😇 Lent 2
Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17.
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
This episode explores what it means to be a descendant of Abraham — not by blood, but by breath. I argue that the common thread running through Genesis 12, Romans 4, and John 3 is the insistence that God's political entity, what I call the Republic of Heaven, cannot be owned, contained, or inherited by bloodline. The spirit/breath/wind (ruach / pneuma) belongs to all people, and any attempt to possess or institutionalize it will ultimately kill it.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
I dig into the Greek and Hebrew wordplay across these texts: sperma (descendants/seed) in Romans 4, ruach/pneuma (breath/spirit/wind) in John 3, and the snake pole image from Numbers 21 that Jesus references in John 3:14. The Hebrew wordplay between nechash (snake) and nechoshet (bronze) signals that the serpent has been rendered fixed and powerless. I also note that John's gospel was nearly excluded from the canon, and that Saul/Paul's hermeneutic in Romans 4 anticipates the Johannine community's pneumatology in striking ways.
Theological Argument:
Paul's argument in Romans 4 is that if Abraham's promise is limited to his biological descendants, it is no promise at all — it becomes narrow and tribal. But if the promise belongs to the breath, to the spirit that no one can own, then it extends to all peoples (goyim). John 3 reinforces this: flesh produces flesh, but breath produces breath. I read both texts as arguing that authentic faith requires holding body and spirit together — neither pure carnality nor pure etherealism, but the unity of the two.
Contemporary Application:
I connect the "you can't bottle the spirit" argument directly to institutional religious collapse — from the destruction of Herod's Temple to Catholic clerical abuse scandals to megachurch corruption. When any institution claims to have captured and contained the divine, its death is already underway. My invitation to you is to engage the lectionary not as a fixed law but as a living, breath-like rhythm — a three-year cycle that removes your ego from the equation and reconnects you to communities across time who have wrestled with the same texts.
Questions Raised:
If ruach/pneuma belongs to no one, what does it mean to belong to a faith community at all?
Does Paul's argument in Romans 4 undercut ethnic or cultural Jewish identity, or does it expand it?
What is the relationship between the snake pole in Numbers 21 and Joshua/Jesus being "lifted up" in John 3:14 — is this a statement about death, healing, or both?
How do we distinguish between healthy institutional structure and the kind of capture that kills the spirit?
What would it look like to practice the lectionary cycle as a spiritual discipline rather than just a liturgical obligation?
Reflection
Hey, welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon.
This morning's readings come to us from Genesis 12, Psalm 121, Romans 4, and John 3. This is Lent 2 — the second Sunday of Lent. There was an alternate reading of Matthew 4, but we've already covered that in previous weeks, so I use John here.
That's part of why in the annual cycles — there are only three years in the Revised Common Lectionary — three gospels are followed in order: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, years A, B, and C. Then John, the fourth gospel, gets scattered in amongst the rest, like a seasoning. You get a sense of why here, because John is doing some things, making some really bold claims that the other gospel authors leave off the table.
John is known as the spiritual gospel, and his symbol as an evangelist is an eagle, because he flies high. He almost didn't make it into the canon, but it was hard to dismiss. I'm sure it existed in whole form with a community that supported its inclusion — but that community is like the guys off in the corner who are pointing at things other people just can't see. Contrast that with Mark, who's very bodily and urgent, writing during the destruction of Herod's Temple. John is up in the clouds, daydreaming.
The tradition we've received is that the author of this gospel is the youngest of the disciples, the called and sent of Jesus. He pretty explicitly claims to be that same person when he later describes racing Peter to the tomb — which is very tongue in cheek, because at that point in history there was a cultural taboo around talking about yourself.
Now, the Genesis reading is brief, and it uses the language of ethnos in Greek and am in Hebrew — "the people," like "we the people" — in contrast to goy/goyim, which is all people collectively, every human being as a group. And then in the Psalm, we have shamar, which means protector. I use that word repeatedly to rehabilitate the servant-protector language. If you haven't read the Joshua chapter in God Is a Grunt, I really encourage you to do that.
What's really important is what Saul — also known as Paul, his Latin name — is doing in Romans 4, and what John is doing in chapter 3. The people who created the RCL probably knew these texts were linked.
Saul is doing some highfalutin theology. He's sympathetic to the Johannine community in that he sees a sharp contrast between Jews who are still oriented around Torah, Abraham, and Moses in a certain way, and this new movement that started within the Jewish community but is clearly exceeding it. Saul is trying to make sense of that.
In Romans 4, he says: look, if you think you're an inheritor of Abraham because of your blood, think about what that does to Torah. But also — and this is where Saul does some incredible hermeneutics — if you think only his blood, literally his sperma (Greek for "descendants") has to carry the promise, then the whole promise is meaningless, because it only applies to a few people.
He says: look at the text. God says to Abraham, "I have made you a father of many peoples." That's a statement about Abraham-as-Abraham within the story, not just about his biological line. You might even say — and John would agree — that the breath comes in and goes out, and doesn't belong to anybody. That's what the spirit is. Ruach in Hebrew — the breath goes in, the spirit goes in, the spirit goes out. Nobody gets to own it. Nobody gets to keep it.
That's what makes God's political entity a republic — res publica, a public thing. If it has the authority of the spirit, of the breath, you can't contain it. You can't keep it. It belongs to all people, even the goyim, even the Gentiles. That's the move Saul is making. He says: I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews, I studied under Gamaliel, I've got Roman citizenship — and this is what that experience has taught me to say, and now I have to say it.
That's why it matters in John 3 when Joshua — the Christ, whom we call Jesus, but his Hebrew name is Joshua — uses the image of body and breath: the carnal, the flesh, and then the breath. Here again, breath, wind, and spirit are all ruach in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek. There's one moment where we get a different Greek word for wind, but for the most part, Jesus through John is holding all three at once: breath, spirit, wind — all of God, all the same thing.
If you think you can put it in a mason jar, you're going to kill it. Remember, the Hebrew imagination is agrarian and semi-nomadic: Abraham was called to wander, but the promise is also about settling — that we won't have to wander forever, that we will find a land and the promise will live on. John, Saul, and Jesus are all singing in harmony here: you can't just choose one. You can't be only body, only carnal appetites. But you also can't be only spirit, entirely unembodied. They're all saying: it has to be both. If you try to have only one, you're going to kill it.
The last point I want to make is about a specific image Jesus uses from Numbers 21. The "Son of Man" language comes from Daniel — an intertestamental text that would've been fresh in their minds, like the Maccabees. But Jesus goes on in verse 14 and says, "As Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness" — what I call the snake pole.
In Numbers 21, God sends snakes to afflict the people like a plague. To heal them, God says: make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole. In the Hebrew, there's a wordplay happening between nechash (snake) and nechoshet (bronze/brass). The instruction is to fix the snake — to make it solid, immovable, no longer slithering on the ground. Construct this thing. Render it inert. And anyone who looks upon it and contemplates its meaning will be healed.
And they are. It's this remarkable sign — a semeion, a proof, a wonder — that the snake has been conquered, reduced to a fixed form that cannot hurt you. All of these images swim together in a kind of harmonic ocean: the snake has been conquered, God is your shamar (your protector) from Psalm 121, God has ordered all things, and the serpent is beneath you.
That's where I love the lectionary style. These are set texts that may have been collected together long ago, but the invitation of the RCL — which I don't follow rigidly, but I invite you to explore — is to make meaning of them in real time. We're all going through time together. The RCL is a three-year cycle we can use to remember our history, to remove our own agenda a little bit. Somebody else chose these texts long ago. But we remain connected to the communities that produced these images, signs, and symbols — and that's what it means to believe.
It doesn't require one prescribed set of certainties. It's like the breath. If you need to hold it in a bottle — if you think you have the only way — it's going to die. Watch how it dies. Watch the Temple get destroyed. Watch the pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. Watch the megachurch corruption in nondenominational circles. As soon as you try to capture it, you can be sure it will die. As soon as you think you can wrap your mind around it with certainty, your thing will die. The thing you made will die.
But the thing that God makes — the thing that the breath makes, by unifying flesh and spirit as one — that will surely last. Not as a promise that I'm going to live forever in some heaven, but in the sense that you will always be good fruit to others. People will always be looking to you to help make sense of turbulent times, because you will be a good fruit. Which is exactly what God does: God makes you to be good for others, just like God makes food for us to eat.
