🦁 Lent 3-👑
Reflection
Hello and welcome to first forward Advanced Scriptural Insight for Christian Soldiers. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. The readings for the third week in Lent, Year B or Marks here is comes to us from Access 20 Psalm 19, first Corinthians one and John two.
And there are two really important pieces the that I want to cover in this morning's reflection on the see the revised common lectionary. The first comes to us in Exodus and Xs 20 is the Ten Commandments. The first appearance of the Ten Commandments makes another appearance in Deuteronomy. But this is the Exodus text and one of the shortest lines in Scripture, one of the most debated, I think I think that's fair to say in terms of military service is Exodus 20, verse 13 You shall not murder. And I don't I don't remember who I heard it from. I believe it was my old Testament teacher and Hebrew scholar Ellen Davis before she was the dean at Duke. When I was an employee there, I think I took no I took NSA pretty young, but I think I heard it from Ellen Davis. I don't know. So don't quote me on it, even though I just cited who it was. But I've heard this before. The idea that, you know, killing and murdering, you know, English might distinguish between the two, but Hebrew doesn't. And normally I would, you know, be I might be swayed by that argument if I didn't know enough about Hebrew and wasn't willing to do the work. And I say that because as this ancient language, Hebrew is a tri consonant or language. So the root verbs to be to speak, to move, to do, these are the the base words, right. The were a bunch of other later more compound words come from using different sounds we now call vowels. The Greek Septuagint that was composed in 300 BCE was based on Hebrew texts that had no vowels. And so if someone were to say to me that this word that we interpret as is murder, thou shalt not murder, that also includes accidental killing or maybe, quote unquote, justified killing. I use scare quotes because you can't justify killing. There might be a reason you do it that doesn't justify it. That's a three year old logic, right? He made me do it or she made me do it. And so therefore what I did, I don't have to say sorry for all. Violence is evil. You always have to repent of it. I understand you know the complexity there. But back to the argument at hand, Exodus 2013, The Sixth Commandment Thou shalt not Murder in Hebrew, the word that appears is rasa or rasa, and Razzaq is a root verb, but it's a big but. Razzaq is the first time or I'm sorry, X is 2013 is the first time that rootstock occurs. You shall not rot suck. It does not describe what the task means. What Moses did to the Egyptian task Master. It does not describe what came to Abel. So there is a different word, and it's either equally primitive or I don't know that other word or any other word that does appear in Genesis four with Cain and Abel is Herod, and Herod is also a primitive root verb, making them varied, making them distinct, even in the most primitive linguistic way. There is a distinction between Herod and Razzak. What you're not supposed to do is ransack and depending who you listen to or hear from, Zak appears to imply intent to put to death to kill, especially to murder. This is Hebrew Strong's 7523 Razzaq 7523. In the Hebrew Strong's concordance, it does have this additional component of knowledge.
It also can be attached to a made a personal word to mean someone who does this thing like the right soccer, the murderer, the killer. But Herod does not have that same implication of knowledge or intent. It is merely the the effect of death, right. To kill. You've killed someone whether you did that an accident because you were drunk or not is different from knowing and going about. So there is a distinction in Hebrew, in the Ten Commandments between murdering to do to end someone's life knowingly and killing to include accidental manslaughter. And that's very clear. Herod, which does appear in Genesis four, that is Hebrew, Strong's 2026, and Radstock again is 75232. Very different words. They don't share. Let's see, they I think they share one letter, but it's a very popular letter here. But everything else is different. There are two different verbs, two different root, primitive root verbs, and they are not the same. There is a difference between killing and murdering in the Hebrew language. The other thing I wanted to point out, if you are preaching to soldiers and veterans, or if you are a soldier and veteran and you want to kind of keep your preacher pastor in check by asking them to take into account the the validity of your service and how it intersects with our faith when Jesus is going through the temple and John John two, he gets really upset, Get these things out of here. Stop making my house, my father's house and marketplace Zeal for your house will consume me all that stuff. This is something that clearly happened. It's recorded in the other Synoptic. John has a different version, but that he also includes. It means it was important for these early communities to remember and John and sometimes the the overturning of the moneychangers tables is taken as like, well, anger is okay, so therefore violence is okay. I'm sorry, that's a stretch. I'm not going to help anybody try and make the case that anger is equivalent to violence. If anything, the opposite is true. The anger is a human emotion that we have to express. We have to figure out how to process healthfully. A lot of people and I say this as you know, the stereotypical angry vet, a lot of civilians aren't welcoming to the human reaction to obscenity that we witness. And combat with. They don't want to hear curse words. They don't want to hear about the things that you did and didn't do. They want you in their box, right? You want to believe that you're a monster. You've always got to forever be repenting or that you know you never repent because everything is justified and we're all fucking three year olds.
So anger, however, is not my point. I do want to point out that anger is important. It's an emotion that veterans and soldiers deal with, in particular probably disproportionately than civilians. And I think it's important. But the, you know, the history and and scripture, you know, nerd that I am. The thing that said that I want to point out is verse 19, Jesus answered them, Destroy this temple in three days. I'll raise it up. And they respond in verse 20, This temple's been under construction for 46 years and you'll raise it up in three days. I point that out because the temple is the center of the liturgical life of Israel, the tabernacle in Shiloh, in the wilderness, the temple in Jerusalem. These are where God resides. It, willingly or not, is a different question. God doesn't ask for a temple. God does not ask for the Ark to leave Shiloh. They are that God does not ask for anything better than the tabernacle. You know, that's cool that David did that. But God didn't ask for that right? God is happy where God was, but it's there. It goes to to Jerusalem. But the answer of his adversaries, the Jews, according to John, is telling We often think of the second temple period as stretching from Joshua of Jojo's attack. His construction under the watchful eyes of Ruby Bowl after the exile all the way until 70 C.E., when the Romans destroyed it with their Sebastian's help and etc., etc.. That is not true. There is a false narrative. There are. There have been three temples already. The first was the temple that Zadok built under Solomon's watchful eye with a lot of money that they had to kind of, you know, they impoverished their own people in the north with the heavy taxes. And it was it was divisive socially. The it result in the kingdom being split between the northern rural tribes and the southern tribe of Judah. That held a claim to the royal lineage and access to Jerusalem, where David had moved the temple out of Shiloh. Then the second temple, as I've mentioned, Joshua and Agios, Jack built it underneath the governorship of the ruble. Who was Cyrus, the king of Persians kind of client, not a puppet. Cyrus held a very light hand, and he's even called a messiah in Jewish literature. In the Bible.
But when Herod comes along, Josephus recounts, and it's not challenged in any known literature, Josephus says that Herod raised the temple to the ground and even removed its foundation stones. Nothing of the second temple built by Joshua. Nothing remained. When he, quote unquote remodeled. And these are the people who Jesus is talking to. They kind of show their hand that their ultimate view of reality privileges Herod's account of Jewish history. This temple is only 46 years old. This is the third temple, Herod's temple. He's not Jewish, is it, man? And he may have claimed to be a religious Jew, but he was not a cultural Jew. He does, you know, in the terms of scripture, he is a descendant of Esau, not a descendant of Jacob, and who was later named Israel. So the temple is in some people's eyes, can be seen as scripturally, illegitimate. There's nothing left in the foundation. Stones were removed, according to Joseph's. Josephus. So this is a literally a third temple. And so how we view our own story is something that this this passage brings out. How do we view soldiers in Scripture? How do we view the and how do we understand our inheritance of a story that isn't ours and we claim has primacy over our lives, but we continue to to think and act and speak in ways that privilege, you know, kind of the dominant culture of the day. I think that's important, as I said, because, you know, we don't we say we love veterans, we say we support the troops, and yet we don't have hate crimes protections, We don't have employment protections, we don't have housing protections. So when you start looking into this stuff, you begin to see cracks in the foundation by how the dominant culture speaks about the minority culture, the minority community. And so keep that in mind. Like it's not nothing that one line, 46 years or 200 some odd years whose temple it is and whose story it is, is an important question that often goes on interrogate and unexamined. And so we have to look for these things in Scripture to figure out who really is inside the story, who is placing themselves inside the story, and subordinating themselves to that story, and who is trying to kind of control the story for their own purposes. Herod, I think, is very clearly wants to control the story. But the these the people that Jesus is talking to here probably aren't trying to control it. They've just accepted the dominant kind of status quo as given. And they kind of say the thing that you weren't supposed to say out loud. This temple is Herod's temple. It's not Joshua's. It's not the Zeta Zadok Temple. It's not Solomon's temple, it's Herod's temple. And Herod was a political ruler who used Judaism to try and secure power and stability, etc.. But that's not our story. So whose story we are embodying is one that we have to ask not only as service members, but we have to ask, because of and for service members.
