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November 2 - December 8, 2019
As a teacher of wisdom, Jesus was not primarily a teacher of information (what to believe) or morals (how to behave), but a teacher of a way or path of transformation. A way of transformation from what to what? From a life in the world of conventional wisdom to a life centered in God.
Conventional wisdom is the dominant consciousness of any culture. It
It is thus enculturated consciousness–that is, consciousness shaped and structured by culture or tradition.
living in accord with conventional wisdom not only was the dominant consciousness of the first-century Jewish social world, but also is the dominant consciousness in our time and culture.
conventional wisdom embodies the central values of a culture–its understanding of what is worthwhile
good life. In first-century Judaism, this kind of guidance was provided by the Torah and the folk wisdom of the culture, some of which is preserved in the book of Proverbs.
conventional wisdom is intrinsically based upon the dynamic of rewards and punishments.
It carries with it a hard-edged corollary, of course: if you don’t succeed, or are not blessed, or do not prosper, it is because you have not followed the right path. Life becomes a matter of requirement and reward, failure and punishment.
conventional wisdom has both social and psychological consequences. Socially, it creates a world of hierarchies and boundaries. Some of these may be inherited, as when differences in gender, race, or physical condition are assigned different cultural values and roles. Some are more the product of performance: there are some people who measure up to the standards of conventional wisdom better than others.
The superego (whether we choose to call it that or not) is the internalized voice of culture, the storehouse of oughts within our heads, and it functions as a generally critical (though sometimes congratulatory) internal voice.
Conventional wisdom is thus life under the superego.
It is a life of anxious striving, and feeling okay or not okay to the extent that we do or do not measure up.
It is living according to the “performance principle,” in which everything depends upon how well I perform.
ironically, we try to be outstanding–to stand out–by conforming to the standards that our culture values
Selfishness seldom has to do with reaching for the biggest piece of cake on the plate; rather, it is preoccupation with our selves.
In an important sense, becoming an adult means internalizing the conventional wisdom of one’s own culture.
There is an image of God that goes with the world of conventional wisdom. When conventional wisdom appears in religious form, God is imaged primarily as lawgiver and judge. God may be spoken of in other ways as well (for example, as forgiving and gracious), but the bottom line is that God is seen as both the source and enforcer, and therefore the legitimator, of the religious form of conventional wisdom. God becomes the one whom we must satisfy, the one whose requirements must be met.
the most common form of Christianity. It is important to realize this, in part so that we do not make the mistake of equating conventional wisdom with Judaism and alternative wisdom with Christianity.
Israel began as “the alternative community of Moses”
“subversive” or “skeptical” wisdom (Ecclesiastes and Job).
Conventional wisdom is not to be identified with any particular tradition; it is pervasive in all traditions.
To emphasize the point once again: the conflict between conventional wisdom and alternative wisdom is not a conflict between Judaism and Christianity, but a conflict within both traditions.
Faith (most often understood as belief) is what God required, and by a lack of faith/belief one risked the peril of eternal punishment.
Thus, for many of us latter-day Lutherans, the system of conventional wisdom remained. Only the content of the requirement had changed–from good works to faith.
There is another consequence of Christian conventional wisdom. The requirement of faith divides the world up into those who have faith and those who don’t, with the implication that God is kindly disposed toward the first group and not so kindly disposed toward the second.
If even the Lutheran tradition, which speaks so emphatically of grace, can so easily become a system of requirement and reward, then it can happen anywhere. From talking with other Christians, I know that my experience is not idiosyncratic.
Most report having heard the Christian message as a message of requirements (whether of belief or of behavior or, most often, of both) and of rewards, typically in “the next world,” and sometimes in this world as well.
in which purity is a matter of the heart and not of external boundaries, in which the poor are blessed, the first are last and the last first, the humble exalted and the exalted humbled?
Many who expect to be in the Kingdom will not be:
Moreover, the Kingdom is not somewhere else; rather it is among you, inside you, and outside you. Neither is it some time in the future, for it is here, spread out on the earth; people just do not see it.34
He directly attacked the central values of his social world’s conventional wisdom: family, wealth, honor, purity, and religiosity.
“Call no man on earth your father, for you have one Father, who is in heaven”
But now I hear them very differently. Rather than an indictment, they are an invitation to see reality as characterized by a cosmic generosity and by an overflowing effulgence of life.
regardless of how long or how hard they have worked, the hearers are invited to enter a world in which everybody receives what they need.45
The parable invites the hearers to consider that God is like this, and not like the God of requirements and reward.
will the older son’s sense of the way things ought to be keep him out of the banquet?47
To speak of God as gracious and compassionate–as womblike, to recall a theme from the previous chapter–is very different from imaging God as the lawgiver and judge enforcing the life of requirements.
The passages in the synoptics that speak of a last judgment with eternal consequences are largely the products of Matthew’s redaction.
In short, it seems that the threat of being judged by God for one’s sins at the last judgment was not central to Jesus,
On the individual level (now as then), if one does not leave the world of conventional wisdom, one remains in it, living in “the land of the dead.” That (and not the threat of hell) is the issue.
The alternative wisdom of Jesus sees the religious life as a deepening relationship with the Spirit of God, not as a life of requirements and reward.
What is needed, then, is a new heart–an internal transformation brought about by a deep centering in God.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.”51
For it is possible to be centered in sacred tradition and yet have one’s heart far from God.52
“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”53
but the process may often involve the stages we have come to associate with the physical process of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Put even more compactly, the way less traveled is life in the Spirit. It is the life that Jesus himself knew. The transformation of perception to which Jesus invited his hearers flowed out of his own spiritual experience.
There is a sovereign voice in his wisdom, one that knows tradition but whose vantage point is not simply tradition.
We may suppose that the source of this sovereign voice was an enlightenment experience similar to such experiences...
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The life to which he invited his hearers was the life in the Spirit that he himself had experienced.
