Jeremiah 7:1-20 - Jeremiah goes to the Temple to urge
the people entering to truly reform and not to put their trust in ancient
mantras of God’s favor: “Stop believing those deceitful words, ‘We
are safe! This is the Lord’s Temple, this is the Lord’s Temple, this is the
Lord’s Temple’” (7:4) The promises of the Lord are not meant to make the
people feel that their behavior doesn’t matter, that they can always be sure of
the Lord’s favor no matter what they do. The leaders have used God’s promises
to build up a spirit of presumptuousness
that God had no intention of inspiring. “Do
you take this Temple that bears my name for a robbers’ den?’” (JB 7:11)
They are reminded of what happened to Shiloh—the
first place set up as a place of worship between the time of Joshua to the time
of Samuel. God abandoned it when people became unfaithful. He can do the same with Jerusalem if
people don’t shape up.
He warns
Jeremiah that the people will not listen to him either. They are all involved
in worshipping alien gods like “the queen of heaven” and other gods. (7:18).
Who was this “Queen of Heaven”? At the time of Jeremiah, it was a Semitic
goddess called Astarte or Ashtoreth or Ishtar. She was worshipped throughout
the Mediterranean region and into the Middle East. The Greeks incorporated her
into their pantheon as Aphrodite. She was a goddess of love, fertility, and
war. That the same title should be attached to Jesus’ mother is difficult to
explain. It is no doubt partly a process of religious evolution and cooptation
of earlier devotions that could be fused with Christian associations. There is
also direct Christian language in Revelation 12 that could be seen as
justifying the use of the term for Mary. I think it was pretty established by
the 5th century. Protestants felt uncomfortable with it, believing
that the practice of fusing earlier pagan holidays with Christian celebrations
was not a good practice. Certainly Quakers were extremists in that phobia – abandoning
even the names of the months and days of the weeks as having pagan roots.
1 Corinthians 11:1-16 - Paul uses the
prevailing cultural norms as ways of bringing out how Christ can be understood
by the people of Corinth. As a man
is head over his wife in marriage, so Christ now is head over the man. Women should not act like men—if she
doesn’t wear the customary veil, she should logically have her head shaved like
a man, but this she does not want to do. Women are to be veiled as a sign of
submission – and for propriety’s sake.
These are all just customs, but people should not be rebellious in
Paul’s view (11:16). It’s important to give this passage closer scrutiny,
however; it’s VERY important to see these words: “[A]ny woman who prays or proclaims God’s message in
public worship with nothing on her head disgraces her husband” (11:5).
Later in the letter, we will see words that basically forbid women to speak in
these public meetings (14:34). Scholars have speculated that these words
forbidding female messages in worship were added later by someone even more conservative
than Paul. Certainly the two passages are contradictory.
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