A Sermon for the 4^th Sunday in Lent – March 22, 2020

John 9:1-41

Today’s gospel text is another long one from the Gospel of John—John 9:1-41.  It’s the story of Jesus healing a man born blind and the reaction that the Pharisees have to that healing.  Like last week, with the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well, rather than read the text then give you a sermon,  I think it will be a better use of our time together to take the text in pieces with commentary in between.

So first, a bit of background about the Gospel of John.  John’s gospel is layered with symbolism and themes that repeat.  One of those themes is light.  We see this theme played out sometimes in subtle ways.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, in darkness.  He’s afraid of being seen by his fellow Pharisees.  Also, even though he is a religious teacher, he’s not very quick to pick up what Jesus is trying to teach.  He’s in the dark.  In contrast to Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman at the well meets Jesus in the broad light of day.  She’s open and honest in her conversation.  She doesn’t care who sees her talking with him.  She is quick to discern that there is something unique about him and quick to invite others to “come and see.”

Light is also used in John specifically to describe Jesus as the light of creation, the light of the cosmos, the light of the world.   For instance in John 1 in that beautiful, poetic prologue we read:

John 1.4

In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.  [Another way to translate did not overcome it is has not understood it.]

Time and again in the Gospel of John religious leaders and authorities fail to understand Jesus.  They’re standing in the presence of the light but they’re in the dark.

As the light of the world, Jesus does two things.  First, he shines as the light of judgment.  He, himself, becomes the standard that separates good from evil.

John 3.19

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  ²⁰ For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  ²¹ But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

The second thing Jesus does as the light of the world is that he enables those who believe in him and who receive the Holy Spirit to see.  Seeing is another theme in John’s gospel, and it’s only natural that it is so directly tied to Jesus as the light.  But seeing as it is used in this gospel is not merely seeing as we do in everyday life, but seeing with a deeper insight and, more specifically, seeing the Reign or Sovereignty of God not just as a future promise, but as a present reality when Christ is present.  To put it another way, when Jesus, the light of the world is with us, the Kingdom of God is with us, and we can see it!  It’s happening now!  But to see it and experience it, you need the presence of Christ and the presence of the Spirit which make you a new creation.  As Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3:3,

 “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

And then there is yet another way that seeing is used in this gospel, and that is to see others as Jesus sees them.  Jesus sees and notices things and persons that others overlook or he sees them before others see them.  And that is where today’s gospel begins.  John, chapter 9, verse 1:

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 

It’s Jesus that sees him first.  And this is a man who is probably accustomed to being overlooked.  He was a beggar.  He was used to being ignored.  But Jesus notices him.  And because Jesus notices him, the disciples notice him, too.

² His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Isn’t it interesting that for the disciples this man becomes not as person in need of assistance or even a person to simply get to know, but a fulcrum for theological debate.  And isn’t it so very human to want to fix blame for things like this?  Who sinned?  Why did this happen?  Who’s to blame?  What went wrong?  Clearly, in their thinking, he’s being punished by God, so why?

I’ve done a little, not retranslating, exactly, but I’ve changed the punctuation in the next part because there is no punctuation in the Greek text.  The NRSV reads “³ Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.  ⁴ We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.  ⁵ As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” The words “he was born blind” are not in the Greek, so I’m not sure why the NRSV translators put them in there.  And the implication of that translation is that God arranged for the man the man to be born blind so that Jesus could come along years later and fix him. But if you take out that phrase that’s not in the Greek and change the punctuation it reads very differently.

John 9:3-5  Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.  But in order that the works of God might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day.  Night is coming when no one can work.  As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

Do you hear the difference?  Jesus is saying, “Nobody sinned.  He’s not being punished.  His parents aren’t being punished.  Stuff happens.  Let’s stop wasting time with that nonsense and let’s get on with the work God sent us to do while we have time to do it!  Daylight’s a wastin’!  Night is coming!  I’m here.  I’m the light of the world.  Let’s get rid of this little bit of darkness.”

⁶ When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes,  ⁷ saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 

So the man was healed.  His eyes were opened and he could see.  That was his physical healing.  But can you imagine how much his spirit, his heart, his soul were healed when he heard Jesus say, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”  Can you imagine what it meant to him to hear those words?

⁸ The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?”  ⁹ Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.”  ¹⁰ But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?”  ¹¹ He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.”  ¹² They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

 ¹³  They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind.  ¹⁴ Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.  ¹⁵ Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.”  ¹⁶ Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.” But others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided.  ¹⁷ So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”

Now here’s the thing.  It’s not really a violation of the Sabbath laws to heal someone on the Sabbath even though Jesus repeatedly gets in hot water for doing so.  It just feels like work the Pharisees, so they don’t like it.  But in this particular instance they have something of a case.  A little bit of one, because Jesus made a paste of mud, and that looks like kneading, as in kneading dough. And that, according to the Mishnah Shabbat is one of the 39 tasks forbidden on the Sabbath.

¹⁸  The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight ¹⁹ and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”  ²⁰ His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind;  ²¹ but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.”  ²² His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.  ²³ Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

Isn’t it interesting what fear and anxiety does to people.  Here are these parents who have seen their son healed, their son who has been blind his whole life, but they’re not celebrating.  They’re not looking for Jesus so they can thank him.  They’re nervous.  They don’t want their status changed.  They don’t want their lives changed.  They don’t want to be put out of the synagogue.  They don’t want to be noticed.  They don’t want to be seen.

²⁴  So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.”  ²⁵ He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”  ²⁶ They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”  ²⁷ He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”  ²⁸ Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses.  ²⁹ We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”  ³⁰ The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.  ³¹ We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will.  ³² Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind.  ³³ If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”  ³⁴ They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.

I love how the Formerly Blind Man answers the Pharisees.  Sometimes we think we have to figure out everything about God and what God is doing and be able to answer all the hard questions.  He doesn’t fall into that trap.  And he doesn’t let them control the dialogue.  He just tells them what he does know.  And I like to think that when he says, “Do you also want to become his disciples?” he is asking the question in earnest—an invitation to grace in the face of hostility.

³⁵  Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”  ³⁶ He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.”  ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.”  ³⁸ He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him.  ³⁹Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”  ⁴⁰ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”  ⁴¹ Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

In the chapter before this story, in chapter 8 verse 12, Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

In this time of Corona virus and self-quarantine, it’s easy to feel like we’re all in the dark, like we’re all flying a little bit blind.  But we have the light of life to help us see that God is still at work in the world and in our lives.  So here’s mud in your eye—the kind that heals.  May the light of Christ shine on you and in you and through you so that not only you can see, but so that others can see by the light that shines through you.

In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

 

 

 

 

Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent, March 15, 2020

John 4:5-42

We’re going to do things a little differently this morning.  Instead of reading the gospel lesson then preaching a sermon, today will be something a little more like a Bible study/sermon.  For one thing, it’s a very long gospel reading, in fact it includes the single longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in the gospels.  So it makes some sense to combine the sermon or teaching with the reading.

If you were a 1^st century Jewish or Samaritan Christian, almost everything that happens in today’s gospel would be unexpected.  It’s a story full of surprises.  So I would invite you to try to hear it that way—as a 1^st century Jewish or Samaritan Christian—and I’ll begin by filling in some background to help you do that.

The first thing that’s unexpected in today’s gospel is that Jesus breaks a social distancing barrier.  He decides to go through Samaria to get back to Galilee from Jerusalem.  True, it’s the shortest way, but Judean and Galilean Jews would almost always take the longer way along the Jordan to avoid going through Samaria because, quite simply, Jews hated Samaritans and Samaritans hated Jews.  I’ll explain why in a minute.  So, it’s unexpected that Jesus decides to go through Samaria. 

The second thing that’s unexpected comes when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.  If you’re a 1^st century Jew or Samaritan, you heard stories all your life about men meeting women at a well.  Moses meets Zipporah at a well… and they end up getting married.  Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac and he finds Rebecca drawing water at a well.  Jacob meets Rachel at a well… and they get married, eventually.  So when you hear a story about a man meeting a woman at a well, your expectation is that it’s going to end with a wedding.  But this one, it turns out, is not—although marriage gets discussed in the dialogue– so if you’re a 1^st century Jewish Christian hearing this story told for the first time, when Jesus says, “Go get your husband,” and the woman says, “I have no husband,” you might think it’s going to go that way.

The third thing that’s unexpected if you’re a 1^st century Jewish or Samaritan Christian is that this conversation Jesus has at the well at Sychar, the single longest conversation Jesus has in all the gospels, a conversation that touches on history, worship, and theology, is not only with a woman, but with a Samaritan woman. 

My friend and colleague, Pastor Kirsten Moore pointed out to me the other day that social distancing is an important element in this story.  That’s a thing we’ve heard a lot about lately.  Social distancing.  Mostly we’re hearing about it in the context of the Corona virus and how it’s important to allow adequate space between yourself and any persons near you if you’re in a public place.  But there are all kinds of social distancing.  Racism is a kind of social distancing.  Homophobia is a kind of social distancing.  Hatred of or fear of or dislike of other people for superficial reasons like skin color or sexuality or religion or country of origin is a kind of social distancing.  It comes in lots of forms.

Remember, Jews don’t like Samaritans and Samaritans don’t like Jews and the reasons are buried in their history.  There’s a Grand Canyon of social distance between them.  And here’s why.

Under King David and King Solomon, Israel’s territory reached from deep into the Sinai Peninsula in the south all the way up to the Euphrates River in the north in what is now Syria.  It was Israel’s golden age.  When Solomon died, sometime around 930 BCE and his son, Rehoboam became king, leaders of the northern tribes led by Jeroboam broke away from the southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin in brief civil war.  They resented centralized government in Jerusalem, but they also resented centralized worship and sacrifice only being allowed at the temple in Jerusalem.  The end result of that civil war was a divided nation and a divided religion:  The Kingdom of Judah in the south with its worship center at the temple in Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of Israel in the north with worship centers at Shiloh, Bethel, Shechem, and elsewhere.

In 720 BCE the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians.  

• The Assyrians resettled other conquered peoples in Israel’s territory and carted off the Israelites to resettle other conquered lands as slaves laborers
• Later, when Assyria had fallen, Israelite returnees often intermarried with the people who had been resettled in their lands
• That’s why Judeans called them “the people with 5 fathers”

Then in 600 BCE the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians.

• In 597 – the first Judean people were first deported to Babylon in captivity

• When Babylon fell to Cyrus the Persian and Darius the Mede and the Judeans were allowed to return to Jerusalem, Ezra – ordered Judean men who had stayed behind in Judah to “put aside” their non-Jewish wives and children

• When Ezra and Nehemiah began to rebuild the temple, the Samaritans opposed and interfered with its reconstruction

• Judeans had Torah, prophets, writings and were expecting a Messiah who would be prophetic but primarily a military leader.

• Samaritans – their own version of Torah – no prophets, no writings.  Expecting a Messiah who would be a prophet like Moses.

• Each side believed that they had preserved the “true religion”

• Each side blamed the other for not being there when the enemy came.

So all of this is in the background when Jesus sits down beside Jacob’s well after a long morning of walking on the dusty road.  

[Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.  ⁶ Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

⁷  A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”  

⁸ (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)  

• It’s interesting that “Give me a drink” is imperative

⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”  

¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?  ¹² Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”  

• “living water”=running water  but she seems to grasp the hint that he may be talking about something more
• This text, by the way, stands in contrast with Nicodemus from last week’s lesson
  • Nicodemus comes at night and did not want to be seen– this woman meets Jesus in the middle of the day and doesn’t care who sees her.  Nicodemus, a teacher, is not quick to grasp what Jesus is talking about.  This Samaritan woman catches on pretty quickly.

¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,  ¹⁴ but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”  ¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” 

• “to draw water” – there is a double meaning here.  She’s thirsty for meaningful conversation.

¹⁶  Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”  ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’;  ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!”  

• Too often because of the “five husbands” comment this woman has been painted in commentaries and sermons as something of a loose woman with disreputable moral character, but there is nothing in the text to actually indicate that.  There are all kinds of reasons she isn’t necessarily a “loose woman”—
  • Her husbands could have simply died.  Life expectancy for men was about 35 yrs.  Life was hard and simple infections could be deadly.
    • If her husband died, she may have been required to enter into a Leverate marriage, the Levitical requirement that if her husband died she had to marry his brother and if he died she had to marry the next brother, and so on.  The Sadducees actually posed a hypothetical situation to Jesus in Mark 12 where a woman ended up married to 7 brothers because they kept dying. 
  • Divorce was easy for men.  All a man had to do was issue a certificate and say, “I divorce you.” So it’s not hard to imagine multiple marriages base on that alone.
  • The word translated as “husband” is andra – It can mean husband but its more basic meaning is simply “man” – she could be living with a male relative and might have lived with other male relatives.

¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.  ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”  ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.  ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.  ²³ But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.  ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

• She moves to one of the primary tension points –What is the proper place for worship?  This is a theological discussion, showing keen intellect and curiosity.
• Jesus essentially says, the time is coming when that will be a moot point
  • The Gospel of John was written well after the destruction of the temple
    • BUT this story is remembered from before that
• You worship what you do not know, we worship what we know
  • Jesus could be saying, “You’ve had Torah, we’ve had the prophets to fill in and interpret Torah.”
    • “for salvation is from the Judeans” – Prophets had said Messiah would come from the line of David, a Judean line from the tribe of Benjamin;  Samaritans, having an oral tradition of Messiah but only Torah and no prophetic tradition had no more concrete information.  Jesus is defending the Judean tradition even as he says that much of it is coming to a close.
• Those who worship must worship in Spirit and Truth
  • As I stand here today in an all-but-empty church and you watch at home and we worship by way of electronic media, this is so important to remember. God doesn’t care as much about where we are as about the state of our hearts and minds.  Lord God may we always worship in Spirit and Truth—even when it is by unusual means and in unexpected places.

²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.”  ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

• We don’t get her immediate reaction to his statement.  But…
• “Messiah will proclaim all things to us.”  Keep that in mind.

They get interrupted.

²⁷  Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”

²⁸ Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people,  ²⁹ “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”  ³⁰ They left the city and were on their way to him. 

• Do you see the connection between “He will proclaim all things to us” and  “He told me everything I have ever done!”?  For her this is the proof that he is the prophetic Messiah promised to their people.
• Base on that, she becomes the first evangelist – she goes and tells others and they come to meet Jesus for themselves.

³¹  Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.”  ³² But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”  ³³ So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?”  ³⁴Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.  ³⁵ Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.  ³⁶The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷ For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’  ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” 

• There’s a whole sermon in those 7 verses.  But it boils down to this:
  • There is strength and sustenance in doing God’s will
  • There is a world waiting to hear about Christ
  • So how do we do that in this time of Covid-19?

³⁹  Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.”  ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days.  ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word.  ⁴² They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

This amazing woman who met Jesus at the well is never named, but let’s call her Grace, after all, there is so much grace in this story.

It’s a story about what can happen when we dare to cross boundaries—to build a bridge across our social distancing–with grace and courtesy and curiosity, with open hearts and open minds.

In spite of the historic hatred between their two peoples, they speak to each other with courtesy and grace… and they listen to each other.

He doesn’t pigeonhole her, she doesn’t stereotype him.

They reach across the distance of accidental geography and sad history, arbitrary cultural restrictions and hide-bound traditions to have a conversation that changed the lives of people around them and, if we will listen carefully, can still change our lives today.

So don’t be shy.  Talk to that other person, those other people who are so very much not you or your kind.  You may be Christ to them.  They may be Christ to you.  You won’t know until you talk to them.

And be willing to listen.  Listen to the truth of your own life without being defensive.  Open your eyes to who it is speaking to you.  Take the living water that Christ is pouring out for you.  Worship in Spirit and Truth.  Feed on doing the work of God.  Go and tell others. 

In Spirit and Truth, in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

If you want to do violence in the world, you will always find the weapons.  If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.  With Scripture, we’ve been entrusted with some of the most powerful stories ever told.  How we harness that power, whether for good or evil, oppression or liberation, changes everything.–Rachel Held Evans

“All scripture,” we read in 2 Timothy 3:16, “is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient.”  That’s how it appears in the NRSV.  The problem is, that’s not exactly what it says in the original Greek.  There are, in fact, some missing words in the Greek and, of course the syntax is different. The original, literally translated, would read, “Every writing God-breathed and useful for teaching for reproof for correction for training in righteousness…”  That’s rather confusing, even in the Greek, and you can see that how this gets translated depends in part on making your best guess at some missing words, deciding where to put them, and making a few punctuation decisions. There are also some important word translation choices.  Writings, for instance, became scripture in most translations, a much more weighted word with implications that shift the meaning of the whole passage.  The great Greek scholar Richmond Lattimore, translated this passage this way: “Every writing that is divinely inspired is also useful for…”  Right at the beginning of the sentence is an enormous difference in meaning between the two translations.

This is a pivotal passage because Christians of almost every stripe will refer to the Bible as The Word of God and will appeal to its authority. We call it the Word of God but we often mean very different things when we say that.  We all have different hermeneutics—the lenses through which we read and interpret the Bible.  We read a text through the filter of our own life experience and a host of presumptions about the Bible on the whole and the text itself.  The same thing happens when we use a biblical text “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” or, far too often, to bolster our position in some dispute.  We often fall into the habit of eisegesis, interpreting and using a text according to our own agenda, bias, or presuppositions instead of using it in a way that is faithful to its context and faithful to our faith.  When that happens, we are abusing one of the great gifts God has given us—and that the Church historically gave itself.

Recently, for example, Romans 13:1-7 was cited by our US Attorney General as a way to counter some of the significant opposition he and the administration have been facing in their policy that has separated immigrant children from their families.  “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”  That seems pretty clear and straightforward.  Except, like so many things in the Bible, it’s simply not as cut and dried as it looks on first glance.

Remember, this was written by St. Paul, a man who had spent significant time in jail for disturbing the peace and for civil disobedience, so clearly he believed that conscience trumped the legal system. He was also a man who frequently relied on the “get out of jail free” card of his Roman citizenship.  He could afford to encourage obedience to the law because, as a Roman citizen, he could appeal to have his case heard and re-heard all the way up to the Emperor if necessary.  Not everyone who read his letter had that option—nor do they today. Remember, too, that he’s writing to people who had been involved in tumultuous riots not too many years before (c.49), riots so disruptive that Emperor Claudius expelled all Christians and Jews from Rome for a time.  So he’s basically telling them to keep calm and stay under the radar because “the governing authorities” are still looking for an excuse to nail you.  Don’t give it to them.

But ignoring all that, even if you take Romans 13:1-7 strictly at face value, when it’s pulled out of its context and used as a blanket instruction to always obey all authority then you’re missing the point of the chapter and, indeed, of the entire letter to the Romans.  “Owe no one anything except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law…Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”  Clearly Paul has a higher ethic in mind than simple blind obedience to human law. Love can do no wrong to a neighbor. If you find yourself stuck between law and love, go with love.  It might break human law, but it’s the heart of the law and ethic of Christ.

This is not the only problematic verse in the Bible that can have powerful and dangerous consequences when misused, but it is one that has been abused most frequently.  In our own history it has been used in numerous unsavory ways, most notably in the subjugation of native peoples and in perpetuating slavery.  The Anchor/Yale Bible Dictionary has this to say about this passage: “The Apostle Paul’s admonition to “be subject to the governing authorities” on the grounds that “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God” has caused much needless suffering and much misery even in the 20th century. This passage seems to lend support to any existing government, regardless of how tyrannical or how corrupt, and any governmental policy, however repressive or unjust. This passage has been invoked by Christians to put down revolt, support war, and justify genocide. In fact, many Christians in Hitler’s Germany appealed to this text as the decisive biblical warrant for obedience to the Nazi regime. And it has been regret over the Church’s alignment with the Nazi regime that has forced a reconsideration of these verses, particularly by German biblical scholars.

            “Again, a careful reading of the text along with an awareness of the historical context is essential for understanding this problem passage. It must be noted that Paul does not say “obey” or “disobey” governing authorities. He instead speaks of “being subject”, which can include disobedience.” (©1992, Anchor/Yale Bible Dictionary, p. 288)

 We all may mean something different when we say that the Bible is the Word of God, but what we mean when we say it will determine how we use these sacred texts—for good or for evil. We should remember that the Bible, itself, says that Jesus is the Word of God who became flesh and dwelt among us. (John 1)  For those of us who call ourselves Christians, Jesus should be our hermeneutic, our lens for reading, interpreting and understanding the words of scripture.  And he was executed for challenging authority.