 
Footwashers

Following the Jesus Way

William Henry Lehmann Jr.

Emeritus Professor,

Concordia University Chicago
Copyright © 1992 William Lehmann. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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# Table of Contents

Forward

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Social and Political Situation

Chapter 2: Alternative Ethical Positions

Chapter 3: The Levels of Ethical Reality

The Physical Level

The Social Level

The Spiritual Level

Chapter 4: The Upper Room Conversation

The First Relation: Doulos, slave

The Second Relation: Filos, Friend

The Third Relation: Hueos Theou, Son of God

The Kingdom of God

Prayer

Discipleship

Prophetic Office

Social Relationships

Marriage

Judgment of Others

Forgiveness of Others

Legal Relationships

Citizenship

The Eternal Perspective

#

# Forward

With his nimbus of hair, and a voice that believably once spoke to Plato or Socrates, Dr. William Lehmann _was_ the philosophy department at Concordia University, River Forest. He could flawlessly assume the identity of whichever philosopher was being discussed, in addition to critiquing them when necessary. No other professors were needed. He did it all, and he did it well. He knew his philosophy. But first and foremost, he knew his theology. Many of the students of the philosophy department in my day were agnostic or atheist. And yet, quarter after quarter they would take classes from this humble man of God, sitting at the feet of someone who affirmed what they rejected: the Word of God.

And then there was _The Ethics of Jesus_.

Cross listed between the Theology and Philosophy departments, the students who took it were a strange mix. Pre-seminary students took it because it had "Jesus" in the title. Philosophy students took it because it was taught by their beloved philosophy professor. I still remember sitting in awe at the back of the class watching, first one side of the room, and then the other, lob opposing questions at Dr. Lehmann. But he handled them all with winsome grace, in no small part thanks to his sharp intellect and depth of knowledge.

The danger for the theologian is that philosophical preconceptions, even unacknowledged ones, will color the conclusions drawn from scripture. This is a common malady in the church, and few escape it. Luther was one who managed it, although his friend Melanchthon was not. Dr. Lehmann, thanks to his deep love for our Lord's Word, has also managed it. He has taken the teachings of scripture, on their own terms, and crafted a philosophical and ethical system from those teachings. This is a rarity. Rarer still, he manages to present an ethic that does not obscure the voice of the Gospel. The ethic presented here in no way impinges on the doctrine of justification.

Unlike many other attempts to craft theology into a Lutheran system of ethics, Dr. Lehmann manages to address scripture philosophically, but manages to do so on scripture's terms, not the philosopher's. The ethic he presents does not simply re-interpret pagan philosophies in light of scripture. Rather, he presents scripture as the ultimate solution to the questions which the pagan philosophies have attempted, but failed, to answer.

That he manages to do this may be a surprise to those who have not known him: many have attempted it and failed. That he succeeds with an Ethic this is thoroughly Lutheran – keeping the Law and Gospel separate and distinct in their respective spheres, and avoiding the tendency to let the Law triumph over the Gospel – is not a surprise to those of us privileged to know him. For such is the doctrine of Holy Scripture. It was this precious doctrine that Luther re-discovered during the reformation. And it is this precious teaching that is presented here, as taken from the teachings of Jesus himself.

A word of warning, however. Luther is briefly mentioned, but not quoted at length. And, perhaps even more uncomfortable to Lutherans, neither is the Apostle Paul. That is by design. This was the textbook for the class "Ethics of _Jesus_ ". One of the rules of the class was that you could not quote Saint Paul, because the class was not "The Ethics of Paul". It was an interesting discipline to remain focused only on the words of our Lord. Much to the chagrin of those who immerse themselves in "modern" biblical scholarship, the parameters of this philosophical exercise do not produce a theology or ethic that is divergent from that of Paul or Luther, but confirms it. Much to the chagrin of those who believe that historic Lutheran teaching somehow diverged from Luther's intention, the thoroughly Lutheran theology presented here is also fully consistent with the writings of Gerhard, Walther, Pieper, etc.

For those who seek to rediscover a 'lost theology', whether it be of Paul, Luther, or some theologian of the moment, the ethic and theology presented here will disappoint. But for those who immerse themselves in the doctors of the church, and who approach Holy Scripture humbly, willing to be servant to the text (and not, as is so often the case, the other way around), this book is the logical conclusion to be drawn from the teachings of our Lord. For many today, taking seriously the word of scripture is a radical concept. And yet, unlike many other "studies" which spend more time proposing the author's pet theories than actually engaging the text one claims to teach (whether that text be Holy Scripture, the Confessions, or Luther's Commentary on Galatians), this is a thoroughly scriptural work. Being able to evaluate the teachings of Jesus, in their own context and on their own terms, and come to the conclusion that His words are no more than what the church has always taught, is a valuable tool as we enter a post-Christian world.

For all the academic, intellectual, and theological rigor that lies behind the text, it answers a simple question that too often bedevils theologians, in or out of the parish: What does the Christian life look like? Lutherans are often erroneously accused of both antinomianism and legalism. If either of those charges is ever true, it means that Lutherans have strayed from the precious foundation of Law and Gospel, and that, rather than seeking to overturn them, they should return to them.

The text is taken from a manuscript that was prepared for publication, but was declined at the last minute for various reasons. This is unfortunate. Our church would have been better off having this available for the last two decades. However, the shortsightedness of that publisher so long ago has given me the chance to not only read this text once again, but engage it and work with it. Most of that work has been limited to formatting for modern readers – both the print-on-demand and electronic reader market.

Regarding the text itself, I have made very limited changes. A few typos that crept through my _alma mater's_ early 1990's spell checkers, or that were added by my more modern scanner/OCR program, have been corrected. A few words here and there have been changed to reflect more accurately the intent. Language can change dramatically in only two decades: "literally" no longer means what it did "back then". Some examples of important social or political issues may seem outdated almost a quarter century on. I have left those intact. They do not harm the structure of Dr. Lehmann's argument. Our perspective may have changed a bit, but the point he is making still comes through clearly. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that some errors that crept in through the scanning process were missed. For any mistakes, I apologize.

I pray that this work is as great a blessing to you as it has been to me. And it is in the spirit of tribute to Dr. Lehmann and all he has given to the church, that I now offer it back to the church.

Lincoln Winter

Epiphany, 2015

PS. The following quote from John Gardner was on a poster hanging in Dr. Lehmann's office. When he retired he gave the poster to me. The sentiment expressed herein applies equally well not only to theology, but to those in the church called to be theologians:

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

# Introduction

Of the many varieties of life which inhabit this planet, none has more difficulty living than the human kind, which often appears unsure of how to survive, what to do with and how to comport itself, individually and in social groups. Other varieties of life seem not to have such problems.

Some of the oldest literature of mankind is ethical: codes of law, texts containing rule of thumb advice, collections of adages, and morality tales. Dating back almost to the beginning of human recollection, they testify to the ancient origin of the problems of human living – that time of original sinning that generated the need for an ethic. Before that time, all was natural; all was good. Since that time a great variety of ethical works have been written to assist human beings with their lives: telling them their meaning or purpose, what to do or how to determine for themselves what to do, and how to evaluate actions and actors.

Ironically, human solutions to problems tend to generate new problems, which continually grow in size and complexity. New ethical works are written to face the new issues. By the time of Jesus, Jewish intellectuals embraced a variety of embryonic ethical positions that competed with one another for acceptance. Jesus took exception to and criticized each of them. They are the subject of Chapter 2.

In the Hellenistic world outside the Jewish community a half dozen fully developed ethical philosophical positions existed. Together with them, the remnants of informal ethical structures survived, left over from antique pagan religions: Baalism, the worship of Ashtaroth, Zoroastrianism. Some of them continue today among the archeological remains of those times, remnants of archaic cultures, practiced in tiny enclaves on side streets of ancient near-eastern cities. They attract little attention in the background of the many great ethical systems which have developed subsequently in the western world, products of the medieval Christian Church and modern philosophical activity in Christian lands.

In the United States the need to reevaluate established religious systems and ideals became apparent during the turbulent '60s, when clergy and laity of contrary viewpoints contended violently with one another about issues of social change. Both sides of the controversy justified their actions in the name of God and, in particular, invoked the person of Jesus Christ as their mentor, expressing as the will of God their novel values or traditional beliefs, often without rigorous self-examination or scriptural verification for what they were claiming. Many wrote books defending their positions. Such activity is not new in the modern church.

The history of books reconsidering or recasting the teachings of Jesus Christ begins probably with Frederick Schleiermacher's _Das Leben Jesu_ , in the mid-nineteenth century. A part of the larger nineteenth century reconstruction activity, taking place in all academic disciplines as a result of the ascendency of Hegelian dialectic, theology also began to be recast in historical, evolutionary terms. The process continues still today in parts of theology even though it has long since ended in most other academic disciplines.

Schleiermacher's work influenced the young Schweitzer, whose _Quest for the Historic Jesus_ is a much more familiar title than Schleiermacher's _Das Leben_. Since Schweitzer, books which diverge from traditional interpretations of the gospels have largely fit into four types or combinations of those four types: those which question the accuracy of the view of the subject person of the gospels, those which revise the historical/sociological setting of the gospels, those which revise the authorship of the gospels, including their intent, and those which challenge the textual accuracy of existing manuscripts.

These divergent views have tended to use five sorts of arguments to establish their interpretations: the _ad hominem_ approach, interpreting what is said or done by Jesus in terms of a pre- conceived view of the sort of person he was. Three views popular today are the "Jesus the Peasant" view, as in John Crossan, the Paulist brother, and others; "Jesus the Radical Revisionist" view of which there have been numerous versions since the '60s, particularly in liberation theology literature, and "Jesus the unofficial Nazarite" view as depicted by Marcus Borg and others since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls.

The particular view presupposed by the author colors his interpretation of the gospels. Instead of letting the gospels create the conditions for legitimate characterizations, the pre-conceived character determines the meanings of the words and actions. That view may also be used as a critical instrument for rendering incredulous actions and remarks an author finds incompatible with his viewpoint. Although this selective or half-truth approach often follows from the _ad hominem_ approach, it may also be used independently of it as, for instance, in conjunction with an historical/sociological approach. An example of such an approach might be a textual entry like the following I have created:

As a member of the northern Jewish agrarian underclass, Jesus, understandably, would have exhibited strong hostility to the southern urban intellectuals' cooperation with the foreign Roman government. Consequently, he might, and upon occasion probably did, say, "Render unto God the things that are God's!", but under no circumstances would he have said, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's!"

The latest version of this sort of approach occurs in Stephen Mitchell's work.

A third sort of approach might be called the _ad populum_ approach. Here the interpretation of the text rests upon the assumption that the author of a gospel, consciously or unconsciously, tailored his message to fit the needs or values of his contemporary situation. Consequently, regardless of what the historic Jesus said or did, the author of the gospel modified, shaded, and added to his words, and added, relocated, and reinterpreted his actions, etc. In short, he fit his gospel to the goals he had in mind to achieve. Usually the authors of the respective gospels are thought to have had in mind to add claims of divinity to the historic account of Jesus words. Analogously, prophecies of events which subsequently occurred (like the destruction of Jerusalem), and miracles (in particular, the miracle of miracles, the resurrection) are thought to have been added by those authors as well.

The fourth kind of approach is probably the most familiar in theological circles and the oldest in regular use: the higher critical approach. Here the text itself is reduced to a smaller text, on the assumption that later editors added materials from other sources. This approach differs from the previous in that few assumptions are made about the person and message of Jesus, but focus rather upon stylistic and semantic considerations. The smaller text which remains is accepted as the authentic, or what remains of the authentic text, and is analyzed in traditional ways.

Finally, the fifth, the relativistic approach, leaves the text largely intact, but reinterprets it to fit modern times. What was once true and good has changed as circumstances have changed. Hence, what was the case once upon a time must now be interpreted differently for our times. Examples of this approach are numerous since the introduction of the concept of cultural relativism by Santayana and its popularization by many anthropologists.

The attractive style, the originality of thought and the internal consistency of argument hide the fact that most of these reinterpretations of the life and teaching of Jesus rest upon logically fallacious reasonings: the _ad hominem_ , the half truth, the _ad populum_ , and the fallacy of ambiguity.

This book is intended as an alternative, attempting explicitly to expound that ethical structure implicit to the gospels, upon which for almost twenty centuries the Church has purported to base its ethical statements. The book attempts to develop an organized, coherent ethical position which one might legitimately call the "Ethics of Jesus." Based strictly on the words and actions of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the gospels, this book uses no other content sources. Many authors of books on the subject of Christian ethics, apparently presuppose that this task of constructing the ethical position based entirely upon the words and actions of Christ has already been done, or more naively, believe that such an outline is unnecessary because the ethical position of Jesus is inherently obvious. The presence of either of these assumptions reveals itself, for instance, in books packed with all manner of radical reassessments and new directives for the people of God, devoid of any clear mandate or example from the life of Christ to justify the directives offered in his name. Sometimes, authors simply offer current popular secular viewpoints as a substitute for traditional views in an effort to "get with it" and achieve relevancy to the times. Sometimes they seem simply to have sanctified their own pre-conceptions and values with the name Jesus. Ironically, many of these books come from within the church and from the church's presses, some of them grand intellectual edifices whose foundations are often pagan and their preconceptions secular.

On the other hand, occasionally a book appears which is different. One recognizes a kindred spirit, and hope is rekindled that the ethics of Jesus can be reclaimed from those who have carried it hither and yon in the contemporary world. Such a book is _Theological Ethics of the New Testament_ by Eduard Lohse. Much more ambitious than the book which follows here, it also attempts in ways which are much more defensible on scholarly grounds than the approaches outlined above, to state the ethical foundation which animates the entire New Testament corpus; this book which follows limits itself to the gospels. Both books are largely compatible with one another in their methodology, although they diverge somewhat in their conclusions.

This book is an outgrowth of an undergraduate course of the same name, developed in the '70s, which sought in a minor way to offer an alternative to the violent religious restlessness of the time. An invitation to lecture at an Anglican seminary in London during autumn term of 1986 prompted the first draft of this book. I am indebted to the faculty and students of Oak Hill College, especially to Dr. Rudi Heinze, for interest and enthusiastic discussion of the book's topics, as well as to my former students in the United States who, over the span of twenty years, joined me in wrestling with the gospels to pin down a word of Jesus Christ for our own day. I am indebted to my professional colleague and close friend Dr. Merle Radke for stylistic criticism and to my daughter Gretchen for editorial advice and assistance.

The approach I use in _Ethics of Jesus_ , requires certain assumptions which are made freely and without qualification:

1) That the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, contain an authentic report of Jesus life;

2) That they are an adequate resource for the task of this book;

3) That the thought and actions of Jesus Christ, as reported by the four evangelists, are coherent with one another;

4) That the ethic which has been uncovered represents the will of God for His New Testament people.

The first and the fourth principles are articles of faith which may be debated by well intentioned scholars. Hopefully the second and third are demonstrated by the text which follows.

The method I employ in the text is called "common places" ( _loci communes_ in Latin) – a method for treating important topics, that are loosely structured within an organizing system, much like a satellite system. The logic used is dialectical, primarily because it is the logic of discovery, but also, because, if used correctly, of all logics, it does the least damage to its subject matter by its internal structuring. Finally, I chose the dialectical method since it was frequently employed within the church because its discursive usefulness helped to reveal and correct past errors and excesses. Throughout the history of the Church, dialectic has been preserved in the Augustinian tradition, named after St. Augustine who, in the fourth century of its existence, was both the Church's first systematic theologian and its foremost philosopher. His _de Trinitate_ and, in particular, his _de Libero Arbitrio_ still serve as models for excellence.

A complete and coherent text that lacks systematic organization can be analyzed and its implicit structure revealed by the careful isolation of statements which reveal relationships within the corpus of the document. A few such relationships together with identified connectors reveal the essential structure, which can then be developed in its fullest form, much in the manner that a jigsaw puzzle is solved – pieces fitted to pieces in their proper pattern. Formulating a particularly rich structure will allow one to answer all manner of questions about the subject, including some not explicitly addressed in the original text.

Gaps in the structure also become evident, revealing content for which there are no answers offered by the available material. Sometimes these gaps can be successfully bridged or filled by other means. Whatever structure emerges assists in showing what is there, what its intellectual foundations are, what can be known beyond, and where only speculation fills the void. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to developing the structure which gives form to this entire book. The remaining chapters treat significant ethical loci based upon passages from the gospels, interpreted in the context of the developed structure.

In the gospels Jesus himself counseled anonymous giving and unobtrusive activity. A book is a rather public object, certain to call attention to its creator. Hopefully, the Author and Source of the content of this book, as identified in the title, will be satisfied with the work of this human editor who arranged the manner of His content into a complex structure. May the divine Subject be glorified by the literary object!

(Authors and books referred to by name in the introduction are the following:

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: A New Vision, San Francisco, Harper, 1991

Crossan, John Dominic The Historical Jesus, San Francisco, Harper, 1991

Lohse, Eduard Theological Ethics of the New Testament, ed. M. Eugene Boring, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991

Mitchell, Stephen The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,

Schleiermacher, Frederick Das Leben Jesu

Schweizer, Albert The Quest for the Historic Jesus)

Chapter l

# The Social and  
Political Situation

Intellectual Palestine at the time of Christ espoused a complex and incoherent collection of social and political values which competed with one another in a vortex of political instability. The Jews had their own turbulent history, no less volatile than the near East today, beginning with the division of Solomon's great nation into two separate and hostile countries after his death.

Israel to the north occupied most of the land. Composed of ten of the original twelve tribes, it soon began to form alliances with the pagan countries to the north, using them diplomatically as a buffer against larger, more powerful nations to the north and east. Judea to the south usually rested in the protection of Israel's military shadow, never attaining military or political importance in its own right, although sometimes it sought the help of Assyria against both Syria and Israel when they formed a hostile coalition, as in the days of King Ahaz. Israel had its own priests, its own temple and altars at Shechem, and its own separate culture.

In 721 B.C., Israel was conquered by Sargon II of Assyria and, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist as a nation. Its 27,290 leading citizens were taken into captivity and resettled north-east of Nineveh. During succeeding years most of the rest of the population was resettled elsewhere. There is no record that any of the descendants of Israel returned to Palestine. They were probably assimilated into the gentile cultures existing south of the Caspian sea. Assyrian, and later Babylonian, people were brought in to repopulate the land and to mix with the remnant people. In 612 B.C. a coalition of Medes and Persians destroyed the Assyrian nation and killed most of its people. The recent Persian Gulf conflict brought to brief world attention some of their descendants living in the gulf and in the United States, ironically, practicing Christians!

Judah, the Jewish nation to the south, survived until 597 B.C. Its capital was Jerusalem; it worshipped at Solomon's temple; its natural alliances were to the south, particularly with Egypt. Though an ancient power, Egypt at this time had become a tired, second rate culture, less vigorous and powerful than the young nations to the north and east. Judah also lived in the memory of its great days under David and Solomon. The Babylonian nation, located on the Euphrates River, conquered Judah and took its court, leading intellectuals, and wealthy people back to Babylon to enrich its own new culture. Many other Jews fled to the cities of the upper Euphrates, south to Egypt or to the west.

Over the centuries that followed, as Palestine continued to be an occupied land, while some Jewish people returned from Babylon, most who left there went any direction but west: to the north, to Armenia, the Caucasus, the Black Sea area, and Medea, south to the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and Ethiopia; toward the southeast they moved as far as India.

From Palestine the Jews dispersed to the major cities of the Mediterranean basin. They traveled as far west as modern Spain, establishing enclaves composed of international traders and craftsmen. They devoutly maintained their faith in an alien culture and attempted, after the rebuilding of Jerusalem, to return at least once to visit the homeland before they died.

After 537 B.C., various efforts were made to gather significant groups of Jews who would return to rebuild Solomon's temple and the royal city of Jerusalem, both of which had been largely destroyed. In 520 B.C. temple rebuilding began in earnest, but was not completed. In all, probably no more than 50,000 Jews returned from foreign lands to resettle the country. For the most part they were the poorest and least capable of the refugees. Those who succeeded elsewhere in the world had no desire to return. As a result, at the time of Jesus, the leading centers of Jewish culture were at Babylon and Alexandria, rather than at Jerusalem. A third rate Jewish intellectual and cultural center existed at the temple in Jerusalem. Fourth place was occupied by Rome.

The Jews occupied two thirds of Palestine. Jesus was reared in the northern section, composed largely of farms, small towns and fishing villages. The southern section where Jesus was born was dominated by temple and governmental commerce. Levites lived in most of the southern towns, awaiting their turns to serve in the temple, from which they all derived their livelihood. Most of the arable territory was devoted to sheep pasturage, although olives, some grain and citrus fruit were grown. Members of the political class of Jewish society and many of the wealthy international businessmen lived in Jerusalem, although more and more were moving to the seaport cities which Herod the Great had developed. The oldest mercantile firms and the local tradesmen, of course, remained in Jerusalem where they had engaged in commerce for centuries.

Between northern and southern Palestine stretched Samaria, the most beautiful area of Palestine, the heart of what had once been the kingdom of Israel, occupied now by a variety of people of mixed racial backgrounds. The Jews considered them mongrel people, beneath contempt and beyond notice. These Samaritans worshipped God at their own sacred places and maintained their own sacrificial altars, cf. the Samaritan woman Jesus met. Ironically, the province of Samaria, avoided by the post-exilic Jewish people, includes what today is the "Left Bank", that disputed Arab territory conquered by modern Israel in the '67 War and never returned. One of the primary Likud arguments for its retention is its historic importance as a Jewish homeland, an argument not supported by the gospels.

The four centuries before the birth of Jesus are marked by recurrent Jewish efforts to achieve independence from a succession of foreign occupations, each bringing, not only its own form of rules and rulers, but also its own cultural values. Before the destruction of the two kingdoms, the primary social problem had been the tendency of Jews to acculturate with their neighbors and to inter-marry. After their destruction, the primary problem was keeping alien values out of the Jewish communities and preserving a kosher Jewish existence in alien lands. But the return to Palestine, oftentimes, ironically, posed a greater challenge for ethnic and cultural purity than living in most foreign lands, because the returning Jews continued to be people living in an occupied land.

Evidence of the fluidity of political and social structures in Palestine is exhibited by a number of significant dates (All dates BC):

**520** Temple rebuilding begins under the Persian rule.

**332** Alexander the Great conquers Palestine on the way to conquering all of the Persian empire as far as India.

**330 – 198** After Alexander the Great dies, his empire is divided among his five generals. Palestine becomes a part of Egypt under the Ptolemy family.

**198** The Seleucid family of Syria gains control of Palestine from Egypt.

**167** Jewish independence is achieved under the Maccabee family. The Pharisee party is created. The independent nation lasts 24 years.

**143** The Seleucids re-conquer Palestine.

**63** The Romans under Pompey conquer Jerusalem and drive out the Seleucids. Antipater, a Maccabee, becomes the token governor of Palestine, ruling for the Roman government.

**41** His son, Phasael, rules Judea briefly.

**38/37** Herod, another son by an Idumean wife, drives out the enemies of Rome from the country and is made ruler of all of Palestine. He is a tetrarch, ruling all four parts of the area.

This Herod is the ruler identified in history books as "The Great", to distinguish him from lesser Herods who followed and ruled only parts of Palestine. As an Idumean, Herod was a descendant of Esau. In this unusual way, God rewarded Esau for being the first-born of his family, even though he sold his birthright to Jacob. He was not able to be ancestor of the Messiah, but his descendant sat upon the throne of David when the Messiah was born. Ironically, Herod promptly attempted to kill his distant relative when he learned of his birth from the wise men who had come from the East.

Herod's lengthy rule in the unsettled land, though it brought stability and wealth, was filled with intrigue. He had ten wives. Paranoid during most of his career, he feared palace revolt. Anticipating assassination attempts, he killed many of his children and relatives. On the other hand, he seems to have been a remarkable politician. Though he was very bad at predicting the political future, he was very good at rescuing himself from disastrous political alliances. He became an ally of Pompey, who was soon defeated by Julius Caesar. Then he became an ally of Caesar. After Caesar's assassination, he became an ally of Cassius, who was defeated and killed in the civil war following the death of Caesar. When Cassius was killed, Herod became an ally of Antony and Cleopatra. When they were defeated, he shifted to the side of Octavian, supporting him during his career as Caesar Augustus. With good reason Herod was called "The Fox", for he was a wily, amoral, vicious ruler.

Herod was a brilliant economist. He soon recognized that his nation would remain in the backwaters of the Empire unless he could improve its economic base. He was also anxious to Romanize it, to introduce the most modern of Roman conveniences: good roads, courts, baths, theaters, and government buildings in the latest Greco-Roman styles. To do that he needed money.

He made two inspired moves. Jews were located in the leading cities all over the world, engaging in trade. Palestine fell largely outside the network because it had no good harbor, limited for international commerce to the ancient port of Joppa or seaports outside the national boundaries. The Mediterranean Sea was shallow off the shore of Palestine. The slightest storm raised great waves which violently swept ashore. No ship could anchor there. Hence, international trade flowed south to Alexandria or north to Tyre and Sidon.

To remedy this deficiency, Herod built the port city of Caesarea from scratch, naming it after Augustus. He built a great artificial harbor there, which immediately greatly improved Palestine's portion of international trade. Commerce between Jerusalem and the world outside Palestine began to flow along the new Roman roads between Jerusalem and Caesarea. This harbor area, recently discovered under the waters of the Mediterranean, is in the process of archaeological exploration. Preliminary studies already reveal a great expanse of water, protected from the turbulence of the Mediterranean Sea by great breakwaters on each side of the entrance to the harbor.

By the year 20 B.C. Herod felt secure and prosperous enough to carry out the second stage of his economic plan. He rebuilt Solomon's temple, using a Hellenistic design, complete with Corinthian pillars. His intent was totally political and economic. The temple would win his people's affection; it would unify Jews all over the world; it would attract income to Jerusalem as festival seasons were developed and advertised throughout the Roman empire. He never won his people's affection. At the same time, he seems to have been able to demolish most of what was left of the old temple with little or no protest, and with popular support, to erect a Hellenistic temple in its place. As pilgrims began to flock to Jerusalem and as one festival after another was revived there to maximize the tourist dollar and to provide a year round supply of tourists, any protests by traditionalists was drowned out by the incredible wealth which began to flow to the city.

The temple grounds began to extend farther and farther from the temple proper to accommodate the large numbers of animals and birds necessary for sacrifice. A banking center to process the great amount of money from various nations of the world, exchanged by tourists for the temple money, provided a constant stream of fluid assets for salaries and temple maintenance. The Levitical standard of living soared. Herod plowed some of the profits from his enterprises into new building for Jerusalem. The crowds grew so great that a large garrison of Roman troops was stationed near the temple, just for crowd control. After Herod's death, Rome retained military rule over the province to prevent revolution and to maintain control over any religious fanatics who might disrupt festival occasions, just as Israel guards Jerusalem today. Saudi Arabia maintains similar careful control over Mecca and Medina, particularly during Ramadan.

Many non-Levites also profited from the temple trade. Bed and breakfasts were at a premium. People ran restaurants; They rented out upper rooms for festival meals. They rented asses and horses, carts and other means of transportation. Undoubtedly, some sold souvenirs. People converted their traditional guest bedrooms into commercial resources. Farmers in the neighboring countryside raised a constant supply of livestock for temple sacrifice.

The water and sanitary facilities of the city were modernized. Guests increased the amount of water used for drinking and washing. The temple used an incredible amount of water for ceremonies and to clean off the ashes, blood and debris from the slaughtering blocks and altars of sacrifice. Herod used modern Roman methods of bringing water from elsewhere to the city, as well as sinking new wells. An elaborate system of floor drains in the temple led polluted water to vast underground holding tanks for periodic emptying into the valley below the temple where the waste and debris from the temple were hurled each day, to be washed down the valley by the periodic flooding rains of spring and fall. Herod also introduced modern sanitation into the new parts of the city so that the sewerage generated by the large number of guests would not overload the system and bring pestilences to the city.

In 4 B.C. Herod died. Archelaus became tetrarch of Palestine to succeed him. Herod Antipas succeeded his father as ruler over Galilee and Perea and ruled from 4 B.C. to 39 A.D. Judea and Samaria were ruled by a succession of Roman governors because of the political restlessness of the population and the burgeoning growth of Jerusalem caused by the religious tourist trade. Judea and Galilee developed different economies. The economy of Galilee was agrarian, largely grains, olives and figs, supplemented by the fishing industry. The Caesarian road passed through part of the land. A trade route to Damascus cut through diagonally, southwest to northeast, and passed around the north-west corner of the Sea of Galilee, at which place Herod built Tiberias around a custom house there to collect tolls from the merchants who passed by on land and sea. Matthew worked there. Galileans by and large ignored the Roman influence and preserved their traditional ways. Theirs was largely a barter economy existing beside an international commerce.

Judea, on the other hand, had created an urban, monetary economy. Jerusalem became an international city, housing people and selling produce and providing entertainment from the various nations of the world. Samaria sat between the two Jewish provinces. The main road to Jerusalem from Caesarea passed through her diagonally from north to south. The north/south coastal highway also passed through. For all that, Samaria was a forgotten land, cut off from the riches of Judea by racial isolation and Roman indifference.

Samaria was Galilee's salvation, sitting as a buffer between the two different economies. In our own history the urban/agrarian proximity of our north and south resulted in the Civil War. Samaria prevented that from happening in Palestine. Galileans usually passed through Samaria on the way to Jerusalem in order to avoid Perea, on the other side of the Jordan, where Herod's capital was. The Roman governor of Judea about the time of Jesus ministry was Pontius Pilate, who remained governor for almost a decade more before being assigned elsewhere because of complaints lodged with his superiors by Samaria.

Over the centuries of dispersion throughout the world, Jews faced a common problem: how to survive as Jews in a gentile world that was indifferent and unsympathetic to them. Moses had handed down a complex canon of everyday law, intended to keep them a people different from their neighbors. It required certain foods, certain calendars, including certain days of rest, ceremonies, festivals, sacrifices of specified kinds of birds and animals, all of which were with difficulty acquired and maintained in gentile lands. Jewish religious leaders over the centuries developed and collected a large body of literature interpreting and applying Mosaic law to various unique life situations. They also developed a system of communication among the intellectual centers of Jewish thought throughout the world and methods for approving of or disapproving religious decisions. The center for the collection and dispersion of such materials was at Babylon.

The body of literature which developed as a result is divided into two collections of documents, the Targumim and the Mishnah. Both bodies of literature supplemented the Old Testament law and the prophets. Though these interpretations of the sacred writings were admittedly subordinate to them, the interpretations frequently were more influential, because they had more specific functional applications. In time, for all practical purposes, they replaced the sacred writings in everyday use.

The Targum is a paraphrase of scriptural thought. The Mishnah is an interpretation of the laws of the Torah, developed by rabbis over the centuries. The latter contains two kinds of documents, the Halakhah and the Haggadah. The Halakhah applied the Torah to specific cases; its counterpart today in the western legal tradition are the collections of case histories in canon law. Among Jewish lawyers, the Halakhah has always had greater authority than the Torah itself, for it is applied law.

The Haggadah consists of wise sayings of rabbinical teachers. It never achieved the authority exercised by the Halakhah, but had wide popular support, for in those days, as now, a pithy aphorism or saying frequently served as a substitute for earnest, complicated thinking in a problem situation. For many centuries the primary source of the content of these documents was Babylon. As other centers of Jewish thought developed, leading rabbis submitted material to Babylon for inclusion. After a time the rabbis developed a system of voting to determine what was and what was not to be added to these collections.

In the century and a half before Christ, Jewish thought began to be influenced by Hellenistic philosophic thought in the great Greek trading cities. As a result, a sort of Jewish Stoic/Platonism began to develop, which culminated in the thought of Philo of Alexandria, a philosopher theologian who produced a curious eclectic mixture of Greek thought applied to Jewish theology, both to systematize and defend it. Palestine itself remained unaffected by this movement; Hellenistic culture – with the exception of architecture – was to be found only at the royal courts and in the Roman cities which had been built in honor of the Caesars. Jews by and large rejected the culture as gentile and, therefore, inferior and pagan.

From its earliest days Israel had opposed naturalistic art, for two reasons. In the canon of moral law Jews were forbidden to construct any graven images. Secondly, art objects tended to be associated with pagan worship, for the various religions of the world all had their divine icons. Israel was unique in worshipping a divinity which could not be depicted. For a time, superstitious Hebrews considered even His name sacred and would not pronounce it. The first temple (erected by Solomon) and Solomon's palace may have begun a new architectural style. We do not know. It seems more likely that their builders drew upon architectural styles popular at the time in Lebanon, from which many of them came.

In spite of six centuries of political turmoil, the Jewish people maintained their integrity as a culture, primarily by adherence to Mosaic law, which continued to dominate every aspect of Jewish life. Though they had no well functioning temple for most of this time, they retained their identity and, by careful control of marriage customs, also their racial purity.

Not all Jews remained faithful to the Torah or were immune to gentile influences. Life in foreign lands seldom lent itself to kosher existence; times of religious laxity occurred also in Palestine, particularly with respect to marriage. Frequently, foreign rulers sought to introduce changes into Jewish life or to disrupt it. Several military generals sought to ecumenize the temple by introducing statues of Roman gods or of the emperor himself. The most infamous event involved Pompey, the first counsel of Rome who, during the time his army occupied Palestine, entered the temple and sought to invade the Holy of Holies. A bloodbath ensued as the pious Jews hurled their helpless bodies upon the swords of the Roman troops. Pompey never understood why the Jews were not flattered to receive Roman attention and resisted the placing of Roman images, insignias and flags in the temple sanctuary.

A special problem developed in the Greek speaking world. Jews lost the ability to read the Torah in the original language. In Alexandria, during the rule of the Ptolemies, two-and-a-half centuries before the birth of Jesus, efforts were made to produce a Greek translation of the sacred writings, called the Septuagint, after the purported 70 scholars who produced it. Its production in the third century B.C. led to a renaissance of Jewish religious life in the gentile world and once again the restoration of the Torah to the position of primary importance among Greek speaking Jews.
Chapter 2

# Alternative Ethical Positions

Because Moses had created a complex system of laws to structure and give a unique character to Jewish life, a judicial system became necessary to interpret and apply the law. As a result, the office of lawyer developed over the centuries to resolve problems of legal interpretation and application. However, in peculiarly Jewish fashion, it developed into the office of the rabbi. There is good reason to believe that this office was created in Babylon during the captivity, either as the Jewish equivalent of a Babylonian lawyer, – for the Babylonians also had a legal system – or, as a practical necessity, to assist Jewish people to resolve the problem of living in a strange political society without losing their own integrity as pious Jews.

Since Jewish law pervaded every aspect of Jewish life, conflicts with local law in foreign countries were inevitable and frequent. The rabbinical office provided a way whereby the best of Jewish minds could discover ways to reconcile or mitigate these differences. Over the centuries the rabbinical office grew in power and prestige. The rabbi was not only the lawyer of the religious community, he was the authority on all matters of faith and life, serving as advocate, clergyman, judge, adviser and political leader. With the redevelopment of Jewish communal life in Palestine after the return from Babylon, the rabbi remained a powerful and aristocratic figure in the community, even though the reasons for the creation of his office no longer existed.

## Scribes

In Babylon a group of rabbis developed a sect – Ezra (460 B.C.) was one of them – whose function it became to maintain and interpret the law, and to organize and codify case histories as precedents for the resolution of future conflicts. Those rabbis thus began to develop the first Jewish law library. As temple life began once again after the return from exile, and as more and more of the temple precincts were restored, a rabbinical group formed also at the temple and began to carry out a function parallel to that at Babylon. They also became responsible officially to identify authentic prophets and to expose false prophets who arose from among the people. This group of authorities on the law were called "The Scribes", the Writers. The Scribes, operating out of the temple complex in Jerusalem, recognized both an oral and a written tradition. They preserved the written tradition, primarily by carefully supervising the production of copies of the Old Testament, particularly the Torah, for use in individual synagogues. But their chief interest lay in preserving the oral tradition of Jewish folkways.

Only scrolls produced by the Scribes could be used in worship. The laborious task of hand writing each scroll was carefully supervised and each scroll was examined by numerous editors for errors. Any scroll containing an error which was not correctable in an inconspicuous manner was destroyed.

When the Scribes were asked to render an opinion on a point of law, they used, in order of importance to them, 1) the oral tradition, 2) the Torah, 3) the Mishnah, 4) additional traditions from various schools. Jesus contacts with them began when, as a 12 year old boy in the temple he conversed with the "learned doctors" and impressed them with his brilliance. (Luke 2:46 ff.) During his ministry, he was not averse to criticizing the oral tradition, usually by introducing his attack with the words, "You have heard it said by them of old ..." (e.g. Matt. 5)

Jesus seems to have gotten a mixed reaction from them. He opposed their oral tradition by quoting the Sacred Writings against them, thereby giving the Writings a higher status. He offered his own prophetic works as support for his original remarks, that ran counter to their oral tradition, notably his assertions about his Messiahship. He also showed that his teachings were compatible with or were prefigured in the written tradition. While the Scribes did not always like what he taught, they were not able to refute him. They permitted him to teach in the temple while at the same time they attempted to undermine his influence. Jesus trial before the Sanhedrin involved the Scribes, perhaps as some of the members of that judiciary, together with priests and Pharisees, certainly, as its advisers.

Of the various religious groups at the time of Jesus, the Scribes were the theologians. Historically, systematic theology has divided its subject matter into the doctrine of God and the doctrine of man, each of these being divided further into the pure and the applied aspects. Considering the nature of their function, they had little interest in the pure side of systematic theology, being primarily concerned with the applied. Unlike modern theologians, however, they had little interest even in the applied side of the study of God. They had no interest in the nature of God, in proving that He existed, in demonstrating His attributes, etc. There were probably three reasons for that. First, their understanding of God reduced to His unity. ""Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one." (Deut 6:4)" Not much can be developed from the concept of unitary simplicity. Secondly, after a time the Israeli intellectuals came to believe that it was an offense to the divinity even to utter His name. Such an attitude was scarcely likely to encourage theological discussion on a subject which may not be identified. Finally, they had countless evidences of His existence in their history, usually acting in punishment for their national irreligion or idolatry. This led them to study, not the nature of God, which remained hidden from them, but the history of their aberrations and the sort of life which would avert the wrath of God pouring down upon them once again. Consequently, as the age of the prophets ended and the Old Testament canon closed, they focused their interests on Mosaic law and the practical problems which arose in their efforts to keep it in order not to get into trouble with God.

## Pharisees

A second powerful group in Palestine (some think the Scribes became members of this group) became popularly known as the "Perushim", the Separated Ones. They preferred to call themselves the "Shasidim", the Pious Ones. They are known today by their popular name, the Pharisees. Both the New Testament and Josephus describe this group in great detail. Both sources present them rather unsympathetically. At the same time the gospels recount a number of times when Jesus and his disciples were guests of a Pharisee for dinner (e.g. Luke 14) and also mention that one time some Pharisees came to Jesus to warn him because they had inside information that Herod was planning to have Jesus killed (Luke 13:31).

This sect originated in the days of the Maccabean Revolt, serving as the "founding fathers" of the new Jewish state. They achieved great political power, particularly through Queen Alexandra. Concerned about the confusion among their fellow compatriots about the nature of "Jewishness", the Pharisees sought to recover and to reinstitute pre-exilic kosher life and law. The Pharisees, influenced to some extent, ironically, by the Hellenistic thought that pervaded the citadels of political power, introduced many novel conventions, provoking thereby the development of an opposition sect, the Sadducees.

By the time of Jesus ministry the Pharisees numbered approximately 6000 of the wealthiest Jews in Palestine. Though men of business, they were also powerful and astute politicians. Their original purpose had been to restore purity of life in the Jewish community by advocating and leading personal lives of strict adherence to Mosaic law and by paying all religious dues promptly and completely. Political power enabled them to pursue that goal, as well as their own private interests, particularly as temple traffic became a growing source of economic prosperity for priest and non-priest alike.

Pragmatic both as politicians and businessmen, they seem to have developed a partial and inconsistent philosophic position, for they are known to have defended at least three mutually incompatible doctrines, l) Human beings choose freely, 2) God foreknows everything, and 3) the world is righteously judged. They seem to have been unaware of the incompatibilities involved in the teaching of a divine source of good and evil and human responsibility for human activity. They taught the doctrine of a final judgment where the actions of all people would be evaluated and appropriate penalties or rewards meted out (thereby implying human immortality). Jesus suggested to them that they would find the outcome of that judgment surprising (Matthew 25:31-46).

By the time of Jesus ministry, Phariseeism had lost most of its vitality and become a theologically dead orthodoxy. Obedience to Mosaic law had become its ethic; many went to great lengths to ensure they had fulfilled its very last letter. They were the ethical deontologists of the day, the Jewish counterpart to the Roman stoics, constituting the conservative political wing of Jewish politics. Jesus frequently clashed with them, questioning their understanding of the purpose for law in Jewish life and pointing out their lack of spiritual motivation. He particularly noted their indifference to the consequences of their actions upon others. For instance, with respect to their liturgical practices he said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." (Mark 2:27).

On the positive side, the Pharisees for several centuries preserved among the Jewish laity a respect for Mosaic law and an awareness of and pride in Jewish culture as embodied in that law. Generally respected in the Jewish community, Pharisees were the bulwarks of Jewish conservatism, particularly against the Sadducees. Usually they found themselves in philosophic company with the scribal traditionalists. At the time of Jesus they were divided in Jerusalem into two parties, the "orthodox" followers of Rabbi Hillel, and the militant radical right Schammai party, from which Saul of Tarsus would later emerge.

## Sadducees

The "Sadducees", the Righteous Ones, were the liberal civic and political leaders of the Jewish people, usually the party in opposition to the Pharisees. They engaged in speculative activity, supporting the primacy of reason to resolve intellectual disputes. They defended freedom for individuals intelligently to conduct their own lives and opposed traditionalism. At the same time they relied upon the Sacred Writings for insights and understandings. They are particularly remembered for having denied the possibility of an after life or eternal rewards and punishments. They denied the existence of angels and other spirits, good or bad, accepted the Pharisees' doctrine of human free will and ethical responsibility, but rejected divine foreknowledge as inconsistent with it. Although the party of the Sadducees came to power under Hyrcanus, it never commanded enough popular support to remain the primary political power in Palestine.

## Essenes

While the Scribes were authoritarians, the Pharisees traditionalists and the Sadducees skeptics, another group, the Essenes, about which little was known before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, formed as progressives to purify Jewish life and revive its spirituality. They were forward-looking and placed a strong emphasis upon contemplation and soul searching. By nature individualists – one cannot contemplate another's inner world – they formed a moral and religious order. Ascetic, celibate, they shared their worldly goods with one another. When they entered the business world, they did not buy or sell on a grand scale; they often simply gave and received.

Essenes practiced strong self-control. They operated small businesses, dealing in products. They opposed slavery – the only group which did – and exhibited calm in the face of pain, like Stoics. Their dress was simple. In obedience to Numbers 6, they did not shave or cut their hair. Highly respected by the Jewish community, some lived in towns and cities, others in caves in wilderness communities, occupying the bluffs overlooking the Dead Sea.

Some saw Jesus as in many respects an ascetic. Like them he taught inner-directed ethics and a life of sharing. Unlike them he taught an ethic which by its very nature built community and, beyond this, was versatile to fit all situations. He also required no restrictions on diet or personal appearance.

## Others

Another sizeable group, the Publicans, served the tax offices of the Roman government. The bureaucrats of that portion of the government, they functioned like bureaucrats do at all times in the history of the world, anonymously, seeking at all times job security, advancement, and the approval of their superiors, bending every effort to stay out of trouble. They were willing to do what was necessary to protect their position and improve it. They played neither a political nor a religious role among the Jewish people, even though they constituted a sizeable number of people with many common interests.

Two incoherent other sub-cultures: the lepers and the prostitutes, were to be found in the vicinity of each town of any size. They must have had a sophisticated communications network, at least so far as the travels of Jesus were concerned, for they seemed always to know about him and to be waiting for him wherever he went, at least in Galilee.

Jewish society at the time of Christ was, thus, composed of a two class society with an underclass. The upper class, composed of Levites, Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, lived for the most part in Judea, although some Pharisees lived in Galilee. They were wealthy and politically involved. The lower class, composed of farmers, fishermen and small businessmen, plus a few merchants, lived largely in Galilee. The underclass, spread throughout the land around town and city centers, were composed of the lepers and the prostitutes. The publicans belonged to no class, being accepted neither by the Romans, because they were Jews, nor by the Jews, because they collaborated with the Romans. Essenes were found here and there, usually living their independent, internally directed lives.

The upper class was oriented to the canons of kosher life, honed to perfection over the centuries, although the Sadducees had their doubts about some of the practices. The lower class looked up to the upper classes as role models and sought, as best they could, to emulate them. The underclass practiced an ethics of survival like street people, bag ladies, and addicts today. They lived as best they could and looked after one another when no one else cared. The publicans practiced a sort of rough-hewn business ethics, leading a life oriented around monetary values: carefully satisfying their Roman masters and collecting a profit on their tax transactions sufficient for their style of life, yet not so great that their clientele would complain to their Roman masters, i.e. to mix a metaphor, maximizing profit without killing the golden goose.

Chapter 3

# The Levels of Ethical Reality

Two passages in the gospels provide the basis for the ethical structure of Jesus thought: the temptation (treated in detail by Matthew and Luke), and the upper room conversation (treated only by John, chapters l3 through l7). The temptation provides the three psychological levels which create the field of ethical concerns. The upper room conversation generates the operational psychology which drives the ethical system functioning among the levels.

Unlike the Old Testament, the ethic of which is centered upon the people of God and the social activity associated collectively with that special group, the ethic of the gospels centers upon individuals, their relationships to other individuals, their appropriate motivations and ensuing appropriate activities.

The temptation of Jesus is an individual's experience, occurring in the desert at a distance from other human beings, beyond their support, "one-on-one" with the devil. Matthew, Mark, and Luke treat the temptation of Jesus, Mark merely mentioning it, Matthew and Luke treating it in detail. The second and third temptations are treated by them in reverse order to one another. For purposes determined by the structure of this chapter, the order of St. Luke's account has been used.

The almost casual encounter between Jesus and the devil hides the fact that the two most powerful forces in the universe are engaged in probing one another's weaknesses. Since the Son of God had taken on human form in the person of Jesus Christ, the temptation exhibits on a colossal scale the points of human vulnerability which are subject to demonic attack, for they are the very points attacked in the temptation. There are three of them, each of which in relation to the other two generates a dimension of a structure. There are, thus, three levels, a physical, a social and a spiritual (following Luke's order).

Each of these levels centers on:

1) A problem;

2) Involving a natural human psychological drive;

3) To which the devil suggests an unnatural response;

4) Resulting in an internal conflict;

5) That leads inevitably to perverted values.

From a physical standpoint, the problem is survival; the drive involved is self-preservation; the suggested activity is acquisition and consumption, resulting in a conflict between the physical and the spiritual levels of existence. This state of affairs tends to result in valuing the physical over the spiritual.

The social level centers on the problem of social integration; the psychological drive involved is ego formation (or identity achievement, becoming someone); its unnatural expression occurs as the attempt to dominate, generating competition and conflict between ruling and serving. This state of affairs tends to yield the value that ruling is superior to serving.

Finally, the spiritual level focuses upon the problem of worship, human activity directed toward the divine; the natural drive involved is curiosity. It finds unnatural expression in the form of daring activity, creating a conflict between the individual and God. The condition creates the assumed value that the individual human being is superior to God (or that the individual is the ultimate value).

## The Physical Level

And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing during those days. And when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." And Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone.'" (Luke 4:1-4)

Outline of the psychology behind the temptations.

The temptation of Jesus follows a short time after Jesus baptism. Following the will of God, his Father, he submits himself to demonic temptation at the beginning of his ministry. For forty days he is led by the Spirit through the desert. The days of fasting and wandering in the desert separate him physically, socially and psychologically from the normal life supports which sustain and protect the integrity of human beings and allow them to escape critical self examination.

In the desert Jesus is separated physically from all of the normal life support nourishments. He is forbidden to sustain himself even by the fruits and berries available in the wild. His senses are unable to locate familiar landscape features by means of which he might be able to locate himself. There are no familiar roads or road signs, rivers, or mountains. The horizon is unfamiliar. The sounds are strange. The setting is foreign. He does not know where he is. He is lost.

He experiences social separation. No one else is there. His names by which he is known, his social customs, his most vivid memories by which his life has been structured previously, slowly fade away over the forty days. He is stripped bare of all of the conventions which have given him an identity among his fellows, by which he could know himself and, thus, hide himself from himself. All creation serves both as a sort of cosmic mirror reflecting himself to himself, and a natural test of his capacity to survive. He is separated psychologically, not only from his fellows, but also gradually from himself as his personhood begins to fray and become unraveled. Reality stretches out endlessly from him. He feels like a point oppressed by infinity. His spirit reels; he is scarcely conscious of consciousness. He is at the point of death, literally living by the Spirit. Under those conditions and at that time the devil offers the first temptation: to change some of the small stones into bread, that he might satisfy his physical needs and draw back from death.

The temptation is subtle. The devil uses an argument which contains a fallacy, the complex question fallacy (known familiarly as the "Have you stopped beating your wife?" fallacy). The devil assumes that life is necessarily dependent upon a physical base. Man lives by food. Jesus is scarcely living. He needs physical food. Jesus points out the fallacy, "Man shall not live by bread alone." (Matthew adds, "but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.") Bread, which masks the presence of the underlying, preserving word of God, is gone from his life. The word alone remains. His word from God, to fast, has not been countermanded by any other word. His continued existence as a human being depends solely upon the life sustaining word of God, suspended by the slender, but adequate thread of divine care.

In this temptation the devil attempts to exacerbate the ancient conflict between the physical and the spiritual sides of human nature, a conflict prompting the first days of labor on the earth when Adam was forced to wrest from the ground the means of his existence and Eve bore her children in pain. The conflict was generated by God to limit human capacity to separate itself irreparably from Him. In a short time this incompatibility resulted in human conflict and murder as the first human sons struggled with one another, first for the favor of God, later for an increasingly scarce means of material security, exhibiting itself even more evidently today in the struggle for the disappearing basic resources for human existence: pure air and water. The problem pervades all international competition for inadequate resources; it shows even in something apparently unrelated to that problem, the continuing incompatibility of theology and science, the one seeking a spiritual explanation of reality; the other a physical; the one subjective, the other objective, each with its own set of ethical values.

Plato noticed the disparity between the physical and the spiritual and, following the lead of his intellectual leader, Socrates, based his metaphysics upon it; Plotinus followed after him. Both observed that human beings in general seem naturally to prefer the physical to the spiritual. Philo of Alexandria claimed that evil itself arises from the effect of the physical upon spirits. Augustine of Hippo recognized that all of creation functions defectively rather than effectively, with the result that everything continually diverges from its intended target.

In the individual human being this conflict of the physical side of nature against the spiritual results in a search for self-preservation, the cause of which is assumed to be dependent upon material possessions and their consumption. On the scholarly level, self preservation becomes, in the late middle ages, a "law of nature", serving as the basis for modern natural law theory in ethics and politics, appearing, among other places, in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and from them in as unrelated a document as the Declaration of Independence in the form of "unalienable rights".

The essential mistake of assuming the priority of the physical over the spiritual, the dependence of life upon bread, generates more, greater, and more complex errors, until an entire incoherent body of values crystalizes and is unquestioningly accepted by the vast majority of human beings who constitute the modern civilized world. Since they are incoherent, the world is unable to move toward harmony and compatibility.

Instead, a series of increasingly radical propositions is proposed and then generally accepted. In serial order they happen thus:

1) Present life becomes more important than future life.

2) The preservation of one's body becomes more important than anything else.

3) Youth becomes more valuable than old age.

4) Security is assumed to vary in direct proportion to material wealth.

5) The earth's resources are presumed to exist only for the physical security of human beings currently existing on the earth.

6) And finally, the supreme error inevitably is made: everything exists for me. And I want it!

According to this false understanding, the affective is more important than the cognitive; How I feel is more important than what I know.

The essential primacy of the physical side of human nature has become so ingrained in modern life that the principle isn't even debated any more - except, perhaps, at an occasional seminary or as part of a business ethics course, as part of an intellectual debate, but seldom with any practical permanent effect. Human beings devote their lives, by and large, to preserving and improving the quality of their physical existence. To that end, many human beings engage in activities exclusively oriented to establish or revise rules for the accumulation, distribution, and exchange of physical materials by means of conventions, laws, taxes and other established economic procedures.

Most of the business activity of the city of London, or the city of New York, for instance, consists in such activity. Life becomes yearly increasingly complicated. The problems of equitable distribution of foodstuffs, international exchange, stable world economies, beggar human capacity to solve, so complex are the problems and so long term their effects.

Some people hold governmental positions devoted directly to the preservation of physical life, or, indirectly, to activities which protect, redistribute or assist in the acquisition of physical possessions. Some people, on the other hand, simplify the whole business by concentrating almost exclusively on their own welfare. They steal, legally or not. Some simply take from others what they want or what they need, attempting to hang onto it as best they can. Others, just as corrupt, but more devious, use the laws and social structures to acquire other's possessions. On the other hand, some devote themselves to humanitarian causes, seeking to reduce human need. Most of organized human activity, thus, relates directly to the problems of human physical survival in one way or another.

A far different view of the function of the physical level of existence is presented by Jesus in his response to the first temptation, and in his expansion upon it elsewhere in the gospels. Jesus response to the temptation assumes at least the following four principles:

**1) Human beings are not free arbitrarily to rearrange nature.** (i.e. to change stones into bread.)

One of the perennial ethical problems involves the concept of "nature" and questions whether humans have a right to rearrange or modify what is natural. What does "natural" mean? What is its opposite? Is it "unnatural", "artificial", "perverse"? Is the domestication of an area of the wild world of nature interference with God? Do medical procedures, particularly when they involve genetic or bodily modification or mechanical substitution, fall outside that which is divinely acceptable? May one legitimately interrupt natural life generating processes or artificially enhance their chances of success? When does one terminate life support systems? Many seriously ill human bodies, which once would have died, today can be sustained indefinitely by mechanical means or terminated by their withdrawal. What ethical rules apply here?

To what extent is one free to modify the world as one finds it? A whole host of environmental issues arise that involve the basic necessities of physical existence – air, water, food – and their purity. On the other hand, one cannot fulfill the Genesis command to "subdue the earth" without in some way or other changing its nature. Would the world in some sense have been a tiny bit better or worse had those stones become bread that day in the desert?

2) Human beings persist ultimately through the providence of God, not the bounty of nature.

Israel in the wilderness did not challenge this principle. They were daily surrounded by physical evidences for its truth. We, however, are so accustomed to nutritional regularities that mark a modern advanced culture that the divine source which preserves us is easily divorced in our minds from the physical medium of life support, with the result that medium and life become associated in a direct and exclusive causal relationship independent of God. Only the occasional exception or totally unexplained event, the so-called "miracle", causes us to question this relationship, or to suspect that physical explanations neither exhaust the meaning of life or begin to explain it. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, it is habit that underlies the coherence of our physical experience, the customary repetition of occurrences which leads us to assume their causal connection to one another ( _A Treatise of Human Nature_ , Book I).

The most powerful evidences for the contingent relation of physical materials to life occur at the edges of existence, in the phenomenon called death where, regardless of the presence of ample amounts of "bread", physical life ceases; again, where against all expectations, when all hope for survival ends, the heart beats on and the body continues to live. No matter how carefully and tenderly a human body may be sustained, eventually it ceases to function; again, no matter how battered and broken, sometimes a human life refuses to give in. These examples remind us of the limitations and the transcendencies of life under physical conditions.

3) Human possessions depend upon God, both as source and sustainer.

This principle follows as a corollary to the previous principle. If human possessions are from God and are preserved by Him, then our relationship to physical materials cannot be one of private ownership. If we are not owners, but, at best temporary managers of them, then there arise a variety of concerns involving issues such as responsibility, obligation, justice in their disposition, duty, etc., requiring quite different treatment from that to which we are accustomed in traditional economic theories. Traditional theories presuppose either that material objects belong to individuals or groups of individuals, or to collective humanity. All property rights, responsibilities and obligations follow from these. Only occasionally does one encounter a view that sees all of physical life as a temporary gift to be cared for and passed on. Such differing views about things, usually construed in terms of the environment, come for the most part out of religious settings, Native American, Buddhist oriental, mystical Hindu, etc., and usually have a common bond of animism to motivate them.

The contrary position of Jesus, expressed in the gospels, scarcely exhibits an otherworldly view or shows a reverence for physical things as sacred objects, but instead shows a divine attitude toward human physical possessions which a Yankee entrepreneur would have been proud to have. Pragmatic and goal oriented, it identifies all humans as stewards of the possessions of God and requires a return on their use. More on that subject later.

4) Life and physical existence are not necessarily co-extensive.

If life and physical existence have only a contingent relationship, connected to one another by the providential wish of God, it follows, then, that God is free to separate the one from the other at any time and to whatever extent He pleases. If, then again, physical life rests upon the providential will of God, the world in which we live becomes suddenly quite fragile and not nearly as solid, objective, and substantial as it may have previously seemed to be. At any moment, at the wish of God, this universe might disintegrate and sift us into eternity.

As we are stripped back to face the reality about our existence, the physical side of our nature confronts us with this existential question: for what purpose do I exist in this physical environment at this time and what uses are to be made of the resources which happen to be available to me? The answer to which we shall come in due time is this: I exist and they exist to care for my neighbors.

Four entities relate physically to each individual human being: that individual human being, God, the devil, and every other human being who may have an ethical claim on the individual relative to his physical possessions. For simplicity's sake, call such a person the "neighbor". Each of these entities can perform three possible actions with physical things: giving, taking and receiving.

Whatever the devil gives is shoddy; he takes whatever he can get and ruins whatever he receives. From this it follows that the pursuit of material prosperity, demonically generated, cannot be permanently successful. This principle is embodied in the old Faustian tradition.

Jesus identifies the act of taking something physical for oneself as essentially pagan (Matt. 6:31-32), and, hence, reprehensible. Each human being receives physical things both from God and his neighbor. Such things are either deserved or undeserved. Those from a neighbor may be either. Those which are from God are always for the individual's good and always undeserved.

An individual can give to God, the devil or a neighbor. That sentence has to be qualified a bit. In a sense one cannot literally give to God, since everything is already God's. Hence only indirectly, that is by giving to a neighbor, can one give to God. One can give to the devil; as a matter of fact, most people regularly do, wittingly or not. What is to be given to him who is the neighbor, who he is, and how it is to be given, occupies most of Jesus discussion of physical things in the gospels. He discusses them in such detail that we can draw certain conclusions from them.

Since neighbors are the medium whereby individuals by means of physical things affect God, all actions of individuals upon other individuals generate a response from God. These responses occur in accordance with certain divine rules of justice to which God has committed Himself. They reduce to two types: those which follow from what one possesses, and those which follow from what one does with what one possesses.

Type 1

**a) Anti-Capitalist Principle:** What one has is not to be used primarily for oneself.

**b) Null Value Principle:** No credit can be earned by any action. Every good act is owed to God.

**c) Imperative Principle:** God expects a return on what He gives.

Type 2

**a) Bounty Principle:** Everyone always receives more from God than what everyone gives.

**b) Atrophy/Expansion Principle:** If something is not used it is taken away by God. Whatever is used, expands geometrically.

**c) Relativity Principle:** What one gives is measured by God in proportion to what one has.

**d) Principle of Proportionality:** One receives in proportion to what one gives.

**e) Transfer Principle:** What one does can make a negative difference in the life to come.

**f) Reciprocity Principle:** What is unjustly taken away in this life is restored in the world to come.

The **Anti-Capitalist Principle (1a)** , finds expression particularly in the Sermon on the Mount in passages like " Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth..." (Matt. 6:19) and "...do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on." (Matt. 6:25) These are identified by Jesus as "pagan" activities, unbefitting a child of God. He proposes instead that the individual "...seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you ..." (Matt. 6:33). He suggests that each individual be content with food and clothing sufficient for the day and to let God concern Himself with the needs of future days, even as He does with the rest of living nature:

"...do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, Look at the birds of the air... your heavenly Father feeds them... Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field... will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?... Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. (Matt. 6:25-34)

The **Null Value Principle (1b)** , follows from two premises: God possesses all things, and its corollary: nothing can be added to what God has. Whatever good one does is already God's and belongs to Him. Jesus illustrates this point by analogizing God to the owner of slaves. When they return from the day's work in the fields, he does not gratefully thank them for what they have done, invite them to sit at his table, and wait upon them. They have done what they owe him as their owner. He will bid them to wait upon him. They could at best say of what they have done, "We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty." (Luke 17:7-10). In similar fashion, all human beings as creatures of God exist to perform certain functions within the general context of the whole creation. To that end they have their physical existence and its preservation by God. Should He no longer wish their service, they will die.

The ethics of Jesus, thus, exclude the possibility of anyone acquiring merit with God or successfully devoting one's life to gaining the approval of God by one's acts. The gospel writers illustrate this point by the several occasions when young men came to Jesus, enquiring what they needed to do in order to attain salvation with God. Each discovered to his great disappointment that his best efforts were inadequate to attain the goal (Matt. 19:16-30, Mark 10:17-31).

Principles 1a and 1b by themselves might very well lead one to ethical indifference. For if nothing should be done for oneself, and if nothing can be done for God, and whatever good one does to others, one ought to do, there is neither goal nor incentive for life.

The **Ethical Imperative Principle (1c)** however, changes the situation from indifference to concern. God expects a return on His investment! He expects to get more than he gave. Jesus illustrates this point by the parable of the talents. The Lord in the parable, who is analogized to God, rewards each of his servants who made a profit with the talent given to him, but punishes the servant who kept it and never invested it, even though he returned it intact (Luke 19:12-27). Other principles, listed under Type 2, also follow from this parable.

The Imperative Principle, functions as a directive principle (but not as an ethical motivation principle, although deontologists attempt to use it as such). Together with the two former principles, it directs an individual not to himself or herself (God takes care of them, 1a); nor to God, (Who has no need of anything, 1b), but to the neighbor, who is the object of primary concern if an individual's help is needed.

The **Bounty Principle (2a)** provides the context within which the succeeding principles of divine justice function. Even the most deprived and the most depraved of human beings are flooded with material blessings by God, far out of proportion to their worth, if they ever had any. Human principles of justice demand that good people should be blessed with the good things of life and evil people should be deprived of goods and punished with evil experiences. The vast majority of people who fall between these two extremes, sometimes good and sometimes bad, are generally assumed to be subject to the principles of reciprocal or distributive justice, and, wherever possible, should receive equitable treatment. All western human jurisprudence rests upon these principles of justice. They are taken to hold for all human dealings with one another in this life. The definitive statement on the two kinds of justice and the distinction between them occurs in Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics_ , Book III, Section H.

Sometimes attempts are made, mistakenly, to apply these principles of human interpersonal justice to the interactions of nations with one another. Nations are not individuals. Hence, principles of individual human justice do not produce satisfactory results when applied to nations. In addition, nations are subject to no courts or justices, so there is no human instrumentality which can effectively administer justice. Of more direct relevance to the subject here, the gospels provide little basis on which one might develop a divine law of nations theory. One comes no closer to the subject than Jesus words about Jerusalem, directed rhetorically to her from the side of the Mount of Olives, speaking her condemnation, "the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!" (Matt 23:37).

Sometimes people mistakenly apply principles of justice to God, attempting to prove or to claim an obligation which God has toward this or that individual or nation because it is good or it is evil. Principles of human justice cannot be applied to God for reasons implicit in principles 1a and 1b.

Since God is not subject to human justice and since He owes no one anything, whatever good He does for someone is by its very nature an undeserved gift. Life itself is the primal example; second only to it is the preservation of that life by God. Whatever qualities of life enrich these only increase the store of undeserved goodness each human being receives.

Similarly, also, the principles which God uses in dealing with human beings in giving, receiving and taking away, are somewhat different from those which human beings apply imperfectly in their conduct toward one another. This is particularly true of the principles which fall under Type 2.

The **Atrophy/Expansion Principle (2b)** , points out something which is true of all of life: whatever is not used wastes away. The principle explains both the spoilage of foodstuffs and the development of muscles by exercise, the use and expansion of a talent, the development of economic resources, and the vitality of spirituality. Whatever is not used disappears or is converted to some other function. The principle recurs in the conservation of energy principle in physics. Life is always in process of change: integrating or disintegrating.

The inverse is also true: whatever is developed tends to expand geometrically. It increases. It grows. Both of these sides of the principle are illustrated in the parable of the talents, cited above and in Mark 4:24-25, with a parallel citation in Luke 8:18, the example of the mustard seed. Enrichment of the quality of life, development of artistic talent or intellectual understanding, growth in the strength, vitality and wisdom of spirituality, etc., do not simply increase additively; they balloon.

Because God works in accordance with both parts of this principle, physical and intellectual progress is possible. We can learn and retain knowledge faster than we forget it. Our development of talents proceeds at a more rapid rate than their natural loss. Our bodily development tends to outstrip our decline. Our anabolism exceeds our catabolism. Eventually we reach a point of balance and a slow movement in the other direction begins. Our exercising does not prevent the stiffening of our limbs; frequent reminders and careful memoranda to ourselves are necessary to compensate for forgetfulness.

The **Relativity Principle (2c)** , indicates that God does not measure human beings against one another, but rather measures each against himself or herself. Hence, this might also be called the Principle of Individuation. Each person, including that person's actions, is evaluated in terms of what use is made of the resources and abilities accessible to that person. Hence, Jesus could say to his disciples at the treasury in Jerusalem where they were watching people making their contributions, that a widow's two pennies were the greatest contribution made that day, for she had given all she had. (Mark 12:41-44)

It follows from this principle that the value of each act and gift is not measured by an objective standard, but is determined proportionate to that individual's personal and material resources. This measurement can be used both to compare an act or gift with that of another or to predict the divine response to it.

The **Principle of Proportionality (2d)** , states the rule by which God guides Himself in determining His response to an act or gift by one individual toward another. God responds positively and negatively to individuals in proportion to their acts or gifts to others. The principle is graphically illustrated by the parable of the unforgiving servant who was treated by his master as he treated a fellow servant indebted to him (Matt 18:23-35).

The use of the principle occurs again in the Lord's Prayer, the fourth petition, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" (Matt 6:12, KJV). Here the petitioner asks that God be guided by the petitioner's own principle of justice in determining what He will forgive. In many situations God uses this principle of distributive justice to determine his action. Sometimes the example of human behavior (fathers, mothers) is used as a basis, to compare God's activity in order to exhibit that it is much greater: "...If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (Matt 7:9-11).

The **Transfer and Reciprocity Principles (2e and 2f)** , show that there are some negative causal connections between physical life and the spiritual life which transcends it. Physical possessions can hinder entrance into spiritual life and can also compete with its active enjoyment. Hence, one is best advised not to have too much and to dispose of physical possessions as soon as possible by devoting them to the welfare of others ( Mark 10:17-31, Luke 12:13-34). The problem of surplus physical possessions is solved by recognizing that all one's possessions, including the body and one's talents, belong to God and that one is simply the steward for them. A steward is responsible to develop or increase those resources, expend them wisely on those in need and to sustain this process throughout life to the glory of God. If this view of possession is maintained, then the welfare of one's own body becomes only one among many objectives at which an individual aims, not a primary objective. Care of one's own body becomes an activity analogous to the care which a third world farmer would bestow upon his draft animal or beast of burden whose continued existence is essential to the operation of the family farm. Without a body, one cannot do any earthly work. With an infirm body, one is less capable than with a healthy body. One's relation to the care of one's own body becomes as dispassionate and pragmatic as that.

Similarly, caring physically for a spouse and children enables them to fulfill their stewardship functions and to play an active role in the family team. Even if they are not willing to be stewards of God, it may be necessary to sustain their existence, if only in the hope that they will some day become faithful stewards.

In Jesus day this objective approach was no better understood than it is today. Hence, he offered the model of the "unjust steward" to exhibit how to use material possessions well for one's ultimate purposes (Luke 16:1-9).

One can also use the physical world for one's ultimate eternal destruction. That possibility seems to be much more generally accepted in the secular world than one might have expected. The reason may be as follows. Since actions having temporal consequences occur so frequently, people generally tend not to find it difficult to believe that, if there is a life after this, what we do with ourselves in this life will have consequences for that life to come.

A few years ago I happened to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, speak at a gathering in the University of Wisconsin Fieldhouse at Madison, Wisconsin. After a few introductory remarks he told this story:

There was a once a Bishop in the Church of England whose name was Bishop White. He died full of honors at an advanced age, but his heart was not always with God. He awoke to find himself at the entrance to Heaven, greeted by St. Peter, the first bishop of the Church.

"Hello, Bishop White," he said, "We have been waiting for you. We have just the place for you!" He led him some distance until they came to a small piece of ground on which there was a small, ramshackle hut, enclosed by a row of coiled barbed wire, such as is found frequently in poor black areas of South Africa.

They entered the hut. Inside crouched the ugliest woman Bishop White had ever seen. St. Peter solemnly intoned, "Bishop White, for your manifestly evil and impenitent life you are condemned to spend eternity here with this woman."

Sometime later another bishop, Bishop Maize, died. He found himself standing at that same entrance, greeted by St. Peter, "Bishop Maize, we have been waiting for you. We have just the place for you."

He led him a greater distance to a small piece of ground surrounded by two coils of barbed wire. There stood a tiny, ramshackle hut, within which there crouched a woman even uglier than the first.

"Bishop Maize," St. Peter intoned, "for your manifestly evil and impenitent life you are condemned to spend eternity with this woman."

Sometime later, another bishop, Bishop Desmond Tutu, died. He woke to find himself also standing at the entrance to heaven. St. Peter greeted him, "Bishop Tutu, we have been waiting for you. We have just the place for you."

He led him an even greater distance to a plot of ground surrounded by three coils of barbed wire. In the center sat an almost collapsed, broken-down hut. They entered. Within, reclining provocatively on a bed, lay Bridget Bardot. (For those too young to recognize that name, in Bishop Tutu's younger life, Bridget was the French ideal of feminine sexuality.)

St. Peter surveyed the scene for a moment, then solemnly intoned, "Bridget Bardot, for your manifestly evil and impenitent life, you are condemned..."

The bishop's closing line was drowned in the laughter of the fieldhouse assembly. Heaven is full of surprises, as well as consequences.

Principle 2f functions as a Reciprocity Principle. Whatever is unjustly taken away in this life receives recompense in the life to come. Interestingly, this same principle occurs in the cosmology of Plato.

Plato uses the principle to argue that in the totality of all history, justice is done. Those who have fared better than they deserve in their physical existence, experience a commensurate suffering in the after-life; those who have fared worse than they deserve are rewarded commensurately in the life to come. (In addition, in the context of his theory of the transmigration of souls, he argues that the person one makes of oneself in one life pre-determines the life one will lead in the next existence since that person chooses the next life before it is lived. The more foolish one becomes in one life, the less desirable the next life which is chosen. The foolish find themselves in an eternal vicious circle of successively more undesirable lives. The wise find themselves in a successively more desirable series of lives, culminating in the philosophical, from which one never returns to endure physical existence.)

In contrast to this, in the ethics of Jesus, since no one deserves anything from God, no inequity ever remains to be recompensed after temporal death. God, however, feels responsible for the suffering or privation experienced by his people because they were serving Him. He will recompense them for this in the life to come. He does not owe those who are not serving him any recompense. They have their reward for what they do in this life, (Principle 2a) (Matt. 19:28ff).

For this reason, a different social hierarchy occurs in the life to come from that of the present life. Among human beings, condition of birth, acquired honors, power, and wealth tend to determine social status. Status in the life to come rests upon the purity of faith, extent of service and degree of suffering of the children of God. Thus, there is status and rank in eternity, but on the basis of different values (Matt 19:30). As a result, many of the first of this life will be last in the life to come and many of the last here will be first there.

One minor qualification before leaving the topic of an individual's relationship to the physical side of life: for a period of thirty-three years some people could actually give physical goods to God in the person of His incarnate Son. Whatever was given to him, meals served to him, a bed provided, a drink of well water, etc. was given to God himself. The evangelists call particular attention to the singular gift of expensive perfume lavished upon the body of Jesus (Matt 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9, Luke 7:36-48 and John 12:3-8). The persons present criticized the action either as extravagant or as inappropriate, i.e. it should have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus accepted neither argument. One cannot be too extravagant when God is the recipient of gifts. He is not an inferior alternative to needy human beings, worthy as they might be as objects of charity.

The history of gifts to God in the form of buildings, artistic artifacts, and other items for use in the formal worship of the Church has had a mixed history. Much of its history, the Church has sacrificed to create splendid objects for the glory of God. In intervening times, iconoclasts have laid their destructive hands upon the treasures of previous ages, like latter-day Assyrians pillaging the temple. Occasionally, as at our present time, the treasury of the Church has been juxtaposed to the needs of the poor, as the disciples demanded of Jesus, and, in a wave of temporary sympathy, dispersed to serve an evanescent goal. A case in point. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City lacks a final roof above its sanctuary. The treasure reserved to complete that place was spent in the turbulence of the seventies to ease a fancied racial guilt. The parish members, for the most part, moved out of the area. Those who held her hostage to blame remain, outside the pale, and at every rain, St. John weeps, not with tears of joy, but of nature, because the temporary tar above no longer holds. One can perhaps better understand the response of our Lord to His own detractors when they pleaded the cause of poverty against the gift to Him, "You always have the poor with you."

After the ascension of Jesus, it was no longer possible to give him personal gifts. He suggested, however, that whatever was given in his name to those in need would have also been given to him (Matt 25:40).

God uses the physical side of life to modify events. As already noted, He sustains the economy of the universe. He floods it with an abundance of physical goods of every variety. But He also sometimes takes things away: lives, possessions, peaceful times, good health, good weather. Sometimes He removes an evil from the world; sometimes He frustrates one human ambition by another; sometimes He just keeps matters in balance.

He also engages in modification of the physical circumstances of His individual human servants to keep them faithful to Him. We human beings have developed a great variety of definitions of good and evil. For God, nothing in the physical universe is good or evil in itself. It becomes good and evil respectively as it brings persons closer to Him or leads them away from Him. God makes use of the physical portion of our reality to frustrate whatever would lead his servants away from Him and to increase whatever would lead them closer to Him. Jesus called this activity "pruning" (John 15:1-14), an activity to get rid of dead wood which is no longer productive and to stimulate individuals to more productive activity.

Such pruning may take the form of a handicap, like blindness (John 9:2-3), that God's power might be displayed, illness "for the glory of God" (John 11:4), the shock of a disaster (Luke 13:1-5) or a massacre, a famine or pestilence (Luke 4:26-27), leading people to ask, "Why us?" or "Why weren't we spared?" Jesus answers that God is pruning to make His people lean, to stimulate them to be more productive, or to change the direction they are going. Such catastrophes give us pause to amend our lives.

One of the most difficult tasks facing children of God is the management of that portion of the physical universe assigned to their supervision, beginning with their own bodies and abilities, and continuing with the physical materials which come under their control. Each has a responsibility, like the CEO of a large corporation, on the one hand to maximize the accrual of assets; on the other hand to increase marketing of products as broadly as possible, while also expending resources on preventive maintenance to sustain the physical well-being of the facilities, and at the same time generating a steady, and, hopefully, increasing profit for the shareholders.

Similarly, even the least of us is expected to manage his or her life in such a way that God gets a maximum return on His investment of a body and physical resources in that person. To the extent that we abuse or neglect our bodies, we shorten their usefulness. They are our sole means of having an influence on others in the physical universe. If they die, our service is at an end.

We tend to have certain basic problems working with God on the physical level:

1) We get impatient.

God usually works slower than we would like. There are many changes in the whole universe which He has to make to satisfy what to us may be a simple request. Very seldom do things happen rapidly. When they do, they are generally attended with mass destruction or a long time to recover from the change. I have written the original of this text on a computer terminal connected to a mainframe. Periodically I am forced to wait as the mainframe digests and integrates what I and others using the computer at the same time have written or modified. The mainframe signals this waiting period by freezing all functions and flashing a message on my screen, "Backup in progress. Please wait ... " All of us wait for a brief time until the overload is gone.

God does not get overloaded, but, with the complex universe and with the billions of people on the earth whose needs have to be harmonized, it takes a while to get things done in a reasonably orderly fashion. We need to learn patience.

2) We are not good at reading the signs.

God frequently signals His intent and we don't notice. We are usually so fixed on our own goals that we cannot see the opportunities or the assets to assist us with those opportunities, which are His response. We are so literalistic that we do not see the significance of what is happening. God has to be patient with us because we are so slow to understand what He is signaling.

Many years ago I was serving a parish on the North Shore of the Chicago area. A young lady of the congregation came to my attention and I enlisted her services as a youth work assistant. I was so impressed with her as a person that I arranged for one of my younger brothers to take her out for dinner. Afterwards, having thanked me for arranging the date, he told me of a girl at home in whom he was growing interested.

A few months later, I arranged for another brother to take out this young lady. He was a junior professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana. He enjoyed the evening, but nothing further happened. He later married someone else.

A few months later another brother came home on vacation from medical school. I am embarrassed to admit this – I arranged a dinner date for him with that same young lady from my parish. After he returned from dinner, he stopped by my office to chat. I asked him how the date had gone. He replied that all had been very pleasant, but all evening she talked constantly about me. Then he said, "She is obviously madly in love with you. When are you going to marry her?" I did. About a year later. That was thirty-four years ago at this writing. Some of us are slower than others in reading the signs.

3) Lack of appreciation marks our response to God's gift of the physical.

It is so easy to identify what we have as our own. We earned it. The sense of private property is very powerful. Only with difficulty do we begin to have even a minimal idea of how lavishly God surrounds our souls with the physical. Sometimes only when our physical well-being is threatened do we realize how temporary and fragile our hold on it is and how incapable of sustained efforts we are.

We have great confidence in the currency of our nation. Nothing seems as secure as the American dollar. But when we experience rapid inflationary pressures or when in a foreign land a bank teller pauses before cashing our traveler's check or looks at us as though we had forged the signature, we realize how temporary a value money has. Yet, our whole capitalistic economy rests upon that uncertain base.

4) We get very self-centered.

To some extent that occurs because of our affective nature. We feel our own pains, our urges and our needs. We feel no one else's. We have to empathize or imagine their needs, which, under the most desperate circumstances are never as powerful as our own, no matter how creative our imaginations. So we must fight our own psychological impulses in order to remain altruistic. The devil is no help.

Demonic destruction occurs continuously in the world. The universe would return to chaos were it not for the preserving hand of God, Who uses even demonic evils for His purposes, either to direct the evil that is done to some good end, or to turn the destructive force of evil back upon itself. St. Augustine, playing with an idea from Aristotle, pointed out that in a world ruined by sin, God must always work with "deficient" causes. "Deficient" describes us at our best. Our failure to function, even at our deficient best, makes the task of God all the more difficult.

## The Social Level

And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, "To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." And Jesus answered him, "It is written, "'You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.'" (Luke 4:5-8)

There is no "high place" from the top of which one can literally see all the kingdoms of the world. Luke suggests that from some physical height to which the devil took Jesus, a panoramic view of the entire globe was presented in spatial order in a very brief span of time – perhaps somewhat in the manner that the BBC presents its signature on television, the revolving world – to generate in Jesus a desire for possession and rule of the physical world, with all its man-made glories and wonders. (Ironically, much of what he offered is available for free public viewing in the British Museum). The devil thought he was topping the offer he believed had previously been made by God the Father to His Son, that in return for his incarnation, fulfillment of the law, his sufferings and death, God the Father would give him the kingdom of the world to rule as he pleased. The devil was suggesting that the same result could be achieved without suffering and death. His offer, he thought, would undercut that of the Father.

The approach is familiar, the technique of the "con artist", the offer of the "easy buck", success without effort, the gambler's incentive, the appeal of lotteries, of high risk investments, and a host of other "get rich quick" schemes that attract the gullible.

The devil claimed that he could deliver. "It has been delivered to me." He was right. He did have control of earthly power and authority and could deliver them, for the world's politicians of that time were his vassals. What he proposed to deliver was world domination, a goal which has often attracted political leaders. Ancient Western history abounds with nations which attempted, one after the other to subjugate the world: Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Macedonia, Rome. In more modern times, Charlemagne, Peter the Great, Napoleon and Hitler have sought the same goal.

The devil could deliver, however, only on the condition that the Son of God fall down and worship him. He had been trying to achieve that result already in eternity when he fell from the grace of God, as he envied the position of the Son of God and desired to be higher than He in the power hierarchy of heaven (Is. 14:12-15), as both Luther and John Milton have dramatically explained – the former in _de Servo Arbitrio_ , the latter in _Paradise Lost_.

The participants entered this temptation with subtly different motivations. Jesus desired to inherit a rule, legitimately obtained from His Father, for the service of His people, instituting the kingdom of God by dying and rising again that it might come to life. Legitimate rule consists in service to others, as Aristotle points out in his _Politics_.

The devil desired to seize a rulership, illegitimately obtained and use it for personal advantage and satisfaction. That was the kind of rule he offered, the only kind he knew. But He could not deliver what he proposed to give unless the Son of God bowed down to him. But if the Son did that, then He would Himself be forever ruled by the devil and in servitude to him. The dominion and authority offered to Him would transfer back to the devil as soon as it was delivered. Jesus could not exercise it, much less enjoy it.

The Son of God was not fooled. His reply, preceded by an expression which in modern idiom might be translated as, "Oh, come on now!" makes his awareness abundantly clear, "Only God is worshipped and served."

In the second temptation lies the foundation for the "Faust tradition", the demonic offer of this or that material good in return for the abandonment of God. Selling one's soul to the devil is remarkably pervasive, particularly in the worlds of commerce and politics. The attraction to power can draw the most dedicated servant of God to actions and words which in less tempting times would have no appeal.

Even the Church is subject to its allure – witness the many cardinals who have served as governmental officers in various nations, the struggle for power and political influence within large church organizations, the recent interest of American clergymen to sacrifice their pastoral offices to run for president of the United States.

Plato claimed in his dialogue, the _Symposium_ , that human beings by nature seek immortality. That search is conducted in a variety of ways. The most common is the conceiving of children to carry on the family name. Almost as common is the search for fame, or its milder form, a good reputation in one's society. The writing of books, production or performance of works of art, practice of a professional sport, participation in professional politics, attempts to move up the corporate ladder – each represents in a different form this common urge to live forever in some way or other, to transcend the limits God has put upon our earthly existence. Theologically, the search for immortality is actually the perversion of an unconscious need for God, which is not satisfied by anything human beings can do for themselves. The frustrations of individuals as they unsuccessfully try to attain satisfaction finds expression in their competition with one another as they take out their dissatisfactions upon one another.

The essence of this temptation is its appeal of the urge to dominate others. The paradigm is Jacob, born grasping the heel of Esau, his twin. The problem continues into childhood, when each infant is forming its personality and relating itself to the human society which surrounds it. The urge to dominate others, to impose its will upon others and to satisfy itself regardless of the consequences for others begins in infancy and finds expression in angry crying and thrashing about. Later it expresses itself in biting and hitting others, calling others names, bullying, fighting etc., as the pattern begins to form and little dictators emerge and strut about. "I want!" is their political platform. We observe them in every grocery store intimidating their servant mothers. We see them in our neighbor's backyard as older brother knocks down or hits younger brother, then pleads ignorance to his mother about his sibling's cries.

As they grow older children compete with one another and with themselves, consuming one another in the process. The perversion crystalizes into a drive for supremacy. By its nature this drive is self-centered and ambitious. Around this ego nucleus form other exclusive centers of interest: family, social group, geographic territory, gang "turf", or national boundary.

Social boundaries are created by excluding others. Every society develops dialectical dimensions, composed of "we versus everybody else" factions. The divisions are reflected in housing patterns, associations, church divisions, even in language forms: Jew/gentile, Greek/barbarian, Roman/barbarian, Arab/infidel and other pejorative distinctions. So we split our world into exclusive enclaves and battle to preserve or expand them.

Egocentric behavior is accepted in the world of business as the norm rather than the perversion. The world of Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ required self-centered businessmen. Today Adam Smith has become Everyman, the model for modern man. "Adam", the new progenitor, "Smith", the nobody who is everywhere accompanying "Jones". Aggressive young latter day Smiths climb the corporate ladder; the charitable are passed over. Social altruism and environmental responsibility fall outside what is often taken as the proper role of business in life. They neither create jobs nor increase profits.

Management tends to feel itself superior to labor in salary, status, and public respectability. Those who give orders enjoy social acceptance and are treated as superior to those who take them. They fare better in the courts; often also in the church. Their comings and goings are noted by the media and the way is cleared for their passage. Their habits are copied by the institutional church. Clergy become superior to laity, bishops to ordinary clerics, head bishops superior to everybody but God.

Ironically, the Jewish people at the time of Jesus behaved in the same manner. He vigorously criticized the religious rulers and the wealthy Pharisees of his day for similar behavior and deliberately consorted with "publicans and prostitutes" to show His rejection of such mores and acceptance of every "sinner".

Any manipulation or use of other human beings for personal advantage to any degree exhibits subjection to this temptation, for it encourages people to reduce others to slavery to their own will. It reverses the relationship which Jesus proposed for those in his Church – that they be in servitude to one another, and no one be over another.

On a massive social scale the attempt to dominate others finds expression in the perversion of aggressive warfare; on the individual level, in personal intimidation. It happens more often than we care to believe, even in such supposed citadels of co-operative effort as the home, where often husbands and children enjoy the services of an enslaved wife and mother. She has no one to reciprocate, caring for her needs.

## The Spiritual Level

And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, "'He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,' and "'On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'" And Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'" (Luke 4:9-12)

The temple did not have a dramatically high spire, like a medieval cathedral. The highest point of the temple was neither high nor conspicuous, but because the temple precincts were located directly overlooking the Kidron valley which drained the mountaintop on which Jerusalem was built, the collective distance of wall and valley was sufficient to ensure the death of anyone who fell or leaped from the top of the turret on the temple wall. Why did the devil propose such an absurd action?

Some people have thought that he was proposing a sort of public relations stunt. Here was a way to get instant notoriety in Jerusalem. A crowd had gathered for the festival days. Within a few days Jesus would be known as the man who leaped and lived, a sort of Evel Knievel predecessor, thereby establishing himself as a prophet, following the standard method for prophetic identification: the working of wonders. If this is the correct interpretation, once again, as in the second temptation, the devil was suggesting a shortcut for Jesus ministry.

In spite of its plausibility, this interpretation does not direct us to any sort of human weakness which is endemic to human beings whereby the devil could work his way. Furthermore, it overlaps some of the meaning of the second temptation for it appeals to the urge to dominate. Again, it does not account for the Biblical interchange as each of the participants in the temptation quotes the Old Testament (the devil quoting Psalm 91:11-12 and Jesus responding with Deuteronomy 6:16). Finally, the suggestion is so patently outrageous that if it were intended as a stunt, Jesus would have undoubtedly disparaged it rather than taken the suggestion seriously and refuted it.

Rather, I think, the devil is building upon the response which he received from Jesus in the first temptation. (If Matthews's order is correct, it would have followed immediately after). By this temptation he is saying, "If, as you say, man lives by every word from the mouth of God and not by physical nurture, and, because angels have been created by God to protect man from any danger, then people of God are in control of the physical universe. They're in a remarkable position. They can ignore any sort of physical restriction and limitation. They can do anything they want. God has to take care of them, doing whatever they want Him to do. Otherwise God's investment in them is wasted.

Even more so is God the Father at the mercy of His Son, for if the Father wants the Son to suffer and to die for the salvation of mankind, then He has to preserve the body the Son inhabits as Jesus Christ until it is time for that body to die and to be resurrected and glorified. As a result, Jesus can do anything He wants, no matter how dangerous. His Father has to keep Him alive. To this Jesus responds curtly, "God is not tempted." That sentence expresses a multitude of meanings, all of which are intended:

1) Don't try to manipulate God!

2) If you try, it won't work.

3) You are done tempting me. Leave!

To use a baseball expression, "You have struck out." The time of temptation was over.

This temptation attacks the human/divine personal relation which, properly exercised by human beings, consists in the worship of and obedience to God. The temptation reverses the natural divine/human relation and suggests using God for human ends. The temptation works through the human natural drive of curiosity, "I wonder what would happen if ...", building upon the same motivation as that by which the devil suggested to Eve that she eat the forbidden fruit when he led her into the first sin in the Garden of Eden. He piqued her curiosity and stimulated her suspicion of God. What would it be like to know both good and evil? Why doesn't God want me to know?

Curiosity has its proper function. One of our blessings from God, without it we would not learn or develop. We stimulate it in infants and children to facilitate learning. A curious child may also get into mischief, explore illicit subjects, and engage in activities which are dangerous for it, activities I have named "daring". They are activities or ways of living which use God and challenge His willingness to preserve us. There are five types of daring.

1) Blasphemy.

For human beings this is the most extreme form of daring: the direct challenge of God with one's very existence, for it dares the God who preserves existence itself to destroy it. A blasphemer is fully conscious of God and at the same time, uses his own existence, which he recognizes as of divine creation and actively preserved by God for God's own purposes, to defy Him. The devil and his cohorts live on this level of arrogance, as well as a few people, fanatically angry with God. They may well be those referred to by Jesus as guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost.

2) Atheism and Paganism.

Less dramatic forms of daring, these occur more frequently in their various varieties, substituting other deities or no deity at all for God. Worship intended for God is diverted in other directions. The preservative energies of God and the resources He provides are channeled elsewhere instead of offered back to Him. Such a way of living differs from the first form in the respect that these people do not know God personally. They feel the need to worship and express it toward idols or they sublimate their need in other directions, preserving an emptiness where God would animate their being. As a result they persist in a sort of perverted, never satisfied, never satisfying sort of way, what St. Augustine described in his Confessions as a sort of cosmic restlessness: "Our souls are restless until they rest in thee".

3) Spiritual Narcissism.

This consists of living for oneself and operating on one's own terms rather than God's, indifferent to one's spiritual dimension. Life is treated as totally secular, committed to the perverted value of the first temptation, that man lives by bread alone, a sort of daring which characterizes many contemporary people. Lacking awareness of God, they are aware only of the emptiness of their lives, but do not realize the danger of their manner of existence.

Related to this very large group of people are those, who, though children of God, fail to preserve their spiritual lives, indifferent to their need for the word of God and the sacraments to preserve and vitalize their lives. As a result they let their spiritual hearts atrophy, being first careless, then indifferent and finally impervious to God, becoming wholly secular in their orientation like the previous group. Unlike them, they cannot plead ignorance, for there was a time when they knew God and their heart stirred to His voice. The scars of their love for God remain in mute contradiction to their life. They may feel an occasional pang of guilt or nostalgia to remind them of a time of innocence when God was real for them.

4) Manipulation and Indifference.

A fourth variety of daring takes the form of manipulating the environment for personal ends, indifferent to the long term consequences of such actions for others. Many people of God are among this group, unaware of the incompatibility of their use of the world in which they live with their purpose in it.

Human beings, careless with their environment, unconsciously challenge their physical relationship and erode it, particularly when they waste irreplaceable resources. Numerous environmentalists worry about worldwide phenomena such as the "greenhouse effect," holes in the ozone layer protecting the earth from ultraviolet rays from the sun, acid rain, the long term effects of radioactive waste, etc.. Many of these consequences of the industrial revolution carry long term consequences which will remain as problems for many future generations.

Northern England contains the site of an ancient copper mine, so old that no one knows who left it. It was old and abandoned when the Vikings invaded. The site remains, but it is infertile, hostile to the growth of any forms of life, a constant testimony to the enterprise which carved out the earth in the search for metal, indifferent to its effect upon the abundant earth which surrounded it. Wherever the slag from the mine fell, or its residue was washed, plants died; the earth lost its fertility.

That ancient mine is a tiny symbol for what is happening to the earth worldwide. Careless mining practice has its counterpart in agriculture where the removal of forests for farms, the careless plowing of land, and the failure to return to the earth its fertility in the form of organic waste, despoils the earth and renders more and more of its farmland desert.

Smokestack industry pollutes the air and water. As the earth's population grows and ingenious industrialists devise ways to employ them and care for them, the earth itself dies even as more and more people come into being dependent upon it. As human beings – children of God and others, alike – become, increasingly a greater and greater percentage of what lives upon this earth, they bring the day of destruction more closely upon themselves.

Surrounded by the effects of human destruction, pious people cannot simply dismiss the damage with the pious belief, "God will provide." He won't. World-wide catastrophe awaits the human race unless it is ready to turn to some form of economy which shares what remains upon the earth with more and more life forms and to withdraw from its continued expansion in greater and greater numbers into all parts of the earth.

Such change is not likely, because familiar ways are not easily given up. Most people are unable to see beyond their little worlds and do not espy their Armageddon until it is upon them. Hence, we are likely to see a time of increasing destruction, followed by struggles among those who remain to control what is left , until, exhausted by warfare, those who are still alive pick among what remains, of nature, government, industry and technology, to try to restructure some semblance of secure existence back together again.

5) Living only for the present.

A final form of daring "mortgages" the future for the sake of the present, either by abusing one's body by living life to the fullest or failing to practice preventive maintenance on one's own body. During the 19th century Romantic Period in Germany and England, a French expression was popular among young intellectuals: _court e bon,_ short but sweet. Idealistic young people lived life to the fullest, daring every danger, attempting to die young before the bloom of youth had left their cheeks. Achieved by the youthful poets Byron, Shelley, and Keats, their untimely deaths were both mourned and envied by their generation.

Early twentieth century literature has also reflected this ideal: Hemmingway's young bullfighters, dying in the afternoon on the horns of a maddened bull, daredevil racers, young soldiers at war, men and women drinking or drugging themselves into oblivion, and others who in countless ways challenged their own existence as though their bodies would last forever.

Desensitized by the massive destruction in the trenches of the First World War, a generation thrilled to the exhilaration of the battlefield charge, ignoring those cut down by machine gun bullets, impaled upon the barb wire fences, or blown apart by the exploding shells. Expend all of life in an irrational minute, filled to overflowing by terror and mass insanity! We all go together! Who wants to live life out in little quiet, safe, dribs and drabs?

The Second War, no less bloody, spread its carnage across a broader spectrum and left, at its end, a world over which hung the specter of a giant atomic bomb, its fuse ticking away like some mad scientist's clock. That atomic universe squeezed out all optimism from human hearts, and all who could turned their thoughts to physical things, their acquisition, their exploitation before the big bang would end it all.

Human daring already had the technical capability to destroy the earth by atomic weaponry. Some day it might reach to the heavens to destroy the stars with its wars – but that day suddenly seemed farther distant when the Big Bang broke and fell apart. Today, we slowly strip away our armaments in a world no longer faced with cosmic war. Little pettinesses remain – the local wars which show that as a race we still do not know where lies true lasting peace – but atomic destruction on a global scale no longer threatens.

Genetic manipulation may lead the next generation, as atomic warfare did the last, to unleash upon itself its own destruction, with monstrous forms of life they are unable to control. Experimentation with the very plasma of physical existence, the helical formulas which build living structures out of things, increases without any controls to hold it in check, except the continuing pollution of this planet by our industrial and personal habits, which may poison or suffocate us before our self-devised monsters have an opportunity to consume us.

Each of these kinds of daring rests upon a common perverted value: the human being is superior to the divine and the divine exists for the sake of the human. Human daring recognizes no limits. Each generation constructs its own Babel tower and fails.

The perversions represented by the third temptation, as with the previous two, have spread generally throughout the world, accepted simply as the way things are. While the response of Jesus to the first temptation called for human beings to dare to live by faith in God and to trust God for their physical welfare, his response to this temptation calls for a conservative life, considering the long term and the eternal consequences of possible actions. God is to be obeyed, not used.

The three temptations reveal a universe of existence which is dualistic. In the introduction I mentioned the use of dialectic. From an ontological standpoint dialectic congrues with the nature of terrestrial experience under conditions of demonic control. Life is divided into contradictories, entities in opposition no one another, conflicted and hostile. Wherever divisions occur the devil is present as their author. Hence the various interpersonal battles, not only on the human, but also on the grosser biological level, betoken a kind of experience turned against itself.

There is, however, another side to dialectic, what Plato called "gathering up", the activity of relating conflicted entities to one another as part of a higher unity, coalescing together ultimately in the highest entity of all creation which has no opposite, the universe itself, preserved by its creator.

Hegel mistakenly saw the dialectic as historic rather than ontic, and conceived of the divine/demonic dialectic as synthesizable, albeit in an unstable relation which generated its own new opposition. Nietzsche compounded the error, by converting the dialectic into compatible alternatives, from "either/or" to "both/and". Having married the divine and the demonic, the Apollonian and the Dionysian to one another as ontologically necessary partners, he at first depreciated the corrosive effect of the demonic and the healing, reconciling effect of the divine. Later, realizing his error, and sensing the impossibility of reconciling this cosmic opposition, he chose to reject both, settling for the loneliness of an ego universe, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces and meaningless alliances, torn within by competing energies.

Dialectic exhibits itself also internally, manifesting itself not just in the heart of the unregenerate in the form of irrational urges, but also in the heart of a child of God in the form of competing motivations, the divine and the demonic. These are complemented externally by the conflicted presentations on the other levels of experience, put into opposition to one another or conflicted within themselves. The physical side and the spiritual side of human nature, the gross and the most intimate, come into most frequent conflict. Bread has an overwhelming appeal to people in spite of the primary expression of power in the universe in the form of psychic energy, expended in the service of God or the devil. Divine energies also constantly feed into the universe, directed back to their source in worship or expended upon human or demonic activities. Those are the only possibilities. If the latter, power concentrates into one or a few hands, taken from other human beings and expended in the interests of the power brokers themselves. If the former, the universe is privileged to last a little longer in spite of its crippled state until all worship ends.

Finally, in this universe human beings can be and are affected by the devil as well as by God. How is the devil able to do it? In the temptations he approached the Son of God. His temptation remained at all times external to the Son; he could not get at Him personally. With mortal human beings since the fall into sin, the temptation is internal. It arises in something Jesus called the "heart" (Matt 15:19). Out of the heart arise urges to engage in this and that demonic activity: evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. The "heart" lies beyond and beneath the ego level of consciousness and, as a result, is not subject to its direct control.

"Heart" is an important concept. This passage is critical for understanding the gospels. Motivations well up from the heart. They arise, shaped and directed. Some theologians tend not to understand the theology of the heart. As a result they tend to deal with some plastic sort of sweetness, called love, which wells up in the people of God, seeking some sort of concrete expression. The shaping of that expression and the directing of that plastic becomes the function of the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, or some other such form of legal mould.

Experience belies such theology. We don't have our motives that way. Our urges and energies seldom lack direction or goals. The occasional times when we feel vaguely uneasy or generally hungry occur because we do not remember what we want. We may make a dozen trips to the kitchen to get something to eat before we remember that it was a chocolate chip cookie we really wanted. Meanwhile, in our search for satisfaction we consumed a sandwich, a bowl of potato chips and a Coke, none of which reduced the urge to eat.

Our usual motivations consist of desires to do this action to that person, to take this, to hide that, to think about this idea. We do not sit down to have a desire for something. Such urges arise preformed in our consciousness. Our problem is whether to entertain and act upon them or to resist. The decision ultimately depends on this: is it a divine or a demonic motivation: from whom did it come?

Figure 3a: A dead heart

A few diagrams may be helpful to clarify or illuminate the previous material. Human beings begin life with "hearts" which are dead to God. Receiving no motivation from God, they are motivated solely by the devil.

People with dead hearts literally are insensitive to God. A whole dimension of possible experience is missing. The situation is similar to the difference between the experience of a person who is sighted and one who is not. They are different. Someone who is dead to God simply never experiences God in any manner. If the concept of "god" functions in his or her understanding, it is as some entity outside the individual to whom the individual has an impersonal relation. Such an individual is more likely than not to be irreligious, since there is nothing in experience to motivate him or her differently. Whatever theology may develop will be purely conceptual, constructed to give substance to an entity which is not experienced. Or something may be chosen or fashioned in the form of an idol to give it substance.

Unfortunately, well meaning members of the Church often attempt to evangelize such people by offering them rational proofs for divine existence, threatening them with eternal damnation, or appealing to experiences which they do not share. Such prospects may well be convinced to join a church, but so long as their heart remains dead, their lives will be at best hypocritical, no matter how skillful they may become at simulating life in Christ.

When God vitalizes a human heart by the Spirit through the means of grace He has given to generate faith, the demonic is repressed, with the result that the primary motivation emanating from the heart is divine. The ego identifies itself with God, i.e. it loves God. The devil attempts to regain control of the heart and generates contrary or conflicting motivations within it or motivations which appear to the ego to be divine.

Figure 3b: A living heart

This concept lies at the heart (forgive the pun) of the ethics of Jesus: a motivational ethics. His is a variety not encountered very frequently, though Abelard and Martin Luther constructed other examples of it. The fundamental ethical question centers on who is controlling a person's heart, God or the devil. Everything else follows from the answer to that question.

Figure 3c: A living psyche

Jesus proposed this ethic to counter the ethics of the religious leaders of the Jewish people and the Pharisees, who followed an ethics of good acts based upon Mosaic law. For this reason Jesus frequently criticized the Pharisees as empty sepulchers, for their hearts were dead to God. Since He could see into their hearts, he knew the devil was motivating them. On the other hand, they could not understand why he was always critical of them, since they saw nothing wrong with what they were doing.

The three temptations call attention to three natural psychological levels, the spiritual "heart" from which arise all impulses to act, the social interpersonal level, the "ego" level on which the individual experiences self knowledge and the awareness of others; and the physical level where contact is made experientially through the medium of the physical by way of a specific body with which the individual identifies and by which he senses it.

Both God and the devil can influence human behavior on all three levels, although under conditions of sinfulness human beings are motivated solely by the devil, resisting God. They must be "born again" (John 3) of the Spirit to be motivated by God. On the heart level they influence human behavior by motivating specific actions; on the social level by dreams, visions, ideas, spontaneous feelings, and intellectual comprehension; on the physical by pruning. The general effect of their influences may be characterized by the following chart:

 **Figure 3d: Demonic and divine direct effects  
on the human psyche**

Human beings can influence one another directly only on the physical level, indirectly on the social level and not at all on the spiritual level.

Were there no demonic interference, there would be no need for an ethic. Divine motivations would flow from every heart. Each human would reach out to the other, using the material resources at hand to benefit one another, carefully conserving them that they might continue to serve the needs of succeeding generations. Periodically, well intentioned religious people attempt to establish such utopian conditions here or there, usually in some pristine land.

Unfortunately, the demonic permeates our world much more than we realize, dominating popular behavior, moving people to pursue the physical at the price of the spiritual, to set themselves in competition with one another, each seeking dominance, and wasting the resources of God in the headlong pursuit of personal gain and pleasure.

The temptations warn us against obsession with physical things, self-centered living, and the manipulation of God. They counsel lives motivated by God, which reach out in loving concern for others and the use of physical resources to satisfy neighborly needs. To that social relationship we turn next, for further analysis and the development of a more sophisticated structure of relationships.

Chapter 4

# The Upper Room Conversation

John devotes almost one quarter of his gospel to a conversation between Jesus and his twelve disciples on Maundy Thursday evening after the Passover dinner. They had eaten it together in an upper room of a central Jerusalem house. Some commentators think it was the home of John Mark. Jesus and his disciples had been staying in Bethany. The previous day Peter and John had been sent to the city to purchase a lamb for Passover, take it to the temple for ceremonial slaughter and sacrifice, secure a caterer to roast the lamb and provide other ingredients for the meal, and finally, to secure a dining room for the serving of the meal and the observation of the Seder liturgy which accompanied it. Meanwhile Jesus and the other disciples remained in Bethany, where on Wednesday evening they were guests of honor at a community meal hosted by Simon the Leper.

Many unusual circumstances surround that Passover event. Though Jesus apparently had gone to Jerusalem for the Passover every year since he had been born, and though his mother and many other of his followers, male and female, were in the city, and even though the Passover was a family event, he chose to eat this Passover with the twelve chosen disciples, one of whom, Judas Iscariot, ironically, left shortly after the post dinner conversation began, to complete preparations for Jesus betrayal.

Only John records in detail the conversation at the dinner. Reclining next to Jesus in his accustomed place, he was an eye and ear witness to the entire conversation. Peter reclined at the other end of the curved table. Judas had the place of honor, on the other side of Jesus, shielded from the view of most of the disciples, his place being closest to the exit from the room.

Ironically, of the evangelists, only John offers no report of the institution of the Eucharist. More remarkable than all of these facts, however, is the substance of the conversation. In it Jesus expands upon three psychological relationships that will prevail among individuals in the kingdom of God, to begin after he has left the world and sent his Spirit to enlighten, guide, and comfort them. The first relationship will govern their activities with other human beings. The second relationship will hold between them and Jesus, and among them as fellow members of the kingdom of God. The third relationship will hold between them and God the Father.

The relationships are treated in that order. The first occupies John 13:2 to 30, following an introductory verse. The second covers John 13:31 to 16:15. The final relationship begins at that point and concludes with the famous high priestly prayer found in John 17. Jesus explains each of the relationships by four devices:

1) A sign;

2) A word;

3) One or more persons opposed to the sign or word;

4) One or more persons who do not understand.

The event begins very simply with a symbolic act performed by Jesus, astounding his disciples: he washes their feet. Jesus explains the nature and significance of his action in the succeeding chapters, setting forth in increasing detail a structure of complex interactions underlying and leading to that simple act. By his explanation he exhibits the structure of unseen activities of God and the internal reactions of children of God which underlie whatever visible actions they perform, the social and spiritual level activities which underlie and result in physical actions. These chapters set forth in the typically brief, simple, Johannine style what might well be called the psychology of Christian behavior.

## The First Relation: _Doulos_ , slave

It is Maundy Thursday evening in the third year of Jesus ministry, his thirty-third year of earthly life. His hour has come to leave the world and return to his Father. He will now show the full extent of his love. He will do the death/resurrection sign, his last and his greatest. (John treats as one act the "sign of Jonah", death/resurrection).

In the twentieth chapter of his gospel (20:30-31), John describes his writing as a book of signs, selected from a larger number to exhibit Jesus as the Son of God, incarnate as the Christ. A sign, a _saymeinon_ , is a significant act performed by Jesus as a part of his teaching ministry. Some signs were self-contained: their significance obvious. Most were not. They required a word, a _Logos_ , to explain what they meant. In this respect they were analogous to parables, verbal signs, which often needed to be interpreted by Jesus.

In this section, Jesus does a sign, a rather homely one – he washes his disciples' feet. They do not understand what he is doing or why he is doing it. It requires a word of explanation for two reasons. Its timing was incongruous. Foot washing occurred before a meal, not after it, as an activity necessary to keep the interiors of buildings clean and sanitary. Palestine was a semi-tropical country. People wore sandals to keep their feet as cool and comfortable as possible. The roads and pathways were dirt and often littered with manure from pack animals and other animals. The streets of towns and cities were not cleaned. Hence, foot washing was a very necessary therapeutic practice.

For the Jews, who abhorred anything they considered unclean, foot washing was filthy work. At the entrances to homes, large stone jars of water stood ready for this purpose. Individuals washed their own feet or, if they could, had them washed by slaves. Sandals were left outside at the entrance to the home. People entered barefoot. In wealthy homes, light slippers were provided for indoor wear.

Jesus disciples did not understand his foot washing action also because they found his behavior inconsistent with his station in life. He was a rabbi, an exalted religious leader; he was a celebrity; he was their host at this dinner; and he was their friend and leader. For each and all of these reasons they did not wish him to do slave's work. His actions required an explanation. He gave it by this word: if he, the Son of God, their master, could do a slave's work for them, they were to be slaves to one another and to others(13:12-17).

A slave is a person who exists for another, not for itself. The slave's reason for being is the will of its master. It does not live for itself

Jesus did not mean to suggest that each of his disciples was now to take orders from each of the others. That would be chaotic. None of them were to give orders, for none of them were masters. He was the master. Instead, his order was that each of them was to look after other's needs. In this way the problem of the first temptation would be solved: God looks after His people; they look after one another. Like the good Samaritan, their concern would be for their neighbor, whoever was in need, whomever they could help.

Figure 4a: _Doulos_ relation

As one might expect, considering that the source of the idea was Jesus, caring for the needs of others is a very sensible and practical social and economic principle. If all individuals live for themselves, each has only one person looking out for that individual, himself or herself. But if all individuals are living for one another, each has everyone but himself or herself looking out for him or her. Everyone fares better. Were the principle generally followed, charity would occur spontaneously and the redistribution of wealth would occur without the need for governmental intervention, in short order eliminating need. Unfortunately, most people prefer to be self reliant, not wanting to live by faith in one another, or afraid to trust one another. Hence the principle is seldom tried, and then usually only by small religious Utopian groups. As a result, when it is tried, the experiment tends not to succeed for very long.

Jesus encountered opposition immediately from two of his disciples. The early Christian Church tried mutual sharing; several members cheated. How long the sharing of possessions would have lasted as an economic arrangement we have no way of knowing, for persecutions by the leaders of the Jewish establishment broke up the social organization and scattered the members. Today only two large groups of people tend to live this way: most children, who have no choice, and spiritual leaders, because they head voluntary giving organizations.

Judas Iscariot was looking out for himself. About to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, he had for some time been subsidizing himself from the group treasury of which he was the business manager. Jesus identified him to himself for what he was. He was not going to be one of the "slaves" of the kingdom because he was looking out only for himself. Judas left. John says that Satan entered him (27). And it was night, both outside and in. Night comes suddenly and swiftly in the mountains.

Peter also didn't understand. He always had a strong need to know what was happening. This night he was not at the center of things. In his confusion he rejected Jesus activity. He did not want Jesus to wash his feet. When Jesus insisted, Peter wanted his whole body washed, showing once again that he did not understand what Jesus meant and that he was thinking only of himself.

To be a slave to others does not require to do for them what they can very well do for themselves, nor does it justify some being slaves while others live in luxury, enjoying the fruits of others' labors. In a true slave community, what each possesses is expended for others. An economic equality naturally results.

Unless all are in servitude to all others, society breaks down into two groups, givers and takers. Takers divide into the further subgroups of idlers, complainers, thieves, etc. All the trappings of an ill society inevitably begin to generate to deal with them: civil and criminal law, police, courts, jails, social service agencies, and the like.

The social and economic model proposed by Jesus functions well for a family, a parish, a church body, a neighborhood. From an early age children can be taught to give to the family, to serve one another within the family group even as they are served. Their motivation for service gets reinforcement when there are regular expressions of appreciation for one another's thoughtfulness.

Within the parish, the spiritual servant or servants, properly carrying out their vocations, model behavior for others, and by identifying those with talents and resources and those with needs, both can be brought together for the welfare of all. Thus, a spiritual community becomes a caring community.

On the broader level of religious organization, church bodies have a sorry history of developing caring relationships with one another, competition and susceptibility to the second temptation often functioning instead of mutual helpfulness. Within the respective church bodies, more often than not the individual person seeks the office rather than the office the person in church government; rare is the shepherd who gives his life for the sheep. Rather, the typical pattern follows the world outside the church with struggles for supremacy, creation of "good old boy networks", perquisites of office and the struggle for prestige, and competing for affluent parishes. Within parishes persons jealously guard their power or seek it if they do not have it. There is little comfort in the recognition that Jesus found the same situation in Jerusalem

Wherever slavery to one another flourishes in the kingdom of God, the danger always persists that at least one person will begin to use the others for personal advantage, as did Judas. Unless prevented, those who do will, in due course, fall victim to the second temptation (to use others) and to the third (to use God) for their own purposes, and in so doing destroy themselves. Although the kingdom of God is composed of people who are economically vulnerable to attack, those who look upon them as easy prey will in the long run find themselves the victims of their own greed or of others like themselves.

Figure 4b: Social interaction between  
a child of God and one who is not.

## The Second Relation: _Filos_ , Friend

The _filos_ section begins with the announcement that Jesus is going to leave his disciples – an announcement which, understandably, arouses consternation. Further conversation elicits the clarification that after he has done the death/resurrection sign (suffered, died, and rose again from the dead), he, the Son of God, will return to the Father to be glorified, that he will be replaced in the world by the Spirit to begin the creation of the kingdom of God through them, and that the Father will be active in pruning them to improve their capacity to serve Him. The relationship which will thereby be established and maintained between the three persons of the Trinity and individual children of God Jesus calls "friend", _filos._

_You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants (_ douloi _, pl. slaves), for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, (_ filoi _, pl.) for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide._ (John l5:14-16a)

Jesus causes the _filos_ relation, thereby connecting individuals to him and to one another. _Filos_ , the social "glue" that creates the Church, exhibits itself in the form of love ( _agape_ ), affection which expresses itself laterally toward others who also love Jesus. In its most selfless form it consists in literally laying down one's physical life for friends (John l5:l3). In a less dramatic sense _filos_ always consists in giving up one's life, for as one carries out the _doulos_ relationship one automatically lives for others.

Figure 4c: Social interaction - Children of God

How does _filos_ happen? People don't just decide to feel a certain way about other people and about God. That is psychologically impossible. Rather, _filos_ results from a complex series of Trinitarian interactive moves. Since they are actions internal to the nature of God, they are, from a temporal perspective, simultaneous.

1) Jesus asks the Father to send the Spirit.

2) The Father sends the Spirit.

3) The Spirit enters the heart of individual people.

4) The Father and Jesus enter their hearts.

5) Those people begin to know God and become spiritually alive.

6) They begin to love Jesus and obey His commands.

7) They become aware of the presence of God in themselves.

8) The Comforter reveals all things.

9) They find themselves, recognizing that God is in one another, loving one another and acting as slaves to anyone in need.

10)They experience peace with God and one another.

They feel an unaccustomed harmony in their lives, a satisfying rightness about what is happening to them. This complex process is friendship. (John 14:15-27)

Understandably, the disciples had never experienced this process. So long as Jesus was with them, they did not need _filos_ ; it ran counter to their entire experience, in which everything which occurred, so far as they could tell, happened on the physical level as they interacted with one another, thereby affecting the social level, on which level they consciously operated as persons, aware of themselves and others. Jesus was suggesting that there is another level, a spiritual level, an entire reality out of reach of their conscious grasp, a level on which they had been dead, but which God could enter and vitalize. This conception exceeded their capacity to comprehend. How could God be a part of their inner world? Why did Jesus have to leave for that to happen. They stoutly resisted the suggestion. Peter said, "I am going with you." He didn't. He fled when the separation began with the arrest of Jesus.

Jesus said that while he was away from them he would be preparing mansions for them. Thomas complained because he did not know the way to the heavenly housing development. Jesus offered himself as the way one gets there, the truth about it, and the vitality by which it comes into being.

Philip, in one of his few recorded comments, wanted eternity to happen immediately because he wanted to see what God the Father looked like, not realizing that for three years Jesus had been showing the Father to him by his own words and actions. "He who has seen me has seen the Father."

Judas Lebbaeus, in his only recorded remark in the gospels, wondered why this very wonderful experience was going to happen only to the eleven of them. It wasn't. It would happen to anyone into whose heart God had entered, whose life, as a result was expressing love. That love would be evidence that the experience was already happening. Jesus made it clear that eternal living, about which he was speaking, begins in this life, if it begins at all, and continues after this life has ended. The difference between the new life here and the life to come is a difference of degree, not of kind. When one passes through death to eternal life, one leaves the devil behind. He no longer exercises any heart control. Temporal and spatial restrictions also cease as the soul takes on a glorified body.

Jesus prophesied that the giving of his peace with God and fellowmen would meet opposition in the church. The devil would actively oppose him. His followers would suffer for their love. Some would fail him. They would be scattered and separate into different groups.

The world also would hate them. Their acts of selfless service would be misinterpreted and resented. Their love would provoke a hateful response from anyone who did not love God. They would experience the same response as Abel did from his brother Cain at the beginning of time, when, angry that God accepted Abel's sacrifice, but not his own, Cain killed him. These disciples would experience a similar violent rejection both by church and state, just as Jesus himself was about to experience.

God generates the condition of _filos_ in the "heart" of individuals by the Spirit. In the twentieth chapter of St. John (v. 22) Jesus makes it clear that the activities of the Spirit would be directed by human agency. He would not normally act apart from human agents (as for instance in the exceptional calling of St. Paul on the way to Damascus). Jesus gave this power over the activity of the Spirit to the ten disciples gathered together on Easter evening by breathing upon them. Later on he gave it to additional disciples in other ways. The vitalizing activity of the Spirit was, thus, left largely under human direction.

Where results depend upon human beings, physical means must be used. Though God can directly affect human beings on all three psychic levels, human beings can directly affect one another only on the physical level. Jesus provided his disciples with three physical means to effect spiritual change in one another.

The primary means which Jesus proposed for them to use was language, words. In his prayer in John 17 Jesus speaks of the words of his Father which he had faithfully communicated to his disciples (John 17:6–8), words which they would be communicating to their followers (v. 20), and so on to the end of time. During the years that followed, many of these words and comments upon them were written down and gathered together, particularly as, because of persecution and natural death, the numbers of primary witnesses to Jesus words and deeds began to dwindle. Thus the canon of the New Testament was established, to preserve the words of the eye witness generation and of St. Paul, the most influential of those who had not personally known Jesus during his earthly life.

In the fourth chapter of John (v. 10, 13, 14) Jesus speaks of a second way to transmit the Spirit to individual human beings. The conversation takes place with a Samaritan woman by a well. Since it is early in Jesus ministry and she is not a Jewess, he speaks cryptically. In a reference to baptism, he speaks of giving living water to individual people with the intent that, having received his water, they would never thirst again; the water would remain a constant flowing fountain within them, an artesian source of spiritual energy welling up from the heart.

The meaning is inescapable in the light of Jesus later instructions (Matt.28:18, Mark 16:16). People are to be baptized in the name of the Trinity. The Spirit, working through the water of baptism, will generate within the baptized person a life which, given regular spiritual nourishment and exercise, will persist through their lifetime. They will not need to be baptized again. This baptism will work independent of anything each individual might be or say, affecting the heart of each individual by putting God there.

In the sixth chapter of John, reference is made to the third and final means to communicate the Spirit, the Eucharist. The physical sign is the feeding of 5000 Galileans who had followed Jesus to the east side of the Sea of Galilee and had been fed by him. The next day a word follows this sign. It is given by Jesus to correct the false hope of the Galilean people that they could retire from working for daily bread, since Jesus would continue to provide them with daily bread, free of charge, as God the Father had done with manna for their ancestors in the wilderness.

Jesus intended to provide food, but it was food for their spiritual lives. Physically, he would give his body and blood on Calvary, to make spiritual life possible. Spiritually, he would give it to them in the Eucharist which the New Testament Church would share with one another in obedience to his command on Maundy Thursday evening when he instituted it. By means of the Passover bread, he would give his body to them, replacing the Passover lamb with himself. By the wine he would communicate his blood. This food would sustain the spiritual life of his church through the ages. (John 6:53-58).

The ethic of the New Testament church thus, in brief, consists in new living, generated by the living water of baptism associated with the command from God, sustained by the Eucharist, informed and developed by the study of the word, expressing itself in love for Jesus, mutual love for one another and service to fellowmen who are in need.

Jesus predicted that demonic efforts would be made to frustrate this ethic: attacks generated from outside the church and schisms within, setting the people of God at odds with one another and internally motivating them with urges and ideas opposed to God. Some individuals would not understand what was happening to them or would doubt the new life that was within them. However, motivated by the Spirit, the kingdom of God would still grow and prosper, even under persecution. (These problems and their solution will be part of the treatment of "Kingdom of God" in a later chapter.)

## The Third Relation: _Hueos Theou_ , Son of God

This name does not appear in the selection, although it is anticipated in John 1:12-13. Its correlative, Father, frequently occurs in this section. In the closing portion of the upper room conversation, Jesus tells his disciples that because they love him, God, his Father will love them just as He loves His Son. He informs them that he has made arrangements with his Father that, during the time he is separated from them in heaven, they will enjoy the same privilege he has as the Son of God: they may address God the Father directly in Jesus name, calling God "Father".

Previously Jesus had done all of the praying. They had reclined nearby and listened, done other things, or slept. In the future, each of them would speak for himself to the Father. Like Jesus, their Savior, they would have this privilege of Sonship, prayer. Americans have difficulty fully appreciating this privilege, accustomed as they are to address whomever they wish face to face or to correspond with those whom they cannot. Those who live in nations governed by a monarch are sensitive to the inaccessibility of their ruler. Even on state public occasions, only the privileged have access. The others must watch on television. Like Jesus, their Master, the disciples would be sons of God, able personally to converse with Him so "that their joy may be full" (John 16:24).

The sign that this privilege has begun, Jesus tells them, will be his ascension and the Spirit's coming. Evidence of the presence of the Spirit in their hearts will consist in their praying. In John 20:17, after his resurrection, Jesus affirmed this same thought when he said, "I am ascending to my Father and your Father." The privilege will continue during the emergence and growth of the Church as it exercises the powers given it by its Lord – by word and sacraments to build the church. The use of prayer and sacraments will terminate at the end of time when Jesus returns to pronounce judgment on the "ruler of this world" (John 16:11), for thereafter the sons of God will see Him face to face.

Jesus attaches to the sign this word, "Whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you" (John 16:23). Opposition will come from the "world" outside and exhibit itself internally in the form of disunity within the church.

The Three Sociological Relations

Figure 4d: The first relation, Doulos, slave

Figure 4e: The second relation, Filos, friend

Figure 4f: The third relation, _Hueos Theou_ , son of God

The disciples understood little and appreciated less what Jesus was foretelling and promising, though they thought they did (John 16:29-30). They exhibited very weak conviction, "We believe that you came from God." He responded sadly that they would soon be scattered to various parts of Jerusalem, abandoning him (John 16:32), but thereafter, would go to all parts of the world. Having completed his grand exposition of what would happen to them spiritually and how they were subsequently to develop the Church, Jesus prayed it all into existence. They sat in silence as the Son of God addressed His Father. They did not yet understand; fortunately, they would remember what he had said. This simple system, elucidated by our Lord the night he was about to be captured, put on trial, and executed, only to rise again on the third day, has, by the activity of the Spirit of God working through the people of God through word and sacraments generated that living spiritual organism we call the Church and sustained it for almost two thousand years. And this in spite of external opposition, internal disagreements and conflicts.

It may be useful at the end of this chapter to talk a bit more about demonic activity. Granted that much of the previous chapter has treated that topic, yet, for the most part it has tended to focus on the demonic globally, rather than as an individual child of God is affected. Having considered in this chapter in some detail how the persons of the Trinity relate themselves to individual human beings as the Spirit makes them children of God, we need to talk in some detail also how demonic activity interferes to attempt to prevent or to destroy the result of such activity.

In the diagram which will follow (figure 5), four demonic activities are identified: destroying, demoralizing, tempting and hating. Since the demons cannot generate divisions between the three persons of the Trinity – that was settled in Eternity - they attempt to destroy relationships between the Trinity and the children of God, and between one child of God and another. They can go about it in four basic ways or combinations thereof.

1) Preventing a divine human connection, i.e. preventing conversion.

The demons cannot prevent the Spirit from doing his work once the means of grace have been used upon individual human beings, but they can attempt to strengthen their resistance to the Spirit and prevent His entrance into their unregenerate hearts. They can also attempt to prevent children of God from sharing the means of grace. They may manipulate the secular political powers to outlaw or to impede such activity, motivating other unregenerate persons, particularly members of family or friends to put social pressure upon those showing signs of regeneration, in order to counteract it,

They may attempt to weaken the resolve of children of God to share their goods with those in need and to interact with those who share the _filos_ relation, by attempting to reduce their activity in the kingdom, thereby bringing about the atrophy of their spirituality. Or they may attempt to divert them to alternative activities by tempting them to those activities at important spiritual times like corporate worship, or when opportunities to witness occur.

The demons may attempt to counter the filetic outreach of the people of God by generating fears of the enemies of Christ and feelings of personal inadequacy. Thus, though they are motivated by God to be active, their hearts fail them from fear, and they do nothing.

2) Weakening or destroying such a connection after it has been established in the heart.

The demons cannot destroy a connection to God, once established. They are less powerful than God. Thus, their tactic, instead, is to attempt to motivate a child of God to self-destruct his or her connection to God. This can be done in only one way, by weakening it through lack of exercise. If the demons are successful, they achieve three important goals, that of point 1, to prevent new connections, that of this point, destroying existing connections, and that of point 3, ultimately to destroy the very will and capacity to make spiritual connections. The strength and frequency of divine motivations in the heart of a child of God can be weakened in two ways, by generating countervailing motivations in that heart, or by creating havoc on the physical or social level and thereby demoralizing that individual, e.g. terrible things happen to that person; or, he or she has a falling out with others, and, as a result, becomes emotionally incapacitated.

3) Destroying the physical supports which nourish the bodies of the children of God and serve as means to their _doulos_ activity.

The demons can attack the very person of a child of God or his or her possessions. Job lost his children, his wealth and, finally, his health. By means of these indirect attacks on the physical level, the morale of a child of God can be weakened or undermined and his or her faith in God threatened.

At the same time, a child of God can be attacked by means of the physical also on the intellectual level. For example, if the idea is lofted into consciousness and offered temptingly, that God is the source of all the terrible things which are happening, the entertainment of that idea can revise that child's conception of God and His relationship to that child, with potentially disastrous results. As ultimately with Job, the urge to "Curse God and die!" may become an option which is on the point of execution, requiring divine intervention to prevent. Just as a child rapidly revises its attitude toward another child or an adult if that person is the source of injury, so also, if it is led to attribute to God the source of its personal pain, it will also begin to revise its estimation of God.

For this reason children need as soon as they are capable, to gain an understanding of evil, its various forms and their common source, how God relates to and creates compensations for them, and what resources are available to help such children when they need them. Such understanding, needs, in particular, to be imparted to children who are born with physical, and sometimes mental, handicaps, in order that they may be assisted to discover the opportunities for their service in the kingdom in spite of their limitations.

At the same time, older children and adults need assistance to prepare themselves for the calamities which might suddenly befall anyone, loss of one or more senses, physical disabilities, loss of someone in death, sudden unemployment, etc.

Because of the uncertainties of our modern world economies and the constant need to revise business structures and investments, very few people have economic security. Most of us who are older grew up with the assumption that unemployment happened only to people who wore blue shirts and carried lunch pails. People who went to college and got a degree were spared that uncertainty, because a safe, life-time job, climbing the corporate ladder to greater and greater riches and status, awaited them after graduation. Or, if they came from a rural background, investing in a small farm represented the path to security. If that view was ever true, it certainly is not today, and has not been for some years. Hence, a parish, on the one hand, needs to concern itself with how its corporate ministry can continue with limited resources in time of need and how those who are no longer able to be as generous in their support, can themselves be supported by their fellow members, without any loss of esteem.

Friends in the corporate business world tell me that those whose employment is most at risk today are white, middle age, middle management executives, who are being replaced by less expensive, more energetic, and more efficient younger persons of diverse genders and ethnic backgrounds. This group of executives have been the backbone of main-line Christian parishes. They suffer an incredible loss of self esteem when they lose their livelihood, even if a retirement package cushions the financial shock. They are ready victims of demonic attack in their weakened condition, particularly if they have unconsciously begun to associate their affluent condition with divine approval. Its loss suggests divine disapproval. Such people need support by their filetic friends to weather the depression which follows upon job loss and repeated failure to secure reemployment on a comparable level. They may also need assistance to see how God can, with their increased free time, provide useful activities for them in lay ministry.

I had a friend, now in glory with our Lord, who, about half a century ago, long before such firings became common, was forced out of a corporate vice presidency in a large company. Left independently wealthy, he scarcely paused to move on to additional responsibilities, chairing his home parish voters assembly, assisting in an adult education committee, and serving – usually chairing – on various boards on the district and national level. He taught me not only how to run a board and chair a meeting, but also how to view wealth and position in such a way that they became neither addictive nor, when they were lost, self destructive.

Pride can be a formidable personal enemy. The devil can use it when we lose employment, to move us to alienate ourselves from our filetic friends and eschew their company, to separate ourselves from the word and sacraments which are our source of spiritual life, and to destroy the relationship we previously enjoyed with spouse and family since we can no longer be the parish leader, friend, spouse and parent we once were, leading, contributing, and providing a life style and opportunities for them, for which we sacrificed so much of our life and time and loyalty to our former employer.

Old age has its special demons, taunting us by bodies which no longer obey the commands of our ready minds, haunting the empty hours when we awake after midnight when those whose bodies are tired by daily labor are still asleep, and we cannot sing the "songs in the night" the psalmist commends. They drag our servant selves into black depression because we can contribute little from our meager pensions to help those in need and fewer and fewer people ask us for any help. We are recognized as senior in our various communities, but left alone, or left with other seniors of our lonely, useless class, to wait for death.

Anyone who works in or ministers to a nursing home is haunted by the lines of vacant faces, each in its own wheelchair, sitting in silent line, waiting for something or someone to reanimate their faces and revitalize their lives with purpose. For a time, meals and therapy mark their days, television and institutional gossip animate them. After a while, if they are still there, they are just there; they stop fighting against irrelevance and capitulate to nothingness, incapable even of a smile responsive to someone passing by.

4) Creating divisions between those who enjoy the _filos_ relationship.

Mark this down somewhere as a cardinal principle of ethics which has no exceptions: Wherever there is division between people, the devil is present or has been present! That principle applies doubly with those who share the filetic relation. The Spirit is constantly at work attempting to reconcile people; the devil works as hard to create divisions between them. Internally, the battle for control of the heart results in confusion and uncertainty on the conscious level. Externally, the battle results in people with divided loyalties or people divided by hatred.

Hate is a natural emotion. We are born with the capacity. As infants we tend to direct it at things; later, at persons; still later at kinds or groups of persons, as our biases begin to form. The devil uses hatred to divide people from one another, even as Jesus used love to reconcile them to God and to one another. Hate may be very focused. It may be very capricious. We have all had the experience of meeting someone and instantly disliking them. There is no reason for the feeling. We may come to like that person; it may linger as a residual feeling, giving a slight cold edge to the friendship which forms. We may always be a little distant toward one another.

Most hatred, however, is more intense and results from some provocative occasion. We have reasons why we hate someone or some group of people. We can recite the events which caused the hatred. Sometimes hatred just sizzles along under the surface, reinforced and fed by a series of events, until enough energy concentrates that it bursts out in some angry action or set of actions. Acts of hatred are justified or unjustified, understandable or defy understanding. Which action are what of these tend in their most violent expression to occupy the courts of law for interpretation and resolution.

In a later chapter we shall be concerned with how Jesus advised his Church to deal with this divisive activity of the demonic forces to set the people of God against themselves and against one another. It is sufficient here to note that it happens and how it happens, and, most important, that wherever there has been disagreement between persons – not persons holding different ideas – there the devil is at work. He always tries to make an issue out of something, no matter how innocent it is.

He will work with a misunderstanding and magnify it. As an injured person broods upon his hurt, the devil feeds all sorts of hostile ideas into his consciousness and attempts to prevent any others which might counteract them. We are living in a time of great national tension where, as international tensions have eased, internal provocations, muffled before by the greater dangers outside, now arise, irritating and frustrating those who do not belong to the company of the provocateurs. It has become popular to be against whole groups of people and to force unpopular beliefs upon the nation, stifling dissent. In these troublous times those who are the children of God need to minister to the affected and to the disaffected impartially. That is neither easy nor popular.

An army which is torn by dissension in the ranks, tends not to win many battles. A kingdom torn by internal strife fares as unsuccessfully. The peacemakers, who inherit the kingdom of God, as the beatitude states, stand as the only hope for its survival. As the Spirit of God works through them, they hold together the very human alliance of the Church at particular places, with their prayers, their counsel, sometimes their very lives, as, with word and sacraments they bring forgiveness and renewal.

Within our consciousness the devil reveals his presence when we begin to think evilly of someone else or when hostile impulses to action arise within ourselves. Within our spiritual communities, when the gossip lines begin to form, when they flow together into printed form as some demon press begins to pump its poison into the community, and when a growing multitude enjoy and begin to believe it, there the Church is in trouble. At that time, major efforts need to be made to discover the sources of demonic activity so that the source of poison can be lanced, that the Church at that place and time can be healed, individually and collectively, to resume its mission, before its own venom destroys it. Any person or family or parish or church body which thinks it is immune from such happenings fools itself. Our Lord Jesus was the victim of such hatred. His redeeming love provides the remedy for it.

The total psychic dynamic involving an individual human being, God and the devil is very complex and may be structured to so extent like the diagram on the following page.

Figure 5: General psychic dynamic of A child of God
Chapter 5

# The Kingdom of God

If the structure exhibited in figure 5 were expanded to include thousands or even millions of human beings, each of them busy reaching out and making slavery and love contacts with other human beings, that complex network would give us some conception of that beehive of activity which Jesus called "Kingdom of God" or "Kingdom of Heaven" (The terms are used interchangeably).

If one could watch the dynamics of that structure change over a period of time, or over all of time, one would see new relations forming, old ones atrophying, persons coming alive in their hearts, others slowly dying as their hearts harden, their spiritual life neglected, and their love relationship with God terminating. One generation of the Church would connect to the next in a friendship network, forming one unbroken fabric of fellowship throughout all of time.

As planned by Jesus, the process of generating the kingdom of God, i.e., the ruling of people's hearts by God, begins with human activity. Individual human beings tell others about God, His love, and His forgiveness; they apply the sacraments. The Spirit of God completes the process.

Jesus compared the process to the sowing of seed. Human beings sow; God creates the plant life and the harvest (Mark 4:26-32). The process begins on a small scale as one person speaks to another. Over a period of time, the numbers increase. The process begins with the creation of a weak and tiny life. The life grows immensely in its vitality and productivity. It begins as a tiny influence on an alien heart; it expands to control that heart (Luke 13:18-20).

The process begins with the proclamation of the word of God, alone or associated with the water of baptism (Luke 8:1). God uses human language to communicate Himself to individual people. The proclamation affects each individual internally. There may be no external sign that anything has happened, as God and Satan battle for that human's heart. On the other hand, there may be a dramatic reaction of affirmation, or, perhaps a violent rejection, as when Jesus healed those possessed by demons.

If the proclamation succeeds, a new life is established in the heart of the hearer. The hearer is "born again" as Jesus explained to Nicodemus in Jerusalem near the beginning of his ministry (John 3:3). This new life begins to give outward physical evidence of its presence in love and service (Luke 11:20). The life exhibits itself because the relationship that has been established is a dynamic Father/son relation with God (John 1:11-13) that cannot help but generate action.

Mark and Luke describe this activity as "child-like" (Mark 10:15, Luke 18:17): simple, pure, honest and straight-forward. Understandably, not only is it not limited to adults, children are the models and are foremost in the kingdom (Matt. 19:13-15). For some reason the organized church has often used the adult as the model for conversion and for spiritual behavior and has then had difficulty with children, since they cannot do a great deal of what adults can do. They cannot reason, cannot examine themselves, cannot make major decisions about themselves, cannot take charge of events, etc. These views may or may not be true. Regardless, children, as a result have tended to get left out of consideration until they were old enough to be trusted to do those things.

If, on the other hand, children become the model for churchmanship, then many of the preconceived requirements for membership, of which only adults are capable, lose their validity. And adults are left with the problem, like children, to obey their Lord. with simple, trusting devotion. But whether children or adults, lifelong children of God or deathbed converts, by word and sacraments each receives the new life alike, as the parable of the workers in the vineyard illustrates (Matt.20:1-16).

Because the kingdom of God is a political entity, i.e. God ruling people, it can be compared and contrasted to other kinds of polities. The kingdom of God does not function like earthly kingdoms; it is not of this world (John 18:36). It does not have an army (though angels guard it); it does not follow the rules of ordinary everyday justice, but rather divine justice. (God treats His people as they treat one another. His people treat one another, not as they are treated by one another, but as each needs to be treated by the other for his or her eternal welfare.) People do not fight for the kingdom of God to protect it; they do not organize it, make laws for it, enforce laws, or engage in any of the other activities which characterize the bureaucracy of a typical political society.

Furthermore, the kingdom of God does not have a visible leader. No human being is in charge. All are subjects, in slavery to one another, none sovereign, for Jesus is the head of all. Strangest of all, the kingdom is internal to each subject (Luke 17:21), not external from each, nor is each a part of a larger whole. The kingdom of God, thus, exhibits unique political relationships that cannot be analyzed in traditional ways. The kingdom needs none of the traditional trappings of rule: uniforms, official flags, palaces, rituals, etc.; its members cannot be catalogued or counted by other human beings, for no one can see into another's heart, and hypocrites by definition defy human detection. God alone knows who are surely His.

For the most part, the times when and the places where children of God live tend to affect the manner of their association. They cluster together in homogeneous groupings, often finding their identity in some common historical event, ethnic source, geographic location, charismatic leader, or other non-spiritual source of identification. Frequently such groups organize their actions for efficiency, for protection, for preservation of their traditions, and for other reasons, often having only marginal relation to their function as part of the kingdom. Sometimes these groups become sectarian, i.e. they refuse to recognize one another as part of the kingdom of God and equate themselves, by words or actions, with the entire kingdom of God, thereby secluding themselves as they exclude the rest.

Sometimes individuals usurp the rule from Jesus and seek that they themselves become the head of the Church, following the example of Satan in the second temptation. The Spirit of God is forced to contend with their competing rules and bureaucratic structures as He does His work of building the Kingdom in the world. Thus the devil inhibits the growth of the kingdom by nurturing the development of little human fiefdoms within it or instead of it. The second temptation, ironically, succeeds in powerful ways as the church develops its own politicians, rivaling those of the world, and generates power structures which interact with or compete with those of the world in an effort to dominate or control it.

Life was no different in the century surrounding the ministry of Jesus, when the office of the high priest was more political than sacrificial. Appointed by the Roman government, the high priest was sometimes the _De Facto_ secular ruler of Judea. He usually functioned as the political leader of the Jewish people and engaged in diplomatic maneuvering with the Roman governor to protect his own political position and to save his people. Jesus had little use for church leaders and church politicians or for that matter, institutional bigness. On Monday of Holy Week his disciples commented upon the massiveness of the temple foundation stones and the grandeur of the temple. Jesus predicted its imminent destruction. He talked of the Church as two or three gathering together in his name, a little flock in a vast world, gathered about the word and sacraments.

Organizations and political structures are human devices to achieve human goals, even though the goals may be set by God. God decreed no specific bureaucratic structure for the Church. The Spirit of God is not bound by any or to any, but achieves His purposes wherever He can with the means at hand. Human efforts to confine the Kingdom of God within one or another kind of human structure are like trying to gather the wind into a bottle (thanks to Solomon for the image). It cannot be done.

The Church needs operational structures to evangelize the world. Hence, as children of God form their organizations to carry out their tasks, they need to be practical to devise procedures which will function with desired efficiency, else they would not be good stewards. But they also need to be sensitive to change and to be flexible enough to modify their structures or abandon them lest, in time, the structures themselves interfere with the work of the Spirit and they themselves become the opposition, like Peter with his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, an enemy of his own Savior.

Three topics fall appropriately under the subject kingdom of God: prayer, discipleship, and the prophetic office. Each deserves a somewhat extended treatment.

## Prayer

The well known Lord's Prayer is generally taken as the typical or model corporate prayer of the gospels, designed for the people of God when they are praying together. As such, it is an unusual prayer, for the gospels almost always speak not of corporate, but of individual praying. Some scholars think that the Lord's Prayer was used by the early church, not only as part of its liturgy, but also as a model to be followed in the formation of all corporate prayers. (Cf. "Pray Like This" by Douglas D. Fusselman, _Concordia Journal_ , April, 1992.)

Unfortunately, sometimes people extend this function and make the Lord's Prayer the model for all praying. On a very practical level, lay people begin to assume that, far from being a spontaneous, natural action for a child of God, praying is a formal, deliberate, prepared in advance, verbal exercise. They come to believe that unless they can speak with comprehensive, simple, elegance, God will not listen to them. They defer to the clergy whose business, they assume, is, among other things, to pray as a surrogate for others. The clergyman does the Jesus thing; the laity stand or sit about like the disciples, listening.

Prayer is, on the contrary, essentially personal, a private talking to God the Father, one on one. We commune with and by the Spirit at the same time. From the moment of our rebirth as children of God, the Holy Spirit prays from our heart to the Father on our behalf, a constant process, like the hum of a fluorescent light tube. When we consciously pray, we plug into that network and send off words, impulses, feelings, mood attitudes, to God the Father. He responds by thoughts which enter our consciousness, modifications of our world, impulses to act, or words communicated to us by others.

Jesus suggested that prayer is so personal that one ought properly to enter into one's closet if one wished to speak aloud to God (Matt. 6:5-15). I once had a student in one of my classes who told me that she had an elderly friend who literally entered her bedroom closet to talk to God. Prayer's purpose, as detailed in the third section of the upper room conversation, is "that your joy may be full" (John 16:24). Speaking to God is a means of communicating to God one's problems and needs, thoughts and feelings, that joy in the Lord will not be inhibited by frustrations, tensions, and worries. Prayer is, thus, among other things, a way of talking matters out with God and sharing concerns with Him.

In his instructions about the use of this special privilege Jesus, by way of contrast, used the bad example of the Pharisees who delighted in public praying. They were the envy of the lower classes who could not equal either their eloquence or their length of oration. In contrast to their example, Jesus prescribed prayer which was private, brief, and to the point (Luke 11:1-13). To illustrate this he offered what is known today as the Lord's Prayer. In the original Greek it is composed of only 57 words. (My friend Michael, who teaches Old Testament studies at Oak Hill College in London, tells me that God the Father used no more than 97 words to create and to organize the universe. There is a God who believes in brevity!)

The Lord's Prayer conveys a mood of warmth and intimacy. The prayer is to be spoken lovingly and confidently. Seven petitions are offered, three related to God's activity, four related to human need, in that order. The three human petitions parallel in an interesting way the three temptations and are their antidote. The first temptation, the need for bread, is resolved by divine providence, the second, the desire to dominate others, resolved by lives of mutual forgiveness, the third by divine deliverance from the temptation to abuse the power of God.

Because prayer presupposes a Father/child relationship (Matt 7:7-12), prayer is only for those who are children of God, not for others. They do not have access to God. Human beings instinctively tend to associate God with their own male parent, unconsciously creating their own personal conception of God from characteristics typical of that biological parent. As a result, children who have difficulty feeling close to and speaking to God are also often children who have had difficulties with a male parent who is lacking in affection for them or hostile to them. On the other hand, those who have a warm personal relationship with their male parent usually do not have difficulty expressing themselves to God. Fathers need to be conscious of this natural phenomenon as their children exhibit it if they are to develop healthy prayer lives.

Jesus set no limits to what may be asked in prayer (Matt. 21:18-22). If anything, children of God tend to ask too little. They also often ask for what is not good for them, in which case they don't get it. They tend easily to get discouraged and lack persistence (Matt 15:21-28). Since they don't see anyone or hear anyone responding, as in human conversation, they easily conclude that God did not hear them, nothing is happening, and their prayer will have no effect. Their very lack of confidence in their prayer activity frustrates their prayer's success. (Mark 11:22-25) Like the child who "knows" he will fail a test, they tend to be self fulfilling.

Jesus always presupposed an organic connection between prayer and the prior and subsequent activity of a person who prays. In the Lord's Prayer divine forgiveness is qualified by the extent to which the person praying has previously forgiven others. Jesus commands that prayer occur after prior reconciliation with one's brother (Matt 5:23ff). By these examples he shows that our vertical relationship to God is affected or interfered with by our horizontal relationship to one another. Interpersonal conflicts can interfere, like static on a communication line, with messages getting through and receiving a response.

Having prayed, one goes out into the world of action and becomes involved. Prayer is not a substitute for action, or a way of shifting responsibility from oneself to God to complete tasks, but is rather an integral part of the dynamic, active life of a child of God.

Some people tend to think of prayer as a separate kind of thing: an alternative to action, a formal event for state occasions, or a sort of diplomatic audience with God. Prayer may be that upon occasion, but for an active child of God, prayer is usually more like singing while working or conversing with a friend while traveling together. When someone has strong conscious feelings toward God as Father and exercises an active prayer life, prayer occurs rather spontaneously and frequently during the working day. Jesus occasionally also prayed spontaneously, notably once in the temple when he called out, "Father, glorify your name." and he received an instant response (John 12:28).

We are, however, more familiar with those planned occasions, when, after a busy day of teaching and healing, Jesus went off to a private place, usually the top of a nearby mountain, to spend the night in prayer to his father. The most famous of his private prayers, of course, is that which he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Less famous is that which he spoke about an hour before in the upper room, the longest prayer recorded in the gospels.

For some reason, some denominations produce people who are better at formal praying than others do. To some extent this may be explained by the central role they assign to prayer in formal worship. Some denominations focus upon sacramental events; others upon the proclamation of the gospel; others upon the time for prayer. Some denominations also emphasize the importance of regular private prayer time and, probably have many members who are adept, although one would have no way of knowing for sure.

As a Lutheran, I have been impressed by the greater importance placed by the Anglican and the evangelical communities upon prayer, in contrast to the typical Lutheran parish. The most beautifully expressed prayers in English, to my way of thinking, are found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (not the recent revised version), even as the King James Version continues to be the most beautiful English expression of God's written words, even though it is not the easiest to understand. At the same time, the set Lutheran prayers in German are more beautifully crafted than those in English and are foremost in quality in comparison with other German prayers.

Perhaps because we Lutherans tend to be very busy middle class Americans, our corporate prayer occasions tend to be perfunctory events, done regularly, on schedule, but often lacking in heart. We seem to view them as ceremonial rather than functional events.

Some years ago while studying at a Jesuit university I made the acquaintance of a young Jesuit novice, working on an advanced degree in philosophy. My wife encouraged me to invite him for dinner, rightly suspecting that meals in a Jesuit dormitory can be rather stark. After dinner she began to ply him with innumerable questions, the sorts of questions a curious, young, Lutheran pastor's wife might have about the male religious celibate life. Her naive charm protected her from rudeness and he delighted in the interchange. During the course of the conversation she asked him why the Roman Catholic church continued to tolerate and encourage religious orders which served no conceivable earthly function, for their adherents devoted their waking hours to long periods of praying. What useful purpose did that serve? I was embarrassed; he was, initially, puzzled how to answer. Finally, he responded that if he recalled correctly, Martin Luther, who was a very busy theologian, had been accustomed from his earliest monastic years to begin each day with at least several hours of prayer. Did she think those hours were wasted?

The discipline of personal prayer has tended to be inadequately taught except by writers of mystical literature. The habit of praying, as the subject matter for a course, does not occupy an important place in most seminary curricula. As a result, prayer tends also not to play an important role in the educational curriculum of most parishes.

And yet, our Lord went to great pains to win from his Father this privilege, that we might speak directly with Him, without any intermediaries, and secured the promise that He would listen to us.

## Discipleship

A disciple is someone who is educated or trained by a master teacher. A word for disciple occurs both in the Old Testament and in the New. Prophets had their disciples. So did Jesus; so did John the Baptist. The tradition continued into the New Testament church, where various of the apostles and other religious leaders had their disciples. Conflict arose among them sometimes, as, for instance, in the church at Corinth.

The kingdom of God is composed of disciples of Jesus Christ, people who are learning to know God better and becoming more expert at serving him. Large portions of the gospels are devoted to the instruction of disciples for ministry. Foremost among these sections are the passages which treat the sending of the twelve (Matt 10), the preparation of the unnamed "Seventy-two" who were sent out to all parts of Galilee and Judea for a practicum experience in evangelism (Luke 10:3-12), and the Upper Room Conversation, treated in Chapter 4, but from a different perspective.

Since Jesus had decided that human beings were to announce, gather together, and organize the kingdom of God on earth, directing the Holy Spirit to this person and that by the instruments he had provided, the word of God and the sacraments, Jesus needed to instruct those whom he had selected. They needed to know God well, to be able to communicate His will for men, to administer sacraments, to testify, etc. And they needed to be prepared for the kind of reception they were likely to get in the world. The instruction Jesus gave them can be reduced to three topics: procedures, responses, and results.

### Procedures

**Function.** They were called to bring the _kerygma_ , the proclamation of the gospel (Mark 16:15-18), to announce that the kingdom of God was near. (As a matter of fact, the kingdom would actually be there, within the person of the disciple himself bringing the _kerygma_.) The disciples could not announce the kingdom without knowing it and being familiar with it. Consequently, they needed instruction and the guidance of the Spirit to understand it. Jesus, of course, had been their teacher. He had provided them with his actions and his instruction, signs, and words, about which, after he was gone, the Spirit of Truth which he would send would enlighten them. He would enter their hearts and they would begin to understand what they until then would only have remembered.

The next generation looked to those who had personally known Jesus for information. After those people died, they looked to their disciples for what the first generation had taught them. After the establishment of the Church, once the great influx of numbers began to be assimilated and an organized method of catechizing converts had been established, it became obvious that a permanent body of information, paralleling the Old Testament, was necessary to supplement the memories of the fathers, sons, and daughters of the church who daily grew older and would soon be gone. So the New Testament canon began to form.

**Preparation.** Little was initially required beyond their personal growth in understanding what they were to do and getting practical experience doing it. God would take care of their physical needs, even as He had cared for the prophets through the ages. Those whose lives were totally devoted to Church service, since they were to go into all the world, began a tradition of owning no permanent home, after the manner of their Lord (Matt 8:18-22).

To his disciples Jesus gave the power to heal the sick, drive out demons, and raise the dead, that they might demonstrate both to men and the devil that they were sent from God (Matt 10:1). The Church since that time, true to that part of its ministry, has also pursued a healing and counseling activity as part of its calling.

The vast majority of Jesus followers were simple people of limited education and background. One of their primary fears as they anticipated talking to strangers about Jesus Christ was the same fear commonly expressed today, "What shall I say?" Jesus answer was very simple: the Spirit would show them. He did not mean to suggest that speaking by the Spirit would be a substitute for study and preparation, or that they would function simply as spiritual conduits for the Spirit to speak, like so many ventriloquists' dummies. Rather, he was suggesting that just as they would not need to concern themselves about their physical welfare because God the Father was looking out for that and they could concentrate on their task (to spread the gospel) so also, they needed not to fret and worry about saying the right thing, but rather could concentrate on acting as the children of God. The Spirit would arrange that all went as God wished.

Pre-pastoral preparation and lay preparation for evangelism have often been debated during the history of the Church, numerous curricula devised, and countless books and study guides created. We still debate them. For a number of years I served on a curriculum commission which had, among its tasks, the revision of seminary curricula. In typical fashion we periodically surveyed the bulletins of the seminaries of various church bodies to discover how they conceived their tasks. They all purported to be preparing candidates for roughly a similar ministry, yet their requirements varied widely - this after the institutional church had been in the kingdom building business for almost two millennia.

Recently I heard that one of the seminaries of my church is about to conduct a major overhaul of its curriculum because it is sadly out of date, both in its expectations about entering first year student competence and its assumptions about the needs of contemporary parishes. I suspect that state of affairs fits many more seminaries and divinity schools.

**Policy.** Jesus also established several general policies to govern his disciples behavior while they were proclaiming the gospel.

1) Since they were not to concern themselves with their own physical needs and since their at home resources would not be available to them, their needs would have to be taken care of by others. Jesus indicated that food and shelter would be offered to them by people to whom they would bring the gospel. They were to accept and also to be satisfied with these provisions. If they were not hospitably received, they should go elsewhere (Mark 6:8-11).

In the ancient near-Eastern world, the Rule of the Stranger functioned. Both in Jewish and Arab traditions, care for the stranger passing through the village played an essential role. To permit a stranger to be in need while he was in the community was disgraceful. Many homes at the time of Christ contained spare bedrooms reserved for invited guests or for the stranger who might happen to need lodging. This tradition, adopted also by Mohammed in the Koran, continues to be preserved today in Arab cultures of the near East where hostilities and ethnic bitterness have interfered to limit its use.

Jesus intended to make use of this custom to take care of the initial physical needs of his disciples as they traveled in the world of Judaism. In gentile lands early missionaries contacted local synagogues. Apart from their common Old Testament heritage and a feeling that the chosen people should hear the gospel first, there was also an assumption that at least one person in each Jewish community to which they came would be hospitable and provide temporary residence and meals.

As the Church began to expand into the Greek gentile world, it had to devise other means of support for its missionaries. Here, Paul, for instance, drew upon his skills as a tentmaker to care for himself when he did not find voluntary hospitality.

2) Jesus did not intend that his disciples become charity cases. They would earn the keep which was offered them. "The laborer is worthy of his hire." (Luke 10:4). Disciples who devoted their time or most of their time to the Church's task of proclamation deserved the material support of their fellow members. They were part of the larger activity of the whole community whereby no one looked out for his own personal good, but each cared for the others and all cared for the needs of those outside the community.

The physical care of church workers in the first generation of the Church has seldom been explored. Little New Testament evidence exists. Several customs seem to have prevailed. Rich members of parishes housed missionary teams, sometimes for long periods of time. People traveling from one place to another stayed in the homes of fellow Christians. St. Paul was proud that he never took money from any parish. Independently wealthy, like Barnabas, whenever he experienced a cash flow problem, he secured a local job, in order to support himself. On several occasions he worked for long periods of time at a particular city as a sort of worker-priest, employed by the family firm of Aquila and Priscilla. When they moved their business, he went with them to Ephesus and continued several more years in their employ.

What about professional church workers today? What economic relationship ought they have to those whom they serve? The answers vary. For some reason the ministry of the contemporary American Church seems to be associated with cheapness. It solicits gifts; expects freebees, offers salaries below the standard business level and tends to economize in construction wherever possible, with few exceptions, justifying its action as that typical of a non-profit agency.

Poverty seems to be equated with holiness, perhaps because of a misunderstanding of the beatitudes. The sanctifying of poverty has a long history, dating back at least to the middle ages when monastics took the vow of poverty. Perhaps the roots of that custom lay in the effort to emulate our Lord himself who did not even have a place to lay his head as he traveled about the Palestinian world. At his death his worldly possessions consisted of the small bundle of clothing the soldiers divided among themselves at the foot of the cross.

At the same time, during the same middle ages, as a result of bequests and careful management, many monasteries became very affluent and their abbots very wealthy and powerful people, managing large estates and dispensing material benefits to great numbers of people, lay and religious alike.

For a variety of reasons, the ecclesiastical leadership of the medieval church came increasingly from the nobility of the various nations. "Younger brothers", were necessary while small as insurance to guarantee that a titled estate remained within the family in case the heir apparent to the title died. Child mortality rates were very high. But, at the time of their majority, when an older brother had attained his estate, younger brothers were an inconvenience and often a threat to his inheritance, especially if he had children. High church office represented a convenient solution to dispose in a respectable way of the danger of younger brothers. Since there were usually more younger sons than high church offices, competition for the latter was brisk and the custom of simony, buying and selling church offices, became inevitable.

As high church offices began to be occupied by nobility, their residences, apparel, and life styles inevitably began to reflect that class from which they came. Their fathers saw to it that they lived like nobles and kings. When they died, their wealth passed to their successors in the office rather than reverting back to their families. With each successor to office a bishopric and monastery increased its wealth and lands. By the time of the Reformation, one fifth of England, for instance, belonged to the Church under various orders. Henry the Eighth, dissolving the monasteries, acquired an enormous nest egg to foster and fund his ambitions to compete with the Spanish crown and its booty from the new world.

History, thus, shows us a Western church both rich and poor at various times. From the message of the gospels we can derive the following principles for contemporary guidance. Parish support for its professional workers ought to take care of their individual needs. They cannot do their work with complete success if they need constantly to scrimp or to supplement income from other sources.

At the same time, they ought not be too well paid lest they become rich, contentious, and envy one another. Concern for monetary increases and comparison of their income with that received by others can generate envy and distrust, which will disable and fragment the most professional staff. Of course, if church professionals receive income beyond their needs, they can always disperse it to others more in need. They can also return their contributions for other work of the parish.

Salaries and other material perquisites ought to fit within the economic profile of a parish. A parish is not well served by remuneration below or above that of the membership. A special problem arises in the case of missionaries working in third world countries where the economic level of their personal life at home or the character of their native culture may differ radically from that of those whom they serve. They may also not be able to live as the natives whom they serve without getting ill.

British missionaries, particularly in the nineteen century age of imperialism, sought to maintain the superior status of the British colonial over the native persons, having servants and enjoying comforts not generally available to others. The 'white man's burden' mentality pervaded the clerical as well as the British business and politico/military establishments.

The history of the Jesuit order's attempts to evangelize China provides an interesting contrast. When first they came, they lived as resident Europeans, met with limited success, and a great deal of suspicion. Eventually they were expelled. When they returned about a century later, they attempted to integrate themselves within the communities where they came. They met with some success, but not much more than the century before. By way of contrast, when the Methodists came to China in the early part of the twentieth century, they established western style universities and were very successful with the upper Chinese classes whose children they taught and westernized.

A third world missionary, coming to a first world nation today, is likely to be received with distrust and contempt unless he or she adopts the garb and life style of that nation. Many major denominations today have shifted from an alien lifestyle approach to missionary work to a sort of culture friendly approach, attempting to modify as little as possible the native culture by their intrusion with the gospel. It remains to be seen how successful they will be. Regardless, missionary styles of life continue to be a problem in the places where work is done and have an undoubted effect upon success or failure there as they create problems for the work of the Spirit.

In a very subtle way, the salary an American parish pays for professional service reflects its evaluation of the worth of that service. Parishes which esteem the service they receive tend to respond generously; parishes which feel inadequately served or where hostility has developed with those who serve them, often express their displeasure silently, but effectively, in a fiscal manner. They are very good at signaling their feelings that way.

I was once associated with a parish on a part-time basis while in graduate school, during which time the pastor who brought me there left. The new pastor, who came some months later, felt my services were more than adequately compensated for and prevented the parish from increasing my salary for several years, even though it was common knowledge that I was with great financial difficulty continuing to serve them and the congregation was able and willing to increase it. The number of my invitations out for meals increased dramatically from that point on. I received generous Christmas and Easter personal gifts from members of the parish and I managed to survive. Parishes have their own methods of achieving economic justice.

Generous parishes are easily taken advantage of by greedy pastors. I know of a pastor who treated his parish as though it were a cow waiting to be milked. He used all the organizations of his parish to fund the various activities of his children, subsidizing their college education, purchasing automobiles for them, and support for other activities. At the opposite extreme, I also know a pastor who takes pride in the fact that for ten years he has not permitted his parish to increase his salary. During those ten years he married and his wife bore him five children. The family lives on food stamps. He justifies his behavior on the grounds that his salary is so low that he pays no income tax and as a result does not subsidize the military/industrial complex of the country. He has a right to suffer himself. He does not have the right to impose the consequences of his convictions on his children.

I suspect that what is equitable falls somewhere between those two extremes.

Hopefully, for most persons who are privileged to devote their total time to assisting parishes to carry out their ministry, financial matters are adequately taken care of. Those additional forms of compensation which never appear in a call document: co-operation, affection and gratitude, which are much more important in the long run, can be adequately savored when they are not accompanied by physical need. Ministry, properly done, is exciting, however, even under conditions of poverty. Somehow God uses us to get his work done, preserving us so long as we can be useful, enriching our declining years and, gathering us to himself at the end when we have finished.

I feel a particular sympathy for celibate clergy. Their filial relationships are limited, their sexual temptations are always present, they are often not totally trusted, and when their days of service come to an end, as so many do today in this age of retirement at fixed ages, they spend an indefinite time in idleness with others who, like themselves, are discarded as superannuated burdens without a blessing until they leave this life. There was a time when such clergy served until death, no matter how inept their performance had become. Today, they are retired, often to suffer a bitter old age. They have no family to love and care for them. They linger, waiting for release. There must be a better way than that.

3) Jesus instruction to his disciples, "If any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." (Mark 6:11), sounds very harsh and cold blooded to our sentimental ears. We do not like to acknowledge the fact that God the Father wishes a maximum return on his investments. If one community does not respond to the proclamation of the gospel, there are many more where success can be achieved with the limited resources we have. Through the centuries the Church has been loathe follow such a policy, but instead has tended to linger and to expend scarce resources of money and manpower on areas of the world where success has been meager, hoping that the situation will improve, rather than applying those resources to areas where more success might be achieved. Commercial corporations would never follow such policies. In the longer run, God Himself tends gradually to withdraw His Spirit from a given area of the world or a given age as its spiritual initiative flags, even while the buildings of the institutional church remain open there for the stragglers.

**Condition.** "I am sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves." (Luke 10:3). The words refer to the seventy-two disciples sent throughout the Jewish lands in Palestine. If they were in such danger among their own people, how much more would the danger later be as they evangelized pagan lands! They would not have political influence. The power of great wealth would not be available to them because what they had to offer would not tend to attract the monied people of the world. They would be Jews in a gentile world. They could not use warfare as a tool, as the later Islamic armies did when they overran the lands of the Church. They had been instructed to "turn the other cheek". Having no army to back them and protect them, they would do their work alone, singly, one on one, or in little groups.

The kingdom of God was not intended to be a political force or a social change agency in the communities where its numbers would grow, becoming just another "wolf" with the others. In choosing the lamb as the role model for the Church, Jesus focused on the weakness, the innocence, and the physical impotence of the lamb as the distinguishing characteristics which were to mark His Church. The Shepherd would protect the sheep and get the work done. When a parish or a church body begins to become a secular power in a community or nation it needs to be on its guard lest it lose its message and its people, its purity and its vulnerability. If a church associates itself with a particular government or form of government, it may find its secular fortunes linked inseparably with it. When the French Revolution occurred, the hierarchy of the church found themselves overthrown together with the nobility with whom they had been associated politically and socially for several centuries.

### Response

**Varied.** In his famous parable of the Sower and the Seed, Jesus articulates the various kinds of reactions which greet the proclamation of the gospel. Some respond immediately with enthusiasm, but soon fade away; some resist, but respond later; some do not react at all and never come to life; some come to life and produce rich results (Mark 4:3-20). The response will vary also from one time to another at the same location.

**Closed Minds.** Perhaps the most difficult people for disciples to minister to, then and now, are those who are triumphantly ignorant. They resist all efforts to share the Truth with them; they think they are omniscient. They seem impervious to the work of the Spirit. When they are wealthy, their possessions seem to insulate them from God (Mark 6:52). When they occupy positions of power in the world they become dangerous. When they are hypocrites, their success at fooling the children of God insulates them from any efforts at conversion.

Many closed minds appear also within the organized church as products of church bodies where traditions have achieved the sanctity of holy writ ( _Wir bleiben beim Alten_ ), or where the trauma of their fanaticism and the rigidity of their mistaken beliefs makes intelligent discussion of other alternatives to those views they hold impossible.

**Hatred and Persecution.** Children of God find it difficult to believe that innocence is not self-protecting. Naively they often assume that everyone naturally approves of God and that one need but identify oneself as a person of God to receive instant acceptance and affection.

Unfortunately, persons who are dead to God respond with indifference to His presence. Those who are actively serving the devil respond with vehement rejection of anything or anyone associated with God. In subtle and sometimes nasty ways they frustrate and undermine the work of people of God, even, where necessary, destroying their credibility and reputation. Or they may blatantly physically attack them or instigate laws which prevent their activity.

The world in which we live, having its own motivation and its own agenda, has seldom waited for God's directives. Furthermore, to leave the world and become a child of God requires that one humiliate and subject oneself to the will of another, God, who accepts nothing human as meritorious and at the same time demands everything. A theology which makes such an entrance requirement for membership, alien as it is to the natural egocentric human spirit, will attract few prospects.

**Opposition by the Established Church.** How can this happen that the organized church itself become an enemy of God? System and structure seem to inhibit the work of the Spirit. Old established church bodies become encrusted with human values, traditions and procedures which, over the centuries slowly strangle innovation and life.

Another source of frustration lies in the very nature of numerical bigness. Large parishes and large church bodies grow increasingly impersonal and intolerant of individuality. Kierkegaard talked of the tendency of "Christendom", the organized church, to reduce spiritual life to the ethical, i.e. to rules and regulations that become substitutes for religious vitality.

In establishing his church, our Lord, who certainly on many occasions drew crowds and was accustomed to the mobs which thronged the temple at festival times, seems to have turned away from that goal to the idea of a church that would gather in smaller, intimate, caring groups all over the world. The two or three gathered in His name would be more representative of the Spirit at work among people, than massive, monolithic parishes composed of thousands of persons. The Spirit seems to be more friendly with one on one relationships. Ironically, the institutional church seems to admire bigness.

Bigness offers security. Big groups seem more likely to last than little groups. Though they are less flexible, they are more versatile, since they can afford to offer a variety of options to their prospects and parishioners. At the same time, they can be made more "cost effective". Because the church is usually short of money, its poverty provides a powerful incentive toward that possibility provided by bigness.

Bigness, however, brings impersonality. Impersonality brings rules and regimentation. Structures grow increasingly rigid and intolerant of exceptions. Each structure that develops generates its own values independent of God. Jesus was scandalized to find his "Father's House" a complex economic enterprise ordered to generate maximum income from pious pilgrims. Temple taxes were exacted strictly in shekels. Pilgrims brought their various currencies from all over the world. The temple established an exorbitant exchange rate. Temple monopoly made large profits inevitable.

Similarly, since large numbers of pilgrims came from all parts of the civilized world for festivals at which animal sacrifice was mandated, and since most of them were unable to bring with them appropriate animals, a thriving market in animals for sacrifice developed, and a growing stockyards was established in the vicinity of the temple precincts. When one remembers Palestine is semi-tropical, one can understand that a visit he temple must have been a disquieting experience for the noses of the devout.

As business improved, the physical configurations and regulations of the temple precincts were determined over the years less and less by worship needs and more and more by the needs of a prosperous religious market economy.

The tribe of Levi also depended upon the tithes of vegetables, fruits and revenues generated by the temple as their source of livelihood. They were not about to reform or restrict the flow of wealth into the temple. At the beginning and the end of his ministry Jesus felt compelled to drive out from the temple the businesses which had developed there (John 2, Matt. 21). Inevitably, the people who managed the temple found themselves on a collision course with Jesus, who advocated depending upon God the Father to satisfy needs.

Throughout its history the organized church has also often tended to reject Jesus approach to economic matters as impractical, and has used instead the devices that have proven successful in the secular world (John 16:2-4). Periodically, then, God has been forced in one way or another to assist the institutional church to slim down.

**Secular Opposition.** It seems unbelievable that any government could feel threatened by the kingdom of God functioning as Jesus intended it to be. Yet, in rather short order it was opposed, even though His church had no interest in wealth or power, did not agitate for social change, did not oppose high taxes, slavery, etc. It did not intend to reform the world, but to transform people. It did not even oppose the continued operation of the temple or the resident Roman government. Yet, as Jesus predicted, his church experienced frequent and regular persecution by civil governments. In spite of the politically indifferent character of the Church, such treatment was inevitable for two reasons: persons having a powerful need to dominate others (second temptation), would be active in the political arena and would see in children of God persons who were malleable and politically impotent. They would attempt to use them. If they resisted, they could be attacked. At the same time, when there was political trouble, they would make natural scapegoats, as Nero discovered. Pagan people could easily be motivated to hate them, because they were of God. In addition, because they were innocent and harmless, they could be used and abused without fear of retaliation by them.

As the church itself finally achieved social acceptance and political approval, it also lost its innocence and, over the centuries became secular, generating political opposition as it sought itself to become a power in the world.

Secular power offers the demonic attraction of proffering shortcuts to achieve spiritual goals, as in the second temptation. If the forces of government can be marshaled to institutionalize and support church goals, the goals can more rapidly be achieved than if the church functions independently. The power, influence, and economic resources of political government can be put into the service of the church to compel, or purchase, or legislate conversions on a mass scale, a much more efficient response to the challenge of the great commission than the one-on-one approach originally envisioned.

### Results

As predicted, as the Church came into being and developed its own history, new kinds of familial ties and other social relations developed, personal priorities changed, and the people of God began to form new values.

**New Familial Ties.** For most people, their family constitutes the first and primary social bond. For many people present in Jerusalem when the kingdom of God began to form on Pentecost, this soon changed. On the one hand, some families split as some members were motivated by God and others by the devil. Family affection continued for those who were children of God; those who were not children of God often grew cool or even hostile to them as the antipathy between the devil and God found expression in their hearts (Luke 12:49-53).

At the same time, children of God found themselves growing in affection for persons who were not blood relatives, but who were fellow children of God as a result of the _filos_ relation operative within the local parish. Thus, in some cases blood ties weakened and spiritual ties replaced them; faith is thicker than blood in the kingdom of God. While a child of God might very well continue to serve the needs of natural family members, in spite of their hostility, personal associations would be more intimate within the Church ( Luke 8:19-21, Mark 3:31-35). Our Lord's own experience with his own natural Galilean family serves as a primary example.

**New Social Relations.** Because the New Testament Church was called to serve the needy, inevitably it found itself spending time with the destitute, the ill and the infirm, the sick and the social outcasts. Jesus Himself devoted so much of His attention to such people (Luke 14:12-14, Matt. 9:10-13, Mark 2:15-17) that he began to develop a reputation for associating with the "wrong" sort of people. The numbers of those who came to hear him began to decline as a result.

The church can easily forget its calling and its constituency, for its "neighbors" are not always the most social of companions, do not always smell the best, cannot repay kindnesses done to them and are often ungrateful. Servanting is thankless work, certainly much less pleasant than enjoying the company of the rich and powerful, the beautiful and the glamorous, those richly endowed with the goods of this life.

"Why, then, should one want to be a child of God?" the disciples reasoned. The incentives are not attractive or the company always pleasant. One has to give up everything in order to follow Jesus. Jesus responded with a harsh negative. Of all persons, God is more to be feared than men (Luke 12:4-12). Either one has an angry God with whom to contend or one has angry men. Which is going to be more hostile?

On the other hand, Jesus reminded them of the principles of divine justice: Whatever one does for one's fellow men God treats as done for Himself (Luke 9:23-26). How children of God comport themselves in the world affects their relationship to God. If a child of God witnesses for God in the world, Jesus himself will call that person to the attention of his Father. If he is ashamed of God and hides his witness, Jesus will also hide him from the love of God the Father.

At the same time, Jesus promised that sacrifices made for Him in this life will be rewarded in the life to come (Matt 5:11-12). Being a child of God is richly rewarding, unless one wants the reward in earthly goods. Jesus disciples themselves entertained such notions. They attempted to divide the "power" positions in the kingdom to come among themselves, worrying that others would get ahead of them. In rebuttal of their competition for status, Jesus stood a child before them as an example of spiritual leadership in the kingdom. He also told them, "whoever would be great among you must be your servant." (Matt 20:26)

In the final analysis, those children of God who are powerfully motivated by Him cannot help but act as they do. They are possessed by love. "What do I get out of it?" is not the sort of question a child of God asks. It is demonic. Child-like questions rather are, "What does God want of me?" "Whom can I help next? or "What more can I do?" In our parish circles we see the Spirit of our Lord shining in the lives of those who are always ready to help, no matter how busy they are. Those, on the other hand, who strive for positions of power and influence soon reveal the self-centered origin of their motivation. They do not last under the practical restrictions under which the Church at best has to operate.

## Prophetic Office

At various times throughout the history of the Jewish people, God sent prophets with special messages for His people to supplement what they already knew, to correct their understandings, or to bring advice, instruction, or a prediction about the future. The Jewish people were accustomed to periodic appearances of persons purporting to be prophets. The scribes, who were responsible for the accuracy of sacred texts and the authenticity of prophecy, had established complex tests for exposing false prophets. Both John the Baptist and Jesus were subjected to them.

Jesus proved to be a very frustrating subject. The "wonders" which he performed satisfied the tests for authenticity, but his words contradicted Jewish traditions, some of his claims about himself sounded blasphemous, and his attacks upon the religious leaders in Jerusalem and many of the temple customs raised strong doubts about his authenticity. He was a radical, so far as they were concerned, yet his actions were beyond reproach. He was kosher and he performed wonders.

Understandably, Jesus was also concerned about false prophecy coming to the Church in the days after he had left the earth. He suggested that:

1) False prophets would come;

2) They would speak winningly;

3) They would appear innocent;

4) They would purport to have new information or instruction from God to supplement what Jesus had given.

Certain common characteristics would also identify them.

**Their Motivation:** Jesus describes them as coming in sheep's clothing, but being inwardly "ravening wolves" (Matt 7:15-17). Jesus frequently characterized his followers as sheep. The image exhibits many revealing characteristics:

1) Ignorant and gullible, lost without a shepherd;

2) Innocent and harmless, not a danger to any one else;

3) Useful and valuable.

Sheep served many functions in the Jewish economy. Because they could graze on slopes too steep and barren of vegetation to support cattle, they made much of the mountainous Palestinian land profitable. They provided wool for clothing, tents, curtains, etc. They were sacrificial animals. Their meat served as the primary animal protein in the Jewish diet. Their tallow was used for candles, one of the primary light sources in use at the time.

Since false prophets would present themselves as though they were sheep, they would appear familiar, simple and disingenuous, harmless and useful. Sheep are herd animals. They are trusting and dumb. They flock to, gather around and are fooled by false sheep. The sheep of the Church would be taken in by their appearance, used and exploited for their private advantage, just as wolves who prey on sheep use them. One of the tests, then, for false prophecy would be their motivation: Why are they doing what they are doing? Are they serving others or are they using others for their own advancement, power, status or quality of life?

Such persons appear regularly in the church. Often they come from the church bureaucracy or the political class who use the organization of the Church to further their own personal interests and needs. Sometimes they take the form of social or political activists, using the power of numbers to form the Church into an influential change agent, or as an obstruction to change. Sometimes they bring a new religion which purports to be an improvement over the old, or new insights to be applied to old understandings. The first test for falsity is not concerned with the morality of their position or the "truth" of their theology, but simply with their purpose. If their ministry is for their own personal advantage, they are false prophets

**Their Actions:** "A tree is known by its fruits" (Luke 6:43-45). Jesus applies this familiar saying of his day also to false prophecy, which tends to result ultimately in evil actions and words. Evil hearts cannot help but produce evil actions. No matter how ingenious or ingenuous, the false prophet ultimately slips up and reveals himself or herself.

Sometimes corruption develops over a period of time. The false prophet does not suddenly appear. He emerges, or the time gets ripe for him to be successful as the situation decays. The temple hierarchy of Jesus day did not become corrupt overnight; the change took place so slowly that when Annas and Caiaphas took power, the Jewish people tolerated their corruption with little complaint.

**Their Secrecy:** When false prophecy is part of a conspiracy involving a number of people, inevitably they conduct their activities clandestinely. Honest men deal openly with others (John 3:20-21).

Sometimes clandestine activities, secret signs, private messages and the like are necessary for the Church to survive under persecution by an antagonistic society. However, in more peaceful times and within the Church, where children of God do not trust others, such activities signal the presence of false prophecy. Within the Church, to operate in secret against brethren is unconscionable.

Oftentimes gullible people within the Church who do not know better engage in such activity, believing that such activity is necessary because the Church is permeated by evil behavior, false doctrine, corrupt leadership, or other perversions which necessitate clandestine activity, lies, and deception. Jesus neither approved of nor accepted such behavior.

Such activity assumes that God is unable to cleanse His own Church and that the persons who are being opposed and their power undermined are not fellow children of God, who are to be loved and dealt with openly and straightforwardly.

Unfortunately, clandestine activity tends usually to serve as a tool to get political control of an organized church bureaucracy or to drive others out, leading inevitably to division, mistrust, insecurity, and the destruction of the morale of the organization.

**Their Opposition:** False prophets are opposed to the growth of the kingdom. Since they are demonically motivated, their intent is to destroy the work of God or to usurp authority for their own advantage.

What of those people who do not appear to be part of the kingdom, but are doing kingdom work? The apostle John, one of those who were sent out to engage in evangelistic activity in Palestine during Jesus ministry, returned reporting that he met a man casting out demons in Jesus name. The man was not one of Jesus followers, so John stopped him (Luke 9:49-50).

Jesus response is somewhat surprising. "Whoever is not against me is with me." The world is spiritually dialectical. Either God's work is being done or that of the devil. Since devils were being cast out, that man was doing God's work. Had God not approved, the devils would not have obeyed the man's commands.

Jesus words suggest that the question of whether or not the work of the kingdom is being advanced, functions as the ultimate test for the activity of the Church. As the Church organized, developed an increasingly complex bureaucratic structure, then split at various times, each smaller segment developing its own structure, this criterion was forgotten or suppressed, replaced by criteria such as these: "Obey orders from the church hierarchy!" or "Conform to your own religious bureaucratic structure and limit your activities to that structure!"

These principles are attractive to and advocated by church politicians because they reinforce their political power, not because they advance the work of the kingdom. Unfortunately, they tend also to perpetuate and increase divisions within the Church.

Blessing the kingdom work of other groups comes with difficulty, particularly if one believes strongly in the unique rightness of one's own religious bureaucracy. John's approach: criticism, attack, and prohibition of the spiritual activity of other groups, comes more easily to the heart. Yet that is the approach that Jesus condemned.

If people are not required to obey their religious bureaucracy, but are left to decide for themselves what actions further the work of the kingdom and which do not, will this not weaken the power and efficiency of the bureaucracy? Yes. Perhaps this was Jesus intent. He certainly had little use for the bureaucracy in place in the temple, though he did not attempt to destroy it. He superseded it by His kingdom.

Unfortunately, the church temporal constantly tends to create and retain structures which survive long after their usefulness has ended. The more offices that are generated by a bureaucratic structure, the more people there are whose personal interests are served by the preservation of the structure. Since those persons also tend to have primary access to the means of communication within the bureaucracy, their influence will tend to extend far beyond the strength of their numbers. Gradually the goal of the structure will change from building the kingdom, which was the original justification for the structure, to the perpetuation of the structure itself, regardless of spiritual consequences. The structure develops its own values and traditions which supersede the original intentions.

Thus it is that in large and aged church bodies, people tend to communicate within the Church institutionally rather than personally; church bodies engage in symbolic acts, in quasi-diplomatic gestures toward one another rather than permit their memberships to speak to one another. Each follows its own private agenda, insulated from the others. The Spirit resists that growing rigidity and privacy of the structures, together with the increasing irrelevance of their self-justifications and, by various devices (including internal division) prunes the Church of its deadwood and breaks it apart that new life may continue to be created.

There is a small area of electoral Saxony in Germany where, as far back as its history can be traced, a spirit of democratic thought flourished, centuries before it began to emerge elsewhere. Hegel was aware of it and in his Philosophy of History, gives credit to the German States, not the Greek City States, for the source of the idea of universal freedom. Among others, Martin Luther seems also to have absorbed that spirit and reflected it in his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

In the nineteenth century C.F.W. Walther brought that same general spirit of democracy to the heartland of America from that same territory, from Leipzig, Germany, and incorporated in the church constitution of the synod he founded the doctrine of the primacy of the local parish to make final decisions on matters of church operation. This principle, while considerably less attractive to church politicians than an episcopal approach to polity, both on grounds of efficiency and order, had the saving grace to keep his church body constantly protected from dictatorship. This held even when they had strong leaders. The people stood ready to assume responsibility, and to take power from those who were attempting systematically to collect it. So long as church leaders are responsible to the divergent parishes which make up the church body, they cannot consolidate and rule a religious empire for themselves.
Chapter 6

# Social Relationships

Although the previous chapters have focused on spiritual relationships with the Trinity, and the demonic perversions thereof which occur, the topic of social relationships has arisen in numerous contexts. This chapter will focus upon five significant subjects which involve social relationships: marriage, judgment of others, forgiveness of others, legal relationships, and citizenship.

## Marriage

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" He answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?" He said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery." The disciples said to him, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry." But he said to them, "Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it." (Mat 19:3-12)

This passage and its companion passage from Mark 10 contain virtually Jesus entire statement on the subject of the most intimate and pervasive social relationship into which human beings enter. Though the text is brief, it is remarkably enlightening. The principles about male/female marital relationships which follow from it include the following seven. The eighth comes from another setting in the gospels.

1) Marriage is a natural condition, necessary for the propagation of the species.

Humans are physiologically bi-sexual. Hence, a sexual ethic is necessary to describe appropriate behavior to achieve the natural ends which are a part of the entire biological order from the time of creation. The natural human relation is bi-sexual, not mono-sexual, as originally planned. God changed His mind after Adam was created lest "the Man" be lonely. Human bi-sexuality, like human creation, thus, came about as a special decision of God.

Some persons naturally, through some accident, by human intervention, or for some religious reason possess no desire or will to enter into any sort of bi-sexual relation. For many of them, having little or no sexual interest is as natural as sexual urges are for most other human beings. For some, the supervening power of a religious oath provides a stronger motivation than the natural sexual urge. Because this is the case, Jesus suggests that the celibate condition is appropriate for such as these; they ought to practice it. Marriage is not for everyone, nor does the fact that a human being is physically equipped by nature for marriage mandate its pursuit.

2) Marital activity generates a natural condition called "one flesh".

Jesus meant these words quite seriously and quite literally. Without taking them literally, they and their implications (which he points out) cannot be understood. The man and the woman who enter into the marital relationship consummate with one another a natural condition of one flesh by their psychological and physical union – a condition which persists throughout the marriage. Because they are now one flesh, no human document, no matter how legal, can do away with this condition. They are still naturally married, divorce decree or not.

Jewish marital customs differed considerably from modern western-world customs, which are largely determined by all sorts of legal niceties oriented, often ironically, to conditions for legal divorce: division of property, disposition of possible off-spring, etc.. As a result, matrimonial rituals have become essentially legal ceremonies that have a religious environment if they are conducted by a clergyman. The Jewish man and woman of Jesus day entered into their marriage in the context of the larger kosher Jewish community. The legal action bringing about the matrimonial union often was established by the parents in the form of a contract when the girl was a child and the man a youth. At least a decade later they began to live together when her body had developed to the point where she could bear children. It must also be noted that a male was a child until age thirty, whereas there was no comparable convention for females. She was an adult when she bore her first child, perhaps as young as fifteen or sixteen. Jewish marriage existed primarily to provide a formal way for a man to preserve his name and bloodline. The bloodline of the oldest son was more important than that of his younger brothers. Hence, the Levirate rule mandated that younger brothers in chronological order of birth, when available, marry his widow, so long as she was nubile, to preserve his name.

Property possession was restricted to males and carried forward from father to eldest son. When a married man died, his property was attached to the widow, so that if she had a son, the son was responsible for her welfare, inheriting the widow with the property. If she had no sons and was of marriageable age, whoever married her acquired the property, provided that he had first right of marriage by blood relation. A notable case of this is reported in the book of Ruth, and was the basis for her marriage to Boaz. Our Lord was the heir of his father, Joseph, and, upon his death, became responsible for his mother, whatever possessions his father had left, and any siblings which might have been minors. His word from the cross, designating John as his mother's guardian (John 19:26-27), was a legal act as well as the action of a concerned, loving son.

Understandably, then, among the Jews of Jesus time divorce actions were also male oriented. A man gave his wife a bill of divorcement; a wife did not divorce her husband. It was a simple matter for a man. Divorce separated a wife from her marital home. She had to return to her parents' home, if one existed, and hope for charity, for she had no legal rights there any longer. She brought nothing back with her except, perhaps, unwanted children, usually female. If her parents would not accept her in their home again, her prospects were singularly unattractive. She had to hope for the charity of other relatives or friends, to beg on the streets, or to pursue a career as a prostitute. The alternative was starvation. Jesus concern for the women of the streets stemmed, obviously, from his sensitivity to their hopeless economic condition and the general indifference of Jewish society to their predicament.

Finally, the mortality rate of women in childbirth was incredibly high. A pregnant woman truly entered into the valley of the shadow of death when she began to deliver. Many men had a series of young wives who followed one another into death, all hoping to give their husband a male heir. As a result, female life was not valued very highly.

Under those social conditions, unbelievably harsh for women, Jesus made his remarks that rejected the time-honored pronouncements of the very source of Jewish law himself, Moses. Jesus insisted that a woman is permanently attached to her husband by their common flesh. He has a responsibility to care for her because she is flesh of his flesh. He cannot simply discard her and go his celibate way; neither can he turn to another woman for his sexual satisfactions and legitimate their relation by a legal marriage.

3) "One flesh" is strictly a two-person, heterosexual relationship.

Jesus views on matrimony presuppose monogamy as the natural and normal marriage relationship. The gospels say nothing about the polygamy of the post-deluvian fathers. Perhaps polygamy was a temporary expedient, permitted and desired by God to repopulate the earth with human beings as soon as possible, but not intended as a regular custom. Yet, what should one make of the multiple marriages of Jesus royal ancestors, David and Solomon? Except for Nathan's condemnation of David's adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, there is no attitude toward polygamy expressed in the Old Testament. Ironically, of all of David's children, Bathsheba's son, Solomon, succeeded his father, David, as monarch.

4) Becoming one flesh with someone and maintaining an existing one flesh relationship to another person is contrary to nature, destroying the previous one-flesh relationship.

The destruction of a one flesh relationship by creating another one is called adultery (Luke 16:18). Sexual activity creates one flesh relationships. Where a one flesh relation previously existed between the male and female, the fleshly bond is reinforced. Where none did, one is created. Where one or both of the parties previously had a one flesh relation to another person, the current activity breaks the previous relation even as it creates a new, illicit relation.

These relationships can be symbolized in the following ways:

Figure 6a: One Flesh

Figure 6b: Adultery

5) Death of one or both marriage partners terminates the relationship of one flesh.

Three of the evangelists report the dramatic confrontation between Jesus and the Sadducees during the last week of Jesus public ministry (Matt. 22:23-33, Mark 12:18-27, Luke 20:34-38). They raise their favorite issue: whether or not there is an afterlife. They use their favorite technique, _reductio ad absurdum_ to show the absurdity of the position which is contradictory to their own. Their argument reduces to the following point: if there were such a thing as an afterlife, an impossible social situation would ensue there. Many people would have had marital relationships with two or more people. To whom would they be married in heaven? Jesus answers that there is no condition like marriage in heaven. The suggested problem never arises. People live like the angels, as non-sexual beings. Bisexuality exists in the temporal nature of things for the purpose of reproduction and the preservation of families. Because neither is necessary in heaven, there is no sexuality and, as a result, no need for marriage.

6) The absence of a one flesh relationship is a precondition for marriage.

Consequently, only under three conditions is a new marriage legitimate:

1) A virginal condition;

2) Adultery by one's former marriage mate;

3) Death of one's former marriage mate.

Only under these conditions can the absence of a one–flesh relationship to another human being exist.

A student of mine asked me after class when we were discussing this subject about the effect of rape on a one flesh relationship. She was concerned because as a young teenager she had been raped. Rape and forced incest, whatever other damage they may do, do not create a one flesh relation with the victim, but they do destroy any previously existing one flesh relationship of the attacker with anyone else. There is not a commitment by the person attacked to the activity and, further, one flesh extends beyond what is merely physical into the social level.

Thus, a wife who has been raped may have great difficulty reestablishing the healthy one-flesh relation she had with her husband. She will not forget the fleeting relation which was created against her will, no matter how strong her marital bonds are reformed afterwards. Her husband also, may feel a certain strangeness toward his wife upon occasion, through no fault of hers. It is a terrible thing which has to be worked on, patiently, tenderly, with great care to repair the damage. A loving husband needs to be understanding of her condition and to do what he can to help her achieve a marital relation which is satisfying and pleasing for her.

Rape will also often damage the marital attitude of an unmarried woman and traumatize her capacity to give herself to a future husband. The young student who spoke with me, obviously had been carrying her wound with her for some years. Apparently, no one had helped her, or she had been too ashamed or embarrassed to confide in someone else. She in her naive, touching way, had concluded that she could never marry because a one flesh relationship had been created with her by her rapist. We managed to clear her mind and conscience, to the great relief of a young man who was attempting to keep company with her.

The creation of, preservation of, and reinforcement of a one flesh relation extends beyond the simple physical behavior of intercourse. Marriage comprehends the social as well as the physical and, hopefully, extends also into the spiritual. As two people in every respect give themselves to one another, loving one another, caring for one another, ignoring their own desires for the satisfaction of the other's needs, and see in the other person's expressions from the heart the presence of God, they realize in their marriage what Jesus meant when he talked of one flesh.

Such a condition represents the greatest intimacy which can be attained by two human beings, as well as the most satisfying happiness this side of eternity. It is easily initiated, but with difficulty sustained. Both persons need constantly to work at it, on all levels. There are regularly distractions and attractions also on all levels to weaken and destroy it, not only by the rupture of adultery, but also by the atrophy of indifference. A marriage which is not exercised dies from neglect.

7) The matrimonial state is not dependent upon legal relationships determined by governments.

Such relationships have different functions. Similarly, a writ of divorce does not sever a marital bond. At best, it simply witnesses a state of affairs which has ceased to exist. It terminates no natural condition. Obviously, then, legal marriages that disregard a one–flesh relationship remaining from a prior marriage are adulterous. Persons may separate from one another and retain their one flesh relation. So long as they do not pursue new relationships, their condition, while not as satisfactory as a happy marriage, is tolerable, resembling the condition of those who are acceptably single. After a time, the marriage will wither up from neglect.

The fact that a human law can neither create nor terminate a marriage does not free people of God to ignore the manner by which the society in which they live publically recognizes and protects the marital state. One who truly cares for a spouse will wish all the protections which the law provides for that spouse and any children who may come of that marriage.

8) In a dramatic word early in his ministry, Jesus announced that lust is adulterous (Matt. 5:27-32).

Not to have engaged in adulterous behavior is not enough to preserve one flesh. Thinking about and desiring some person not one's spouse also damages the marital relationship. It does not, fortunately, create one flesh with another person. That other person has not been aware of or participated in such mental activity. As a result, though human beings may find the leers and suggestive looks of another irritating or repulsive, they need not worry about unsuspected or undesired one flesh relationships suddenly thrust upon them as accomplished conditions, generated by the evil thoughts of someone else.

If, on the other hand, they themselves lust after persons not their own spouse, they are beginning to tear apart the fleshly bond of their marriage. It estranges them. If the spouse is aware of those feelings, a further barrier begins to develop as the spouse feels embarrassed, irritated, or insulted by the spousal mental preference of another person. In this manner prurient interests weaken the marital bond.

Lust originates on the spiritual level of the psyche and manifests itself on the social level to the individual's consciousness. It need not manifest itself on the physical level as overt behavior to be adulterous. Such urges rise into the conscious mind of most healthy normal human beings as one variety of demonic urge. Human beings are not responsible for the thoughts that enter their consciousness; they are responsible if they accept them, dwell upon them, and act upon them. Martin Luther once said that one is not responsible for the birds that fly overhead; he is responsible if he lets them build a nest in his hair.

The principles of atrophy and expansion apply also to the one-flesh relation. Marriage must be exercised to remain strong. During the course of a long marriage the social level becomes increasingly important as sexual activity becomes less and less significant. Expressions of affection, supportive attitudes, loving thoughts, surprise gifts and thoughtful deeds sustain the bond. Where there is indifference, where there is blatant mutual hostility, the one flesh atrophies or tears. At what point one flesh no longer exists though there is no adulterous activity, lies beyond human certainty.

Where adultery has taken place, one flesh can be reinstituted between the marital parties by reinstituting the physical relationship between them. Considerable activity needs also to occur on the social and spiritual levels to heal the breech, wherever there has been damage, in order that complete openness, trust and confidence can be restored.

One of the one-flesh relationships which deserves special noting is that between a child of God and someone who is not. The two individuals function not only with different, but also with opposed motivations. The one serves God; the other serves the devil. They are still one flesh, bound every bit as close to, if not closer than, Siamese twins. On the other hand, inevitable spiritual tensions will develop. A child of God naturally gives; a pagan spouse naturally takes.

At the same time, to the good fortune of the spouse who is not a child of God, God is as near to him or her as the spouse with whom the relation of one flesh is maintained. The quiet witness to the Spirit's presence may both enrich the marriage and have a converting effect upon the unregenerate marriage partner.

People can more easily destroy their marriage than sustain it. On any or all three levels a marital partner can be abused as well as cherished. On the physical level, not only periodic unfaithfulness, but also physical abuse, generating fear of physical harm or death, or showing indifference to a spouse and a spouse's needs, weaken and destroy the marriage.

On the social level, verbal abuse, public humiliation, expression of envy, jealousy, demeaning treatment, weaken it further. On the spiritual level, seeking to prevent the exercise of faith, hating the spouse, deliberately acting in ways offensive to God, help to make the marriage intolerable and, unless checked, destroy it. Perverted forms of marital behavior may also occur: incest, bestiality, sodomy, necromancy and other varieties of perversion, some of them seeking to be legitimated as alternatives to heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

The birth of children can complicate a marriage or enrich it. Where there is incompatibility on the spiritual level, the birth of a child brings into focus the spiritual problem of the marriage, for the spiritual welfare of the children of the marriage sooner or later must be addressed. Where such issues are not addressed or are deferred, the singleness of flesh in the matrimonial relationship is sorely tested and often torn, resulting sometimes in very hostile feelings, culminating in legal divorce.

Where marriage binds children of God together, manifold opportunities exist to reinforce one another's love for God by acts of service to, expressions of love for, prayers for, support of, confession to, and absolution of one another. Where, in addition, service to and affection for children of the marriage are interwoven, the marital relationship attains a richness of texture exceeded only by the love of Jesus Christ for his bride, the Church.

## Judgment of Others

Few socially disruptive activities exceed gossip and other judgmental behaviors in their corrosive effect upon personal relationships. Criticizing others seems to have been a common Jewish fault. It seems to be a common fault in all legalistic societies. It was among the Romans. Jesus frequently found himself judged by the religious leaders of his people; he had a great deal to say about judging. His solution to the judgmental habit was simple: Don't judge others, ever! Unfortunately, the pronouncement is not so easily followed.

The subject of judgment comprehends the entire jurisprudential area of human organized society. The Jewish judicial system of Jesus time represented the culmination of many centuries of social existence under a complex body of laws, precedents, and opinions that had been shaped by a Jewish experience under many foreign governments, some of them incompatible with and most of them hostile to the Jewish way of life. In opposition to the Jewish legal tradition which had developed to reduce social conflict, Jesus announced that in the kingdom of heaven there was to be no judging one another to resolve problems. Differences between and among children of God would be settled by means other than laws, judges, and penalties.

The act of judging presupposes at least three conditions:

1) That the judge's perspective is superior to that of the person judged;

2) That accurate and adequate evidence can be gathered on the basis of which a just decision can be rendered;

3) That prescriptive accuracy can be attained, i.e., that the situation can be justly resolved.

The first presupposition is contradicted by Jesus response to his second temptation. No man is superior to another by nature or by divine command. All are equal in the sight of God, equally evil by nature. By the grace of the Spirit they fall into two groups, children of God and those who are not. However, no special ability or grace has been conferred upon children of God that they should rule either the pagan world or one another. As already described, they are called into the kingdom by God to serve, not to rule others.

The second presupposition is no less erroneous. Human beings are unable to gather adequate evidence about one another to judge one another. They have access only to the physical nature of their fellow human beings. They have access to their own physical and social nature and, to some extent, their spiritual nature, particularly if they are children of God and are sufficiently mature to compare their divine with their demonic motivations. They do not have direct access to the social or spiritual natures of their fellow men. At best, they can infer something from another's overt behavior about that person's hidden levels of reality by comparison with their own behavior and its internal preconditions.

Human beings do not know the thoughts of other human beings unless those thoughts are expressed. They do not know another's motivations. Small children are reasonably transparent in their behavior. Most of their psyche is exhibited. Their thought processes are simple, their desires uncomplicated, their moods transparent. We usually have some idea about them from which we can reach a reasonably just judgment. As they mature, however, they retreat increasingly into themselves and become less transparent. As adults they are like icebergs in that they are largely hidden from the observation of others. They show only what they wish to show of themselves and for the most part this is beyond the accurate assessment of others.

Jesus judged others. In fact, toward the end of his ministry he frequently criticized others and was rather harsh in his use of pejorative names. By what right did he do that? As the Son of God he was able to read people's minds and to probe the depths of their unconscious motivations. Consequently he could and did have accurate and complete evidence on the basis of which to judge them. His judgments tended to be directed to the social or spiritual levels of the psyche of others. The gospel writers make this quite clear. "He knew what they were thinking." "You obey your father Beelzebub." "You are dead within. You are like sepulchers, beautiful on the outside, but with dead men's bones inside," etc. He must have found it frightfully frustrating to deal with people whose minds and hearts were so transparent to him, whose lies he could detect and whose motivations, hidden often from themselves, he could clearly discern.

The third presupposition fails for the same reasons as the second. If human beings cannot gather accurate psychological evidence about one another, they cannot accurately prescribe what would be in the best interests of one another or of human society as a whole. Each human being can judge only one person with reasonable accuracy: that person himself or herself. Jesus commended such activity to his friends: Judge yourself! Don't judge others! You are like blind men trying to lead one another (Luke 6:39-42).

Human beings sometimes try to judge others by comparing them to themselves. They tend to err in two directions. Either they compare another's worst apparent aspects with their own best characteristics or they compare their own worst characteristics, those that emanate from the demonic side of their nature, with the best evident behavior of others. In the former case the situation can be further aggravated by attributing the worst possible thoughts and motivations to explain the actions of others. The other person, inevitably, has to look evil.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a famous short story, "Young Goodman Brown", that illustrates this point. Young Mr. Brown, unknowingly, entered into league with the devil. From that time on, he was able clearly to see the devil at work in the hearts of the fellow Christians of his New England religious community. But he could not see God at work in their hearts. He spent the rest of his life lonely and bitter, convinced that he alone had escaped service to the devil.

If a person is honest with himself and is capable of accurate self examination, he cannot help but find himself inferior to most other human beings, for he knows the depths of his own depravity and compares it with the goodness of the behavior of others. He cannot help but become depressed when he judges. To him Jesus also was speaking when he forbade judging, because to judge honestly is to condemn.

There is a further reason not to judge. The principle of divine justice dictates that God judge individuals as they judge one another (Matt. 7:1-5). Consequently, if individuals sit in judgment on others and apply laws to them, God will also sit in judgment on the self appointed judges, applying His law, holding them strictly accountable instead of attributing the righteousness of His Son to them. If they put the best construction on the action of others, God will act understandingly about them. As Jesus taught his disciples by the Lord's Prayer, if they forgive others, they may ask the same treatment from God.

Judgment, then, if it is to occur in the kingdom of heaven, can at best be self criticism. Each spiritually active child of God regularly engages in self-examination, judging not only actions but attitudes, conceptions, procedures, and motivations. Further, such a child thereafter institutes reform, so that service to God will constantly improve. Of necessity, such activity must occur each day. Jesus dramatically pointed to this need for self-examination in the disputed passage in John's gospel (John 8:2-11) where he advised those who surrounded the guilty woman taken in the act of adultery: "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone." Obviously, no one could.

Conflicts are inevitable in the kingdom of God on this side of eternity. How are they to be resolved if the judicial method of conflict resolution is not to be employed? Jesus answer lies in the famous Matthew 18 passage (vv. 15-35). The method is intended only to reconcile differences between two or more people in the kingdom, not as a general method to be used indiscriminately among all human beings.

Jesus suggests that there are three stages of conciliatory activity which are reached in an unresolved conflict whose participants are guided by God to desire a resolution of the issue. The first is one-on-one private conversation. If that should fail to resolve the issue, one or more helpful parties may be made part of the dialogue. Finally, the Church itself may have to be invoked to provide a final setting for resolution.

**Stage One** : The injured party is counseled by Jesus to seek out the injuring party. This has several reasons to commend it. The injuring party may be unaware of the injury or its extent. If deliberate, the motivation which led to the injuring will likely persist for a time to prevent any feelings of guilt. When feelings of guilt occur and are followed by remorse, these feelings may inhibit reconciliating action because of shame. So the matter will tend to persist and fester if left to the guilty party to resolve it.

On the other hand, the injured party comes to the matter in all innocence and is in a position likely to attract sympathy, then remorse. If the injured party comes seeking recompense or revenge, potential reconciliation gets converted into confrontation, and the situation becomes legal and judgmental as each seeks what he thinks is rightly his due.

Essential for the success of the first stage is an openness on both sides to listen to one another and a willingness to be persuaded to some commonly acceptable solution to the problem. A concern for one another's welfare rather than for vindication requires servanthood of the highest order.

In personal conflicts outside the kingdom, the goal aimed at is the attainment of just desserts. In the kingdom, the goal is to free the people of God so that they more easily and successfully can perform their privilege of proclaiming the gospel. The essential question at stage one, consequently, is this: How is the work of the kingdom being impeded by our conflict and how may it be resolved that the work can resume? Often, when stage one is successfully concluded, the work of the kingdom is not only resumed, but also enhanced, and those who have resolved their differences attain a closer relation than before.

Regardless of the stage, essential to its success is the presence of the Holy Spirit, who is invoked by prayer that he may enlighten the participants by the word of God. Stage one terminates either when the problem has been successfully resolved, the dispute remaining confidential between the two parties, or when one of the parties becomes indifferent to the concerns of the other or is unwilling to continue attempting to resolve the matter.

For it to succeed, the first stage must remain totally private. As soon as another is privy to the matter, a natural urge to protect their reputations in the eyes of the uninvolved spectator causes the two participants to compete for support. If the injuring party becomes increasing self-protective and begins to close off himself or herself from further open exchange, step two may become necessary in order to reopen the situation for resolution.

**Stage Two:** One or two additional persons are made party to the matter. They ought to be persons who are wise, open, informed, rich in spiritual life, and non-partisan. Stage two is not introduced to "stack the deck" against the offending party to force him or her to yield. Nor do such witnesses become parties to the matter to help the injured party to collect evidence or doctor the evidence so as to make a case for Stage Three. Stage Two is not its preliminary; it is itself a main event.

Impartial witnesses, apart from the strength which their prayer and wisdom contribute to the proceedings, have a quasi-juridicial function. As uninvolved spectators they can give an impartial opinion about the matter, uncolored by the emotions of personal involvement which affect the two participants. They may hear the evidence and advise the participants. They may urge the one or the other to yield on a point. They may suggest alternative ways which have not previously been addressed to resolve the matter. However, they do not serve as judge or jury. Their function is simply to attempt to bring the matter to a successful conclusion or, if not, at a later time, to present information to the larger spiritual community about matters which have transpired so that the congregation may reach a conclusion about the matter and bring it to closure. Stage Two, like the previous stage, may be quite protracted.

Sometimes a different alternative is proposed rather than what Jesus suggested. Each side proposes to bring an additional person to the conversation. This procedure creates a quite different state of affairs, for each brings a partisan supporter who, if carefully chosen, will back the person who chose him or her. As a result, the situation quickly deteriorates from reconciliatory to activity which is confrontational, as each side both attacks the other side and defends itself.

Unfortunately, even within the church, this second stage is sometimes mistakenly perverted by selecting several partisan supporters who favor the injured party with the intent that the sheer force of numbers wear down resistance and achieve a capitulation by intimidation.

The selection of the two or three who are added to the effort at reconciliation is, under the best of circumstances, fraught with the danger of failure. The confidence of the injuring party is crucial to their selection. Regardless of the choice, the intention remains the same, that the conflict be resolved and that unity be restored where at present there is division.

The restoration of unity goes far beyond the acknowledgment by the guilty party of his guilt, appropriate restitution, where necessary, and forgiveness by the injured party. That simply achieves a just state of affairs. It does not reunite the parties. Hence, each must seek to recover a unity of trust and confidence in one another which has been destroyed. Once again, this requires more than simply being satisfied with what has been achieved. When conflict resolution has been achieved in the fullest measure, there is often a bond among the participants stronger than before. They are more aware of one another than before, and they are more active in loving and caring for one another than before the conflict. That sort of reconciliation in many respects resembles the healthy healing of a broken bone. Afterwards it is stronger than the surrounding tissue.

**Stage Three:** The matter becomes public; it is brought to the attention of the fellow members of the kingdom closely related in kingdom work. The prayers and admonitions of the Church are brought to bear upon the situation as a sort of last ditch effort to resolve the matter. Should it fail, Jesus says, "... let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." (v. 17). These words probably sounded like pejorative terms to Jesus Jewish listeners. Don't have anything more to do with him! Cast him out!

Heathen are people outside the spiritual community. Tax collectors were people from the ethnic community who were social outcasts. Both had in common the need for God's forgiveness. Therefore, both were prospects for the evangelical activity of the church. Stage Three terminates with the cautious conclusion that the former brother in the faith no longer is spiritually alive. He cannot be treated as though he were. It is not good for his eternal welfare. He needs to be converted once again and restored to life. A pamphlet which I once used in a parish identified excommunication in its title as another way to initiate evangelism procedures.

When one approaches people as children of God and potential children of God, how one thinks of them changes from when one thinks of them as friends or enemies; or, our church, other churches, and those going to hell. I once had an evangelism team which, surprisingly, delighted in pressing doorbells. About once every quarter we canvassed a different area near our church. Other times we were following up on prospects acquired through educational agencies, welcome wagon lists, Sunday visitors, and the like. When we returned from canvassing we reported on our "hot prospects" we had found. A "hot prospect" was anyone who had no apparent church connection and who greeted a visit with great hostility. Such people, so far as we could tell, were in the service of the devil. So, they were prospects.

We knew their names, having gotten them from the voters lists of the community. We sent them invitation cards, schedules for special services in Lent, at Easter and Christmas. We invited them for parish open houses. Sometimes we just sent a "Hope you are doing all right" kind of note, signed by "Your friends at _____ Lutheran Church". If they celebrated a wedding, had a death in the family, or some similar event that we knew about, we sent appropriate cards. Everything was sent first class. No mass mailings. Sometimes we made a phone call.

We got some angry letters in response. We got a few people who came to our church just to find out who we were, who were spending so much postage on them. Some kept coming. The church office received an anguished phone call one day from a middle aged woman who tearfully begged that we stop sending cards because her husband was so angry with her – he suspected her of collusion with us – that he was threatening divorce. We stopped, after sending him a personal registered letter informing him that his wife had nothing to do with our mail to them, that Jesus Christ was behind it all and we would keep on thinking about him and praying for him even though he wouldn't get any more mail from us.

In another situation involving our mailings to "prospects", an elderly widow who had begun to attend our services after some initial opposition, informed me one day that she was planning to take instruction for membership. The following Saturday evening fumes leaking from her power mower caused a freak gasoline explosion in her garage, which was attached to her house, engulfed her home in flames, and covered her with burns over most of her body. She lingered in intensive care for a week, died professing her faith; we accompanied her to her grave with joy that she was now with her Lord. One never knows where and how the Spirit will prevail – even with former members.

Matters of church discipline frequently require extended and careful treatment. Human beings, including children of God, tend not to be patient. Injured parties run short on willingness to continue to discuss matters. There are no patterns to the process. Each case is different. Since we cannot look into one another's heart, we do not know whether progress is being made. Quick solutions seldom happen in the Church; when they occur, their author usually is God. Recognizing their own frail humanity, participants in such activity need openness, abundant charity, and patience to persist, hoping always for a peaceful resolution of the issues.

This procedure outlined by Jesus cannot be standardized. He did not give it as a law for the Church. It dare never be used impersonally or as a subterfuge for gathering evidence for an ecclesiastical trial. The eternal destiny of all participants is involved in the determinations that are made. How people are treated, what is said, what is decided – all affect the attitudes of the participants toward the Church, and beyond the Church, toward God, and ultimately the attitude God will take toward all the participants. All who become involved in the process, not just the accused wrongdoer, fall under the scrutiny of God.

Each church body of some historical duration has its horror stories of how people once upon a time were treated because they came into conflict with others, with church leaders or the organizational church itself. Hostilities leave deep scars which seldom heal. The proliferation of denominations throughout Christendom testifies to the failure of the organized church to achieve reconciliation with itself. Casual conversations in social situations sometimes move to the topic of personal religious membership and the comment, surprisingly often, is made, "I was a _____ when I was a child, but the pastor threw my dad out of the church and we never went back." The hurt is still there in the remark, decades later.

Jesus concludes his discussion of conflict resolution in the church with the admonition that decisions made by the Church on earth are binding in heaven – another reason for great caution in the use of this procedure. The Kingdom of Heaven cannot be indifferent to internal tensions among its members. It cannot also at the same time casually permit itself to bind God to a decision which is indifferent to personal spiritual welfare.

Unfortunately, the procedure recommended by Jesus is frequently preempted by a less formal procedure, gossip. Gossip begins by someone telling someone else of an injury suffered from a fellow member. The incriminated injurer is tried and convicted in a discussion from which he or she is carefully excluded, so no defense is possible. The matter is shared with others. Positions are taken, pro and con, no responsible person monitoring the process for accuracy and adequacy. Conclusions are reached informally, reinforced by powerful rhetoric, and demands are made to the church to enforce this principle of law or that. Divisions occur within the parish. If aggravated, the parish may even split. In every respect, such a procedure contradicts everything that would heal and strengthen the Church. The saints of the Church build it; the gossips undermine and fracture it.

The chapter thus far has concerned itself exclusively with social relationships in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is not, unfortunately, independent of the kingdoms of the earth. Some formal method is necessary for interpersonal, harmonious interactions between children of God and those who are not. The art of statecraft (about which more later) has been developed to regulate human political activity and the art of jurisprudence has emerged from it as a man-made convention for the resolution of human conflicts. The blessing of God rests upon both, for they protect the sheep of the kingdom from the wolves of the world. At the same time, neither statecraft nor human jurisprudence have a legitimate function in the kingdom where all are sheep.

This distinction between the use of human justice and methods of spiritual reconciliation needs to be carefully preserved lest the former become a substitute for the latter. When it does, the Church slowly strangles itself in a net of human legislation and litigation, frittering away its limited resources on confrontations with itself.

## Forgiveness of Others

Jesus presents readiness to forgive as the appropriate posture for children of God in situations of social tension. Of the three primary problem areas involving inter-personal relations, marriage is difficult to sustain over the long run; the ability to resist criticizing others and to resolve conflicts between members of the church is more difficult, because they do not necessarily have an underlying mutual human affection underlying them, to which appeal can be made; but most difficult of all, I think, is to be ready at all times to forgive others, particularly those who are not children of God, whatever they may do to us.

Readiness to forgive requires personal characteristics which are not common, as, for instance, the ability to tolerate inequity without complaint. Such tolerance is particularly difficult to acquire and to sustain at the present time in our country when the national climate has focused most powerfully upon the rights of individuals and the achievement of equitable treatment for disparate minority groups. To suggest that one might well tolerate inequity for the sake of the gospel flies in the face of current social dogma.

Furthermore, of the three levels of reality that have given this book focus, the third, the spiritual, is the most important, the second, the social, is the next important, and the physical, the least important. As a matter of fact, it exists for the sake of the second and the third. The age in which we live, however, has made the reverse order popular. Where it is popularly challenged, the challenge extends only to this extent that the social level is made the primary level. The spiritual level is either denied or taken for granted as irrelevant. As a consequence, religion often subtly becomes humanistic as it reduces its focus to individuals, their needs and how they feel about their life, ignoring the complex network of Trinitarian interaction with the soul which makes care for a neighbor an act of God. Sympathy becomes, instead of the motivating force for action, a curious cross between morality and spirituality, blurring the motivational distinction between the demonic and the divine. The goal of the church and all "right thinking people" becomes making the earthly world a better place in which to live, apart from considerations of whether or not that would bring people to their Lord.

Sentimentality can very easily replace the very careful distinction our Lord made between service to the needs of all and the affection of children of God for one another. The determination of what specific service one can render another on the physical or social level in order to improve that person's spiritual condition requires thought and careful planning. Hearing someone's claim of need and responding to it emotionally without any thought of consequences requires no thought at all. The whole event is largely organic. Much of what passes for spiritual service to others today functions largely on this level. The situation is exacerbated by the popular custom of orchestrated campaigns for perceived needs by self-identified victims of inequity in order to provoke sympathy or to generate fear of the consequences if there is no recompense. In such a heated atmosphere little good is done. Such an atmosphere prevailed at the public trial of our Lord, and contributed to Pilate's final capitulation to the mob.

Furthermore, serving the needs of others can easily be converted to making this a better world in which to live. Thus, very subtly, the primacy of the spiritual level becomes subordinated to the primacy of the physical. Instead of people becoming the new creation of God as work is done in the kingdom of God, the world becomes the new creation of men as they attempt to improve it for habitation as long as possible. In this difficult and confused context in which we are living today, the people of God still need to improve their capacity to forgive.

In order better to understand what is involved in forgiving as a child of God, we need to conceive the situation more broadly than that simple second level, one on one relation. Our prior treatment of the principles of divine justice reminds us that how we treat one another not only flows from the motivations on which we act from our respective hearts, but also affects how God responds to what we do to one another.

The general formula for divine response which relates to these sorts of situations, the Principle of Proportionality, has somewhat the following form:

God →The individual Child of God

as

That Individual → Other Individuals

God treats His children as they treat other human beings. This principle has at least three general applications. The first focuses upon freedom: since God is always caring for the needs of his children, they are free to serve the needs of others to the extent they are able, while God cares for their own needs: They care for others; God cares for them.

The second application involves failure. If one fails to care for the needs of others, God will treat one accordingly: They fail to care for others; God fails to care for them.

The third involves generosity. If one cares abundantly for the needs of others, God will care abundantly for that one. They care abundantly; God provides abundantly. For the expression "care for" we can substitute the expression "forgive". When we do, we can see what, on a cosmic level, forgiving is all about.

A situation involving wrong, done by one to another, requires action by the person wronged in order to right the situation. In secular life, such a situation requires action to get justice. The person wronged, or a representative of that person, reports the wrongdoer to the authorities. They take charge of the matter to see that justice is done.

The situation of a child of God is far different. When a wrong is done, that wrong is evidence that the wrongdoer has a spiritual problem. By virtue of the fact that the victim is the object of the wrong, he or she thereby incurs responsibility to assist the wrongdoer to resolve the spiritual problem. How he or she deals with the wrongdoer and his or her problem affects not only the wrongdoer's relation to God, but also the victim's. To forgive requires setting aside the standard principles of compensatory justice in order to achieve a greater spiritual good. It is not easy to do that or to be willing to do that.

Such a life of forgiveness requires a personality which is open to new opportunities for service, is sensitive to people's needs, is able to put personal feelings aside, and is willing to sacrifice personal advantage for the spiritual welfare of others. These characteristics are difficult to acquire. In prior chapters three levels of psychic reality have been identified: the physical, the social, and the spiritual. As we have pointed out a number of times, the most important of these is the spiritual; the least important is the physical. In interpersonal relationships, the physical welfare of the server is less important to him than the spiritual welfare of another whom he serves.

Forgiveness requires as a prerequisite a readiness to tolerate inequity for the longer range concerns of the gospel. Jesus himself gave an example of this when as a boy of twelve (Luke 2:49-51) he went down to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents even though as the Son of God he was superior to them. He bore the abuse of the Jewish religious leaders and eventual torture and crucifixion for long range goals affecting the destiny of all men. In this respect he is a bigger-than-life model for all who reside in the kingdom of heaven.

A life which is always ready to forgive produces behavior different from customary human behavior, a sort of behavior which often seems strange or even foolish to those who do not understand. It is summarized thusly:

" _But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them._

" _If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful._

" _Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you." (Luke 6:27-38)_

A number of principles follow from this passage.

1) Forgiveness is non-discriminatory.

The Jewish people had a great deal of difficulty with ethnic and race relationships. Supremely conscious that they were the chosen people of God and that they bore the seed of Abraham, from which the Messiah would come, they kept themselves separate from the other people of the world. The more they suffered and the more they were humiliated as a people, the more they clung to that distinction.

They were also very sensitive about ethnic purity. The host of people of mixed Jewish and Gentile blood living between Galilee and Judea further aroused the separatistic urges of the native Jewish people, urges of hostility which were reciprocated by the Samaritans. As Jerusalem became increasingly an international city hosting the various religious festivals of the year with the accompanying sacrifices (which could be made only at Jerusalem) the pride of the local Judean ethnics increased immeasurably as more and more aliens came, who, though they were Jews, often had strange ways and languages and were tolerated, but made to feel inferior.

The relationship between the Jewish people and the Romans was, at best, diplomatically formal. The Jews hated their alien conquerors, resented their Hellenistic customs, and both hated and feared the possible imposition of Roman polytheism and emperor worship upon them. Many of their number had died protecting the temple from Gentile pollution. On the one hand they maintained a Court of the Gentiles, into which any gentile could come to worship. On the other, the inner precincts were reserved exclusively for Jewish men and the priests. Gentiles were not allowed. At the same time the Romans despised Jews, considering them the most inferior of people.

In the context of those social problems, which were to some extent unique to the Jewish people, the typically human discriminations between friends and enemies and between ourselves and others, divisions common to all groups of people, regardless of their ethnic origin, became incredibly powerful. Jesus call in the passage cited above for enemies to be treated as one would treat one's friends required a radical change of attitude in the hearts of his hearers, even more radical than the need in our nation today to overcome racial attitudes. He reported that from the divine perspective, the principle of reciprocity would govern interpersonal behaviors: God would treat them as they treated others, including the Romans and the Samaritans. The same principle prevails over our attitudes today.

Since all people have needs, all are indiscriminately to be the objects of the service of children of God. In fact, since enemies and those who act maliciously toward a child of God are in greater need of help than those who are kind, they may well have to get greater care and attention.

Frequently the sort of behavior for which Jesus calls goes contrary to our personal inclination, for human inclination is naturally positive toward those who are friendly and negative toward those who are hostile. He focuses attention, not upon one's own personal reaction to others' behavior, but upon their need, thereby activating the sympathetic motivations which flow richly from the hearts of children of God.

Jesus points out that social action, the basis for which is simply natural inclinations, loving friends and hating enemies, has no ethical value. Only if one overlooks or ignores personal feelings of hostility to forgive and care for others in their time of need, going beyond what is traditionally acceptable, does one reach the level of the ethical. Where children of God follow such a life of forgiving others, they frequently find themselves caring for the unloved and the unlovable, even as Jesus himself did.

Racial considerations or ethnic loyalties sometimes intruded then as they do today to make the work of the kingdom difficult. Jewish/Samaritan hostilities sometimes exhibited themselves in the gospel stories. Jews looked down upon Samaritans because they were the descendants of Jews left behind in the Babylonian captivity, who had intermarried with Gentiles and, as a result, were an "unclean" people to the Jews. Luke 9:52-55 details an event of Samaritan inhospitality which provoked in James and John such strong feeling of racial hatred that they were ready to use the powers Jesus had given them as disciples to call down fire from heaven to destroy them. Jesus had to remind them that this was not their purpose as sons of God. He was sent to the world, not to condemn it, but to redeem it; the kingdom also would exist, not to condemn the world or to reform it, but to gather the sons of God. As a result, every action had but one test: how much it contributed to the growth of the kingdom of God.

2) Forgiveness serves, among other goals, to rehabilitate criminals.

Jesus uses the example of a common thief to illustrate his approach to the problem of petty crime. Suppose that a thief steals someone's coat. Jesus suggests that inquiry be made as to other needs the thief may have. Jesus example and his approach to it suggests that one needs to go beyond the sheer physical level of action and the administration of criminal justice to deal successfully with the problems of criminality. Why did the criminal do what he did? What is his inner motivation? How can he be helped? Unlike common morality which focuses upon restitution to the victim and punishment for the criminal, Jesus focuses upon the criminal as a human being whose overt act is symptomatic of his need for help, a need which extends even to his very heart, for he knows no way of self preservation other than by taking what is not his own.

Mohandas Gandhi was very impressed with this passage and made such behavior toward thieves a law for those following the non-violent way of life, insisting on it even to the extent of refusing himself to testify in a court against a thief ( _Indian Home Rule_ , Chapter XVI). Unfortunately for Gandhi's intention, sometimes the best long range interests of an habitual thief are better served by courtroom testimony and confinement for purposes of civic safety and criminal rehabilitation.

In this passage Jesus suggests the idea of rehabilitation, the winning of a criminal from his evil ways. In his discussion of the last judgment, not by coincidence, I think, Jesus mentioned visiting persons in prison as one of the acts he saw that could be done from love for himself (Matt. 25:39). Being visited in prison can be a very embarrassing experience. It can also be a very comforting experience if handled diplomatically. It may also be a very subtle way of saying, "I believe you are innocent even though the law found you guilty."

I have some dear friends who travel several hundred miles almost every month to visit their former pastor, convicted some years ago of killing his wife. They steadfastly proclaim their belief in his innocence, not only by what they say, but by that monthly journey.

A visit may also convey another message. It may say, "Even though you are guilty of a terrible crime, I forgive you and care that you fare well while you are imprisoned." Some recent laws, providing that after someone has been found guilty of murder, but before sentencing takes place, relatives of victims may be afforded opportunity to testify about the effect of the murder upon them and the sort of punishment they deem appropriate, while it may give the survivors an opportunity to vent their feelings, also provides them an opportunity to express demonic feelings of hatred and desires for revenge. They have little to contribute to help a just sentence to be determined. The opportunity to testify, more likely than not, also renders more difficult the resolution of the personal problems generated by the crime. Those who have done wrong need forgiveness; those who have suffered wrong need help to forgive, not verbally to retaliate.

The continuing failure of our penal system to reduce and prevent criminal activity, brings the topic of rehabilitation as opposed to sheer incarceration to the fore once again and provides children of God an opportunity, not simply to visit persons in prison, but to devise new ways to deal in a non-penal manner with those who have committed crimes and to rehabilitate others while and after they are incarcerated.

Rehabilitation is but one of the ways the children of God can help to reconcile the world to God. The ministry of reconciliation requires impartial activity. Periodically, persons in the organized church begin to get the idea that the church has a crusader function, to correct this state of affairs or that, by whatever means necessary, regardless of its ethical character. The church literally embarked a millennium ago upon a number of crusades which devoted money and manpower to the ultimately fruitless task of freeing the Holy Land from Islamic control. Today there are crusades of another sort, even as there have been in the intervening centuries, for other goals. Regardless of the intent, every crusade is incompatible with the ministry of reconciliation, because, by its very nature a crusade is divisive, pitting one force against another. It identifies one group as friend, another as foe, and fights against the foe. Regardless of the outcome, the foe becomes hostile or is rendered more hostile to the ministry of the gospel by the activity.

Regardless of the cause, the children of God have to keep themselves both non-partisan and active, or as Jesus put it in his high priestly prayer, "in the world, but not of the world". Children of God can never identify anyone as the "enemy", except as such identification identifies such a person as requiring extra love and concern. Consequently, children of God must be impartial, as much as they can, so their range of persons to serve is not limited; and they must be active to serve the needs of those persons to the extent that they can.

3) Forgiveness remits debts.

The Jewish people engaged in international trade at the time of Jesus even as many of them do today. The world of commerce generates indebtedness as individuals and companies trade with one another. Debtors are expected to pay their financial obligations. Jesus suggested that on the personal level, as opposed to the commercial level, a procedure be followed guaranteed to frustrate any good businessman: Don't call in your debts! As God has forgiven you, forgive your brother his debts. There is a correlative principle implicit here, however, which leaves the economic position of the child of God less vulnerable to abuse by someone without principle: Pay your own debts!

If in the Church each member is determined to pay his personal debts when they are incurred, open remission of debt can succeed as a general policy, for it becomes necessary to invoke it only in the case of a debtor in great economic need. If he is a child of God, in better times he will still repay it even though it has been remitted.

This principle has implications also for social welfare legislation. If people do not look upon their monetary resources as their own, but as resources from God to satisfy need, social welfare legislation will often not be needed, or if needed, will not be resisted by those who will be taxed. In the former case, those in need will be taken care of by the private sector. In the latter, assuming the legislation is equitable, public revenues will take care of what the private sector cannot finance.

Should thieves and embezzlers be tolerated and excused from penalty or the need to make restitution? No. It is not in their spiritual best interests or that of others who may be attracted to their easy life of preying upon the assets of others. One who has engaged in criminal activity has serious personal and social problems which either evidence that that person is not a child of God, or, if he or she is, that the animating spiritual life is weak or dying and needs restoration and strengthening.

On the other hand, children of God are not only servants of one another, but also stewards of the resources which God has put at their disposal. God expects a return on His investment. Such a return, however, is impossible, as Jesus himself indicated, without investment, either in profit-making industry or in the form of an interest bearing loan. Consequently, there are two demands placed upon a child of God: to maximize the size of the resources at his disposal that he may have to give to needy people, and to distribute the resources regularly in the wisest manner without depleting them. He is, thus, in many respects, like a banker.

Being a child of God brings with it heavy responsibilities. It is not the simple, easy life often pictured in popular religion. The more talent one is given by God, the more the resources available, and the more the opportunities, the greater an individual is exercised by the Holy Spirit to expand the enterprise, and the more that person is held accountable.

On a corporate level, a parish has a parallel challenge, to function with the resources available to it and the opportunities where it is, to gather in and activate as many children of God as possible and to spread its beneficent influence as widely as it can. It dare not function in such a way that where it has been resembles a battlefield, littered with casualties of the "holy wars" that were fought there. Even under the best of circumstances there will be skirmishes. The devil will not ignore an active parish. But if the members and the parish are careful, such minor divisions will not lead to the wholesale slaughter of parish warfare.

4) Forgiveness is not aggressive.

One of its primary characteristics is that it suffers, enduring personal attacks without retaliation. Christianity is often criticized for producing non-competitive human beings, who are lacking in initiative, ambition, or the urge to get ahead in the world. Perhaps the most famous criticism was that of Karl Marx who described Christianity, into which he had been baptized, as the opiate of the people, the way whereby evil governments made their citizens docile and easy to manipulate.

Quaker Christians (Friends) have made non-violence and opposition to warfare such a distinguishing mark of their people that they are identified with this characteristic. They follow the precept of Jesus who, one time, called upon his followers to "turn the other cheek" (Matthew 5:39), tolerating personal abuse as they seek a peaceful solution to interpersonal problems. Many a young boy has suffered the consequences of this principle as he followed the counsel of a parent or teacher not to fight back, which suggests that there may be something mistaken about such an interpretation.

Those who advocate non-violence as the only appropriate stance for a child of God fail to note that our Lord who said, "turn the other cheek" did not do so when struck himself (John 18:19-23). Instead, he challenged the action and demanded that it be justified. The Spirit of God does not create children of God to be punching bags who may be pummeled at will. While they are to tolerate injury to themselves if that will serve the welfare of the kingdom, they are not to permit evildoers to function freely without having their actions challenged, and if necessary, violently resisted, because it is not good for them to act in such a manner.

Consider children. Aggressive children cannot be permitted to develop into tyrants or playground bullies, for their spirituality is harmed by their behavior. The urge to hurt and to dominate others arises from the demonic side of their hearts. Permitted free expression, it leaves a child vulnerable to total demonic control.

Adults are no different. How they comport themselves relative to others affects the balance of the motivations arising from their hearts. If they become accustomed to harming others, attacking others, and dominating others for their own advantage, they will inevitably find themselves motivated that way for the most part and, eventually, will discover that it is their primary motivation.

The world of politics and the world of high finance in particular are entered into with great risk to the spiritual life of the politician or the financier. We are well aware of what an active and aggressive career can do to the dependents of a successful man or woman. We are less aware of the spiritual damage which is also done. Nations engage in conflicts with one another. As they aggressively pursue their own goals, indifferent to the effect of their actions on other nations, they reveal the presence of the demonic in their actions and must be curbed. I suspect that this awareness underlies the traditional theological doctrine of the "just war", a last resort to extreme measures, to prevent the encroachment of the forces allied with the devil from widening the scope of his power.

The word "devil" has had an interesting history in the rhetoric nations hurl at one another in times of conflict. "Foreign devils" and "white devils" are a few of the expressions by which our nation has been identified in the propaganda of our wartime enemies. There is always a grain of truth in it, because when a state of war exists, people are compelled to enter the devil's arena to destroy his power. Children of God are not exempt from that compulsion. Because they are called upon by their nation to fight, they have a difficult dilemma, not the apparent one, whether or not to participate. The easy way out is conscientious objection. One can act in such a way that one's principles of non-involvement are kept intact at the price of enduring the temporary scorn of the popular multitude until the war is over.

For a child of God the more difficult way is to participate in the war, in obedience to one's current "Caesar" whose coin without a qualm of conscience one uses in times of peace, and to try to find a way, in the midst of that devil's cauldron, like Daniel in the den of lions and the three men in the fiery furnace, to keep on being an active child of God. Only in that way can a war be redeemed for good.

Upon occasion, some propose opposition to capital punishment as the only proper Christian posture. The gospels are silent on the matter, with the exception of the ambiguous words of Jesus to Peter in Matthew's gospel, stating that those who live by the sword will perish by it (26:52). Ironically, Peter was trying to prevent the capture of Jesus by the temple guards. Ironically again, we are indebted to the Jewish and Roman use of capital punishment for our salvation by the death of Jesus himself on the cross of execution. Finally on this subject, Jesus did not rescue the thief, crucified on his left, who called upon him to save himself and them. He did save the one crucified on his right, who put his faith in him, but did not save his body, which continued to suffer until it died, and now waits with the bodies of all the faithful for the final resurrection.

5) Forgiveness is compassionate.

Children of God mirror the attitude of the God they worship. Those who know God, know Him as sensitive to the feelings and yearnings of His people, compassionate and longsuffering with them. He is open to the weakest of His servants. He readily forgives. If anything, He is more generous and forgiving than His children.

He is aptly characterized by John in the verse which follows the famous sixteenth in chapter three, "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Forgiveness, by its very nature reaches out aggressively, actively seeking opportunities to heal and to enrich the lives of others. Its energies are directed, not to self-enrichment, but to sharing personal riches with others, on all levels: the love of God for the heart, friendship for the social need, and physical resources where appropriate.

Those who engage in self-aggrandizement have an existential emptiness, a hunger; they lack something which would prevent them from believing they have a right to seek and to obtain for themselves whatever material possessions they want, regardless of ownership. Children of God, on the contrary, begin their spiritual life with everything they need. They are the heirs of eternal life. They are already living it, for whoever personally enjoys the love of God has all he or she needs. Consequently, they don't need to seek anything else for themselves. Rather, they have a different need, to find ways to share the love of God, which they possess in abundance, with others in whatever ways they can find.

As a result, they do not always fit well in cultures which are militantly aggressive. They were in many ways incompatible with the Roman ethic, in the environment of which the kingdom of God emerged, although they both emphasized social contribution and care for others. They are even less compatible with most modern cultures, which are self-serving and oriented to material achievement. As Christian people struggle to make their way in the modern secular world, sharing their eternal inheritance with whomever they can, they face the problem, not only of survival, but also of infection from material possessions, the lure of the first temptation, the belief in the primacy of the physical. As the international conflict between the capitalistic and the communistic approaches to the distribution of material resources seems to have been settled in favor of the capitalistic approach, that temptation will increase for the children of God.

The early Church in its infancy was spared the problem of materialism by persecution and death in the Roman arenas. Its blood seeded the Church, Augustine tells us, so successfully that eventually the Church survived the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, as it then began to achieve material success, it became itself a worldly empire, which was weakened, first by division, then later by fragmentation into hundreds of sects, a process of fragmentation which persists to this day, and finally, by an unequal struggle with physical science, in a world grown increasingly physically secure.

Because the people of the kingdom of God are compassionate, they frequently find themselves in the company of the poor, the downtrodden and the undesirables of the underclass. They are the Church's traditional constituency, for they most feel a need for help from others and are not too proud to receive it. Those people pose little danger to the spiritual lives of children of God for they cannot infect them with either wealth or power, possessing neither.

6) Forgiveness is also subject to the rules of divine justice.

Most of Jesus discussion of forgiveness with respect to this fact is presented negatively, as in the words, "If you do not forgive your fellow, God will not forgive you."

At the same time, he points out that God's forgiveness is always greater than that of any human being. His act of atonement, itself, to mention only one act, exceeds any sacrifice any human could make for any other humans. Beyond this, God continues to tolerate persons actively opposed to Him and continues to preserve them, evidence of a willingness to tolerate them while the Holy Spirit does his work upon their hearts. If he succeeds, God forgives them and embraces them with His love.

In Matthew 5 Jesus makes it evident that divine demands are considerably more stringent and thorough than human demands. Humans can observe only one another's physical nature. Their corporate regulation of one another, for the most part, extends only to their behavior. Little regulation extends to their social level, usually then only to determine whether there are extenuating circumstances for their behavior, e.g., what they intended in performing a particular action.

God can see into the very heart. Consequently, motivations from which and for which actions are done enter into consideration. Adultery is not limited to a particular physical act between two persons. It extends to the entertainment and acceptance of a motivation, lust, even in the absence of an overt act. Murder is not limited to the illicit termination of another human being's life; it extends to the hatred of others or the desire that they be dead, cursing them, or verbally harassing them. As a result, Jesus developed a comprehensive ethic to include one's entire being and relationships, not just actions and consequences. In a very practical way, Jesus suggests the following two principles of action:

1) Settle matters with men before you approach God to settle matters with Him. An old legal convention requires that persons seeking the help of the courts approach with "clean hands". The same general principle applies in dealings with God. Do not approach God for help when you owe a fellow human being. Matters are better settled on the human level before attempts are made to rectify matters with God. Our free communication with God suffers if there is any blockage of our communication with one another.

2) Settle matters with men before they take you to Court. Then, as now, only lawyers and judges won consistently when cases were taken to court. The legal system, by its very nature as developed in the western world, depends upon confrontation to attempt to arrive at human justice. Confrontation, by its very nature, is hostile to the customary reconciliatory activity of children of God. They are uncomfortable with courtroom decorum; they tend not to be very good at such behavior; and they find themselves, whether they win or lose, with a situation, probably more hostile and unfriendly than when they began, and an enemy who has become even more intractable. They may also find themselves, to their horror, experiencing and cherishing powerful demonic feelings of hatred, jealously, and desires for revenge.

## Legal Relationships

Even though by means of a legal structure which permeated every aspect of life, God developed an Old Testament people organized uniquely for His service and preserved that structure for many centuries, the ethical approach which His Son developed for the New Testament Church was not similarly deontological. It centered upon inner motivation. Jesus opposed the leading deontologists of his day, the Pharisees, because, though their behavior was right, their motivations were reprehensible to God. Why did this ethical change occur? The ethics of the Old Testament was intended to preserve an ethnic group whose assigned life-style, by its very nature would keep them separate from other people and preserve their integrity until the Messiah would be born of them.

On the other hand, the kingdom of God was intended to spread throughout the world. Members of the kingdom required an ethic which was transportable into every part of the world and would enable each individual child of God to function, if necessary, autonomously. Consequently, Jesus moved God inside, to the heart, in order that the people of God could be versatile to fit into any situation. The will of God, continuing to find expression in the written word, would be expressed by spiritual motivations from the heart and the voice of conscience. Just as the temple ceased to be the world center for Jewish worship and sacrifice, so also the kingdom of God could sanctify places of worship wherever it wanted. Christ having completed the sacrificial age by his own sacrifice on the cross, the Church carried into the world, not sacrifice, but the sacraments, God's gifts by which new life would be created and sustained. Old Testament law by its very nature was ethnocentric and conservative. It held people in the group. The New Testament Church would be outgoing and liberating. It would gather new people in and assimilate them to one another in novel ways, depending upon variations of circumstance. The prior ethic produced conformity; the latter resulted in creative novelty. The former depended upon external constraint, the kosher life; the latter depended upon the common Spirit which would animate the people of God, the common word about the Lord that they shared and taught to catechumens, the sacramental and liturgical actions in which they engaged as they related themselves to God in the company of one another, the activity of prayer, their response to the individual motivations of God arising in their respective hearts and their careful heed of the warnings of conscience.

What sorts of polities they would form, how they would organize themselves to love one another and care for those in need, depended to a great extent on the local circumstances where the Spirit brought them and the variety of local leadership.

Because Jesus brought a new ethic for the novel task facing the Church of the New Testament, the ethical questions he raised dealt not with whether or not a given action conformed or did not conform to some moral or divine law, but whether or not it was properly motivated, i.e. whether it was God or the devil who had motivated it from the person's heart. Even the "new law" which he proposed for his Church, to love one another (John 13:34-35), was a motivation. It would not stand over and outside individuals, demanding obedience and threatening sanctions for failure; it would flow from within them naturally, as God took control of their hearts.

At the same time his encounters with teachers of the law usually reduced to a debate about some fine point of Jewish law as they assumed that he was talking about what they were accustomed to: a law ethic. When he was criticized for his disciples' petty breeches of Sabbath custom, or faulted for healing on the Sabbath, he shifted the focus of the discussion from law infractions to human needs, treating law as a functional device to resolve human difficulties.

God expects all three levels of a human being to function in congruence with one another: divine motivation flowing from the heart into and enacted on the ego level, resulting in human service on the physical level. Jesus abhorred hypocrisy, an inconsistency between heart and action, which he could clearly detect. His experience of other persons differed radically from ours. He was able to observe physical behavior – as can we – and to read peoples thoughts and observe their inmost motivation – as we cannot. He must have found it frustrating, then, to converse with someone attempting to fool him or someone who pretended to be his friend, while hating him, etc., without growing more angry than he often did become. We can understand why he was particularly outraged to observe the hypocrisy of the Jewish religious leaders, for he observed their internal inconsistencies. They never were able to appreciate the fact that he understood them better than they understood themselves. Many a time he must have thought to himself, "How stupid do they think I am? How ignorant they are about themselves!" His most heart-wrenching experiences must have been those final days with Judas Iscariot. He knew what Judas was planning, even while playing the faithful disciple.

Jesus obeyed the law in its entirety (Matt. 5:17-20). He did not set himself above it. One of his functions was to fulfill it, i.e. to fill it fully, so that it would have no more function. He had done it perfectly for God. Now it was set aside and his church could turn its attention to other matters. He began the transition with his disciples. Criticisms directed against his disciples for subtle or blatant transgressions of the law, e.g., not washing before eating, working on the Sabbath, not fasting (Mark 7:5, 2:23-24, 2:18), he turned aside as incongruous or unnecessary. Why wash hands when the entire system is corrupt? Why should those who celebrate the kingdom fast? The mood is inappropriate.

Law would have a role in the kingdom, but would function internally, not coerce from outside. Children of God in the kingdom would have been washed with the water of baptism, which would make them clean before God. Any other bodily washing would have solely a therapeutic effect, to clean or purge their bodies, not a spiritual effect, except, possibly for some ceremonial purpose. After baptism no additional water is necessary to preserve spiritual life.

Children of God were free to fast, but fasting was not necessary. Jesus fasting is reported only once, before his temptation by the devil. Fasting might legitimately be done for personal purification, but, as such it was neither necessary nor appropriate that other people be aware of it (Matt. 6:16-18). Fasting is a means to some end beyond itself. It might be done to focus one's attention on God, the source of all life; it might be done as an act of contrition, to humble the body and its appetites; it might be undertaken to relieve strain on the heart, to lengthen physical life, to reduce weight in order to be better fitted for the tasks of daily life, etc.

The swearing of oaths by children of God to one another is unnecessary and contrary to the openness which should hold among them (Matt. 5:33-37). Simple affirmations or negations ought to be all that is necessary to conduct the work of the kingdom.

Charity cannot be bureaucratized. The time for helping people is determined by the severity of their needs, not by institutional regulation. Jesus encountered bureaucracy in its most heartless form on a Sabbath day when he healed the curved spine of a woman, who undoubtedly suffered constant pain as well as mental and social discomfort from it. The leader of the synagogue complained because Jesus had chosen to heal the woman on the Sabbath day, even though he had six other days a week on which he could have done it. The Sabbath day should be kept free of such acts of charity and other God pleasing behavior in order to concentrate on what he thought was more important (Luke 13:14-16).

Finally, Jesus suggested that all good actions should be done as secretly as possible, hidden both from the recipient and observers (Matt. 6:1-4). Public credit is not necessary; God already knows about the act. No one else needs to know.

Public praise can lead to hypocrisy both on the part of those who praise and those who are praised. The practice easily leads to wrongly motivated charity. One thing alone is necessary: that the recipient was helped. Whether or not someone gets credit for it is unimportant. Unfortunately, this word of Jesus has largely been forgotten and there is as much competition for status and charitable honors within as without the institutional church.

Academic institutions of higher education perennially run short of money. Church related institutions are no exception. All of them devise or copy others' devices for attracting money from small and large donors. For many years buildings have been named for those who paid for their construction. Recently the honorary degree has also been used as another device for attracting or rewarding the large donation. There are mixed views inside and outside the academic community about the traditional awarding of the honorary degree. Academicians are not impressed by them, yet they also argued violently against someone they feel unworthy of the honor. They also seldom decline one when it is offered. At any rate, a college of which I know recently decided to award an honorary doctorate to an elderly lady who had made a sizeable donation from her family's estate, which had greatly increased in value as a result of the discovery of mineral deposits under the land. She was a lady of modest education, rich faith, and, I suspect, very good sense. She gently, but firmly rejected the honorary doctorate, arguing that her family had come by the wealth without earning it. She hoped that they could give some of it away without being rewarded for it. I would like to meet that lady some day.

Jesus criticisms of Jewish customs as he found them practiced, together with his views about the role of Old Testament law and religious ritual in the future kingdom of God, reveal a number of common characteristics which he expected would distinguish the behavior of children of God from that of Old Testament people. We have discussed them in detail above. We summarize them below:

**Spontaneous:** Behavior arises out of the existential situation, responsive to individual situations or individual needs, not institutionalized behavior.

**Need Directed:** The value of specific actions is determined by the degree of success in satisfying the need.

**Functional:** Actions fall under either of two types of goal: self improvement for better service in the kingdom of God or service to the neighbor.

**Divinely Motivated:** Whatever actions God motivates cannot help but be in accordance with His will, for He would not and could not contradict Himself.

How does one determine the source of the motivation of an act one wishes to perform? An action is either contrary to the will of God as expressed in His word, or it is not. If it is contrary, it is demonically motivated. If the action is not contrary to the will of God and if the action arises from a desire to serve a neighbor's need or to glorify God, the action is divinely motivated. If it does not arise from such desires, the source is probably demonic.

**Secret:** The institutional church tends to have a great deal of difficulty with this word of Jesus. It uses modern advertising techniques and sales methods, the same fund raising procedures and material incentives as used commonly in the world. In general, it attempts to organize and staff itself to motivate its people, regulate, and record the results of their behavior in statistically satisfying ways. In so doing, it tends to destroy the vitality of the private, individual service which Jesus envisioned.

When the kingdom of heaven is happening, the blessing of God rests, not on the mighty of the world and those surrounded with the riches of the earth and the rewards of earthly achievement, but on those of quiet, humble spirit who are doing the work of God in secret: the meek, the merciful who are full of forgiveness, those who are honest and straightforward in their dealings, those who bring peace to the earth. They may be troubled by others. They may be persecuted by those who hate their love of God, or pushed aside as unimportant. Yet they are the people who constitute the kingdom of God.

Jesus was a spiritual populist. He was not impressed by kings and religious leaders. Perhaps it was because they were unable or incapable of being consistent with themselves on the three levels of their nature. Perhaps as leaders of others, they were incapable of following Jesus. Whatever the reason, Jesus found his people of the kingdom among those who, like Mary were of "low degree" (Luke 1:48) and immortalized them in the words of the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.  
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.  
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.  
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.  
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.  
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.  
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt. 5:3-12):

## Citizenship

Citizenship in the kingdom of God affects the relation of a child of God to the geo-political state in which he or she happens to reside, and its demands. Few passages in the gospels treat that relation, I suppose because Jesus himself had few contacts with the three temporal governments in Palestine at his time: that of Herod in Galilee, that of Pilate in Judea, and the religious government of the high priestly party in Jerusalem. When Herod executed John the Baptist, whom he had imprisoned, Jesus left the country lest Herod would seek to imprison and execute him next.

As the Son of God, Jesus owed allegiance to no man. As an earthly human being of Jewish ethnic background, he could not avoid contact with the demands of Mosaic law. He participated actively in Jewish public worship, at local synagogues and in the temple at many festivals, particularly Passover, which he never missed even including the night before his crucifixion. The gospels record no ceremonial washings (other than John's baptism), spiritual retreats or fastings. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. He clearly did not require them of his disciples. He took no oaths.

Because he generated no personal income, he was not subject to the tithing regulations of the temple, nor, for the same reason, was he subject to Roman taxes attached to property or income. He was, however, subject to any "head" tax which might have been enacted. He encountered one such during his ministry, a tax levied on every adult male for temple maintenance. To the embarrassment of his disciples, a temple tax collector attempted to collect two drachmas from him (Matt. 17:24-27). Jesus argued that sons of the kingdom are exempt from the taxes of earthly kingdoms. Their Heavenly Father rules everything. However, so as not to stir up an argument with the political authorities and give them an opportunity to frustrate his ministry, Jesus arranged for the tax to be paid in a most remarkable way. He sent Peter fishing. Peter caught a fish whose body contained the requisite coin. Thus Jesus paid his temple tax – and yet he didn't.

From this example has developed the practice of ecclesiastical exemption that is reflected in the tax laws of various countries which exempt church property and professional church workers from taxation. Some have also used Jesus words on this occasion to argue that they are not subject to the tax laws of their country, failing to note that Jesus tax problems were not with the secular government but with the church. What he would have responded to the Roman government under similar circumstances, we do not know.

Jesus words and actions in this event, do tend to suggest that the practice of earthly citizenship by children of God, religious or secular, follows these principles:

1) It is voluntary rather than mandatory;

2) If the government's activity helps the work of the kingdom, it should be obeyed for the sake of the gospel lest conflicts with constituted authority in a given country inhibit religious activity;

3) If laws of a political society conflict with the will of God, they must be resisted.

Note Jesus conservative approach to political relationships. Contrary to the claims of the Jewish religious leaders at the Roman trial of Jesus, he never at any time acted as though he was attempting to overthrow the Roman government and to put in its place a revolutionary Jewish republic.

Jesus engaged in disruptive activity only in one place, the temple, against the secular businesses of the temple and the economic system which had been instituted to "milk" the pilgrims coming to the temple to worship (Matt. 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-19, John 2:13-17). He led no protests. He himself protested against the abuse of the pious by their religious leaders. For that they tried to execute him.

There is no record that he ever proposed political insurrection against the Roman government; others did. There is no record that he proposed a tax revolt; others tried to get him to do that. He consorted with Roman officials upon occasion: centurions and publicans in particular. One publican, Matthew, who apparently was an important man in the seaport tax office at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, left to become his disciple. Jesus advised Zacchaeus, a notorious tax collector, to practice fairness in determining assessments.

Jesus sought to have minimum contact with government himself as the object of government attention, and advocated the same for his disciples, emphasizing, in particular, the avoidance of courts. He associated publically on a social basis with Pharisees, many of whom were politically active. One of them, Nicodemus, conferred with him surreptitiously about spiritual matters which he did not understand.

Jesus refused to give testimony in his religious trials before Annas and Caiaphas (Matt. 27, Mark 15). He thereby indicated his unwillingness to recognize them and their trial as legitimate. He did not speak at the public trial before Pilate. He did, however, converse privately with Pilate and impressed him with his innocence. During that conversation he made a remark of which much has been made in the subsequent development of political theory. He said to Pilate, "You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above." (John 19:11). From this passage has developed the doctrine of the divine right of kings, practiced by the famous Louis XIV and Louis XV of France and espoused, after their example, with mixed success by the kings of the Stuart family in England.

By these words Jesus meant that as Son of God he was more powerful than any earthly ruler. He was subjecting himself to Pilate at that moment and would shortly be executed at his orders because God the Father was permitting it in order to achieve His own greater goal. Significantly, at the conclusion of his crucifixion, Jesus "gave up the ghost". The verb is active. He simply ceased living. Thus, he was executed, and yet he wasn't. He cooperated in death.

He was subject to a law of which people were seldom aware, the will of his Father, the _Logos_ which came to him from his Father and which he shared with those around him in the form of actions and teachings. His entire life he was under orders from his Father and, as the Son of God perfectly obeyed them. We do not have a very good idea of how the Trinity communicated with one another during the time of the incarnation. The Father spoke audibly, upon occasion, but to others than His Son. Jesus communicated in prayer, two occasions of which are reported in some detail, the high priestly prayer of John 17 and the prayer in the garden of Gethsemane shortly after. He was led by the Spirit to be tempted in the deserts at the beginning of his ministry and commanded to fast.

In conversations with others near the end of his ministry and on the day of his ascension, Jesus made it evident that after his return to the right hand of the Father the future history of earthly governments would be subject to his plans for his kingdom. When the work of gathering his people into the kingdom was completed, the world would be permitted to go to its inevitable ruin (Matt. 24:22-25).

In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus held back the sword of Peter that had been raised in his defense and repaired the damage it had caused (Matt. 26:52-54). He did not wish the kingdom to be spread by the edge of the sword. That militant doctrine would be enunciated by Mohammed a half millennium later and copied by the Christian Church, first, in self defense, later as a tool for aggressive incursions into the pagan world, as, for instance the crusades and the conquests of Central and South America. Finally, factions of the church would turn their weapons against one another in their battles for control of the institutional church and the land upon which it was situated, east against west, papal states against the Italian free cities, and the traditional church against the churches of the Reformation. As a result today, the institutional church has drifted far from that irenic approach to the world, intended by the divine founder, that like leaven, quietly, almost invisibly, it would infiltrate the world while earthly armies blindly clashed for supremacy, ignorant of the hidden work of the Spirit which continued unnoticed in their midst.

The most famous passage in the gospels, however, on the subject of church and state involves a coin. The account records what seems to be an ambiguous response by Jesus to a pointed question. Yet, the event must have been memorable, for three of the four evangelists recorded it (Matt 22, Mark 12, Luke 20). The event took place during Holy Week, on Monday or Tuesday, in the temple. The religious leaders of Jerusalem were desperately attempting to cause Jesus to advocate a political position which would either destroy his great popularity with the common people or give the leaders evidence to accuse him of insurrection before the Roman courts. After his triumphal entrance into Jerusalem on Sunday, they concluded that he was on the verge of a political coup against them and their Roman allies in the name of Jewish independence and religious reform.

They found a topic by which to create political problems for him: Roman taxation. They confronted him in the temple, surrounded by his followers. The situation was not unlike a modern, antagonistic political press conference or a debate toward the end of a bitterly fought campaign in the United States.

So they asked him, "Teacher, we know that you speak and teach rightly, and show no partiality, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?" But he perceived their craftiness, and said to them, "Show me a denarius. Whose likeness and inscription does it have?" They said, "Caesar's." He said to them, "Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (Luke 20:21-25)

The apparent ambiguity of Jesus response, but one which apparently left his attackers speechless, contains considerably more specific substance than is at first apparent. The passage makes at least three points.

First, two distinct jurisdictions exist, an earthly jurisdiction and a divine jurisdiction. They are separate from one another. Each is a legitimate form.

Second, each also makes a legitimate ethical demand upon those it affects. People of God have parallel responsibilities, to "render to" Caesar and to God. Responsibility to the Roman government arose from the fact that Jews used the advantages arising from Roman coinage, Roman law, Roman law enforcement, Roman roads, Roman language and culture etc., to lead a successful and peaceful life. Thereby they incurred an obligation which had to be discharged. The figure and inscription on the coin represented every advantage offered by Rome for which payment was owed in the form of obedience.

On the other hand, though the form of the coin was Roman, the matter, as with all matter, was the property of God, lent to them as living creatures for their maintenance. Thereby, they also had an obligation to God which also needed to be discharged. It was no less an ethical demand than that of Caesar nor any less important.

Finally, the two jurisdictions, though separate, were not separable. They overlap. They share a common coin. They share a common constituency - human beings. Human beings, thus, owe a dual obedience. Those obediences sometimes conflict. To whom is the coin to be given? It is not always clear.

Within the Jewish constituency a smaller constituency was forming, the children of God, who would constitute the living kingdom of God. They had a separate allegiance, unknown to Jesus Jewish opponents. Service to God in that kingdom is unqualified. It has no earthly legitimate competitor. However, earthly kingdoms could make legitimate ethical demands upon the children of God in return for services rendered and children of God might freely cooperate with them in acts of good will because they preserved peace in the world.

The role of law changed from the spiritual world of the Old Testament to that of the New. In the old world it was prescriptive. In the new it became prudential. The people of the kingdom of God had to sort out what was useful, what was useless and what was hostile to the new life in Christ from the old kosher culture. As a result, sacrificing disappeared. Jesus had ended that with his own sacrifice. The tithe and the other mandatory offerings were no longer required. The Church was free to use them if it wanted. Circumcision was no longer required, nor kosher food. Fasting, ceremonial acts and washings became voluntary. Worship focused on Easter, not on the creation of the world when God rested. It moved to Sunday.

The law of the stranger expanded into the _doulos_ impulse which motivated charity, reaching out to those in need instead of waiting for them to come. The sacraments conveyed the love of God, the forgiveness of God, and the grace of God to those who received them. As the people of God began to express the love of God which motivated them, they encountered others of like motivation and reached out to one another to share the work of caring for the world and building the kingdom, spontaneously forming parishes.

The New Testament people of God encounter law in four different forms in the world. As children of God they are motivated by _doulos_ and _filos_ , the spiritual laws which govern their hearts as they express the love of God into their world. These spiritual laws are opposed by demonic chaos internally and human opposition externally.

They encounter law, secondly, in the form of Church Law, created by human beings to organize and carry out the mission of their institutional churches as they conceive it. Sometimes these bodies of law are compatible with the spiritual laws of the heart. Sometimes they are not. They can be friendly to the people of God, as when they provide spiritual instruction, forums and forms for corporate worship, opportunities for confession and absolution, sharing the sacraments and providing opportunities for expressing the need to care for others.

They can also suppress them and become their enemies, as when they substitute law for gospel, confusing the difference between divine activity and human activity, substituting corporate charity for personal care, rendering the life in Christ impersonal, suppressing the free expression of the Spirit, preventing the association of the people of God with one another, and becoming divisive and political, turning enemy to the people of God by becoming demonic.

They encounter law, thirdly, in the regulations of the various secular political constituencies wherever they find themselves at one time or another in the world. Once again such legal structures may be very helpful for the expansion of the kingdom of God or they may become a hindrance, or an overt enemy, attempting to destroy the Church.

Political societies are friendly to the kingdom when they restrain those who engage in activities harmful to their fellow citizens and permit those others who are threats to no one, freely to pursue their own private goals. They are also friendly when they share the servant role of the Church, helping to care for those in need.

They become inimical when they interfere with or prevent the free exercise of religion, attempt to divide the church by showing favoritism or kill the people of God or their leaders. There are times also when the people of God find church law and state law in conflict with one another.

Finally, as maturing adults, the children of God begin to find within themselves the law of conscience, sitting in judgment on what they are thinking and doing. It can be a friend if, under their direction they are able to use it to restrain the demonic within themselves. It becomes their enemy when it tyrannizes over their spiritual motivations and generates guilt when they are serving God, when it becomes a substitute for divine motivation, acting like the voice of God, or when it is defectively developed or suffering from demonic influence with the result that it admonishes them for actions which are blameless before God, or, finally, when they attempt to impose their consciences upon others or objectively to codify them in the form of laws for church or state.

Somehow, amidst the webbing of all these legal controls the people of God have to weave their individual ways to be the slaves of the world and the friends of the Church as the lovers of God.

Five distinct governmental orders comprise the various interwoven constituencies that make up the living world of which the people of God are a part.

1) The Kingdom of God.

It functions by the love of God that serves as an internal motivation and rule.

2) The Organizational Church.

It finds imperfect visible expression in the form of institutional structures: parishes, denominations, confederations, etc., where human beings, chosen in various sorts of ways, attempt to guide the organizational growth of their respective memberships.

3) The Biological Universe.

All human beings live in the physical world as part of a larger biosphere of which they are a tiny, but very powerful part, interacting in accordance with general principles of growth and decay within the general ecology of God. The earth's ever changing economy preserves a living environment within which the kingdom of God can persist and grow.

4) The Human Social Structure.

Unique and common to the human constituency are certain rules that follow from the nature of man and give rise to such natural ethical precepts as the prohibition of murder, theft, etc., which form the basis for general human moral codes.

5) The Political Society.

Finally, in the world, configurations of humanly instituted and directed governmental structures develop at various times, persist for a while, and are succeeded by other similarly temporary structures. Each responds to its environment and situation with its own regulations to control and overcome them. These human laws gain their legitimacy both from the acceptability of the goals they seek and the success they attain.

These five orders interact with one another in the context of a physical universe, operating in a reasonably orderly fashion, identified traditionally in Western thought, as eternal law, a sixth, non-living order. Some of them are subject, solely to the control of God. Others are not.

Law serves five legitimate functions for a child of God:

1) To preserve his or her physical life;

2) To curb demonic internal motivations;

3) To facilitate the functions of the Kingdom of God;

4) To improve and facilitate interpersonal activity;

5) To restrain those with hostile intent toward others and their possessions.

A natural transition occurs at this point to the final topic, which occupies the last chapter. During earlier chapters a complex structure of dynamic interrelationships called "Kingdom of God" has been conceptually developed and analyzed. This kingdom has no natural terminus; it persists beyond time. For completeness' sake, the subject called "kingdom of God" must be examined once again, briefly, this time from an eternal perspective.

Chapter 7

# The Eternal Perspective

The subject of eternity cannot be considered without a prior consideration of the concept of time because how one conceives of time determines how one conceives of eternity and the nature and destiny of the human soul. A variety of conceptions have been developed over the centuries by philosophers and scientists. The view of time in the gospels varies in important respects from them.

Probably the most commonly used conception of time is identified as the Time's Arrow view, characterized by the naive notion that time has three dimensions, past, present and future, and that these are transitive, non-symmetrical, and non-repetitious. Consequently, an arrow passing through time would leave a past behind it and move into the future by way of the present. It could not stop at any time, reverse the process, or exactly replicate any part of it again.

In the famous Eleventh Book of his Confessions, St. Augustine challenges this view and proposes another, arguing that, though time has three dimensions, humans never encounter the present. They are always passing from the past, presented to their consciousness by memory, toward a future, represented to it by the intellectual capacity to visualize a hoped for reality.

God, on the other hand, lives in an eternal present: "I am that I am!", and, so is asynchronous with us, unknowable by us until we enter eternity, which is a timeless present. We can approximate a reasonably accurate understanding of God because ideas, which we use to comprehend the constantly changing past/future world of physical experience, do not change, but each resembles some aspect of God, albeit defectively. Those ideas are our bridge to understanding the nature of God, Whom, Himself we know by the faith He has created in us. God, on the other hand, understands our deficiencies and can communicate with us, limiting His majesty that we are not destroyed by His imminence, when He chooses to express Himself to us.

A third view of time conceives of it as cyclical, either progressing in one great circle of time, _a la_ Einstein's fourteen million light year circumference theory, or looping back upon itself, but never returning back to a previous time, like a stretched out coil of bailing wire or a spring, a view popularized by Nietzsche, although it has antecedents in the pre-Socratics. Physical time goes on forever, never repeating itself, yet often resembling itself. This view, popular among physical scientists, preserves continuity, admits novelty and, at the same time, permits scientific knowledge of similar phenomena. One sub-version of the cyclical theory, presented two dimensionally, is the pendulum theory of time, which argues that history progresses back and forth, moving from one extreme to its opposite. This notion of time encloses the concept of eternity within the physical universe and allows no escape from limited temporality. Time itself is eternal and we are temporal within it. If God exists, He persists through time. Since He is a temporal phenomenon, He is forced to change; otherwise He would be timeless, which is impossible within this conception of time.

Another variation of cyclical time, an advance on the pendulum theory, is the dynamic dialectical theory of Hegel. Each significant temporal condition generates its opposite condition. Their dialectical opposition to one another generates its opposite, a condition of reconciliation, which contains within itself the opposed conditions in harmonic tension. This synthesis of opposites becomes itself a new condition, generating its opposite, ad infinitum. Viewed holistically, Hegel's universe constantly expands, loses no content, and is constantly increasing in numbers of different kinds of entities. It is incapable of destruction since that is a self-contradictory concept in that system.

A fourth view of time, developed most recently by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, treats time biologically as emergent or as evolutionary. Things emerge into existence and dissolve into other emerging entities. Time functions rather much like the phenomena of time lapse photography movies or the special effects created for movies and television by computers. Things develop, reach their climaxes, shrivel up and get replaced by other things, like the lilies of the field or the Palestinian grasses in early summer, referred to several times by Jesus in his discussions of the transitory character of physical existence. Nothing has any permanence except existence itself, which is fluid and only temporarily meaningful. Nothing exists outside of this completely plastic reality, within which everything dissolves into something else, like the segue of a musical composition from one melody in one key into another. Although Teilhard de Chardin attempted to make this conception of time reality compatible with Christian theology with his doctrine of creative evolution, few theologians have followed his lead.

A fifth view of time, tracing back to the Eleatic, Parmenides, denies any reality to time. Change does not occur; therefore time is impossible. [Note: A somewhat more sophisticated scientific treatment of the topic of time can be found in Stephen W. Hawking's best selling book, A Brief History of Time. (1988, Bantam)]

A very precise conception of the structure of time, somewhat more complicated than any of these, but resembling some of them in some respects, underlies the view of reality presented by Jesus in the gospels. Physical time is presented as having both a beginning and an end, a natural beginning and a violent, unnatural end. At some point on the continuum between beginning and end, the "Christ time" emerges, a time which decades later St. Paul would call the "fullness" (Gal.4:4), a sort of ballooning out or culmination, toward which all prior time is oriented and which draws posterior time back toward itself.

The temporal character of the physical universe is such that the entrance of the Son of God into the physical world had a dynamic impact upon it, functioning like a great gravitational focus emerging within a field of magnetic force, with the result that prior history also is pulled toward it, gaining its significance from it, hence, the great variety of prophecies about the Messiah. It is as though time were a great canvass, anchored at the four corners of reality like a tent. Thrust into its middle, upward, rises the incarnate Son of God, stretching and pulling all the fabric toward itself like a center pole. As a result, the Old Testament is structured by prophecies and events that anticipate and prefigure the "fullness" time which both explains them and fulfills them so that their function terminates with its end. A counter concentration of demonic energies focuses upon the fullness time itself, spilling over upon the minds and bodies of many individuals in Palestine. The incarnate Son of God is there, surrounded by the heavenly host; the devil and his holy angels also are there, defying him. Their demonic energy will begin to dissipate for a period after the fullness time, until, near the end it will reemerge for one final violent effort at conquest before the dissolution of everything temporal.

The fullness time draws the future toward itself in such a way that foreshadowing events occur that are signs and portents of the end times of the universe itself. As a result, the times prior to the fullness time contained evidences for the end times as well as signs of the fullness time. Times subsequent to the fullness time continue to be permeated with the fullness time, but also contain evidences of the end times, which increase in their number and intensity as the end approaches. Thus, every moment of time contains within itself past, present and future, inseparably linked as sign, significance and portent. Instead of being simply linear, time is textured and poly-dimensional.

Figure 7: Movement of Time

Jesus himself identified the last of the messianic portents (Matt. 16:4), as the sign of Jonah, prefiguring Jesus dead time, which covered all or part of three Jewish calendar days. The rending of the veil of the temple follows his dying, symbolizing the revelation and completion of the final mystery of the Old Testament, high priestly sacrifice. The last sacrificial victim, the Son of God Himself, has died. Soon the city of Jerusalem and its temple, obsolete remnants of the Old Testament world will also be destroyed (Matthew 24:27-51).

Portents of the future include such simple everyday events as weather signs (Luke 12:54-59) and signs of the seasons (Mark 13:28-37, John 4:35-38). They also include violent events – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, disturbances in the heavens, etc.– all of which are reminders of the fragile foundations of physical existence; wars and rumors of wars, which reveal the gossamer strength of human social structures; disease and pestilence, which exhibit the fundamental frailty of temporal life.

Any moment of time, thus, contains within itself the past in the form of events which have shaped what is now the case and continue to affect it. That past is preserved in memory; it recedes away from us in every direction, apprehended on the grossest level by the scientific instruments with which astronomers scan the skies, looking for the edge of its physical beginnings.

At the same time every moment lies open to re-creative and regenerative activity. Passage through time resembles an automobile trip through the mountains (I am indebted to John Dewey for the example). At every moment reality changes. As one approaches it from a distance, a mountain scarcely shows above the horizon. As it grows closer, it grows larger. Passage through the foothills suddenly surrounds one by the mountain. It has become almost all of perceptual reality. The summit reached, the process reverses. The mountain begins to appear in the rear view mirror behind us, slowly receding until it disappears in the distance. Where one is in relation to the mountain determines both what it was, what it is and what it will be. All are in flux. None is fixed. At any moment we can change our direction. Both what lies behind us and what lies before depends on the direction we choose to travel.

The time in which each of us lives as a child of God is shaped by the sign of Jonah, the death/resurrection character which has been given to us as the first fruits of Jesus resurrection. We are different from other people because he died and rose from the dead. We are Jonahs, not in an unlucky sense, but people who, miraculously, are privileged to live again. Our baptism flows continually within our hearts, keeping us spiritually alive and motivated by God. Our physical habits and intellectual configurations both free us to be creative and, ironically, limit our potential. The world which surrounds us creaks and groans, achieving and failing to reach its goals. It throws up living forms in abundance, feeding upon itself to sustain its variety, and amongst them creates some defective forms which cannot live or scarcely live, showing that it is flawed and will not last. It stimulates us both to hope and disappoints us with its results, showing just enough of regularity that we read the omens of what is to be and believe, yet just enough of failure to fulfill its promise that we must always live by faith.

We base our human groupings on our affections and, when they wane, form other bonds. Some hold better than others – family, friends, the people of God – yet none is forever. A young man must leave his folks, God said at the beginning, and form another bond; so must his spouse. Sometimes those bonds break as we twist and tear at them in the urge for temporary personal delight. At leisure we knit them up again, or part.

We pass through life, ourselves a mystery to ourselves, always the same person, yet always different. No one other than I has my experiences, yet, who is the I who has them, yet whom I never have as my experience? The artifacts of memory, organized like a tidy attic, contain all that I have been and never thrown away. If I lose my memory, I do not know whom I am, for I have lost all traces of my former self. Half of every day I am not, as I sleep. And when I awake, I must take a few moments to recollect and to connect myself up to what I call "my life." So fragile and insubstantial is human existence! Sooner or later it ends for each of us. Some time it will end for all of us, suddenly, violently, as its final reason to exist disappears. The last possible child of God will have been found and redeemed for the kingdom. Then the end will come.

In view of the insubstantiality of the physical world and the imminent return of Jesus, signaling the end of time and the beginning of timelessness, this question is certainly appropriate: How ought people who are destined to live always with God, conduct themselves under the present conditions of physical limitation? Jesus provides a generous response in answer, which can be reduced to four statements.

First, children of God have already passed from death to life by virtue of their new life in Christ. Physical death is simply the transition from a temporal to a non-temporal basis for existence (John 5:24-29), marked by a change of the physical character of reality whereby corruptibility and spacio-temporal limitation cease. Conflict between the physical and the spiritual (first temptation) becomes impossible. Neither nutritional needs nor sexual differences exist, metabolism and reproduction being no longer necessary or desirable.

Children of God focus this life upon the preservation of their own spiritual existence and the transmission of similar existence to other persons by the Holy Spirit. Social and physical persons and things are valued as they contribute to the support of spiritual existence. They have no intrinsic value in themselves. Their value will not survive beyond death, at which time the attention of all children of God will shift from those who are in need of salvation and care to him who is their Savior and Shepherd.

Second, children of God need always to be alert and ready to leave the temporal for the eternal at any time (Luke 12:35-40). In view of the fragility of the physical universe and the weakness of the strongest human body, it would be foolish not to be ready. We tend not to dwell upon death, partly because it is not a pleasant subject, partly, because we have more important things to do. We need, each of us at some time or other, however, to reflect upon the suddenness, not only of death, but of our own irrelevance. One moment we are in the midst of a busy active life. The next we are dead. Two or three days later we are buried out of sight and others are picking over what we have left. Six months later, unless we have been someone highly unusual, most people have forgotten that we ever lived. We need to take care of our bodies, fragile as they may be, because they are our only link with the times in which we are living!

Excessive forms of physical activity and the ingestion of substances which rob a person of self control need to be avoided (Luke 21:34-36); the former because they weaken or destroy the body, the latter because they open an individual to demonic temptation without his or her spiritual defenses functioning at maximum strength.

Third, Children of God need always to be on guard and active to carry out their appropriate tasks. Jesus frequently emphasizes to the children of God to keep busy, not to sit and wait for his coming, and to protect themselves from temptation at all times. Why? They do not know when Jesus will return (Matt 24:42-51). Many people will be taken by surprise, engaged in pagan celebrations when he returns (Luke 17:26-37). The time of his coming is such a secret that even the Son of God Himself does not know. He also keeps himself in readiness for that long awaited order from his Father, to return to the earth to gather in the children of God.

And Finally, Children of God who are prepared for the life to come avoid the excesses of this present life. Though they are sober and vigilant, they are not people without humor and sensitivity to the absurdities and pleasures of life. They, however, maintain perspective. They do not dine to excess or indulge themselves beyond proportion. They are largely indifferent to accumulating possessions, except as they are useful for their ministry, and to pursuing pleasures, except as they are gifts from an over-indulgent Father, Who loves to delight His children.

A quite different ethic from the popular secular ethic follows from this view of reality. Material possessions have value only as they contribute to personal health or provide resources for the work of the kingdom. They are not stockpiled, but are circulated as intelligently as possible to maximize spiritual effects.

Social achievement has importance only as it creates opportunities for the proclamation of the gospel. Human beings have no value in themselves, regardless of how popular they might be among other human beings, for all are equally sinful. They have value only to the extent that God can use them for His purposes.

As a result, many a celebrity, who is a hero to the world is recognized by a child of God as a depraved monster, responsible for the destruction of many fellow human beings and their possessions. Super-wealthy persons are recognized by children of God as people whose values are so confused that material resources flow to rather than away from them. They are to be pitied because they do not know how to disburse the wealth which accrues to them. If they have been children of God, their wealth has probably begun to clog their spiritual arteries and inhibit their spiritual life, darkening their consciousness of their need for God, or filled their lives with worry and insecurity lest someone steal it.

Celebrities tend to be ego-centric. The drive for self-aggrandizement which has brought them to the attention of their fellow human beings, has, at the same time, driven them away from God and their fellows. The pursuit of power brings with it great loneliness. Political power which they attempt to seize and use is often obtained at the expense of their own souls (temptation two). Their struggle to control their destiny inevitably involves the effort also to manipulate God for their own ends (temptation three).

In contrast, heroes of faith, those who are extremely valuable to God, who seem almost effortlessly to make their way through life, tend not to impress people who are not children of God. In _Fear and Trembling_ Kierkegaard called them knights of faith, non-entities in the world, seldom noticed, seldom in the power structure of either the state or the organizational church. Only God and perceptive fellow children of God recognize and value them. Their kingdom is not worldly. If someone asks, "Show me one of these great heroes of God", that person will be surprised at the person pointed out.

Jesus disciples once asked who was great in the kingdom. To their great astonishment and embarrassment Jesus placed a small child in their midst. Kierkegaard posed a similar question. He predicted that if a knight of faith were identified, there would be this popular reaction, "But he is only a publican!" – a nobody. The ethics of Jesus creates such nobodies. Whoever is unwilling to be a nobody must avoid the ethics of Jesus. His people are not likely to get rich. They will probably never be famous. They are seldom powerful. Other people may make life difficult for them or even kill them. Their sole distinction lies in this: the Holy Spirit has made them spiritually alive, and they have lived and are living that life to the fullest, eternally in the presence of God.

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### Coming in 2016 from Lincoln Winter.

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