God Does That? Really?

 

 

God Does That? Really?

January 27, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

We all know that things in this world are not what they’re supposed to be. Yes, there are a great many good people who do a great amount of good in the world. God bless them. They are doing what they can to make the world a better place. Still, there’s no denying that in many ways the world is a mess. Two thousand years after Jesus it remains a long, long way from the realm of God of which Jesus spoke. Because rich nations are greedy, children starve to death in poor countries. Because so many white people think of themselves as the human norm and that therefore people who aren’t white are less because they are different, racism and white supremacy distort and stunt people’s lives and racial injustice dominates our institutions, our legal institutions most of all. People all over the world lack decent health care and adequate education. The wealthy rule at the expense of everyone else. Many nations, the United States most of all, maintain enormous militaries the cost of which makes defense contractors rich and makes needed social programs impossible. In the US at least the tax structure so benefits the rich that government goes farther and farther into debt and necessary programs like universal health care and the  repair of our physical infrastructure are thought to be too expensive. The strong get ahead through deceit and lies, Donald Trump being a prime recent example. Far too many of us fall for their deceit and their lies, often voting against our own self interest. Petty crime by Black people is often punished more severely than is major crime by white people. The list of horribles could go on and on, but I trust the point is made. Despite all the good the good people do, the world is still a mess. It still isn’t close to being the way God dreams it should be. Yet God knows that the world could be that way if more of God’s people would just wake up.

Things weren’t any better in the ancient worlds of the Bible. In many ways they were worse. Empires established peace, of a sort at least, through the massive applications of violence. One or two percent of the population were very wealthy. Nearly everyone else lived at or below the subsistence level. In Judea and no doubt elsewhere Roman taxation kept nearly everyone in poverty. The mass of the people faced starvation when the crops failed while the rich always had enough to eat. Most people had no legal rights the state had to respect. Slavery was a normal and accepted part of the social structure. Rulers were almost always tyrannical, and their rule almost always benefited the rich over the poor. In ancient Israel many thought that poverty was God’s punishment for sin, so the elite were quite content to leave the poor in their poverty and blame poverty on God rather than on the radically unjust social and economic systems through which they ruled. So no, things weren’t any better in the ancient world than they are today. In fact they were in many ways worse.

At least some of the people in the worlds saw how unjust so much of life was. Some of them demanded that the rulers and the social and economic elite do something about it. Many of the ancient prophets, for example, condemned rulers and demanded justice for the poor. Some of those who got it, however, expressed their demands for justice in a way that has always struck me as odd. They wrote that God had already done or was doing what needed to be done. Here are two examples of ancient authors doing that, the first from Psalm 146:

 

Happy are those whose help is

              the God of Jacob,

       whose hope is in the Lord

              their God,

who made heaven and earth,

       the sea, and all that is in

              them;

who keeps faith forever;

who creates justice for the

       oppressed;

who gives food to the hungry.

 

The Lord sets the prisoners free;

       the Lord opens the eyes of

              the blind.

The Lord lifts up those who are

              bowed down;

       the Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over the

              strangers;

       he upholds the orphan and the

              widow,

       but the way of the wicked he

              brings to ruin. Psalm 146:5-9

 

Then this from Mary’s song we call the Magnificat:

 

He [God] has shown strength with

              his arm;

       he has scattered the proud in

              the thoughts of their

              hearts.

He has brought down the

              powerful from their

              thrones,

       and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with

              good things,

       and sent the rich away empty. Luke 1:51-54

 

Texts like these always leave me a bit nonplussed. When I read them I always want to say, “Really? God does that? God has done that? I sure don’t think so.” I mean, is justice being executed for all of the oppressed? Not so as you’d notice. Do all the hungry have food? Hardly. They’re still hungry precisely because they don’t have food. Have all the prisoners been set free? If so, why are our jails and prisons so full? I seriously doubt that the other things Psalm 146 mentions are much done either. I love Mary’s Magnificat. It’s magnificent ancient poetry and prophecy, but I have the same reaction to it that I have to the lines I quoted from Psalm 146. Really? God has done all those things? It sure doesn’t look like it to me. Even if, as I’ve heard, the Greek here means both has done and is doing (or something like that), these words just don’t describe the world I know. They sure don’t describe the world Mary knew. The powerful still sit on their thrones, be those thrones literal or metaphorical. The lowly are still low. The hungry are still hungry. The rich have hardly been sent away empty. The meek, as they say, may be getting ready, but the strong still rule the world. Psalm 146 and the Magnificat have God stepping in and creating an ideal world that certainly does not exist today and never has.

So what, if anything, are we to make of these ancient texts? The only thing I can come up with is that they express what God wants, not what God has done or is doing on God’s own. I think of their use of present and past tenses as poetic license, not as descriptions of what God actually does. They don’t use the phrase “the realm of God” the way Jesus did, but they depict God’s dream for the world in the same way Jesus did. We’re talking here about a longing for a transformed world, not about a world that actually has been transformed.

Then if God doesn’t intervene directly to create that transformed world, do these verses really mean anything to us at all? I think they do, but we have to do a bit of isogesis to pull a meaning out of them. I mean by that that we have to take them to mean something they don’t actually say. We have to read a bit of meaning into them. The meaning I read into and then pull out of these verses is that they call us to create that world of which God dreams. We are the only way God has to make the dream a reality. Through these verses God is calling us to get to work. To feed the hungry. To bring about justice for the oppressed. To care for the alien, the widow, and the orphan in our midst (and never mind if the alien is here legally or illegally). To reform our criminal law system so that far fewer people, especially people of color, end up in prison. To lift up the lowly and (nonviolently) to bring the powerful down from their thrones so that all have enough to live on.

Yes, I know. It’s quite a challenge. Some Christians have been trying to do it for as long as there have been Christians. They’ve perhaps made some progress, but we still have a long way to go. When we try to do the work we face opposition, sometimes violent opposition, Donald Trump and his white supremacist backers being just a very recent and appalling example that remains current even though Trump is now out of office. Doing the work can get you killed. It got Jesus killed. Yet the call remains, and we can do it. We can do it because we know the truth of what the risen Christ promised his disciples so long ago, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:20b. See, God doesn’t intervene to impose the realm of God on the world, but neither is God absent from the world. God is always present working  with and supporting the people who do the work. God’s presence and help don’t make the work easy or safe, but they do make it possible. So let’s get on with it, shall we?