Daily Old Testament: 2 Maccabees 9 and My Own Article on "Friends' Testimonies" (Part 7)

2 Maccabees 9 – Antiochus is outraged when he hears of the defeat of Nicanor and Timotheus. He races out to take revenge, but God strikes him with a terrible pain in his bowels and “excruciating internal torture” (9:5) that cause him to smell very bad. The author uses this as a lesson in how God takes his revenge on those who persecute even in this life, and no matter how exalted a man may be in power, his power is not greater than the power of God’s justice.

He actually seems to come to a realization of this on his own. When “he could not even bear his own stench, he spoke in this way: ‘It is just to be subject to God, and a mortal should not consider himself equal to God.’” (9:12). He seems to want to reverse all the terrible things he had planned – destruction of the city, massacre of the Jews and the plundering of the Temple. He even promises to “become a Jew himself, [so he could] travel through every place on earth and declare the power of God” (9:17).

He writes to the people, begging them to respect him and the son he has named to succeed him when he dies – a reality he sees as coming soon. So “The murderer and blasphemer, having been struck very badly, just as he himself had treated others, passed from this life in a miserable death” (9:28).

Philip the Phrygian flees into Egypt to Ptolemy Philometor because he is afraid of Antiochus’ son. Antiochus' son is supposed to have been nine years old at this time, so it is unlikely he was really afraid of him. His tutor and guardian is the man he is afraid of - Lysias.

“Friends’ Testimonies”

Part 7

The reduction of spiritual issues to political or social ones was deeply bothersome to me, as I have said several times. It sapped the faith of any real need for Christ and failed to recognize that the deepest barriers in us that kept us from God were not societal but spiritual. I already lived my life wary of the kind of materialism that capitalism promoted. Simplicity for me involved more things like avoiding political or philosophical fads, trying not to be overly cerebral about what I believed, speaking what was on my mind and heart simply and directly and trying not to be manipulative or devious in my dealings with others. These were the parts of the simplicity testimony that came to mean most to me, maybe because talking and arguing about ideologies was something I had done a lot.

If you believe that God dwells in you and works in and through you, then it is your responsibility to treat your words and acts with respect by making sure that what you say and do comes as much as is possible from a spirit of love, that it is sincere, and that it comes from a deeper place in you than off the top of your head. How what you say or do is received or whether it changes anything is not for you to worry about.

Examples of the kind of speech I am talking about are very common, such as words of apology or repentance for things you have said or done in anger or impatience. If, like me, you lose your temper with people in frustrating circumstances—you are forced to stand in line endlessly or have to deal with people who cannot understand some important, complex issue you need to work out with them—if the Lord puts a word of repentance in you to offer to that offended party, you have an obligation to act on it. It doesn’t matter that it was a week or two weeks ago. It doesn’t matter that you might go through the rest of your life without every having to cross paths with that person again, you have an obligation to go back and try to apologize.

Or perhaps you have a family member or friend with whom you have long-standing and intractable “issues”. In these situations too, you have a duty to speak thoughtfully, lovingly, and with integrity what the Lord gives you to say. I know I did. There were family members who had hurt me many times over the years, relationships that were tortured and difficult because my need for them had always been so great. People who come from broken, dysfunctional families like mine will easily be able to understand what I am talking about even without the boring details. There was a need and a call in me to “speak truth” in love to members of my family and also, for the first time, an ability to accept the broken reality I had always previously hoped would be healed by my silence or endurance. I could not cure things in my own will. Perhaps it would not be God’s will either that everything be cured the way I had in mind. But my job was not the end result. My job was only to be faithful to the little truths I believed God had given me to speak.

Daily Old Testament: 2 Maccabees 7 and My Own Article on "Friends' Testimonies" (Part 5)

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).