April 12, 2009
(Our State) - I don't think God wants slaves. Paul
seems to think so. He throws around the term δουλου (doulou - Koine for indentured servants)
like it was candy. Fact is, I've never thought Paul was all that. Now that biblical
archaeology has gotten so much better, and we're no longer burned to death for asking
embarrassing questions, it's becoming more and more evident that when it came
to Jesus, Paul's interpretation of his vision went way beyond the notes of the meeting.
That's not to say that he was wrong about the Ultimate Messianic Nature of Jesus,
or that Jesus died to reconcile humanity as the Knowable Person of God, or that
we should be very, very sorry for our stupid mistakes which have screwed up ourselves
and others. I'm talking about his layering the simple message of Jesus with the
legalistic pharasaic experience of his early years. Much of that experience which made
up this genius Roman Jew had to be reconciled, in his mind, with the remarkable
meeting/vision he had with the Begotten of the Almighty. You can see him torture
himself in his writings. He just KNEW he was right, and for a long time Paul's ideas
have been substituted for Jesus's.
I just don't buy the parts that demand we be God's slaves. Simply put, slaves have
no free will. Slaves can be commanded to love. No free will means God is self-stimulating,
and that's a picture I don't even want to contemplate. I will go so far as to say
that the creation of a universe which has to want to hang out with God is far more
agreeable to a sane diety than a universe which is ordered only to do only that which the diety
has set out in advance. I'm not even close to being God, and I find that orderly
prospect to be ponderously boring.
A universe with free will doesn't have to be chaotic. But it can't be pre-destined,
either. Not in the Calvinist sense, anyway. Otherwise, all those post-modernist
philosophers are right and there is either no God or God is insane.
No, I think God wants friends. I think he wants people around him who like him
and have different ideas and different ways and different talents. I think God
wants to invite us to a dinner party where we feast in ways that are incomprehensibly
joyous. I think he wants us to invite others to the party that he's throwing, too.
The old protestant hymn is pretty accurate - "What a friend we have in Jesus."
And, we ought to remember what that Jewish Prophet, Isaiah, said,"And God will wipe
away all tears from their eyes." Slaves don't need their tears salved. That's something
you do for a friend.
Happy Passover. Happy Easter.
