Twenty First Sunday 1996

Twenty First Sunday 1996

The Tribalization of God

The point of the reading is contained in this whole business of the Jews’ self-understanding as God’s chosen people. What does it mean, in other words, to be God’s chosen people? In normal usage you would say: "I’m elect..., therefore you are not." It is very simple: "I am chosen, you’re excluded, you’re not chosen." This is a normal tendency among us human beings, and you see it over and over in the history of all religions, not just Judaism. It’s what could easily be called the tribalization of God: God is our God, she is safely in our corner and we can call upon Her any time we want to do anything we want against anybody we want banged upon.

The Jews suffer from that as well, and so we have this extraordinary document in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Jonah. What is the Book of Jonah about? "It ain’t necessarily so," as George and Ira Gershwin said. It ain’t necessarily a piece of history, but it is a very profound piece of theology, which, of course, is what the writer intended . Namely, the Book of Jonah is precisely a caution against the Jews’ tribalizing of God through their understanding of elect as a mode of privileging themselves and dis-privileging, if there is such a word, everybody else. The Book of Jonah says: "no, I’m going to send the Jews’ greatest prophet to the Jews’ greatest enemies, the Ninevites, and have them preach repentance, and then, by God, they’re going to repent." And Jonah, of course, is outraged: "What do you mean? We’re the elect of God; they’re a bunch of bloody pagans..." The interesting thing was that the Jews chose to include the Book of Jonah in their own collection of official texts as a caution to themselves against misconstruing what election meant.

Many of us in this room grew up with this official doctrine, "extra ecclesium nulla salus." It sounds better in Latin because it doesn’t sound so noxious as it really is: "outside the Church, no one is saved..." When was that particular self-understanding of the Roman Church perversed? --At the second Vatican Council in 1965... The point ought to be clear that we had not listened well enough to our own Jewish past to understand what election means. To be elect means precisely to be the agency of God’s saving will for everybody... The notion of God’s electing us is not the fact that God has provided a pedestal upon which we can climb and therefore look contemptuously upon all the underlings, which is of course everybody who is not part of our crowd... The arrogance, however unkind or however veiled with all kinds of psychological dodges, with which the Catholic Church has bestridden the world is remarkable. And it remains in place, if you remember a couple of years ago, the Pope said he wanted to celebrate the change of the millennium by rehearsing all of the viciousness that the Catholic Church has worked upon the world: the inquisition, the destruction of native peoples and native religions, virtually all over the world... And the College of Bishops said, "no, no, no, we don’t want to do that..." Well, I suggest that’s precisely what we need to do and if we listen to our own Jewish past, and truly appropriate it, that’s what we would rush to do.

So let me make a suggestion, finally, as to where we Roman Christians can re-appropriate our Jewishness as the elect of God, the saving agent of God. We have normally taken that in the metaphor of a mouth: God has given us a mouth with which to address the world... All theology in the Roman Universities and Colleges is traceable back to a Thirteenth Century Dominican named Thomas Aquinas... I’d like to propose that what God had in mind was to give us Roman Christians new ears with which to hear. To hear the quiet presence of God in African Tribal religion, in Chinese Confucianism, in Indian Hinduism... I’m talking about precise examples of where Roman Missionaries, Jesuits, have in fact been introduced into India, and Africa, and China with a view, not of listening, which is the first of the saving acts of God, but of addressing and speaking. If God has not first given us ears to listen attentively we don’t even know whom we are addressing. How do you talk meaningfully with another human being if you’ve not first heard that human being, and listened attentively to find where, at the deepest level, you have a shared life, or shared desires, or shared hopes? I mean, we in the university are not very good at this because we are paid for running our mouths, which we do endlessly... And the whole great crisis of political correctness in the academy today, however you stand vis-à-vis that issue, is somebody asking, "are you people really listening?" How large are your ears and how great is your heart, that you can hear and take seriously somebody who is alien? I put it to you, that ought to be the distinction because that’s what election means. If we are to act as God’s saving agent in the world that means that, above all, we have to have the skills to listen. Implicit in the capacity to listen, of course, is a profound awareness of the partiality, not provisionality, of everything we know, or think we know, or ought to know, or want to achieve... Because without that we can’t listen...

For years and years I’ve had this sneaking suspicion, without thinking anything particularly intelligent, that by walking away from our Judaism, we have walked away from something that is absolutely essential to who we say we are as Roman Christians. And, because the Church today is in worse shape than I’ve ever seen it in my sixty-one years, I think we ought to be really earnest in seeking some way to have hold of something that is worth holding on to; we ought to go back to our roots and to attempt to live out of them, rather than out of the particularly deracinated life, uprootedness, that characterizes so much of Christian life today. And that’s why it’s really important that we gather here and listen to each other, and listen to these words, and find peace in the prospect of finding real joy in what we say is the truth, because if we don’t find it here folks, everything else is, to use the famous metaphor, a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic, and my God, so much of our history fits that particular description... We ought to have leaned that life is too short to spend time doing that.

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