Mouse, Moses, and Messiah

Acknowledgements. The ideas expressed in the following blog were first formulated by Baruch Spinoza in his Treatise on Theology and Politics. To the extent the ideas effectively express the truth, the credit is his. The interpretations and phrasings are of course mine. The reader must, however, take full credit or blame for any discomfort the ideas may produce, since the source of any discomfort produced by ideas is always in the guts of the beholder.

When Moses descended from the mountain bearing the Ten Commandments, he immediately set forth, with authority from on high, to found the Hebrew state. The nation he created was a theocracy. It obtained its authenticity, its direction, and its laws from God. It may be endlessly debated whether the conception of God as a human-like being, created in the first five books of the Bible, is accurate in every respect, but the question is, in any case, moot. The Hebrew people believed what Moses told them. The Hebrew state thus acknowledged the God of Abraham as its God, and obedience to His laws as the obligation of every citizen.

Even a cursory reading of the Torah (especially Leviticus and Numbers) will show that the Mosaic Law consists of many more regulations than the mere ten Moses brought down from the mountain. There are laws governing most of the major relationships between the Hebrew state and its people. Over the centuries the laws listed in the Torah were interpreted and expanded, with the result that by the time Jesus of Nazareth was born, laws and rules existed covering virtually every aspect of Hebrew life.

In a word, the Hebrew state was founded on the notion that its people must be obedient to the law, and because the laws – even those dealing with highly personal matters – were logically derived from interpretations of what were presumed to be God’s laws, to the Hebrew people, disobedience was unthinkable.

But – note well – like any set of laws enforced by any nation, the laws of the Hebrew state demanded observable obedience, behavior that could be seen and heard by one’s fellow Hebrews and the minions of the law. The requirement is typical that heresy (and other violations) could not be prosecuted without the testimony of two reliable witnesses. The Mosaic Law was a just law, and justice was defined as overt conformity to the letter of the law.

Certain of the songs and prayers in the book of Psalms suggest that the Hebrew people were aware of the inner state of their being, but for the most part, those sensibilities represented devotionals to the power and authority of God, and thus to the Mosaic Law. Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, etc,” identifies the Psalmist as a sheep, who will prosper only if he is completely obedient to God (i.e., the law). The “rod and … staff,” by which the shepherd chastises the herd to keep it together, were seen as comforts. The Psalmist appeared, in that song, to be steeling himself against the strictures and discomforts of the law. The final line – “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” – can be understood as his resignation to the will and law of God, however contrary the actualities of the Hebrew nation may appear. The lion’s den and fiery furnace of Daniel can also be understood as encouragements designed to assure the Hebrew people that, despite their obvious tribulations, God will rescue them.

The entire Old Testament appears to be a history of the Hebrew people and their attempts to survive as a theocratic nation. Its repeated failures are invariably interpreted as a backsliding from the law, either by the people or their rulers.

Modern Christian apologists, who argue that Jesus of Nazareth was not a “nation builder,” are essentially correct, but they miss the point entirely if they do not see that he was, in fact, a nation destroyer. Jesus may be correctly interpreted as having said that “the Kingdom of God is not of this earth,” but it would be false to assume that he meant by those words that the kingdom of God was up in the sky somewhere. It was to be here on the earth, but not of the earth. Jesus seems to have intended to locate the law of God, not in an earthly state, but in the hearts and minds of the people. The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 through 7) clearly makes the case that the outward observance of the law is not good enough, but rather the inward ownership of the law as one’s own. The Beatitudes cannot mean that the government bestows blessedness on the meek, the peacemakers, the poor, the mournful, the merciful, and the persecuted. Blessedness is a state of being, a self-acknowledged quality, known – and knowable – only to the person so blessed. Jesus re-centered God’s law. He removed it from the state and placed it squarely on the people themselves.

And, of course, that’s where it had always resided. The Hebrew nation had failed, and states will always fail, when the law appears as an imposition and not as a self-willed ordinance freely adopted by the people. Laws that cannot be explained and understood by reasoning people, laws that seem designed to perpetuate the state rather than its subjects, can never be wholly owned by the people who must – when all is said and done – enforce the laws upon themselves.

Jesus pulled no punches about the difficulty of his gospel. It may be “good news” to righteous people to be told that they are on target, but to those focused on maintaining the integrity of a particular theocratic nation, or to those temperamentally in need of external force to keep them “righteous,” it is certainly not good news to be told that the kingdom of God is nowhere but in themselves.

It was certainly not good news to the Hebrew people to be told that they no longer needed a nation of their own, but could abide in blessedness wherever fortune placed them. Throughout their history, they had seen themselves as a people apart, bearers of God’s message to the world. Now they were being told that the message was not so much a message as a way of relating to God. The God preached by Jesus of Nazareth was not a God speaking to a nation, but was a God speaking directly to the hearts and minds of individual people. His oft repeated quip, “Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s and unto God those things that are God’s,” can be understood (perhaps can be only understood) as a rebellion against theocracy. A man’s relationship to God is private, not subject to the laws of any nation, and no nation obtains its authority and integrity except by the willing commitment of a free and righteous people. We observe the law because we choose to do so, not because we are forced. We are the authority that gives the nation its power.

And therein lies happiness, or blessedness. The free man – which we all are, existentially and without question – is not a slave to the law. He is the owner of the law. If we render to Caesar, it is because we see in our government a means that promotes and enhances our blessedness. If Caesar wants our obedience, then Caesar must recognize our supremacy. When he fails to do so, when he values himself or the state above the people, then Caesar forfeits any expectation of our loyalty. He becomes “chaff,” to be plowed under. He becomes merely another of the errors we the people have made when we have failed to recognize and accept our God-given responsibility. That’s the “good news,” you see: Jesus and his spokesman, the Apostle Paul, were telling us, “You’re in charge. It’s your responsibility to learn God’s will and to implement it. Otherwise, there shall never be a Kingdom of God.”

Yes, happiness is a “warm puppy,” but the warmth emanates inside ourselves. We are the “artists” who create beauty. If there be such as blessedness, we are its creators. God is simply, and only, that which has made blessedness possible.