God-with-a-Goody-Bag
Wait just a minute. Is Jesus trying to take stuff away or give it?
by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Gospel Reading: Luke 12:32–40
For Sunday, August 8, 2010: Year C – Ordinary 19
Let’s try and meet some new girls.
Many pericopes in the lectionary contain within them something so familiar, so known that they become by default what the passage is about. When I read passages like this one from Luke 12 it feels like a bustling cocktail party. I scan the crowded room of unknown eyes and noses and mouths until I see a familiar face. I scan the passage of random verses which all seem so very unfamiliar until bam! I see her: where your treasure is, there you heart will be also. It’s tempting to hang out with the one girl you know. But let’s be honest. EVERYBODY knows her. So, just for tonight, let’s see what the other girls are like.
What not to wear?
Hmmmm, take verse 33 for instance: What’s up with the contradictory fashion sense? Just a couple chapters ago in Luke when Jesus sends out the seventy, he instructs them, “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals,” yet now in verse 33 of Chapter 12 he says that it’s okay to make homemade ones. So which is it? And again in Luke 12:22 Jesus says to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.” Yet here he suggests we have spandex at the ready: Be dressed for action (verse 33).
So how exactly do we take what Jesus says at face value? Perhaps we don’t. I cannot help but assume that when we face a text which contradicts not only itself but also several passages that proceed it, the answer is simple: We don’t actually know what it means. The text simply resists our attempts to domesticate it. It’s not something easily transposed to a tacky coffee mug.
Good News/Bad News
Other texts might seem more promising. Check out verse 32. Now there’s an attractive little number in a party dress. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Nice. This is fabulous news! A Father whose good pleasure it is to give us the kingdom. I could use a Father who wants to give me stuff. The image of God-with-a-goody-bag is understandably popular and I, for one, would quickly sign up for such a God.
Yet in the very next verse Jesus pulls a bait-and-switch, because now he’s saying we should sell our stuff. And then later Jesus describes himself as a thief: “But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Am I the only one who feels like Jesus just implied that he’s like a thief? Usually Jesus is the kinder, gentler person of the Trinity. Not here. (But I love it when the first and second persons of the Trinity try and play Good Cop/Bad Cop.)
The good news is that the Father’s good pleasure is to give you the kingdom. The bad news is that his son is going to steal from you whatever is left that you haven’t already gotten rid of. Maybe your pride. Or your ambition. Or your obsession with your retirement money. Or your sense of doom. Or your Kia Sorento.
God’s insistence that I have less does not instill in me the greatest confidence that God really wants to give me more.
The Hardest Question
Perhaps it’s time to pop the question – the hardest question in this pericope for me: Does God want to give us stuff, or take stuff away? According to this text, The Father is a giver and the Son is a taker. What’s up with that?
Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber is the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. She is the author of Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television (Seabury, 2008) and blogs at www.sarcasticlutheran.com and Jim Wallis’ www.GodsPolitics.com. Nobody really believes she’s an ordained pastor in the ELCA. Maybe it’s the sleeve tattoos or the fact that she swears like a truck driver. Either way…she’s fine with it. Nadia lives in Denver with her family of four.
I love your question “Does God want to give us stuff, or take stuff away?”
In your asking, I find the same posture toward Scripture with which I’ve connected in the thought of Jacques Ellul: That the biblical text is fundamentally dialectical and contradictory, which incidentally doesn’t make it less true. Holding the tension between two opposites is what any honest reading of Scripture requires of us.
For instance, is God with us or is God holy and separate from us? Does God require obedience or does God forgive sin? Does God judge or does he reconcile? Is the kingdom here or not here yet? Are we saved by faith alone or are we required to work out our salvation with fear and trembling? The text teaches both/and.
Ellul claims that life (including human history) without tension and conflicting facts and ideas is static and might as well be dead. God has created a world in which dialectic (“investigating opposing ideas and forces”) fuels movement and growth. In Hegelian terms, thesis without anti-thesis yields no synthesis. And, history does not progress forward. Ellul claims the same is true for individual human lives. I suspect this is also true for Christian communities.
I think that embracing this philosophy (especially as artists) allows us to express ourselves more effectively in culture. Our postmodern world has become keen to the fact that tension exists; it is reality. This is why the fundamentalist version of a “domesticated” Jesus – to use your term – with nice and neat categories, answers, and boxes will not do.
It will not do, first, because this is not what the Bible reveals about God. Second, it will not do because our world will not accept such a One.
August 4th, 2010 at 4:54 pmFace value reads are always a blast, but I wonder how much reading into things we are doing in view of our reference frame of a greed/material driven culture. Peter appears to wonder the same in v41, but likely from an anti-greed/anti-material community of his fellow apostles. Either way, most fascinating.
August 4th, 2010 at 5:48 pm[...] Wednesday, August 4, 2010 in Uncategorized Response to @LindaParriott RT of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s post called “God with a Goody Bag” [http://thehardestquestion.org/yearc/ordinary19gospel/] [...]
August 4th, 2010 at 6:54 pm@Eric,
This is exactly what I find compelling about Lutheran theology: paradox. As in we are all simultaneously Sinner and Saint. The tension between 2 opposing things is where the energy is. I actually would find the Bible MORE suspect if there were no contradictions within its pages. Those places in which we find dissonance in the text are the places most rich with meaning for me…maybe because they resemble life more than all the stuff that seems to make sense.
@Ron,
August 5th, 2010 at 7:51 amI wonder how possible it is for us to NOT read the text through both the materialism and the Western individualism of our culture.
@Nadia Its too bad so much of the early church fathers writings and commentary are lost or have yet to be translated. I’ve found it fascinating pulling up commentaries from the 1800′s on via interlibrary archival copy services… While not perfect by any means, I think it takes some of the contemporary cultural bias out of the picture. Otoh, reading old printing like such, even if in English is major headache producing.
August 5th, 2010 at 11:41 amAfter reading your comments on Luke 12 and the tension between giving and taking away for some reason I couldn’t get the 2010 Kia Soul comercial out of my head. Maybe your comment about Kia lead me in this direction. The comercial draws on a popular rap song – “you can deal with this or you can deal with that – this or that – this or that”. Isn’t “that” the way many deal with scripture? This or that – either or. What ever happened to the gray? The “and both”? The tension which leads us to wander the wilderness of the divine? Who ever said God’s kingdom made any sense? That’s the beauty – not clearly defined and under control – but splendidly out of our control! “You can deal with this or you can deal with that!”. Just can’t get rid of that song!!!
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November 23rd, 2010 at 5:44 pm