Ezra
9:1-4
“Zeal” isn’t a word that we hear
very often. Occasionally, you do hear
somebody called a “zealot”, which usually comes across as criticism, if not
even an insult. “When it comes to
exercise, she’s something of a zealot.”
“He takes his dislike of messiness to the point of being a zealot for
shelving and cabinets.” “They were
zealots for Bernie Sanders and for Ted Cruz, and haven’t spoken in years.”
Zeal itself is not a bad thing,
though. Whole-hearted devotion to God is
something I aim for, and urge you to do the same.
“Love
the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your mind. … and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and
the prophets.” [Matthew 22:37, 40]
The
Wesleyan Movement has always insisted that a big part of the Christian life is
to nurture that zeal for holiness, that zeal for God, that puts all of life
into God’s hands. John Wesley’s
“Covenant Prayer”, that we often use at New Year’s, leaves no loopholes.
“Lord, make me what you
will.
I put myself fully into
your hands:
put me to doing, put me to suffering,
let me be employed for you, or set aside for you,
let me be full, let me be empty,
let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and with a
willing heart
yield all to your pleasure and disposal.”
Many people living in Judea at the
time of Jesus’ ministry sought to develop that kind of devotion. For them, says Reza Aslan,
“Zeal implied a strict adherence to the Torah and the Law, a refusal to
serve any foreign master-to serve any human master at all-and an uncompromising
devotion to the sovereignty of God. To be zealous for the Lord was to walk in
the blazing footsteps of the prophets and heroes of old, men and women who
tolerated no partner to God, who would bow to no king save the King of the
World, and who dealt ruthlessly with idolatry and with those who transgressed
God‘s law. The very land of Israel was claimed through zeal, for it was the
zealous warriors of God who cleansed it of all the foreigners and idolaters,
just as God demanded. ‘whoever sacrifices to any god but the Lord alone shall
be utterly annihilated’ (Exodus 22:20).”[1]
One
of those “zealous warriors of God” was a man named Ezra, sometimes called Ezra
the Scribe, and we read his memoirs just like they did. But when we read them, it doesn’t sound quite
as heroic. In fact, there’s a kind of
tragedy involved in how he went about things because he did great harm as he
tried to do great good.
To summarize the background: when
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and most of the survivors were
carried off to Babylon as prisoners, there were a handful who were not
considered worth the trouble or who had run for the hills just in time and they
slowly began to build up life again among the ruins. These were like the folks we see in our day
who survived the bombings in Iraq and Syria and who came out of their cellars
shell-shocked and starving when ISIS was scattered. Their children grew up among the ruins and,
as happens, when they came of age they began to marry. But the people they married were not
necessarily Jewish, since they had been greatly reduced and ethnically
cleansed.
After decades passed, Nehemiah led a
party of exiles and their children back from Babylon and they began to rebuild
Jerusalem. Some of the survivors (not
all) welcomed them back and slowly the city walls began to rise again, and the
Temple would also be restored. At some
point, another outsider came from Babylon: Ezra the Scribe, who brought with
him scrolls that he called the Book of the Law (basically an early edition of
the Hebrew Scriptures, with at least the Torah, the first five books, and
possibly more).
He
was welcomed, too, at least at first, because when these books were read out
publicly, people heard the voice of God speaking to them in their words. They restored their sense of purpose. They talked about God’s formation of and care
for a people, from the start of time, and gave them a place within his eternal
plan. Hearing it, people broke down and
cried, so deeply were they touched.
Then
something happened. Ezra himself tells
it this way:
“After these things had been done, the
officials approached me and said, ‘The people of Israel, the priests, and the
Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their
abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites,
the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they
have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons.
Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this
faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way.’ When I heard
this, I tore my garment and my mantle, and pulled hair from my head and beard,
and sat appalled. Then all who trembled at the words of the God of Israel,
because of the faithlessness of the returned exiles, gathered around me while I
sat appalled until the evening sacrifice.” [Ezra 9:1-4]
After that, he gave and enforced an
ultimatum. Anyone who had entered into a
mixed marriage could either divorce his wife and renounce any children, or else
be cut off from the people of Israel forever, shunned and outcast. And, yes, he did follow through.
Before
we condemn him utterly ourselves, let me point something out that we don’t like
to discuss. We don’t see too many people
marrying Hittites and Perizzites these days, but we do see Christians marrying
someone who has no faith at all or who, for some reason, has renounced all
religion. Garrison Keilor used to refer
to them as people who attend the Church of the Brunch, whose Sunday mornings
revolve around pancakes and eggs. It
takes courage and persistence for the believing partner to continue to worship
regularly. It becomes even harder when
there are children, and they reach the age where it is natural to test the
parental limits, and they start saying, “Why do I have to go to church? None of my friends go to church. Even Mom doesn’t go.” At the same time they get the message from
their sports coaches, “If you want to be part of this, you have to be at every
game. We have a tournament every Sunday
starting at 9:00.” Those go together a
lot of the time, and prey on the adolescent fear of being left out.
Ezra was right about what can happen. He was wrong, as both history and our gut
reactions tell us, about the solution.
Family separation does not do anyone any good. The gospels, written centuries later, point
out over and over that the Jews and the Samaritans held onto deep distrust and
even hatred for one another. Guess where
a lot of it began. Guess what happened
to the people whose connections were sliced off at the time of Ezra? Maybe part of the Good Samaritan’s motivation
in helping a wounded traveler was to be able to say to himself how clearly he
and his people were better than the Jewish priests and Levites who had rejected
his ancestors and now, concerned with the same religious purity, could leave a
bleeding man at the side of the road.
The apostle Paul took a different view. He said that if there is a believer in the
household, that person could be like a missionary stationed right there.
“For the unbelieving husband is made holy
through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy through her
husband. Otherwise, your children would
be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.” [I Corinthians 7:14]
Nobody said that would be easy, but very little
about marriage is simple or clear-cut.
In practical terms, one of his great helpers was Timothy, whom Paul says
came to faith through his mother and grandmother. (In other words, don’t rule out the beneficial
influence of meddlesome grandparents, either.)
In
Ezra’s day, somebody wrote down a story already old at that time, yet one that
we still read. It’s about a Jewish woman
who had lived abroad for many years but was forced back to her hometown by poverty
following the death of her husband and her two sons. One of her daughters-in-law wouldn’t leave
her and it happened that when they got back to Israelite territory and sought
out what was left of her family there, one of this woman’s relatives took a shine
to this foreigner who had tagged along from the land of Moab. Eventually the two hooked up and then married
and had children. Her name – this
foreign woman – was Ruth. Her husband,
whom Ezra would have cut off from Israel for marrying her, was named Boaz. They lived in a town called Bethlehem, from
which Ezra would have banished them.
They had a son whose name was Obed, whom Ezra would have barred from
among the people of God. Obed’s son was
Jesse, the Bible tells us [Ruth 4:22] and Jesse’s son was David.
[1]
Reza Aslan, Zealot: the Life and Times of
Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2014), 40-41.
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