Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

John the Baptist vs. Herod - The Rest of the Story - Lazar Puhalo

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HEROD: THE REST OF THE STORY

St. John the Baptist was preaching across the Jordan River at Bethany of Peraea, that little strip of land east of the Jordan that belonged to a Galilee. Only later did he came across into Judea and began preaching at Ai. This may have been because of the controversy between him and Herod.

This conflict was somewhat more complicated than the brief summary that is given to us in the Gospels. You will recall that Herod wanted to marry his sister-in-law Herodias, who was the wife of his half-brother Philip. The first part of the problem was that Herodias was not only his half-brother’s wife, but she was also Herod’s half-sister. In fact, she was also Phillip’s half-sister, so neither one of them should have been married to her. This was a double violation of the law, marrying your half-sister and also your brother's wife. This was a real scandal to pious, believing Jewish people and certainly a scandal to someone like Saint John the Baptist who was, after all, preaching repentance.

The other part of the story is something that might have caused far more serious consequences. King Aretas of Nabataea had been in conflict with Galilee which he had invaded a little earlier and burned the city of Sepphoris which was the old capital of the province before Herod named a city after himself and made it the capital. They were rebuilding the city and had made the peace treaty with the daughter of King Aretas, who was a treaty bride married to Herod. At that time women were not accorded full humanity and were used for barter and for treaties. Women were married off to help seal a treaty or in order to gain social status, to step up a notch.

Herod was married to King Aretas's daughter at a time when men only had one wife at a time. Naturally, when Herod wanted to marry Herodias, Aretas's daughter became a bit frightened because she thought “if he wants to marry somebody else, am I going to meet with an accident and die so he can get me out of the way?” After all, Herod’s father, Herod the Great had murdered more than one of his wives. So she fled back to Nabataea to her father’s house.

This was not only a great offense to his daughter and a violation of their treaty, but it shamed the king as well and he was furious. Aretas wanted to invade Galilee again, only the intervention of the Roman governor of Syria stopped him from being able to do this. Otherwise, he would have invaded and certainly John the Baptist was surely aware of this dangerous situation. The matter was very politically delicate and thousands of people could have lost their lives in such an invasion of war.

This must surely have been also on John the Baptist’s mind as he protested this consanguineous marriage which was not only against Jewish law but fraught with other dangers. Thus the whole incident with John the Baptist was much more serious than what we read in Scripture. Herod gets off too easily in the part of this that is recorded by the evangelist. You may very well have respected John the Baptist, even feared him a little as a holy man, but in fact, he may also have been looking for an excuse to dispose of him.

As a footnote, it seems that Herodias actually did love Herod because when he was later sent into exile she voluntarily accompanied him.

9/11 was a test - Wayne Northey

Below are excerpts from an outstanding essay by a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism in 2019. But the last lines, though intended to be hopeful, ring perversely hollow–especially given what one can read on this website about the horrors of American Expansionism/Exceptionalism/Empire:

America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.

Perhaps he has no choice but to sound such a note when writing for mainline media that fully endorsed the War on Terror 20 years ago.

Then there is the White Evangelical Community, perhaps epitomized by Southern Baptist theologian Dr. Richard Land–of (1990s/2000s) “The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission” of the Southern Baptist Convention. I engaged in Alaska with Dr. Land in 1997 on the issue of capital punishment. The following about that is from: Why I Oppose the Death Penalty: “The Talking Place: Discussing the Death Penalty” Forum on the Death Penalty, Fairbanks Alaska, March 22, 1997.

The dialogue was organized by the Presbyterian Church in Alaska because debate was heating up in a state with no death penalty on the books.

It took place March 22, 1997, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and was teleconferenced throughout Alaska including into the Juneau legislature, and also translated simultaneously for the deaf. Questions were posed from the university audience and from the teleconferencing sites. There was a professionally produced video of the exchange made available to churches in Alaska. Parts I and II permitted a statement of my opposition to capital punishment. Part III dealt with specific biblical texts used erroneously, I argued, in defense of capital punishment.

Worse, Dr. Land sadly went on to become one of the most outspoken American evangelical voices in support of the War on Terror. See his tragic “Land Letter.”

When I was initially invited, it was to a “debate.” I refused to attend. I said that a debate reflects a “winners” and “losers” mentality that is of little use except possibly as entertainment. But I said I would take part if it was a “dialogue.” The event eventually was called “To the Talking Place,” based on a local aboriginal tradition of the entire community coming to “the talking place” to work out differences respectfully and communally. ¹

It involved a morning pre-session by a Religious Studies professor at the University on how to read the Bible. The dialogue was moderated by a local radio host. It was highly tasteful and respectful.

Afterward, Dr. Land shared with me that he was a seventh-generation Texan. That growing up white in that state meant profound “unlearning” on racial issues alone. That when his then 18-year-old son, a top university American football draft pick that year as I recall, discussed the “dirty little war” in Vietnam, Dr. Land told me that, contrary to his Southern Baptist preacher-father, he informed his son that if America otherwise was caught up in another war of that sort, he was duty-bound to burn his draft card! (Dr. Land’s father had warned he would be disowned if he ever burned his draft card during the Vietnam War.)

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Alternative or Adversary? Eric Janzen

Alternative or Adversary?

Around the world, tension seems to be at a boil. The globe suffers from pandemic blues, armed conflicts, a mountain of injustices, poverty, and the terrible discoveries of innocent lives lost. Whether understood or not there is a damaged and changing environment, forest fires, and destroyed towns, homes, and lives. The list is seemingly endless and each item is acquired and politicized by this or that group, seeing in the suffering and anger of humanity opportunity to advance what is mostly selfish power interests. The Church has been drawn into this adversarial battlefield time and again much to her detriment. And it makes me sad.

It grieves my heart to see the name of Christ used to justify opinion and political platforms. To see the words ‘kingdom of heaven’ reduced to a meaningless label used to bolster nothing more than earthly powers that care nothing about the heart of God or his vision of a redeemed human race living in the wholeness of Shalom and peace with one another, nature, and Himself. I am realizing there is a principle we have lost sight of: When the Church positions herself as an adversary instead of as an alternative, her voice is compromised because the Church only carries the authority of the kingdom of heaven when she positions herself in the Way of Christ: the Way of co-suffering Love. She is called to be an alternative community offering something only she can hold: the mercy-love of God.

When we love others, doing all we can to genuinely—without reservation—suffer alongside them because the Holy Spirit has filled our hearts with compassion and love that refuses to withhold mercy or grace, we become mirrors reflecting the light of Christ to all people. When a Christian follows Jesus they must embrace his alternative vision of how to be in relation to reality. In all circumstances, they pause to ask: what is the Way of Christ here? Now—in this moment? Which is to say: How do I show the Gospel love of Jesus here? How do I love as he loves? Now—in this moment?

What is that love? What can we say about it? We listen to Jesus who says that his command is to love...that the greatest act of love is to lay down one’s own life for others. We listen to the beloved disciple John when he tells us that God is Love. We hear Jesus sum up all of the Law and the Prophets when he says, “Love God with all of your being and love your neighbour as yourself.” We hear Paul saying not to live selfishly and to humble ourselves, putting the interests and needs of others ahead of our own. Just as Jesus poured out his own life for the sake of others we pour out our lives for the sake of others. This is true freedom for we are liberated from thinking we are the centre of everything and that we are all that is important—one of the oldest of lies. 

This is how we love as he loves. He showed us the way of humility, which always puts the people around us first. This is the radical, alternative vision of the kingdom of heaven:  It is not my life that is paramount but the life of the other, my neighbor, and even the life of my enemies. Here the Way of Christ refuses to compromise and all are offended and challenged beyond their abilities—yet Jesus is clear: following him is not comfortable and the Way of Love leads to a spiritual reality beyond human rationality.

This is a reality that can only be lived by walking in the Spirit with the humblest of hearts and the willingness to love as Christ loves. Here we ascend to the apex of Christ’s teaching and Way: Love your enemies. You no longer follow the way of the world exchanging an eye for an eye, meeting hostility with hostility—no: we give them the other cheek; we give up our own comfort, the shirt off our back. We walk for more miles after the forced mile is done…we are followers of Jesus, taking up the cross and walking in the alternative reality of the kingdom of heaven. In the kingdom there is one command: Love the one in front of you as though they are Christ. And the honest heart groans in prayer, for this is neither simple nor easy.

But isn’t this the point? Isn’t this why we follow Jesus? To become like him? To be transformed into new creations that are abandoning a broken humanity that chooses enmity and alienation over love? It has to be, for this is why God became Emmanuel and dwelt among us: to free the human heart so that it can become like Jesus so that we can know our Heavenly Abba. This is true freedom. We give all we have to this Way where the action we take to care for the weakest, the most fragile around us is done as though they are Jesus—and in a mysterious way, Jesus tells us they are him. Here we discover the joy that is transcending cultures and the passions of this present world. In short, we enter the presence of God when we follow Christ’s co-suffering Way of the Cross.

If we dare to take up that journey we must realize that we are a people of invitation, not domination. We are a people of mercy, not judgment. We are a people who will choose love in the face of hostility, not arm ourselves with weapons of retaliation, whether physical or spiritual. We are a people who bless and do not curse. We choose the wellbeing of others over our own wellbeing, considering all selfishness as a trap preventing us from knowing Christ who is always giving of himself for the sake of the entire world. We are a people bound to the Law of Love because we are loved by God and we love him. When we are caught up in the alternative reality of the kingdom of heaven, filled with the mercy-love of God, we cannot help but appear foolish to those who prefer to become the adversary setting themselves against others instead of looking for the Way to love as Christ loves.

Being the adversary is to choose hostility and anger--pride that places ourselves as first and foremost above others. We may love our friends but our enemies? No, we will take them on and we will grind them into dust. When we choose to be the adversary we grasp at power and attempt to wield it against others in order to obtain what we want, what we think we deserve. We allow ourselves to believe in the philosophy of emperors that we should impose our codes and rules on our neighbours instead of loving them and then foolishly believe they will thank us for it. Power and authority are not the same thing.

When the Church acts as an adversary she may wield power but it is the power of dominance, acting as the wolf instead of the lamb. In our adversarial position, we forget that in the kingdom of heaven the first will be last and the last will be first. We walk in authority when we humbly serve others, for that is where kingdom authority lives and abides...in unselfish love, never refusing mercy or kindness to anyone. When we choose a path of seeking power over others, we have no authority in the kingdom of heaven and thus our connection to Jesus becomes distorted and eventually lost. We lose sight of the one who has served us all and we no longer look like him. We no longer sound like him. We no longer reflect the light of his presence or reveal the message of the Gospel in this world.

The face of power lacks love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These fruits of the Spirit are found in the humble heart that chooses to love as Christ loves. The Church must choose again and again who she wants to be. What position does she want to stand in? The Body of Christ that acknowledges the Way of Christ or a System using the name of Christ in order to wield a worldly power that seeks to control and dominate others?

Jesus never sought control over others. He never attempted to dominate people. He always invited them to follow him. He invited them into an encounter with God that they couldn’t quite comprehend because it was so filled with love and compassion and a vision of God no one had fully seen before. Jesus invited the human heart into the alternative reality of the kingdom of heaven where not only is love the law but transformation and a new reality are taking place. Christians cannot be both disciples of Christ devoted to his Way and be driven by an adversarial spirit. In every circumstance, the Church has an incredible freedom to choose how she will respond to her place in the world. Will she be an alternative community inviting people to encounter the living God of Love or set herself up as an adversarial community seeking earthly power instead of the kingdom of heaven?

In the Way of Christ—of co-suffering love—the Church’s voice is filled with the authority of the kingdom, empowered by the grace of Holy Spirit. When the Church chooses the way of the adversary, her voice becomes a gong...a clanging cymbal...mere noise amidst all the noises with nothing distinct to say and thus loses her meaning, her identity, as the sacred bearer of the message of Christ:

Love, for you are loved by God. Now, remember to always put others before yourself and you will stay true to the Way of Christ. Love is your compass. Be ready with a kind word. Be ready with a compassionate embrace. Invite the broken to the table of mercy and grace. Pray for everyone and welcome all with loving-kindness just as your Father has always welcomed you.

Praying to the God of Vengeance - Derek Vreeland

Praying to the God of Vengeance

 

We have a tradition at our church, following Brian Zahnd's morning prayer liturgy, of praying the psalm for the day that corresponds with the day of the year. Yesterday was day 244 so we were praying Psalm 94. (There are 150 psalms and 365 days, so on day 151 we start over at Psalm 1.) Psalm 94 is addressed to the "God of Vengeance." Such an address can be troublesome to followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. We believe Jesus is the full revelation of God and reveals to us the heart and nature of God our Father. Subsequently, Jesus taught us to love our enemies and do good to those who harm us. How are we as followers of King Jesus in the reign of his peaceable kingdom to make sense of addressing prayers to the "God of vengeance"?

 

Here are some thoughts as I prayed Psalm 94. 

 

1. The God of vengeance is defined by Jesus upon the cross

 

The word "vengeance" can bring up a lot of violent images. I know it does for me. As a child of the 1970s who grew up in the 1980s, my imagination was shaped by retaliatory violence predominately through movies starring Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallon, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I am still a big fan of The Outlaw Josey Wales, where Eastwood plays the role of a confederate outlaw who refuses to surrender the Union after members of the "Red Legs" murdered his family. (There is a hint of peace at the end of the movie when Wales strikes a deal with Chief Ten Bears of the Comanche tribe. But that's a story for another day.) For Christians, we define vengeance through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, particularly the death of Jesus. Whatever it looks like for God to be a God of vengeance, it must be shaped by Jesus who died for our sins without a hint of retaliation, and only the words of forgiveness on his lips. 

 

2. Vengeance is associated with God's judgement

 

To claim, as we do, that God is love plus nothing does not imply God isn't a judge. In the creed, we confess concerning Jesus, "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end." We are free to forgive and not retaliate because when we forgive those who have harmed us we place them in the hands of God and we believe God will do with them what is just and fair. How God judges and when God judges isn't our concern. Our job is to walk in love, forgiveness, truth-telling, and justice. God's judgment often comes in the form of rejection, rejecting that which is unloving and inhumane. Judgment is often depicted as God's anger or wrath in the Scripture. According to N.T. Wright, "The lamb's anger [i.e. judgment] is the rejection, by Love incarnate, of all that is unloving. The only people who should be afraid of it are those who are determined to resist the call of love" (N.T. Wright, Revelation for Everyone, 68). 

 

3. God's judges according to mercy

 

The criteria by which God judges is mercy, the kind of mercy that is renewed every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23). Those who find themselves on the other side of God's vengeance are those who withhold mercy from others. James writes, "So whatever you say or whatever you do, remember that you will be judged by the law that sets you free. There will be no mercy for those who have not shown mercy to others. But if you have been merciful, God will be merciful when he judges you" (James 2:12-13 NLT). The "law that sets you free," according to James, is the royal law of love, that is to love your neighbor as yourself. God's judgment will fall upon the proud, the haughty, those who use power to oppress others, those who reject the way of mercy. Is God a God of vengeance? A better question would be, "Am I a person of mercy?"    

 

Derek Vreeland is the Discipleship Pastor at Word of Life Church, St. Joseph, Missouri . 

Love on a human scale: The Gospel according to Ivan Illich - Review by Marcus Rempel

Every now and then a book comes into my life that puts me in a happy dilemma: I want to lend it to all my friends, but I don’t want it to leave my house. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey is a labour of love by Illich’s long-time friend and co-conspirator, David Cayley. At 552 pages, its heft reminds me of the boxes of “a good, but inexpensive wine” that Illich managed to write off as a teaching expense. This opus represents many, many evenings of intelligent, friendly, and finally life-changing dialogue that culminate in a  near-symphonic quality.  Cayley’s deep understanding and clear prose pull a complex, balanced harmony out of themes that to the casual reader of Illich could seem eclectic. What does medical overreach have to do with the 12th-century innovation of silent reading or the New Testament concept of the Anti-Christ or the dissolution of gender as a capitalist phenomenon, for heaven’s sake? 

In a confusing and troubling time, this book gave me the permission to weigh the harm done by coronavirus against the harms done in the fight against it, a model to help me accept and be grateful for some of what medicine provides, and still have the confidence to resist to the hysteric shunning of my unvaccinated friends. In the wake of the discovery of more than 1,308 unmarked graves for Indigenous children who were coerced into residential schools and never came home again, the book helps me name the totalitarian hubris of a church that thought it could “do what God cannot, namely manipulate others into their own salvation” through brute force, child abductions and mind control, and repent of such hubris through a closer walk with Christ, rather than by running away from my spiritual inheritance.

One of Illich’s mottos was “I fear the Lord is passing me by.” Illich receives in Jesus’ parable of the Samaritan a radical freedom to encounter the other Other in the human other—an opening to friendship that can not be guaranteed, a surprise that cannot be institutionalized. His other motto was Corruptio Optimi Pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. Glorious innovations tend to have dark shadows. A faith in which there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free is uniquely prone to an imperialism that flattens Indigenous cultures and drives men and women out of the complementarity of gender into the competitive, unidimensional arena of sex.

This last idea risks generating much more heat than light, and a book review by a white man about a biography by a white man about another white man seems unlikely to help the cause. I may just be securing my copy from being borrowed! At the risk of mansplaining, I will spill a little more ink on what may be a stumbling block for many in accessing Illich. Many of Illich’s friends advised him against publishing his thoughts on this matter, and when Gender came out in 1982 it did mark a fall from grace for Illich among the New Left.

Cayley’s chapter on “Gender” takes care to first understand what Illich had to say before critiquing some of his nostalgia and gender essentialism, a courtesy that was not granted him by early reviewers. Cayley summarizes Illich’s argument as follows:

Illich speaks loudly against equality as sameness. But he also speaks loudly for equality in its sense of equity, arguing that most women suffer irremediable disadvantages in a realm of universal circulation and competition. The two points are connected. Illich claims that idealizing equality may allow some women to rise to new heights of wealth and influence but that it will hurt many more—by lowering the status of every form of sustenance that occurs outside the cash nexus in which equality finds its measure, by fostering an illusory sense of opportunity, and by inviting those who fail to seize these opportunities to blame themselves. His analysis of feminism, in this respect, took the same form as his analysis of every other modern institution that he explored—it incites envy and delivers frustration. Only by reversing economic growth, unbuilding the global megalith, and restoring human scale will the majority of women regain their dignity, he says, because only then will the contribution of those who have been shunted aside in the rat race begin to matter. This is the sole sense in which he speaks against equality: equality-as-justice, he says, cannot be achieved without a firm rejection of equality-as-sameness.

Illich is on the lookout everywhere in his work for one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore the bonds and bounds of our bodies, whether the social bodies of community and culture or the physical bodies of women and men. Visions of justice that require everyone to have the same kinds of jobs, visions of health that require everyone to take the same kind of medicine, visions of education that require everyone to have the same kind of standardized credentials are for Illich a liberal power fantasy with an ugly underbelly, a perversion directly inherited from a church that could envision the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven as the mass conversion of global humanity into a single catechism and a single rite under a single worldly authority with divinely underwritten supremacy. Such a universalism inherently corrodes human freedom and erodes “the soil of friendship” which is always limited and local. “As long as you think of the world as a whole,” Illich said, “the time for human beings is over.” 

Illich is trying to protect islands of the homegrown, the homemade, and the homespoken. I think of feminist friends who make homegrown pickles with their homeschooled children when they could easily get jobs that would pay for cheaper pickles, cheaper child care, and then some. Perhaps at the kitchen tables of these mothers, Illich’s analysis of gender has “reached the hour of its legibility,” as is hoped by Giorgio Agamben, another male commentator. Besides the voice of Illich’s colleague Barbara Duden, and a comment from Cayley’s wife, we hear little sympathetic commentary from women in this chapter. That is too bad. 

 Illich calls this domain of the homemade “the vernacular,” reviving an old Latin adjective that could be applied to one’s mother tongue as well as to a cow raised at home instead of acquired at the market. He hopes such islands can align in an “archipelago of conviviality”—a chain of islands where life is still livable on a human scale, where we can love one another as neighbours and renounce the kind of “care” that implicitly takes the point of view of a systems administrator. It is not that Illich is against institutions and systems organized to achieve social goods, but as a loyal dissident of the Roman Catholic Church, he is acutely sensitive to the harms done in the name of good, and of the importance of limits and humility for those of us who get caught up trying to save the world, whether with sacred rites or secular ones. “Risk awareness,” Illich said to Cayley late in life, is “the most important religiously celebrated ideology of today.” That was before the Coronavirus lockdown.

Illich blesses the missionary impulse at the same time as he chastens it. He understands that whether inspired by Jesus or by a medical breakthrough, people will want to share their good news. But he sees with near-clairvoyant power how the good news is accompanied by a terrible danger. Humans inspired by visions of God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven all too easily construct an artificial, man-made world from which there is no escape. 

As a reader of Illich via Cayley, I find myself more deeply drawn into the good news of Jesus, and more able to discern and rebuke the spirits that dress up like Jesus while perverting his good news. I find myself both grateful for a vaccine that reduces the symptoms and spread of a nasty virus, and alert to the shadows of a campaign of global vaccine compliance. When a frightened neighbour who does not attend my church recently reached out to me to ask if I could write a religious exemption for her son so that this unvaccinated young man could attend college this fall, I said yes. As I did so, I silently thanked Illich and Cayley for helping me get my head around what the hell is going on in this strange time and how in heaven’s name such a yes to my neighbour could possibly be a yes to Christ.

Afghanistan: The Great Facade — Analysis by a Combat Veteran — Lt. Col. (ret.) D.L. Jones

The Great Facade by D.L. Jones 

This article is dedicated to MG Harold J. Greene and LTC James J. Walton, both of whom were Killed in Action (KIA) in Afghanistan. One was my boss and mentor; the other a dear friend.  

 

August 15, 2021

August 15, 2021, will be a date that no U.S. combat veteran of Afghanistan will ever forget, nor will any combat veteran of the Five Eyes Alliance, or of Germany, nor should any citizen in the West.  

Many are comparing the fall of Kabul (and Afghanistan) to the Taliban to the Fall of Saigon (and Vietnam). One thing is for sure: political scientists and historians in the West will be writing about Afghanistan for the next 50 years as they have about Vietnam.

This article is solely the private thoughts of one combat veteran of Afghanistan. I do not speak for nor do the views expressed here represent those of the U.S. Government, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I do not pretend to be a subject matter expert on Afghanistan nor the region. I am simply writing because I must. My conscience forces me to write. If you find this article of value then retain what is true and good about it for yourself and share it with others. If you disagree with it, then ignore and discard it.    

Afghanistan is The Great Facade

Afghanistan is The Great Facade. The fall of Afghanistan is not the fault of President Joseph Biden. Partisan Republicans attacking the President are simply perpetuating The Great Facade or Great Lie to the American people. If fault is to be laid for our failures in Afghanistan, it should be laid at the feet of the Neoconservatives (Neocons) who created the policies of Afghanistan and sustained this "House of Cards" over the last 20 years. The Neocons have infested the Department of Defense and State Department. Therefore, there has been a continuity of Afghan policies across many Presidential administrations and across party lines.