Signs of Life. Rick Fabian
some old allies have not yet noticed. In the 1960s, British critics Norman Perrin and Reginald Fuller overturned five decades of earlier argument by relegating all gospel futurism to editors’ and later preachers’ commentary, which Jewish tradition calls midrash. During the next decades Perrin and Fuller’s opinion attained critical consensus. Unlike both Jesus’s contemporary teachers and his well-meaning gospel editors, Jesus himself preached God’s reign already come here and now, before we could possibly prepare or manage it. We must respond wisely, and just in time—otherwise fools will find it is already too late. Here comes God now, ready or not!
Jesus’s Prophetic Sign: A Stumbling Block
For his distinctive message, Jesus chose a sign. The Hebrew word for a sign is ‘ôth; the Greek is sêmeion; but setting aside etymology and linguistic philosophy that fill some commentaries, we may observe how Hebrew prophets actually use signs to show people what God is doing, because people are dangerously failing to see it. Jeremiah shatters a pot at the Jerusalem garbage dump, declaring: this is what God will do with our nation unless our leaders change their plans.7 Jeremiah’s sign does not pretend magically to break up the nation; rather it is his urgent gesture to win people’s attention, so they will see what God is up to before it is tragically too late.
For a prophetic sign of his teaching that God comes here now, ready or not, Jesus took up an image from the prophet Isaiah, who envisioned a banquet where God’s chosen Hebrew people and the unclean heathen would feast together.8 Jesus began dining publicly with notoriously unqualified sinners, those shunned by other religious reformers: a practice that many modern critics think chiefly led to his condemnation and death.
Paul calls Jesus’s life and death a scandal, a term that likewise wants defining from usage. The Hebrew words translated as “scandal” or “stumbling block”9 denote a snare or trap, but one singular Levitical instance became normative for the New Testament. This was part of the Holiness Code, a text that Judah Goldin says all synagogue schoolboys memorized: “You shall not curse the deaf, nor lay a stumbling block before the blind. I am YHWH.”10 Nearly all references to a stumbling block in Hebrew and Greek scripture imply blindness. When Jeremiah warns, “I will lay a stumbling block before this people,”11 he is taunting them: My people are blind!12 Terming Jesus’s ministry a scandal means that people who fail to see what God is doing, despite Jesus’s sign, risk downfall and destruction, just as Jeremiah forewarned his nation they would be destroyed. Jeremiah was ignored, and his people perished. Gospel editors believed that had happened again to the first-century Jewish nation who ignored Jesus’s sign, when the Romans invaded and paved Jerusalem, and it will happen wherever people fail to see.
Like Jeremiah, Jesus consciously chose a sign to scandalize his nation. In his day kosher food still lay in the future; ritual purity applied then only to the diners, not to the food. Palestine abounded in dining fellowships called chaburoth, each restricted by profession and by degrees of contaminating business contacts with impure Gentiles and non-observant Jews. So Jesus chose that scandalous sign of common dining to seize people’s attention before it was too late. Today that scandal continues wherever Jesus shows up. As the Lutheran writer Gordon Lathrop puts it: “Draw a line that includes us and excludes many others, and Jesus Christ is always on the other side of the line. At least that is so if we are speaking of the biblical, historic Christ who eats with sinners and outsiders, who is made a curse and sin itself for us, who justifies the ungodly, and who is himself the hole in any system.”13
Some opponents of the Open Table deride its “mere acceptance” of unbaptized people. Philip Turner sees “a theological chasm . . . between those who hold a theology of divine acceptance and those who hold a theology of divine redemption”14 But the presence of genuinely wrong and unacceptable people at the table was essential for Jesus’s sign. It fit his teaching perfectly. The heroes of his authentic parables include criminals, pre-moral children, and pushy women. Jesus’s criminals are real criminals: not to be rehabilitated by our “understanding” how they grew up oppressed or in dysfunctional families; not to be welcomed into our company in hopes they will change their ways. In Jesus’s parables they never change their ways.
Jesus’s Claim to Orthodoxy
That is not to say Jesus thought himself a revolutionary. One of his most famous parables argues otherwise: the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, which most “conservative” and “liberal” critics concur that Jesus authored.
A Pharisee and a tax collector both went to pray in the Temple. The Pharisee stood erect praying: “Thank you, God, that I am not like other folks: grasping, cheating, fashionably adulterous, or anything like that tax collector. I fast twice weekly; I donate ten percent of all I get.” The tax collector stood far off with his eyes lowered and struck himself, praying: “God have mercy on me a sinner.” But I tell you this second man went home with his life all fixed; the first man did not.”15
This parable does not oppose a hypocritical Pharisee against a repentant tax collector as models for our ethical choice. Perhaps unique among the parables, this is a theological story-form comment (halakah) on Joel 2:13-14, which lays out the Hebrew Scripture’s doctrine of God:
Tear your hearts and not your clothing,
Return to YHWH your God,
For he is gracious and merciful,
Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,
And relents from punishing.
Joel’s text is commonly misheard as an instruction to sorrow over our sins; but Joel means quite the opposite. In Hebrew imagery the heart (lëv) is not the seat of our emotions. Lëv is where we make plans. Hence the Septuagint and Greek liturgical texts regularly translate lëv as nous, or “mind.” “Tear your hearts, not your clothes” means: “Quit mourning over your misdeeds and your predicament, and instead change your plans, and return to YHWH.” Editors carved a virtual woodblock from the next verse, “YHWH is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love (chesed), and relents from punishing,” and stamped it eleven more times around their Bible, sometimes bluntly overruling the earlier revanchist theology preserved alongside.16 This is the Hebrew editors’ theology, which formed the Bible we receive; therefore this is the true Old Testament doctrine of God.
Jesus’s parable is ingenious. It says God fixed things for the tax collector— just as the biblical tsedaqah means: God undoes our enemies and puts us back on top where we belong—whereas the Pharisee went home all unfixed, which is to say, doomed.
But not because of hypocrisy! Hypocrites pretend to virtues they lack, but the Pharisee reports truthfully that he fasts twice in the week, and gives tithes of all he has. Indeed, both his claims exceed the Torah’s commands. By contrast, the tax collector guarantees no change of life as a claim on God’s love. However he might wish, this tax collector may yet have to add his share to taxes as before, if only to make his living. “Lord have mercy on me a sinner”—period.
Nevertheless, in the light of Hebrew scripture’s doctrine of God, the tax collector is orthodox, and the Pharisee is not. The tax collector tells the essential two truths that Joel and the Bible’s editors teach: he is a sinner; and God has chesed, the strong love that sticks with people no matter what. (As in “you’ll always be my child, no matter what you do.”) By contrast, the Pharisee tells two lies, which he wrongly if earnestly believes: (1) that his virtues make him “not like others” in God’s eyes; and (2) that God achieved this difference, for which the Pharisee can give thanks; whereas the true God observes no differences among human beings,17 and God has chesed for all. The tax collector’s truth-telling is all God requires, to put things right for him. God will not work with lies, so the Pharisee dooms himself.
The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector represents the core of Old Testament Theology, as quoted twelve times around the Hebrew Bible. So the author knows Hebrew scripture more closely than those scholars who fail to recognize his theological allusion. The parable implies more: like the tax