The Persistence of Tradition
Reflections on the Lectionary for April 6th
One of the gifts of following the Revised Common Lectionary, for me, is the ways it presses texts together to see how they react to each other. Sometimes the lectionary’s selections make a literal kind of sense; a text from the Hebrew Bible might be paired with a text from the New Testament that refers back to it, for example, or the lectionary might use two texts on the same theme. Other times the passages collected in the week’s readings are less obviously related, and it’s left to us to find more alchemical reactions between them, and to search for less obvious relationships. This week’s readings, I think, are that second kind of collection—the ones that don’t stand out as related on any surface level, but that provoke us to read unrelated texts alongside each other to see what’s produced by the juxtaposition.
Reading through this week’s readings—a passage from Isaiah, a Psalm, part of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and a memorable story from the Gospel of John—I don’t see any obvious or surface-level threads passing through them all. Maybe, if you get really abstract, the theme of persistence shows up in each, though even then we aren’t really talking about persistence in the same kind of way. But as I read and re-read these passages, looking for a hook to unite them all, I began to think about a class I’ve been teaching recently for members of the Mountain Sky Conference of the United Methodist Church. The class is a part of a large grant the conference received to foster “compelling preaching,” and my class is an overview of a dozen different exegetical methods. I’m helping the students in the class—clergy and laity alike—find new ways to read texts and interpret them in “compelling” ways. One of the methods we’ve talked about is tradition criticism. Basically, tradition criticism looks at the way traditions develop within, among, and alongside biblical texts, and the way our knowledge about those traditions can help us interpret them. For example, already in 1 Corinthians 11 Paul is able to refer back to a tradition about the last supper, which has by his day crystallized into a practice of shared mean fellowship, which Paul is attempting to correct. “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” Paul writes, pointing to a continuing tradition. In the Hebrew Bible we could look to something like God’s promise to Abraham as a tradition that emerges again and again, in slightly different ways, in widely varying kinds of texts.
As I read this week’s lectionary texts, I began thinking about tradition criticism. Although two of the texts come from the Hebrew Bible (texts deriving from ancient Israel and Judah and their traditions) and two of them come from the New Testament (texts written by early Jesus-followers), they all participate in one way or another in the story of God’s presence with God’s people. After all, all four of these texts were written by Israelites as reflections on Israelite tradition, in one way or another, even though Philippians and John ended up part of a canonical collection associated with Christianity. When Paul and John sat down to create the texts that we now know as Philippians and the Gospel of John, they did so with the understanding that they were living in and contributing to an already-ancient tradition of reflection on God’s relationship to God’s people.
We can read the Isaiah passage as a kind of thesis statement, not only for this week’s lectionary, but arguably for the whole of the Hebrew Bible. This passage is doing at least three things at once. It is retelling the story of the flight from Egypt and the destruction of Pharoah’s army. It is reminding the people of their relationship with God (especially in 43:21). And it is characterizing God as a certain kind of God—the kind of deity who creates possibilities and renewal. If you don’t ever zoom out and take a broad look at the corpus of the Hebrew Bible, you might not appreciate just how frequently this kind of formula shows up, and just how important the recapitulation of the Exodus story is to the broad sweep of the Hebrew Bible—how central this tradition is to the whole enterprise. It shows up everywhere, in all kinds of literature, and it is used in all kinds of ways. Here, the old story of the flight from Egypt is being used to tease a new story—a “new thing” that “springs forth” like a river in the desert. In good prophetic fashion, Isaiah is reminding his readers that the God who delivered them to safety in the past is planning to deliver them to safety in the future, and that they can count on a future in which God carries on a tradition of deliverance. (Slightly complicating this sentiment is the instruction, in 43:18, to “not remember the former things or consider the things of old,” which comes right on the heels of reminding everyone of the former things and the things of old). In this Isaiah passage, the past’s example is the future’s prologue; Isaiah is pointing to God’s saving works in the past as a way to promise deliverance in the future.
Psalm 126, then, is like zooming out slightly from the specific references in the Isaiah passage, until you’re left with only the broad outline of the themes. The psalm is full of specifics, like Zion, the Negeb, and references to Israel’s place among “the nations,” which is a way of referring to the rest of the world. The Exodus story isn’t explicit here, and neither is the specific story of any other national event or moment. Instead, this psalm concerns vaguer language that could apply to many different moments, “when the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,” and then it moves into more poetic territory. Psalm 126 offers a handful of metaphors for restoration: laughter, watercourses in the desert, and a plentiful harvest. Shouts of joy are mentioned three times in these six verses. This psalm is less about one discrete moment and more about a mood or an affect; it is about the feeling of having been saved from a calamity. In that sense, Psalm 126 is universalizing the specific, and making the very historically-situated content of Isaiah 43 into something much more generalized to different experiences of suffering. After all, the story of the flight from Egypt is the paradigmatic experience of suffering and liberation for ancient Israel, but it was far from the only experience of suffering and liberation. Psalm 126 is applicable to all those circumstances, and the psalm is claiming that the restorative force of God’s work applies to a much broader range of situations.
Philippians 3:4b-14 is tricky. This is one of those passages (especially the first part) that can be read in wildly different ways, depending on your assumptions as a reader. Some read this passage as Paul’s rejection of Judaism, the Jewish law, and Paul’s own Jewish identity. They read 3:7 as a denial of Judaism’s efficacy and value. “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ,” Paul writes about his Jewish identity. And many readings of Paul—especially Protestant ones—stop there. They take this as evidence that Paul has substituted Christ for Mosaic law—end of story. But that reading ignores everything that comes before and after (not to mention a lot that comes in others of Paul’s letters), where Paul is actually saying something quite different. To connect back to the Isaiah passage and to Psalm 126, Paul is saying something about the high value of his Jewishness. 3:4b-6 is as emphatic a claim to Jewish identity as we might hope to find; in those lines, he’s reciting his resumé and pointing out how fully integrated he is and has always been in Jewish life. And then in 3:8, Paul ups the stakes. It’s not only his Jewish accomplishments that he has “come to regard as loss,” as 3:7 says, but it is in fact “everything.” “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ,” he says in the latter part of 3:8, with a bit of Greek profanity being translated as “rubbish” to smooth things out for pious religious readers. (Many dictionaries suggest reading this word as “crap,” but you could easily go for a stronger word). So while Christians, especially Protestants, read 3:7 is evidence of Paul’s rejection of Judaism, a broader reading of this passage reveals that Paul is in fact counting everything as a loss compared to the one thing he has begun to pursue at all costs: the saving work of the Jewish messiah.
That is, after all, what Paul is saying here. Paul writes “Christ,” 7 times in verses 7 through 12, and “Christ” is nothing but the Greek form of the Hebrew word “messiah.” Again and again Paul emphasizes his goal and purpose, which he has found in the Jewish messiah. So in these verses Paul is not rejecting Judaism, he is embracing what he sees as the culmination of the Jewish story. How does the story culminate, for Paul? It culminates in the very deliverance and restoration remembered and promised in Isaiah and Psalm 126. The story culminates in the messiah, the one sent by God, against whom all else is crap (or worse), who came to offer resurrection, the final form of deliverance and restoration. Far from rejecting the story known and proclaimed by Isaiah and the psalmist, Paul thinks he has lived to see the writing of a new chapter.
This is the value of reading with tradition criticism. While Paul does not stop to recite the story of the Exodus, or even to cite Isaiah or the words to a psalm, that history and tradition of deliverance and divine favor stands behind his argument in Philippians 3. Paul is relying on a grand sweeping narrative about God’s saving power, shorthanded as “Christ,” to talk about his purpose. All of it—circumcision, Israel, Benjamin, Hebrews, law, Pharisees, righteousness—Paul thinks it has all come down to Christ, which in Greek literally means “the anointed one,” or “messiah.”
That leads us to John 12:1-8. The tradition of God’s deliverance and renewal isn’t anywhere close to the surface in this passage; nothing related to that is even mentioned. But the passage nevertheless relies on the logic of divine redemption that was established in the tradition of the Exodus, as found in places like Isaiah 43 and Psalm 126. The scene is in the private home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, a trio of siblings whom Jesus had interacted with at length just one chapter earlier when he raised Lazarus from the dead. The siblings invited Jesus for dinner, along with at least one of Jesus’ disciples (Judas), presumably to thank Jesus for restoring the life of Lazarus. (It’s interesting that the broad sketches of the story found in Luke 10—where Martha stays busy with tasks while Mary attends closely to Jesus—are reproduced in this story from John, even as the details of the stories vary a lot). The story plays out as an interaction between Jesus and Mary, and Judas’ reaction to their interaction.
Versions of this story—or at least a similar story—appear in the synoptic gospels, but only John names the woman. In Mark and Matthew the woman anoints Jesus’ head, but in Luke and John she anoints Jesus’ feet. And only John gives the passage its most pointed meaning—that the ointment is connected to Jesus’ death and burial. John uses the interaction to foreshadow much of the passion narrative.
I want to focus, though, on the dynamic of anointing. After all, the primary title used for Jesus throughout the gospels is Christ, and Christ means “anointed.” Many modern English-speakers might not appreciate this. Some might even think that “Christ” is Jesus’ surname or second name. But Christ is a title, and it has a specific meaning, which points to the anointing expected of an Israelite king, and therefore to a messiah. The title Christ, then, is intimately linked to that tradition of God’s deliverance and redemption that we’ve been talking about, which by the time of Jesus many people expected the Messiah to enact. The Messiah was supposed to be the one who was God’s agent of restoration and redemption. The scene with Mary and Jesus depends on this tradition and it plays on it; it is an anointing that might be expected of a king of Israel (and Mark and Matthew make that more clear with the anointing of Jesus’ head), but in John the anointing serves a double meaning, made clear by Jesus, that it is also an anointing for burial.
The gospels can tell this story of anointing because they expect their readers to understand already that there is a tradition of an anointed one, a messiah (or a Christ), who will come to enact God’s plan to restore and redeem Israel. That’s the subtext of this passage from John 12 (and the subtext of many other parts of the New Testament), and it relies on a long tradition laid down by texts like Isaiah 43 and Psalm 126. John can put a new twist on the anointing story because he expects that his readers already know something about what anointing means, and he expects that they have made the connection between Jesus and the continuance of the tradition of God’s intervention into the life of Israel.
I’m not sure whether that’s what the lectionary folks had in mind when they put these four passages together, but as a whole, these four passages illustrate nicely for me the utility of thinking with tradition criticism. When we recognize that many different kinds of traditions stretch through biblical texts, and when we recognize that those traditions show up in many different ways in many different places, then we can begin to find evidence of them across biblical texts and draw connections between them. The tradition of announcing and expecting God’s redemption is as old as the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible, and it also underlies many of the passages in the New Testament. Even when it’s not at the surface, this tradition might be underneath.
And that can be an invitation—if we let it—to continue to imagine how the tradition of God’s deliverance and renewal might continue in our own time.
That class with the UM Conference sounds wonderful! I hope you offer it as a Tier course some time!