Lectionary Reflection — 01 July 2018
The Bible used this week is the Common English Bible. I’ll return to the Message next week.
13 God didn’t make death. God takes no delight in the ruin of anything that lives. 14 God created everything so that it might exist. The creative forces at work in the cosmos are life-giving. There’s no destructive poison in them. The underworld doesn’t rule on earth. 15 Doing what’s right means living forever. … 23 Humans were created to live forever. They were made as a perfect representation of God’s own unique identity. 24 Death entered the universe only through the devil’s envy. Those who belong to the devil’s party experience death.
Other readings: Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8.7, 9, 13-15; Mark 5.21-43
Today’s Lesson comes to us from one of the oft misunderstood and shrouded in mystery texts of the “Apocrypha” — the Wisdom of Solomon (or Book of Wisdom or just Wisdom). I’ve quoted it from the Common English Bible because it’s not included in The Message (nor any of the other books from the Apocrypha). The primary reason I used this passage instead of the Gospel is because some of my readers may not be familiar with these books, especially if they come from a Protestant background. Here’s a some information about these texts.
The Apocrypha can mean different things to Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. Generally, it means any text that falls outside of the biblical canon. But for this post, what I mean by the Apocrypha is the collection of books from the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint, the Jewish Scriptures used in the time of Jesus and the early church2) that have been part of Christian Bibles from the beginning but are not accepted by Protestants. The books of the Apocrypha are:
Psalm 151 (the Psalms are also numbered a little differently)
Before the Reformation in the 16th century, the Bible used by the churches of the East and West contained these books. The only difference was that the Orthodox church, the church of the East, saw (and still sees) these books as authentic and canonical. That is, they’re part of the Bible and Christian tradition since the time of Jesus and the Apostles and should be seen on the same level as the rest of Scripture. In fact, these books aren’t called “Apocrypha” by Orthodox Christians.
The Catholic church, the church of the West, on the other hand, while not rejecting the Apocrypha, didn’t (and still don’t) recognize them on the same level as the the rest of the Bible and refers to them as Deuterocanonical (meaning “second canon”). The Protestant church (for the most part) rejects the Apocrypha outright since they weren’t part of the Hebrew text.3
It should be noted that there are deuterocanonical texts of the New Testament, too. These are:
Most people don’t know this but Martin Luther tried to remove Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation from the canon probably because of their close association with faith and good works (see James 2). Obviously, he didn’t succeed.
Why am I going into all of this?
I have a couple of reasons. First, like I stated above, some of my readers may never read a passage from the Apocrypha. Second, and I’ve mentioned this already too, the texts of the Apocrypha were part of the Jewish scriptures in use during the time of Jesus and the Apostles. They would have heard, read, and used those books along with the rest of the Septuagint.4 I’m thankful that the Orthodox church still counts these texts as canon and that they’re used in church liturgies all over the world.5
So what about the passage?
Quite right.
This passage is astounding on so many levels. It states planely, “God didn’t create death.” Yet I’ve heard so many people say something like, “If God didn’t create death, then God isn’t god.” The idea is that, since God is omnipotent (i.e., all powerful), then God must have created death. If God didn’t create death, then God isn’t omnipotent. But that’s a misunderstanding of death. Death is not an addition to Life; it’s the subtraction of Life. Death is the absence of Life.
Next we read, “God takes no delight in the ruin of anything that lives.” This sentiment is echoed in other passages:
23 “Do I take pleasure in the death of the wicked?” asks Yahweh. “Certainly not! If they change their ways, they’ll live.” … 32 “I most certainly don’t want anyone to die!” This is what Yahweh says. “Change your ways, and live!” … 11 “Say to them, ‘This is what Yahweh says: “As surely as I live, do I take pleasure in the death of the wicked? Certainly not! If the wicked turn from their ways, they’ll live. Turn, completely turn from your wicked ways! Why should you die, house of Israel?”’”
As we can see from Ezekiel, death is the consequence of the actions of the “wicked.” In other words, God doesn’t kill the wicked; death is the result of their choices.
Next, the Lesson calls us back to the creation account in Genesis. Wisdom 2.23 states people “were made as a perfect representation of God’s own unique identity.” In Genesis 1, it states, “God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them” (verse 27). Here we see the true identity of people, the true depth of the human soul — we’re a “perfect representation of God’s own unique identity.”
This theme runs through the heart of the Celtic Christian tradition. Celtic teacher and poet John Philip Newell wrote —
The Celtic tradition invites us to look with the inner eye. In all people, in all places, in every created thing the light of God is shining. It may lie buried and forgotten under layers of darkness and distortion but it is there waiting to be recovered.6
And that last bit is also telling. For too many of us, we’ve been told that the “darkness and distortion” have extinguished the Light of God within all life, especially the human soul. This is known as the doctrine of “original sin.”7 We’ve been taught that, because of the “Fall” of Adam and Eve, there is a “destructive poison” running through the depth of creation, destroying all it touches. But Wisdom teaches us, “The underworld doesn’t rule on earth” (verse 14). Sure, this “destructive poison” may have piled on layers and layers of “darkness and distortion,” but buried deeper than all that’s wrong is “God’s own unique identity.”
Leading us back again to the creation account, St John wrote, “through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light” (John 1.4-5; emphasis added). In other words, Jesus, the Logos of God8, comes like a light, piercing the layers of “darkness and distortion” until if finds the Light and Life of God buried within the human soul and ignites the flame of creation.
But I want to turn all of this on its head.
Like a lot of wisdom literature, the Lesson today makes a clear distinction between “righteous” and “wicked” people. But reality is a lot more gray than the Lesson would have us believe. Running right through everyone of us is the potential to commit acts of “righteousness” or “wickedness.” The question, then, is what is our intention, our motivation? Is it to further “self” at the expense of others, including the earth? Or is it to cultivate life — all life, human and non-human alike? Do our intentions lead us to destructive actions to snuff out the Light and Life of God buried deep within all things? Or do they help others reach their true potential as God’s children and expand the Realm of God “on earth as it is in heaven”?
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In the Love of the Three in One,
Br. Jack+, LC
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1. Scripture quotations marked (CEB) are taken from The Common English Bible. Copyright © 2011 by Common English Bible.
2. The Old Testament is primarily based on the Hebrew text of the Jewish Scriptures in the majority of our current Bible translations. This started with Jerome when he began a revision of the Latin Bible in 382 CE (the Vulgate). When Jerome started on the Jewish Scriptures in 390 CE, he chose to use Hebrew texts instead of the Septuagint. “[Jerome] believed that the mainstream Rabbinical Judaism had rejected the Septuagint as invalid Jewish scriptural texts because of what were ascertained as mistranslations along with its Hellenistic heretical elements. … Jerome's decision to use a Hebrew text instead of the previous translated Septuagint went against the advice of most other Christians, including Augustine, who thought the Septuagint inspired” (Wikipedia, Jerome: Translations and Commentaries). This explains why some (most) of the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament don’t line up — the New Testament writers were using and quoting from the Greek Old Testament while the majority of our Bibles use the Hebrew texts. The old adage, usually said about the King James Bible, fits here — “If it was good enough for Jesus and Paul. it’s good enough for me!” In other words, if you don’t have a Bible with it’s Old Testament based on the Septuagint (like the Orthodox Study Bible), I highly recommend that you get one. After all, it was the Bible used at the time of Jesus and the writers of the New Testament.
3. There are exceptions to this, however. The Anglican/Episcopal church uses them.
4. When we read that the Bereans “examined the scriptures each day to see whether Paul and Silas’ teaching was true” (Acts 17.11), we can be assured that those scriptures were the Septuagint.
5. I can see why texts like these were kept out of some Bibles and streams of Christianity. They speak against a worldview, a narrative, that would remove a type of power from the church and places it squarely in the hands of people. It’s really hard to say that people are born enemies of God, destined to Hell, if passages like the one above are in the Bible.
6. Newell, John Philip. The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1999.
7. For more on “original sin,” see my Trinity Sunday 2018 reflection. Also, see my chapter, Original Sin?, in the upcoming Celtic Bible Commentary: Volume Four — The Far-Seeing Eagle: The Good News According to John.
8. The Greek word translated “word” is λόγος and it means, not just the spoken word like that of creation in Genesis 1 (to which John is intentionally pointing), but it carries the connotation of thought and intention.
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