🐮 Proper 27
Readings: Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38.
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This week’s First Formation reflection comes from Haggai 2, Psalm 98, 2 Thessalonians 2, and Luke 20. I chose Haggai because it spotlights a figure often overlooked but essential for a coherent Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible: Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest who rebuilt the Second Temple.
The Other Joshua: Reading Haggai, Violence, and Privilege in the Hebrew Bible
We tend to forget there are three Joshuas in the Bible’s great arc:
Joshua son of Nun, the military leader who led Israel into Canaan;
Joshua son of Jehozadak, the priest who rebuilt the Temple after exile; and
Joshua son of Mary, whom Christians call Jesus.
Each stands at a threshold in Israel’s history — conquest, reconstruction, and redemption. Yet our modern theology rarely connects them.
The Real Name of Jesus—and What It Means
The name “Jesus” isn’t Hebrew or Greek. It’s Latin — an imperialized form handed down by Jerome in the 4th century. The Hebrew name was Yehoshua or Yeshua, meaning salvation.
In Greek, it became Iēsous; in Latin, Iesus. Somewhere along the way, we lost the resonance with the book of Joshua — and with the moral tension that name carries.
To reclaim Joshua is to remember that salvation was never sanitized. The same name connects Israel’s conquest of Canaan, the rebuilding of the Temple, and Mary’s son preaching peace under Roman occupation. Each Joshua inherits the mess and the miracle of divine calling.
Haggai and the Second Temple: A Class Struggle in Scripture
Haggai prophesied during the Persian restoration, when exiled elites returned from Babylon with imperial funding to rebuild the Temple.
Zerubbabel served as governor under Persia, and Joshua son of Jehozadak served as high priest. Meanwhile, the people who had never left—the ones we later call Samaritans—were excluded from the project.
This was not simply a religious revival; it was a class struggle within Israel. The same tensions echo through Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel. To ignore books like Joshua, Judges, and Haggai is to miss how empire, class, and theology intertwine in the story we claim as Scripture.
Violence, Assembly, and Honest Theology
The “Lord of Hosts” in Haggai literally means Lord of Armies — YHWH Sabaoth. The Greek root (stratos) gives us “strategy” and “army,” but it can also mean assembly. Sometimes God calls the people to battle; other times to simply stand still and watch as divine justice unfolds.
We don’t like looking at violence in Scripture — or in ourselves. But when we refuse to look, we lose the ability to tell the truth about those who fought and suffered on our behalf. Mature theology doesn’t glorify violence, but it refuses to pretend it never happened.
As Haggai puts it:
“Work, for I am with you,” says the Lord of Armies. (Haggai 2:4)
Sometimes that “work” is the honest moral labor of looking at what we’d rather ignore.
Why These Minor Characters Matter
Joshua son of Jehozadak isn’t a household name, yet his legacy defines the Second Temple — the plain, unadorned one rebuilt after exile. It stood until Herod tore it down to construct his ornate, imperial temple — the one that stood in Jesus’ day.
Between those two Joshuas — the son of Jehozadak and the son of Mary — stands a story of humility, rebuilding, and resistance to empire. To study them together is to see how God’s people keep trying to rebuild meaning after destruction.
What’s Next for First Formation
With Advent approaching, First Formation enters a new liturgical cycle. I’ll begin publishing my own paraphrased readings of Scripture — replacing “Jesus” with “Joshua” and restoring the linguistic and moral connections often lost in translation. These reflections, along with audio and transcripts, will be gathered in Notion and linked through PewPewHQ.com/firstformation.
After nearly six years and hundreds of recordings, this is the start of First Formation’s final and most focused chapter — bringing everything home to the Chapter House in Albany, where faith, study, and work meet under one roof.
Reflection:
To follow Joshua son of Mary faithfully, we must remember Joshua son of Nun and Joshua son of Jehozadak — the soldier and the priest who walked before him. Each carried the same name, the same call to trust God amid violence, and the same task of rebuilding the world in faith.
Transcript
Good morning and welcome to First Formation. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Haggai two. Psalm 98, second Thessalonians two in the gospel. Luke chapter 20 for Prompter 27. I missed last week because I was preaching.
I will get that audio up soon. But there is video available on YouTube and you can also check my website, logan mi.com. This morning's readings, I chose the Haggai reading because it speaks to one of the. Characters that I think we really need to pay more attention to if we are to do a coherent theological hermeneutic about the Hebrew Bible as a whole, as Christians.
And so what do I mean by that? I mean that Christianity is names a person or a community that takes Mary's son to be the prophesied Messiah or anointed one of Israel. And there's, I say it with a little bit of hesitation because. Christianity can be and has been co-opted by forces or powers that do not have any interest in following Mary's son, Joshua.
His Hebrew name is Joshua. I will continue to use that name because that's the most, that's, we already have an Anglicized name, and I've said this before, you can check it out on the grunt Works blog. What was Jesus' real name? And I say that because not only. Do we get Jesus only through the fourth century translation of Jerome who latins the Greek scripts manuscripts.
And that makes Jesus an imperial name, a Latin name, his Hebrew name is Yoshua, which is the exact same name as the sixth book of the Bible, named after the military commander who led Israel in invading and occupying Canaan. And what a lot of. Mainstream theologians and exes get wrong as they avoid Joshua and Judges, and that is the backbone of the Deutero domestic history and one of the oldest traditions to survive within what we now call the Hebrew Bible, which was first written or the oldest versions of which we have in Greek called the step two.
Again, I've been reading the step two again as. An outsider to Judaism. I don't consider myself Jewish. And I also think that there's, we misread the coherent, consistent, comprehensive story of the Hebrew Bible. If we elevate the house of Judah above the other houses or tribes of Judah, Judah was the monarchial.
Tribe. And a lot of this took place in the era described by Haggai and also Ezra and Daniel and Nehemiah. During the second temple period when the exiles, which were the elites who had been carried off into Babylon, they the Solomon's temple built by the high priest, Zadak was destroyed. The second temple would be built.
With Ubal as the governor of Metta Yehuda, which is the Persian province of Judah. Al, you could say he's a puppet, but he's not. He's given a lot of money to rebuild the temple, and I point that out because for a lot of anti imperial Christians, we don't like to acknowledge the fact that before Mary's kid was called the anointed one, Cyrus, the Emperor of Persia was called the anointed one in Isaiah, I wanna say 18.
And so we cannot have. Anti imperialism or we can't hold onto anti imperialism. And also, ignore Cyrus and what he did for the Jews. These were the establishment Jews who were carried off into Babylon for a generation about 40 years. And when they go back, the people who had no disruption from the land were then called Samaritans.
They had worshiped at Mount Garrison. And so there's a whole class struggle. In between the pages of the Bible that if we skim over the parts that we don't like, like Joshua and Judges and some of these minor prophets like Haggai, we'll miss a very important piece of the hermeneutical puzzle that we call the Hebrew Bible.
Ubal, as I've talked about, was the governor who was given, who was returned to, jerusalem to rebuild. And the second temple built by Joshua son ak was very plain. They didn't overspend. Solomon built it with slave labor and imported goods. And Joshua's temple, the second temple was very plain.
Herod then tore it down to the foundations and rebuilt a nice ornate imperial hegemonic, affluent temple again. But before that. Right around the time Joshua Mary's kid was born Herod destroyed Joshua's temple and began building a new one a third temple Herod's temple. And so Joshua's son of Jeh is the high priest who oversees the second temple whose father Jeh didn't have a temple to perform the priestly duties in.
So for one generation, poor jeh, like a non father, just like the son of Nun, Joshua's father Nun is mentioned only as the father of Joshua, who was a spy to who spied out Canaan and whose friend Caleb was. We're the only two spies who were confident that they could take Canaan on under God's direction.
The rest of the spies and the people were like no. They're big. They're scary. And so they wandered another 40 years. So Joshua's son of Jeh is a character that we know far less about than we should because it's the same name as the individual that Christians say that we follow. And we love to talk about religiosity and temple worship and Jerusalem centralization of worship.
But we don't like to get into the subtext of the hominems and how important they are. And also what it means to be honest about the privilege that we have inherited. And I say that because when we. Say Jesus instead of Joshua as Christians, we downplay the sixth and seventh books of the Hebrew Bible.
We don't wanna look at them 'cause there's a lot of violence. There's a lot of violence in our own, his history. And when we try and shake off the people who did the violence for us, we're like drawing up the ladder behind us. We are looking down our nose at people who did the work to get us what we have.
And you'll notice, I believe it's in, was it in Haggai or was it in Psalm where? It says, work and do verse four of Haggai work for I'm with you, says the Lord of Armies hosts in Hebrew is Saba. And in Greek it's Strat or it's a root strato which is an array, an assembly. And it's the same two words that are used throughout for hosts.
The God or the Lord of hosts. The commander of armies is also this military term, but not necessarily violence, but that's why I like to say assembly. Sometimes you assemble for war Saba, sometimes you assemble to count everybody out and divvy out. Fairly the land, which is most of what the Book of Joshua is about.
And so when you line up in your companies or your hosts, or your arrays or your assemblies, you might just be receiving the promise that you had been told had been afforded to your ancestors. And that through your work of believing and trusting in God despite all the violence and the storm, the moral storm that, war kicks up.
God throughout the these battles says, be still and know that I'm God, I fight for you. Don't fight for yourself. Stand back. Let me do this. Watch how I will prevail over insurmountable odds. That's how you know it wasn't by your own agency. And so we don't like to look at violence. Who does?
I don't. But when we refuse to look at violence, we then. Can believe any kind of lie that we can conjure up about the people who do violence for us. And it's, I think it's a mark of undeveloped theology to be unable to look at these critical pieces of the deuteronomistic canon. The Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomy is a collection.
Within the works of the Bible that reflect a certain interest in centralizing worship, following the Yahweh and not following other gods. And when we don't, when we look at some, it's cherry picking. And I think that's very dangerous when other people do it and when I do it. And so that's why it's important for me to point out like.
Some of these unsung heroes like the son of Jeh, like that's a big deal. This is the person, this is the high priest, a Zite the House of Och. Same as with Solomon. He builds the second temple. And this is the context, the cultural context within which. Most of what we now know as the Hebrew Bible is compiled, preserved, and then eventually in the third or fourth century, BCE, the Tmeic Kingdom in Egypt or the Jews in Egypt begin compiling all these and putting them into Greek.
And those copies we have much more of than we do the original Greek. The Greek manuscripts only date to the 11th century, somewhere between the ninth and the 11th century. Of this common era, like the middle medieval period, those are the oldest Hebrew manuscripts we have. And so the text that Mary and her son and her family had were likely Greek, 'cause that was what everybody was talking outside of the local language of Aramaic.
Nobody spoke Latin. And mostly it was priests that spoke Hebrew. And so we have to do the kind of work that we say we're doing, which is looking at original sources, look at the oldest sources. And when we do that and when we kind of account for the. The similarities and we provide meaning for the sim.
What does it mean that Joshua, this name, which is literally just means salvation? HOIA is the definite article savior that many of the judges are called. The first three judges are called Savior and Deborah's then called a prophetess, or a prophet and a savior. And a judge, and then go, and then Savior's kind of dropped.
And then s Samson's, the last judge before Samuel is the 13th judge, and he gives way to the monarchy, which is this complicated moment in Israel's history. And yet it's the monarchic kind of imagination that, is compiling a lot of this. And so at the top of the podcast, I talked about the primacy of the House of Judah.
Whatever moralizing we might do around how they got there. Israel was a unified monarch monarchy, and then it split and they were trying to figure out why and not just within the, datum. Or the data that was apparent and like objectively verifiable and the facts and the chronology, but what does it mean that we live in a world that we didn't create?
And what does it mean that this world has meaning? And what does it mean to ascribe meaning to our world that we cannot control? We came from tribes. We came from a confederated. Political system led by charismatic leaders who did violence, and then that got out of hand and tribes were waring against other tribes.
And then that got out of hand, and then we were like, you know what? Screw it. Let's just do a monarchy. Let's just do kings because we can't handle this. And so we have this complicated history, and if we don't treat it as complicated, we will flatten everything under a false name and ignore the difficult conversations that arise from our own privilege.
And so that's why it's important. To me to point at all these minor characters that I think should have a lot more influence on our interpretation than is typical. And Joshua's son of Jeh is one of them. And the other being Joshua's son of none, and Joshua's son of Mary. But anytime I have the opportunity to discuss.
The importance of some of these seemingly minor characters. I'm going to take it. I do wanna also mention, I know this is a longer episode already, but in a couple of weeks we're gonna start Advent and I'm going to be including, rather than redirecting to the NRSV on Bible gateway in the link, I'm going to be directing links to my own personal notion.
Pages in which I am retranslate or paraphrasing the Bible, not only to switch Jesus into Joshua, but some of these other names and verbs and nouns that we sometimes kind of skim over. And so be on the lookout for that. This is like the reboot of first formation. It's the beginning of a new liturgical cycle.
We've been in year C with Luke. We're gonna begin in a few weeks with Matthew and year a. And so with that reset, I'm going to be trying to. Make public my own paraphrase, translation of the Bible, but also hold everything in one place in notion the recordings the readings, and then my reflections as well.
That doesn't make sense. I'm still trying to figure it out myself, but I'm also very aware, like I'm entering the final. The final home stretch of first formation. I did all the dailies over three years. I smattered in some. I've been doing the Sundays for Luke, but it's at the end of the cycle.
And so this is going to be a complete not self-contained, but I'm going to reestablish first formation within the liturgical cycle. So for three years, I'm going to be doing this, and that will be the end of first formation. As part of that, I'm going to be. Publishing or publicizing as many of my old episodes as possible under pqq.com/first formation.
I'm trying to make it so that this is accessible freely to everybody and if you subscribe, maybe you get it earlier, something but know that there's some positive changes coming. Now at the chapter house established in Albany, we went through our grand opening. And things are coming together.
And so I'm trying to do things in the manner in which they deserve to be done. And so I'm going to recollect first formation and try and make it coherent. And I know it, nec hasn't necessarily been coherent, but because as I've said before, I did this for me and I did it to familiarize myself with the Bible.
And now I feel confident enough to like. Engage with the Bible on a deeper level and provide an alternate way of reading, even from some of the, more established and scholarly and credible translations. This is just gonna be a paraphrase. It's not a translation, and I'm gonna be using. Public domain translations, whether that's the world English Bible or the the step two against that, there's a couple of public domain ones that I can publish without fear of violating copyright.
So anyway, be on lookout for that. I'll try and do another kind of reminder post. I've got another couple of weeks, I think before Advent, but in this new lectionary cycle. It's gonna be as polished and up to speed as possible. So I appreciate everybody listening to last, I don't know, six years, I think, something like that.
If it weren't for doing this, I wouldn't be as comfortable as I am now with the Bible, and I wouldn't be as comfortable with my own Marshall Hermeneutic and what I've found reading the Bible and trusting my own. Experiences and instincts and training in ways that sometimes diverge from not even the most popular translations, but some of the more like scholarly ones too.
God forgive me for being a narcissist, but I think there's something I see. And I, I find fascinating and awe-inspiring that I haven't found in the institutional church. And so Grunt works and first formation is gonna be the place where I explore that more deeply and invite others to follow me and doing the same.
