Turning The Dial
Having been raised without television has advantages. When in 2015 I chose to reduce my news intake from broadcast media, it wasn’t difficult. Consistent with this decision to be selective about media exposure, I skipped coverage of the presidential inauguration. Instead, I sought out William Barber II’s sermon at the Commemorative Service of the King Center.
It was in high school that I learned that the sign of a good news publication is that it is able to represent opposing views. Few publications offer such perspectives and I have learned to seek them myself. For our current situation I can say that I already know the perspective of the politics of power and I do not need more of it. I will seek opposing views instead. This predisposition was nurtured by many years of listening to the scriptures read by the Church in worship.
But it wasn’t until seminary that I received my first introduction to Biblical hermeneutics. Form criticism was waning but still very present, seemingly preferring speculation (about a text’s original place or function) to the text we actually have before us. But hermeneutics is a wider field, and what the lectionary gives us for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany shows not only that we have long been listening to the Scriptures (Neh 8:1) but that the Church’s reading of the scriptures has given us a hermeneutic to read our times.
Ezra/Nehemiah is a problematic work. Wes Howard-Brook says that it is a story unable to disentangle itself from imperial religion, and because the perspective of the narrative is that of the returnees from exile in Babylon, the people in the land are shunned as foreigners.¹ That the people wept when they heard the Law is commonly interpreted as a sign of remorse when confronted with their sins, but at least one interpreter wonders if the people were weeping because some of the interpretations provided by the Levites were hurtful and injurious.² Ezra/Nehemiah finds no echo in the New Testament.
And so I am not entirely sure what to make of Ezra/Nehemiah. Given the xenophobic aspects of the work, should it have been included in the Canon? Yet, since it is part of the Church’s scriptures, I wonder if in the places where it offends we can learn why it offends, how it interacts with the rest of the scriptures, and how it can help us better understand the calling of the Church. Our reading provides us with the opportunity to seek a deeper understanding of our identity as God’s people. It is not without irony that it is Ezra/Nehemiah that provides this opportunity. This returns to us the question of hermeneutics, as applied to the scriptures as well as to the way we navigate the world.
We must note that our pericope does not talk about the walls of Jerusalem, nor about Israel’s neighbours or enemies, nor does it speak about a new rise of the nation. As much as Ezra/ Nehemiah is entangled in imperial politics, our reading is about Israel remembering the covenant, God’s gift and the guarantor of its identity as God’s people. Those among us who have come from other places know the challenge to maintain one’s identity in a new land. But remembering the covenant means to notice the dissonances of Ezra/Nehemiah with the rest of the scriptures which call on God’s people ‘not to abhor any of the Edomites, for they are your kin, not to abhor any of the Egyptians, because you were an alien residing in their land, and to remember that your children of the third generation that are born to you may be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.’ (Deut 23) Seeking a hermeneutic to read our times, we remember that we need not just a few verses, but the whole of scripture.
In our Gospel reading we encounter Jesus, who, having resisted temptation, returns to Galilee. In the synagogue he is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and proceeds to read his mission statement: good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, the setting free of those who are oppressed, the proclamation of the year of Jubilee; words that evoke the expectation of the restoration of God’s people. We do well to notice that in his reading Jesus omits the day of vengeance proclaimed in Isaiah. Jesus shifts the parameters, showing us that in the reign of God there is no place for vengeance. Not surprisingly, we encounter Jesus as the interpretative key for the scriptures and for the life of the church in the world.
I don’t regret having missed the inauguration and chosen the witness of the Church instead. The narrative of the Church is our narrative, and the good news to the poor and the inclusion of the foreigner is our hermeneutic. We just need to turn the dial more often.