Picking the Right Cherries--August 30, 2022

Picking the Right Cherries--August 30, 2022

"Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised?  Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised?  Let him not seek circumcision. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything." [1 Corinthians 7:18-19]

I read a line the other day from pastor and writer Brian Zahnd recently, who says, "Look, we all cherry-pick the Bible--including Jesus and the apostles! It's just that some people are terrible at it--they pick all the worst cherries!"  

I haven't been able to forget that since.  And now here is Paul the apostle showing us exactly a clear example what it means.

It's fashionable in some circles to criticize people who emphasize or center their theology on some particular strand of the Bible. "You don't just get to cherry-pick out the parts you like!" goes the standard finger-wagging speech.  "If it's in the Bible you have to like it, and if you don't like something that's in the Bible, you're wrong!"  My guess is you've heard the rest of that spiel and all the standard boilerplate, like, "The Bible said it. I believe it.  That settles it!" and all the rest.  And I get it--it comes from the well-intentioned desire to take God's Word seriously, and not to let ourselves off the hook when the Scriptures challenge, stretch, confront, or pull the rug out from under us... which they do, if we really do take them on their own terms.

But the Bible itself doesn't present itself as a reference manual or a cookbook where every sentence carries the same heft, or even the same importance.  Jesus himself, when asked, "What is the greatest commandment [presumably from the Bible of ancient Israel--the Torah]?" doesn't respond with, "It's all equally important because it's all the Bible, and if you question that you are going to burn in hell!"  But rather, Jesus selects--he focuses on a particular center point.  Jesus' answer is, "Love God--oh, and even though you didn't ask, the other side of that coin is to love your neighbor... which is everybody."  Jesus says there are some things of greater importance in the Scriptures, and some of lesser importance.  And like a lens bending light to bring greater clarity, Jesus uses the "greater importance" stuff [loving God and loving neighbor] to bring the rest into focus, making some things to sharper and clearer in light of that love... and also allowing some things to recede out of focus.  We might not have been taught to recognize this, but Jesus is cherry-picking.  It's just that, to borrow Brian Zahnd's turn of phrase, Jesus picks the good cherries, not the worst ones.

Christians, too, by the way, have been doing the same intentionally for the last two thousand years every time we read the Scriptures in light of Jesus--he shows us what is central and what is peripheral.  Jesus himself is our lens--and Jesus insists that love is his own lens. So let's dispense once and for all with the fake seriousness of Respectable Religious People who say, "Every word of the Bible is equally, homogenously authoritative, and you cannot preference one part over another part--it must all carry the same weight!"  If we're paying attention at all, Jesus himself has been preferencing certain strands of the Scriptures, and he is certainly in line with the prophets who came before him who did the same.  

Don't believe me?  Go read Micah 6:6-8, where the prophet, speaking for God, preferences justice, mercy, and walking humbly with God over sacrifices--even though there are an awful lot of very specific commandments in the Old Testament about how and when to offer sacrifices.  And then, if you're up for it, go read Isaiah 56, where the prophet there says, "I know the old commandments said that foreigners and eunuchs are not allowed to belong to the people of God, but now I say that they do belong, even though they are still foreigners and eunuchs."  Voices from within the Bible itself have been picking cherries out of the rest of the Bible for centuries before Jesus.  The question isn't whether we should or not, but rather how to follow Jesus' and the prophets' lead for the ways to do it rightly.

So when Paul the apostle here says, "Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything," we need to be clear that he is doing the same, too.  On the face of it, the sentence is staggering in its audacity--because pretty clearly there were precisely "commandments" in the Scriptures about being circumcised to belong to the people of God.  Going back to the story of Abraham and his descendants, and then reiterated again in the commandments from Sinai, no less than God commands males to be circumcised on the eighth day of life.  And by the time of Jesus and Paul, circumcision was one of the chief defining hallmarks that made you a visible member of the Jewish people, if you were male.  It is one of the commandments of God, straight out of the Bible, and sometimes God could be painfully clear about the importance of circumcision in some of the stories of ancient Israel [I will leave it to you to do the searching there if you want to find those tales].  And yet here is Paul saying that the condition of being circumcised doesn't matter, but rather that really matters are "obeying the commandments of God."  Wait--what?

Paul is clearly making a judgment call about which commandments are the center of God's direction for the followers of Jesus, and which are peripheral. He is unapologetically, unabashedly cherry-picking.  Just like he does in Romans, where he writes, "Owe no one anything except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law," and then goes on to say all of the commandments "are summed up in this word, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law" [Romans 13:8-10].  But Paul isn't just making things up or editing things out willy-nilly--he is following the lead of Jesus, who has already shown us the beating heart of the Scriptures is love: first God's love for us, then our love for God and neighbor.

But look at what a radical move Paul is making here.  Even though it is very clear that "the rules" insist on a permanent physical procedure like circumcision, Paul is convinced that the real heart of the commandments is love, and people who are uncircumcised are able to fulfill that commandment as well and as truly as those who are circumcised.  And so Paul can write to the Corinthians that the "box" they fit into doesn't matter--what matters is to embody the call to love.  By doing that, Paul also reveals that the old binary either/or of "circumcised or not-circumcised" was never adequate for all the people of God anyway--it only ever applied to the half of the population with the prerequisite anatomy, so it was never a rule for the women of ancient Israel.  And for that matter, it never had a way of including people, like the case study about eunuchs in Isaiah 56, whose bodies didn't fit into any neat and tidy categories.  By saying that the binary choice of circumcised or non-circumcised doesn't count for anything, in favor of actually following God's direction to love, Paul is making a clear choice about what in the Bible itself carries the most weight, and what is of lesser substance.  And like Jesus before him, Paul points us to love at the center.  It's always been about love... for God... for neighbor... and yes, we find ourselves loved by God and neighbor, too.

We get ourselves into a ridiculous amount of trouble, often in the name of showing how pious and devout we are, when we treat the Bible like a set of instructions for assembling furniture from IKEA rather than a story centered in Jesus.  Paul here has given us a really helpful case study in knowing how to keep Jesus in focus and to read the rest of the Scriptures in light of him--that is, how to pick the best cherries, rather than the worst ones.  Following Jesus' own lead to see love as the center of the Scriptures allows us to see which of "The Rules" do not have to trouble us, so that we are freed to keep the great commandments at the beating heart of it all--the call to love.  It will keep us from making an idol out of the Bible so we are freed to love and serve the true God to whom the Scriptures point.

May we read the Scriptures with such discernment and clarity, and may we then live what we have read and understood.

Lord God, keep pointing us to the center of things in you and in Christ Jesus, who shows us your own heart of love for us and for the world.