Refractions

Caesar has never wanted us to know anything but the grinding juggernaut of inevitability, of just the way things are. Caesar has never wanted us to know that there is an alternative to Caesar, another way, another kind of power and a different kind of future. Caesar has only ever offered the extension of current arrangements to create a known, predictable, imposed future. “Resistance is futile.”  Mostly we accommodate ourselves to this, deliberately or by default. We argue realpolitik and “It could be worse.” Some choose to make a deal, to become agents of Caesar, entrenching his power ever more deeply in the fabric of communities and the lives of households and persons, shoring up its claim to permanence and inevitability. Some retreat – to private and ahistorical spiritualities, to addictions, to one or more of the “isms” that embody our penchant for idolatry. Some are destroyed by the greed and violence of Caesar, Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar. Some rise up violently to overthrow (an...

For Isaiah, in the context of twenty-three verses of Chapter 7, from which we tear seven (10-16) for the fourth Sunday in Advent (A) the problem is idolatry, and the consequence is ruin. The people will be reduced to eating curds and honey while their land is swarmed, as if by flies, by a foreign army. And in the midst of that ruin, a child will be born. His name, the promise of his birth, Immanuel – “God-is-with-us”.  In the midst of great devastation, God's great "nevertheless". Immanuel! The context in which Isaiah gives this testimony is a struggle for Jerusalem (described in 2 Kings 16), first in an attack on Jerusalem by the alliance of Israel and Syria, then in a new alliance between Judah (King Ahaz) and Assyria (King Tiglathpile). Judah becomes, in many ways, Assyria's client state. Ahaz sends gold and silver from the temple as a “present” to Tiglathpile, and reorganizes the temple to feature altars that follow the pagan designs of Damascus. As usual, the...

“Their birth-songs are battle-songs, the women we love,” Joseph says to Elkanah. Elkanah thinks of Hannah, mocked by Penninah for what seems her weakness, her childlessness. Joseph considers Mary, pregnant without (apparently) the (biological) involvement of a male. “The women we love sing the mighty from their thrones, the empty-handed rich, the broken bows of the mighty and the wealthy hiring themselves out for minimum wage. They sing the humble exalted, the poor raised up from dust and the needy lifted from the ash-heap to sit with princes”. “Yes, they do, Elkanah says to Joseph. "They most certainly do.”  Joseph and Elkanah cannot speak for Mary and Hannah. But they can consider them, the women they love, and wonder what these birth-and-battle songs might mean. Elkanah knows the gossip that shrouds the soul of the woman he loves, that Penninah provokes Hannah to weeping and hunger. Joseph knows that he can foster or ruin the thriving of his expectant betrothed, whose expect...