🐮 Epiphany 7
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the seventh Sunday after Epiphany, also known as Epiphany 7. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Genesis 45, Psalm 37, and Luke 6. The Genesis reading I want to interpret it in a way that avoids people claiming God is doing good through bad.
And it's a very fine line, but Joseph says, look, you didn't sell me here. God did it to save you. And it's one of those things that makes me think of C. S. Lewis's line from the great divorce, I think. Where he says that you only really realize a thing in retrospect. When you die, you'll only be able to look back upon your life and see it as a success or failure based upon how you always thought of it.
And. Here, when Joseph says, God did this thing for good that you thought was bad, I want to point out a couple things. First, They didn't harm him. They sold him to slavery. That sucks, but they didn't create physical harm. In fact, they took goat's blood and smeared it over his technicolor cape to make it look like he was killed, which foreshadows or yeah, foreshadows the Yom Kippur goat that takes away your sins.
But in retrospect, Joseph is assigning agency to God. in order to reassure his brothers to make good out of bad, but not to do good by, or to do bad by claiming it's for good. Remember, this is in retrospect. And I say that, otherwise it's just this interesting verse, but it's really easy to take any literature, And ascribe it some holiness.
And then say, ah, see I'm doing, I'm only doing bad so that good can come of it. In fact, Ro Paul, Saul, says this in Romans. Don't let anybody tell you that I'm doing bad so that good may prevail. No, that's a corruption of, that example at least, in Genesis. And just recently somebody said whatever doesn't kill America is legal, or something to that extent.
It's another version of the ends justify any means, right? If I have good intent, I can have all kinds of ill effects, right? And don't let anybody tell you that's stupid. Yeah, I'll stay by that, I think it's stupid. But in 1 Corinthians 15 I was I always thought this was cute how in Genesis this Hebrew word, adam, which is a shortened version of adumah, which is a feminine noun meaning ground, earth, or soil.
Adumah is shortened, making adam, which is it just means humanity from the humus of the earth, humanity. For a long time, your several verses and chapters, there is no pronoun or proper name that is Adam. There's no Adam and Steve. That's not the way Genesis, at least in Hebrew, understands itself.
Adam just means humanity. And like a lot of indigenous cultures, the earth was seen as female because it produced things, which is what the female of a species does, is it incubates and produces things. stuff to eat, stuff to enjoy stuff to protect you. And so the earth was seen as female, and the sky and the rain was seen as male, because, the rain droplets are like semen, or the seed, that helps produce the thing from the female, the earth.
Anyway Paul is the first one that I can think of that I, Apparently that uses this Hebrew word, Adam. And he's, remember he sells himself as a Hebrew of Hebrews, right? He was clearly trained in Torah, in the law, in the set the Penit in Greek. He's speaking in writing in Greek. So he's bilingual and he takes this Greek, or he's writing in Greek and he says in the text, it spells out phonetically Adam. And in Greek, there's no, there, there is Adam, it's Greek word 77, G76, Hebrew Strong's Greek 76. But that's not a Greek word. It's a a phoneme, I think. He is the first one to take that Adamah Hebrew and use it as a name, as a proper name.
And in Greek it's the last Adam Ho estas. Adamah became a life giving spirit, blah, blah, blah. But earlier in what verse in Corinthians are we talking about? Verse 45, thus is written, the first man Adam in the Greek, Saul actually writes, not Andros man. But Anthropos, human, the first human, Adam, remember it's a feminine shortened pronoun noun.
So he's let's Saul and everybody that he's writing to speak Greek. Saul and some of the people he's writing to speak Greek. Hebrew as well, and maybe Aramaic. So he's addressing this Greek speaking audience in Greek, and he brings in this Hebrew word that is recorded using Greek letters. But everybody who knows Greek knows that what he's really saying is this earthling, this thing from the earth, shortened from adamah, which again is feminine, and he does not say man or male.
He says Anthropos, the first human, Adam, because that is what Adam means, human, not Adam. It's not, there is no Adam and Steve. There is Adam, which is human. And then, and I have to look through Genesis again, I don't remember if it continues using Adam, or if it goes back to using something else. Because Eve's name means the mother of the land creatures, but anyway and so it, not only is Saul using this language in this kind of playful, almost vulgar way that we do now but he's deliberately taking intermingling Greek and Hebrew in a way that if you don't know what you're looking for, you just take for granted that the first human's name was Adam.
And it wasn't. The other thing in the gospel of Luke, we have, or last week we had the beatitude, the sermon on the plane. And Luke not only is a pragmatist, he has four blessings, four curses. But he goes on in this kind of weird, if you read Luke six closely, there's this kind of inversion or it's like opposite day.
And you, in verse 31, you have the golden rule due to others is you would have them due to you. Pretty basic, right? But if you read before it, he's actually saying if somebody does something bad to you, don't treat them the same way. If you hit someone, I would expect them to hit me back, right?
Do to others as you would have them do to you. But he I would, I should probably do a deeper word study or pericope study on this. But, It's not equal. If somebody treats you poorly, treat them super nice. And he doesn't say this explicitly. He does elsewhere. He by Heap burning whole coals upon their head by, kill them with kindness.
I think that's in Luke as well, but he doesn't say it here. At least Jesus doesn't. Luke doesn't have Jesus saying it. Instead He explained, or he says, due to others As you would have them do to you, but that's not, that's the only place that you can find that idea in this passage. Because it's literally not to do what is equal or called for, but to do something to exaggerate and satirize what they have just done.
If someone hits you on the cheek, let them hit the other cheek. If they curse you, bless them. And so the golden rule is not to curse. is in some way, in a very important way, not Christian. Or maybe to be Christian is to not settle for merely the golden rule. If someone hits you, hit them back. That's the golden rule.
And so it's this, There's something going on in the text that I think, if you pay attention the face value of it is deliberately being subverted. Do not do as to others as you would have them do to you. Or don't make things equal. Lex talionis, the eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
But something very close to, but so close that it's almost mirrored. Don't settle for the golden rule because everybody does that, right? It goes on. Don't sinners pay back sinners. Don't sinners love only those who love you themselves. And so the intent, the function of the passage is really actually to say the golden rule is not our rule as followers of Christ, but something so close and so distilled of the golden rule that it's something similar, but also incredibly dissimilar.
