POLITICS OF INMORTALITY

During previous weeks I have been talking about the strong (see shellacked mandala or fear and generosity posts) presence of the Exodus story in the gospel passages. Even going back to the feeding of the five thousands, we have seen Jesus re-enacting the Exodus story. I have pondered that Jesus interest in reactivating as if it were such a powerful foundational myth in Israel must also been an important part of his program of re-igniting hope in his audience.

However the exodus of Jesus is not quite the same of the exodus from Egypt, it plays on the historical memory of the people of Israel known as “The Exodus” and it does shares its major motifs and specially its major symbols and breaking points. Like manna, water crossing, feeding. Walking to freedom, passage from state of slavery and scarcity to state of freedom and abundance, to mention a few. But it does it like the one who dyes new hues into old and worn fabric bleached by centuries of fierce sun and heat. He picks up the pattern and repaints a New and quite different Promised Land.

We have talked about that the Israelites of the First century found themselves again “ab intio”, back to square one, slaves and living in scarcity, the problem was they were in Egypt no more, but in the promised land were supposedly they will live in freedom and abundance. There was a dissonance between God promises and reality.

The contractual nature of the relationship of the people of Israel and God, assumed that the people have not fulfilled their side of that bargain and therefore God was off the hook in fulfilling his. There was historical precedence, they had a severe and catastrophic similar covenantal failure when the educate leadership was deported to Babylon. They came back after 500 years, we presume some of them, while others were probably assimilated to Babylonian culture. And joined the locals that were left behind. Similar failure on the covenantal relationships happen when the Northern Kingdom fell to the invader and Israel was reduced to smaller southern portion known as Judah. Jesus and most of his followers were descendants of that disappeared kingdom in the northen part and seen as suspicious by their southern brothers.

Now, at the time of Jesus no one was free, and Jesus audience with some noted Gospel exceptions, were a raggedly riffraff. For this crowd the hope of liberation was not a philosophical or theological musing of the well-fed-ivory-tower-scholars, but a rather more crude, pungent and pressing need. Studies have it that the level of poverty in Israel at the turn of the first century was widespread and deep, as in hand to mouth. It is from this urgency that Jesus frequently scoffs at the Pharisee and Sadducee political parties, who although nationalistic the first and lacayune the second have both failed to provide guidance to the people in such dire times and spent all of their energy in endless arguing of the finer points of the law and the correctness of doctrine.

The Sadducees close to the Romans and the puppet government in Jerusalem did not believe in life eternal and went on to prove that one could derive a clear direction from the text of the law to sustain such believe. For the Sadducees when one died we sleeps in the Lord until and that is that. No wonder they were consumed with “earthly concerns” if they could deal with their meaning in life by succeeding here and now. The pharisees, who scoffed at the Romans for having other religion and being not form the chosen people, believed in the idea that life prolongs itself beyond its physicality. Some of the stories told by Jesus seemed to indicate that he was at least within that group of ideas akin or close to the pharisee party.