January 8, 2023

Isaiah 42:1-9, Matthew 3:13-17

He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.

Cornell West once said that justice is what love looks like in public. Which sounds catchy, but what does he mean? What does justice look like? And what, if anything, does justice have to do with love?

Before we get to that, the word “justice” has a commonplace meaning: the maintenance of what is just or right by the exercise of authority or power. Conversely, justice can be about punishing someone for doing that which is wrong or taking some form of retribution for a crime. Justice is also a philosophical concept, an ideal. And the promised leader called for in Isaiah will be someone who brings about that ideal into an unjust world.

Which leads me to another question: is such a thing possible? Is such idealized justice ever possible? Or, do we have to muddle through with something less than an ideal.

As we begin the New Year, I am beginning a new sermon series. This time I am looking at the cultural influences upon Christianity. The effects of various cultures upon how Christianity has developed over the centuries and what that means for us today. Some of these influences changed the core principles of Christian thought. Some have their roots in the Bible, some do not. Some of these ideas are so inherent to the tradition that one might have expected them to have been a teaching of Jesus, one of the prophets, or even one of the disciples. And yet, that is not always or even often the case.

One of the earliest and most significant influences over Christianity was Greek culture. This should not be surprising because Greek culture was the dominant social influence over much of the ancient world. The Greeks under Alexander the Great had conquered a massive chunk of land, including modern day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Egypt. He only stopped conquering because he died at 32.

Alexander was personally tutored as a child by Aristotle and was apparently an able student. He was also appreciative of other cultures, which is a helpful trait for a conqueror, and therefore he was able to assimilate territories without as much local resistance. This was the spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down. And as Alexander was conquering much of the known world, he brought along with him the culture of Greece and, most importantly, the thinking of the Greeks.

If you look at a map of the territory Alexander conquered, it starts in Greece and heads east and south, not so much west or north. He started off making sure that his neighbors in the Balkans were quiet. He swept back into Greece and utterly destroyed the city of Thebes. That got everyone’s attention. And then Alexander headed off into Asia and Africa.

This roadmap is important because Alexander never fought on the Italian peninsula or with its up-and-coming powerhouse, the Roman Republic. Why was that? Greece already had a presence there, on the island of Sicily and in the southern parts of Italy. If I had to hazard a guess, Alexander planned on getting to Italy eventually, but he was so successful taking out the Persians and the Egyptians that he just kept going further toward where he had already made headway.

But Alexander in many ways succeeded in conquering Rome even long after he was dead. Again, the Romans had been in close contact with the Greeks and absorbed many aspects of their culture. And when the war-like but less culturally developed Roman Republic began to conquer Greek cities in the centuries after Alexander’s death, it embraced even more of that culture.

And for this reason, Greek cities like Athens flourished during the Pax Romana. Rome kept the peace and the Athenians could focus on arts and philosophy. Greek arts and architecture were emulated by Rome. Greek religion was allowed to flourish and famously to influence the Roman system of belief.

During the lifetime of Jesus, Rome may have been the occupying empire, but the Greeks were culturally and intellectually in charge. Even the four Gospels were written in Greek, though Jesus and the disciples probably spoke Aramaic as their everyday language. One might expect that they chose Greek because it was the far more widely understood language and had been the scholarly language in the Middle East for centuries.

And along with this common language came a wide range of writings: mathematical texts, theatrical plays, epic poems, and of course philosophy. Lots of philosophy. If you had any education, if you had any illusions of being an educated person, you would have studied these Greeks writers and thinkers. And like Alexander himself, you would have read Aristotle and Plato.

And with such a fine classical education, what would you have been thinking about? Maybe about the nature of the divine. Greeks famously had a large pantheon of gods, figures like Zeus and Apollo, Athena and Aphrodite. And these flashy figures would have represented the popular, everyday expressions of religious thinking. There was a god for practically every aspect of living, no matter how mundane or obscure. Aristaeus, the god of olive-growing and bee-keeping. Iris, the goddess of the rainbow. And perhaps my favorite, Moros, the god of impending doom.

Again, these gods were part of the popular, everyday expression of religious life. But that did not mean they were the highest form of thinking about the nature of the universe. Many philosophically minded Greeks were not concerned about the complex cosmology of the Greek gods. Instead, they were thinking about the nature of existence and the world around them. It would have been like an Oxford professor who said all the right things to come across as a fine upstanding member of the Church of England, but who in his heart of hearts was indifferent to the details of churchly life. There were deeper thoughts to be thunk, as it were.

Take Plato, for example, a man whose influence over Christian thinking cannot be overstated. Plato developed the notion of forms, that every object and every idea has some kind of underlying form or pattern by which it can be identified. A chair has certain qualities that make it a chair rather than a rock or a table. And more relevant for our purposes, Plato proposed that ideas have certain qualities, certain ultimate qualities that make them what they truly are.

Consider justice. The sort of justice that the foretold king in Isaiah would be bringing forth to the nations. For Plato in his great work the Republic, justice was an ideal. Justice was what would happen in a society if it was run by those who were wise, those called the philosopher kings. Even though the Book of Isaiah predates Plato by a few centuries, Isaiah’s prophecy about this just and wise king is quite similar to that of Plato’s philosopher kings. In fact, the great virtues of Plato’s Republic are comparable to many of the common themes of the Hebrew scriptures: justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage.

These ideas are so similar, you might imagine that it would have been easy to connect the religious thinking of the Bible with the philosophic thinking of the Greeks. And you would imagine correctly. But please bear in mind that just because both the Jewish prophets and the Greek philosophers used the same ideas, it does not mean that the shape of those ideas were the same.

Take justice for example. Justice in the Bible is an expression of God’s will. Something is just in the estimation of God. Human beings are righteous or not in the eyes of God. Justice comes solely from God, not from human beings. Conversely, even though Greek philosophy arose from within a religious system, it did not necessarily seek to justify itself within that system. The Greek goddess of justice was Themis, but the philosophical concept of justice was an idealized form, one that does not exist in the world but can only be sought after. This is not a goddess to be appeased or worshipped, but a goal to be pursued. And even though Plato was not the only Greek thinker talking about justice, in time Plato and his student Aristotle were the ones anyone seemed to talk about.

Early Christians were not starting from scratch. They were in most respects relying upon Jewish theology and Jewish traditions to organize themselves. That shifts over time, however. Think of the custom of baptism referred to in our reading. John the Baptist was relying upon a Jewish ritual of purification, but he was using it as a threshold initiation into a new religious perspective. Baptism was not about ritual purity but repentance and the seeking of forgiveness from God directly rather than from Temple priests.

When you are figuring out your new religion, the nature of God, or the nature of that which is divine, is rather important. But is that effort a process of discovery or an act of storytelling? I do not mean to insult those early Christians, but a human being’s ability to understand the nature of the divine is more about accepted beliefs than it is about proven facts. And those beliefs might change from time to time.

Even in the Hebrew scriptures, God seems to change, to evolve. God starts off as a physical participant in events, talking to Adam and Eve, telling Noah what he needs to do to save his family. But then God gets more remote. In the stories of Joseph and his brothers, God appears in the form of dreams. The later prophets encounter God in visions. Our reading from the Gospel of Matthew is startling for this reason as a voice from heaven is heard saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Our understanding of God might change because of the cultural influences that we encounter through the centuries. For example, the Christian understanding of God developed amidst the philosophical backdrop of the Greeks. And as early Christian thinkers considered the nature of God, the Platonic ideals became an important feature. God was biblically the source of justice, which under the Greeks becomes perfect justice. God was biblically the source of wisdom, which under the Greeks becomes a perfect sort of wisdom. God in the Bible was supreme and God under the influence of the Greeks becomes perfect. Absolutely, unerringly, and unchangingly perfect.

Now any of you who are fond of the epic tales of the Greek gods and goddesses might be thinking, those gods and goddesses were anything but perfect. Which is true. They were frequently selfish and cruel, arrogant and vain. But again that was the common, everyday form of Greek religion, not the high-minded ideas of Greek philosophy. Plato imagined perfect forms and perfect concepts. And from that imagining arose a different way of understanding the nature of God. Early Christians clearly rejected Greek religion, but they would in time thoroughly embrace Greek philosophy.

For example, using these idealized and perfected forms from Plato, God is described as being all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, or put another way God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. The foremost source for this thinking was Augustine, a fourth century Roman bishop, who stated that he relied upon Plato for these ideas.

And while we are on the subject of Augustine, he is probably the original source for the Christian idea of a soul. The soul as a disembodied, nonmaterial presence that survives death. This notion of a soul is also not in the Bible. Not in the Hebrew scriptures and not in the New Testament.

When a modern person thinks about a soul, there is a different set of ideas that they can draw upon compared with ancient writers. The soul could be form of energy that is resident in the body but is released at the time of death. In Jesus’ time, there was no notion of energy as compared to matter. The soul was something like the air around us, not visible but still there. It was literally imagined as the breath of God.

And when you died, there was no soul floating up to heaven. When the time came for one to be resurrected, God would once again breathe life into your body and you would live on for eternity on Earth. This is in certain ways similar to the Egyptian notion of the afterlife, which required you to be mummified, needing a body and all. Eventually for Christians, the idea of a soul becomes less tangible and the idea of heaven becomes less connected to the world around us.

Ideas about God and the soul change over time because we do not have any way of verifying what God is like and what a soul is like. And across the centuries, many cultures and many of their great thinkers have spent considerable time considering such questions. And some of the answers from those different cultures are found to be compelling. They are incorporated into one’s way of thinking. Which over time makes God less like Zeus and more like the perfect images of Plato. Which makes the soul less like the air around us and more like the intangible energy borrowed by Augustine from Greek thought.

There is nothing wrong with seeking to understand these questions in new ways because they are fundamentally questions that cannot be conclusively answered. In another decade or another century, we may have new ideas about the universe that will change the way we think about God, the soul, or the nature of existence.

Which leads me back to justice, because we need something practical on Sunday morning. Even though justice for Plato can be described as a perfect ideal, it is also something that human beings seek to bring about in the world. That human created justice will not be perfect. It will not be perfect as set forth and it will not be perfect over time. Because the world changes and human beings change. But rather than simply throw up our hands at this guarantied imperfection, we need to work towards such ideals without worrying that our efforts will always fall short of the ideal. That is how ideals work.

Recall that Cornell West said that justice is love in public. Love meaning a concern about what is fair, what is necessary, and what is right in a situation. Fair even though the world around us is not always fair. Necessary because society exists to assure that people can get all that they need if not generally all that they want. And right because we need to try to follow the stories that we tell ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves about the way the world should be. And those stories are not typically about being perfect. They are about doing better. Better than yesterday. Better than the year before.

New Year’s Day has come and gone. It is traditionally an occasion for making resolutions about what we wish to do better in the coming months. Sometimes that is about our health. Sometimes that is about our relationships. And sometimes that is about who we wish to be. I am not going to suggest that any of you go to the gym or give up smoking. You might wish to, but that is not my job. Instead, I am going to suggest that we all should take things slower this year. Slower.

Slower to get upset at the person in front of us in traffic. Slower to get angry at the person we think of as an idiot in the newspaper or on television. Slower to judge what is going on around us out of frustration, out of impatience, out of fatigue. If justice is what love looks like in public, then love is how we can become more fair to others, more right in our decisions, and more concerned with the world around us.

Love in this particular sense is about time. The extra time we might need to take a breath, to look once again, and to delay settling upon the immediate reactions we have. The Greeks talked about perfect ideals. But ideals are about a horizon to consider rather than a reality that will ever come into being.

And the same is true for love. We will never love perfectly. But we can try to love better. Better than last year. Better than yesterday. Better than the last hour. Better because that is all we can really ask of ourselves and one another. For we will never be perfect. But we can always try to do better.

Happy New Year.

Amen.