worship that I’d never noticed before. The last line of the reading, which was the Exodus version of the Ten Commandments—there are two versions, one in Exodus and one in Deuteronomy—told of the people’s response to Moses’ encounter with God. They had been watching while Mount Sinai was engulfed in smoke and fire, and while Moses disappeared into the pyrotechnics; they saw Moses then emerge and come down, and they listened as he read what he’d been given—Ten Commandments that are actually better rendered as ten utterances, brief as they are, and even more so in Hebrew.
Here’s what the story said about this response: “When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.’ Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.’”
Here’s what’s striking about this: Moses’ admission that the reason for all the spectacle, the shock and awe, has nothing to do with God’s presence, God’s essence. There’s nothing about God that is fire and smoke, trumpets blasting, thunder thundering. This isn’t how God necessarily comes to manifest among humans; this isn’t how God’s essence substantiates. No, this has to do with some human need, a human expectation of God.
Not unrelatedly, there’s been another shot fired in the culture war about religion. Bill Maher—comedian, and provocateur who’s got his own talk show, and mind behind the film Religulous by which he meant to strip naked the ridiculous nature of religion itself—made comments about Islam that then had movie star Ben Affleck coming to Islam’s defense.
Now, already you can likely guess that the discussion wasn’t an intellectually rigorous one. Not that I think these two are incapable of intellectual rigor—I have no idea about that—but I do know the context for the conversation isn’t conducive of such a thing: a talk show that is often more of a shout-down. Plus, what little I know of each of these two indicates that neither has any actual experience with Islam or any other “religious” practice for that matter.
So, what superficiality got played out between these two—attacker on the one side and defender on the other—is the idea that there are two kinds of people in the world: there are religious people and their gods, and there are irreligious people and their common sense; there are people who will defend religion (or at least their religion) against any and all attack or critique, and there are people who see religion as, well, “religulous.”
Amidst all this straw-man knocking-down is this depth that goes uncovered and unexplored and indeed probably entirely unknown: the idea that Lord himself, the Living One whom we meet in the Bible and with whom many people of the book throughout history and the world over pilgrimage through life to life, is as critical of religion as Bill Maher could ever be.
The Bible is a deeply ironic text. God, whom the Jews first recognized and then, across centuries, witnessed into the world; God, whom Jesus knew intimately as Father, Abba, Daddy; God, whom Peter and Paul and the other apostles spread abroad through preaching and baptizing and community-building—this God is a God who is deeply ambivalent about religion.
First, to define our terms: “religion” is famously difficult to define, and “you know it when you see it” doesn’t cut it. Knowing this, scholar William Cavanaugh surveyed university religion department catalogs and found courses on the following: “totems, witchcraft, the rights of man, Marxism, liberalism, Japanese tea ceremonies, nationalism, sports, [and] free market ideology.”6 In fact, the whole concept of religion is one that arrived late to the game. Though the practices that fall into this category are as old and persistent as humanity itself, the critical concept of religion is a modern concept, one introduced to study the strange peoples and practices that exploration and colonization had European people encountering the world over.
I always find it helpful, then, to go back to the word’s root. Re-ligio is a term meaning to re-bind, ligio meaning bind, as in ligature and ligament. So, perhaps religion is any phenomenon that binds people back together—one with another and one with their god, which is the transcendent made imminent. Re-ligio is, then also, that phenomenon which establishes who’s in and who’s out.
And now we’re in some tricky territory. Now we must proceed with caution. It’s what God would have us do.
Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac and Mount Moriah—when Abraham bound Isaac at God’s command so to sacrifice him, and then unbound him, at the Lord’s command so to let him go. There are those who call this story “The Binding of Isaac,” the Aquedah in Hebrew; and there are those who call this story “The Unbinding of Isaac.” Which is it to you?
And consider this—the scene revealed to the prophet Ezekiel of a valley that was full of dried bones, a mass grave, really, filled with the remains of a people slaughtered. But then the bones began to come together, a clattering, bone to its bone. And then there were sinews on these bones, ligaments, so to hold them together; and then flesh. It was a re-binding, this scene. It was a re-ligious coming together. The moment of true life for these resurrected bones comes when the breath of God enters each body, but the breath wouldn’t have had any place to fill had not the bones been rebound, bone to its bone.
But then consider this—when the king of Aram, Israel’s enemy, Naaman, was suffering terrible leprosy and sent for the Jewish prophet Elisha for help, for a cure. And, though he received one, it wasn’t what he was expecting, and he was dismayed, outraged actually, by the irreligious nature of the cure—so common a thing, so unspectacular a thing. “Go wash in the river Jordan seven times.” He said, in a rage, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” But then his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, and his flesh was restored “like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.”
Now consider Jesus and his many arguments with the religious authorities, noticing first of all that his objection was not because they merely abused their authority but because they abused their religious authority. Sloppy thinking has had those in the church often hear this as Jesus taking issue with them because they were Jewish. Sloppy thinking has had us sometimes assume Jesus objected to their religious practice because it was the wrong religion, the religious authorities of his day being Jewish while he was the first Christian. But Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He was a Jew. He was a Jew living in Jewish territory with other Jews, worshiping by Jewish Scripture and abiding faithfully with the Jewish God. So, no, he didn’t object to them because they were Jewish. He objected to them because they were religious, were religious before they were anything else. They led with religious rectitude and never departed from this.
And consider him saying this, as his ministry was becoming more and more focused on the cross: “Come to me, you who are weary; and I will give you rest—for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The great twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich claims, “[T]he burden He means to take from us is the burden of religion.”7 And he goes on to say that, when it comes to knowing and abiding with God, “Nearly nothing is demanded of you—no idea of God, and no goodness in yourselves, not your being religious, not your being Christian, not your being wise, and not your being moral. What is demanded is only your being open and willing to accept what is given to you, the New Being, the being of love and justice and truth, as it is manifest in Him whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.”8
Finally,
