Jason Micheli's Blog, page 81
March 29, 2023
Q: What is the best way to demonstrate belief's credibility?
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Hi Friends,
Thank you for welcoming me into your inbox and your headspace.
In addition to the public posts, I’ve got a few projects in the works for folks who take the plunge and subscribe to the site (ie, my mom).
One project is this catechism which I started years ago but did not complete because of a vacation called cancer. I’m reworking it and aim to round it out as I go. If you missed it, here’s the Kick-Off Catechism Post.
Another project is the fruit of some talks I delivered this fall on grace and proclamation for the Anglican Church of Canada. A number of people responded that those lectures were helpful so I’ve started a series called “Hitmen and Midwives: Talking Preaching with Preachers.” I’ve kicked it off with a series of conversations (The 9.5 Theses on Preaching) with my friend Dr. Ken Jones and I plan to include other preachers and pew-sitters down the road.
If you’ve got suggestions for other material you’d like to see in this space, please let me. Shoot me an email or leave a comment.
7. What are some ways of demonstrating belief’s credibility?The tradition refers to them as “Way”s of reasoning such that God is the most credible conclusion. Importantly, these ways function to show believers in the God of the Bible that, though belief in the true God is possible only on the basis of God’s revelation and so beyond the limits of reason, belief in the true God is not itself irrational. Thus, these ways of demonstrating belief’s credibility serve to assure believers rather than convert unbelievers.
These ways derive from God’s self-revelation as Being itself in Exodus: “I Am He Who Is.”
That is, “I AM Is-ness.”
These ways include:
The First MoverSome things have been moved. All things that are moved are moved by a mover. An infinite regress of movers is impossible
Therefore:
There is an Unmoved Mover beyond creation from whom all motion proceeds.
This Mover is what we call God.
The First CauseSome things are caused.
Everything that is caused is caused by something else.
An infinite regression of causation is impossible.
Therefore:
There must be an Uncaused Cause of all that is caused.
This Cause is what we call God.
ContingencyNo things in the universe must necessarily exist; that is, all things are contingent beings.
It is impossible for everything in the universe to be contingent because something cannot come of nothing, and, if traced back, eventually there must have been one thing from which all others have occurred.
Therefore:
There must be a Necessary Being whose existence is not contingent on any other being or beings.
This Necessary Being is whom we call God.
BeautyIn all creatures and objects there is found some degree of beauty.
Something is called beautiful according to its nearness to some principal of beauty.
Therefore:
If an object possesses the property of beauty to a lesser extent, then there exists an entity which possesses the property of beauty to a maximal degree.
Therefore:
This Infinite Beauty we call God.
TelosAll natural bodies in the world act towards ends.
These objects are in themselves unintelligent.
Acting towards an end is characteristic of Intelligence.
Therefore:
There exists an Intelligent Being that guides all natural bodies towards their ends.
This Intelligent Being is whom we call God.
8. What is the best way to demonstrate belief’s credibility?Testimony.
The true God has made himself known, and revealed his name to be neither Beauty nor First Cause nor even, generically, God.
The true God is Israel’s Lord and Jesus’s Father.
The true God is Israel’s Servant Jesus and the Father’s Son.
The true God is their bond of love, the Spirit.
The true God is Trinity, the God who raised Jesus from the dead having first rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt.
Thus, God is not rightly named as Unmoved Mover, for the true God is a happening—the happening in which and from which all things unfold.
Therefore:
The best way to demonstrate belief’s credibility is to bear witness to how this God happens.
For example, “I know Jesus is alive because I have met him.”
Or, “I know that God exists because last Sunday someone spoke the gospel to me, and it promises what only God can promise.”
“He is not here, for he has risen, as he said.”
— Matthew 28.6
Read Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
March 28, 2023
It's "Thou Shalt Care"
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Reflecting on the decalogue, the theologian Robert Jenson recalls how the tablets of the two tables of the law were written with the finger of God (Exodus 31.18). This little overlooked detail leads Jenson to ask a question that is at once obvious and surprising,
“Which person of the Trinity has a finger?”Perhaps if understood that it is the Lord Jesus who hands the commandments over to Moses, then we would respond to the news of yet another school shooting with something more than a thus it will ever be resignation. Maybe we would react as though our salvation depended upon it. If the Lord Jesus is the giver of the mosaic law, then “Thou shalt not murder” must always aim for far more than the absence of killing. Since Christ is the conveyor of the commandments, the positive correlative to the sixth commandment will always mean something like “Thou shalt care.”
The Westminster Larger Catechism has long known and confessed just this:
Q134: Which is the sixth commandment?
A: The sixth commandment is, Thou shalt not kill.
Q135: What are the duties required in the sixth commandment?
A: The duties required in the sixth commandment are, all careful studies, and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves1 and others by resisting all thoughts and purposes, subduing all passions, and avoiding all occasions, temptations, and practices, which tend to the unjust taking away the life of any.
School shootings are so often in the news.
The sixth commandment is so seldom on the minds of Christians.
It is hard to keep the names straight to say nothing of the children and teachers and, even, the gunmen burdened by monsters we will never understand. I too am angry at what feels like muscle memory and scar tissue we’ve all built up over the course of America’s “copy and paste tragedy.” As soon as the headlines break, we know the hot takes we will read on social media and the talking points our tribes will turn to on television and on Twitter. Many rightly deride expressions like “Thoughts and Prayers” as a way to avoid political engagement or confess our collective culpability— it’s sentimentality not faith. Prayer need not be nothing at such times, yet faithful, biblical prayer at such a time as this sounds less like, “God be with the victims of…” and more like, “God damn it— damn all our avoidance and posturing and hand-wringing, damn all our indifference and apathy, and by your Spirit shake us awake.”
I’m not a lawyer or a politician nor even an activist.
I’m a preacher.
The Bible is my area of expertise.
And as a professional interpreter of the Bible, I can say without qualification that a society that tolerates the ongoing slaughter of children in the name of rights is not a free society but an idolatrous one.
A society that tolerates the ongoing slaughter of children in the name of rights is not a free society but an idolatrous one.
No right given by the Founders trumps a commandment issued by God. Not only is life a gift given by God, every life is one for whom God in Christ died. Life is neither ours to take nor ours to dismiss with indifference when it is lost.
In fact, as the Westminster Larger Catechism makes explicit, the indifference that masks itself as impotence to effect change violates the sixth commandment. It’s not a commandment merely to refrain from killing; it’s a commandment to create the conditions for life to flourish unharmed.
The indifference that masks itself as impotence to effect change violates the sixth commandment.
As the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe puts it in his book on the Decalogue:
“The rest of the ten commandments are a kind of definition of the idolatrous society out of which we are called by Yahweh. You shall not kill: the idolatrous society is the society of violence. The word used here is not quite the same as the English word “kill.”
Hebrew has special words which are normally used for killing in battle and for putting a man to death. It’s not these that are in question here. Nor, however, can we translate it by the word murder, for the word is used to cover accidental killing too.
The commandment “You shall not kill” then says not merely that you must not actually murder, but that you must CARE that people get killed.
You must not be indifferent to blood. You must not carry on the traditional respectable life, absorbed in the worship of your gods, while throughout the world people are being killed by the horrible pain of hunger and the diseases that go with it or as the “collateral damage” of war and violence.”
We’re commanded to care.
That the Lord Jesus so commands us is simultaneously our only hope in a country of such cut and paste tragedies, for the commandments finally are less rules we must not disobey and more a description of the Kingdom that will occasion Christ’s triumphant return. In other words, the commandments from God— especially, Thou shalt not kill— gesture to a promise by God. As Jenson writes,
“We are promised the day when God’s intentions for us will be done. The ultimate purpose of the Decalogue is to tell us how things then will be. When we teach them to ourselves and our children, this is the last and best thing we are to say, “God is making a world of love to God and one another. See how fine that world will be. We will be faithful to God. We will be passionate for one another. We will be truthful to one another. We will not harm one another…”
Thus, the command against killing is God’s promise that a better world is on the way.
May the Holy Spirit fit us for such a future.
Lord knows, we’re doing a shitty job of preparing ourselves for it.
Thank you for reading Jason Micheli . This post is public so feel free to share it.
March 27, 2023
America's Cut and Paste Tragedy
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
A society that tolerates the ongoing slaughter of children in the name of “gun rights” is not a free society but an idolatrous one.
Any definition of freedom at odds with the Good that is God is not freedom but slavery; in fact, the way we talk about freedom is very often the way the Bible describes Sin.
Moloch (above), not the 2nd Amendment, is the Bible's name for the idol to which our ancestors sacrificed their children
We’re naive to think fealty to a false god looked any different in ancient times than it does today.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, the image above says everything decency and righteousness allows.
Covering the Cross with Roses (or Palm Leaves)
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Matthew 26:14-27:66
For Palm Sunday, the lectionary appoints Matthew’s long account of Christ’s passion, which includes Christ’s trial before Pontius Pilate.
In John 6, after the feeding of the five thousand, the crowd responds by trying to install Christ as king and Christ responds by running away across the water. In Matthew 27, Jesus can run no longer; in fact, he’s nailed in place, enthroned upon a cross, with the title he’d avoided fixed up his crown of thorns, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews."
Chances are, your Bibles all title this section of the passion, “Christ’s Trial Before Pilate,” but the Gospels all suggest with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer that Pilate is not the judge here and Christ is not the defendant. Notice how, in John’s account of the exchange, Jesus answers the judge’s question, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus replies, “Who’s asking? Is this you talking or did someone else put you up to it?” You don’t need Nancy Grace or Court TV to point out for you that this is not a standard way for the accused to answer a judge’s serious question. It’s insubordinate. It’s out of order. He’s a hostile witness.
Pontius Pilate questions the accused again, “What did you do?” And again the accused calmly evades the question, “My Kingdom is not rooted in this world.” Once again, the judge asks the accused, “So you are a king?” Yet once more the accused does not feel compelled to answer the judge, “You’re saying I am. I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth.” And Jesus’s choice of the word for you, the emphatic you in Greek, is the exact same word Pilate has just pointed at him. In other words, the accused is taking umbrage with the judge and throwing his words right back at him. Christ is not the one under judgment here.
Christians can debate whether the Bible teaches universal salvation.But what the Gospels give us beyond a shadow of a doubt is universal implication.Jesus may be the one whose hands are zip-tied together but Pontius Pilate is on trial.
And with him, all of us who are like him.
Pilate asks maybe the most important question, “What is truth?” But, notice, he can’t be bothered even to wait for the Truth’s reply. Before Jesus can even answer his question, he’s gone back outside to keep his status quo. Maybe Pilate’s question is a sincere question. The ancient church fathers thought it was a sincere question. It just goes to show far short sincerity falls from the glory of God. In the end, the answer to his question is less important to him than just getting through his daily To Do list and minimizing the headaches in his life and preserving his place in this kingdom’s pecking order. Matthew informs us that Pilate is married. So maybe Pilate’s got kids at home and he’s only got but so much time to spend on the answer to his question. He’s only got but one hour to spend on God.
Christ is not the one on trial here.
We are.
The passover pilgrims outside the courthouse— they are on trial.
And with them, all of us who are like them.
Many in the crowd, the Gospels make clear, are bitter and exhausted after having suffered generations of oppression and poverty. They’ve not come to the courthouse looking for the execution of justice. The’ve come to the courthouse looking for the execution of a scapegoat— someone who can serve as the golem of their rage and frustration.
Some in the crowd are angry and disillusioned. Jesus had cracked the whip, and thrown a temple tantrum. Jesus had checked every box on the JD for revolutionary leader. It was time to bring low the high and mighty. But then, he stops short of an armed insurrection. He doesn’t take up the sword. He lets himself be handed over.
But most in the crowd are pilgrims from the Jewish diaspora who’ve come to Jerusalem for the Passover. They’re on vacation. They’ve not been privy to Jesus’s ministry. They’ve not read about him on Twitter or heard about him on FoxNews. Therefore, they’re just there for the spectacle. They are there because, no matter what they tell themselves or their friends at church, they enjoy the name-calling and brutality. They relish the endorphin rush that the mockery and the cruelty and the violence give them.
Like Kyle Rittenhouse, they’ve been drawn to the chaos.
And notice what John writes about the crowd in the passion story. For whatever reason they’ve come to the Praetorium, the reason they have remained outside (it’s not because Pilate wouldn’t permit their entrance) is because they do not want to ritually defile themselves for the Passover by entering the Gentile courthouse. The Passover Lamb who takes away the sins of the world is no further away than a flight of stairs, but they remain outside because they prefer to practice their piety before others, to earn their righteousness, to justify themselves.
Christ is not the one on trial here.
It’s all of us.
Look how the soldiers respond when Pilate asks them, “What charge do you bring against this man?” They say, brazenly, “If this man wasn’t guilty, we wouldn’t be handing him over to you.” Their answer implies that anyone they bring to Pilate is guilty by default. Guilty until proven innocent.
If he wasn’t guilty, he wouldn’t have run away.
If he wasn’t guilty, he wouldn’t have resisted.
These arresting officers do not even see the accused as a person. They refer to Jesus as “this one” and “that one.” In fact, they do not so much as give Jesus a personal pronoun— he or him— until they get him to Golgotha.
And notice—
When Pilate suggests to the soldiers that they take Jesus away and judge him according to the Jewish Law, they tell Pilate, “Unfortunately, it’s not legal for us to put anyone to death.”
But here’s the Big Bible Fact for Holy Week:
THAT’S A LIE.
March 26, 2023
The 614th Commandment
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Genesis 33.1-11
You know the story.
The begrudgers were grumbling, “This Jesus welcomes sinners— tax collectors, even, Jewish enablers of Israel’s imperial enemy. This rabbi welcomes the very worst sinners among us, eating and drinking and who knows what else.”
So Jesus reaches for his holster and quickly fires off three parables. The first about a lost sheep. The second about a lost coin. And then, a parable about lost brothers.
“There was a man who had two sons,” Jesus says.
“One day, out of the blue, the father’s youngest son wishes his Daddy dead, demands his share of his future inheritance right now. Continuing a pattern of poor biblical parenting, the man calls his realtor, sells off half his land and the livestock on it, and hands over a cashier’s check to his rotten kid.”
“And wouldn’t you know it,” Jesus says to the begrudgers, “The ingrate takes out a ridiculous lease on a tricked out ride and peels off to live it up in the far country, but he hadn’t even emptied his third tank of gas by the time he’d squandered away his entire inheritance.”
Seeing the begrudgers raise their eyebrows at his story, Jesus adds, “Just like that, every last shekel was gone, use your imagination as to how. So the kid’s broke and homeless and, having no resume, he hires himself out to tend pigs— not a very good job for a Jewish boy. Before long— his boss hadn’t yet Venmo’d him his first week’s pay— the boy is so desperate he’s slurping up the slop the pigs are eating.”
And Jesus catches the look of disgust that creeps over the begrudgers faces.
“I know, right?” Jesus says, “It’s gross.”
“Anyways,” Jesus says, “As I was saying, the snotty kid’s on his knees at the pig troth as though it was a seat at the table and it occurs to him that even his old man’s servants have it better than his present circumstances. The boy says to himself, “I will get up and go to my dad, and I will say to him, “Sir, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”
“So the kid hitchhikes his way home, and while he was still just a dot on the horizon line, his old man sees him. Evidently, his father’s been sitting on the porch every day hoping his prodigal son would return. His father sees him and immediately he does what no respectable Jewish father would do. He gathers up the hem of his garment and he sprints down the driveway, blubbering all the way. With big, ugly tears in his eyes, he throws his arms around his son and kisses him so ferociously the kid can only mumbled the speech he’d prepared, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
“But the father didn’t even hear his apology. He was already too busy pivoting into party-planning mode, snapping his fingers at his servants, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and call the DJ we used for the bar mitzvah last month. Let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
“And then,” Jesus whispers with a dramatic flair, “Just when the meat hit the grill and the beer had been dumped in the cooler, the father’s elder son returned from mending the fences.
“He heard the commotion and he smelled the barbecue so he asked the help what was going on. The servant replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.”
“Hearing the news, the elder brother tossed his tool belt on the ground and ran down to meet his brother and, throwing his arms around the prodigal, the elder brother exclaimed, “Of course, we have to party! We have no choice, or this brother of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
No.
You know the story.
You know that’s not how the story ends.
But that is, more or less, how this story ends in the Book of Genesis.
Other than their divergent endings, the similarities are so striking there’s no way Jesus wasn’t thinking of Jacob and Esau’s reconciliation when he told his story of two brothers.
Having wrestled with the Lord Jesus until daybreak, Jacob finally realizes he has reached the limits of his capacity to manipulate events. His elder brother Esau is near, and Esau is determined to be Cain to Jacob’s Abel. Accordingly, Jacob has just prayed an insistent, desperate prayer— the longest prayer in the Book of Genesis— demanding that God make good on the promise he pledged to Jacob. Remember, the last words Esau uttered in scripture swore vengeance, “I will kill my brother Jacob.” Indeed the two brothers have not spoken to each other since the younger swindled the elder out of his birthright.
So Jacob prays a long petition in the chapter prior, placing his future entirely in God’s hands. Limping his way past the place he names Penuel, Jacob lifts up his eyes and, like a dot on the horizon line, he sees his bloodthirsty brother approaching him. Actually, it’s more like lots of dots on the horizon line, for the unsubtle Esau leads four hundred men with him.To his credit, Jacob does not use his family as human shields; instead, he ventures out in front of them, alone.
Jacob limps towards Esau.
And then he bows in deference.
He limps towards Esau.
And then he bows down in submission.
He limps.
And he bows.
As though it’s a full-bodied confession, “I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your brother…” Seven times, scripture says, the younger son limps and bows, all the while making his way to the father’s elder son who has pledged to kill his brother. But when the vengeance he’s sought is finally in front of him, Esau responds by breaking his promise. He does not do what he’s vowed to do.
Or rather, the Lord keeps his promise to protect Jacob by willing Esau to forsake his promise to kill Jacob. Like a prodigal father, Esau runs across the would-be-battlefield, throws his arms around his brother, falls on his neck, and kisses him— weeping from the start. “We have to party! We have no choice, for this brother of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
The end of the story is almost too good to be true.
“This is surely the hand of the highest,” Martin Luther comments on the two brothers’s reconciliation. The God who can stay the proud waves of the sea is the same God who can stop the fury in the heart of Esau. In other words, this ending, this resolution, it’s a miracle. In the end, Luther argues, Esau is “not conquered by strength, diligence, plans, evil tricks, or pretense, but solely by the goodness of God, for Esau’s will is changed.” Thus Jacob, Luther contends, belongs to the number of those of whom Christ says, “All things are possible to him who believes.”
Perhaps.
Maybe the end of the story is too good to be true.Maybe the end of the story is too good to be true just yet.If you read further into chapter thirty-three, you discover that the brothers’s miraculous reconciliation does not lead to happily ever after.
Esau invites Jacob to join him on the journey to Seir.
But Jacob dodges the invitation and says, “Yeah, um, you know how it is, a long car ride and all. The kids are tired and the lambs are nursing right now. You go on ahead, brother, and I’ll follow after you just as fast as the livestock will allow.”
Esau journeys on to Seir.
And Jacob journeys to Succoth, which— you have to know your Bible geography to catch the clue— is in the opposite direction of Seir.
It’s the equivalent of Jacob promising to meet Esau in Baltimore and then heading towards Charlottesville. Combine this little detail with the fact that both the Book of Exodus and the Book of Numbers depict Esau and his descendants as enemies of the people of Israel.
“We have to party! We have no choice, for this brother of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
It’s not simply that the end of the Jacob and Esau story outdoes even Jesus’s own story of lost brothers; it’s that the prodigality of their reconciliation (the lavishness of it, the weeping and kissing and embracing, the over the top talk about seeing the face of God in the other) it cuts against the grain of the larger biblical narrative.
For this reason— pay attention now:
Both the old rabbis of the Synagogue and the ancient fathers of the Church, interpreted this scripture eschatologically; that is, this scene with which the story of Jacob and Esau ends it points to the End with a capital E.
After all, the very first principle of interpreting scripture is that scripture interprets scripture, and the apostle Paul makes it explicit in his epistle to the Romans that Jacob and Esau function respectively as figures for the Church and the Synagogue. Jacob is the Church, the younger sibling who, according to the purpose of God, has taken the birthright of the older brother.
“Does this mean God has rejected the elder brother, Israel?” Paul asks before quickly answering, “By no means!”
It’s all in service to the salvation of the world, Paul writes.
What God does with the few, what God these two, Jacob and Esau— God does for the many. It’s for all. Esau’s embrace of Jacob foreshadows the reconciliation of all things by the thin, narrow line of God’s election, first of Israel and followed by the Church.
Esau then Jacob.
It’s about how the Story with a capital S will End.It’s about Synagogue and Church.It’s about Jews and Christians.It’s about what we ultimately make of each other and what finally God will make of us.A few of years ago, my wife and I were traveling in Southern France.
On one hot, sunny day we toured a museum in Nice devoted to the work of the artist Marc Chagall. A Jewish artist, Chagall had been born in Russia but fled to France before the outbreak of World War II. The museum is a series of large, round rooms with Chagall’s boldly colored art displayed against spartan white walls. Because of the diversity of tourists, there was no single tour guide per se. Instead everyone was given a hand-held radio each set to a specific language with numbered buttons that corresponded to the numbers next to each section of paintings.
Holding the radio next to my ear, I worked my way through the museum in no particular order. After a while, because my feet were sore, I sat down on a long leather bench in the middle of a gallery floor next to an old man. He had a yarmulke clipped to his white, wiry hair and, faintly, I could hear that his radio was set to Hebrew.
Like the old man sitting at my left, I stared up at the painting entitled White Crucifixion:
I pressed the button on my radio, button fourteen, and I listened as the GPS-sounding voice explained how Mark Chagall, who’d studied Torah before he’d studied art, saw in Jesus of Nazareth the ultimate symbol for the suffering of all the Jewish people. When the GPS-sounding voice went on to mention how earlier versions of White Crucifixion depicted soldiers in black with swastikas on their arms burning down a synagogue, I heard the old man next to me start to cry. His palsied hand was holding the radio up to his left ear. Just underneath the cuff of his white sleeve I could see the numbers tattooed on the inside of his left wrist.
Like a tag on an animal.
Or a barcode on a piece of supermarket meat.
It’s not a trivial matter that both the rabbis and the apostles read this scene of reconciliation eschatologically, as a sign of the day when Jews and Christians would embrace one another in the life everlasting that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a twenty-two year old boy named Emile Fackenheim managed to escape as Nazi storm troopers ransacked and burned Jewish homes and businesses and synagogues and then took thirty thousand men to concentration camps. Emile Fackenheim went on to become the most important Jewish theologian of the twentieth century. Fackenheim wrote a book of post-holocaust philosophy called To Mend the World.
In that book, to all those who worship the God of Abraham, Fackenheim issued what he calls the 614th commandment. According to the rabbis reckoning, the Old Testament contains 613 commandments. Because of the enormity of the Holocaust, Fackenheim argued that those who worship the God of Israel should add one more commandment to the list, a 614th Commandment.
Commandment #614 goes like this:Thou shalt not give Hitler any posthumous victories.For Jews, Fackenheim argued, the 614th Commandment means they should not despair. They should not despair that this is God’s world and they are God’s chosen people.
And for Christians, the 614th Commandment means we should remember that the New Testament itself insists that God wills not only the existence of the Church but God wills the ongoing existence of the Jews as Jews.
According to Paul, the people of Israel have an abiding and irremovable place in the will of God.
Thou shalt not give Hitler any posthumous victories.
Such a commandment requires that we understand not only that God wills the ongoing existence of the Jews as Jews but it requires too that we understand why God so wills.
As politicians increasingly give voice or platform to anti-semitic tropes, it’s all the more urgent we understand why the Jews as Jews remain a necessary part of God’s final intention.As the Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod insists, it is:
“…the fleshly, incarnations character of God’s relation to Israel which makes the Christian claims about Jesus intelligible in the first place.”
When the gospel first ventured out in mission, it collided with a world shaped by the Greek religion of Plato. The devotees of Plato’s religion believed that deity, by definition, is eternal and so immune to time; that is, God is above and beyond history not involved in history as both its author and an actor within it. Deity, the Greeks simply assumed, is pure spirit not matter and certainly not flesh. Jesus’s bodily resurrection from the dead made absolutely no sense to the pagan world into which the apostles took the gospel message just as it remains unpalatable to pagans today.
But Jews, Wyschogrod writes, understand the claim of the gospel even if most find it in fact false.Thereby, Jews make the Christian gospel intelligible.While most of Israel still does not find it credible that in Jesus of Nazareth God lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly, Israel cannot claim that the gospel is alien to the God of their scriptures. Not if:
“Israel’s God can indulge in a little wrestling match with Jacob, or sit down to Abraham and Sara’s cooking, or converse with humans as his own angel; not if all the phenomena the rabbis put together as the Shekinah [the glory of the Lord] are appropriate to him; or if he can establish an earthly address at Number One Temple Avenue.”
In other words, the Jews are our corroborating witnesses.
God wills the ongoing existence of the Jews as Jews because they are our corroborating witnesses.
They themselves may not be persuaded by our testimony; nevertheless, they abide because they are able to testify on our behalf that “Yes, that sounds like something our God, the true God, would do.”
Thursday afternoon I met a woman in the community for coffee. What I had expected to be an innocent get together instead started with her asking me if I would officiate her son’s funeral, “if and when the time came.”
The surprise must’ve registered on my face.
“He’s lost again,” she said, picking absentmindedly at the sleeve of her blue blazer.
“Who’s lost again?” I asked, “How?”
And then she told me about her oldest son, Connor, how he’d struggled with Tourette’s as a kid and how that grew into a struggle with addiction and mental health at the end of high school. A couple of years ago he’d gotten himself clean and stable when one evening while he was jogging a car struck him and dragged him thirty yards and then drove off and left him in the road.
“He worked so hard through his recovery,” she said, dabbing her eyes with her napkin, “He was back, healing and healthy and whole. It was like, in this terrible but miraculous way, he’d been found.”
She stared over my shoulder for a few moments.
“But it didn’t last.”
“What happened?”
“He developed schizophrenia. He started using again. Then he fell into a delusion that’s made him terrified of his father and me. He absolutely believes it and cut off all contact from us. He bounces around from hospital to homeless shelter. We don’t know where he is now.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“His brother and sisters are done with him and want nothing to do with him,” she struggled to say, “and I feel just awful that some days I know exactly how they feel.”
Even “I’m so sorry” didn’t seem too meager a response so I said nothing.
“I can’t stop dwelling on what I did or didn’t do,” she wept, “how I failed him and how I’m failing him now but just wanting to give up.”
I waited for her to finish and for her tears to run out.
When she could look at me, I said to her— no, I promised her:
“On that last bit, I have a particular word to give you. Christ Jesus has authorized me (and I believe he’s sent me here) to speak it to you today. On his authority, I declare to you the entire forgiveness of whatever you’ve done or not done, however you’ve failed and whatever you’ve countenanced. I can promise you that the Lord has nothing but mercy for all of you.”
With the absolution, she discovered another well of tears. After she cried some more, she nodded and was about to speak, but I cut her off.
“Hold on,” I said, “I’m not done. The Lord Jesus has given me some other promises to hand over to you. One day— I promise you— in this life or in the life everlasting, he will be healed. He’s baptized, don’t forget. That means, the Lord Jesus has promised to raise him up. So one day, I promise you, he will be made whole. One day everything that is broken in your family will be mended. One day— it’s guaranteed, either in this life or the one to come, the two of you will throw your arms around each other and you’ll be like that father in the story who says, “Let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
“God, I hope that’s not too good to be true,” she said.
“It’s true,” I said.
I didn’t add, but I could have said to her, “Don’t take my word for it. I have an older brother. Call him Esau. We may not always agree, but he could vouch for me. He would tell you, “Yeah, that’s exactly the sort of thing our God would do.”
March 25, 2023
The Fall Takes Place Not in Eden But at Mt. Sinai
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Recently I ventured onto social media long enough to see the above meme shared as enthusiastically as it was ubiquitously.
I confess that whenever I see either/or assertions of this sort thrown down on the internet, the Old Adam in me first wonders:
“Have you actually read the scriptures?”The available texts are too numerous to list. I could start with John the Baptizer’s declaration, which kicks off John’s Gospel proper, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of of the world.” I could follow-up with Paul’s Easter text from his first epistle to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins.” The apostle refers to that message as the Church’s word of first importance apart from which we are the most pathetic people in the world.
Of course, there’s the seldom examined anti-judaism that lingers behind the modern aversion to the language of sin and humanity’s need for atonement. While we can certainly debate the merits and demerits of so-called atonement motifs, Israel’s cultic life, commanded to it by God, straightforwardly says that God’s people, as they are presently constituted under Sin, are not acceptable to a holy God (I sure as shit know that’s true about me and worry about those who do not so identify). They must be made acceptable by God. And the mechanism God gave to Israel was gracious, vicarious sacrifice. Thus the Temple apparatus and its tribe of priests, of which, the Book of Hebrews claims, the Lord Jesus is the head not the negation.
Granting the above meme is a “sermon,” the god so invoked is not the triune God.
The binary between empire and atonement is simply not necessary as anyone who’s recited the Apostle’s Creed already knows.There are only two proper names in the creed besides Jesus, who is 1) Mary’s son and 2) Pilate’s victim. It’s quite obvious that the simplest historical answer to the question “Why was Jesus was crucified?” is “Because we killed him.” As the creeds state bluntly, “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” However, Christ is not the only vicarious substitute in the paschal mystery. Pilate’s name abides in the dogma as a placeholder for all of us. In Christ, God the Son died because we killed him (and would do so again).
We are the empire—
a fact often elided by those who endorse the first half of the above meme.
But!
That in Christ God the Son— ie, the Second Person of the Trinity— died means that the crucifixion of Jesus must always have more than the merely horizontal explanation of his opposition to an unjust imperial status quo.
Moreover, as a workaday preacher with over two decades experience attending to these texts, I often puzzle over those who posit that the political, anti-imperial posture of Christ and his apostles is the only faithful reading of the scriptures. On the one hand, it does not square with Israel’s scriptures, though Israel herself was not shy about agitating against oppressive empires (often, embarrassingly so to us, the Lord himself dispatched those empires to oppress his people Israel and so chasten her back to faithfulness to him). On the other hand, the purely political, anti-imperial interpretation of Jesus’s ministry requires a tremendous leap of blind faith, for it asks us to accept that the apostles who first journeyed forth with the gospel, the evangelists who composed the canon, the church fathers who formulated it into creed, and most of the ensuing tradition all misconstrued the fundamental nature of the faith.
Quite simply:
If Jesus is fundamentally nothing more than an anti-imperial political activist who died an unfortunate death, then all the evangelists and the apostles, all the fathers and the mothers of the ancient church, all those who formed the tradition and all those who reformed it, then all of them would be the very worst communicators.
Everywhere they allowed language like, “The death he died, he died to sin once for all,” to confuse their simple, this-worldly horizontal message. For example, the simplest refutation of the above meme’s assertion is the Church’s liturgy for the Easter Vigil, whose sequence of readings makes it clear that the choice offered in the “mini-sermon” is a false one.
Again, Israel is instructive. No one understands oppression under various empires better than the Hebrew people. Nevertheless, the witness of their scripture is that in the end only God can split the sea that stands between the oppressed and their Pharaoh. That the Tanakh is also the Christian Old Testament suggests a consensus on the claim.
The ills and injustices of empire are real and we should stand up against them, but ultimately, as Auden wrote, “nothing that is possible can save us.”
March 24, 2023
Hitmen and Midwives: Talking Preaching with Preachers
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Back in the fall, I gave a series of talks on grace and proclamation to a clergy conference for the Anglican Church of Canada. I titled the talks, “Hitmen and Midwives,” taking the idea from the Word’s self-description in the Book of Deuteronomy:
“I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal.”
Or, to put it in terms of Holy Week, new life only comes by way of the grave. Just so, preachers are like Hitmen and Midwives, killing the Old Eve and Adam in hearers in order for God to create faith and, through faith, a new creation.
You can find the audio of those talks here on the site.
As an extension of those talks, I am beginning a series of conversations on preaching with preachers and those who listen to them.
First up, my friend Ken Jones, in true Lutheran fashion, has sketched out 9.5 Theses on Preaching. Also, in true Lutheran fashion, Ken has neither a shortage of opinions nor a fear of polemic.
In this conversation, my best friend, Johanna Hartelius, and I talk with Ken about Thesis #2:
Preaching is an extension of what Christ does and who he is and of what scripture declares God has been making of us from the foundation of the world.
Here’s our conversation about Thesis #1.
To access the remaining 7.5 Theses and all other future installments, be sure to subscribe.
March 23, 2023
The Church is not the Jesus Memorial Society
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The upcoming Old Testament lectionary text for the last Sunday of Lent is from the Leviticus of the prophets, the Book of Ezekiel.
It’s not as random as it might strike you: Matthew reports two earthquakes in his Gospel. Upon the death of Christ on Golgotha, the earth quivered in Easter anticipation, trembling like a woman in labor Three days later the resurrection tips the Richter scale again, Matthew says. This connection between resurrection and earthquakes originates in the graveyard the Lord reveals to the prophet Ezekiel in perhaps the Old Testament’s most important passage.
The Lord brings Ezekiel into the middle of a valley strewn with bones. Dry bones. Bones detached from the bodies to which they once belonged. Bones beyond any possibility of identification or reclamation. The Lord informs Ezekiel that the many anonymous and forgotten bones in this mass tomb are the whole House of Israel. That is, the entirety of the People of God. In other words, you and me.
The hopeless, meaningless valley of the bones is our common fate.Apart from the mighty work of God.Easter begins at the grave.
The Lord leads Ezekiel all around the valley of the bones before asking him, “Tell me, mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel— he honestly does not know the answer, “O Lord God, only you know.” And the Lord promises Ezekiel that there will be a ra’ash, a rattling of the earth, when the answer to the question comes upon us.
Can these bones live?
Does life have any other point but its own refutation?
The theologian Robert Jenson, writes that all of scripture and the whole of the Christian message can be distilled down to the question God poses to Ezekiel in the boneyard and whether or not God has answered his own question by raising Jesus Christ from the dead.
Easter begins at the grave.
And because Easter begins at the grave so too does the Gospel begin there because the Gospel is God’s answer to his question, “Tell me, mortal, can these bones live?”
I was working double duty both as a pastor and as a hospital chaplain at UVA, where one of my responsibilities was to accompany shocked and freshly grieved strangers to meet the bodies of their loved ones.
One winter night, in the middle of an overnight shift, I was paged to go and meet a mother who’d arrived to see— view— her daughter.
She was waiting at the security desk when I found her.
Her mascara had already streaked down her cheeks and dried in the lines of her face. I noticed she hadn’t put any socks on and she’d put her sweater on backwards.
“I don’t know what she was doing out this time of night,” she kept whispering to herself.
A resident doctor, a med student no older than I was at the time, accompanied us. She’d been the one who’d attended her daughter when the rescue squad brought her in from the accident.
The three of us walked soberly to a tiny, antiseptic room. When the mother saw her daughter, she immediately lost her footing. And then she lost her breath. Then after a long, stretched-out moment, she let out a bone-racking sob. I had my arm around her to comfort her and keep her from falling, but I didn’t say anything.
The med student, though, was clearly unnerved by the rawness of the mother’s grief and by the absence of any words. She put her hand on the mother’s shoulder and looked over at the teenage girl lying on the metal bed with flecks of dried blood not all the way wiped from her hair and forehead and said: “It’s alright. She’s not here. She’s slipped away. That’s just a shell…”
I’d known instantly it was the wrong thing to say, that it rang tinny and false and was completely inadequate for the moment.
Nonetheless, it surprised me when she pushed the doctor away and slapped her hard across the face and cried: “It’s NOT alright. That’s my daughter. She’s not just anything. She’s Beth.”
March 22, 2023
Q: Is Belief in God Credible? A: Yes.
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Hey Friends,
I recently decided to revisit and finally finish a catechism I began writing a decade ago, which, thanks to a long vacation called cancer, I never completed. My plan is to rework what I had written, as God has made otherwise than who I was back then, and to write new entries for the questions that I left unaddressed.
It matters that believers understand Christian dogma (it’s necessary and requisite claims) and their implications. For example, consider Father Brown’s rebuke of a young secularist friend in The Incredulity of Father Brown:
“It’s drowning all your…rationalism and skepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition…it’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery…All the menagerie of polytheism returns: dog Anubis and great green-eyed Past and all the holy howling bulls of Bashan, reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning…all because you are frightened of four words, “He was made man.”
Catechism is important, therefore, because “post-Christian” names not an entry into a new, neutral spiritual landscape but a return to the old mythology from which the gospel once liberated us.
If you missed it, here’s the Kick-Off Catechism Post.
I’ll post one every Wednesday so if you’ve not yet subscribed to the Substack…FFS!!
Already, this space is a sort of community. So evangelize by hitting the share button.
4. Can God be proven?No.
God cannot be proven because God is not a god. God is beyond the limits of science, the powers of reason or the perceptions of sensory experience because God is not a being within the material, observable universe.
God is Being itself, distinct from and encompassing all universes.
5. Can God be disproven?
“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closet relationship with the Father, has made him known.”
- 1 John 1.18
“...God’s greatness is unsearchable.” - Psalm 145 .3
No.
God cannot be disproven because God is not a god. God is beyond the limits of science, the powers of reason or the perceptions of sensory experience because God is not a being within the material, observable universe.
God is Being itself, distinct from and encompassing all universes.
6. Is belief in God credible?
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
- Isaiah 55.8
Yes.
While God cannot be proven, the case for God can be rationally persuasive. Belief in God is not superstition.
That being said, it is no more possible to disbelieve generically than it is possible to believe generically. It makes all the difference the identity and history of the God who bears that title. For example, the God of Israel. It is an assertion that begs for credible alternatives to posit that because Rome crucified hundreds of thousands, all of whose names are lost to us, we would not know the name of Jesus Christ had the true God not raised him from the dead.
“God is love.” - 1 John 4.8
Read Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
March 21, 2023
Transfiguring Doubt
Jason Micheli is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Here is the latest session of our online study of Chris Green’s new book, Being Transfigured, in which we talked about doubt.
Here are some of the quotes from the chapter that we cited and discussed:
Grace cannot save us without first losing us, which means grace always makes things awkward.
Not all questions are faithless. And sometimes, in fact, the only faithful response to truth is confusion.
If we’re honest, we’ll have to admit that much of what passes for doubt is nothing but honest hesitation, the inevitable upshot of generations of poor or bad teaching, teaching which trades in simplicities and cheap certainties, often eschewing pain at all costs, leaving us to feel that our salvation depends not on the mystery of faith, sustained by God’s devotion to us, but on our own grasp of our own beliefs or on the intensity of our desire for religious experiences.
We have to be saved from “simple faith.” But not so that we might have “great faith.” That, too, always proves false. We need, instead, “the faith of God,” which is what is left of our faith after it has been purged by the Spirit.
If you’d like to catch the next session live, you can register HERE.
Read Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
Jason Micheli's Blog
- Jason Micheli's profile
- 13 followers
