Jesus renews the covenant that places the frail and outcast, the widow, the stranger and the orphan at the heart of the community of the compassionate God.
Renewed order through the birth of Christ
The renewed social order will come about through the birth of Jesus. He will develop and challenge the existing norms at every stage of his life, death and resurrection. Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, where the values of the Sinai covenant “to care for the widow, the stranger and the orphan” – all those who are powerless, are reflected back to God’s people by an outsider, causes crisis in those listening. If they carry on with the current practices of separation and ritual purity, taught by their leaders, they are guilty of breaking the covenant that God revealed to Moses. If they accept that the Samaritan outsider can be the minister of God’s compassion, then they have to break with the national story and step into what Jesus calls the “kingdom of God”. A free, bigger space and story than state and religion, and then their simple certainties about their own religious superiority are blown away. The structures of Temple and hierarchy are relativised, and the original open mystery of God as “I am who I am, I will be where I will be”, the undefinable, uncontrollable, creative Divine Spirit appears again as at the Burning Bush. The people encounter the disturbing mystery of divine presence anew in the everyday reality of economic violence and the manipulation of religion and national structures.
Jesus reawakens the prophetic story-telling tradition of Elijah and Elisha. In their time these prophets challenged the story of the 400 year rule of the Kings of Israel, (told in 1 Kings 1-22 and 2 Kings 1:1-25). In the books of Kings this 400 year reign is celebrated from the top down by royal scribes who recorded wars won and secure heirs provided. The official account celebrates the heritage of King Solomon’s power and wealth and its legitimation by the royal liturgy of the Jerusalem Temple which he had built. But a third of the two books also record Elijah and Elisha’s re-reading of the same reign from the grassroots of society.
Then in Elisha’s telling it becomes clear that Solomon’s wealth is underpinned by one of the most predatory tax systems in the ancient world. His wealth and that of his parasitic court depended on cheap, conscripted, forced labour. (1 Kings 5:13-18 records 70,000 labourers, 10,000 stonecutters, and 3,300 supervisors.) Solomon has forgotten the founding story of Israel in Egypt when liberated gangs of slaves were called to form a new nation free of slavery sustained by the establishment of Sabbath and Jubilee years.
The texts of I and 2 Kings celebrate Solomon as a dominating global trader, extorting protection money from neighbouring peoples. His wealth is further enhanced as an arms dealer importing horses and chariots from Egypt and Kue (1 Kings 10:28-29) and selling them on to the Hittite Kings and the King of Arram.
In all the years of the kings that follow, only King Josiah tried to return to the Mosaic covenant and restore its ethic of neighbourliness. Of him Jeremiah will say:
He judged the cause of the poor and the needy.
Then it was well with him.
Is not this to know me? Says the Lord.
Jeremiah 22:15-16
Only the ancient prophets address the specifics of the real struggles under such totalitarian figures. Which is no doubt why the philosopher Plato famously excludes storytellers and poets, from his ideal Republic. They are dangerous to the status quo.
In his first sermon, Jesus deliberately identifies himself with this prophetic critique in his appeal to the Jubilee year values in Luke 4:18-19. In facing opposition, he cites the prophet Elijah’s care for the foreign widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:8-16) and Elisha’s curing of the Syrian general Naaman (2 Kings 5) in Luke 4:24-27. Jesus renews the covenant that places the frail and outcast, the widow, the stranger and the orphan, whoever they may be, at the heart of the community of the compassionate God.
The ‘Kingdom of God’ as a metaphor of hope
What emerges in the hope-filled prophetic and apocalyptic texts that begin to develop in the Old Testament is a metaphor which becomes the core teaching of Jesus in “the kingdom” or“rule of God”. This judgement on all forms of power becomes real and embodied in Jesus’ life and teachings as announced in Mark’s opening chapter:
14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
Mark 1:14-15
It is fulfilled in Jesus’ healing actions as in Luke 7:21-23 and in his parables. The radical tradition of hope that emerges is expressed in the prayer he taught us. So we invoke the Father’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. This is the central hope of our faith and practice that Jesus opens up in that very first sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth when he renews the hope of the jubilee year in Luke 4:18-19 –
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
Jesus and his shocking dinner tables of hope
Anthropologists tell us that to know who, what, where, when, and with whom people eat is to understand the character and identity of a society. Jesus’ stories of the open table fellowship of the Kingdom are shocking. He tells of invitations to meals that include everyone regardless of their class, gender, status, or moral worth. He eats with men and women of any class or status ignoring traditional distinctions. And as you would expect, he is fiercely criticised, with his enemies saying he eats with tax-collectors, sinners and prostitutes in Luke 7:33-34 and Matthew 11:18-19. Implicitly they suggest he is no better than those he associates with. People thought that sin was contagious, one’s only hope for salvation was to stay within a holy huddle (e.g. the dining groups of 12 pharisaic families). It is not surprising that in Mark 3:20 Jesus’ family come to take him back home because they thought he was “beside himself” that is, mad!
The Pharisees in particular, clashed with Jesus over his eating practice. In an attempt to keep the purity of Jewish life, in the context of its corruption by Greco-Roman influences and of their religious and political leader’s collusion, they had taken all the dietary and purity rules applicable to the Priests and the Temple and adapted them to the domestic table of the home. Their pure homes took the place of the impure Temple. The Pharisees’ idea of a holy people was symbolically a nation of priests even though they were a lay movement. In the process, they cut off the possibility of most people in Galilee and Judea from joining their circle of holiness. The “people of the land”could not give the time and effort needed to maintaining such ritual practices of purity, tithing and only buying from certain sources, nor did they have the money for such purchases. Jesus’ prophetic shared meals are a direct provocation to such practices. For the radical Pharisees he is unclean because of the people he eats with. He is contaminated by associating with the sinners, the unclean and impure. But for most people his meals are a sign of hope, there is a place even for them in God’s promised renewed creation.
Jesus’ response is clear and direct. He locates the centre of God’s people outside of holy spaces. At his meals outsiders become insiders as an enactment of the coming of God’s Kingdom. He says: “Many will come from east and west, from north and south and sit at table in the reign of God” in Luke 13:29 and Matthew 8:11. Jesus’ meals then become rituals of reversal, witnessing to the breaking in of God’s reign among the very people that the holy ones exclude. They are meals of living hope. Signs and sacraments of lasting hope.
We see this clearly and deliberately with the feeding of crowds in the desert, with no one to check their religious credentials, no opportunity to practice rituals of purification – all are invited to sit down and share whatever God provides. We know the outcome of this extraordinary event – everyone shared and there was not only enough, but plenty left over. A new and promised but forgotten community emerges around Jesus that we are now challenged to re-imagine and celebrate in our own time.
