We read scripture to be transformed. We are not interested just in adding to our knowledge, or even to our being. For we sense intuitively that we not only fail to hear, but have been trained not to hear God speaking. We know that the domination system has deeply deluded us, through the everyday process of socialization, into attitudes, actions, and assumptions that violate others and rob us of our true life. Therefore we listen all the more keenly, not as those who have and wish for a little bit more, but as those who do not have, and are desperate to find their own authentic lives. Give us your word, O God, because without it we collapse back into the grip of convention and forget who we really are.
July 5: The Mission of the Seventy
1 Kings 21:1-3, 17-21; Galatians 6:7-18; Luke 10:1-12, 17-20
Luke has constructed a second sending, not just of the twelve (9:1-6), but of a larger circle of disciples. Seventy (or seventy-two) probably is symbolic, anticipating the mission to the gentile nations (Genesis 10:2-31). Luke's location of this account implies that Samaritan villages would have been included (9:51-56). These advance agents not only prepare a crowd for Jesus' coming, but also heal. Exorcism is not mentioned in their commission, but this is what most excites them on their return (10:17). They are doing the kingdom thing. Healing and exorcism are better ways of getting attention than preaching or organizing, as the Pentecostals have proven. Since Luke was a traveling companion of Paul, this training manual probably reflects actual church practice.
Greet no one: Traveling salespeople can gab and put off knocking on doors all day. Carry no money or clothes: They are to be so utterly dependent that someone will have to take them in, and this will identify a genuinely compassionate person who can become the nucleus of converts there. Don't upgrade accommodations: Stay in one place so that the core leader gets maximum training. They are lambs in the midst of wolves: Precursors of the domination-free order of God (10:9,11), who bring a new kind of peace so palpable it can be bestowed or recalled from the host's house like dust. It is not the absence of violence but the presence of a powerful alternative.
The wolves are vicious and bite, however, and the disciples rankle for revenge. "The more they detached themselves from this world in their everyday actions," says Gerd Theissen, "the more they kept destroying the world in their mythical fantasies, as if they had to work off their rejection by this world. How natural it was to consign hostile places to the fire and flames of the last judgment." Jesus expressly forbade such fantasies (Luke 9:51-56), and the disciples no doubt fought against their desires for revenge. But what Jesus denied just verses earlier is now promised as the fate of these townsfire (10:10-15).
Power to heal and exorcise was also there. Jesus nips the pride of power in the bud, however: Do not rejoice that the spirits are subject to you, but that your names are written in heaven.
When has the kingdom of God come near you? Has it come near lately? Have you positioned yourself where it might happen to you? With whom are you sharing the good news of the end of domination?
July 12; The Compassionate Samaritan
2 Kings 2:1, 6-14; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37
This tired parable is the wet noodle with which Christians flagellate themselves into acts of mercy. We thus become as deeply mired in works-righteousness as the lawyer who put the question. As if there were anything one could do to inherit eternal life!
Two fiendish Princeton sociologists exposed the whole game. They put a group of seminary students in a room, read them this parable, then asked them to go at varying intervals, one at a time, to a building next door, where half would give extemporaneous sermonettes on the parable and the other half would talk about ministry as a vocation. An actor was planted beside the sidewalk who feigned distress. The real test was to see how many of these Christians, their heads full of this parable of compassion, would actually stop. Only 40 percent did.
Ingenious. This study proves that people are not compassionate because ordered to be so by religious law. They are, on the contrary, compassionate most often when they see themselves as the victim beside the road. Compassion--"to suffer with." The Samaritan was not a better person than the priest or levite or lawyer. We call him "good" though we know nothing about his life. He may have been a shyster. He simply knew what it was like to be unable to get decent accommodations as a hated half-breed. He knew that, if he had been mugged, no one would stop. He identified with the victim.
Jesus invites the lawyer to do the same--to see himself in the ditch, to watch his own religious leaders pass him by, to see a Samaritan approach, to undergo the choice. Do I let this accursed person render me unclean, or do I let him save my life? Then Jesus makes the Samaritan his role model: Go and do likewise. Not to inherit eternal life. But because he sees himself in the sufferer.
It is as we identify and find healing for our own wounds that we are able to become wounded healers for others. As we openly share our woundedness, others are enabled to bring their wounds into the open for healing. Do a picture of your wounds--the ways you have "fallen among robbers." If you are in a group, share your picture.
July 19: Mary and Martha
2 Kings 4:8-17; Colossians 1:21-29; Luke 10:38-42
Women in Jesus' day were not full members of the covenant. They were saved through their men (father, husband) and through bearing male heirs. They were taught only the negative commandments of the Law; the positive ones were reserved for men. The Mishnah states, "If any man gives his daughter a knowledge of the Law it is as though he taught her lechery." The logic is impeccable. To teach her lechery is to cause her alone to sin; to teach her Torah is to break down the division between male superiority and female inferiority, and to threaten male dominance.
Rabbinical texts reveal that some women persisted, nevertheless, in trying to learn the Law. One such in the gospels is Mary, whose sister Martha complains to Jesus that Mary refuses to help serve the dinner, but is instead seated at Jesus' feet--the prerogative of a male disciple of a teacher. However much we might wish that Jesus had gotten up and helped to serve the meal and to clean up afterwards--a role to which he seems not to have been averse (Luke 12:37; in John 21:9-14 the risen Jesus confirms his identity by cooking breakfast for the disciples, a task normally reserved for women and servants)--the fact remains that Jesus and Mary were transgressing on a deep-seated prohibition from which Martha could not free herself.
Martha projects her own authority on Jesus: You tell Mary. Her anxiety and agitation reveal her as caught in a gender role from which Mary has extricated herself. As the failed struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment showed, it is often women who most profoundly oppose liberation from male supremacy. This issue very much survives today, in both Christianity and Judaism, in the question of the ordination of women.
But we must not split Mary and Martha into good and bad, but look for both within ourselves. What is the one thing needful for me? What is the source of my anxiety? How do I perpetuate collective definitions of myself as woman, as man? Redo this story in a role-play that carries the story forward to address our more recent concerns for full equality between women and men.
July 26: On Prayer
2 Kings 5:1-15; Colossians 2:6-15; Luke 11:1-13
Watch the imperatives! Jesus' teaching on prayer is impertinent, rude, a theological embarrassment. He understands nothing of Christian etiquette. Prayer as he describes it is effrontery. He commands us to command God. We are to hammer on the door until God, out of pure irritation, answers our need. Like the widow haranguing the judge, we are to persist in prayer like a dog worrying a bone (Luke 18:1-8). The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
All this seems a bit beneath our sophistication about prayer. After all, God is God. Who are we to order God around like a lackey? We should rather surrender ourselves to the inscrutable will of God and be willing to receive whatever God sends. God is immutable, and cannot be changed by our incessant implorings.
Oh yeah? That's Stoicism, pure and simple. Jesus, and the entire Bible with him, teach prayer as jawboning. Abraham haggles with God like a merchant in a bazaar (Genesis 18). Moses makes God repent (Exodus 32). God, it appears, wants relationship, not unapproachable authority and power. God, it seems, is creating history with us, alongside us, and wants, needs, cannot do without, our input. The limp passivity of what so often passes as Christian prayer is anathema to the Bible. When we pray, we are to be totally energized beings staking everything on God's future for the world.
Hence the imperatives. "Hallowed be"--imperative. It is not something we do, but that God does through us (compare Ezekiel 36:22-23). We are commanded to command God to hallow God's name: Come on, God, be God! "Your kingdom come"--imperative. We are ordered to order God to bring on God's domination-free order. Are you ready to receive it? We are permitted, as children of the Abba, to demand (imperative) our daily bread, and to insist (imperative) that we be forgiven and shielded from temptation.
What would we have to give up to pray this way? What would it require of us? How would it alter our picture of God? Do we care enough to pray thus? Role-play the parable in Luke 11:5-8. Alone or in a group, shout the Lord's Prayer at the top of your lungs in order to grasp its imperative force.
Walter Wink was professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and the author of Transforming Bible Study (second edition, Abingdon Press, 1990) when this article appeared.
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