Daily Bible Reading: 1 Maccabees 13 and 1 John 3

1 Maccabees 13 – With Jonathan in Trypho’s custody, Simon takes over the leadership of the Jews. He gathers the people, encourages them and rekindles their spirit. He completes the planned fortifications.

Trypho assembles his army to invade and sends envoys to Simon demanding a ransom of 100 talents and two of Jonathan’s sons before he will free Jonathan. Simon prepares to pay it more to assuage the desires of the people than anything. He believes it is all a trick.

He sends the demanded things but they do not release Jonathan. Trypho invades and also kills Jonathan.  Simon recovers his body and builds a great monument to all his family in Modein. Trypho also deals treacherously with the young King Antiochus, Alexander Balas’ son.  He kills him, allegedly by sending him for a surgical procedure he really does not need; then he seizes the Seleucid crown.

Simon writes to King Demetrius, seeking to use him against the growing power of Trypho.  The king responds by pardoning the Jews and making peace with them. It is 142 BC and the year is celebrated as the year that pagan rule of Israel was finally ended.

Simon leads a force to take Gezer [see http://www.bibleplaces.com/gezer.htm] 20 miles west of Jerusalem. He builds a residence there. Back in the Citadel in Jerusalem, men are starving because they are not allowed to get their supplies from the Seleucids. Jonathan makes peace with them, but expels them and purifies the Citadel in 141 BC. Then Simon makes his son John commander of all his forces. 

1 John 3 – Very deep words from John: “My dear people, we are already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is” (3:2).

How then must we live to be faithful to this promise? We must aspire to be pure – “as pure as Christ” (3:3). We must break from sin and “live a holy life” (3:7). “No one who has been begotten by God sins; because God’s seed remains inside him” (3:9).

If you are not living this way, you are not a child of God’s. The way of God and the way of the world are diametrically opposed. “You must not be surprised . . . we have passed out of death and into life, and of this we can be sure because we love our brothers. If you refuse to love, you must remain dead; to hate your brother is to be a murderer, and murderers, as you know, do not have eternal life in them” (3:13-15).

We learn to love others by thinking of the love Christ showed us in giving up his life. Like his love for us, our love for others must not just be “mere talk” (3:18); it must be “something real and active” (3:18).

“His commandments are these: that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and that we love one another as he told us to. Whoever keeps his commandments live in God and God lives in him. We know that he lives in us by the Spirit that he has given us” (3:24).

There is a great deal in these words of John that are deeply meaningful to me. Indeed, John’s entire “take” on the Christian message is what drew me back to Christ at a time when I was full of doubt about religion. Early Friends understood John’s words. They saw the passage from “death . . . into life” as spiritual; they understood the presence of “God’s seed” in them as the fulfillment of the earliest scriptural “promise” in Genesis 3:15. We will be doing the Gospel of John after we finish with this epistle, so I will go into it more then.

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Maccabees 12 and 1 John 1-2

1 Maccabees 12 – Jonathan decides that it is not enough to be siding with Trypho and his attempt to set the child-king Antiochus up.

Jonathan continues to use “triangulation” as a policy; he sends people to Rome and Sparta to build other alliances against the Hellenists. He sends letters and ambassadors to renew or initiate treaties of friendship. The author includes a copy of the letter Jonathan sends to the Spartans. It reminds them of good relations in the past and speaks of the terrible wars that have encircled them. They have tried to appeal to Heaven for aid but now they are also appealing to Rome and to the Spartans.

When Demetrius comes again to make war on them, Jonathan tries to divert them to Hamath so as to keep them away from Jerusalem. Hamath is on the northern border of Syria. They learn that Demetrius plans a night raid and they prepare for it.

When the troops of Demetrius learn somehow that the Jews know their plan and are preparing to meet it, they become afraid and decide to withdraw after lighting fires to cover their retreat. Meanwhile Jonathan’s brother, Simon, takes Joppa to keep it out of the hands of the Seleucids.

           

Jonathan returns to Jerusalem and meets with the elders there; he convinces them to build fortresses in Judaea and to make the walls of Jerusalem higher and to isolate the city even commercially.

Then the story returns to Trypho. He decides he would much rather be king himself than have the young Antiochus on the throne. He fears that Jonathan might not support that plan. So Trypho decides he must wage war against Jonathan. He fools Jonathan, into thinking he is going to even turn the city of Antioch [Ptolemais] over to him.  He convinces Jonathan that he can trust him, but when Jonathan comes to Antioch, Trypho seizes him, puts some of Jonathan’s men to the sword, and holds Jonathan himself captive.

Some escape and return to Jerusalem. There “they mourned for Jonathan and his companions and were in great fear; and all Israel mourned deeply” (12:52). This chapter makes it sound that Jonathan has been killed, but he will show up again in chapter 13 as a captive, so I am assuming he was not dead yet. The chapter ends with the pagans all around Israel exulting in their weakness and planning to wipe them out.

An important letter – combining elements that are strongly emphasized in Quaker thought but really important to all Christian groups.

1 John 1 – The prologue to the Gospel according to John says in verse 14 that the Word with God in the beginning was “made flesh, and dwelt among us.” It is this that John writes of in this letter: “Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word, who is life—this is our subject” (1:1).

John wants to tell us about this all so we too “may be in union with [them], as [they] are in union with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1:3).

The central message is this: “God is light; there is no darkness in him at all. If we say that we are in union with God while we are living in darkness, we are lying because we are not living the truth. But if we live our lives in the light, as he is in the light, we are in union with one another and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1:4).

This reality of sin is not something we can deny but “if we acknowledge our sins, then God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and purify us from everything that is wrong” (1:9).

1 John 2 - John wants us to realize that we can live differently, not caged in our sinful natures. Jesus is our eternal “advocate with the Father” (2:1). But it is not enough to just say we know God through Christ; we must show it in the way we live. “We can be sure that we are in God only when the one who claims to be living in him is living the same kind of life as Christ lived”(2:6).

This is nothing NEW. It is the same expectation God had of us since He created us. It is the same old commandment (2:7). But it is new as well because “the night is over and the real light is already shining” (2:8). It is all about love. “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the dark. But anyone who loves his brother is living in the light and need not be afraid of stumbling” (2:9-10).

So while sin is real and we must break with it by submitting to the commandment that we love our “brothers,” we can only do this if we detach ourselves from worldly desires. “The love of the Father cannot be in any man who loves the world because nothing the world has to offer—the sensual body, the lustful eye, pride in possessions—could ever come from the Father but only from the world; and the world, with all it craves for, is coming to an end; but anyone who does the will of God remains for ever” (2:15-17).

John, like Peter before him, and really all the early apostles and teachers of Christianity, is convinced that the end times are near. Here he says, “these are the last days . . . and now several antichrists have already appeared” (2:18). These antichrists are “rivals of Christ” (2:19) who have arisen from the Christian community itself; but he says they have left. “The man who denies that Jesus is the Christ—he is the liar, he is Antichrist; and he is denying the Father as well as the On, because no one who has the Father can deny the Son, and to acknowledge the Son is to have the Father as well” (2:22-23).

“Keep alive in yourselves what you were taught in the beginning; as long as what you were taught in the beginning is alive in you, you will live in the Son and in the Father” (2:24). The “anointing [Christ] gave teaches [us] everything” we need to know - what you received from him remains in you, so that you do not need anyone to teach you. The content of this letter, the ideas expressed in it, were incredibly important to early Friends; and I would say that much of what John says here still remains central to Quakers. But I think many Quakers would have trouble with some of John’s words about the Word here. He is very concerned that people NOT FORGET that this Word was FLESH in Jesus Christ.

It might be interesting for Friends to know that the Catholic Catechism also teaches this same lesson in section 427: “[E]verything is taught with reference to him – and it is Christ alone who teaches – anyone else teaches to the extent that he is Christ’s spokesman. . .” And I like also that the Catechism teaches in #430 something I felt I first learned when I studied early Quaker writings that in “Jesus, God recapitulates all of his history of salvation on behalf of men.”

Daily Bible Reading: 1 Maccabees 11:38-74 and 2 Peter 3

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1 Maccabees 11:38-74 - The politically complex situation around which the Books of Maccabees are constructed is not easy for modern readers to understand. Generally, in school, history teachers focus on the rise of the Roman Empire in the years we are discussing here. The details of the Hellenistic world simply do no make it into the history books. What is happening here is that the Hellenistic rulers - Ptolemies and Seleucids - are trying hard to expand and consolidate their power in the face of growing Roman power. And the smaller kingdoms of the region - the Jews, for example - are caught up in the larger conflict, using whomever to build local strength. While the Maccabees rise in Jewish history as a force to battle the Hellenists, they soon begin to manipulate the situation for their own benefit as well.

King Demetrius II is unpopular with his own people and with his own troops largely because he does build up the local groups; he depends on Cretan mercenaries. His own troops - the veterans who served his father especially cannot stand him. A man named Trypho [Diodotus Tryphon], formerly a supporter of Alexander Balas, goes to the person who is raising Alexander's young son - whose name is Antiochus, and tries to convince him that young Antiochus could displace the unpopular king.

Jonathan tries to use the situation - the challenge to Demetrius - to get even more favors from him. He wants the Hellenist troops removed from the Citadel in Jerusalem and in other strongholds because they continue to challenge his [Jonathan's] authority. Demetrius promises Jonathan pretty much anything he wants, so Jonathan sends him 3000 men to join his fighting force. Certainly this is only going to make the anti-Demetrius group even angrier.  These troops, along with the other mercenaries working for Demetrius, kill 100,000 people. "They set fire the the city [Antioch] and seized a large amount of spoil . . . and saved the king" (11:48). The people of Antioch surrender to Demetrius, and the Jews return to Jerusalem with lots of loot. But Demetrius doesn't keep all the promises he made to Jonathan when he was trying to get him on his side. 

Meanwhile, Trypho returns with the young challenger to Demetrius - Antiochus VI. He sets the poor kid up as king and gets all the discontented veteran troops to rally to him. They attack Demetrius' troops and rout them from Antioch. Then it says that "the young Antiochus wrote to Jonathan" (11:57), confirming him in the high priesthood and setting him up as chief authority over the four districts the Jews claimed were theirs. He also appoints Jonathan's brother Simon "governor from the Ladder of Tyre to the borders of Egypt" (11:59). He gathers forces together without any trouble until he gets to Gaza, but there the people resist his authority. "So he besieged it and burned its suburbs with fire and plundered them. Then the people of Gaza pleaded with Jonathan, and he made peace with them, and took the sons of their rulers as hostages and sent them to Jerusalem" (11:61-62). 

Jonathan and his troops finally confront Demetrius' forces. At first he does badly; his troops mostly desert him. He "tore his clothes, put dust on his head, and prayed" (11:71), and this seems to turn things around for him. When he returns to battle, things go better and they win the day. Jonathan returns to Jerusalem. 

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2 Peter 3 - Peter associates some of the worldly temptation issues with prophecies of the “last days.” He says, “in the last days some people will appear whose lives are controlled by their own lusts. They will make fun of you and will ask, ‘He promised to come, didn’t he? Where is he? Our ancestors have already died, but everything is still the same as it was since the creation of the world!’” (3:4).

It is understandable, I think, that people who heard Christ say he would return would at some point begin to doubt that these words could be trusted. And if it was hard back in the first century, it is a great hurdle today, two thousand years later. But he reminds us “There is no difference in the Lord’s sight between one day and a thousand years; to him the two are the same” (3:8).  

“The Lord is not slow to do what he has promised, as some think. Instead, he is patient with you, because he does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants all to turn away from their sins” (3:9).

“The Day of the Lord will come like a thief. On that Day, the heavens will disappear with a shrill noise, the heavenly bodies will burn up and be destroyed, and the earth with everything in it will vanish” (3:10).

So what does this mean for how we should live? We look not for the destruction, but for the “new heavens and new earth, where righteousness will be at home” (3:13). As we wait for that day, we must do our best to “be pure and faultless in God’s sight and to be at peace with him” (3:14). We need to “continue to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (3:18).

We are asked to appreciate the great patience God shows us and we are warned against getting confused by people who distort the church’s teaching or the words of Scripture