We the People
Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash
The Gospel of Luke places an acute social conflict at the center of his gospel narrative. In the episode of “the cleansing of the temple,” Luke juxtaposes the two parties to the conflict that runs through the narrative (Luke 19:45-48):
-The chief priests, scribes, and leaders of the people. These are the urban elite who clustered around the temple, symbol of religious and political unity and tax-collecting apparatus.
versus
-The people, those who were “spellbound” by the teaching of Jesus.
It is a very old, long-running conflict between elites who feared change “from below” and those eager for change because they knew they were presently denied their rightful share of the bounty of the community. Luke of course places Jesus at the center of the dispute, the one whose very life constitutes a threat to the monopoly of the elites and whose very life constitutes an alternative possibility for the disadvantaged. In the end, the elites would prevail via their execution of Jesus as an enemy of the regime. In the end, that is…except that the narrative does not end with the Friday of execution.
In Matthew’s telling of the same incident the dispute concerns the “blind and lame” whom he healed, and an index of “amazing things” he performed that defied the settled world of the “chief priests and scribes” (Matthew 21:14-15). The rendering in Mark 11:15-19 offers the same language as Luke, but the opposition is described differently as “chief priests and scribes” versus “the whole crowd.” The narratives are consistent in their conclusion that what frightened the privileged was what was utterly compelling to the mass of people who lived amid an exploitative socio-political-religious environment. His presence and his actions that defied conventional explanation in the eyes of the disadvantaged made possible what had seemed to them to be impossible. The healing of the blind and lame was verification of his capacity to work effectively outside of conventional norms for the sake of wellbeing.
We may pause to reflect on the population of these disadvantaged folk who are designated as “the people” (laos) or “the whole crowd” (oxlos). This mass of people is recurringly the subject matter of the biblical narrative, even though the elites seek to exclude this same population from access, influence, or empowerment. If we look long term at the formation or such a population, we may reach back to the phrasing of Exodus 12:38 where the mass of people enroute to the wilderness is designated as ‘rv rav that NRSV translates as “mixed crowd”:
A mixed crowd also went up with them, and livestock in great numbers, both flocks and herds. They baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt; it was not leavened, because they were driven out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves (Exodus 12 38-39).
This company enroute to the wilderness was without pedigree or tribal identity. That company lacked any cohesion beyond the fact that they had escaped (“were driven out of”) Egypt, and were on the run without “any provisions for themselves” (v. 39)
We may entertain the thought that the Bible narrates the process whereby that “mixed crowd” without any identity was transformed into a “holy people.” When we reach belatedly Nehemiah 13:3, it is Israel as a “holy people” who is separated from all those of “foreign descent” (col-‘rv). The transformation from no people” to “holy people” is accomplished by the wonder, power, and will of YHWH:
Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me priestly kingdom and a holy nation (Exodus 19:5-6).
God makes covenant with this mixed multitude, imposes commandments on them, and bestows a peculiar role and identity on them. This “holy people” bears all the marks of a “mixed crowd” and is never characterized by any pedigree of its own. Their new identity is all by the will of this “people-making” God. Indeed Hosea can go so far as to imagine that this people can forfeit its status and become “no people:”
Then the Lord said, “Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God (Hosea 1:8).
To be sure, Hosea promptly reverses field so that God reconstitutes this no-people as God’s people:
I will have pity on Lo-ruhamah,
and I will say to Lo-ammi,
“You are my people”.
and he will say, “You are my God” (Hosea 2:23).
Both the ending and the restoration of this people are all at the behest of YHWH.
The matter is not different concerning “the people” in the New Testament:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts or him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy (I Peter 2:10).
It is the gift of mercy that transposes a “no-people” into a people with an historical presence and destiny!
If we have this memory of “people-making” in purview, we might notice in the episode of temple cleansing in the Gospel narrative that Jesus is indeed at work forming a ‘people” who are gathered around his inexplicable power to make new. This people (laos), that is, the whole crowd (oxlos), eagerly responded to the possibilities he generated, because they knew for certain that present social arrangements governed by “the chief priests and scribes” were for them a dead end. They have no prospect for ever gaining wellbeing, influence, or power in the present system. They are for good reason “spellbound” by his possibilities beyond all present impossibilities.
We should notice, however, that the elites (chief priests and scribes) did everything they could to maintain their own control and their exclusive access to wealth and wellbeing. In the temple system of ancient Israel, the primary strategy for such exclusion was the “purity codes” that effectively eliminated access to all those “unlike us.” Thus the temple itself had gradations of holiness for which selected groups of people had various levels of access.
And now in our own turn in our own time the “holy people,” that is, the one of European extraction, are competent to devise tools of exclusion for all others in order to protect advantage. Such tools are variously in the service of segregation signaled by familiar phrases:
We reserve the right to refuse service...
No xxx need apply.
The strategy applies to immigration policy as well as restrictions in housing, schools, transport, and health services. The elite in Jesus’ time would have claimed to be protecting “holiness” by their exclusionary temple practices. The gospel narrative constitutes a dramatic articulation of Jesus’ solidarity with those excluded. Thus with reference to Mark 12:41-44, yet another confrontation enacted in the temple, Allan Boesak, Dare We Speak of Hope? Searching for a Language of Life in Faith and Politics (2014) can write:
When Mark writes that Jesus stations himself “opposite” the temple treasury, he is not talking space and position. He is talking opposition: opposition to exploitation, to abuse of the faith of the poor, to the false piousness that proffers avarice as devotion to God. No, it is not sentimental approval of baptized exploitation we are seeing here—it is divine outrage. The temple tax system that made riches for the temple elite made victims of the poor. Jesus knew what the people needed was to be freed from the awe of the temple, the temple system, and the power of the ruling elite “so that they might be free from the paralyzing fear of offending God by rejecting the caretakers of God’s supposed house (64).
The very ones whom the elite seek to exclude are the primary candidates to constitute the community of Jesus, for the “holy people” is formed “from below” among those who live a distance from the mirages of virtue and control.
All of this was on my mind as I read Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian (2018). Slobodian details the way in which neoliberal ideology and practice have displaced the force of empire and its colonization. He takes the trouble to list elements of “a basic consensus” among neoliberals, notably those of the “Geneva School.” Among the fifteen notes of consensus that he articulates, two in particular bear upon this discussion:
#6 Democracy is a potential threat to the functioning of the market order. Therefore, safeguards against the disruptive capacity of democracy are necessary.
#7. Democracy’s danger is its legitimation of demands for redistribution. All world economic problems are rooted in domestic distribution struggles (p. 272).
In this telling, democracy constitutes a threat to an unfettered market order because the wrong kind of people may have a voice in financial affairs. Through this perspective I have come to understand in fresh ways why we have among us all kinds of restrictions to democracy, variously expressed through gerrymandering and voter repression. Such efforts occur because the wrong kind of people may intrude upon the unfettered gains of the powerful and moneyed. Thus the curtailment of democracy in our contemporary context is equivalent to Israel’s old purity codes that serve to prevent the wrong kind of people from gaining access ore influence. It is exactly the wrong kind of people who were spellbound by Jesus and who flocked to him to form God’s “new people” in the world, the carriers of God’s newness that shows up as merciful justice.
Proposition #7 in the list by Slobodian is even more poignant. The great fear of democracy—with the wrong kind of people having a voice—concerns redistribution of community resources. Such a force of democracy does not arise from any formal commitment to “socialism” or any other ideology. It is rather simply an insistence that the resources of the community must be devoted to the wellbeing of the community, its health care, its schools, its transport, and its housing. Of course such redistribution via taxation contradicts our regnant ideology of greed that justifies great private wealth at the expense of the common good. That is exactly what was at stake in the gospel narrative in which the “chief priests and scribes” managed public fund to their own advantage. The “woe oracles” of Jesus in Matthew 23 are precisely to the point of such abuse of public power for private gain.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. (Matthew 23:23).
The antidote to such mechanizations, as Slobodian sees clearly, is that the demos (the people-laos-oxlos) should have access and power to enact public possibility. Thus Jesus is on the side the demos who are mesmerized by the possibilities Jesus exhibits outside the norms of official order.
It is worth a pause to consider the kind of “order” that the mixed crowd” might fashion for the management of the public good. We might well look to Israel’s Torah for clues about an alternative economic order as the “mixed crowd” convened at Sinai. Out of the Sinai confrontation came guidance for social reconstruction, at the center of which is a requirement for debt cancellation in the “Year of Release” (Deuteronomy 15:1-18) and the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25). There can be no doubt that debt is a a primary tool of neoliberalism, as the financial community imposes insatiable demands on the vulnerable, placing them in hopeless debt and so reducing them to cheap labor. (See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years). Conversely the Torah provisions permitted those in debt to “begin again” with debt cancelled, to reenter the economy in viable ways. Of course, what spellbound the crowds around Jesus was his empowerment of vulnerable people to begin again, forgiven, healed, restored, and rejoicing. That is the will of the Torah and the offer of the Gospel.
In truth the church has too readily been on the wrong side of this defining question of shared wellbeing all too often. Too often the church has echoed and legitimated the interests of the moneyed. The church has had two theological strategies for such a misguided illusion. First, we have spiritualized and privatized our sense of salvation, thus easily supporting the most mistaken individualism at the expense of the common good. Second, we have much too much emphasized life-after-death and otherworldliness that took away energy from the urgency of justice and mercy in this present world. The antidote for the church of course is to accent its this-world care for the neighborhood, and its communitarian conviction that as neighbors we are all in it together.
At the center of this world engagement is a readiness for redistribution of common resources and allocation of funds for the neediest of neighbors. The church’s insistence, at every turn, on this-world community will go far to escape the easy religious temptation of privatized individualism and other-worldly escapism. All we need is to engage seriously the covenantal-prophetic traditions of the Torah (the ones downplayed in the common lectionary) to understand the vortex in which Jesus was formed, by which he was instructed, and to which he bore steady witness. It is always about the people, about the ordinary folk who do not have great resources but who have names to honor, lives to protect, and identities to preserve. Our faith concerns the mass of folk who clustered around Jesus spellbound.
The religious orientation of Abraham Lincoln is most elusive. There can be no doubt, however, that his stunning formulation in his Gettysburg Address is exactly to the point. Our common faith and our common political requirement is a governance,
of the people,
by the people, and
for the people.
It is the rule of the demos (laos, oxlos), democracy. That rule is under threat from the force of neoliberalism that has largely preempted the tools of government. For good reason Slobodian ends his important book with this stunning sentence:
In the mid-2010s, the popular referendum in favor of Brexit and the declining popularity of binding trade legislation suggest that even if the intention of the neoliberals was to “undo the demos,” the demos—for better or worse—is not undone yet (286).
A great deal is at stake in this for our society, and thus for the church in its calling to speak to the power of money.
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles.
