Beatitude Week - Day 2: The New Moses, The New Israel

One of the fascinating things about the New Testament is how much of it is actually the Old Testament. Take a look! You can’t go a page or two in the gospels or Paul without a direct quote or thematic reference to something that happened in the Old Testament. Hebrews is about half Old Testament. James wants to be an Old Testament book. Revelation is Zechariah, Isaiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel in a blender and then smothered with Jesus.

[Tangent: You sometimes hear from detractors of Christianity that the story of Jesus is a warmed over version of other ancient dying and rising god myths – Dionysus, Horus, Mithras, Baal - take your pick. The thing that gives the lie to that is the bond between the life of Christ and the story of Israel. Ancient Roman culture was a syncretistic society – that is, they never minded a good mish-mash of religions, as long as you paid your taxes. Ancient Jewish society was the exact opposite – "No outside influences, please, we’d rather die." And all of Jesus' first disciples, and Paul, were Jews. There’s more to be said about this, but that’s it in a nutshell. End Tangent]

So the topic of the day is how the Beatitudes fit into the New Testament/Old Testament love fest.

First of all, we’re in Matthew, and that gospel writer is so concerned with the Old Testament that he starts his gospel with a genealogy. Jesus, the son of David, the son of Abraham. The Messiah – the representative Israelite, linked to the other representatives of the nation of Israel – the representative Hebrew, and the representative king. As a baby, his life parallels the story of the people of God – in danger from a wicked king, he flees to Egypt, then is called out of exile. As an adult, the echoes continue – he passes through the waters of the Jordan, and he wanders in the wilderness. With those who had ears to hear, here was one who was living anew the old, old story, an individual standing for the whole. And then he finds himself on a mountain, surrounded by a crowd of Israelites.

And he begins to teach. Remind you of anyone?

Here’s a hint:


But it is not laws he pronounces, but blessings. Later he will quote the old law, given on that first mountain, by that first prophet who came out of Egypt – and then He will say “But I say unto you…” The crowds will be amazed, and will say that this one teaches with authority. And in a few short chapters, he will choose 12 disciples. Twelve, like the tribes of Israel. That is not a coincidence.

What is going on here?

Jesus is rebooting the franchise. He is fulfilling the as-yet unfulfilled promises of God. He is telling Israel, the people of God, what it looks like to be the people of God in mind and heart and soul, and not in name only. It is as N.T. Wright states in Jesus and the Victory of God, “a challenge to Israel to be Israel.”

And he starts with blessings…

Can of Worms: The Middle East

If you have been watching the news at all, you are aware of the latest violence in Israel and the Gaza strip. A few years back I realized I had absolutely no real concept of what Israelis and Palestinians were fighting about, and no context for the conflict. A wealth of information and opinion is available to you, of course (hence the “can of worms” label), but I humbly offer the brief piece of historical critique that has been most helpful to me. It comes from Thomas Friedman’s 1989 book “From Beirut to Jerusalem.” It was a National Book Award Winner, and my paperback version helpfully carries the blurb, “If you’re only going to read one book on the Middle East, this is it.” You might think that a twenty-year old assessment of the problem might be out of date – it unfortunately is not.

Here’s Freidman’s assessment of what the heck is going on over there, and has been going on since 1947:
“The Zionist Jews who founded Israel had three basic objectives in mind when they thought about the kind of state they wanted to build. They wanted to create a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state that would be located in the historical homeland of the Jewish people. In November 1947, when the United Nations offered the Jews roughly half this area for their own state, while promising the other half to the Palestinian Arabs, the Zionist leaders were forced to answer that fundamental question: What kind of nation do we want to be?

David Ben Gurion, then the leader of the Zionist movement, essentially said in effect to his nation: ‘In this world we can only have two out of our three objectives. We are being offered a chance for a Jewish state and a democratic state, but in only part of the land of Israel. We could hold out for all of the land of Israel, but if we did that we might lose everything. If we have to compromise on our objectives, let it be on obtaining all the land of Israel.” So between 1947 and 1967 Zionism lived, and even flourished, with two and half of its goals satisfied.

Then came June 1967. Israel, in the course of the Six-Day War, occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, extending in the process Jewish control over virtually all the historical land of Israel. From that moment on, Israelis again faced the monumental question: What kind of nation do we want to be? Once again, it could only have two of its three objectives.

One choice was to keep all the land of Israel, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to remain a Jewish state, but this could only be done by curtailing Israeli democracy. The only way Israel could permanently control the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be by physically suppressing them and ensuring that they were never given political rights.

The second option for Israel was to annex the West Bank and Gaza and remain a democracy, but this could be done only by giving up the Jewish character of the state, because if the 1 million-plus Palestine Arabs then residing in the occupied territories were allowed to vote, along with the 500,000 Israeli Arabs, by early in the twentieth-first century they would outnumber the Jews. (Current estimates as of 2008 – 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, 1.5 million in Gaza, 1 million in Israel for a total of 5 million – compared to 5,320,000 Jews in Israel)

The third option was for Israel to remain a Jewish and a democratic state, but this could be done only by either getting rid of large areas of the West Bank and Gaza or by getting rid of large numbers of West Bankers and Gazans, in order to guarantee a Jewish majority well into the twenty-first century. Since the world would never tolerate a forced transfer by Israel of Palestinians from the occupied territories, this option really came down to relinquishing territory.

Instead of definitively choosing among these three options…Israel has spent [the intervening years] avoiding a choice – not in theory, but in practice; not on paper, but in day-to-day reality.”

How you would solve this problem likely depends on which side you think has a greater right to the land. Since Friedman wrote this piece, Israel has allowed a limited degree of Palestinian self-government to exist within the West Bank and Gaza, and removed Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. About 250,000 Israelis currently live in exclusively Jewish settlements within the West Bank.

That’s the bare bones status of the problem. Each side has embraced the identity of victim-hood. Each side has plenty of blame to go around.

But what is the solution?