Breaking and Entering. Liz R. Goodman
God, whom Peter and Paul and the other apostles spread abroad through preaching and baptizing and community-building—this God is a God who is deeply ambivalent about religion.
First, to define our terms: “religion” is famously difficult to define, and “you know it when you see it” doesn’t cut it. Knowing this, scholar William Cavanaugh surveyed university religion department catalogs and found courses on the following: “totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism, sports, [and] free market ideology.”6 In fact, the whole concept of religion is one that arrived late to the game. Though the practices that fall into this category are as old and persistent as humanity itself, the critical concept of religion is a modern concept, one introduced to study the strange peoples and practices that exploration and colonization had European people encountering the world over.
I always find it helpful, then, to go back to the word’s root. Re-ligio is a term meaning to re-bind, ligio meaning bind, as in ligature and ligament. So, perhaps religion is any phenomenon that binds people back together—one with another and one with their god, which is the transcendent made imminent. Re-ligio is, then also, that phenomenon which establishes who’s in and who’s out.
And now we’re in some tricky territory. Now we must proceed with caution. It’s what God would have us do.
Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac and Mount Moriah—when Abraham bound Isaac at God’s command so to sacrifice him, and then unbound him, at the Lord’s command so to let him go. There are those who call this story “The Binding of Isaac,” the Aquedah in Hebrew; and there are those who call this story “The Unbinding of Isaac.” Which is it to you?
And consider this—the scene revealed to the prophet Ezekiel of a valley that was full of dried bones, a mass grave, really, filled with the remains of a people slaughtered. But then the bones began to come together, a clattering, bone to its bone. And then there were sinews on these bones, ligaments, so to hold them together; and then flesh. It was a re-binding, this scene. It was a re-ligious coming together. The moment of true life for these resurrected bones comes when the breath of God enters each body, but the breath wouldn’t have had any place to fill had not the bones been rebound, bone to its bone.
But then consider this—when the king of Aram, Israel’s enemy, Naaman, was suffering terrible leprosy and sent for the Jewish prophet Elisha for help, for a cure. And, though he received one, it wasn’t what he was expecting, and he was dismayed, outraged actually, by the irreligious nature of the cure—so common a thing, so unspectacular a thing. “Go wash in the river Jordan seven times.” He said, in a rage, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” But then his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, and his flesh was restored “like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”
Now consider Jesus and his many arguments with the religious authorities, noticing first of all that his objection was not because they merely abused their authority but because they abused their religious authority. Sloppy thinking has had those in the church often hear this as Jesus taking issue with them because they were Jewish. Sloppy thinking has had us sometimes assume Jesus objected to their religious practice because it was the wrong religion, the religious authorities of his day being Jewish while he was the first Christian. But Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jew. He was a Jew living in Jewish territory with other Jews, worshiping by Jewish Scripture and abiding faithfully with the Jewish God. So, no, he didn’t object to them because they were Jewish. He objected to them because they were religious, were religious before they were anything else. They led with religious rectitude and never departed from this.
And consider him saying this, as his ministry was becoming more and more focused on the cross: “Come to me, you who are weary; and I will give you rest—for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The great twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich claims, “[T]he burden He means to take from us is the burden of religion.”7 And he goes on to say that, when it comes to knowing and abiding with God, “Nearly nothing is demanded of you—no idea of God, and no goodness in yourselves, not your being religious, not your being Christian, not your being wise, and not your being moral. What is demanded is only your being open and willing to accept what is given to you, the New Being, the being of love and justice and truth, as it is manifest in Him whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.”8
Finally, consider Jesus in the last week of his life, according to the Gospel of John, when he went to the grave of his friend Lazarus who had recently (though really) died. To no one in particular or to the grave or to the power of death, Jesus said this of the bands of cloth used to wrap a dead body, and more specifically to have wrapped Lazarus’s dead body: “Unbind him, and let him go.”
But then be mindful that on the night of his arrest, Jesus said to his disciples in reference to bread, said to all of them together (the “you” of this plural): “Take, eat; do so in remembrance of me;” And of the cup, he said, “This is the cup of the New Covenant; whenever you drink of it, do so in remembrance of me.” And consider this, that if to remember is to re-member or to reattach what has been dismembered or cut off, then this could well be understood as a sacrament of re-binding, of re-ligion.
And yet once dead, Jesus’ passion is said to have had this effect: the temple curtain torn in two, that is, the curtain that separated the inner sanctuary from the Holy of Holies, that innermost sanctuary into which no one could enter but the High Priest on the High Holy Day—this very seat of religious observance and cultic practice—yeah, that curtain. It was torn in two, as if to say there is no separation between the holy and the mundane, between the divine and the created order or even among those within the created order; there is no such dismemberment, or at least not anymore; and so there is no formal need for reattachment, for re-ligion.
This is what the Bible has to say regarding religion: it’s good, it’s bad; it’s a blessing, it’s a dreadful trap; you don’t need it, here it is as a fulfillment of your need; take and enjoy, take care and be very cautious.
Ambivalence, anyone?
Walter Brueggemann has something interesting to say about the golden calf. This is often thought to be an idol. This is often taken as the first transgression against the recently given Ten Commandments, one of which is, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” The golden calf is often taken as just such an idol, which means it took the people all of ten chapters to break their covenant with the Lord. But Old Testament scholar and quite fiery preacher (from what I’m told) and member of the United Church of Christ (go, team!) Mr. Brueggemann suspects it’s not so simple. He suspects that the golden calf “is an alternative representation for God . . . not idolatrous but simply a competitor to the ark of the covenant as a proper sign of divine presence.”9
This makes some sense to me. What’s more, as far as competitions go, this one seems epic. The golden calf is an appropriated fertility symbol—appropriated from Egypt, perhaps, and their bull god Apis; or from Canaan, perhaps, and their god Baal, imaged as a bull. This is to say the golden calf is a religious artifact plain and simple. Endowed with a power based on the people’s belief that it has power, and perhaps on the fact that the materials of which it was made are materials considered of great value, and so perhaps worth fighting over—peoples’ gold jewelry which they surrendered, though by what force or coercion we can only imagine—the golden calf carries no critique of itself, no warning of the power it purports to possess and exercise.
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