2 Maccabees 7 – Seven
brothers are also models of the kind of Jewish revival the Maccabees seek.
They refuse to comply when the king orders them to eat pig’s flesh. To punish
them, he orders one of the seven – the spokesman – to be tortured and killed. He is cut up and fried. Both mother and
other brothers look on but only encourage one another in accepting martyrdom.
“Inhuman fiend, you may discharge us from this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up,
since it is for his laws that we die, to live again for ever.” (7: 9)
This is the first time in scripture that belief in bodily
resurrection is expressed. The note says
the “doctrine of immortality [is] developed in the atmosphere of Greek thought
and without reference to the resurrection of the body . . .For Hebrew thought however, which makes no distinction between soul
and body, the notion of survival implied a physical resurrection . . .”
Ironic that a book so dedicated to rejecting Greek influence would import such
a Greek-influenced notion!!
It is the mother who is most highly praised. She says, “I do not know how you appeared
in my womb; it was not I who endowed you with breath and life, I had not the
shaping of your every part. It is the creator of the world, ordaining the
process of man’s birth and presiding over the origin of all things, who in his
mercy will most surely give you back both breath and life, seeing that you now
despise your own existence for the sake of his laws” (7: 22-23).
A hard thing to understand is that all of these martyrs
ascribe their sufferings not to the evil of the king but to the punishment of
God for
sins they have presumably committed: “We are suffering for our own sins;
and if, to punish and discipline us, our living Lord vents his wrath upon us, he
will yet be reconciled with his own servants.”
Everyone dies in the end here – and all are honored by both
Jews and Christians for their faithfulness to the traditions of our faith.
“Friends’
Testimonies”
Part 5
Simplicity,
Integrity, and Plainness of Speech
The idea of looking solely to God for one’s direction, of
turning one’s gaze from all the pressures and preoccupations of the “world” one
was living in, led to a kind of radical
simplicity about what was important in life. For me it is especially hard
to tease apart the testimonies of high importance to me, so I will deal with
them here together.
Simplicity for
Friends involved a turning away from the two things human beings are most
likely to worship in place of God—the self and the world. The “world” in
this context is not the “world of
John 3:16,
“For God so loved the world, that he
gave his only Son, so that everyone who belies in him may not perish but may
have eternal life.”
but the “world” of 1 John 2:15-16.
“Do not love the world or the things in
the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all
that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride
in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world.”
The good “world” was the creation and humanity made in God’s
image and likeness, the world that God’s love “was toward” as early Friends put
it. It was the world God’s love went out
to in spite of all the problems man’s disobedience brought. The “fallen” or
bad “world” was the unjust and tawdry world of things that fed human pride and
sparked human lust: superfluous possessions, customs and traditions that set
one person or class or race up over another, transient and unimportant things
that people loved instead of loving God. As people came into a sense of God’s
real presence in them, however, the vanities and attractions of the “world”
lost their allure:
“. . . we received the gospel with a
ready mind, and with broken hearts, and affected spirits; and gave up to follow
the Lord fully, casting off the weights and burdens. . . . Oh, the strippings
of all needless apparel, and the forsaking of superfluities in meats, drinks
and in the plain self-denying path we walked. . . . Our words were few and
savory, our apparel and houses plain, being stripped of superfluities; our
countenances grave. . . . .Indeed we
were a plain, broken-hearted, contrite spirited, self-denying people; our
souls being in an unexpressible travail to do all things well pleasing in the
sight of God, for our great concern night and day was to obtain through Jesus
Christ the great work of salvation, and thereby an assurance of the everlasting
rest and Sabbath of our God” (Charles Marshall, Early Quaker Writings, Barbour and Roberts, eds. 81).
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