Category: Religion & Philosophy

Sabbath as Resistance

“In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. Such an act of resistance requires enormous intentionality and communal reinforcement amid the barrage of seductive pressures from the insatiable insistences of the market…” -Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance

Sabbath, or the spiritual discipline of resting one day every week, is practiced today by many orthodox Jews but virtually unheard of in most Christian circles. Yet in my own spiritual journey, it has been a healing antidote to the many idols of modern life. To set aside a 24-hour period every week where no work is to be performed helps me to reset, be rejuvenated, and detox from the toxic ideology that my worth is in what I can produce.

Below are a series of selections taken from Walter Brueggemann’s book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Walter Brueggemann is a legendary professor of theology at Columbia, focused on the Old Testament, and I love his insights. I hope you enjoy the selections I posted below, and recommend you read his entire book if you want to learn more!

The lack of rest inherent in Egypt’s system

“In the [Bible], the gods of Egypt are stand-ins for all the gods of the several empires. What they all have in common is that they are confiscatory gods who demand endless produce and who authorize endless systems of production.

It is clear that in this [Egypt’s] system there can be no Sabbath rest. There is no rest for Pharaoh in his supervisory capacity, and he undoubtedly monitors daily production schedules. Consequently, there can be no rest for Pharaoh’s supervisors or taskmasters; and of course there can be no rest for the slaves…the “Egyptian gods” also never rested, because of their commitment to the aggrandizement of Pharaoh’s system, for the glory of Pharaoh, surely redounded to the glory of the Egyptian gods. The economy reflects the splendor of the gods who legitimate the entire system, for which cheap labor is an indispensable footnote.

All parties at [the giving of the 10 Commandments]–YHWH, Moses, Israel–could well remember what it had been like in the world of Pharaoh:

  • They could remember that Pharaoh was regarded, and regarded himself, as a god, an absolute authority who was thought to be immune to the vagaries of history, a force with insatiable demands.
  • They could remember that Egypt’s socioeconomic power was organized like a pyramid, with a workforce producing wealth, all of which flowed upward to the power elite and eventually to Pharaoh who sat atop that pyramid.
  • They could remember that Pharaoh, even though he was absolute in authority and he occupied the pinnacle of power, was an endlessly anxious presence who caused the entire social environments to be permeated with a restless anxiety that had no limit or termination…
  • They could remember how that nightmare of scarcity… led to rapacious state policies of monopoly that caused the crown to usurp the money, the cattle, the land, and, finally, the bodies of vulnerable peasants (Genesis 47:13-26).

Pharaoh was remembered at Sinai. But Pharaoh was not at Sinai. He was left helpless at the bottom of the waters. At Sinai, while Pharaoh was remembered, YHWH was front and center as the decisive force who enwrapped Israel in new promises and new social responsibilities…

God introduces Sabbath to His people

Thus the Sabbath command of Exodus 20:11 recalls that God rested on the seventh day of creation… [and moreover shows]

  • That YHWH is not a workaholic,
  • That YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work…Such divine rest serves to delegitimate and dismantle the endless restlessness sanctioned by the other gods and enacted by their adherents.

Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest. The same either/or is evident, of course, in the teaching of Jesus. In his Sermon on the Mount, he declares to his disciples: “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt 6:24). The way of mammon (capital, wealth), is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.

Sabbath as Resistance to the Anxiety and Violence of Unrestrained Capitalism

And of course, every facet of this restlessness is grounded in and produces anxiety that variously issues in aggression and finally manifests in violence:

  • violence expressed in military adventurism that enjoys huge “patriotic” support;
  • violence against the earth that is signaled by overuse;
  • violence in sports, now with evidence of “paid injuries”;
  • violence in the neighborhood, with guns now the icon of “violent security”;
  • violence against every vulnerable population, sexual aggression against the young, and the “war on the poor,” which are accomplished by law and by banking procedures.

It is impossible, is it not, to overestimate the level of anxiety that now characterizes social relationship in our society of acute restlessness? That violent restlessness makes neighborliness nearly impossible. None of this is new; all of it is much chronicled among us. All of it is as old as Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Such faithful practice of work stoppage is an act of resistance. It declares in bodily ways that we will not participate in the anxiety system that pervades our social environment. We will not be defined by busyness and by acquisitiveness and by pursuit of more, in either our economics or our personal relations or anywhere in our lives…

And as the work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety, so energy is redeployed to the neighborhood. The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness. The latter does not produce so much, but it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity that redefines the human project…

The Seduction of Prosperity

Moses regards the land of Canaan, it being so fertile, as an enormous temptation and a huge seduction to Israel…Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia…Moses understands, as do the prophets after him, that being in the land poses for Israel a conflict between two economic systems, each of which views the land differently…if the land is a possession, then the proper way of life is to acquire more. If the land is inheritance, then the proper way of life is to enhance the neighborhood and the extended family so that all members may enjoy the good produce of the land…

“All are to rest: ‘sons and daughters, slaves, oxen, donkeys, livestock, immigrants….Sabbath is a great day of equality when all are equally at rest…

In Deuteronomy 15:1-18, Moses enunciates the most radical extrapolation of Sabbath in the entire Bible. Every seven years, in an enactment of the sabbatic principle, Israel is enjoined to cancel debts on poor people. The intention in this radical act of “seven” is that there should be no permanent underclass in Israel. Moses, in this instruction, anticipates resistance to the radical extrapolation of Sabbath, that Israelites may be “hard hearted” and “tight fisted”. But that is because they have fallen into coercive patterns whereby the poor are targeted as objects of economic abuse rather than seen as Sabbath neighbors…

Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend out power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing…

[In Isaiah 5:8-10] the indictment is against those who “join house to house” and field to field”, exactly the language of the commandment and of the Micah oracle. The process consists of buying up the land of small peasant farmers in order to develop large estates. The vulnerable peasants are then removed from their land and denied a livelihood, and now coveters can bask in their newly secured isolated self-indulgence…in our time, the same crisis might refer to urban gentrification that dislocates the poor and the vulnerable…

Sabbath is an antidote to anxiety that both derives from our craving and in turn feeds those cravings for more. Sabbath is an arena in which we recognize that we live by gift and not by possession, that we are satisfied by relationships of attentive fidelity and not by amassing commodities. We know in the gospel tradition that we may indeed ‘gain the whole world’ and lose our souls (Mark 8:34-37). [Sabbath fights against that temptation.]”

Communal/Generational Sin

Many white evangelical Americans have a very individualistic view of sin, wherein we cannot understand how we could carry any responsibility for something that our ancestors/relatives/friends/police/leaders did or continue to do. [I’m sure that’s also true for some other types of Christians too, but I see this view being especially prevalent among fellow white evangelicals]. Yet that is not a fully biblical view of sin: God calls his people to enact justice and righteousness for the entire community, not just in their own personal lives. Hence the prophets’ warnings to the entire nation of Israel, or Jesus’ warning to entire groups of people like the priests and Pharisees. It is tough to shed our solely individualistic view of sin and adopt the Bible’s more balanced view, but understanding communal guilt is absolutely essential if we are able to ever tackle massive, widespread sins in our society like racism. 

In 2017 Tim Keller, a white pastor from NYC, gave a short talk explaining the biblical view of communal guilt. It is more of an overview than a deep-dive, but it’s a good overview of the concept. However, I will say that the absolute best way to adopt a biblical view of sin is to just soak A LOT in the Bible and learn more about the ancient Middle Eastern culture(s) in which the Bible was written. As a start, check out these Bible passages below that address the idea of systemic/communal/generational sin and evil. It took me barely about an hour to find all these passages, and I know there are many, many more!

As you read them, ask yourself: What would it look like for white American Christians to adopt a similar mindset in our day? What would it look like to actually confess, repent, and make amends for the systemic sins that are present in our culture? And what are the costs if we continually reject the Bible’s complex and multi-faceted view of sin in favor of a purely self-centered one?

Daniel 9:4-5 And I prayed to the Lord my God, and made confession, and said, “O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments, we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments.”

Isaiah 6:5: “5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Ezra 9:5-7 “5 Then, at the evening sacrifice, I rose from my self-abasement, with my tunic and cloak torn, and fell on my knees with my hands spread out to the Lord my God 6 and prayed: “I am too ashamed and disgraced, my God, to lift up my face to you, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. 7 From the days of our ancestors until now, our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today…”

Leviticus 26:40-42: “40But if they will confess their sins AND the sins of their ancestors—their unfaithfulness and their hostility toward me, 41 which made me hostile toward them so that I sent them into the land of their enemies—then when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin, 42 I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.”

Judges 9:56-57: “56 Thus God repaid the wickedness that Abimelek had done to his father by murdering his seventy brothers. 57 God also made the people of Shechem pay for all their wickedness. The curse of Jotham son of Jerub-Baal came on them.”

Matthew 23:31-36 “31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started! 33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation.“

Deuteronomy 24:7: “If someone is caught kidnapping a fellow Israelite and treating or selling them as a slave, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you.”

1 Corinthians 12:25-26: “25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

Matthew 25:31-33: “31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left….”

2 Chronicles 7:14: “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Matthew 12:41-45 “41 The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. 42 The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, and now something greater than Solomon is here. 43 “When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”

Isaiah 24:5-6: “The earth is defiled by its people;
    they have disobeyed the laws,
violated the statutes
    and broken the everlasting covenant.
6 Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
    its people must bear their guilt.
Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up,
    and very few are left.“

Malachi 3:8-9: 8 “Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. “But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ “In tithes and offerings.9 You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me.“

Revelation 18:1-5: “After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. 2 With a mighty voice he shouted:
“‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!’[a]
    She has become a dwelling for demons
and a haunt for every impure spirit,
    a haunt for every unclean bird,
    a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal.
3 For all the nations have drunk
    the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her,
    and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”
4 Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“‘Come out of her, my people,’
    so that you will not share in her sins,
    so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
5 for her sins are piled up to heaven,
    and God has remembered her crimes.“

A Good Friday Historical Realization

[Written on Good Friday 2020]

I’ve been reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian wars, which occurred a few centuries before Jesus’ life. In reading his work, it struck me how after every single battle, the victorious army would set up a “trophy” made up of the armor, shields, and weapons of the defeated soldiers. These “trophies,” which were also usually dedicated to a god, would be erected on the battlefield as makeshift monuments displaying the power of the victors over their enemies. The Romans would continue the Greek tradition of setting up trophies in commemoration of major battles they won.

Anyway, I decided to Google “what did ancient trophies looks like”, and…well…they looked a LOT like what happens in a crucifixion! Do you see the resemblance?

All images from this link

In other words, Jesus’ death on the cross looked very similar to a trophy, the ancient militaristic symbol for a victory. This blew my mind, so I did some more research and it turns out early Christians (who actually lived under the Romans) made this connection as well. Tertullian, writing in the 2nd Century CE, said “The Cross is a trophy, a sign of…victory over death.”

Isn’t that fascinating! On Good Friday, Jesus inverts the intended cultural message of the Roman Empire’s practice of crucifixion. While the Romans wanted every crucifixion to be a public “trophy” that displayed the unlimited power and victory of their Empire against any mortal that dared resist it, through the cross Jesus actually is the one who conquers! As Paul says in Colossians 2:15, “Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he (Jesus) made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” And as Christians believe, at the cross Jesus isn’t just conquering the Roman empire, but every power of hell, sin, and death. The irony is that in dying on Calvary, the site of Jesus’ greatest “defeat” is simultaneously the site of his greatest victory.

To put it another way, theologian Brigette Kahl writes, “Crosses and trophies are twin images in the Roman visual world of the first century CE, omnipresent as signposts of imperial power over the bodies and minds of the conquered. While crosses expose armor-less human bodies to torturous dying, … trophies are the body-less armor of an already dead enemy. Both are images of triumph and merciless retaliation against the non-compliant… Seen through the lens of the trophy, Paul’s theology of cross and justification by faith emerges as a resistant messianic counter-visualization, as the body of the crucified empowers a rebellious re-embodiment of the dis-embodied.”

There’s probably a lot more symbolism here, and if anyone is a student of ancient history or of Christianity, I welcome your input. All this to say: this yet another reason why studying history is important. Without it, we are lacking the crucial pieces of cultural context that can inform and enrich our deepest beliefs.

May everyone have a very blessed Good Friday.

Babel, Empire, and Learning to Speak a New Language

20th-Century postmodern philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, and others all teach an essential truth: language matters. The words and discourse used to describe reality in turn actually create and construct that very reality. Those who control the words and terms control how reality is perceived. I won’t explain the whole theory in what I hope is a short essay, but some examples commonly used are rights discourse (used to justify violence against those seen as having no rights) or nation-state discourse (used to unify the nation against the outsiders). These philosophers argue that language not only fails to describe the world as it truly is, but it also inevitably inscribes the values and taboos of the ruling class. Institutions of oppression are inevitably established, masked by a linguistic system that justifies it.

Interestingly enough, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel also addresses this philosophical truth. In the story, the whole world has one common language. One group of people decides to create a city (Babel) with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that “we may make a name for ourselves, and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). We can see their fear of being conquered and divided. Their response is to group together, unified by a single language, build a fortress city, and defend against those who wish to scatter them. By their common language, they seek to control the entire world.

Hans Bol, Tower of Babel, 16th Century

God, however, does not like this. Babel is the establishment of the first empire, and while it is not a threat to God, he knows that such a dominant power would wreak immeasurable pain, havoc, and suffering on earth. Thus God says, “Let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other”. They do so, and the empire is halted in its tracks. The very thing Babel was created to defend against—its people being scattered—is in fact what happens to them.

God’s intervention at Babel creates other languages, and thus more opportunities for different people groups to rise up with their own languages of oppression. But God is more willing to have that than a singular language that could dominate everybody. Indeed, by scattering the people of Babel, God is actually putting humans back on the path he originally intended for them in Genesis 1, to “be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth”, which would inevitably result in a diverse array of cultures, foods, clothing, and human appearances. Diversity of language and culture was always part of God’s plan.

What’s interesting is that throughout the Hebrew Bible, the word for “Babylon” is not just similar, it’s exactly the same as the word for “Babel.” Thus every time we see Babylon come up later in scripture, the poetic-spiritual connection must automatically be made to the Tower of Babel and to the idea of language. The destruction of the Temple and the burning of Jerusalem in 587B.C.: Babel. The beginning of the Israelite captivity: Babel. Babel sees [herself] as God: “I will continue forever—the eternal queen!” Babel proclaims in Isaiah 47,“I am, and there is none besides me.” Babel is the eternal evil empire, the narrative foil for the people of Israel throughout the Hebrew scriptures. Babel is an archetype, a symbol for empire, domination, greed, and spiritual adultery. Even 500 years later, in the Christian New Testament, John uses the image of Babel/Babylon to illustrate the brokenness of humans (even though the actual Babylonian empire had been conquered by Persia far earlier).  

In Revelation 17, Babel is depicted as a woman in a desert sitting on a scarlet beast. The beast is covered with blasphemous names: words so evil that merely writing them down was a crime—again highlighting the connection between wrongful language and evil. Later in Revelation, we learn that the woman Babel “is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth”, that the merchants all trade their goods with her, and that she is the murderer God’s people. Babel is the locus of all power, wealth, and violence against God and his people. All empires can truthfully call Babel their mother.

Artwork by Shin Maeng commissioned for Urbana 18. You can see more of Shin’s art on Instagram: @shinhappens

It therefore makes sense that in John’s vision Babel’s violent destruction is met with wild celebration in heaven. At last!— the evil city that is the spiritual signifier for every emperor, greedy merchant, and persecutor of innocents has been thrown down. With the final destruction of Babel, God’s holy city (New Jerusalem) can descend from heaven. In New Jerusalem are people from every nation and language; gone is the false unity that Babel attempted to impose. God’s Kingdom instead brings peaceful diversity. What an image!

But is there hope in the here and now? What can Christians such as myself do to battle the empire of Babel all around us? Hatred, greed, racism, domination—they surround us all, and many of God’s people give themselves up to these things. Whether it is out of fear of “being scattered”, or ignorance, or perhaps because we have bought into the myths of Empire, too many Christians see serving the nation-state above God and engaging in imperialism or domination as acceptable and even admirable practices.

But God gives us a “linguistic turn” to flee the colonizing language of Babel. And that is through Jesus, the Word. As John 1:1 states, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1 is perhaps the most incredible chapter in the Bible from a philosophical philological perspective.) God seems to know that He cannot be completely translated into human language, so he must become human. Jesus is God’s translation: all of God’s words, logic, and law revealed in one single being. In order to speak God’s language, his Words, we follow Jesus.

And Jesus behaves in an entirely anti-Babel manner. He wants his followers scattered, that doesn’t bother him in the least. He eschews violence. He opposes all who seek empire, Roman and Jewish alike. He cares little for nationalism, instead seeking out the “Others” around him: women, Samaritans/Palestinians, Romans, slaves, the poor… Jesus shows us how to break the curse of Babel. And that’s through unconditional love and forgiveness. It’s as if he’s saying to humans: “Stop trying to make a name for yourselves—I’ll give you a new name”.

Ultimately, rather than overthrow Babel by force, and so become leader of a new Babel, Jesus willingly lets himself be tortured and killed by the biggest, most powerful empire the Middle East had ever seen–Rome. He endures the absolute worst that humanity has to throw at him, and even forgives them in the midst of that: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” Three days later he rises from the grave, once and for all defeating the final tool of the oppressor—the threat of death.

If that were all Jesus did, that would be enough. But there’s more! In Pentecost, we see another linguistic turn. The Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples and they proclaim the good news of Jesus to a diverse crowd from every nation known to the residents of the Middle East—yet each listener hears words in their own language. Babel, where language was confused, is finally reversed, but in a totally unexpected way; it’s not that everyone suddenly speaks the same language. Instead each person hears the Gospel in their own home language. It is a foretaste of Heaven, where every single nation, tribe, and tongue will worship God all as a great multitude (Rev. 7:9).

In the present day, the Holy Spirit is God living inside of humans who choose to follow Jesus, enabling us to speak and live out God’s language as Jesus did. That may mean physical miracles, or speaking in tongues, or prophecy. And it may mean living in an anti-Babel manner, by loving our enemies, aiding the oppressed, and reaching out to the Other. But in all of this, we must speak in the language of Jesus, the one who did not seek to have power over others, but instead willingly laid down his life. We cannot advance the Kingdom of Jesus with the language and tools of Babel, as tempting as they may be. For those of us who have been raised in empire, in Babylon, all our lives, we will have to learn a radically new way of being, thinking, and speaking. It is hard, but that is the way of Jesus.

(This essay is adapted from a post I originally wrote in 2011).