Church Write-Up: Odds and Ends, 3/18/18

For church on Sunday, I went to the Missouri Synod Lutheran church, its class on patristic interpretations of John’s Gospel, and the “Word of Faith” church.

A.  The pastor at the Missouri Synod Lutheran church focused on two passages.  The first was Luke 24:13-32, which was about the two men on the road to Emmaus, who were accompanied by the risen Christ, whom they did not recognize.  They shared with this stranger that they hoped Jesus would have been the one who would deliver Israel, but their hopes were dashed by Jesus’ crucifixion.  The pastor talked about examples of our hopes being dashed, whether by the loss of a job, or health problems.  The pastor also shared that political scientists and historians agree that people rise up against their oppressors when there is some glimmer of hope that things can be different, and better; otherwise, they will endure the oppression.

The other passage was John 11, the story of Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus.  Lazarus’ sister Martha said that, had Jesus been there, Lazarus would not have died.  Jesus affirmed that he was the resurrection and the life, and she then placed her faith in him as the Christ.  According to the pastor, Martha, like the two men on the road to Emmaus, initially had her own desires about how God should act, but Martha moved away from that by putting her focus on and her faith in Jesus.

B.  As usual, the class on patristic interpretations of John’s Gospel got into a variety of issues.  A sample:

John Chrysostom criticized the excess that occurred at funerals, as people hired mourners and clothed the wealthy dead in luxury.  Chrysostom expressed his criticism to what was the wealthiest church in the Roman empire at the time, the one at Constantinople.  Chrysostom noted that Jesus rose naked, as he left his clothes behind at the resurrection.  Rather than being clothed with ornate clothing, why not be clothed with mercy?  Someone in the class mentioned how the Egyptians gave the dead supplies, thinking the dead would use them in the afterlife.  Chrysostom, however, was departing from that sentiment by affirming that you can’t take your wealth with you after death, so why not give it to the poor?  The teacher stated that Greco-Roman society rested on people exalting themselves and stepping on each other to do so.  Christianity promoted a different ethic, one that was concerned for the disenfranchised and came to provide a social safety net; when the Roman empire fell, Christianity had established itself in society to such an extent that it could take over the society.  I thought about John McGuckin’s The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years: he noted that Greco-Roman society had some concept of philanthropy, but he also noted prominent elements of it that discouraged helping the poor.

In John 20:1-9, Peter and John go to Jesus’ tomb to check it out.  John outruns Peter, perhaps because John was younger.  John sees the tomb but does not go in, whereas Peter actually enters it.  Gregory the Great likened John to the Jews: John did not go into the tomb, and the Jews largely refused to believe in Jesus.  Peter represented the Gentiles, who existed prior to the Jews (as Peter was older than John): the Gentiles believed in Jesus, as Peter entered the tomb.  The teacher then talked about how Gregory, like many Christians, was perplexed that most Jews, who had God’s Scriptures and were in covenant with God, did not believe in Jesus as the Messiah.  The teacher than discussed Romans 9-11, in which Paul engages this question.  The teacher interpreted Romans 11 to mean that God hardened the Jews’ hearts against believing in Christ because, had most Jews accepted Jesus as Messiah in the first century, Christianity would have remained a Jewish movement, and it would have maintained that Gentiles needed to become Jews (through circumcision) to become Christians.  God wanted the Christian movement to go another direction: to include Gentiles as Gentiles, and to go beyond being solely a Jewish movement.  This interpretation interested me because it was a sociological interpretation of Romans 11.

In John 20:15, the risen Jesus, appearing as a gardener, attempts to comfort Mary Magdalene, who is weeping because Jesus’ body is missing.  Cyril of Alexandria treated Mary Magdalene, the first woman to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, as a new Eve: in comforting Mary, Jesus was ending the curse that women would have pain in childbirth (Genesis 3:16).  The teacher wondered what Cyril meant by this, since, of course, women since Mary Magdalene have continued to have pain in childbirth.  I did not say this in class, but I wondered if I Timothy 2:15 could be relevant: it affirms that women would be saved through childbearing, if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with propriety (to draw from the KJV’s language).

C.  The “Word of Faith” church went through John 7-9.  The pastor said that Jesus was the real deal because he was not trying to exalt himself but rather to get people in touch with the Father: he was speaking the Father’s words, encouraging people, even if they disliked him, to listen to his words and to let them work on them.  At the same time, the pastor noted, Jesus pointed to himself as the source of springs of life bubbling out of believers: he invited the thirsty to come to him.

In discussing John 8:1-11, the story of the woman caught in adultery, the pastor said that this occurred during the Feast of Tabernacles, a time when people committed adultery inside of their booths.  To trap Jesus, his opponents caught a woman doing this and brought her to Jesus.  If Jesus agreed to stone her, he would appear cruel; if he decided not to stone her, he would appear to contradict the Law of Moses, even though the stoning of adulterers was not a common practice of Jews at the time.  Jesus, according to the pastor, said that anyone who has not committed adultery during the Feast is free to cast the first stone.  Nobody cast a stone.  I had not heard this particular interpretation; I wonder if the pastor got it from a commentary.  John 8:1-11 is a floating pericope and appears in Luke’s Gospel in some manuscripts, so one can raise the question of whether it should be situated within the Feast of Tabernacles, which is the setting of John 7-8.

In discussing John 9, the story of Jesus’ healing of the blind man, the pastor said that the disciples demonstrated their own spiritual blindness when they asked who sinned, the blind man or his parents, that he was born blind.  The pastor said that many Christians seek to blame people for their suffering in hopes to feel better about themselves: if God is punishing someone with suffering for something bad that he or she did, their logic runs, then God will spare them from suffering because they do not do that.  They can end up being self-righteous and self-congratulatory if they do not suffer!  The pastor interpreted Jesus’ response in v 3 to mean that, rather than finding some way to blame a person for suffering, we should ask God if there is any way that we can manifest God’s glory and goodness to that person who suffers.