Thanking God (or not)

The theme of the Lent study group that I've been participating in had the theme of 'Saying thank you to Jesus' this week. It looked at this passge from Luke 17 (vs 11-19, NRSV):

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

I don't really know what we are suppose to learn from this passage. It reads to me like a story very specifically addressed to (criticising) his Jewish audience (hence the reference to 'this foreigner') and when I encounter things like that in the bible I try to see how they would translate to Christians (that works well for the parable of the 'Good Samaritan' for example), but I don't really get it for this story.

So, here's my problems with thanking God or Jesus. 

In an interview a while back I heard the Revd. Luke Larner talk about some of the issues he has with a certain sort of evangelical Christian, and as an example he made reference to Christians thanking God for helping them get a parking-place at the supermarket. I remember that sort of thing from my days in 'Christian Union' groups when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. Someone gets lucky on a visit to a busy supermarket because a spot comes free as they arrive, so they give thanks to God/Jesus. (OK when I was an undergraduate it wasn't about parking cars - none of us had cars - but you get the idea.) We can laugh at that, but there's something quite insidious if, as is often the implication, if not explicit, that they see it as God singling them out for help because they are a Christian. It feeds into the 'chosen people' narrative. That we Christians are God' s chosen people (replacing the Jews). This idea of Christians being God's "Chosen People" comes up quite explicitly sometimes, and it is used to make Christian communities feel good about themselves. The trouble is that if you have chosen people by definition you have people that have not been chosen. God gave you that parking space rather than someone else. To see where that leads look at Zionism (both Jewish Zionism and Christian Zionism) which is used to defend Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. A bit of a stretch from thanking God for finding you a parking space at a supermarket and ethnic cleansing with genocide, you think?  I'm not so sure. It only seems absurd because we are safe and comfortable in England, insulated from the harm we are doing elsewhere on the world, and we can do that thing that we English are especially good at: hypocrisy. 

But there things that I want, feel the need, to give thanks for. There are lots of wonderful things in my life and it is good to appreciate them. For general things like the beauty of the world, for flowers and good weather, which are for everyone. There are also personal things that I'm grateful for, like my own good health and my friends and family. To be thankful, but not thanking God or Jesus for giving them to me, as though they are personal presents like the birthday presents from family members.

I would say, BTW, with a SoF hat on, that the need to give thanks is one of the purposes for creating God. We feel delight in the world and want a something/somebody to give thanks to - as well as something/somebody to blame for the bad things in the world. But that is whole other discussion for another time.

Coming back to the bible passage. Being healed from leprosy is clearly on a different scale from getting a parking space at a supermarket, but it is in the same category in the sense that if you are healed and someone else isn't, then it might seem that you have been 'chosen', or even 'deserved' to be healed rather than that other person. So I'm still struggling with knowing what, if anything, I should take away these verses, and for the moment don't have a lot of use for them.

The Fall of Jericho: biblical genocide?

The guest preacher, Terry Boyle, at the Church I attend this morning (Sunday 17/11/2024) preached on this reading:

Joshua 5: 13–15  The Fall of Jericho

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?” 

The commander of the LORD’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.

Boyle's key message from the reading was that Joshua achieved success because he was obedient to God. And, he said: 'We all know what happened next'. 

Indeed we do, and I remember as a child joyfully singing "and the walls came tumbling down". 

It was a great triumph for Joshua because he followed the will of God, and Boyle took it for granted that we would all rejoice at this story of victory in the history of the Israelites. That is indeed always how I remember the story in my Christian upbringing.

But here's what the bible tells us happened after the walls came tumbling down:

"They devoted* the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys." Joshua 6:21

*A footnote to the NIV translation on Bible Gateway explains that the Hebrew term translated as 'devoted' refers to "the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them".

And:

"Then they burned the whole city and everything in it...." Joshua 6:24

Sound familiar? 

How did we deal with these passages when I read the story in the past? When singing the song you go no further in the narrative beyond the walls coming tumbling down, and you don't need to think about what happened next. From bible classes I have vague memories of worrying about killing so many people, but I think we read it as a story and which was no more real than, say, the Lord of the Rings. If it is 'just' a story it is an exciting tale! (The business with Rahab the prostitute sheltering Joshua's spies, Joshua 2, and Joshua in turn saving her and her household from the killing, Joshua 6:22, is weird but a memorable story.)

But now Israel is acting-out a modern-day slaughter of Palestinians and it is very, very real. Israel is destroying "men and women, young and old' and 'burn[ing] the whole city and everything in it' - but not just Gaza City, the whole of the Gaza strip. And people in Israel, and even more so Zionist Christians in America, are justifying it based on the authority of the bible.

As I said about Psalm 124, it is not good enough that churches use these stories without joining the dots. We can no longer stop at 'the walls came tumbling down'. We've got to ask about the slaughter.

What to do about Psalm 124?

Yesterday (29th September 2024) I was on the rota for reading at Church, and found myself reading Psalm 124, one of the lectionary readings for the day:

1 If the Lord had not been on our side –
  let Israel say –
2 if the Lord had not been on our side
  when people attacked us,
3 they would have swallowed us alive
  when their anger flared against us;
4 the flood would have engulfed us,
  the torrent would have swept over us,
5 the raging waters
  would have swept us away.
6 Praise be to the Lord,
  who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
7 We have escaped like a bird
  from the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
  and we have escaped.
8 Our help is in the name of the Lord,
  the Maker of heaven and earth.

I don't need to spell out the problems with this, in the light of the activities of the state of Israel over the past year, do I? 

In the past I wouldn't have worried. or not much anyway. The psalms are notorious for 'difficult' content ("happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks", psalm 137 v. 9) and need lots of interpretation. For example, I heard someone suggest that the infants being dashed against the rocks should be thought of as evil thoughts starting to grow in your mind: smash them before they become too big. For myself, I see the bible as a human creation and, like any book, open to criticism. We can contexualise all we like, we can interpret it in the light of modern understanding, but at some point we just have to say: no, I think that is wrong.

At the end of the reading, as is the custom, I said 'this is the word of the Lord', and the congregation responded 'thanks be to God'. I toyed with instead saying 'this is what it says in the bible' or something like that, but in the end I didn't have the courage to break with what we are 'supposed' to say.

But if this psalm is being read in churches across the world, at the very least we have talk about it surely? To put it crudely, is it saying that God is on the side of modern-day Israel? That the slaughter of 40,000 people in Gaza, and the bombing of Lebanon and the Yemen will succeed (is succeeding) because the Lord is with them?  

And, before you shout 'anti-semitism', I'm talking about the state of Israel, and about Christian churches. And, let's be clear, the most ardent Zionists, the most dangerous Zionists, are right-wing Christians in the USA. I don't know what goes on in most Synagogues, but I do know that large numbers of Jews would have no sympathy whatsoever with Zionism, certainly not Zionism which leads to the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians.

In my church, the minister's sermon was based on the New Testament reading* and made no mention of the psalm. I suggest that's not really good enough: we can't just have a reading which some people might read as giving religious cover to genocide, without at least saying something about it.

*Mark 9: 38–41. "Whoever is not against us is for us", and he spoke of the need for diversity and a range of perspectives in the church. This was fine, but could have been preached at any time. And, TBH, I've heard it plenty of times before.