Attested: The Shape of Emergence Christianity. Part Two: The Book of Liberation.

Worshiping, trusting, obeying, and following Jesus Christ is the only job of the gathering of disciples, the Church.  This job demands all our energy.  It means first of all remembering who Jesus Christ is before and apart from the radically reconfigured version projected and pushed on us by Empire.  The message of the Cross is that the real Jesus Christ is always the One that Empire is trying to silence and kill, but who nevertheless rises to new life to inspire and guide a gathering of followers.  Which is why Barmen starts with the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture. 

The Bible of course has also been commandeered and appropriated, its real message buried under dense strata of interpretation designed to enforce and reinforce the demands of Empire.  But listened to more closely, especially through the lens of Jesus Christ and the New Testament, we come to understand that the Bible offers a profoundly liberating alternative and resistance to Empire.

When I attended seminary one of my Old Testament professors suggested that the oldest verse in the Bible, the verse that everything else likely sprang from, the seed of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, the most lucid, potent, and fruitful memory that has forever characterized our faith, is Exodus 15:21.  Here it is:

And Miriam sang to them:

"Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

horse and rider he has thrown into the sea."

We hear the voice of Miriam, Moses’ sister, singing in triumph after the miraculous deliverance of the people at the Sea.  It is the song of the band of liberated slaves at the moment when their freedom is guaranteed by the destruction of Pharaoh’s pursuing army.  We may even see the whole Bible as a commentary on that single, pregnant, exuberant verse.  

The entire Biblical story and tradition is essentially and originally about liberation, a movement from death and ignorance to life and Wisdom.  It is written from the perspective of enslaved people who have experienced a miraculous emancipation at God’s hand.  The Bible is at its core and blossoms out of the experience of a group of freed slaves.

We only correctly understand the Bible from this perspective.  It is about the movement from bondage to freedom.  It is good news to the poor, the sick, the disinherited, the disenfranchised, the outcast, the excluded, the oppressed, the lost, and the destitute, and can only be interpreted from their point-of-view.  It concerns hope to the hopeless, and gratitude for God’s miraculous deliverance.

It is also about the destruction of evil.  Pharaoh’s army represents all oppressive and unjust and violent systems that perpetrate inequity, exploitation, bigotry, and tyranny.  The liberation of the people necessarily involves the defeat of a dominating inhuman power.  In other words, Empire.  The Egyptian cavalry's attempt to enforce and restore a regime based on lies finally gets inundated by the reality represented by the surging water of creation.  Such is the inevitable fate of Empire through the Bible until Revelation.  It is no wonder that the Church under the yoke of Empire suppressed this perspective; but it remains there in the text to be discovered.   

The Lord Jesus recognizes this as well.  He pointedly chooses Passover, the holy day commemorating the Exodus liberation event, as the time for his own death and resurrection.  In many parts of Christianity the day we call Easter is referred to as "Pascha," that is, Passover, making the connection to Resurrection explicit.  In the New Common Lectionary the Old Testament reading for The Resurrection of the Lord (Easter) is from Exodus 15.  Jesus clearly sees his own work as a fulfillment of the Exodus, and it is through him that we see the centrality of Miriam's story in the first place.

  Exodus 15:21 is also the song of a woman.  At the most portentous places in Scripture, it is the women who first get it.  And a lot of the time they are named Mary: In addition to Miriam (the name is Hebrew for Mary), Jesus’ mother sings the hymn called the Magnificat, expressing her faith in the One she will bear, witnessing to the Incarnation in explicit political and economic terms.  Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus in advance for his burial, anticipating the way he gives his life on the cross.  She serves thus as the primary witness to his passion; indeed hers is Jesus' only actual anointing with oil, which means that Mary literally ratifies that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One.  And Mary Magdalene (the name means The Tower; there was no town named Magdala) is the first to meet and proclaim the risen Jesus, becoming the Apostle to the Apostles.  (She is also likely the one who in the oldest manuscripts proclaims "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world" (John 11:27).   

Finally, Exodus 15:21 is the song of an Israelite, a member of a minority group which had been forced into slavery and oppressed because of her race.  As they were originally migrants from Canaan, this aspect of being foreigners in Egypt also comes into play.

Miriam's song shows us that the Bible is essentially geared towards the interests of marginalized, excluded, suffering, and exploited people.  And it cannot be authentically pressed into service in the interests of Pharaoh, that is, rulers, owners,  and privileged, wealthy people.  It cannot be used to legitimate the power of the powerful, or to oppress the weak, poor, excluded, or sick.  To use the Bible to advocate for or defend imperialism, colonialism, slavery, racism, the subjugation of women, economic or ecological injustice, the exclusion of refugees and migrants, or any kind of social stratification is to contradict not only it’s heart at Exodus 15:21, but the entire flavor and tenor of the rest of Scripture, culminating with the ministry of Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection constitute the final fulfillment of Miriam's Song, and of the entire Hebrew Scriptures.  

The Church needs regularly and frequently to place itself at the edge of the sea with Miriam, and at the mouth of the empty tomb with Mary Magdalene, and realize again the deliverance to which it is called to bear witness.  The powers that would hold us in crippling and lethal bondage have been vanquished.  The new life has come!

Here is a brief summary of the main flow of the Biblical story, through the lens of Miriam's song. 

1. The "prequel" of Genesis shows how God liberates the creation from chaos, declaring everything God makes as "very good."  We see the disease of ego-centric corruption infect creation, only to be washed away in the Flood.  And then, in the renewed creation, it depicts God's selection of the family of Abraham and Sarah to be the seed of a new humanity that trusts and obeys the Creator, an example and blessing to the whole world. 
2. The Bible continues with the story of God’s people in Exodus.  They begin as slaves under the thumb of a cruel, abusive, and exploitative imperial regime in Egypt.  Thus a fundamental opposition is established in the Bible that will run through every subsequent book.  On one side we find the powerless people of God, and on the other a series of corrupt, mighty, wealthy, privileged, violent, idolatrous empires, and those who want to be like, or benefit from, them.  God is always unequivocally on the side of the former.  Always.
3. So the Bible is essentially a book by and about a band of emancipated slaves and their descendants.  It is therefore inherently suspicious of and opposed to slavery and all forms of coercion and bondage.  (Slavery was, nevertheless the foundation of the economy of world civilization for thousands of years, until the Industrial Revolution, when it got replaced by its upgraded version, Capitalism.  So, while there are passages which tolerate, regulate, and manage the practice as a matter of practical realism, the Bible essentially hates slavery.  We who still participate in Capitalism are in no position to judge ancient peoples in this regard.  Our descendants will shake their heads at our tolerance of a system of owners paying (as little as possible) for people's labor, which is basically a blend of slavery and prostitution.) 
4. God immediately brings the people to Mt. Sinai and gives them a Law.  This Law is designed to ensure that God’s people are a new kind of nation, one that will not devolve into anything like the empire from which they have just been liberated.  Therefore, the Law is clear in its insistence that among the people of God there is fundamental equality.  No class of people will be permitted to accrue permanently appreciably more economic wealth or political power than anyone else.  Leviticus 25 gives us the most clear statement of procedures for making sure this doesn’t happen; it's the ancient Hebrew way of saying "Tax the rich!"  In the new nation, only God leads; other knots of authority and wealth, "events and powers, figures and truths" get undone or subordinated.    
5. Empire expressed idolatry in oppressive, exploitative, and unjust practices against the poor, aliens, workers, and the Earth.  Such injustices are so out of synch with God’s Law that they inevitably bring down upon themselves.  military, economic, or ecological disasters.  Living out of synch with God’s Law means attempting to live a lie, it simply does not comport with reality, and therefore collapses.  This is what happened to Egypt.  Their injustice led directly to a set of 10 ecological catastrophes/plagues, forcing Pharaoh to let God's people go.
6. God gives the people a way to remember and reaffirm their devotion to God and God’s Law by establishing an annual cycle of holy days, and regular rituals centered in the Tabernacle/Temple, which symbolically represented the creation.  Through prayer, song, and sacrifice/meals, the people celebrated their liberation from bondage and gave thanks to their Creator for life and freedom.
7. The conquest of the land of Canaan by God’s people displaced the idolatrous and exploitative petty rulers of Canaanite city-states, which were clients of Egypt.  The incoming mass of formerly oppressed, landless migrants from the desert, probably allied with local oppressed people (see the story of Rahab in Joshua 2), rose up and overwhelmed these oppressive regimes and established a decentralized tribal order ruled by God’s egalitarian Law.  In this case, the Israelites were themselves the disaster that these cities and their leaders earned by their idolatry and injustice.
8. The religion of these tyrants was designed to support their agricultural economy.  It therefore involved gods of economic growth, invented and sponsored by the ruling economic and political class.  To worship these deities was to embrace the unjust and exploitative system perpetrated by the rulers pushing them.  That’s why God required that the people put these gods away: worship of them fostered and legitimated inequality, injustice, and violence in society.  It required allegiance to the rulers and owners who developed these gods, thus acquiescing in an unjust political and economic system.  The epitome of these deities was called Baal.
9. The people of God were originally led by individuals called and authorized by God.  These prophets, priests, and judges did not acquire excess wealth (the priestly tribe was explicitly forbidden from having their own land), nor did they exert power beyond that given them by God, sometimes only for a limited time.  God eventually allows the people to have a king only as a grudging concession to them.  (Read Samuel’s stern warning in 1 Samuel 8:10-18 about what having a human king means.)  None of the subsequent kings was flawless; many of them were pretty atrocious.  Not even the virtues of the few good ones were able to prevent the nation from eventually falling into disaster.  The institution of the monarchy was largely a failure.
10. Even when there were kings in Israel and Judah, they ruled a small, relatively weak country, nearly always threatened, and sometimes overrun by or made subservient to larger neighbors.  Even the glory days of David were later undermined by idolatry and injustice, which led to the permanent split between the two kingdoms. 
11. According to the prophets whom God sends as critics, the failures of the kings were overwhelmingly related to their addiction to idolatry which led to injustice.  The message of the prophets is to reject economic growth as a value in itself, and instead to follow YHWH, whose Law ensured social/economic/ecological justice.  The primary themes of the preaching of most of the prophets were anti-idolatry and pro-social justice.  It is only YHWH who creates a society of peace and prosperity.  Following the gods of economic growth only leads back to the inequalities and injustices of Egypt.
12. Idolatry therefore leads inexorably to social and economic injustice.  The people of God fall into these practices as well.  As a consequence, the Assyrians destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel, and those tribes were almost never heard from again.  Later, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and took the leaders of the last remaining tribe of God’s people, Judah, into exile.
13. The prophets around the time of the exile flatly stated that the failure of the Judean State was a direct result of idolatry and injustice.  The monarchy was permanently eradicated.  In Babylon, the people learned to keep their faith without land, temple, power, wealth, or even political freedom.  Much of the Bible as we know it was edited and compiled by and for a defeated and all-but enslaved people in Babylon.   
14. Second only to the Exodus, the return of God’s people from exile is the great miracle of the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Lord once again vindicates and lifts up the losers, restoring them to the land of God’s promise.
15. The Wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures articulates the universal and cosmological dimension of Israel's liberation story.  These books, many of which were pointedly left out of the Protestant canon, often give us a broader and deeper perspective on God's Presence.  A central figure in them is Wisdom, in Greek Sophia, a mysterious figure who dances between the Creator and creation, bringing true enlightenment to those who find her.  The centerpiece is a marvelous, multi-layered sensuous, erotic love poem called The Song of Songs.  God, it turns out, is love.  The heart of the commandments is love: "Love one another," "love your neighbor as yourself," "love God with all your" soul and being: these are all teachings proclaimed and embodied by the promised Messiah.
16. When the Anointed One, Jesus, finally comes, he is born, not in a palace, but in a barn to parents who have no place else to go, as they are jerked around by an imperial edict (Luke 2:1-8).  Thus Jesus’ lineage as a descendant of King David affords him no privileges; it doesn’t even get him a real bed to be born in.  In him the Creator thereby lives as one of the poorest of the poor.  At the same time he is recognized and celebrated by religious and ethnic foreigners, even enemies, through signs in creation itself (Matthew 2:1-12).  Both stories affirm that no dominant, patriarchal male figure has anything to do with his birth, which is purely the act of "God and a woman" (Sojourner Truth).
17. In his ministry Jesus categorically rejects wealth and power, critiques those who have them, and identifies himself with the “least” in society (Matthew 25:31-46).  Thus he remains firmly within the tradition of the faith of emancipated slaves.  At every turn, beginning with the hymn sung by his mother before he is born (Luke 1:46-55), Jesus advocates the nonviolent overturning of society.  This happens not by the exertion of power (Luke 4:5-8), but by the establishment of alternative communities of people who trust in him and follow his teachings.  He announces a “Reign of God” (Mark 1:15), which undermines and contradicts the regimes of human rulers, and a advocates for a return to the values of the Law in a new situation (Matthew 5:17-20).  Jesus witnesses to and enacts the Reign of God by his ministry of healing, exorcism, forgiveness, teaching, and example.  In all these activities he raises up hurting, sick, deprived, grieving, and hungry people, whom he says are specially blessed by God (Matthew 5:1-12).  
18. Jesus eventually brings his work to Jerusalem, where he predictably attracts the ire of the religious and political authorities.  By throwing the commercial interests out of the Temple, he so threatens them that they work to eliminate him.  He knows that his arrest and execution by them are inevitable, given his message and ministry of liberation and equity.
19. He also knows that his sacrificial death is necessary.  In giving himself up to die Jesus identifies with all the lynched and unjustly executed, the tortured, the sacrificed, and the scapegoats.  At the same time, he personally weaves together, and fulfills three strands of his own Jewish tradition: (a) The Passover Lamb whose blood protects the soon-to-be-liberated people from the death of the last plague against Egypt (Exodus 12).  The people walk into freedom literally under the blood of this lamb, painted on the lintels of their doorways.  (b) The rituals of the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16) in which the High Priest uses the blood of the goat representing God to cover (in Hebrew: KPR) the Temple, representing creation.  This blood serves both to protect creation from the harmful effects of experiencing God’s holiness directly, and to connect creation to the beneficial grace of God.  And (c) the figure of the “suffering servant” of God (Isaiah 53), who empathically bears in his own body the consequences of the people’s idolatry and injustice, thus healing and redeeming them.  Interpreting his death through these three lenses, Jesus and the early church understand that he fulfills the promise of the Hebrew Scriptures and opens the way to reconciliation with God for all.
20. Jesus’ resurrection reveals the final truth, meaning, and destiny of all creation as a transfigured life beyond the power of death, thus liberating all who participate in it from fear, anger, and shame, and for God’s life of justice, peace, and love (1 Corinthians 15:20-26).  It removes fear of death as a legitimate motivation, showing that death is merely the transformation into a new and unimaginable form of life (1 Corinthians 15:35-57).  His blood literally permeates and sanctifies the whole creation (John 19:32-35).
21. The disciples of Jesus, now sent by God's Holy Spirit as Apostles, spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, lifting up the good news that Jesus, who was executed by the Romans for sedition, nevertheless still lives with, within, and among them, and establishing alternative communities of resistance against the Roman Empire.  These communities, gathered according to Jesus' commandment, around the Table of his Body and Blood, witness to the alternative commonwealth Jesus called the Reign of God.
22. The final book of the New Testament is the most explicitly anti-Empire statement in all of ancient literature.  It depicts in graphic terms the collapse and disintegration of Satan's rule in the form of Roman power, the destruction of "those who destroy the Earth" (Revelation 11:18), clearing a space for the emergence of a New Heaven and a New Earth, of joy, blessing, peace, and justice.       

The Bible, therefore, is not “objective” or neutral.  It is thoroughly biased.  It is not “fair and balanced.”  It doesn’t give equal time to all opposing viewpoints.  It has a definite agenda.  And if we don’t approach the Bible from this perspective, we can get a horribly distorted message out of it, which has in fact happened for much of Christian history.  The Bible was often being read and interpreted from the point-of-view of ruling and owner classes, starting with the Roman Empire.  We inevitably misread the Bible when we try to read it from above, as privileged people who wield wealth and power.  

In truth, the Bible was written for and largely by people without much, if any, wealth, power, and privilege.  Therefore, authentic interpretations of the Bible must be biased towards “the least of these,” and for their benefit. 

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[Part Three will make the point that the Bible belongs to the community of people who trust in and follow Jesus Christ.  That community alone, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is guided by and shaped by the Bible; it also has the right to determine its content and meaning.]