9. The
Woe to you scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn
the monuments of the righteous, and say, “If we had lived in the days of our
fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
prophets,” therefore you are witnesses
against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your
fathers. Serpents, brood of vipers! Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise
men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you
will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city.
- Jesus of
I’ve said some hard things, and there’s more. So before I go on, here’s some good news.
When Jesus says, “Serpents, brood of vipers!” is he necessarily condemning them? Does he gleefully threaten destruction? Not at all! God commands us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God for a simple reason: God Himself does justice, loves mercy, and walks humbly. Once God identifies us as serpents (that is, resembling Satan), He loves us! He sends prophets, wise men, and scribes – every sort of servant – to talk sense to us and rescue us from delusion. We go too far only when we murder our rescuers, shooting the firemen who climb up to rescue us from the flames – and Jesus says here that we still have a chance if only we don’t shoot them all.
How could Jesus reason that in honoring those that their fathers killed, they became witnesses against themselves that they are like the murderers and will do the same thing? It’s quite simple. They were not really honoring the prophets and the just. They were honoring themselves as better than their fathers who had killed them. In saying, “We’re not like our fathers!” they were asserting their own goodness, just as men today name streets after Martin Luther King to show they’re not like their segregationist fathers. Asserting their own goodness and hating the prophets for telling the hard truth is what led their fathers to kill the prophets. When the scribes and Pharisees said, “We would never do like them,” they too were asserting their own goodness and denying their own sin – which is exactly the attitude that prompted their fathers to kill the prophets. Have we not all seen how swearing never to be like our parents is how we come to be like them in what we hate the most?
It is what John the apostle wrote (1 John 1:8-9):
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and
the truth is not in us. If we confess
our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from
all unrighteousness. If we say that we
have not sinned, we make him a liar, and His word is not in us.
So what does John tell us we’re doing when we prove how good we are? We’re deceiving ourselves. The truth is not in us. We have to make God a liar to show that we’re telling the truth when we’re lying. Since we’ve convinced ourselves He is a liar, His word is not in us.
In this kind of shape, how can we not kill the prophets and other innocent people, especially when they tell us the truth that we live to reject? It’s bound to happen!
One of the most convincing ways for us to say we have no sin is simply to stop doing something without ever acknowledging the real extent of our problem, presenting our new-found righteousness as evidence that it was just a small slip, now put right. The alcoholic stops drinking, and now denies that he is an addict. But he’s deceiving himself, because only confessing our sins is repentance from our real problem – our self-conceit and proud refusal to acknowledge hard reality. And only such confession, which must actually be what Alcoholics Anonymous rightly calls “a searching and fearless moral inventory,” gets to the essence of what’s wrong with us. That’s why God can forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness only when we fully face up to the truth and say what it is. America and its Christians in 400 years have never been willing or able to do that, especially concerning our collective history. That is why we keep repeating it. Jesus and the apostle John have shown us exactly why, as Rap Brown said long ago, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”
Here’s some good news. To learn who we really are may indeed feel like learning at the end of a good meal that we’ve been eating a baby. No one who prescribes such medicine will be popular. That’s why, when God sends His servants to tell us the truth, we are likely to “kill and crucify . . . and persecute from city to city.” But if we really sit still for truth, we will indeed find what it is to really be forgiven and washed, able to hold our heads up not in pride and brazenness but in truth. We will no longer be fools, returning to our folly as a dog returns to his vomit (Proverbs 26:11).
Finally, if there is a Judgment in which God brings everything to light, and we don’t get it straight beforehand, all of this will come out anyway to the last lie and the last drop of blood. Now, not then, is the best time to talk about such things. It really hurts less now than it will then, and feels better sooner, so let’s do that.
The Everlasting
As
a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.
- Proverbs 26:11
On August 22nd,
What strikes us as the most remarkable thing in this matter is the horrible ferocity of these monsters. They remind one of a parcel of blood-thirsty wolves rushing down from the Alps; or rather like a former incursion of the Indians upon the white settlements. Nothing is spared; neither age nor sex is respected - the helplessness of women and children pleads in vain for mercy.[1]
What strikes us is the unconsciousness of the writer that slavery with all its cruelty and injustice might have had anything to do with it. These “monsters” appeared out of nowhere and killed perfectly innocent people with no cause. The only possible explanation was that they were “monsters,” “blood-thirsty wolves,” or of course Indians who likewise could not have had any just cause for their hostility to those who were robbing and killing them. But Turner had made his grievances very clear – for instance, he made a point of permitting no sexual molestation of white women because he didn’t want to do as the white people were doing to black slave women. But Turner was just a “monster” – a religious fanatic. There was no other explanation for what had happened. Slavery could not have had anything to do with it. There was no remedy except to tighten the screws on black people and murder several hundred who had known nothing about it, and to mutilate and torture many others.
On September 11th, 2001 – the 28th anniversary of the American-sponsored coup in Chile which brought about the murders, torture, and disappearances of thousands of innocent people – a preacher who was convinced that God had chosen him to destroy the American empire and avenge its cruelties sent airplanes into American buildings and killed almost 3,000 people. These “monsters” also appeared out of nowhere. Only their fanatical religious beliefs could have made them do such a thing! But Osama bin Laden, like many others before who were paid no attention when they peacefully pleaded with Americans about their injustices, made his grievances very clear. He resented American troops in Saudi Arabia; the unconditional support of America for every act of cruelty, robbery, and oppression that Israelis want to commit against occupied Palestinians; and the genocide by embargo against the civilian population of Iraq – a fact confessed and approved of on American television by UN Ambassador and future Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who declared to Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes that the deaths of 500,000 innocent children at our hands were “worth it.”[2] To this day, few Americans will agree that the American practice of genocide against little kids has happened and might have some connection with the deaths of innocent Americans in response. While it was completely abominable for bin Laden to retaliate in this way for these hundreds of thousands of murders, Americans have declared at the ballot box and elsewhere that it is fine to retaliate by killing many thousands of perfectly innocent people all over the world who had nothing to do with it, just as the white people did to perfectly innocent black people in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. As of the end of October 2004, the British medical journal the Lancet estimates about 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq since the invasion, mostly due to US Air Force bombing of crowded civilian neighborhoods – not counting Fallujah! By the summer of 2006, the tab was up to over 650,000, and Americans mostly still didn’t care.
The names have changed, and the scale of crime all around has grown much, but how America today handles the world under its lash is unchanged from that of slave-owning Virginia in 1831. The fears, passions, and willful blindness of Americans today – and especially of American Christians – are exactly those of our fathers 175 years ago. Like Lamech the son of Cain, Americans are avenged 77-fold and proud of it. How many American Christians, then and now, have shown any interest in obeying what Jesus says about taking our own vengeance, preferring instead to call him, “Lord, Lord,” in mouth, while their hearts and deeds are very far from his words?
The American southern plantation consisted of the Big House, where the master entertained his friends and family with gentle hospitality – and the slave huts out in the fields. He could sit in peace in his library and write eloquent words about freedom and equality. All this rested on the forced labor of slaves, but they were out of sight except the house servants, who of course loved him and his family, especially since the alternative was the fields. The master generally committed no cruelties himself. His overseers got the work done which enabled him to prosper and be the soul of kindness and generosity – and neither he nor his family needed to know in detail just how the overseer got it done. Of course he might enjoy the slave women, who if they knew what was good for them enjoyed his attentions. It was a wonderful life, from a certain point of view – the master’s.
The United States as a whole has become the Big House, which like the Roman Empire of old generally treats its own citizens like human beings, while the rest of the world, especially outside Europe, labors for the master’s luxury and occupies the slave huts. Consider how we feel free to corrupt elections in other countries, to “bring them democracy” on our own terms, whether they like it or not. Do we invite foreigners to interfere in our elections in this way? We may bomb and invade whomever we please. May others do that to us? We may fill the world with military bases surrounded by bars and whorehouses, corrupting the host society, with our soldiers free to commit rapes, beatings, vehicular homicides, and other felonies with impunity. Would the Christians of America give the same hearty approval to foreign military bases here surrounded by the whorehouses, bars and wanton violence that they prescribe for other people? In the words of the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which legalized slavery throughout the United States, others are “so far inferior as to have no rights that any American is bound to respect.”
Like slave masters such as Thomas Jefferson, Americans until recently preferred to not torture people themselves, entrusting the job of overseeing the “lesser breeds” to local talent – the Shah of Iran; Saddam Hussein; Ferdinand Marcos; the Saudi royal family and other Arab puppet regimes; Mobutu; Pinochet and the Guatemalan military regimes along with many other Latin American dictators; Suharto the butcher of Indonesia and East Timor; and countless other tyrannies from whom America has expected nothing except that they keep their people in line for American economic profit and political control. Sometimes overseers like Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega, who were both on the CIA payroll, forget who they work for. In such cases, the master feels free to replace them.
Like the southern slave master, American Christians are uneasily aware of just what kind of rapacious cruelty sustains their luxurious and wanton lives (James 5:1-6) – enough to grow angry and defensive when it’s brought up. But at the same time we contrive like that slave owner to stay oblivious to the sea of misery upon which we glide through life, like the rich man in the parable who feasted sumptuously every day and was clothed in purple and scarlet – not even seeing Lazarus lying in misery at his gate (Luke 16:19-31). Should Lazarus sneak in, the Border Patrol can deport him unless his presence suits the wealthy campaign contributors he works for – and we make sure to vote for upstanding Christian politicians who will insist on it. As Jesus said, we live this way because we shut our ears to Moses and the prophets – and Jesus – while loudly claiming to believe them.
Those who do believe the Bible may read clearly in it why American Christians generally go unheard by God and man – “He who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor shall cry himself and not be heard” (Proverbs 21:13). The Bible does not endorse the choice of American Christians – the arm of flesh, American imperial power, to enable us to shut our ears. This is just how our fathers prostituted themselves to the Roman Empire and the so-called Christian kingdoms of Europe to our shame until this day, and here we go again! Instead, the Bible says to confess our sins and open our ears to the cry of the poor, whoever they may be and however much they frighten us. Then God may justly open His ears to us and be with us as we claim (Amos 5:14).
God has placed his people in the earth to hear and see in His name those whom the world shuts its eyes and ears to – to bring our eyes and ears where the silence is (Proverbs 24:11-12). This is our priestly function. Since we came up out of the ocean, American churches have consistently rejected this priestly identity - shutting our eyes and ears to Indians robbed of their land and lives, to slaves robbed of all human dignity, to Palestinians robbed just as our fathers robbed the Indians, and to the poor trampled all over the world so that American business can get rich and we can stuff our eyes and ears full of toys lest we hear. Matthew 25:31-46 assures us that Jesus is out in the slave huts, not in the Big House with Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. Moses too refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter so that he might be with God among the slaves. That choice qualified Moses to become a deliverer.
Unlike Moses, we have chosen the pleasures of life in the Big House with the slave master, gratefully accepting his favor and protection. We are at home with Pharaoh in his palace, delighted indeed to pledge allegiance and be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. To reject the path of Moses and Jesus in this way, we have shut our eyes and ears to the slave huts, giving approval to oppression. Because Jesus chose to forsake all the kingdoms of the world rather than give any worship to Satan, the Spirit of the Lord was upon him to set people free (Luke 4:18). Because we have rejected his choice, we have forfeited his power. God is not mocked.
The Everlasting Wilderness
This Man, if he were a
prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching him,
for she is a sinner!
- Luke 7:39
The Pharisees were the guardians of law and godliness. Like the Pilgrims and Puritans, the Pharisees judged themselves the shining beacon of light in a dark, disordered world – especially the unclean pagan nations, including their Roman rulers, but also “the people of the land” who did not know the Law, as they did. When the officers they sent to arrest Jesus came back saying, “No man has spoken like this man!” the Pharisees responded, “Are you also deceived? Have any of the rulers or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.”
Here are all the elements of Christianity in America. It’s a howling wilderness out there. Safety, security, and godliness are right here in our group which is the light of the world, and certainly not out there. And so it can only be the truth if our “Christian leaders” say so. We can’t hear or see for ourselves anything that our crowd doesn’t agree with. We say the Bible is our authority, but does the Bible really matter? Even if the Bible says something so clear that any non-Christian can see it for himself, how many of us believe the Bible against our pastors and fellow church members? Does the Bible tell us to kill our enemies and make sure not to hear anything they say, much less love them? Does the Bible teach us that the way to prosper is to be tough on poor people and do every possible favor for rich people (Proverbs 22:16)? Does the Bible tell us to hate immigrants and shove them back where they came from (Hebrews 13:1-2)? Does the Bible tell us to silence everyone but ourselves while doing everything we can to make them listen to us – raging against the ACLU, the Muslims, and the rest of the crowd who in our eyes does not know the gospel and is accursed (James 1:19-20)?
From the beginning we decided that the good people of America, the orderly and respectable people, were the light of the world – not the poor of the world whom God has chosen to be rich in faith (James 2:5). The Indians were demons in human form in Satan’s wilderness, so the Indians had to be annihilated and the trees cut down. And then the wilderness arose in their midst – the slaves, the drunks, the Quakers and other heretics – so they had to be controlled or driven out. The shining dream of a holy society began to dissolve anyway, and so witches had to be found out and hanged. This way has been so constant in American life, so obvious, that Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, was instantly recognized to be about Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt. America has never been able to stop hunting witches, down to the “war on drugs” and “the war on terror.”
And the “bad people” so marginalized have learned the way of their abusers, as always happens. To the “liberals” and “progressives,” Christian fundamentalists and guys in pickup trucks with a shotgun on a rack have been the howling wilderness, a barbarian horde of darkness – who must be shut out and never listened to. In their own eyes, these “progressives” and “liberals” are a hard-pressed beacon of light in a sea of ignorance. They comfort themselves by schmoozing with their own and carefully hiding from their opponents in just the same way as the church members they despise. They hide from the Bible and distort it in order to dismiss it with contempt in just the way that Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell misrepresent and ridicule them. These “progressives” are indistinguishable in essence from their 17th century New England Puritan forefathers – although they deny the relationship with horror. In this, too, they imitate the scribes and Pharisees who denied that they were like their fathers who had killed the prophets.
Even the beatniks of the 1950s dismissed others as “squares,” and the hippies of the 1960s despised the “straights.” Whoever we are, when we feel a chill wind of condemnation from someone, don’t we answer by huddling together and congratulating ourselves for not being like them? “Thank you, God, that I’m not like that Pharisee!” American civilization is Pharisaic to the core. How can real community exist among competing Pharisaic sects?
This essential rivalry and disunity in Pharisaic religion
led under pressure to self-destruction through internal strife during the siege
of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The Jews killed
each other more than the Romans did.
This threat of dissolution is never far from any Pharisaic society. Since truth is lacking, a man-made, coerced
unity must be imposed, since the real thing is not possible. John made this point in his gospel by
referring to the religious leaders as “the Jews,” apart from the Jewish people
as a whole, in the same way that Daniel the prophet had referred to the
religious leaders of Babylon as “the Chaldeans,” apart from the Chaldean people as a whole.
Babylon got its start at the tower of Babel, known for manufacturing its
own unity by means of a big project (Genesis 11:1-4). John is making the point that Pharisaic
religion constructs an artificial unity based on human enthusiasm, religious
conformity, and peer group intimidation – all very obvious in the gospels – and
John is reminding us that this is very Babylonian. These qualities are also clearly seen in
modern American churches, as in Puritan New England at the beginning. As John’s gospel tells us to expect, the
Pharisaism of the Pilgrims and Puritans laid the foundation for Babylon to take
shape again in America.
[1] Original editorial reprinted at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h499t.html from Henry I. Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971).
[2] 60 Minutes,