Numbers 21:4-9

Reflections and Questions

1. This lesson is chosen, no doubt, to go with the John 3 allusion to the serpent on the pole being lifted up. John 3 puts the story to Christological use. Its original roots in mythology are a different story. It would take quite a study to find all the parallels in mythology and to assess the way in which the Hebrew tradition appropriated such stories. The most obvious link is with the Asclepius, the ancient Greek god for healing. His symbol was two snakes entwined around a pole (which I believe is where the AMA gets its symbol). The idea was that opposites which war within are brought into harmony, resulting in healing.

2. A sermon could make use of modern medical practices as illustrations. I have given sermons on these texts around the theme "Facing the Snake the Bites You." Modern medicine has seemingly gotten away from the links between our physical and spiritual health. Does its focus on physical causes and treatments, especially its 'addiction' to using drugs, merely cover over the deeper symptoms of our sickness? Conversely, does the cross of Jesus help us to really get to the roots of our sickness by making us "face the snake that has bitten us"?

Looking at a snake on a pole to be healed from snake bite is resonant with the notion of pharmakon in Greek culture: a drug is a poison that, taken in the right dosage, is also a remedy. The pharmakos, often translated as "sorceror," was one accused of evil and run out of town and often killed -- in other words, the scapegoat. Scapegoating is thus like taking a drug: the poison of violence is taken at just the right dosage in order to bring a relative measure of peace. For more on this and the connection to healing, see Epiphany 7B.

Ephesians 2:1-10

Exegetical Notes

1. 2:3: tais epithymiais tes sarkos ("desires of the flesh") and tekna physei orges ("children by nature of wrath"). Mimetic theory is an anthropological thesis that makes explicit the close connection between mimetic desire (epithymia) and wrath (orge). In fact, that connection is within the word for desire itself since the other most common Greek word for "wrath," in addition to orge, is thymos, a root to the word epithymia. I have done some digging about epithymia previously (see notes for Proper 18A) when reflecting on Romans:

Girard himself also has some helpful comments on a root word, thymos, in Violence and the Sacred, pp. 154, 265. I decided to dig deeper for myself and was stunned by what I found in Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the NT (TDNT). Here's an etymology of words that could stand as solid corroboration of Girard's theses! The two central themes of Girard, desire and sacrifice, are bound together in the etymology of the ancient Greek words, even more than of what Bailie and Girard had previously made me aware.

Here's an overview, before going a bit more in depth. The most common Greek words for "sacrifice" (including in the NT and LXX) are thyo (verb) and thysia (noun). Derived from this are thymos, most often translated as "anger" or "wrath" (often used interchangeably with orge in designating the wrath of the gods), and epithymia, or the verb epithymeo, meaning desire. Essentially, these are both strong desires (1) thymos relating especially to the sacrificial cult; and (2) epithymia relating to the sorts of desires which lead to sacrificial crises. epithymia can mean any strong desire or yearning, but very often has a negative connotation, sometimes translated as "lust." ... the verb epithymeo is what is used for the rendering of the tenth commandments prohibition against "coveting."

A one sentence summary of Girard's anthropology could be summed up in the relationship of these words: thyo (sacrifice) is what we humans resort to in order to keep in check our epithymia (covetousness), all the while hiding our problem with epithymia (mimetic desire) from ourselves by attributing the need for thyo (sacrifice) to the appeasement of the thymos (wrath) of the gods.

My digging in the TDNT suggested even deeper relationships among these words. The article on thymos / epithymia by Buechsel (Vol. III, pp. 167-172) is especially revealing. (It also points the reader immediately, in its heading, to the huge article on orge [vol. V, pp. 382-447], which has a section on the interchangeability of thymos and orge in translating the "wrath" of God in the LXX.) Here's how the article on thymos starts (with a better etymology of thyo than the article on thyo [vol. III, pp. 180-190]):

"thyo originally denotes a violent movement of air, water, the ground, animals, or men. From the sense of 'to well up,' 'to boil up,' there seems to have developed that of 'to smoke,' and then 'to cause to go up in smoke,' 'to sacrifice.' The basic meaning of thymos is thus similar to that pneuma ['spirit'], namely, 'that which is moved and which moves,' 'vital force.' In Homer thymos is the vital force of animals and men.... thymos then takes on the sense of a. desire, impulse, inclination, b. spirit, c. anger, d. sensibility, e. disposition or mind, f. thought, consideration. The richly developed usage in Homer and the tragic dramatists is no longer present in the prose writers, e.g., Plato, Thucydides. For them thymos means spirit, anger, rage, agitation. In Jewish Gr. thymos is common in this sense.... Everywhere in the NT it means 'wrath.'"

I find this fascinating! Especially the comparison to pneuma as a vital force. Oughourlian has advocated for mimeticism as the universal vital force that animates living beings (akin to gravity which governs the movements of physical objects; see ch. 1 of The Puppet of Desire). From a biblical perspective, especially when informed by Girard's anthropology, we might say that that vital force divides in two, blows in two different directions, thymos and pneuma. The first is mimetic desire fallen into rivalry and the descension into wrath, the wrath we ultimately project onto the gods through our sacrificial cults. The second is the true vital force of life, a loving, non-rivalrous desire, also known as agape, which only God truly originates, a Holy Spirit. We need to put on Christ to live in this pneuma, while "making no provision" for epithymia.

1. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong. There is a several page section suggesting a unified reading of the letter to the Ephesians entitled "Redeeming the Time," pp. 229-232.

2. William Loader, "First Thoughts," Epistle for Lent 4B. Loader challenges the common individualist reading today of such a proclamation of God's grace -- an individualist reading that often coincides with politics and economics of self-interest. He writes,

The world of transactions for profit frequently invades such reflections and reduces them to market commodities. One common way has been to see salvation as the ultimate luxury (manufactured by God) and to cultivate those qualities deemed to deserve it and hold proudly to them. We are then 'God's special people' - the worthy, who can then strut our stuff and tell the rest of the world that they should be like us. Even when the persistence of the tradition succeeds in convincing people that it is not something we deserve, but is God's gift, theological accountancy reduces the transaction to the level of the markets again by imagining that God needed to be paid off to be free to love (on the assumption: who'd want to love, if they weren't paid for it!). Then we are told that God instigated a self payment by engineering the punishment of his son. Accountancy wins. The ledger was squared. Despite God's daring and generosity our values are then upheld, because we have found a way of reducing the whole thing to being just like the transactions which are fundamental to our economic system, now globalised.

2:8-10 give us a chance to see beyond the reductions to the real foundations of the divine vision. In fact the language shows that it is really about God's creative generosity. God's intention all along has been that people become what they were made to be and the 'earth be filled with the glory of God'. God's glory is God's goodness. The move which the passage celebrates is not a move from this world to the next, from the outer to the inner world, from the world to the church community, but a move from a death way of being to a life way of being - here and now.

1. It strikes me that these ten verses are a marvelous condensed version of the Pauline theology in Romans 3-6. There are the themes of salvation by grace through faith (Romans 3); dying and rising with Christ (Romans 6), though Eph 2 goes beyond this by having also seated with Christ in heaven already; and the theme of God's love saving us while we were still enemies (Romans 5). It is the latter theme that has become increasingly important to me in recent years. The point of greatest uniqueness of the Christian ethic is its emphasis on love to the great depth of loving one's enemies. I've realized more clearly that this derives from God's love in Jesus Christ, that God loved us even while we were "dead in our sins," expressed in passages such as Eph 2 and Romans 5:8-10. I wonder also about John 3:16; see below.

2. Another connection to Romans 3-6 involves what comes immediately after the proclamation of God's grace, namely, the payoff for human community:

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.... (Ephesians 2:14-15)

John 3:14-21

Exegetical Notes

1. zoen aionion, "life everlasting." The first two appearances of this phrase in John are in John 3:15-16. It occurs 3 times in Matthew, 2 in Mark, 3 in Luke, 1 in Acts, 3 times in Romans, 1 in Galatians, 2 in 1 John, and 14 in John (with one a piece in 1 Timothy and Jude). Most commentators bring out the immediacy of this phrase for John, namely, that it begins right now for those who believe. It is about a quality of life in this world more than about some other-world to come in the future. In the context of mimetic theory, I have found it meaningful to experience this promise of eternal life as being in deep relationship to the unending source of life itself. We are able to imitate the self-giving life of Jesus Christ with the promise of being connected (as branches to the vine) of the unending source of life. We need not fear death. We need not fear a life of self-giving generosity in the midst of a world of the forceful grasping after life that leads to death. When believing in the Resurrection and the Life, one won't really die in the sense of not being conquered by the forces of death in this world. Those forces may yet win some battles, but they will not prevail in the end -- not when one is connected to the source of life itself.

2. John 3:3: gennethe anothen, "born again," or "born from above." This verse is not in today's lection but is crucial for interpreting the passage as a whole -- especially in the contemporary "evangelical" Christian scene of emphasizing being born again. John's Jesus is using a pun in the Greek around the word anothen, which can be interpreted as "again" or "from above." Modern evangelicals miss the pun, but not as badly as Nicodemus, who takes it literally in terms of asking about getting back into his mother's womb. Jesus' response to Micodemus shows that he is speaking more in the sense of being born "from above" -- being born into God's reign ("reign" having a spatial connotation of being over) through the Holy Spirit. (See especially Breuer's reflections below, #5.)

Resources

1. Gil Bailie, audio tape lectures on the Gospel of John, tape 4. Link to my complete notes / transcription of the lectures on John 3-4 -- or here are some excerpts:

Introduction to the two stories in John 3-4. The arrangement may seem haphazard, but the structure is really quite marvelous. These two stories raise the question about the encounter with Jesus. Compare and contrast the two stories:

• Characters:
• Nicodemus-upright leader of the Jews, strict, orthodox Pharisee, a moral paragon. A man.
• The Samaritan woman-a heretic by Jewish standards, a loose woman of moral disrepute. A woman.
• Setting: at night vs. noon.
• Theme: birth vs. marriage

 
But both bring out whether or not a decisive encounter between the person and Jesus is able to take place. What kind of things frustrate that possibility get in the way. The problem with Nicodemus is that he already has a coherent, integrated sense of self. He's a Pharisee, an upright one, a leader of his people, Mr. Rectitude.
 
John 3 / Nicodemus. vs. 3: He comes to Jesus expecting an encounter with a teacher and a performer of signs. Jesus responds that Nicodemus must be born again. He can reach moral perfection as a Pharisee, and that still isn't the answer. He must throw all that off and be born again. No lesser form of transformation will work. This is what Paul had discovered, too. Paul had been a Pharisee; he had been Nicodemus. And he discovered that 'you can't get there from here.' No matter how morally or religiously scrupulous you become, you can't get there from here. So the question is "What does that change entail?" And the next question is "How's it come about?"
 
Jesus continues with what seems like a total non-sequitur. John 3:8: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." In other words, there is an integrity to their lives that cannot be seen. It is not an adherence to a set of rules, not a strict pattern of behavior. It is invisible in that sense; but they are obeying something much more elusive, and much freer. It is an obedience that is indistinguishable from freedom. Perfect obedience and perfect freedom at the same time. One's life is moving to this mysterious spirit, just like the wind. We can see its effects, but there aren't any clear markings.
 
This passage is taken from NAS Ecclesiastes 11:5: "Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones are formed in the womb of the pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things." (NRSV: "Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother's womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.") It links these two images: birth with the wind.
 
Jesus is talking about a new kind of self; a new anthropos, as Paul would say; a new coming into being. When does the first coming into being happen? And how can we come into a new one? Buber on the essential relation: the barriers of individual being are breeched, and a new phenomena appears only in this way. One life opens to another. Two participate in each other's being. In modern psychology, psyches create relationships. In the biblical world, relationships create psyches. Selfhood is dependent on relationship.
 
There are two ways of living in an ordered world. One way is to live in the delusion of the GMSM. The other way is to be grounded in the "one essential relation" with the Creator of all, which gives one a whole world.
 
Having a new birth comes with the sense of having a new parent. Jesus lived out his whole life, after his baptism, centered on his relationship to his heavenly father.

3. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, the beginning of Chapter 4, "The Resurrection and Original Sin," pp. 115ff. Beginning with the Resurrection, Alison traces the transformation that took place for the apostles. The fact of the resurrection first caused a transformation of how the apostles experienced death. It was a three step process: first, that "whatever death is, God has nothing to do with it." Second, that we are the ones most intimately involved in death, that it is not merely biological but part of a sinful reality: "the putting to death of Jesus showed humans as actively involved in death. In human reality, death and sin are intertwined." Finally, the third step is to see "that the human reality of death itself is capable of being forgiven." Here, he cites John 3:16-17:

The victim of human iniquity was raised up as forgiveness; in fact the resurrection was the raising up of the victim as forgiveness. This it was which permitted the recasting of God as love. It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us. It is to exactly this that bear witness the remarkably similar passages found in Jn 3:16-17 and Rm 3:21-26, as well of course as 1 Jn 4:9-10.

Now, this "giving his only Son" is not an idea pulled out of a hat. It is, itself, the demythologization of a story from the Old Testament: the story of Abraham who was prepared to give up his only (legitimate) son to God, by sacrificing him. But look at what has happened meanwhile: in the first story God is a god who demands sacrifices from humans, including the one sacrifice which really mattered, even though, in the story as we have it in Genesis 22, God himself organizes a substitute for the sacrifice. In any case, we still have a capricious deity. What we see in the New Testament, completely in line with the change in the perception of God that I've been setting out, is that it is not humans who offer a sacrifice to God (by, for instance, killing a blasphemous transgressor), but God who offers a sacrifice to humans. The whole self-giving of Jesus becomes possible because Jesus is obedient to God, giving himself in the midst of violent humans who demand blood, so as finally to unmask and annul the system of murderous mendacity which the world is.

Once more, if you think I'm making this up, everything which I have been saying is beautifully and exactly resumed in the first epistle of John. There we see what the message is, the nucleus of the Gospel:

This then is the message which we have heard of him [i.e., Jesus], and declare unto you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)

That is: what Jesus came to announce was a message about God, and God's being entirely without violence, darkness, duplicity, ambivalence or ambiguity. This message is then unpacked by the author in the following verses, and then he gives us the famous summing up of where this process of the changing perception of God has led to:

...for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, that God sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:8-10)

Here we have the element of the discovery of the absolutely vivacious and effervescent nature of God leading to the realization that behind the death of Jesus there was no violent God, but a loving God who was planning a way to get us out of our violent and sinful life. Not a human sacrifice to God, but God's sacrifice to humans. (pp. 45-46)

Following Jesus is not a program for self-improvement; it's an invitation to a community. It's dislocation from a network of relationships that perpetuates injustice, death, and alienation so that we can be knit into a network of relationships that brings healing, reconciliation, and abundant life rooted in the eternal.

Think about how many things are set by our birth in this world: We are born in a geographical location that can accustom us to unjust privilege or prevent us from access to clean water, education, the chance to live to adulthood. We are born in families that instill in us a sense that we are loved and too often a sense also that we are deeply inadequate. We are born with a skin color that will also condition our sense of who we are, what we deserve, whom we may love or fear. This world is set up in ways that try to lock us into patterns of relationship based on our birth -- patterns that separate us from one another and from God.

How might the world be different if those patterns were disrupted, if you and I could be sisters and brothers in healthy relationship? ... Let me put it this way:

What would our relationships look like if we shared one birth and were raised in one loving, supportive family? What would an economy look like that took seriously that we live and work in a world that is our common inheritance, and not a set of disconnected chunks of land and resources to be conquered like a Risk game board? What would a world look like in which we saw every child as our own little sister or brother, if "family first" included them all as our own flesh and blood?

That's Jesus' invitation to us today. Being "born from above" means that Jesus offers us freedom from relationships that ensnare, and the choice to relate to one another as beloved children of one loving God. It's a choice not just for a new name:

It's a new world of new relationships, of new and abundant life.

 Today’s text was made popular in the twentieth century through the work of the American evangelist Billy Graham. We grew up hearing that God loved us and had a wonderful plan for our life. We also learned that we screwed up and God needed to punish us and that Jesus stepped in and took our beating. We were told if we believed in Jesus, God would be merciful to us and not slam us with some kind of nasty eschatological sentence. All others would go to hell.

Now, this whole thing starts off right but ends up rather quickly in the dustbin of religion. To interpret this text in an exclusionist manner is to misread the text and to remain in darkness. One can only interpret this text in an exclusionist fashion if one is first committed to some kind of retributive justice in God. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us as heralds of the good news of Jesus Christ, to make sure that we do not read our scriptures from the perspective of myth, which excludes, and to make sure that we take our cue from the text itself and read ‘from below,’ from the perspective of the victimized, from the horizon of the cross. Only when we do this will we find that we can be inclusive in our soteriology.

Second, the self-giving, selfless sacrifice of Jesus is highlighted. When, in our atonement theories, we make the cross an event between Jesus and God (Jesus suffers God’s wrath or some such), we sacralize Jesus and begin the process of Christian mythologization. On the other hand, if we begin with Jesus self-giving as a fundamental Christological and soteriological axiom, then his forgiveness of us for killing him as he hung dying is the true word of the gospel.

Political, social and economic systems in the Christian West have long been tied to atonement theories although this correlation wasn’t realized until the late twentieth century. As Preachers, we do ourselves and the gospel, not to mention our congregations, little good, if we persist in announcing a christified version of all the other gods of religion. During this Lent, we are given opportunity to repent of our mimetic ways of thinking. As Bernard Ramm used to tell his students, “God forgives our theology just like he forgives our sin.”

1. If we consider Wink's thesis about John's generally negative usage of "world," does John 3:16 give us another version of God's love for us even while we were still enemies (see reflection on Eph 2)?

2. Or does the passage as a whole still fall into exclusionary theology between believers and unbelievers? The positive statement about not coming into the world to condemn the world in 3:17 turns into: "Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:18). Yet it is important to see in the next several verses what mimetic theory interprets as self-judgment, or self-condemnation: "And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19). It is a matter of decision. One precludes him or herself from living in the light by choosing to love the darkness. It is a theme of judgment that will carry all through John's Gospel, with next Sunday's text (Lent 5B) being another important one on the theme of judgment. (John 9 is another important passage on the theme of self-judgment; see Lent 4A for more on John 9.)

3. John 3:17 seems even more crucial to me, especially from a Girardian perspective, i.e., the contrast between condemning and saving. The Girardian reading of John's gospel highlights the two contrasting paternities: the father of lies, who was a murderer from the beginning (John 8), and Jesus' father in heaven. A couple weeks ago I shared part of the sermon on Satan the Accuser and God the Chooser. Jesus came to reveal to us a Father whose business in not condemnation; that's the business of the other father, Satan the Accuser. Jesus came to reveal to us unconditional love that continues to choose us, even while we were enemies, dead in our sins. Such revelation, Jesus tells Nicodemus, results in nothing less than re-birth, a change of paternities.

4. In 1997 I preached a sermon on the psychological crisis born in mimetic rivalry that centers on shame, entitled "Encountering the True God." Shaming one another comes from a psychology of needing to derive our sense of being at the expense of another. Satan lures us into playing games of accusing one another, of shaming one another. And the effect of being shamed is most often addiction, something to numb or subdue the painful effects of shame. Addiction is behavior that tends to go in the two extreme opposite directions: self-destructive addictions that fulfill one's sense of shame, and addictions to perfection that seek to deny one's sense of shame. Does John give us encounters of Jesus with these two extremes in consecutive narratives? Nicodemus, addicted to perfection, and the Samaritan woman, addicted to sex and self-destructive relationships? The remedy is to be reborn to a different way of relating to the other. Jesus came to reveal such a relation in the love from the Father, a love that refuses to play the games of condemning, of shaming.

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