This Sunday, the Old Testament reading in many
churches is Is. 58. Some Christians routinely issue a calumny against ancient
Judaism that assumes that it was a legalistic religion. Here is a parade
example of its falsehood.
The setting is one where God is answering the
complaints of the people. They are wondering why their worship practice seems
to do little good. They do what they are supposed to, but they feel no closer
to God.
God fires back with a remarkable linkage:
worship and justice. Some wish the church to be a place of solace away from
political squabbles. Some go so far as to say that the spiritual should not
intersect with the political. This does not seem to comport with much of the
biblical material. After all, the 10 Commandments have two tablets, one for the
“vertical” relationship with God and the “horizontal” relationship with each
other. Jesus sees love of God and love of neighbor as inextricably bound
together. Some take this and act as if worship is secondary to the doing of
social good, to be the Salvation Army without the Salvation part. NO,
Christians are called to help make the world look like the world presented
within the stained glass of the sanctuary.
Here are words from a generation or so ago:
“examples are profuse in the life of Jesus as to the political dimensions of
the gospel. Consider Herod's attempt to assassinate the child. Or the healing
episodes in which Jesus directly confronts the demonic powers and their effort
to wreck creation and ruin human life... Jesus is tempted by the power of death
incarnate as the devil in explicit political terms. ... Jesus in the wilderness
was tempted, truly tempted, to become idolatrous of the power of death, thereby
rejecting the very Word of God which constituted his being. He transcends and
repels the temptations and thus enunciates his Lordship in this world now. That
politics is, then, verified in his crucifixion. The politics of the gospel are
the politics of the cross." (Stringfellow, The
Politics of Spirituality, p. 44)
Indeed God turns the table on the worship
practice of fasting and instead makes it a program of social aid (6-7):“to
loose the chains of injustice... to set the oppressed free...to share food with
the hungry and provide the poor wanderer with shelter (NIV). In other words, it
is a prequel to the famous sheep and goats parable of Mt. 25 and the source for
the Roman Catholic corporal works of mercy.
It then becomes chilling as it seems to indicate
that the presence of God will become apparent if their social actions change
(v. 9). We rarely think of social sins as blocking our relationship with God.
We rarely feel the need for forgiveness, human or divine, for social sins.
In a time where spirituality is often limited to
the ethereal feelings of an individual, or people of faith are convinced that
faith means following a partisan banner, disengaged from the faith itself,
these are bracing words indeed.
In his new book the New Testament scholar N.T.
Wright sees our basic problem as a steadfast refusal to carry out our mandate
as humans: to see each other as made in the image and likeness of God and to
act like it. IN Isaiah we are called to be repairer of the breach, the restorer
of the streets. That had resonance in the time f Isaiah when the streets of the
once ruined city still needed repair. It has resonance in Alton
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