Jesus: The Jewish Teacher
From Bilateral to Unilateral Relationship
Monday, March 2, 2015
In the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s covenant love seems to morph from a bilateral covenant (“You do that and I’ll do this”) as in the covenants with Moses and Noah to a totally unilateral covenant (with Abraham and David), when it becomes clear that we humans will never keep our side of the agreement yet Yahweh always has and always will. Jesus reveals a deep personal trust in the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants, where Yahweh fills up all the gaps with divine mercy and says in effect, “I’m going to do it all from my side.” This morphs into the highly enlightened idea of “restorative justice,” but most of Christian history was read inside of the very limited notion of retributive justice—lasting to this very day. (We should have understood restorative love from the way that good parents love their children when they are young. The little one, precisely because of his or her very littleness, is incapable of doing anything to earn the parents’ loving care, so the child is loved unconditionally—which develops the child’s own capacity for the same kind of love! But sadly, most parenting in most cultures has followed the punitive and retributive model, again lasting down to our own time.)
As we saw in last week’s meditations, God’s unique love for the “anawim,” the humble and poor ones, runs throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. (Look at the entries under “poor” in a concordance.) “Whoever is a little one, let him come to me” (Proverbs 9:4) was Thérèse’s favorite Bible quote. Jesus, always the good Jew, presented this same idea in three places (Mark 10:14, Matthew 9:13, Luke 18:16) and went even further in Luke, saying “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (18:17). God knows we are too little and poor to earn or deserve God’s love, so God gives it freely, as already promised by Isaiah: “As a mother bounces a child on her knees, so will I care for you” (66:12-13). Given this emphasis on God’s care for the poor ones, it is so strange that Christians expended so much effort trying to be “big” instead of surrendering to being “little.”
Jesus experienced God as a loving parent at his baptism when “the Spirit of God descended like a dove, alighting on him, and a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’” (Matthew 3:16-17). Once Jesus knew at his core that he was God’s beloved Son he was able to begin his ministry of revealing the Good News of this totally loving God to the world. Jesus connected the dots of God’s intimate love in the Hebrew Scriptures because they resonated with his own inner experience. Jesus’ name for God was Abba, an Aramaic term of endearment meaning “Daddy” or “Papa.” Jesus clearly knew his God was with him and was on his side. This also implies that he must have had a very good human daddy to open this channel for him. We call him St. Joseph.
What God does in biblical history (and wants to do in our own lives) is to lead people beyond the idea of a bilateral contract in which we must earn, deserve, and merit, to an experience of pure, unearned grace, a unilateral or “new” covenant with an Infinite Love Source. This is a huge humiliation for an egocentric or narcissistic personality. Only the central theme of grace is prepared to move people beyond a bad and tired story line of reward and punishment. As Marcus Borg wrote in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, only a personal experience of unearned love (“grace”) can move us into a religion beyond mere “requirements” to a religion of actual transformation of consciousness. Very practically, this is experienced as being moved from a God-view of scarcity and limitation to a God-view of infinite abundance. If this is not an earthquake to your understanding, you have not yet had the experience.
Gateway to Silence:
Teach me Your truth.
References:
Adapted from “You Must Start with Something Positive,” Homily for January 11, 2015;
Hierarchy of Truths: Jesus’ Use of Scripture (CD, MP3 download);
Scripture as Liberation (MP3 download); and
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 159