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Emeril Lagasse, idou and the Gospel of Matthew

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Lanier, founder of the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, TX.  While he is one of the best lawyers in America, he is also one of the best Bible teachers you will ever hear.  His first degree at Lipscomb University was Biblical Languages.  He joined me for Exegetically Speaking, a podcast of the friends and faculty of Wheaton College.

Here is the URL to our conversation:

http://exegeticallyspeaking.libsyn.com/emeril-lagasse-idou-and-the-gospel-of-matthew

or

click here

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What are the chances Jesus of Nazareth was born on December 25th?

Christians around the world celebrate December 25th as “Christmas.”  We identify it with the time of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  Songs are sung, carols are played, and stories are told about Mary and her baby boy.  But what are the chances that Jesus was born on December 25th?

Well, to put a number to it.  The chance that Jesus of Nazareth was born on December 25th is 1/365 or to be slightly more accurate 1/365.24.  Obviously the calendar we use today didn’t exist then, and our calendar corresponds to the solar year not the lunar.  Jesus had to be born on a day that corresponds to our calendar one way or another, but we can’t be certain of the day of his birth because there is no identifiable date recorded in the texts.

That may sound strange to us who celebrate birthdays every year and who have birth certificates.  Often our birthdays identify us.  Recently, I went to the doctor and before they wanted my name, they asked my birthday.  When the receptionist keyed in my birthday, my name came up.  So, for us living in the 21st century, our birthdays identify us.  You’ve probably had a similar experience.

The fact is most human beings born thousands of years ago didn’t know their birthdays.  They didn’t have a reliable and stable calendar as we do today.  This was especially true of people of  “lower class” or the “worker class.”   I’m using the terms here sociologically not pejoratively.  Joseph and Mary were ordinary people.  Joseph was by trade a tekton.  Some have translated the word “carpenter” but it may be better to translate it “stone mason” since most construction in those days in the land of Israel was of stone.  But they weren’t well off.  And there is no record of the day of Jesus’ birth.

I won’t go into the reasons why December 25th was chosen as the “day” we celebrate Christmas.  Many people have written on that on the Internet. My point is more simple.  As Christians we do not celebrate the “day” Jesus was born, we celebrate the fact he was born at all.  December 25th just happens to be the day we celebrate it.  In Jesus we see  the coming of God into the world in a unique and powerful way.   Theologians call it the Incarnation, literally the enfleshing of God or embodiment of God.  For us Jesus is the embodiment of the God of Israel who has come into our world to save and to give us an example of how to live.

Let me illustrate this using a more recent example.  I know a man, let’s call him Claude.  Today, at the time of my writing, he is 92 years old.  He was born in a little town in Mississippi in 1926.  The exact date of his birth “day” is unknown.  The country doctor who delivered him wrote down one date in the county register where Claude was born.  But he recorded it several days later after he had delivered other babies.  Then there is the record of Claude’s birthday in the family Bible, which 92 years ago was the family record of birthdays, weddings, baptisms, and death days of beloved family members.  Then there is the day he was told by family members  that he was born.  Now the dates do not correspond, they are off by a significant amount.  Which one is true and accurate?  We don’t know, and in important ways it doesn’t matter.

Claude celebrates his birthday now on a day late in September. Essentially, because of American law, he had to choose one of those days and call it his birthday not knowing exactly the “day” he was born.  He gets cards, presents and phone calls on that day congratulating him on making it another year. He has a social security card and a driver’s license that display his chosen day.   So, that day was chosen to recognize the fact of his birth, not the day of his birth.  Essentially we celebrate the person not the day.  The same is true in ways for Jesus.

December 25th–Christmas, Navidad, Weinacht, whatever name by which you know it–is not a celebration of the day Jesus was born, it’s a celebrate of the fact he was born, that in him God became flesh and dwelt among us.  It is a unique day in the Christian calendar to recognize a singular great event in history, the Incarnation.  In Jesus of Nazareth we recognize that God has come into the world and that is worth stopping and thinking about.

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Resurrection and New Creation

Recently (Nov 16, 2018) N. T. Wright gave a lecture at the Lanier Theological Lecture in Houston, TX, on “Resurrection and the New Creation.”  It was vintage Wright.

Here is the URL:

https://www.laniertheologicallibrary.org/videos/

Or you can click here

 

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Podcast: Daughters And Sons

Dr. Amy Peeler joined me recently on the “Exegetically Speaking” podcast at Wheaton College.  She did a good job explaining the value of inclusive language in places like the NIV, but also argued for a more masculine reading of a passage in Hebrew 2.  It’s worth hearing.

Here is a link:

http://exegeticallyspeaking.libsyn.com/website/daughers-and-sons

Or you can click here.

 

 

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Righteous & Merciful Judge

First appeared in print in Christianity Today, December 2018,  under the Title “Prepare for the ‘Day of the Lord'” (p. 76)

Matthew Aernie & Donald Hartley. The Righteous & Merciful Judge: The Day of the Lord in the Life and Theology of Paul. Studies in Scripture & Biblical Theology.  Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018.

These days it is out of fashion to talk about judging and judgment.  Ours is a much more “tolerant” day—or so we’re told. But as our authors, Aernie & Hartley, correctly describe, throughout the counsel of Scripture the idea of God coming in judgment to right all wrongs and settle all scores is at the heart of God’s revelation.  Yet the specter of Marcionism is still with us in the church especially when we divide the Scriptures into parts and imagine that the first is dominated by justice and wrath, the second by mercy and grace.  As our writers point out, such mischaracterizations undermine the unity of Scripture and subverts the true story of God in the world. Some of the most wonderful passages of forgiveness, restoration, and grace are found in the Old; some of the most unsettling about justice, wrath, and judgment are found in the New. Righteous and Merciful Judge

The project Aernie and Hartley pursue in this book is to consider the theme of “the day of the Lord” in Paul’s letters.  They argue that it is not some subsidiary crater to Paul’s theology, but it stands as a major motif in his thinking.  They stop short of calling it the center, but they do make it central by arguing that “every aspect of his theology was in some way affected by the concept” (p. 5)  So their book examines the theme of “the day of the Lord: in scholarship, the Old Testament, extracanonical Jewish literature, Paul’s call/conversion on the Damascus Road, and the language of the day of the Lord and associated themes in Paul’s letters.  As a result, they shed much needed light on an ignored and marginalized feature of Paul’s theology.

Like most scholars Aernie and Hartley pursue their task systematically working through time, asking first: where this concept came from? But, of course, scholars don’t tend to agree on much and that includes how and where the notion of “the day of the Lord” entered into Jewish consciousness.  Some think it came from the holy war tradition; others from enthronement ceremonies when YHWH is installed as King.  Some think it came from within Israel itself; others imagine it was adopted and adapted from the Canaanites or the Babylonians.  The starting point remains elusive. What is clear is that the OT is rich in associations around the notion that God will visit the nations, including Israel, in judgment, power, and restoration.

While the phrase “the day of the LORD” is not found in the Books of Moses, our authors claim the theme  sits just beneath the surface in passages that portray YHWH as coming to visit his people in blessings and curses. The prophets developed the language of God’s visitation into the language we know, “the day of the LORD.” Only later, among the prophets does the phrase “the day of the LORD” become a technical term for a day of final judgment.  As such, depending on how a people are currently situated toward YHWH—whether faithful to the covenant or not—it is a day that prompts fear or a day awaited with joy.

In the past, periods of famine, scarcity, war and ultimately exile could be construed as “days” of judgement in typological patterns of what is to come: the final, definitive, eschatological day of the Lord.  When that day comes, God will make the world right.  In the final assize of history anything wrong in Israel or the nations must be judged.  All that is right is destined to be redeemed and restored. These patterns are found throughout the Hebrew Scriptures but they are also present in later Jewish collections such as the Pseudepigrapha and the Dead Sea Scrolls.   This was the symbolic world that Paul inherited.

One of the more interesting features of the book is how Aernie and Hartley interpret Paul’s Damascus Christophany as “a proleptic day of the Lord.” In other words, Paul had his own day of judgment when he encountered the risen Lord.  Instead of getting what he deserved, i.e., wrath, he found mercy.  Instead of being marked out for destruction, he was transformed, converted, and called to a new mission.  In this encounter the persecutor replaced the false identity of Jesus he had developed for the  true identity as Messiah, Son of God, and Lord. Now that the moment of Paul’s own judgment had arrived and he had found grace, he began to think that the final judgment for all was closer than he ever imagined.

The last portion of the book goes deeply into Paul’s language associated with “the day of the Lord.”  For Paul, “the day of the Lord (YHWH)” had become “the day of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess 5.2) or more simply “the day of Christ” (Phil 1.10).  Words of coming (Parousia), “revelation” (apocalypsis), and “appearing” or “manifestation” (epiphania) season his discourse as he likens the coming of Jesus to judge the living and dead to various manifestations of God in the Scripture. The final chapter offers the most detailed exegesis in the book.

The big idea Aernie and Hartley pursue offers an important corrective for the academy and the church. The current western mood is to avoid anything that smacks of judgment.  We want a merciful, forgiving, anything-goes kind of god, not one who demands something of us and will ultimately judge us.  We  cannot adequately deal with Paul’s life, mission and theology until we grasp where he believed the telos toward which history was moving.  The next thing we await is the final, definitive coming of Christ in glory, power, and judgment.