Short Stories by Jesus: the Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

by Amy-Jill Levine (2014), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament and Jewish studies in Vanderbilt Divinity school and a self described ‘Yankee Jewish feminist’, brings a Jewish interpretation to Jesus’ parables.  The parables challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives.

Through the centuries ‘the parables have been allegorized, moralized, christologized and otherwise tamed into either platitudes such as ‘G-d loves us’ or ‘Be nice’ (p 3).  Jesus’ first followers would have understood more of them; ‘they knew that parables and the tellers of parables were there to prompt them to see the world in a different way’ (p 4).  Levine points out that just as rabbis held that parables were a means for understanding Torah (scripture), so Jesus the Jew uses parables to help his followers understand the kingdom of heaven (p 8).

She points out that  we need to see them in Jesus’ own context, flowing out of his stories and conversations, not reduced to one-line zingers (‘what would the parables have sounded like to people who have no idea that Jesus will be proclaimed Son of G-d by millions, no idea even that he will be crucified by Rome’ (p 3)).  She emphasizes the temptation to tame the parables into screeds against Jewish practice, ethics or theology (p 278).  ‘The people who first heard him did not, at first, worship him, yet they paid attention’ (282).  She details rabbinic (Jewish) perspectives on the implication of Torah (scripture) on the central perspectives of the parables.  I found her work on the prodigals (Luke 15) and Lazarus and the Rich Man (Luke 16) the most compelling.

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Exiles in the Empire: Believers Church Perspectives on Politics

by Nathan Yoder and Carol Sheppard, editors ( 2006), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

This is a book that explores the troubling paradox of the United States appearing to be both imperial and Christian, living the gospel authentically while also being citizen in an imperial superpower, of being exiles in the empire.  Eighteen essays explore themes of a believers Church Conference held in September 2004.

For me, the key chapters are ‘Jesus’ Confrontation with Empire’, ‘Seek the Welfare of the Empire’, ‘A Personal Journey to Political Involvement, ‘Why Believers Might Conscientiously Abstain from Voting’, ‘Prayer by the Chaplain’.  Several chapters reflect the situation and gospel witness in Lithuania, China, South Africa and Vietnam.

For the United States to be both Christian and imperial is troubling from a missiological, ecclesiological, ethical and Christological perspective.  Metaphors express that hope, metaphors of permanence and transience, of homeland and pilgrimage (p 2-4).  Ted  Grimsrud mentions four connecting points in ‘Jesus’ Confrontation with Empire:  empire’s agents care more about coercive power than about truth (e.g., Jesus and Pilate), the empire’s violence toward any all threats, Jesus’ contrast with imperial leadership styles, the resurrection as an ultimate counter-empire statement’ (p 42). 

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Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological Economic Vocation

by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda (2013), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

Moe-Lobeda starts her book by pointing out the connection between the exploitation of sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic and the vast profits made by corporate owners of the sugar cane industry located in the United States.  As a child, she believed that if you simply knew what was on the other end of material wealth, our economic patterns would change.  But mere knowledge is not enough to enable social change.

The chains of structural violence can, however, be resisted and dismantled.  While structural evil may be beyond the power of individuals to counter, it is composed of power arrangements that are humanly constructed and therefore may be dismantled by other human decisions.  ‘What humans have joined, let humans also put asunder.’  Her book  does not seek to instill guilt in the overcoming of claims, but attempts to identify the moral-spiritual resources in our culture, resources that are to be found in all of earth’s great spiritual traditions.

Each chapter tells a story dealing with people’s linkages, e.g., a community in India whose land is being eroded by bauxite mining, with North America the beneficiary of the bauxite in all the aluminum product.  A compelling section deals with love as transformative power, and reiterating that G-d’s love is the foundation of human love for G-d, self, others and earth.

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Mapping Exile and Return: Palestine Dispossessionism and a Political Theology for a Shared Future

by Alain Epp Weave (2014), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

1948 in Palestine saw the Nakba (catastrophe) which accompanied the creation of the state of Israel and resulted in the destruction of 500 Palestinian villages and the creation of refugees, a ‘deliberate displacement’ of the Palestinians by Israel as a matter of policy (p 17).  This policy has continued with land confiscations (from Palestinians) and the construction of physical and legal barriers separating Palestinians from Palestinians, ‘resident aliens’.  This has been reflected in Israeli mapping practices.

It is in this perspective that the Nakba provides a counter memory to Israeli policies, an attempt to resist  erasure of the communities that once were home to the now displaced.  Mapping Exile is a look at the Israeli attempt to remove cartographic (mapping) reminders of villages that once stood here but have since been bulldozed by the Israeli army.  It is also a look at the concept of exile, built on the writings of Palestinian Christians.  Weaver also acknowledges his own location as a descendant of European immigrants who settled on land held by Pawnee and Cheyenne nations.

Kufr Bir’im is one of over 120 destroyed Palestinian villages over which tourism and recreation sites have been established (p 97).  Summer camps in these villages for children and youth descended from the original inhabitants map the memories across generations, emphasizing rootedness in the face of uprooting (p 106).

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The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine

by Mike Peled (2012), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

Mike Peled was born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well-known Zionist family.  His father, Matti Peled, was an Israeli army officer during the 1948 Israeli war of independence, and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai.

The growing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians came into Peled’s family when his niece was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem.  Pele, who had been living in California, found the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and this began a warm relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.  Several other discussion groups were formed.  Here he heard Palestinian stories of people forced from their homes as children, and Peled and his new friends began to speak at Rotary clubs, sharing their stories of friendship and trust.

A major high point was when the two sons of a Palestinian friend slept over at the home of a Jewish Israeli home (Peled’s home).  The peace position for Peled developed as he heard more of what his father, an army office, had believed and held on to—how his father had “opposed the massive land confiscation Palestinians had to endure, helped those who had legal issues and spoke out against injustice when people were detained or deported” (p 137).

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Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire

by Brian Walsh and Sylva Keesmaat (2004), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

Colossians is a subversive tract for subversive living and it insists that such an alternative imagination and alternate way of life is found and sustained within the context of community.”  For Paul, “the Christian household is an alternative to the dominant Roman model of household life” (p 9). Walsh and Keesmaat recognize the contextual nature of reading, and focus on postmodernity and globalization that shape our worldview; we live in a “global consumerist empire,” similar to that which the church in Colossae lived in, and so this is a critique not only of the time in which Paul wrote but also of our time.

The authors suggest we follow Paul, who was following the prophets (p 85). Paul weaves a vision of life, a vision that tells us who rules the world, where wisdom is to be found, and he identifies two themes that focus our response to the empire: a radical sensitivity to suffering and G-d’s overarching creational intent (p 107), a creation-wide intent of Israel’s G-d that militates against its being co-opted by a totalizing idolatry (p 104). Their perspective is powerfully given in a poem based on the great Christ hymn of Col 1:15-20. “We see a kingdom that is an alternative to the empire” (p 156) characterized by resurrection, ascension, liberation and eschatological ethics. Also, a relational ethic, an ethic of secession that leaves something to join with something else, seceding from imperial sexuality, idolatry, violence.

An ethic of secession arises when we cease to be comfortable in the empire. The writers invite us to explore what it means for a church that seems not to suffer but, rather to thrive, under empire, to live freed from “the oppressive absolutes of the empire” (p 233).

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Set Them Free: The Other Side of Exodus

by Laurel Dykstra (2002), reviewed by Vern Raztlaff

Exodus is a disturbing book that sees G-d siding with the oppressed and the marginalized; this means that the western church recognizes its own immense privileges under corporate capitalism and identifies with the Egyptian oppressor. Dykstra’s Set Them Free is a book about biblical Egypt, global capitalism, liberation and oppression.

The great empires that succeeded Egypt (Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome—and Britain and the United States!) operated by domination, extraction of resources and exploitation of labour. Egypt was the site of forced labour, religious oppression and the execution of children (p 59)—sound familiar? Profit, personal comfort, control, dominion, slave labour, displacement of indigenous people, cultural arrogance, global military power. Then and now.

Dykstra writes, “We fit in among the functionaries in Pharaoh’s court rather than among the workers in the slave labour camps” (p 126). Exodus believes people could actively resist empire and its allies of the oppressed: global capitalism makes this difficult. Looking specifically the land of Egypt leads us to focus on environmental/ecological issues, issues of women, and connections between modern corporate exploitation of the natural world and of other humans” (p 196).

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John, Jesus and the Renewal of Israel

by Richard Horsley and Tom Thatcher (2013), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

Interpretation of John’s gospel has traditionally focused on its unique Christology, a spiritual gospel (according to Clement), meaning that John’s story is less Jewish than what we see elsewhere. Horsley and Thatcher argue that “the Gospel of John portrays Jesus engaged in a renewal of the people of Israel against the rulers of Israel, both the Jerusalem authorities and the Romans who placed them in power” (p 1). They also articulate that religion was inseparable from political-economic life. The gospels are about all of life, life that is “inseparably political-economic-religious” (p 6).

We need to understand John’s story in its historical context. The fundamental social form in Roman Palestine was the village community, comprised of many multigenerational families. Rome ruled through a succession of client kings (Herod and his sons) or of religious collaborators (the Judean priesthood).

While Galilee was under the control of Herod’s son, Judea was under the control of the temple and its priesthood. During the lifetime of Jesus, Galilee and Judea were under different administration, but each had stories of resistance to the Romans. “There was a cultural divide that corresponded to the political-economic tradition, and the scribes and Pharisees who served the temple state” (p 33).

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Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine

by Richard Horsley (2014), review by Vern Ratzlaff

Horsley outlines the force of culture and the historical context of Jesus’ time that puts new perspective on the Roman occupation. The major conflict was not between Judaism and Hellenism, but between the Romans and their client Herodian and high priestly rulers on the one hand, and the vast majority of people living in villages on the other. “Jesus was catalyzing a movement based on the village communities that constituted the fundamental social form of Galilean and Judean society” (p x).

Horsley summarizes the popular movements in Judea, Galilee and Samaria that came into open conflict with the Romans and the temple authorities, the “messianic movements and popular prophetic movements” (p 39). He also points out the difference between what subordinates and superiors say and act, the difference between public transcripts and hidden transcripts (p 40). Peasant compliance was “a mark of acquiescence, not of support, and considerable discontent with Herod’s temple and the high priests had been building up precisely as the people acquiesced in Temple ceremonies and requirements under Herodian rule” (p 41).

In the context, Jesus’ words are not just “teachings” but speech acts (“performative speech”) that make something happen. Jesus’ call for renewal of Israel under the direct rule of G-d, in the tradition of the prophets, marked a politics of resistance and renewal, .ie., the religious political festival of Passover was the occasion and context for speaking truth to power (p 52).

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Exiles: Living in a Post-Christian Culture

Michael Frost (2006), reviewed by Vern Ratzlaff

In the western world, by the middle ages, church and state had become pillars of the social culture, supporting each other. Where at one time followers of Jesus had met secretly, now they were given some of the greatest temples and meeting spaces of the empire. Christianity moved from being a dynamic, revolutionary, social and spiritual movement to being a static religious institution with its attendance structure, priesthood and sacraments. It became Christendom.

But it has been in decline, where the institutions and values no longer have a major role. The church is experiencing a “sharp and dramatic deterioration in its influence and impact on western society” (p 5), as “the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence’ (p 6). Some see the church as dying; others express hope not in the reconstitution of Christendom but that the end of this epoch “actually spells the beginning of a new flowering of Christianity.

The death of Christendom removes the final props that have supported the culturally respectable, mainstream version of Christianity” (p 7).  The passing of Christendom might be compared to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, best described as exile, where we can no longer rely on temporal, cultural supports to reinforce our message, moved by the confronting message of Jesus.

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