Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 15-18 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 20)

Isaiah 15 – This oracle on Moab – the mountainous region on the eastern side of the Dead Sea. In the biblical story, Moab was the son of Lot and Lot’s elder daughter. The Assyrians invaded Moab. Nebo to the north was the mountain on which Moses was said to have died. The people lament; the land is a wasteland.

Isaiah 16 – Moabite survivors ford the Arnon – boundary with Judah – and take refuge there. When the assault is over and the “destroyer is no more” (16:4), a king will be reestablished there, “a judge careful for justice and eager for integrity” (16:5). The prophet grieves for Moab; his “whole being quivers like lyre strings” (16:11). In the end this proud land will be reduced to impotency.

Isaiah 17 – Oracle against Damascus: The city will soon be a “heap of ruins” – towns “abandoned for ever” (17:1). “That day, man will look to his creator and his eyes will turn to the Holy One of Israel” (17:7). Idolatry will end, worship of gods like Adonis.

Isaiah 18 – Oracle against Cush (Ethiopia), which then was in control of Egypt: They are a nation that is “mighty and masterful” (18:2) but it will not always be this way. They will one day turn to Yahweh too on Mt. Zion.

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 20

I had had the knowledge of Christ but had missed the connection, and now that I was seeing the connection and the relevance, the knowledge seemed much more credible. How could I have been so willing to set aside these experiences and memories? How could I have turned my back on the life He had begotten in my heart?

Early Friends addressed such questions too, and the answers they gave seemed right to me. There was also  “that in us” that did not want to respond to God, a part of us that was much more comfortable with the answers the world gave. Francis Howgill, one of the early Friends I liked the best, wrote of this with insight as well:

         It [Christ’s word in you] has often checked and called, but you

have not answered its call, and so have chosen your own way, and so have gone from the way, which is the light of Christ in you. And so you run into the broad way; and that which desired after God hath not been nourished and fed, but hath been famished and another hath been fed, which now is for the slaughter. But now as you return home to within, to the true Light of Jesus, which is that one thing, which leads all men that own it, and to be guided by it, you shall have true rest and peace (Howgill, Early Quaker Writings, Barbour and Roberts, eds, 175-176).

This was true. I too had famished the part of me that had desired after God, and I had fed the doubting parts. I too had rushed into the “broad way” – the popular way – of my generation, the way of ideology and political theorizing, the way of psychology and scientific “positivism,” the way of doubt and skepticism of all tradition and truth. Now I wanted to “return home” as these early Friends had done, to “own” the light again and be guided by it to a place of “true rest and peace.” God had been pouring his spirit out on me my entire life, and I had not received Him in a way I could build on, but now I would. I felt my heart respond to the idea of returning to Christ:

O that I might now be joined to him, and he alone might live in me! And so, in the willingness which God had wrought in me, in this day of his power to my soul, I gave up to be instructed, exercised and led by him, in the waiting for and feeling of holy see, that all might be wrought out of me which could not live with the see, but would be hindering the dwelling and reigning of the seed in me, which it remained and had power (Penington, The Light Within, 6).

This was the way back – waiting for and feeling for his “holy seed,” listening for his voice to instruct me, seeing the things in me that “could not live with [it] but [that] hinder[ed] the dwelling and reigning of the seed in me.” This was the way Friends pointed toward. It was just as present to us as it had been to Quakers in seventeenth-century England and to Christians in first-century Jerusalem.

Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 14 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 19)

Isaiah 14 – The “Lord will have mercy on the descendants of Jacob. He will choose Israel as his special people once again. He will bring them back to settle one again in the own land” (14:1).

The prophet offers a satire on the king of Babylon: In Sheol, the “kings” of the earth will greet the Babylonians, saying “So you too have been brought to nothing” (14:10). 

They used to think they would “climb up to the heavens” (14:13) but no – they cannot rival God. People of the world will look and see them no longer. God will wipe out every memory and remnant. Assyria too will be brought to nothing, and the Philistines are warned too.

From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism

Part 19

This early Quaker message wasn’t a message they had invented, but it was one they were clearer about than any other Christians I had ever come in contact with. The Scriptures told us of this Christ. In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul writes these words: “Examine your selves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test Yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” (13:5)

And John—John knew this Christ:

He [John the Baptist]. . . was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming

into the world (John 1:8-9).

God’s light enlightens every person according to John, and this light came into the world in the person of Jesus. “Abide in me as I abide in you,” Christ says to his disciples (John 15:4). The indwelling Christ was the “light” in us that permitted us to see God and Christ (see 1 Cor.2: 10-12), to hear God’s voice and feel the encouragement of God’s love: “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us” (1 John 3:24).

These are all familiar passages to people who read the Bible or attend church with any regularity. I had heard and read these passages earlier in my life too, but I had never realized that they meant what they said in any kind of practical way—poetical flourish or mystical sentiments maybe--but nothing I could relate to my day-to-day-life.

No one I had ever met as a practicing Episcopalian or Catholic had ever spoken of these things in a way that related them to my experience. But it stood to reason that if Christ’s Spirit is really in the human spirit, it must be something you can experience and be in contact with. How does one sense that presence? How does one discern it from all the other things that are present in the human mind and heart? How does it connect with the gospel the apostles preached or the church they established? These were the things Friends spoke of in their preaching and writing. These were the things they focused on in their worship and in the living of their lives.

They talked about “motions” that drew them to God and made them feel his presence and “openings” that helped them comprehend his will. They experienced “pressings” that revealed to them God’ s displeasure with things that they said or did, and “callings” from him to challenge worldly customs or preach his gospel to the world. These were the things Friends wrote about. I knew what it was to have such “motions,” “pressings,” and “openings.” I had had them one way or another all my life. I had just not been able to see them in the context of the Christ spoken of in Scripture. A few of the “openings” I had had over the course of my life had even survived my atheism. I still believed there was order and design in the universe, and I still felt there was something in human nature that tapped into some transcendent something somewhere.

Now I began to open myself to the idea that it was not just weakness or neediness in me that was at the root of these experiences and intuitions, but something real and necessary and solid—even God himself:

 . . .this is he whom I have waited for and sought after from my

childhood, who was always near me, and had often begotten life in

my heart, but I knew him not distinctly, nor how to receive him or

dwell with him (Isaac Penington, Early Quaker Writings, Barbour and Roberts, eds., 233).

I had tried to convince myself that he had been an illusion, but now I could see that he simply needed to be accepted in faith. Friends’ way of applying the Christ event to my interior life permitted me to see a validity in it that was so helpful and so powerful spiritually that the intellectual difficulties I had had seemed to pale by comparison. A profound and powerful sense of meaning came from accepting it. Again there were words in the Eliot poem that seemed perfectly to capture what was happening:

         [I had] had the experience but missed the meaning,

         And approach to the meaning restores the experience

         In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness (Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”, Four Quartets, II. 93-96).

Daily Bible Reading: Jeremiah 31-32 and 2 Corinthians 12-13

Jeremiah 31  - This chapter is maybe one of the most important biblical passages in Quaker “theology.” Jeremiah gives voice to his prophecy of the “New Covenant.” I don’t think scholars are sure of the origin of the Book of Consolation  (chapters 30 through 33}, of which this is a part. Laurence Boadt, in his Reading the Old Testament, says that they are “words of hope from a variety of different times and occasions. Some . . . are addressed to ‘Israel’ and probably were from the early days of Jeremiah’s prophetic work under Josiah when he was addressing the remnants of the northern kingdom of Israel. His comforting words are later reused to comfort the exiles of Judah who would be the “new Israel” (373). 

Jeremiah says God’s people will find pardon in the wilderness.  “I have loved you with an everlasting love. . .I will guide [you] to streams of water, by a smooth path where [you] will not stumble. For I am a father to Israel” (31:3 and 9).  They “will be like a well-watered garden; they will have everything they need. . . I will comfort them and turn their mourning into joy, and their sorrow into gladness” (31:12-13).

The two important messianic verses follow in verses 31:21-22. If you “google” around a little, you will find that there is a good deal of controversy over exactly how the verses should be translated:

1)     My Catholic Jerusalem Bible has the following: “Set up signposts, raise landmarks; mark the road well, the way by which you went. Come home, virgin of Israel, come home to these towns of yours.  How long will you hesitate, disloyal daughter? For Yahweh is creating something new on earth: the Woman sets out to find her Husband again.” The Jerusalem Bible note here indicates that there is a lack of clarity in the last line in Hebrew.  The Hebrew verb, which they translate here as ‘set out to find again’, means literally ‘to surround’, ‘to turn around something’ [or dance around it], or ‘to go looking for’. The Vulgate Latin edition, translated by Jerome in the 4^th century emphasized the messianic meaning by translating it as “the woman will surround the man” and this was interpreted as referring to Mary’s virginal conception of Christ.”

2)     And then comes the prophecy of the New Covenant:  “See, the days are coming—it is Yahweh who speaks—when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel (and the House of Judah), but not a covenant like the one I made with their ancestors . . . Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts.  Then I will be their God and they shall be my people.  There will be no further need for neighbor to try to teach neighbor, or brother to say to brother, ‘Learn to know Yahweh!’ No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest [. . .] since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind” (31:31-34). Cross references include all of the following: Ps.51; Mt 26:28; 2 Cor 3-6; Rm 11:27; Heb 8:6-13 and 9:15; 1 Jn 5:20.

For early Friends, this promise of a New Covenant that no man could teach, but only God’s Spirit, present in the human heart, was perhaps the most important verse of scripture. Here are Fox’s words about it:

“He it is that is now come and hath given us an understanding that we may know him that is true; and to rule in our hearts even with his law; and to rule in our hearts even with his law of love and of life in our inward parts which makes us free from the law of sin and death. And we have no life but by him, for he is the quickening spirit, the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, by whose blood we are cleaned and our consciences sprinkled from dead works to serve the living God, by whose blood we are purchased, and so he is our mediator that makes peace and reconciliation between God offended and us offending, being the oath of God, the new covenant of light, life, grace, and peace, the author and finisher of our faith” (Journal 603).

While almost every Quaker will happily turn to these words of Fox to justify their conviction that the New Covenant means NO ONE NEEDS TO BE TAUGHT by anyone about the Way we must “walk,” few in my experience would say the other things Fox says here: that we have “no life but by [Christ]” or that it is through Christ’s blood that we are redeemed.

Jeremiah 32 - It is again 588/587 BC, during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.  Zedekiah has Jeremiah imprisoned in Court of the Guard in the Royal Palace for prophesying Judah’s defeat. The Lord tells Jeremiah that his cousin Hanamel will come to sell him some of the family land in Anathoth and that he should buy it as an act of faith in the restoration promised by God (32:38-40), even in the face of imminent destruction.  He gives the deed to Baruch, his scribe to put in an earthen jar for safe-keeping. Then again, we hear the words of God to Jeremiah, words promising redemption:

           

“I am going to gather the people from all the countries where I have scattered them in my anger and fury, and I am going to bring them back to this place and let them live here in safety. Then they will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them a single purpose in life: to honor me for all time, for their own good and the good of their descendants. I will make an eternal covenant with them.” (32:37-40).

2 Corinthians 12 - Paul speaks of his visions and ‘openings” or revelations.  He speaks of someone he knows that he says was “caught up to the third heaven” (12:2) fourteen years earlier and “heard ineffable things, which no one may utter” (12:4). The NAB note indicates that this is just a more “distant” way of referring to himself, but I am not sure how this interpretation came about. Paul continues to speak of his dedication to the work of apostleship he has done. He acknowledges his weaknesses. He sees them as a way of keeping him humble. “I am content with weaknesses, insult, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong" (12:10). 

2 Corinthians 13- Paul warns the Corinthians that he will not be lenient with them when he comes the third time. They are looking for him to give “proof” that Christ is speaking in him, but Christ and he share the same power.  “For indeed he was crucified out of weakness, but he lives by the power of God.  So also we are weak in him, but toward you we shall live with him by the power of God” (13:4).  Then these wonderful words: “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith.  Test yourselves.  Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” or better yet the JB translation, “Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ is really in you? If not, you have failed the test” (12:5-6).