🐮 Easter 4
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the fourth Sunday of Easter Tide, or the fourth Sunday in Easter. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Acts nine, Psalm 23, revelation seven, and John 10, and they're all New Testament readings with the Psalm, because we're in Easter tide being the time between Holy Week and the Tridium and Easter.
On the one hand and then Pentecost and the beginning of ordinary time on the other hand, and Psalm 23, I'm sure I've reflected on it before. It's one of the most popular ones for the military. And there's not much else to say about it other than the one of the things that does stand out to me is the relationship between.
The narrator and their enemies and what it means that God prepares a table before the narrator for the narrator while the enemies are there, the enemy there to witness and have heaping coals piled on their head. Or are they there in the presence because they will be eating beside you in the great feast that is to come, in this imagined afterlife.
And that's always been fascinating to me. And also the anointing, which the narrator receives and the tie with that between MAA, which is to anoint or to smear and ma, which means the person who is smeared or the anointed one. And the earliest kind of. Canonical thing we get from that is in Isaiah Isaiah, I wanna say 68 or I can't remember the name, but basically the first time the earliest historical record, which is in Isaiah.
Is that right? Yeah. That there, there's this line, I anoint my shield in oil, which is to douse a leather part of your shield with oil to keep it supple and ready to receive and deflect. Blows or absorb the blows from somebody else's sort. And so the oil is smeared on leather, which is cow skin to as a defense mechanism.
And then the holy priests, the high priests are anointed. And then some of the kings are anointed, but it's all this dirtying to keep alive as a defense thing. But anyway, I do, I've lately been getting into the uat, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And I say that because John, in our reading today, there's a whole lot of philosophy in John.
And I can't help but think that John and Jesus, the Messiah whose name, whose native name is Joshua. I can't help but think that there's actually a lot more going on with the fact that the tut is the earliest complete Hebrew Bible we have, and it's not in Hebrew. The earliest Hebrew we have is now the great Isaiah Scroll which was discovered in 47.
That was in, that is in Hebrew and it matches a lot of the retic text, but some of the structure and some of the. There's some differences that align it more closely with the Greek SEP two again than the Hebrew metic text, which is a ninth or 10th century ce construction. This the Sept is we could, we have manuscripts that date to before the ti well before the time of Christ.
We think it was probably composed around, I think like 300 b, CE, and that's right around the time, aristotle and the Greeks were Aristotle and the Greeks. About 70 years before the Sep two, again, probably was composed. That's when Aristotle was done, and he tutored Alexander the Great Aristotle and Plato and their mentor Socrates.
They gave birth to the Hellenistic revival or the Hellenistic Renaissance, which included writing and recording and. Philosophizing and they influenced and inspired the ese the Hellenistic kind of Egyptian culture that produced and called for and produced and recorded the Tugen. So there's a very important connection between Aristotle and the Greeks.
On the one hand and the Hebrew Bible on the other. Now we know there was a Hebrew Bible that existed and was passed around before the SEP two. Again, we don't have any copies. The SEP two again is the first time that a culture I'll call it a dominant culture, the, not just the Greeks, but even the Egyptians, which make a big appearance in the, in Genesis and Exodus.
But a dominant culture. Looks to a, an oral tradition, an indigenous mythology or cosmology, and says, okay, we like that. We're gonna help you do this thing. In fact, there's a story about it, which is historical with Cyprus or King Cyrus, emperor Cyrus, the Persians who funded the building of the second temple and all the rest.
So there's good history. Of emperors helping poppers do the popper thing. The empire is not the problem. It's the kind of empires and the kind of emperors that abuse power, but that's another thing. I mention all this in light of John because John was written at least 70 years after Jesus walked the Earth, at least.
Just like the difference in time between Aristotle's writings and the composition of the SEP two again, and if we think that John can credibly speak to two. Jesus' life and ministry and the communities that held him in esteem. Then I think there's a plausible connection between the Aristotelian and Hellenistic audience, or zeitgeist or whatever, and the toes and the production of the earliest Hebrew Bible, which was successfully recorded and preserved by Greeks.
And so by the time we get to Saul and Jesus and Jesus' followers who are making this split from the quote unquote the Jews that, it's in my mind like it's a non-starter. There's no argument. We've already been Hellenized and Saul therefore looks at the Jews and the people who have rejected their own Messiah to include.
Saul and thinks, wait a minute. I don't want these judaizers coming in and telling people to go back in time or to like, not accept what God has done in Christ and clearly what God has done in SEP two. And anyway and there's this, all this comes from John because I personally am thinking about like religion.
As I've experienced, it sells you on this idea of an eternal life. And Jesus says this in John, Jesus says this, I give them eternal life and they will never perish. And during Jesus' lifetime, the idea that there was an afterlife was debatable within the Jewish community. The Sadducees said, no, there's no afterlife.
Get what you can now we're gonna get what we can. F the, f your neighbor, the Pharisees were more like the local. Pastors of local synagogues and with them it was mixed because they were like pastors, like different communities had different needs and expectations and motivations. And so some Pharisees were like, you know what, actually I could see that.
I could see there being an afterlife. And this is, 200 years after the Greeks, two or 2 50, 300 years after the Greeks were like, we believe in the internality of the soul. And that probably kicks off that same question in the. Tmeic Empire and the Roman Empire, and I can't help but thinking like Genesis and Exodus.
It isn't in it's not in the Bible. We know it historically. Like the Egyptians really seem to think that they could live forever, and they built these huge things as a testament to their insecurity about death. They even killed other people when their cool kids died. Kings and Pharaohs killed their slaves and took them to the grave with them.
Because that's what they needed for the afterlife. And so I can see a kind of like a power dynamic in which Jesus and other prophetic voices to include John, to include Isaiah in his time and Jeremiah and his time. So much of the prophetic utterance seems to be to satirize the world's ridiculousness like golden pyramids.
Pointing to the sky in the hopes that we'll live forever. And so Jesus and John and everybody comes along oh yeah, we're gonna live forever. You think you're gonna live forever? This is how you live forever. Make good friends. Learn boundaries. Do right by one another.
That's how you live forever, because nobody will stop talking about you. What good is immortality? I, frankly, I don't wanna live f forever, I'm just being honest. But what we can accomplish and what doesn't scare me, is something like symbolic immortality where people are still talking about Gandhi long before, long after he is dead.
People are still talking about Jesus and Paul and Aristotle. You wanna live forever, make friends, do good by them. Establish boundaries. And tell stories and write them down. Share them with people. Don't be so scared that you write down everything. Don't try and preserve everything, but preserve the good stuff and acknowledge that there's bad stuff too.
But if you wanna live forever it's not as, it's not as simple, but it's also not as it, it's not what the world tells you. Don't trust the world because the world so often. Is corrupt and doesn't listen to the clear utterances of God, which is to say the universe in our own observable world don't.
Maybe there is an afterlife, but don't stake your hopes on it. Don't drag other people down to the grave with you literally, which is what the Egyptians did or metaphorically. Don't drag other people to horrible places. Learn, grow, improve. And you can't do any of that without love.
