Friday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
I often hear people proclaiming that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are drastically different. One is a God of wrath, a God who slays people on behalf of the people of Israel, a God who is violent and vengeful. The other is a God of mercy, so bursting full of love that he sends his only Son to die for us on a cross. This dichotomy has been popular at various points in Christian history, as far back as the second century (in a heresy known as Marcionism). This kind of dichotomy is attractive because it means you can throw out all the "bad" parts of scripture in favor of the part that looks the best and most makes us happy. The thing is, you can't get too far in this kind of over-generalization of scripture without bumping headlong into evidence that this just isn't true. Today's scriptures provide a case in point.
In the first reading (2 Timothy 3:10-17), Paul contrasts his own way of life and his own persecutions from those who are charlatans, who deceive and are deceived. He suggests that anyone who is trying to follow Jesus will find themselves at odds with other people, with authorities and so on, because Jesus asks for some pretty radical commitments that go against standard thinking of the day (including our own day). For example, Jesus forbids divorce, something that was practiced relatively widely in both Jewish and Roman culture; he eats with tax collectors and those would would not ordinarily be given the time of day. He shows very great concern for the poor, those who so often get overlooked despite the best efforts of society.
So for Paul, living a Christian life will put you at odds with society to the point that you will experience persecution of some sort. (It doesn't have to be death, but it may just be derision or intolerance.) Paul worries that those who are not experiencing persecutions in some way are probably not living up to the faith, but are probably instead agreeing far too much with social norms that are against God's teachings.
Thus Paul gives his protege Timothy some advice: he needs to be faithful to what he has learned and believed, which includes the scriptures he has known from childhood. Now remember: whenever people are referring to "Scripture" in the New Testament, they mean the Old Testament. The New Testament was being written at that time and had not yet been collected and codified. So Paul is saying that the Old Testament is where Timothy will find the means to follow Jesus. Old and New cannot be separated. And indeed, a closer look at the scriptures confirms this. For example, Jesus' great commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is found in Deuteronomy. The Old Testament prophets are full of warnings about caring for the poor, the sick, and the orphans.
Jesus himself, in today's gospel (Mark 12:35-37) confirms that Old and New must be read together, for here, he reveals what it means to be the Christ, based on Psalm 110:1. We already know about Jesus in the Old Testament, even though he had not yet been born. The Old Testament reveals Jesus Christ to us, in full - and this is so well enshrined in Handel's Messiah, which tells Jesus story using only Old Testament writing.
So what do we do, then, with the passages of scripture that we don't like - the ones that seem to portray God as wrathful and vengeful? In part I think this requires prayer and humility, and a recognition that we cannot possibly know everything about God or life or the way things work. Sometimes being loving requires justice, and retribution, which isn't a comfortable spot to be in, when you're the one on the receiving end. But I also think that part of the way to deal with this problem is to remember that the parts we like come right alongside the parts we don't like. They are bound up and mixed up together, just as we ourselves are all mixed up, good and not-so-good, together. This is one of the mysteries of human life.
Today, let us pray for the grace to be good people, even as we recognize that in our humanness, we don't know entirely what it means to be totally good.
- Jana M. Bennett