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Le Roi est Mort! Vive le Roi!

Now I crown myself the king of fools,
self-proclaimed by virtue of my own vanity,
and as the awkward crown is precariously
balanced upon my misshapen head
a cacophony of trombones and drummers
announces the beginning of my sovereign rule.
Kneel down before me my leaky red-blood celled servants;
kiss the hem of my coffee stained robe
and hail me as your foolish lord.

The Earliest Incarnation of the Doctor...

The Bad-Tipping Pastor and the Unmerciful Servant

The story of the bad-tipping pastor has been flying around the internets in the past couple of days.  You may have already seen it - but in case you haven't:

A St. Louis Pastor wrote a snarky message on her receipt at an Applebee's restaurant.  "I give God 10% Why do you get 18"  - in response to the restaurant's policy of automatically adding a gratuity of 18% for parties of 8 or more.  A photo of the receipt and the snarky question appeared on the internet and it wasn't long before the pastor's identity was discovered.  She then called Applebees to demand that the waitress who posted the picture to the web be fired.

In sharing this story on the Facebook, I commented that "the wrong person in this story was fired." Which in turn sparked a brief flurry of discussion among my friends - one of whom laid the challenge to me that in accusing the pastor of being graceless towards the waitress I am, in turn, being graceless towards the pastor.

And this may be true.

But I prefer to let the accusation stand as a contemporary enactment of Jesus' parable of the unmerciful (or ungrateful) servant.

 Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times?"

Jesus said to him, "I don't tell you until seven times, but, until seventy times seven. Therefore the Kingdom of Heaven is like a certain king, who wanted to reconcile accounts with his servants. When he had begun to reconcile, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents.  But because he couldn't pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, with his wife, his children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down and knelt before him, saying, 'Lord, have patience with me, and I will repay you all!' The lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt.

"But that servant went out, and found one of his fellow servants, who owed him one hundred denarii and he grabbed him, and took him by the throat, saying, 'Pay me what you owe!'

"So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, 'Have patience with me, and I will repay you!' He would not, but went and cast him into prison, until he should pay back that which was due. So when his fellow servants saw what was done, they were exceedingly sorry, and came and told to their lord all that was done. Then his lord called him in, and said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt, because you begged me. Shouldn't you also have had mercy on your fellow servant, even as I had mercy on you?' His lord was angry, and delivered him to the tormentors, until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you don't each forgive your brother from your hearts for his misdeeds."

I only suggested that the pastor should have been the one to be fired.  Jesus’ parable would seem to call for something much worse…

What Isaiah Was Jesus Reading?

In Luke chapter 4: 14 - 30 we read of Jesus’ return to his hometown of Nazareth.  This wasn’t quite the triumphant return of the “local boy made good.” Instead he was rejected by his friends and family and was dragged out of town by the furious citizens who wanted to kill him by throwing him off the edge of a cliff.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that there is no “cliff” from which he could have been thrown, I am curious this morning about what Jesus read in the synagogue that provoked such a reaction.  Luke tells us that “the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.”  John P Meier suggests that Jesus chose the passage himself as “[i]t is anachronistic to think of a universally observed lectionary for synagogue services in the early 1^st century A.D.”[i]   Unrolling it, he came to the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

    because he has anointed me

    to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

    and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

But here we have a problem.  This text that Jesus read[ii] , as Luke records it, is not found in the book of Isaiah.  It is actually a conflation of two different (but not complete) parts of Isaiah.

Isaiah 61: 1 - 2	Isaiah 58: 6
1 The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,     because the Lord has anointed me     to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,     to proclaim freedom for the captives     and release from darkness for the prisoners, 2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor     and the day of vengeance of our God,     to comfort all who mourn,	6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice     and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free     and break every yoke?

The not quite complete passage from Isaiah 61: 1 – 2 has been interrupted with a single line from a single verse from chapter 58: 6.  The lines above in bold have been dropped from Luke’s account of Jesus’ reading in the Nazareth synagogue. 

So here’s the question:  How do we account for this strange reading?

And here are several possible (but not necessarily equally plausible) solutions:

Possibility 1 – The synagogue at Nazareth had a garbled copy of the book of Isaiah.  In an era of hand copied texts, there were frequent mistakes in the process.  Words and lines were dropped or repeated, words were rearranged or changed.  Various parts were merged together…. It is possible that the scroll owned by the local synagogue in Nazareth actually included this conflated variant reading.

Possibility 2 – Jesus, while reading from chapter 61 (and remember that the chapter and verse divisions came much, much, much later…) ‘improvised’ a little and included the line from chapter 58 from memory. 

Possibility 3- The source Luke consulted during his preliminary investigations had an imprecise memory.  Eyewitness testimony, while important, should be handled with caution.  Human memory is more fluid than we might like to admit. 

Possibility 4 – Luke bungled.  Perhaps his information was, in fact, completely reliable, but Luke failed to record it accurately.

Possibility 5 – Luke has purposefully changed the text in order accommodate his narrative and theological goals.  The gospels are not court room transcripts of historical events.  That Luke might have altered the content of Jesus’ Sabbath day reading and subsequent discourse in the synagogue shouldn’t be surprising.

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[i] Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus Vol:1 The Roots of the Problem and the Person, Doubleday, New York, New York, 1991,  pg. 302

[ii] And here again, I am ignoring for the moment, the question that should be asked, ‘Could Jesus even read?’