Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2005-2006
Session #5

Scripture Forum
Session #5
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
February 17, 2006

Texts:
     Exodus 35:1-36:7
     Matthew 21:12-45

Introduction to the texts (Dr. Randi Rashkover):

• I wanted to tell you a little bit about why I chose these texts -- Exodus 35 and Matthew 21. When folks read Exodus 35, and particularly when Jews read Exodus 35 -- the account of the building of the tabernacle -- their eyes glaze over. But it's clear to me that we can make a case that this is
  a text dealing with economics, and I want to give you two potential angles for approaching this as a text about economics.
• The first angle is to investigate the text in the context of the discussions we've had so far. We began by looking at certain economic operations, e.g., the sabbatical and the jubilee year.
• One thing we wanted to do when we read those texts was to explode the theological interiority of what might be going on there. We recognized that the texts presuppose that there is a difference between rich and poor, but we asked if there was any way to ameliorate that particular problem from the get-go. That is to say, there was kind of a spiritual buffer zone that we felt that we needed to explore to begin to understand some liturgical posturing within a raw economic text. To that end, I explored texts about sacrifice seeking to discover liturgical practices that accompany this sort of economic mapping.
• In the last session, we explored the economy of involuntary sacrifices. Now, in order to continue with the impulse to take the raw economic of things like the jubilee and the sabbatical and interiorize it, I've chosen to look at the construc-tion of the tabernacle, thus building a concentric circle around the performance of sacrifices. The sacrifices take place in the tabernacle, which was itself constructed as an act of service, a liturgical act. So, in certain respects, all I'm doing is contin-uing the same kind of graphic impulse of trying to incorporate the economic into the liturgical that we've done thus far and making it a wider circle.
• If you ask a Jewish reader who hears the parshah [Torah portion] on the building of the tabernacle whether or not it's an economic text, he'll immedi-ately say yes because it's text from which we derive thirty-nine categories of labor. We read the building of the tabernacle as an instruction manual to know what counts as work and what, therefore, we cannot do on Shabbos.
• Yet making the clear connection between labor and building the tabernacle is not necessarily to say that a Jew would see building the tabernacle as an economic text, because the labor that is often talked about is not remunerative employ-ment. Shabbos doesn't just mean not performing remunerative employment; it also means a lot of other things that the text calls labor, but which don't really seem like labor. And there are other things that Jews must do on Shabbos that seem laborious.
• I think there's another reason to read this as an economic text. I want to say that this is a text that helps us to appreciate the connection between how economics works in the Hebrew Scriptures and the overall account of salvation history, the narrative of the Jewish people.
• I think sometimes when we read these texts, and particularly when congregational folks read them, the first impulse is to move from the texts outward and ask how the texts can service our contempo-rary environment. While I think that's a really healthy impulse, I want to suggest that, before
  we move from the text out to the world, we pause for a moment and allow the text to teach us how to read the text even more deeply.
• To illustrate what I mean, recall that last time
  we mentioned that Leviticus begins with the word "and." We have an entire book about legislation that begins with "and" as a necessary link to the Exodus narrative that precedes it. It seems to be the case that in the Hebrew Scriptures, cult, law, and performance are always linked to the narra-tive, even when the links are not obvious.
• I see the same kind of connection to the narrative in the Deuteronomy 15 text on the sabbatical year. There are two main parts to the sabbatical text: There will be a remission of debt, and the slave will go free and be able to get employment. If you look carefully at the end of that text, you'll see that God is telling us about this economy of the sabbatical year because He wants us to remember that we were slaves in Egypt and
  He redeemed us there.
• In other words, the economic legislation is serving as a mnemonic device to bring us back into the story of the Jewish people. The economic legisla-tion is almost like a Haggadah, which is the way that Jews tell the story every Passover of the exodus from Egypt. The sabbatical year is providing a kind of Haggadah leading us back to recall that narrative. So, to a certain extent, every time that particular economic reality is performed, it's also a sign that enables Jews to ask themselves who they are and where they come from.
• What I want to suggest is that, if the sabbatical year provides a mnemonic device for us to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt, it can also provide a mnemonic device to help tell the story
  of the building of the tabernacle, because the two elements that are part of the sabbatical year are present as well in the building of the tabernacle:
       The building of the tabernacle represents a remission of debt after the episode of the golden calf. The building is an act whereby God forgives the debt of the Jews and gives them the oppor-tunity to begin again.
       The building of the tabernacle also represents freedom from slavery into authentic labor.
• If we see the economy of the sabbatical year prompting us to ask about the role the building
  of the tabernacle plays in the story of Jewish salvation history, I think it can lead Jews to think about how building the tabernacle is a part of who they are and where they've come from.
• At the same time, when we read the building of the tabernacle through the sabbatical year, we can further understand that the building of the tabernacle is not just a narrative occasion but is itself an economic piece of legislation because the interreference between the two texts goes in both directions.
• One could say that the condition of the possibility of the sabbatical year as a piece of economic legislation is contingent upon God's issuing this possibility for the Jews themselves. That is to say, God issues, to a certain extent, a sabbatical condition for the Jewish people: He remits their sin, and He provides them with the opportunity to cease being slaves and to engage in work. Reading the text back and forth enables us to understand the claim that economy and narrative are linked in the Hebrew Scriptures.
• I think this point is important for congregational work. I have said that, while our impulse is to go out from the text, I think it's good to wait, to read the text through itself and then go out. What can we potentially bring out here?
• PBS did a show on Wal-Mart that showed the underbelly of the Wal-Mart economic phenomenon. I know that Target has a similar kind of economic structure, but I'm a parent of a five-year-old and we go to Target all the time. Every time we go there, I try to divest myself of the underbelly story that I know is true about it, to forget the reality of the real economic story. What that reveals to me is that the story of our economic lives in contemporary circles doesn't rest very
  well with our sense of who we are, and we go through a lot of different moves to try to bring those two things together.
• So I would suggest that bringing this kind of paradigm to a congregation is a way of helping folks get into a conversation about the possibility of a slippage between our rhetoric about democ-racy and our rhetoric about capitalism, about a slippage in the stories that we tell about how we behave.
• I also think that reading the sabbatical text and the tabernacle text back and forth is important
  for reading the Matthew text:
       If the Hebrew Scriptures are telling us that there is a link between economic behaviors and the Jewish account of its own narrative through salvation history, what happens when the Chris-tian account challenges the economic paradigm? Does that mean that the Christian account is also challenging the Jewish account of salvation history?
       When the Christian account challenges the Jewish account of salvation history, does that mean that the Christian account is also chal-lenging the economic paradigm?
• Is that what is going on in those texts where we see Jesus "cleansing" the Temple?
• As we begin to discuss the text, keep in mind the following: Exodus starts describing how to build the tabernacle around chapter 31, and there is a detailed account of how it is supposed to be done. The golden calf episode takes place, and right af-ter it the people build the tabernacle. The context of this, of course, is sabbath.

The first text: Exodus 35:1-36:7 (NRSV translation)

Moses assembled all the congregation of the Israelites and said to them: These are the things that the LORD has commanded you to do: Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy sabbath of solemn rest to the LORD; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death.

You shall kindle no fire in all your dwellings on the sabbath day. Moses said to all the congregation of the Israelites: This is the thing that the LORD has commanded: Take from among you an offering to the LORD; let whoever is of a generous heart bring the LORD's offering: gold, silver, and bronze; blue, purple, and crim-son yarns, and fine linen; goats' hair, tanned rams' skins, and fine leather; acacia wood, oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, and onyx stones and gems to be set in the ephod and the breast-piece. All who are skillful among you shall come and make all that the LORD has commanded: the tabernacle, its tent and its covering, its clasps and its frames, its bars, its pillars, and its bases; the ark with its poles, the mercy seat, and the curtain for the screen; the table with its poles and all its utensils, and the bread of the Presence; the lampstand also for the light, with its utensils and its lamps, and the oil for the light; and the altar of incense, with its poles, and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense, and the screen for the entrance, the entrance of the tabernacle; the altar of burnt offering, with its grating of bronze, its poles, and all its utensils, the basin with its stand; the hangings of the court, its pillars and its bases, and the screen for the gate of the court; the pegs of the tabernacle and the pegs of the court, and their cords; the finely worked vestments for minis-tering in the holy place, the holy vestments for the priest Aaron, and the vestments of his sons, for their service as priests.

Then all the congregation of the Israelites withdrew from the pres-ence of Moses. And they came, everyone whose heart was stirred, and everyone whose spirit was willing, and brought the LORD's offering to be used for the tent of meeting, and for all its service, and for the sacred vestments. So they came, both men and women; all who were of a willing heart brought brooches and earrings and signet rings and pendants, all sorts of gold objects, everyone bringing an offering of gold to the LORD. And everyone who possessed blue or purple or crimson yarn or fine linen or goats' hair or tanned rams' skins or fine leather, brought them. Everyone who could make an offering of silver or bronze brought it as the LORD's offering; and everyone who possessed acacia wood of any use in the work, brought it. All the skillful women spun with their hands, and brought what they had spun in blue and purple and crimson yarns and fine linen; all the women whose hearts moved them to use their skill spun the goats' hair. And the leaders brought onyx stones and gems to be set in the ephod and the breastpiece, and spices and oil for the light, and for the anointing oil, and for the fragrant incense. All the Israelite men and women whose hearts made them willing to bring anything for the work that the LORD had commanded by Moses to be done, brought it as a freewill offering to the LORD.

Then Moses said to the Israelites: See, the LORD has called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; he has filled him with divine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft. And he has inspired him to teach, both him and Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. He has filled them with skill to do every kind of work done by an artisan or by a de-signer or by an embroiderer in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen, or by a weaver -- by any sort of artisan or skilled designer.

Bezalel and Oholiab and every skillful one to whom the LORD has given skill and understanding to know how to do any work in the construction of the sanctuary shall work in accordance with all that the LORD has commanded. Moses then called Bezalel and Oholiab and every skillful one to whom the LORD had given skill, everyone whose heart was stirred to come to do the work; and they received from Moses all the freewill offerings that the Israelites had brought for doing the work on the sanctuary. They still kept bringing him freewill offerings every morning, so that all the artisans who were doing every sort of task on the sanctuary came, each from the task being performed, and said to Moses, "The people are bringing much more than enough for doing the work that the LORD has commanded us to do." So Moses gave command, and word was proclaimed throughout the camp: "No man or woman is to make anything else as an offering for the sanctuary." So the people were restrained from bringing; for what they had already brought was more than enough to do all the work.

The discussion begins:

• Remark: It seems that if we have a plan or a
  goal that has been met and more energy re-
  mains, there's a notion that if we're not building, not growing, then we are somehow in retreat.
  The very idea of having a clear idea about what is enough seems to elude the thinking of most of us.
• Remark: Development people will tell you to have three goals: one you're sure to meet, one you're likely to meet, and a stretch goal that could well be more than enough. I'm struck by how many times the heart -- the interiority -- is mentioned
  in this text.
• Remark: This may say more about us than
  about the text, but I was struck by the numer-
  ous occurrences of the phrase "that the LORD
  has commanded." I counted six or seven times. Something is going on here that's linking the activity with the fact that the LORD has com-manded it. I don't know if it's because it's not self-evident and therefore has to be repeated. Did the people think, "What does this have to do with the LORD?" so the text says, "The Lord commanded it"?
• Response: In a verse like v. 5 there's an unusual juxtaposition between command and voluntarism: I command you to take an offering; I command you to have a generous heart; I command you to voluntarily do this.
• Remark: I'm wondering if, in the building of the sanctuary, the text wants to shed light on and challenge what we think being command is about. It struck me as a different angle into what I'm commanded to do.
• Response: Well, of course, you're being hired. The people weren't hired before, they were command-ed by pharaoh. Commanding here isn't coercive; it's loving somehow.
• Remark: But, once again, their hiring is non-remunerative. (Response: Exactly the opposite.)
• Remark: I don't want us to go astray from the economics of the text, so I'll just say this and be finished. I actually thought this was a text against idolatry. That is, we are always going to be com-manded by someone, but we should be attentive to the command that we are responsive to; it is the LORD who should be commanding us.
• Response: You wouldn't expect the person com-manded to respond with a generous heart unless the commandment itself were an act of love that prompted him in turn to respond generously. My non-Jewish students don't understand why Jewish women would want to have extra mitzvot. I tell them this is because every commandment is an opportunity to draw near to God, to have cove-nantal intimacy. I think this text is playing that out.
• Question: Does that raise the question of the nature of freedom? We talk about the importance of personal autonomy.
• Remark: I think in Judaism that's a highly overrated concept. (Response: I would say in Christianity also.) It's in direct contradistinction to the way most of our congregants understand how they should live their lives, and it's a big challenge. In Orthodox Judaism people still have a sense of feeling commanded in a very real way, that they must observe these laws. That feeling produces a very powerful religious connection and experience. In the liberal Jewish community, that's a non-existent feeling.
• Remark: I want to point to v. 30 to think about the relationship between commandedness and ability: "Then Moses said to the Israelites: See, the Lord has called by name Bezalel … he has
  filled him with divine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft." His being commanded is in the context of God giving him the ability. So being commanded is not necessarily being told to do something difficult or coercive. This is a case where the command is clearly ac-companied by a kind of grace, where the ability is there along with the command.
• Response: It strikes me that that could be ex-tended into the economic area of giving charity. Do people feel commanded to give charity, and how commanded do they feel in the sense of how much can they give and how much are they willing to give? I think it's common that people will say, "I'll give a little bit, and then I'll buy myself a new TV," when they could have given a lot more and bought a smaller TV.
• Question: Could they are they're not generous because God didn't give them a generous heart? Does the text make that possible?
• Response: I don't know. It's an interesting ques-tion.



• Question: Where did they get all this stuff? (Response: Out in the middle of the wilderness.)
• Response: That's a big question and there are debates back and forth about it. Some biblical scholars suggest that a nomadic people could have had these sorts of things available to them.
• Response: Then there is also the line that when they're leaving Egypt the Egyptians give them all this stuff. (Remark: Back pay.)
• Objection: But they threw all the gold in to make the golden calf.
• Response: Well, maybe not all of it. Something that occurred to me -- and maybe this is com-pletely out of line -- is a parallel with the feeding of the five thousand and the idea that the food was already there. It was just a matter of getting it to be presented forward to be shared among those who didn't have any. People saw what could happen when each of them contributed the least little piece that they could. It created a whole that none of them would have realized they could do but for their movement of their heart.
• Remark: To push it a little bit further, I was think-ing that no one stands outside of an economic system. One may have more goods, less goods, more options, fewer options; but even the poorest have a relationship to the system. It is universal. It is all-encompassing. It's voracious, if you will. As I'm reading I see these lists that go on and on and on. In a sense it seems to me that part of the command is also its voraciousness. All the people are encompassed in this command to participate to the extent that they can: If you have things, then share your things; if you have skills, share your skills; if you have nothing but good will, then share that, too. If we take your advice to go deeper into the text, there's something very profound, even voracious, happening in this text with the universality of the command and how one is to respond to it.
• Response: I think it's important to see the vora-cious response to the command. These folks got completely off track in making the golden calf, so much so that God was at the point of being fin-ished with them. Now God is commanding them again, so they know God has forgiven them. That creates a generosity in them, prompting them to return a gift to God.



• Question: Is this the first time that women are included in a command? (Response: I don't know.) That struck me right away. Initially, the Ten Commandments were directed to the men of the assembly. Maybe after the men screwed things up so badly, God decided to include the women to try to get the whole community back in order.
• Remark: There's an underlying rabbinic impulse that runs through all the commentary about the exodus events that it was really on account of
  the women that the Israelites deserved to be redeemed. Not just around the time of the exodus itself but in the hundreds of years leading up to it, the women had been the ones who maintained the continuity of tradition. They had been the ones who were righteous enough of character to de-serve God's attention.
• Remark: There is a woman who spends her springs and summers in El Salvador. She's been doing that for a long time, going to the same remote moun-tain village every year. She speaks of how generous these people are. They have absolutely nothing, and they're incredibly generous. We have often talked in our little group about this notion of "what I have isn't enough or barely enough to live, but this I share." What made me think of this is what was said about giving less and buying a bigger TV. It seems that the issue of generosity is an economic issue of the wealthy more than of the poor, and that's sort of counterintuitive.
• Remark: We get statistics out of the national church, and every year the poorest churches
  have the highest percentage of giving.
• Remark: Maybe one of the things that indicates is that it's easy to give when you don't really have anything. (Question: Doesn't that make very little sense if you think about it?) No. Because what's the difference: You didn't have anything yester-day, you're not going to have anything tomorrow, so you might as well give.
• Objection: That's not how this text works. I don't think it suggests that these are folks who don't have anything. It says in v. 23, "everyone who possessed blue or purple or crimson yarn or goats' hair or tanned rams' skins or fine leather, brought them." Everyone who possessed these things made an offering, as opposed to people who didn't have them. What you're presupposing is that they had these things, but they didn't have anything else.
• Response: What I'm trying to figure out, though, is, if I knew nothing and I read this text and someone asked me, what would you make of this people, I would say they're very wealthy people. There's no sense here that the poor did anything. Were there no poor people here? I want to under-stand the place of those who don't have relative to this text, a text that wants me to think that there is such abundance.
• Remark: I think that the very dynamic of scarcity is absent here. (Response: That's my point.)
• Question: Is that intentional, though, that there isn't any scarcity? The commandment to build all this was given to Moses earlier. Then there's a fallow period when the people are not fulfilling the commandment and they build the golden calf. But now there is this kind of liturgical fulfillment of the commandment, and the way the narrative is told, there is no one who doesn't have what is neces-sary. There isn't anyone who doesn't have a generous heart. There isn't anyone who doesn't have some ability to serve the LORD and fulfill
  the commandment that has been given to them.
• Response: But there's an economy of what's just enough as well. While scarcity may be missing, we can't then say that there is surplus of abundance either. Everybody gives what he has, but that doesn't mean that he is wealthy in other respects. What is interesting here is that, unlike other texts, there's no mention of poverty or wealth, no distinction between the rich and the poor. It's a more moderate economy that's not pulled to the extremes.
• Reaction: I see it as more than just a moderate economy because there is an overabundance. There was such a generosity of heart and such a wealth of wanting to serve that it had to be cut off before the people were overwhelmed by it. (Response: Yes, I agree.)



• Question: Which leads me to the question, why does the LORD need any of this stuff? And how did they know when they had enough? What is the economy in that? What is the economy of our religious institutions in terms of what we expect in order to worship the Lord? And do we know when to say enough is enough?
• Response: My eyes tend to glaze over reading the section that names all the stuff, so I agree with you: Why did they need all this? But this follows the story about the idol, the golden calf, and to some degree there is an aspect of concession that the people need somehow to concretize their hopes and dreams. The question is, how do you direct that impulse in ways that serve God rather than yield idolatry?
• Remark: There is also a limitation here to what
  is asked for; it's pretty specified. So how do we know when we have usurped the command that's been given to us for proper worship and have moved into idolatry in our worship?
• Response: Partly what's going on here is a satisfaction of the people's aesthetic impulse to create a thing of beauty. You say you kind of glaze over on this stuff, but the sorts of things they're bringing are actually quite beautiful. God is commanding Bezalel to be an artisan, which should on some level be shocking to Jews because the question of creating religious art is a very delicate one. What is interesting is whether their creating this as a thing of beauty is the fine line between generosity and too much. Does the aesthetic become the supreme thing rather than simply being in service of the liturgical?



• Request: Can you talk a little bit about what, at the end of the day, you have here?
• Response: You have the tabernacle.
• Request continues: Muse some, if you would, about how the tabernacle forms and shapes
  the imagination of the people who use it.
• Response: I think there's a direct correlation between this and the golden calf episode. What God learned then was that the people, at least at this point in their history, were unable to worship Him in, for lack of a better term, a pure form of worship. They needed something and that was why they created the golden calf. But that was the wrong thing for them to have. Because of their failure, God needed to concretize their worship, to give them appropriate guidelines so that they would have a thing that would be the right thing to have. Notice also that there are echoes here of the golden calf story: The people brought their gold and silver and gave it to Aaron. Here they are bringing things, but what they're doing is correct.
• Remark: Part of what is interesting to me is that the result of their labor is something moveable. This is a vision that is still compatible with a nomadic existence. (Response: Maybe.)
• Another response: This is not the Temple, but it's the design for the Temple.
• Remark: It's also a political environment because the tribes literally dwell almost like in a phalanx around the tabernacle. All the elements of society overlap -- economic, political, social. Some people read the story of the golden calf not as an inci-dent in which the people are demonstrating idolatrous behavior because they need an arti-
  fact to pray to, but as an incident in which they express their need for a leader. They were really upset that Moses was gone, and the golden calf was a way of dealing with the fact that he wasn't there. They looked to the golden calf as a leader. It is remarkable that in verse 20 "all the congrega-tion of the Israelites withdrew from the presence of Moses." You were asking how the tabernacle functions in the imagination, and I think it func-tions partly as a place of leadership and order.
• Response: And that construct enables the people to be weaned from the overbearing dominance of Moses. (Response: Interesting to consider.)
• Remark: If you read carefully the beginning of the chapter that describes the golden calf, the first thing it says is that the people built the golden calf because Moses wasn't there anymore. Some people read that as saying that Moses had be-come a godlike or a demi-godlike figure, and that when he wasn't there the people needed another god to replace Moses.



• Remark: What is troubling to me about this text is precisely the beauty and the aesthetic of it, that we need in this place where the LORD is pre-eminently present to have a kind of decorative sense that I find distasteful. Maybe it's my anti-Catholic Catholicism. This is part of the struggle for me. I don't think we shouldn't have vestments, but do we have to have vestments with gold bro-cade and diamond studs in them? (Response: Yes.)
• Reaction: Isn't it valuable to give a gift of beauty? It's not beauty for the sake of adornment. The emphasis on the beauty is that it comes from a generous heart.
• Another reaction: It's hiddur [adornment, orna-mentation; honoring, respect].
• Response: You're absolutely right. But when those chalices sitting on the altar are studded with dia-monds and rubies, I don't see them as things of beauty. I can prescind and say, "Gee, in and of itself that is an object that is truly beautiful: the workmanship of it, the character of the gems in it"; but then I think, "What the heck …?"
• Response: So you do the liturgical thing that we do: When we're in Lent, all the vessels are glass. We go back to the silver for Easter. At Christmas and Easter I'm in the middle of the church, it's beautiful, I'm celebrating the Eucharist, and I have this moment of thinking, "Shouldn't this be out in the street?" I wonder how much my sense of scarcity plays into that.
• Remark: This will sound very Protestant, but isn't this part of the notion that God learned that, be-cause of our fallenness, we are not yet capable of taking care of the poor and seeing that as a litur-gical act? Because we are not capable of doing that with any kind of authenticity as a received and an expressed grace, we build St. Peter's. That takes us on the way to where God wants us to be. God doesn't need St Peter's; He needs us to take care of the poor. But we need St. Peter's.
• Remark: I feel like I'm sitting around the table with my session having the same argument that's been going on in the congregation for a hundred years. People argue back and forth about whether we ought to spend money on the mission, or whether we ought to spend money on new choir robes. I think the point of the text is that there doesn't necessarily have to be a choice between one or the other. This does not abrogate the earlier commands to care for everybody in the com-munity. There is enough to do what is adequate for worship and what is necessary to care for everybody.
       But what I wanted to say earlier is that, while I see the relationship to the golden calf story, I also see a secondary relationship between pharaoh's hardness of heart and the people's generosity of heart. To me this story seems to
  be contrasting the economy of pharaoh with the economy of God. It seems to me you could take that contrast in a number of directions. For example, think about how all these people with various gifts and talents are reduced in pharaoh's economy to making bricks, whereas in the building of the tabernacle they're allowed to flourish with the gifts that they've been given and to create a beautiful thing together in a community.
       In connection with that, I don't see that the text says anything about the people whose spirit wasn't willing. I think there probably were some of those people because the text says "everyone whose heart was stirred, and everyone whose spirit was willing brought the LORD's offering." It doesn't say everyone in the community brought something. I think the focus is on generosity, and the comparisons we make -- I'm more generous than that; our congregation is more generous
  than that -- miss the point.
• Reaction: Say a bit more about what you think the implications are for those who are not explicitly mentioned, those who didn't want to come forth with things.
• Response: I think our tendency is to want to see how they're punished, or how they don't receive goodness, or how their life isn't made better. There's a tendency, at least in the Christian church, to say, "If you do this, then x, y, and z will follow," and they are all positive things. If you don't do this, negative things will follow. I think this text, at least in this section, is really talking more about the fact that generosity in and of itself is not some kind of burden but is actually a joy that some people are allowed to experience. Even in this conversation we've tended to talk about generosity as some sort of burden or as a responsibility or as something other than a pure, life-giving kind of exercise. Maybe that's because generosity contrasts so much with our cultural norms that it's hard to consider that we would actually enjoy giving things away.
• Reaction: That's a great sermon.
• Remark: Several years ago Mercy Medical Center was redoing its lobby because it had built another wing and it was trying to integrate the new struc-ture into the old one. There was an enormous discussion among the executive about what the lobby should look like. Some people, both Sisters of Mercy and lay folks, pushed for something clean and neat and sparse so the rest of the money could be put into clinics. But not everyone agreed. So they decided to ask a number of employees from different areas in the hospital what they thought. The employees from the service areas -- dietary, housekeeping -- said the lobby should be beautiful because for many people who come into the hospital that beauty will be the only beauty they'll know. The lobby is not ornate, but it is always spotless, and it is so pleasing and beauti-ful. I've never forgotten that story because it tempers my own inclinations.
• Remark: In the Catholic Church in the wealthiest suburban parishes, people come in flip-flops and sweatshirts. And in the poorest places of the worst neighborhoods, people are dressed to the nines. The rich suburban people will tell you that they dress in coat and tie every day and they don't need that when they come to church. The poorer folks dress in uniforms or work clothes every day, and when they get together to wor-ship God, they want to feel better. There's an economic element in this. In my experience, the angst over whether things should be made of gold or silver is the angst of the affluent. In the blue-collar churches, there is no doubt in the minds of the people: "You put silver or gold up there, dam-mit, and I'll scrub another floor to give you the money, because that's what we do in God's house. I have glass in my house, but God has something better."
• Response: The one piece we haven't mentioned in the building of the tabernacle that can contribute to the high aesthetic impulse is that this is an Imitatio Dei act. The language used as the directive for building the tabernacle incorporates much of the same language that God uses in creating the world. This repetition recognizes the aesthetic detail with which God Himself created the world, so it has liturgical significance. I think your concern is more than just a cultural concern. I think your concern is that there appears to be
  an ethical slippage between this high aesthetic and fairness; and I think it's interesting to consider that slippage as well in the sabbatical text that we looked at where we had the potential contradic-tion between "there will always be needy among you" and "there will never be needy among you." To a certain extent, this is the tension of sabba-tical rest and abundance while there are disparities otherwise. I'm not sure that the fact that there are rich and poor in our world precludes the possi-bility of being able to have this kind of liturgical reach. I think there's a way to appreciate it as
  a kind of eschatological or spiritual plumb line without denigrating what is a very authentic concern about rich and poor.
• Response: I guess I just haven't reached that level of maturity. I don't mean that negatively.
• Reaction: But what about the time and effort that we put into music as opposed to mission? The lob-by may be the only time that people experience beauty in a world in which beauty is scarce, and church is sometimes the only place where people hear live music performed and have a chance to participate in it. But my choir puts in way more time than anybody in the church puts into out-reach, and that issue never gets raised. Nobody ever says, "Why don't we cancel choir practice and go down and work in a soup kitchen."
• Remark: The opening comments about the big box stores and the comment about people in suburban churches dressing down made me thing about the big box megachurches in suburbia, which are, for the most part, aesthetically barren. If they invest money in anything in the interior, it's for their high-tech sound system and their big screen so the pastor can be forty feet high. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I think there's something there to consider.
• Response: I heard a pastor [of a megachurch] say they want their people when they walk in to feel like they've walked into Starbucks. In other words, there is an imitation of the dominant economy or culture in order to get people in the door because that's more comfortable than walking into a cathe-dral space, which feels foreign or intimidating.
• Remark: And the clergyman wears no tie, much less vestments.
• Remark: We have seen in our own congregation where an expenditure of funds has created a difference in terms of the religious lives of our members. When I came to the synagogue, our Friday night service was conducted in a room in the school wing of the building because we didn't get a large crowd on Friday night. It was a decent room but plain, and thirty or forty people came for services. A couple of years later, we built a brand new, beautiful chapel that cost about a million and a half dollars. We started having our Friday night services in there. Same clergy, same service. We now have two hundred fifty people coming to the service. Why? Because it's a different prayer space, and people react to that.
• Remark: If you see this text in the context of the sabbatical year, or if you just recognize that this becomes a location where the rest of the legis-lative opportunities are possible, then you understand that this is not a community that's being extravagant without regard to the poor. To read this text in a context in which the aesthetic trumps social concerns is to desacralize the text, to strip it of its sacramental beauty.
• Response: I don't think we should be living in box-es; aesthetic beauty enhances worship. That's not my issue. My issue has to do with the degree to which aesthetics really functions as something else, although I'm not sure what that is.
• Reminder: The text does talk about reaching a point where there is enough and you don't go beyond that point.

The second text: Matthew 21:12-45 (NRSV trans.)

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, "It is written,
          ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’;
          but you are making it a den of robbers."
The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry and said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read,
          ‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
          you have prepared praise for yourself’?"
He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

In the morning, when he returned to the city, he was hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the side of the road, he went to it and found nothing at all on it but leaves. Then he said to it, "May no fruit ever come from you again!" And the fig tree withered at once. When the disciples saw it, they were amazed, saying, "How did the fig tree wither at once?" Jesus answered them, "Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive."

When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, "By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?" Jesus said to them, "I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?" And they argued with one another, "If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet." So they answered Jesus, "We do not know." And he said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

"What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.

"Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will re-spect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time." Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the scriptures:
     ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the corner-        stone;
     this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?
Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.

The discussion continues:

• Response to the reading: This chapter reminds me of why I was so glad when we finished Matthew in December and moved on to Mark.
• Another response to the reading: Oy.
• Question: I'm curious as to why you selected this text to go with the Exodus text.
• Response: I was looking for texts where Jesus cleanses the Temple. After getting a deeper sense of what's going on in the Exodus text, we could see more of what's at stake when Jesus enters the Temple and overturns the tables. I wanted to challenge the understanding of the tabernacle that we find in these New Testament texts. The way that Jews always respond to Matt. 21:12 is: Why is he so upset? We didn't read the texts in Exodus that explain what the money is doing in the Tem-ple: It's there to support the continued building of the tabernacle, but it's given as an offering, as charity. The fact that Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers and those who sold doves and takes to task the fact that they were buying and selling seems so odd to Jewish readers be-cause that's exactly what God had suggested
  they do there. There's nothing scandalous about the integration between materiality and a space in God's house.
       I also wanted to look at the question of Jesus' authority. What is his stature when he enters the Temple? What is the character of his challenge? Is it the imposition of a different kind of authority? And then, of course, the rest of the text is all about economics -- the parable of the landowner. That could be understood to be about who's in charge of the Temple. God is the landowner who leases the vineyard to the priests, and they're the ones in charge. But a foreigner comes in, a slave comes in, somebody comes in who's not supposed to be there, and what do they do? They don't permit him to come there. It appears to be a repetition of the dramatic events that have just transpired, and it ends with God saying, "You guys aren't going to be the lease owners of this Temple anymore, or this piece of land."
• Remark: So it's a different response than the one God had after the golden calf.
• Remark: The sanctity of the Temple is a constant here, though. I know there are ways of reading this that would suggest that what is really going on is Jesus' overturning the entire sacrificial sys-tem, and that's part of a program, if you will, to literally displace the locus of the divine presence.
• Response: And that may be what Matthew's doing, by the way. What Matthew is doing.
• Response: Well, I think that's an interesting question.
• Response: It may be. But the question is, would it be what Jesus is doing?
• Suggestion: You were going to pose a different possibility.
• Response: I was going to argue that at least one way of reading this is that the Temple continues to remain a locus of the divine because Jesus keeps coming back to it. Otherwise, why wouldn't he just go out and do whatever he was going to do and reject the Temple altogether, as did some of his Jewish compatriots?
• Objection: But he does do that at the beginning of Matthew 24 after the big showdown speech in chapter 23. He doesn't come back to the Temple.
• Objection to the objection: But the curtain was torn at the end. That's an implication that there
  is still something divine going on there, right? (Response: That could be an implication, yes.)
• Remark: There's also the possibility that Jesus is not actually revering the Temple but substituting himself for it, because he says in v. 42, "Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected [that is to say, me] has become the cornerstone.’?" That is, Jesus is the Temple.
• Response: That's played out in the Fourth Gospel: "Destroy this temple …" And in the very beginning of the Gospel: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." The verb for "dwelt" is the verb for "pitching a tent or a tabernacle."



• Remark: It strikes me that one of the things that makes this so complicated is that it's a post-destruction text, so one way or another, this is a community that has to find how it's going to live its life without dependency on the Temple as its cultic locus.
• Response: That was actually the point I was
  getting at, that in Matthew's community, be-cause it's post-destruction, the question of
  where the preeminent presence of God is located is not a supersessionist question; it's everybody's question. But Matthew's putting this statement in the mouth of Jesus changes the whole valence of the text to sound like something else.
• Response: I don't see how you can escape its being supersessionist, because if what you have is the presence of the divine locus being transposed and focused on the person of Jesus, then those who reject Jesus are rejecting God's presence.
• Response: No, no. What I intended to say was that the question is not a supersessionist ques-tion: Where is the locus of the divine presence? Everybody is asking that question.
• Response: The question is not supersessionist, but the answer that is being articulated …
• Response: Yes, this answer is; and that's why I said, by putting it in the mouth of Jesus, the text gets totally skewed. We could talk about this for-ever, but I'm interested in the economics of it. Is there a challenge to the economic order embedded in this text? Or is it a continuation of a similar kind of vision? I don't know if the text answers those questions, but I assume that there was something in your choosing it that wants us to spend some time on that.
• Response: I think it's unclear whether or not there's an out-and-out displacement of the economic system, but I think that there probably is. I look at v. 43: "Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom." I juxtapose producing the fruits of the kingdom with the kind of labor and production that they did before. It's a different context. Now we have to have an eschatological economy rather than whatever it was that we had had before. Is the fact that there is a trampling on the physical plant the same as an undermining of the econ-omics?
• Remark: There's a set-up in the other parts of the Gospel that we're missing because we're getting to the conclusion here and we've missed the lead-in. Jesus is constantly speaking against the economic system that masquerades as faithfulness. He's trying to rip the mask off and expose this "den of robbers." It's the theology he's attacking, which is an economic theology.
• Question: What is the theology that he's attack-ing?
• Response: I think it's what Jesus is interpreting as a misuse of the law, which becomes abusive rather than productive of the fruits of the kingdom. The law no longer has the connection that we see in Exodus, where it produces a generous response. It becomes something that oppresses the widows, the poor, the alien. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew talks about the law and how it is inter-preted or applied in a certain way, but how it can be reinterpreted in another way that seems more faithful.
• Response: That does not strike me as being an attack on the theology of the Temple. It seems to me to be an attack, at least in the way you're describing it, on the practice of the priesthood. In other words, Jesus' primary concern has to do with the corruption of the Temple, the betrayal of its original intentionality, not the theology that undergirds it.
• Response: Let me rephrase and say it's an attack on the theologians of the Temple rather than on the theology of the Temple itself as it's estab-lished in Exodus. If the people who ran the Temple did so in a faithful manner, I don't think that the Temple would have been attacked as it seems to be here. There is definitely the sense that Jesus is going in as a marauding, occupying force -- "I've come in to take over and ‘cleanse’ the Temple."
  He will occupy the Temple, cleanse it, and then vacate it.
• Objection: Don't you think it's important to notice that what Jesus is doing here is being presented as a symbolic prophetic action? He's not coming in with guns blazing. In movies we've seen scenes of the cleansing of the Temple where everything is a mess. But Jesus goes into one specific place (Interjection: Which would have been outside …); it's not in the heart of the Temple. He probably overturns one table as a prophetic action. It's what he says that's important: "My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you are making it a den of robbers." What is a den of robbers? It's where they store their ill-gotten gains. So the point he's making, I think, is not so much a direct attack on the Temple system, which he knows was divinely instituted. It's an attack that other people in that society were making as well; the Essenes certainly were not happy with the Temple. Jesus seems to be indicating that the practices of the money changers are legitimate practices, but in some way they are extorting too much money in carrying them out. They're too greedy in their practice of a legitimate activity. I don't think it's an attack on the Temple, although what comes after it is: "The blind and the lame came to him in the Temple and he cured them."
  He cured these people who would not be allowed inside the Temple in the Temple. Again, another symbolic prophetic action that is explained by what the children are crying out: "Save us, Son
  of David."
• Reaction: You're very convincing in your argument that he's not critiquing the Temple, he's critiquing some kind of distortion of what's going on there. But with regard to the last point you made, my instinct is that that's not necessarily the case. There is something noteworthy about the fact that this is all happening in a post-Temple environment, which basically means that the presuppositions that are held with the Temple no longer obtain. But that aside, I think your last example, where people come in and want to be healed … under normal circumstances, and that's precisely the point, under normal circumstances, they wouldn't be allowed to come in and be healed because that's not what the Temple is for. That is to say, he's not just critiquing distortions of the Temple. There's an instance where he's saying what the purpose of the Temple is: "My house shall be called a house of prayer." Well, I don't really think that's the first thing that Jews would say is what the tabernacle is really about. There
  is a construct of the Temple that's being offered here through Jesus that may not be the same as the construct of the Temple that we saw before.
• Reaction: I think of E. P. Sanders' analysis of this, which is to say that the reason the coins are be-ing changed is because you don't want to have idolatry. The coins that are being brought would have Caesar's image on them. So in the first place, the transaction has to take place in order to pre-vent idolatry from contaminating the Temple. But if you bring an end to the exchange of money, you literally interrupt the whole system that enables the Temple to operate. So the overturning of the money changers' table in this way is read as an overturning of the entire sacrificial system. As the currency is being displaced, the whole shebang is being displaced. In order to make room for a new locus of divine authority -- whether it's a new Temple that descends from on high, or one in which Jesus becomes the key center -- you have to destroy what is there. So, it's a symbolic act of destruction.



• Questions: So if the theological construct of the Temple is being challenged, then is the economy that is woven into that construct going to be challenged as well? And are the fruits of the kingdom indicative of an eschatological economy? If the theological construct of the Temple is being challenged, is the economy that goes with this new construct somehow an eschatological con-struct? What is an eschatological economy; and
  if we try to figure out what that is, will it give us any insight into points of commonality or points of radical difference between what Matthew under-stands and the ways in which Christian theology and rabbinic Judaism have moved on this point?
  An eschatological economy is a new thought for me. What would it look like?
• Response: The fruits of your labor, the product of your service, if you will, whether service is litur-gical or economic or whatever, is to proclaim the kingdom of God. (Response: That piece I know, but what does that really mean?) It's a very Mat-thean way of looking at it, that the obedience that we perform now is kind of a radical kingdom ethics that we're performing in preparation for the kingdom that is coming.
• Remark: The eschatological ethics or the eschato-logical economy is what's been laid out in all of Matthew. This comes at the end of Matthew,
  not at the beginning. It's not like Jesus begins
  his ministry by launching himself into the Temple, overturning tables, and saying from now on the Temple is obsolete. There has been a long lead-
  up to this.
• Request: So summarize it in your own words.
  What would you say is the underpinning of this eschatological …?
• Response: I think that the way it's presented by Matthew is that there has been a corruption of the pure kingdom ethic already laid out, a veiling of the true ethic that we can read from the Old Testament. Jesus doesn't come presenting some-thing completely new. He simply reveals the corruption that has shrouded the real fruits of the kingdom. The Temple is perhaps the icon of all this corruption. Getting rid of the Temple, or trying to change the way the Temple works, is the culmina-tion of everything else that he has laid out -- feeding the poor, understanding the command-ments in a different way. This is not a great new understanding but a sort of renaissance or reformation.
• Reaction: But we still have the same issues, and they get back to what is the relationship of the material and the theological, or the transactional economics and the kingdom economics in a sacred place. I'm among those who sort of make fun of the megachurches, where you find a Starbucks,
  a gift shop, and a health club. There is all this transactional economics going on, and I think, "That's not what a church should be doing." Yet there are all these megachurches that are doing precisely that. The tensions with which Matthew
  is grappling are ones we're still grappling with two thousand years later. What is the appropriate re-lationship between transactional economics and sacred space or theology? We still don't have a good answer to that question.
• Remark: I'm wondering if a radical reading of this has to do with something like the following: My labor serves the inbreaking of the reign of God. That means that my labor is dedicated to all the things that the Gospels have laid out as what God's reign looks like. When you try to put con-tent around the question, what does God's reign look like, that's when you get all this stuff about the poor, the sick, the lame. The reason Jesus cures these people in the Temple, I think, is be-cause they need curing, and needing curing preempts all of those structures. I'm trying to
  give you another reading, and I'm trying to work
  it out as a non-supersessionist, not anti-Jewish reading the way it's traditionally been postured. It's an eschatological reading, and I don't know
  if it necessarily has to be supersessionist.
• Objection: It seems to me you can't have what once existed and the rules of economic engage-ment as they get played out in terms of this new eschatological economy of having your labor directed to the production of the fruits of the kingdom. You can't have both. The way in which it's set up is that you have to choose, and the selection of the one entails the rejection of the other.
• Response: That is Matthew.
• Reaction: That's why I'm saying that I have no idea how you come up with a non-supersessionist reading.
• Question: What's being superseded? I don't think it's the people. Certainly Matthew doesn't have Jesus coming in and saying in a Manichaean way, "Forget about the Old Testament. I have some-thing new." Instead, there is, as I was saying, a reformation or a recapturing of what was. (Response: I think that's an interesting question.) Think about Acts. What do the disciples do imme-diately after the ascension of Jesus? They go to the Temple. The Temple was still an integral part of their understanding of their relationship to God. So the Temple isn't superseded, and Matthew wasn't saying that Jesus was rejecting the Jewish practices and all of the old laws. He wasn't saying that we need to take everything for this new eschatological economy from heaven above in a second coming.
• Response: But then I think of texts where Jesus says, "It has been said and now I say to you."
  You could read those texts and say they're interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures, as you suggest. Or you could say that it's really a new ethics, a new righteousness. The interpretation
  is so markedly different from what's there that it really does look like a new thing with a new li-turgical economy, a new labor economy, a new understanding of service.
• Reaction: I would like us to perhaps think about spending a little more time on a New Testament text to really press these issues about whether the vision is a vision of a new and different everything. A new everything makes us different, but can we be different without the charge of our history? I don't know. That's a separate issue. Are there visions laid out in the Gospels that really present a different order -- a different economic order, a different worshiping order, a different liturgical order -- so that all these things serve
  the same God but are by their very nature, if they are indeed radically different, going to challenge that which they're different from? Maybe there are real tensions between Jews and Christians, real differences about how one is to live in the world.
  I don't know. It just seems to me that this has
  the potential to press the conversation beyond "we don't want to offend or be supersessionist." Are we blind to something the text and the tra-dition are teaching us? I don't know.
• Reaction: What's important is that every time the difference is articulated, it's placed back into old settings. That is why we can't get beyond the charge of our history. Matthew doesn't have to be talking about the Temple here. That there is no longer a Temple is a narrative construct for him. So we can't say that it's all new and different.



• Remark: There are segments in here that I find just give me terrible heartburn. One of them is the fig tree. The treatment of the fig tree goes hand in hand with the landowner, and that registers as an allegory, not a parable. What seems to me to be built into these texts is a contrast to the narrative we were looking at in Exodus, wherein you have the rehabilitation of a people and the means to bring about that rehabilitation. These seem to me to be texts of just plain out-and-out rejection.
• Response: I agree with you that they're texts of out-and-out. The question is whether they're out-and-out rejection because that's obviously a word with a lot of luggage. If these texts signify some-thing radically different, they're going to say this, not this. But rejection necessarily carries a de-meaning quality.
• Response: Yeah, right. Can you read this text in a way that isn't freighted with that?
• Response: No, but the question is, what does that therefore mean for me? As a twenty-first-century Christian, can I make a distinction between a radically different vision and what Matthew is doing in terms of demeaning Judaism, or do the two go hand in glove? That's a different question. That's not an economic question.
• Response: And for the life of me, I don't know how to get the hand out of the glove.



• Remark: I'm struck by vv. 12 and 23: "Jesus entered the Temple." Is this fig tree business necessarily part and parcel of what's going on with Jesus in the Temple, or is it really an issue about the eschatological economy? If you're a fig tree, you're supposed to have fruit. If you're standing around with leaves and nothing else, you're dead. If I'm not bearing fruit, guess what? That's a scary thing to me. What does that mean? What are the fruits I'm supposed to be producing in my daily life?
• Response: The fruits of the kingdom of God.
• Response: But it's a question of rehabilitation. Could there have been a rehabilitation? (A little pruning, a little seed.) The earlier text is all about rehabilitation.
• Response: I think that there are times when Jesus is having a bad hair day, and this is one of them. We need to give Jesus a chance to be, if you will, pardon the expression, human. If you want to re-habilitate this, we can understand that the Son of God can be human and just be ticked off and not all the Son of God we want him to be, if that's what our theology is.
• Reaction: That's not Matthew's theology.
• Another reaction: That's a cop-out.
  [A free-for-all ensues.]
• Response to the reactions: This is the peace that I can make with the text, because otherwise it will just drive me crazy.
• Objection: I think we've got a trifecta going here. In the overturning of the tables of the money changers there is a symbolic prophetic action. In the healing of the blind and the lame in the Temple precincts there is a second symbolic prophetic ac-tion. I think the cursing of the fig tree is a third symbolic prophetic action that is explained by the words about faith. The disciples ask, how did that happen? But Jesus doesn't answer how it hap-pened; he answers why it happened, why he did it. I think Jesus intends this action as a demon-stration of the power of faith, and he's talking about faith in the way that faith is often used in the New Testament, the way that Paul tends to use it -- in terms of steadfast loyalty to God.

Return to Index

Who We Are :: What We Do :: Events Calendar
Clergy and Educators :: Scholars' Corner :: Newsletter
Information Resources :: Get Involved :: Home

The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies
956 Dulaney Valley Road, Baltimore, MD 21204
410.494.7161 / fax: 410.494.7169
email: Info@icjs.org