Returning . . . an answer to Billy's question.

well my friends . . .

In the eyes of a Jew, sin is breaking the Torah. Yet, Jesus comes along and really compromises the general use of the Torah among the spiritual leaders in his society. Suddenly it's no longer eating pork, or touching fish that makes one sinful. Pay attention to the contrast he sets up here. Jesus was a layman. He was no Ph.D. He was not a man who had spent his life in a library contemplating the depths of metaphysical truths. The power of his parables and his proverbs is the fact that they should be obvious, only we can't see them for their simplicity. The simple truth is that things in the world are actually the opposite of what they may seem. The Pharisees in the presence of Jesus and his disciples were attempting to show them as being inferior because they could not fully keep the law. The Torah, in all it's detail, proclaimed Jesus and his disciples as sinful. They touched things that were unclean. They broke the Sabbath by exerting themselves to pick grain. In the generally held view of the day, they were sinful.

Yet, Jesus has a different perspective on God, God's purpose in the world, and God's intention with the Torah. Jesus says it is not the letter of the law, but the heart behind it. It is not the details, but the purpose that the Torah holds for the world. It is in this light that Jesus expresses the contrast of how the Pharisees read the law, with how he reads it. The Pharisees see the law as the infallible dictation of God's will for the people of Israel, therefore these sinful fishermen should recognize their proper submissive, 'sinful' status. They should not tread on the spiritual high-ground of the pious Pharisees. Jesus reverses their assumption, saying that it is not the food they eat or the things they touch defiling the person, but the attitudes of heart that come forth revealing a persons impurity.

I really don't think Jesus ever intended for this to be taken to the extremes of introspective psychological torture, which Western Christianity seems to have been plagued by since Augustine. In fact I think the overt introversion that has been typical of Christian thought has done much to distract us from the social redemption that Jesus and his early followers sought with the fullness of their being. The moral compass that we have long used to alert us to sin has too often become a moral scalpel to disect our intentions until there is little life left in us.

To a Pharisee to repent was to return to strict observance of the Torah, word for word. For Jesus to repent was to return to the heart of the Torah, which was the ultimate will of God. Simply put: for Jesus the will of God was the overarching peace of God (shalom) to dwell among men and women living in a community ethically centered on service and love. This is the theological measure that the Torah and the interpretation/application there of was weighed. If an interpretation of the Law, even if the Law itself! were to compromise the well-being (shalom) of humanity it must be pushed aside. In this way we seek not a perfect understanding of the Law as so many were in Jesus' day. Instead, we seek first the Kingdom, and things are set right as God wills them to be.

The early Christian community was convinced that the person of Jesus, his character and the actions they remembered from him were the standard of how this Kingdom was incarnated into our world. As the Torah became flesh in Jesus (who broke the Torah by the way), the World/Kingdom that the Torah alluded to became flesh in the community that followed him. It was a community free of domininance, which upheld the poor and oppressed as the standard.

So, what then does it mean to repent?

Well, in light of my last post, I see sin as the broken competitive nature of our world. Sin is a term for the social games which keep others at disadvantage. The structures of society that maintain separation between rich and poor, holy and righteous, privileged and oppressed are the lucid display of evil in human nature. The greatest denial of God is the theft of human dignity. Sin is the action of the person which would displace God with our self, and therefore see fit to have other humans serve and worship us. This is the epitome of sinfulness. I think we often get carried away with the worry that our bad thoughts will condemn us to hell; meanwhile our thoughtless daily activities and ignorance to social patterns of domination and violence contribute to hell's presence in the periphery of our society.

Heschel says, "The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, means return. Yet it also means answer. Return to God is an answer to him." To a Pharisee repentance is a return to Law-keeping. To Jesus this was not enough. The Pharisees kept the Law, and the world was every bit as broken as it had ever been. The various religious leaders of his day used the Law and their interpretations of it to oppress other people whom, being sinful, were inferior to them. Jesus instead took a stance with the poor, the marginal, the whores, the 'sinners'. He stood alongside all these less pious people and declared that they cared more for setting the world right, that is, for seeing the Kingdom come, than the spiritual elite did. These people were answering God's heart, not with feeble words, but by living in service and equality. It wasn't about a benign moral existence. When spirituality is controlled by the rich and privileged it is used to castrate those of lower class. Jesus taught in a way that freed the sinful from the tyranny of the spiritual elite, and the marginalized found the living God on their side. These marginal people then entered the Kingdom of God with power restoring human dignity to the world around them. These actions, these words of life, these hands serving daily were their return to God. Repentance is lending oneself to the restoration of shalom.

When Jesus speaks of all the persecution his believers will face, this is why: there is no social structure that will be left in tact. Returning to God is a dangerous activity. Jesus spoke with little remorse that the Temple, which was the center of all political, social, and religious activity, would be demolished. No stone would be left on top of another. This attitude toward his society was radically subversive. Repenting is returning to God and serving his Kingdom. The Kingdom is no supplement to the way things are, it will destroy everything we know, including our concepts of right and wrong, all for the sake of watching the seeds of Eden grow up anew.