a picky eater (both with food and biblical texts). But sometimes the secret to eating something you don’t like is in the preparation. I don’t like eggplant all that much, but I once had some fantastic kung pao eggplant that was one of the better meals I’ve ever had. The lectionary can work that way, offering new ways of preparation, new flavor combinations, and new presentations for things you might not have chosen on your own. And the joy is in the cooking.