What kind of crummy miracle is this!?

Jesus answered and said to [John the Baptist’s disciples], ‘Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of me.” (Lk 7: 20-23)

… wait a minute … The poor were not “made prosperous,” or at least given a steady income? Wouldn’t that be the “cure” for them? But no, the poor “had the gospel preached to them.”

The point I’m making is that material poverty is not an “affliction” our Lord promises to “heal” materially.

Sr. Vassa Larin, The Gospel and Prosperity (emphasis added).

Sr. Vassa’s quick observation that “material poverty is not an ‘affliction’ our Lord promises to ‘heal’ materially” left me wanting more, and before the day was over, I got more.

Father Steven Freeman in a podcast (I think it was an older one I hadn’t yet heard) noted that Christ made the lame walk, not fly. Christ restored the truth of things, mended brokenness. He didn’t lower himself to cheap parlor tricks.

This brought to mind some of the things C.S. Lewis wrote about Christ’s miracles as well. For instance, I believe he commented on the miraculous change of water into wine at the wedding at Cana (I can’t find the Lewis passage) as being what God always does — though He usually uses sunlight, soil and time — so that there’s a fitness to Christ’s miracles in a way missing in some miraculous stories from other religious traditions.

Is there anything broken about poverty? Is a rich man whole in a sense that the poor man lacks? Apparently neither our Lord nor His Apostle James thought so. (The scriptures make clear, though, that relief of poverty is a Christian duty.)

So in what sense does preaching the gospel to the poor restore the truth of things or mend brokenness? I’m not sure there’s any deficit unique to the poor that the preaching of the gospel addresses, but there’s a deficit in us all. Our truth is that we were made for union with God. Our brokenness is that we are alienated instead. And that’s where the preaching of the Gospel is exact what the poor need — as do all of us.

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Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Theophany 2013

On January 6, Eastern (Orthodox) Christians celebrate Theophany, not Epiphany. It is second only to Pascha (Easter) in importance, for it is the feast which celebrates the revelation of the Most Holy Trinity to the world through the Baptism of the Lord.

The major hymn:

When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, worship of the Trinity wast made manifest; for the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee, calling Thee His beloved Son. And the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of His word. O Christ our God, Who hath appeared and enlightened the world, glory to Thee.

In contrast, Epiphany for Western Christians celebrates the visitation of the Biblical Magi to the Baby Jesus, and thus Jesus’ physical manifestation to the Gentiles.

Secondarily, in the east, we recall:

When the Lord entered the waters of Jordan, He sanctified every drop of water on the face of the whole earth. Thus, water no longer is a mere object used or abused – some thing out of the tap. Rather, water is now a medium for cleansing the heart, blessing the soul, and healing infirmities; for every drop has touched the sacred flesh of the Lord Christ!

(Devotional for 1/4/13, italics added) So we also do on this day the Great Blessing of Water.

As a former Protestant of relatively “low church” sensibility, I must corroborate the devotional: we Orthodox Christians decidedly do believe that the Most Holy Trinity communicates grace through physical means, not just invisibly and spiritually. If you doubt, remember the woman healed merely by touching the hem of Christ’s garment, or the dead man raised when he touched Elisha’s bones.

It’s not magic, and sick people don’t typically leap up instantly healed after anointing with oil or holy water, but such parts of my Bible I didn’t underline as a Protestant amply attest physical means of grace.

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Postscript: My Priest is down with the flu, so a subdeacon and I must lead a Reader’s Typica – a service missing all but the “bones” of a liturgy. (You surely didn’t think we’d improvise, did you?) Here’s a meditation on some of what we’ll be missing, by a favorite priest/blogger, Fr. Stephen Freeman.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Choose your own Jesus

Ross Douthat takes a detour and frolic from politics to diss the interminable “search for the historic Jesus.” The proximate cause of his ire is a religion professor reportedly much smitten with the “well attested” notion of Jesus ben Pantera, the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier:

Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.

Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus.

…

[T]he synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

Ross is good when he’s carrying forward the New York Times’ mission, but this is better than good. Bullseye! All thumbs up!