😇 Epiphany 3
Readings: Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 4-9; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
In this episode, I explore Jesus's inauguration of ministry through Matthew 4 and Isaiah 9, focusing on what it means when something radically new begins. I'm translating "basileos" as "Republic of Heaven" rather than "kingdom" because kingdoms were subordinate to Rome's empire—but God's republic distributes power among ordinary people, not through monarchical centralization. This inauguration isn't just historical; it's happening now. Something big is unfolding in our political moment, and while it doesn't have to hurt, we need to stop clenching our fists and watch what unfolds, accompanying those who are afraid rather than choosing sides.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
I examine John's baptism as adapted from priestly mikvah and women's menstrual cleansing—rituals involving blood and water, the two substances we need to live. The agrarian parables in Hebrew scripture create a meaning system around work, production, and spoilage: fruit left too long on the vine falls and becomes compost. Tomorrow's manna saved today goes bad, teaching us that accumulation beyond need equals corruption. The Greek "oikos" ties together household, economy, and servanthood. I see the twelve apostles not as reiterating the twelve tribes but as echoing the thirteen judges, with Samson—the twelfth judge who tears everything up—as a crucial parallel for understanding disruptive renewal.
Theological Argument:
Jesus demonstrates radical indifference to the temple economy. When he flips the tables in Mark's account, he's showing us what power looks like when distributed among a council of trusted friends rather than centralized in monarchy. The prayer "give us today our daily bread" isn't just about sustenance—it's about resisting accumulation, recognizing that hoarding tomorrow's provision breeds spoilage and corruption. A house that must steal from others to survive is already decomposing, destined to fall under its own weight. God's republic operates on actual need, not value extraction. This is why I translate basileos as republic: it acknowledges subordination to something higher while distributing authority among the many, not concentrating it in hierarchical power structures.
Contemporary Application:
I'm watching the Trump administration like I think of Samson—someone tearing up systems to see what breaks and what holds. The ICE recruitment bonus isn't just fascism; it's economic desperation. Eighty thousand applicants aren't all ideologues—they're people like me in 2000, seeing $50,000 as a way out of economic depression. Someone was taken by ICE at Two Rivers Market in Albany, and I'm in conversation with restaurant owners who don't know what to do. Neither do I, but I want them to trust me. Rather than going to protests or trying to resist systems I've watched percolate for decades, I'm choosing to accompany people who are afraid. Something big is happening—we need to unclench and witness it.
Questions Raised:
What does it mean that Jesus's inauguration happens in his hometown, and what does inauguration of ministry look like for us today?
How does understanding "republic" versus "kingdom" change our relationship to divine authority and power distribution?
What economic systems steal from others to survive, and how do we recognize when we're accumulating tomorrow's manna that will spoil?
Can we see the current administration as Samson—tearing things up to inaugurate something new—without endorsing or demonizing?
How do we accompany those who are afraid without choosing sides in binary political frameworks?
Reflection
Hello and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon.
Our readings today come from Isaiah 9, Psalm 27, 1 Corinthians 1, and Matthew 4. Isaiah 9 is the text quoted in Matthew 4, where Jesus's inauguration occurs in his hometown. This same inauguration story appears in Luke 4 as well. We're in Epiphany, in ordinary time after Epiphany, and I used this text during GruntCon—the inaugural GruntCon just a couple months ago, the last weekend in October, with the Hospitallers of St. Martin and Grunt Works. I used Luke 4 and Luke 1 to tell a story of inauguration: What does it mean to begin ministry? What is ministry? What is Jesus about to do in the Gospels?
To set the stage, I want to focus on when Jesus begins saying, "Repent, for the Republic of Heaven is at hand." He has adopted John's baptism. John's baptism, or immersion, is for repentance. It used to be called a mikvah—a ritual water cleansing for priests before they performed rites in the temple and tabernacle, and for women after or during their menstrual period. The cleansing of blood and water, blood and water. John is using this symbolism to bring these together. We need blood, we need water. If we don't have either of those, we're dead.
Now, if you forget that you're a modern person with a modern imagination, in ancient times they didn't know everything we know about medicine and biology. They knew a lot, but they didn't know as much as we do. They knew that if enough of your blood spilled out, you were gone—you couldn't be revived, you were dead, and they buried you. They buried you to protect other people from infection, from decomposition. You can think of decomposition as spoiling, like fruit stuck on a vine too long. At some point there's enough spoilage that it weighs down the fruit and it falls—that's when something is dead, when something has gone from living to being compost.
Jesus and John use, over and over again, these agrarian parables, these agrarian symbols and meaning systems to say: the fullness of time, the ripening of time, is such that we're either going to fall off the tree or we're going to have to do something different to force the spoilage back to the peripheries so life can go on. There are all kinds of reasons I see it this way. I need to do better about writing it out, and part of this podcast, this exegetical project, is me laying this out over a long amount of time because I'm terrible at showing my work. I think I have theories about everything, but to lay them all out would take too much time.
But think of these agrarian parables. This system of meaning-making in Hebrew imagination is very earthy, very worker-oriented. Earlier the text talks about "oikeos" in the Greek, and in the Hebrew it's "ebed"—servant, worker, and member of household are all tied up together in this meaning system. If you work on the land, you will produce food. If you don't, you will not. And if you need someone else's food because they're working and you are not, how do you get it? You steal it from them, or you buy it. You reduce everything down to a value system, not a meaning system—a value system. You say, "I have X amount of worth, I'll give that to you because I need food."
Economic systems—oikos, oikonomia—family, household economy: all of these in the Greek are overlapping. If you have a house—in Hebrew, "bayit"—if you have a house that is corrupt because it has to steal from other people just to get by, and that puts them in desperation and bad economic times, that is a spoiled house. That's a house doomed to destruction because it doesn't have enough life of its own. It's going to get heavy and weigh down until it falls.
Of course there are all kinds of systems to prevent death, to stay alive even though you should be dead—you accumulate, right? Do you know what happens in the desert if you try to save tomorrow's manna and it's not the day of rest? It goes bad. Tomorrow's manna is a stand-in for corruption, a stand-in for spoilage. If you don't eat as you go, it's going to go bad. "Lord, give us today our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses"—this is the prayer, translated: Remind me when I forget that I only need what I really need. If I want more than I need, I've begun to spoil. I've begun to forget what it means to work as I go and earn what I need.
Now, the other thing I think I did last week, and I'm certainly doing again: when the text says "basileos," the kingdom of God, put yourself in their perspective. The kingdoms were beneath Rome. Herod had a kingdom, and everybody knew Herod's kingdom was a vassal to the imperator, the commander, the emperor. The emperor is the one who thinks they have no debts—all debts flow up to the emperor. They don't owe anything to the people.
A kingdom is stuck underneath there. Herod and Antipas, Philip II, the Herods that Jesus knew and had to deal with—they owed money above to Rome. Rome from below could say, "Herod's land is ours." Rome could claim that Jesus was Roman. In fact, that's what Paul and the Roman church want you to believe: that Jesus comes to enter the magnificent halls of power to redeem them. I'm not convinced that's what he's doing, but that's another podcast or lecture or sermon.
Herod has a kingdom—that's language that puts him in subordination to something above. Jesus talks about Rome, Jesus talks about money. Herod was allowed to coin his own money, but he had to get permission from Rome. So "basileos," the kingdom, was a position of subservience.
I use "Republic" because the Greek word for that in Acts and in all the Greek writings is "politeia." The Roman Republic, when spoken of in Greek, was the "politeia"—politics was the republic. The "imperium" or "imperator" was the empire. If you want to distinguish between kingdom—and in our mind we think monarchy, centralization of power, hegemony, "monos" (one) "archos" (power)—you could better think of it as oligarchy. Even if there are two or three or four chokepoints in power, that's still hegemony. There are two parties in American democracy—that's a binary oligarchy. If there are only two ways you're allowed to choose power, that's not a healthy republic, that's not a healthy democracy. It's not a democracy; it's a form of oligarchy.
So I talk about, and will continue to talk about, the Republic of God, or God's Republic, or the Republic of Heaven, because I think that relays to my people in my context—American Christians—more accurately and more helpfully. It recognizes there's a certain subordination. It's not the empire, and it's not a kingdom. It's not like Britain where there's—or maybe it is like Britain now, where we have a king but you also have parliament. Then you've got to ask: what are we doing with the king? Why don't we just go with parliament?
So if you hear me talk about the Republic of God or the Republic of Heaven, that's "basileos," which is looking up.
Now, inauguration. Jesus comes to Nazareth to do something radically different—I mean atomic bomb kind of different, nuclear option different. He seems to deliberately not care about the temple economy. When he does go in—his final act, I don't want to speculate whether he knew it was his final act or whatever—but in Mark, on Palm Sunday, he goes up, he goes to the temple grounds and sees nobody there, so he goes away. He comes back the next day, he sees people there—that's when he flips the tables. He wants to show people: if you think I'm your king, if you think I'm the monarch, the centralization through which you understand power—which I do have; I have a Christological anthropology, or I try to—if what Jesus looks like is what we're supposed to be thinking about when we think about kings, then the temple economy is flipped.
What does he do? He has a council of trusted friends, some of whom betray him, but he has a small group, an inner circle. I don't think the apostles were supposed to be a reintegration or reiteration of the tribes. I think the apostles were supposed to be a reiteration of judges. How many judges were there? Thirteen. The twelfth judge is Samson, and he tears it up. He just messes up. He's that judge everybody wants to hate, but he succeeds.
I think of Samson like I think of the current administration. I don't like him, but he is tearing up a lot of things. He's jostling the system to see what breaks and what doesn't. My prayer is that the nuclear option on morality and ethics—where nothing we think of as having morality seems to persist, nobody cares about ethics or being of good character or goodwill, nobody cares, they just care about getting to the top—I kind of hope that the Trump administration jostles our systems enough so they can be renewed. I hope we have a Samson or a Samuel character, a thirteenth judge who inaugurates a new system, trying something new. "You want a king? Okay," God says. "They haven't rejected you, Samuel—they've rejected me. But we're going to try this."
Inauguration of these new systems. I have this sense—when I was a kid, my mom learned real quick not to tell me when I had a shot to get. She learned that if I knew, I'd stress out over it, I wouldn't be able to shut up. So she wouldn't tell me. She'd pick me up from school and I'd be like, "Are we—what are we doing? Are we going to get ice cream?" "No." "I thought we were going to do something else." And I see we're going to the doctor's office. "What are we doing here?" And of course I'm thinking, "I'm going to get a shot."
The more I know, the more I get worked up and nervous. At least one time—I think it was one time, but she talks about it like it's every time—they had to get a male nurse to secure me to my chair so I could have a vaccination. Of course it stings and it's done.
Something big is happening, but it doesn't have to hurt. Something big is happening, but if we hold our breath and kick and scream and want to go to the protests to see if we'll get hurt—I go to the skate park to get hurt; I know what that feeling is like, this restlessness like, "I want to do something." I'm not in a big city, I'm not in Chicago or Minneapolis, I'm not there. I'm in a tiny little town in rural Oregon, and I feel like God wanted me here.
Somebody was taken by ICE at Two Rivers Market in Albany, Oregon, and I'm in conversation with the restaurant owners. They don't know what to do. I don't know what to do, but I like to think they know they can trust me, and that's enough. Even as I'm saying that, I feel like the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, but that's the truth.
Something big is happening. I don't think it has to hurt, and it has to happen. We need to unclench our sphincters and watch what happens. That isn't to say ignore ICE—that is not to say that. But I'm also someone who can't ignore both sides of the story. The recruitment bonus for ICE—who do you think has taken up that offer? Would it be someone like me in 2000, who didn't see prospects in their hometown in Southern California, so I went into the Army for money? It was before 9/11, so it wasn't the ratcheted-up stakes. Do you really think 80,000 recruits or 80,000 applicants are all fascist douchebags? Or do you think half of them, or more than half, are just in economic depression, and $50,000 sounds like a nice payday? "I could pay off some debt with that."
It's hard for me to demonize even the ICE people who are wearing masks to hide their face from one another. That's what Cain is afraid of with God: "Don't turn your face from me. Don't hide from me." And here we are—human beings hiding their identity just so they can get a measly paycheck.
Something big is happening. I want to acknowledge that. I see it. I've been seeing it. Part of me feels like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle in 2016 on SNL, on that one skit where they're looking at each other, all the white people are like, "Oh my God, Trump got elected," and they're like, "You're surprised?"
There have been a handful of people killed in the Twin Cities in the last week, and each one is horrific. Each one is bad. It doesn't matter what their skin color is, doesn't matter that they were white women, doesn't matter if they were VA nurses. All lives are equal—they're supposed to be. And when we speak up and say, "Actually, they're not equal," those voices that remind us of these truths, that this moment is forcing us to reckon with—those are the voices I think we need to be listening to.
It doesn't have to be mine, but I suspect there's someone in your community who's looking at what's going on and thinking, "You know what? Somebody's making money off all this. They just bought TikTok. Someone's trying to figure out how to monetize all this rage." I think that's an inconvenient and difficult truth.
I don't think choosing sides has ever really served us well. That isn't to say I wouldn't kick an ICE agent in the nuts who tries to come into my store, my property, and harass or kidnap another human being. I would do it in a heartbeat. That opportunity hasn't arisen—I cannot bear witness or testify to my character in that way. But I can be a friend to people who are afraid, and I think that's one thing we can all get behind. There are a lot of people who are afraid, and I'd rather accompany them and do my best to shelter them than go out and try to resist something I've seen percolating for decades. I don't know how we can be surprised.
Something big is happening. It doesn't have to hurt, but something big is happening. I want to acknowledge that, and I want to suggest there's more than two ways to think about all this.
