The Devil didn't make me do it Virgin in Trouble Pregnancy, Poverty and Power Jesus as a Pre-teen Riots at Campaign Launch Faith Through House-breaking
1.
THE DEVIL DIDN’T MAKE ME DO IT
Luke 4:1-13
The Richtersveld would be a difficult place to be by yourself for forty
days. Heat and hunger and thirst make the deserted corners of this earth
places to avoid – unless you are in search of some sort of inner
spiritual encounter. My memories of the Namaqualand spergebied will stay
with me for ever: salt encrusted streambeds; the shimmer of 40’
heat where there is no shade; the flicking tongue of the adder.
Jesus’ had some bad hallucinations in the desert. Except that they were too frighteningly coherent to be hallucinations. What coalesced out of the heat, the interference of some outside person and his own inner awareness were three devastating temptations: 1. to have as much bread/provision/wealth as he could desire; 2. to have complete do-things-my-way power; and 3. to impress and manipulate people by public display & image.
Jesus didn’t go that way. He must have been meditating on the book of Deuteronomy, because his come-back lines to the devil were three crisp, no-nonsense bullets, all taken from the old scroll – 1. life is not just about things to eat and use; 2. God must have the executive power; and 3. don’t measure/test God against yourself in public.
The Church is of course always getting this wrong – we don’t do what Jesus did: we dive right in there for the money, power and influence. Is this hypocrisy? Or is it falling to the clever manipulation of the same destructive will that tried to take Jesus down? Either way, we have this story to remind us how we have messed up. Jesus’ way is like this…the other way is like that…
I guess for me the issue is this. Am I brave enough even to think about my inner motivations? Am I prepared to go into some desert where there is no cell-phone reception, no internet connection, no music on my mp3 …? Just me and God and whoever else is out there, and hear the voices. And make the choices.
2.
VIRGIN IN TROUBLE
Luke 1:26-38
Most Christmas cards don’t mention the possibility of a woman being
buried up to her hips in sand and then being pelted to death with stones
- at least, that is the current Middle Eastern method of executing the
“sexually immoral” (from a Google source, so I can’t
vouch for it) My Religious studies mentor, Rabbi Mervis, explained that
the Rabbinically approved ancient method involved just one heavy stone
dropped onto the chest. Whatever. Mary stands forever as the patron of
pregnant teenagers, “in trouble” in every way..
The story in Luke is extremely strange. Few people then, and few people now, believed in parthenogenesis. The occasional isolated shark in an aquarium might give birth to young without recourse to intercourse, but if a young woman is pregnant we all want to know the name of the father.
And in this story we get the disturbing news that God can interfere in human reproductivity. Father: God. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” [2:35] If true, then very disturbing, although the text suggests that Mary had the option to not carry this particular burden/child.
I find this one of the most difficult things to believe in the Bible. And of course lots of people simply laugh it off as pious or manipulative invention. She was pregnant, so it was either Joseph or some other man. Happens all the time.
I do, however, believe it happened the way it says it happened. Tentatively. My faith is based on a rather fragile chain of conditions: if God created the world, and; if God sustains the world through holding all things together (and remember we have not yet found where mass actually inheres – we have only found mysterious forces and space within atoms); and if Jesus really returned from death (which has a more accessible verification evidence); then it is true that “nothing is impossible with God”[2:37]. You don’t have to follow me down that subtle path, but in this story we read that Mary did. And then there was the baby. And believe the story of his conception or not, the baby was quite an unusual person.
3.
PREGNANCY, POVERTY & POWER
Luke 1:47-56
This is a first century “mshini wam” – a song of the
oppressed, promising food and freedom. It’s lyricist, composer and
first performing artist is a pregnant Jewish teenager.
All the rhetoric is there. For all the years of pain. Every Roman sneer and tax raid, every soldier’s rape and every naked man sweating and dying on the rows of crosses. The proud and arrogant will fall! Caesar’s Throne, Herod’s Throne, the Garrison Commander’s ceremonial lion skin sedes – are all going to be tipped over and broken…no names, of course, but we all know what this one is about (nudge, nudge!) Mary sings, “My soul praises the Lord.”[1:46]
So where is the military hardware to do all this? Where is the Kalashnikov? Mary doesn’t actually call for ‘mshini wakhe. No first century weapon makes an appearance: no spear, no sword, or bronze-tipped arrow. No Egyptian war-flail, and not even the weapon of choice of young King David, the deadly coiled sling. The process of “filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty” [1:53] is the dream of the poor, defenseless and powerless.
Yes, it will happen over and over again down history – kingdoms that rise will fall. The powerful will be broken time and time again.
But why is Mary so happy now? She doesn’t carry any hardware, but she is carrying the Baby. And the Baby can do it. “My spirit rejoices in God my saviour.” [1:47}
4.
JESUS AS A PRE-TEEN
Luke 2:41-51
Mary and Joseph lost Jesus. They had guardianship over the regent of the
universe, the cosmic lord of all lords, the incarnation of the God who
launched space and matter and who presides over the grinding tectonic
shifts of this planet and all its fragile life – and they mislaid
him. Whoops.
Luke draws us a picture, though, of a strangely different avatar. Here is a gangly boy easy to lose among traveling relatives. His parents don’t have to worry so much any more about ditches, wells and cobras hiding under curiously turned stones. He has survived those years, and Jesus has blended seamlessly into a middle eastern family. But I bet he wonders what his real father is like.
Teenage is the time for identity crises. It’s really hard to understand teenagers – especially for teenagers. And this crisis drives Jesus to three days “in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”[2:47] “What is my father really like?” is the subject here, a question that every pre-adolescent boy still asks. At last he has discovered a group of thoughtful, elderly father-figures who don’t swat away his questions. They are not like his carpenter foster father, preoccupied with measurements and sawing angles and cash flows. They are, in fact, professional questioners and answerers. This young adherent would have been indulgently welcome. Ah – at last! What every teacher hopes for and secretly fears: a keen, intelligent learner…
…who then gets hauled out by the ear by tearful, dusty parents.
I like to think, though, the those three days “in his Father’s house”[2:49] gave Jesus a lot to think about as he shaped peg-hole blanks for ox-yokes in the carpentry shop.
5.
RIOTS AT CAMPAIGN LAUNCH
Luke 4:14-30
It must be the very worst campaign launch ever. In the end Jesus’
heartland constituency try and kill him after his manifesto event in Nazareth.
An outsider reading the Jewish prophets might well question why people do so much religion and so little justice, because justice gets so much column space. Jesus agrees. He takes the Bible very seriously. So he says that he is going to prioritize the poor! (cheers!), the prisoners (cheers again!), the blind! (scattered applause); and the oppressed! (standing ovation. Toyi-toying breaks out. It takes 10 minutes to restore order)[4:18-19]
And then into the expectant silence Jesus drops the worst political clanger ever caught on camera by gleeful journalists (or ever). He says that it’s going to work out like this: Elijah and Elisha, those prototype prophets, skipped over the Nation and favoured the non-Nation with miracles of provision and healing [4:24-27]. In the same way the “year of the Lord’s favour”[4:19] is going to overflow into the Greek, Roman, African, American, Asian and Pacific Island realm – from all of which the Roman invasion force would have been happy to recruit. Jesus thinks that non-Jewish poor, blind, oppressed prisoners are on the agenda!
Kill the bastard!
He escapes this time, but if he carries on like this it’s only a matter of time before his crazy campaign falls to pieces
JESUS: 90% FAILURE RATE?
6. FAITH THROUGH HOUSEBREAKING
Luke 5:17-26
Does your insurance cover someone removing your roof tiles and breaking
through your ceiling? I like to think of this incident as “Jesus
in the Rubble”, as clay and dust and bits of stick drove back the
people around him. Next thing, sunlight; and a body dumped on top of the
debris.
How did this paralyzed man feel? It must have been so frustrating not to be able to move – a recent spinal injury perhaps? Broke his neck climbing for honey? Now his eager beaver friends have dumped him into the middle of a hostile crowd, and there’s a stick in his ear that he can’t get out. I suspect that he just may have directed a few pointed comments at Jesus.
Who forgave him! For…everything.
And that just about demolished the rest of the house [5:21] Since when can I forgive you for stuff you’ve done to someone else? Only God is involved in every bad thing done to any one of his children. But Jesus puts the maximum stress on standard theology. He stretches everything to breaking point and then shows what you can make with the broken pieces. Broken roof, broken neck, broken promises… and since he can rewire and reactivate the neural pathways in and from the spinal column of a paralyzed man, perhaps he does have the authority to do “what only God can do”[5:21]
Which leaves everybody seriously off-balance about who on earth he actually is!
But the four friends on the ropes must have dusted off their hands with the satisfied feeling of a job well done. I have always wondered, though, if they helped to rebuild the roof afterwards…