Sunday 23 April 2006

Pic of the day: Fire and darkness on the mountain. Not a good place to be, right?

Ebal and Gerizim

When the LORD your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mount Ebal the curses. (Deuteronomy 11:29)

Half of the people stood in front of Mount Gerizim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, as Moses the servant of the LORD had formerly commanded when he gave instructions to bless the people of Israel. (Joshua 8:33)

The Samaritans worshiped on Mount Gerizim and have continued to do so until our days. When Jesus talks with the Samaritan woman by the well, she mentions this: "Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." (John 4:19-24)

But Mount Ebal was never mentioned again.

***

If we look at the actual list of blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 28, we see 14 verses of blessings and 54 verses of curses. The curses are both more numerous and more detailed, quite vivid they are. But if you go into a church today, you are not likely to hear many curses. Indeed, here in Norway we have an expression: "To curse in the church", which means to say something highly unwelcome, inappropriate or out of place; an act of social disgrace.

There used to circulate a joke among Christians when I was younger, I don't remember the details, but the gist of it: A man joined a congregation and noticed that the preacher was always talking about the Mormons, which he warned against. Whatever the text was, it always ended up about Mormons. So one day he asked the preacher what the reason was. "Well, when I began here, I started to preach against greed, but someone told me that there were some rich members of the church which did not like to hear this, and their tithes were important for the church. So next I preached against adultery, but again I was quietly informed that a very influential member of the church felt targeted by this. So I decided that at least we don't have any Mormons here, and now everyone is happy."

I think we may all be a lot like the Samaritans, who prefer to worship in the place where the blessings were said. Everyone likes a blessing. It is kind of like Peter, after he had been on the mountain with Jesus and seen him meet up with Moses and Elias. Peter wanted to build a house there so they could live in that place. I think this is very common too, if not literally then at least figuratively. When something good or impressive has happened, we want to stay there. We don't want to go down and trudge off to Jerusalem to the crucifixion. And we sure don't want to walk down from Gerizim and walk over to Ebal to listen to an interminable long list of curses.

***

And yet, if the Bible is either the Word of God or some kind of accumulated wisdom, as heretics call it, the curses are surely part of it. And they will surely come over us if we don't heed the warnings. I suppose forgiveness goes a long way, but it doesn't really fix everything. Most of the curses on mount Ebal were not spiritual in the least, but horribly material. And if people don't live their religion, things will go wrong. Abstract faith is one thing, but if we don't follow the rules, society as a whole will suffer. The law of Moses was largely about society, not about the spiritual growth of each citizen. That was in many ways a side effect really. And we are still in a situation where our actions causes blessing or curse to those around us, and ourselves. Forgiveness won't really change that.

Obviously if I murder someone, a lot of lives will never be the same again, including my own. But the same is true (hopefully to a lesser degree) with adultery. Theft is definitely not a good idea if we want to live a happy, peaceful life for ourselves and our neighbors. And so on. Now in the New Covenant, it really boils down to "do what you would want others to do to you". This is pretty simple for the most part, but simple is not easy. Still, if we don't do it – if we treat others like scum – the curses will show up in a variety of ways. They won't be happy, we won't be happy, cooperation will break down and we will not be able to get the things done that need to be done. There is really no change in that.

People think that Christianity has fixed the problem with curses. Under the Law there were curses, but Jesus took the curses on himself so we should be free from them. It is a pretty thought, but it does not fully apply to the material plane at least. If we don't do the right thing, the wrong things will still happen. That's why we need both Ebal and Gerizim. Because if there are a lot of ways things can go right, there are even more ways they can go wrong. And we need that warning.