Speaking In Tongues (part 5)

As a denizen of the first century Greco-Roman world and as a popular teacher that would have been increasingly viewed through messianic lenses, Jesus would have been quite conscientious of the way that He was perceived by the public.  That said, He appears to be almost completely unconcerned with the honor and shame system.  It almost seems as if He viewed it as being quite backwards, with actions seen as most honorable by the wider public, perceived by Jesus as being shameful, and vice versa. 

At times, Jesus accepts the honors being afforded to Him, but generally He only accepts honoring or honorific statements when they come from those that do not possess any public honor (tax collectors, lepers, those that have been possessed by demons, unclean women, etc…).  When the rich or the rulers attempt to honor Him (and thus flatter themselves and attempt to accrue honor by their own association with Him), perhaps by calling Him “good,” He disavows the approbation.  He routinely speaks of the first being last and the last being first.  He interacts with tax collectors, who may have money and a measure of power, but who are not looked upon as being honorable in the least.  He touches lepers.  He allows dishonorable women to touch Him.

He is more than happy to take the lowest place at a meal, eschewing the places of honor and instructing His followers to do the same.  He washes the feet of His disciples, which is the role of a slave and a reminder of the slave’s shameful place.  He allows children who, being children, do not have a place in the honor and shame pursuit (they do not have honor or shame accorded to them), to come to Him.  When they do, He tells those who are listening to Him that they must enter the kingdom of Israel’s God as little children---unconcerned with the pursuit of honor or the avoidance of shame (which has nothing to do with a “childlike faith”).  He ultimately ended up on a cross, which was the lowest and most shameful place of all, and He went there willingly as He embraced the role of Israel for the world. 

These things (the honor and shame culture along with Jesus’ treatment of this broad social construct) would have been well understood by Jesus’ followers and those that made up the believing communities that attempted to live out what it meant to be the renewed Israel that represented the rule of the Creator God through the remembrance of and reflection upon the orally transmitted Jesus tradition.  When Paul wrote his letters, especially what are considered to be the early letters, there were at that point no known and codified written record of the life of Jesus.  There were no Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as they exist in their present form.  Paul doesn’t have his own body of work or the letters from other apostles from which to draw, nor do the early believers.  What they had were the words of the apostles. 

Those apostles shared their stories of Jesus (a relatively unified story to be sure, though with different emphases, as is obvious from the variety of presentations of the life of Jesus that can be seen in the Gospels) so that those who threw in their lot with the crucified and resurrected King (the church) might do their best to model out the example that He provided, as the movement of the kingdom of the Creator God began to spread through the world via the instrument of the church, with this spread understood to have been motivated by the Spirit of God.  They too were to be motivated to eschew honor and embrace shame, especially if such brought glory to their King and to their God and extended the reach and rule of that Kingdom as they conscientiously strived to bring heaven to earth by mimicking the counter-cultural behavior of Jesus. 

John's Inquiry (part 1 of 3)

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds Christ had done, he sent his disciples to ask a question: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” – Matthew 11:3-4  (NET)

In light of the flurry of first-century messianic figures in Israel, the question that John asks his disciples to put to Jesus is one that is both legitimate and understandable.  Just like a great number member of the nation of Israel in that day, as Israel stood under Roman occupation, John seems to have carried, based on his message, some expectation that Israel’s God was going to break in to history through His Messiah, to go about establishing His kingdom.  To John, the deeds of Jesus, in the areas of healing sickness and disease, casting out demons and giving of sight to the blind, looked very much like the Scriptural portents that indicated what types of events would accompany the time (and the person or persons---messiah figure) through which Israel’s God would become King.  A the same time, the words that Jesus was speaking, and the way in which He was going about building a following, differed from much of the expectations of the messiah that had been created by Scriptural interpretation, Israel’s sense of itself, and the actions of the previous would-be messiahs. 

In consideration of these things, and though some do, we should find that there is absolutely no justifiable reason to chastise John for asking the question of Jesus.  Frankly, it would have been the question on the minds and on the lips of nearly everybody with whom Jesus came into contact.  Surely, John was not the only one to ask this question of Jesus’ messianic status; but Matthew, so as to be able to provide a context for further statements about John that were to come from Jesus, puts the question into the mouth of John ahead of all other questioners. 

How does Jesus respond to the question?  Does he send John’s disciples back to him with a stern rebuke?  Does Jesus say, “How dare you ask such a thing?”  No, of course He doesn’t.  Considering the subversive nature of His ministry---as He appears to be cutting across all of the religious and political movements within Israel in that day (that would seem to be at least one of the ideas to be garnered from the Gospel presentations of Jesus), and also considering the fate of every single person that had claimed the status of messiah for themselves (death on a cross at the hands of the Romans)---Jesus answers in the only way possible.  He offers a gentle answer, albeit indirect but in the affirmative, saying “Yes, I am He.”  How does He do this?  He says, “Go tell John what you hear and see: The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news proclaimed to them” (11:4b-6). 

Though we do not utilize Luke to interpret Matthew, as the authors had different intentions for their biographical offerings, looking to other portraits of Jesus does allow us to get a better sense of the way in which Jesus was understood in His own time and relatively shortly thereafter.  Of course, we also consider that Matthew and Luke had a common source (often thought to be the Gospel of Mark) that provided the underlying structure of their own works.  So if we look to the Gospel of Luke in consideration of the response of Jesus in Matthew, how do we hear and see Jesus announcing Himself?  While in the synagogue in Nazareth, he read from a scroll, saying “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 release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (4:18-19).  He then added, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read” (4:21).  Naturally, that sounds somewhat similar to the answer given by Jesus in answer to John’s quite reasonable question.  Of course, in those words, Jesus was reading from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah---reading the words that were possibly expected to be found in the mouth of God of Israel’s Messiah---and applying those words to Himself. 

We can presume that John, with a messiah-expectant mindset (especially in light of the new exodus movement that he was leading---an exodus is accompanied by a deliverer/redeemer), would have understood the implications of this statement reported by Matthew just as well as did the people that heard Jesus that day in Nazareth (as reported by Luke).  On that day in Nazareth, after Jesus added a few more words of explanation, and when those words that indicated the direction of His messianic program did not necessarily appeal to His group of hearers, “the people in the synagogue were filled with rage” (4:28b).  It is with that in mind that we can return to what Jesus said to John, and perhaps better understand why it is that Jesus, after providing His subtle answer in confirmation of the substance of John’s inquiry, adds “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” (11:6).