🐮 Proper 28

Readings: Isaiah 12; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19.

Central Theme: Jesus's prophecy against Herod's ornate temple reflects a consistent biblical pattern of God rejecting centralized religious power and wealth accumulation in favor of decentralized, agrarian faithfulness.

Key Insights:

• Luke writes post-70 CE with knowledge of the temple's destruction, but this doesn't negate Jesus's prophetic vision

• The name "Joshua/Jesus" (Yeshua = "salvation") connects to Joshua the builder of the plain Second Temple

• Septuagint (LXX) Exodus 15:3 reads "The Lord brings wars to nothing" vs. Masoretic "The Lord is a warrior" - a crucial difference for understanding God's relationship to violence

• Hebrew root LHM carries both "laham" (fighter) and "elohim" (gods), pointing toward a God who undoes war

Theological Argument: Salvation is cooperative work between humans and God, not passive reception of predetermined grace. The biblical witness consistently undermines those who claim entitlement without labor (Pharaoh, Herod, Solomon) and instead elevates agrarian mutuality and decentralized interpretation.

Contemporary Challenge: We must "federate our faith" and resist religious institutions that enforce monopolies on meaning. The oldest manuscripts we possess are Hellenized texts that already represent a tension between imperial power and prophetic decentralization - we should embrace this pluralism rather than seek singular authority.

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Edited Transcript

Good morning and welcome to Proper 28. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from The Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. Our readings today come to us from Isaiah 12, Psalm 98, 2 Thessalonians 3, and Luke 21. I'm going to work backwards because that's how these readings are also presented, starting with Luke 21.

In Luke 21, we have words put in the lips of our savior, the Christ, whose Hebrew name is Joshua—or Yeshua in Hebrew, which means "salvation." Yeshua (or Yesha) is both a proper name and also a noun that means salvation. He's literally walking around and his name is Salvation.

Luke, which is written after Mark—probably in the late 70s or early 80s—is written after the fall and destruction of the temple. Now, when Jesus was walking around, maybe he did say these things, but this is written with the benefit of knowing what has already happened. I want to preface that because I don't doubt that Jesus prophesied, that Jesus saw what was going to happen and said, "This thing that you're looking at, the temple, will not last."

And there's a reason why the name Joshua—salvation—is significant here. Joshua (Salvation) is the builder of the second temple. When the Israelites were returned from the Babylonian exile by the Messiah Cyrus, the elder Persian Emperor, Joshua (Salvation) built a very plain temple, just stone—that's it. The second temple and the second temple renaissance occurred with a temple that was very plain.

This fits with the wider story of God and the Israelites, of the Hebrews. God never asked for Solomon or David to build a temple. Yahweh was happy in a tent in Shiloh, in the northern tribes, which is rural, which is more impoverished than Jerusalem and the city of David.

So Jesus sees this temple and he knows—because it was destroyed around the same year that he was born—that Herod razed the second temple to its foundations. In Josephus, it is explicit: even the foundation stones were replaced. Now that's not breaking it down entirely, but it is—it's not the second temple anymore.

And so when Luke makes sure to point out that what is being judged or condemned is the temple "decorated with beautiful stones and gifts"—not the plain Jane Joshua temple—we're talking about Herod's temple. Herod, who pretends to be a Jew but isn't. He looks more like Solomon, who inherited entitlement from people before him—Solomon being from David. Jesus looks at all this ornate, flashy bullshit, and he says, "That's going to be torn down brick by brick." The writer of Luke knows it's already happened.

That doesn't mean that the Christ did not see it and prophesy it. It's like a needle point in my brain because Jesus's name—Joshua, Salvation—is coming up again, and we heard it in Isaiah and the Psalm.

Very quickly in 2 Thessalonians: I like this passage because it reminds me that working produces what we need. The Israelite, the Hebrew imagination is agrarian. Anybody can farm. Some farmers can be better than other farmers—they know how to work the land, to cooperate with the land instead of trying to exploit it. But if you work, you will get fruit. You will eat.

Fast forward several generations, even millennia: people were hoarding other people's labor. Or symbolically, when Pharaoh was hoarding grain—grain represents human labor in tandem with God, working with God. Pharaoh's like, "I don't like working with God. I like saving up. I like having a savings account, and I like investing in the stock market, and I like gaming the system. So what if a few people below me get crushed? I don't care." Herod represents that same entitlement.

And so in Thessalonians—and you know, this is why the Bible is a coherent, unified whole—it always talks against those who think they deserve something without doing anything. If you haven't worked, you don't get to eat. And if you need to be a recluse, if you need to be a busybody, just eat your own bread. Don't steal from others. Go out and collect your own manna and be satisfied with it. Don't try and take it from other people who are doing the work.

Back to salvation, which is a work—it's a fruit of the spirit. Fruit being the thing that we have to work toward. If you just put a seed in the ground, yeah, maybe it'll grow, but it'll take forever. Anybody who's tried—there are ways you can speed that up, but if you're lazy, it's going to take a long time before you eat and it won't be as good, quite frankly. But if you put your mind to it and then you put your hands and knees and feet to it, you're going to produce good food. And so salvation is a work. It is a fruit that we do participate in with God. I don't believe in predestination, grace alone. I don't think I ever fully have.

But in the Psalm and in Isaiah, we hear salvation, salvation, salvation—this guy's name, right? Isaiah 12 is quoting from Exodus 15. Isaiah 12 is a very short chapter, and in verse two it says, "Behold, my God is my Savior. I will trust in them and not be afraid. For the Lord is my glory and my praise, and has become my salvation."

Compare that to Exodus 15 in the Septuagint—the Greek version that a poor northern Jew would have had. The Septuagint, not the Hebrew text that didn't get preserved and didn't get rebuilt until the 11th century. The Greek Septuagint reads—in the Song of the Sea, the song of Moses, after they escaped Pharaoh's army and they see Pharaoh's army drowned at sea—they begin singing and it begins: "Let us sing to the Lord for you are very greatly glorified. Horse and rider thrown to sea."

Verse two of Exodus 15: "He was to me a helper and protector for salvation. This is my God and I will glorify him, my father's God, and I'll exalt him. The Lord brings wars to nothing. The Lord is his name." That's the Greek.

In the Hebrew, the Masoretic text of the 9th or 10th century says, "The Lord is a warrior. The Lord is his name." That's not what the Greek says. The Greek says symbo—to break apart, to destroy, to demolish, to deconstruct. The earliest Exodus 15 we have—the Greek Septuagint—says the Lord brings all wars to an end. The Lord is his name.

For whatever reason, the Masoretes said, "Oh no, no. What it really says in Hebrew is the Lord is a man of war"—ish milchamah—"the Lord is his name." But the Greek doesn't agree. And that's an important difference because the Song of the Sea, the Song of Deborah, the Song of Miriam—all these different songs are some of the oldest parts. And the oldest manuscript we have is in Greek, and it records a different Song of the Sea than the Masoretic text does.

The Masoretes went through the Hebrew Bible and added vowels to say, "Less interpretation, more adherence to our interpretation," right? The Hebrew Bible contains no vowels, and that means you get a lot of freedom in interpreting a tri-continental rooted language that doesn't include vowels.

The sound laham can also sound like elohim, depending on the vowels. The Hebrew root LHM is both laham (fighter) and elohim (gods). And what kind of fighter is this God whose name is Elohim (gods) as well as Yahweh? The kind of God that this God is brings wars to nothing. That is the kind of war this God brings—the undoing of wars, not "God is a warrior."

And this also gets into why we need to stop referring to soldiers as warriors. It is not humanity's place to try and assert their political interests over and above an omnipotent, omniscient God. What is God omniscient on and omnipotent about that allows wars to continue? I mean, there's a classic atheist kind of dig at Christianity, and it has some traction. We have to be careful.

Back to 2 Thessalonians 3: Jesus is prophesying about this and the first thing he says is, "Watch out that you don't get led astray. Watch out that you don't get led astray." Do your homework. Dig into this stuff.

Yes, the Hebrew is absolutely important, but we don't have copies until the 9th or 10th century. The Greek we have much earlier—that's the Bible that Jesus would've had much more ready access to because he was a poor person outside of Jerusalem, outside the purview of Judea in the Hebrew imagination, the House of Judah. He was up in Samaria, in the northern tribes. In fact, he was the northern of northern tribes—Zebulun and Naphtali. Nazareth is in Zebulun. Naphtali is highland—it's a holy city, just like Kadesh-Naphtali, where Barak came out of in Judges 4. These parallels are there for a reason.

Be careful who you follow so that you don't get led astray. Whose example are you following? The religious elites of various days, to include the Sadducees and certain rabbinical traditions—which tradition?

If you believe in historical credibility, or—you know, I'm a kind of originalist—the oldest texts we have are Greek, and that signifies a cooperation between imperial power, colonial power, and decentralizing Hebraic prophetic tradition. We have to hold them in tandem, in tension, instead of just choosing one and saying, "This is the one that everybody has to adhere to."

No. I firmly believe that we need to federate our faith. We need to empower everyone—as many as possible—to do this work of interpretation and then follow where the consensus leads, keeping in mind credibility and linguistics, et cetera.

My lack of trust in religious systems of meaning that are enforceable or enforced upon a people—I see this over and over again reflected in the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. And it leads me out of institutions and out of organizations that try to assert a monopoly on meaning, because that just doesn't follow in the historical or even literary tradition or account that I find in the oldest and longest-lasting Hebrew Bible, which ironically is a Hellenized text.