Isaiah 49:1-7
49:1 Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me.
49:2 He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.
49:3 And he said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified."
49:4 But I said, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God."
49:5 And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength-
49:6 he says, "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."
49:7 Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, "Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."
Psalm 71:1-14
71:1 In you, O LORD, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame.
71:2 In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline your ear to me and save me.
71:3 Be to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress, to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
71:4 Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.
71:5 For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth.
71:6 Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother's womb. My praise is continually of you.
71:7 I have been like a portent to many, but you are my strong refuge.
71:8 My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day long.
71:9 Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength is spent.
71:10 For my enemies speak concerning me, and those who watch for my life consult together.
71:11 They say, "Pursue and seize that person whom God has forsaken, for there is no one to deliver."
71:12 O God, do not be far from me; O my God, make haste to help me!
71:13 Let my accusers be put to shame and consumed; let those who seek to hurt me be covered with scorn and disgrace.
71:14 But I will hope continually, and will praise you yet more and more.
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
1:18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
1:19 For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."
1:20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
1:21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.
1:22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom,
1:23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
1:24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1:25 For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.
1:26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.
1:27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;
1:28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are,
1:29 so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
1:30 He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption,
1:31 in order that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."
John 12:20-36
12:20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.
12:21 They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus."
12:22 Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
12:23 Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
12:24 Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
12:25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
12:26 Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
12:27 "Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say--' Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.
12:28 Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again."
12:29 The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him."
12:30 Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.
12:31 Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
12:32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."
12:33 He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
12:34 The crowd answered him, "We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?"
12:35 Jesus said to them, "The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.
12:36 While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light." After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.
Yesterday I ended on the gospel of Luke, where Jesus quoted the passage from Isaiah in Monday's lectionary reading. I am not so clever to have ended that meditation with Jesus walking away from the crowd in anticipation of this passage from John today. But I want to come back to that through Paul's letter to the church in Corinth. In the original of this post, I posted a quote with a link to a prior post. In lieu of that, I'll include the entire quote this time:
My thesis is twofold. 1. In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the "Kingdom of God" are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called that "world," resulting in what I call a "sacred anarchy." Consider but a sampling of its more salient features. In the Kingdom, the last are first and first are last, a strategically perverted system or privileging, so that the advantage is given not to beautiful Athenian bodies that house a love of wisdom, but to lepers, deaf mutes, the blind, epileptics, and the paralyzed. The favor of the Kingdom falls not on men [sic] of practical wisdom, of arete, of experts in freeness, but on tax collectors and prostitutes, who enjoy preferential treatment over the upright and well behaved. In addition, in the Kingdom the way to be arrayed with all the glory of God is to neither sow nor reap but to behave like the lilies of the field. If you try to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose it you will be saved. In the Kingdom one should hate one's father and mother but love one's enemies, and if a man strikes you you should offer him the other cheek. There, if you are rich, you have a very fine needle indeed to thread to get into the Kingdom. If you would want to become rich with the treasures offered by the Kingdom, you should sell all you have and give it to the poor. Moreover, you should give to the poor not only what you can afford but even what you need for yourself. If one of your sheep is lost, then you should not worry about endangering the other ninety-nine but go out and search for the lost one, which is an unaccountably odd way to count. If you host a party--even a wedding for your children--you should go out into the streets and welcome in the passers by. There bodies pass easily through solid walls, rise from the dead, traverse the surface of water without sinking, glow with a blinding whiteness, and pass instantly from one state, like water, into another, like wine. Cripples are made straight, lepers are cured, and the dead rise from their grave. All these bodily metamorphoses are in turn figures of a personal transformation best described as metanoia, which might be retranslated from "repentance" to "being of a new mind and heart," being turned and attuned to the new being that come of belonging to the Kingdom.
2. The event that shocks the world is not a strong but a weak force. Underlying, or arching over, all these famous paradoxes, there is, on my hypothesis, a thesis about God, or about the event that is harbored in the name of God, one that is contrary to the powers that be in theology and the church, a startling thesis found in what Paul calls "the weakness of God." Saint Paul puts this thesis about weakness very powerfully, even paradigmatically, in a veritably Deleuzian discourse on the "logos of the cross (logos tou staurou)," the mark of which Paul identifies as "foolishness." Here, in a virtuoso performance of the interweaving of sense and non-sense, of a logos that is the offspring of moria, Paul spells out the way this weakness jolts the world: God chose the foolish ones in the world to shame the wise, and what is weak to shame the strong, and what is the low down in the world, the ones who "are not" (ta me onta), to shame the men of ousia, men of substance, the powers that be. The "weakness of God," Paul says, is stronger than human strength. (I Cor. 1:25).
John Caputo, "Spectral Hermeneutics," After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (Columbia University Press, 2007). pp. 61-62.
I'll leave that passage on the basiliea tou theou for a bit later in the week, and continue on with the second part of the quote, which is where the original post started. I just thought the full context would be helpful, in the long rung.
"...the event that is harbored in the name of God..." In Jewish tradition the word "God" is treated as one of the names of God, and so written without vowels ("G-d") similar to the tetragrammaton YHWH for the word for God in the Yahwist (v. the Elohist) of the Torah strata. Caputo's phrase strikes me as something similar, and appropriate. The more the we identify God as comprehensible (a being, a person, a "father") the more we reduce God to pocket-size, and distort and misunderstand what we are talking about.
We also misunderstand Isaiah when he says “I.” Isaiah is applying the pronoun to Israel, not to the prophet, or to any person. It is Israel collectively: “my servant, Israel,” although the metaphor crosses back and forth between the personal and the collective. Israel, as God’s servant, will be the light of the world. When God says, through the prophet, "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth," God is speaking of the nation, and giving Israel a purpose beyond simply saving Israel. Salvation, after all, is pretty weak tea if it's only for a chosen few.
But Israel only acts as God’s servant, not as God’s fist 👊 in the world. The weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
And here's the reversal of the Greek idea, the challenge to the Greek concept of logos. John's gospel is the gospel of logos, but Paul is reversing the Greek idea of logos. For the Greeks logos struggled against chaos, a struggle it was powerful enough to win, but in the long run not powerful enough to sustain. Eventually chaos won out, and logos was defeated. It's a very bleak view of the cosmos, a cosmos doomed to descend back into chaos and disorder; a cosmos headed, in other words, for disaster, for a state of complete disrule where all laws, human and "natural," would pass, and only disorder prevail. Against that, pointedly against that, you get Paul's declaration about weakness, and how it can be stronger than strength. God's weakness, Paul writes, is a of a different order than human weakness. It is the weakness of logos that eventually fails in the struggle against chaos. But God's weakness is not the weakness of the Greek logos; God's weakness is strength, because it perserveres, it prevails; it is from everlasting to everlasting, and outlasts all the powers of the world. Of course, God's weakness undergirds the whole of creation. It is the weakness that is stronger than human strength because, in Greek terms, it cannot be diminished, cannot be weakness. It is weakness only in human perception; but it is strength beyond our understanding of "strong."
These scriptures are actually shot through with paradox. Perhaps that is what joins them together for the lectionary today. The servant in Isaiah will raise up the tribes of Israel and be a light to the world. A servant? Servants are like the Victorian definition of children: to be seen (barely) but surely not to be heard. We don't elect servants today; we want "leaders." Joe Biden is much closer to the ideal of a servant than Donald Trump, but does anyone really want a "servant" in the White House?
The Psalmist sets up the paradox of God's weakness as strength. No matter how much he struggles against his enemies, they are not overcome. Like the Greek logos against chaos, chaos is bound to win. The Psalmist has only one recourse, and that is to hope continuously. What strength is that, except the strength of God's weakness?
Even in John: the passage is Jesus preparing himself for the sacrifice of the crucifixion. But the story ends this way:
12:34 The crowd answered him, "We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?"
12:35 Jesus said to them, "The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.
12:36 While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light." After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.
He has spoken of the servant role again, and life gained coming only from life lost:
12:25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
12:26 Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
But when he tells those questioning him to walk in the light, he then hides himself from them.
Nothing is as it seems; nothing is revealed directly, told directly, given directly. Everything comes from its opposite: strength from weakness, wisdom from foolishness, light from darkness, the revealed from the hidden; the leader from the servant.
The first, from the last.
. . . . . . . . .
About the picture:
"Inspired by insects, the Bug Dome is a small sheltered area used during the SZHK Biennale for underground bands, poetry reading, and discussions, and after the Biennale as an un-official gathering place for illegal workers from the Chinese countryside. Built on a wasteland of a ruined building site in-between the Shenzhen City Hall and an illegal workers camp, the structure is intended to reveal the connection we share with nature: ”In large scale, if we learn to understand the connection what the hundreds of millions of hands that are now migrating from the rural China to the modern cities might bring along them, we might be able to ruin the industrial city. We might be able to make the city to be part of nature."
"The building is made of bamboo and was adapted to meet the site-specific conditions. Inside the cocoon, “a weak retreat for the modern man to escape from the strength of the exploding urbanism”, a small area allows people to come together, and a space to share a fire is also provided." [from www.archdaily.com interview with the architects.] Photo by Movez.
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