Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

This morning’s lectionary reading from II Kings provides us with a list of actions King Josiah took to reform the religious life of Judah, and there are a number of ready-to-hand ways of approaching this list that may not be the most productive, even as they’re likely the most familiar. 

So, for instance, we might see Josiah’s reform as little more than a political exercise: the mention of the kings of Judah who had ensconced these idols in the temple and in the devotional life of the people more broadly suggests to us yet another example of the ways in which religion is used as a political tool.  Indeed, it’s quite possible all those deities represent relations with neighboring peoples, a way of making-nice or conducting diplomacy with other nations via normalizing those nations’ religious practices.  In this way of looking at things, Josiah is a bellicose monarch using religion to consolidate power and (re)construct a national identity over against Judah’s neighbors.  Moreover, Josiah is behaving in ways that are disrespectfully and intolerantly anti-pluralist, his zeal for the Lord little more than atavistic fanaticism.

This particular reading of the reforms brings up some questions we may want to consider in our own day: How do we understand the value of pluralism given our own religious convictions, and to which are we likely (or prepared) to make the most compromises?  Or: Granted that religion continues to affect political discourse and vice versa, how comfortable are we really with the ways religion and politics so frequently intertwine, and is our comfortability here merely a situational value dependent on the degree to which religion and politics do or do not intertwine in our favor? 

For better or worse, beloved, this morning missive to you is not going to address these questions or those like them (at least not directly), in part because the approach to the reading that gave rise to them largely misses an important point of the reading.  The reforms of Josiah have less to do with religion as a tool for politics and more to do with Josiah’s realization that faithfulness to God must be the foundation of the kingdom if it’s to flourish in goodness and truth.  Being in right relationship with God necessarily means being in right relationship with others; the social fabric arises from—is woven from—this primary relationship, and not the other way around. 

When scripture deals with idolatry (and our scripture today is no exception), the issue is never actually about rivalry between God and a god.  God is not in rivalry with anything.  As James Alison writes in his essay “Some Notes for a Girardian Reading of the Book of Revelation” (and I’ll quote him at length here:

The Hebrew scriptures attest, in a variety of ways, to the process of a people being discovered by God-who-is-not-one-of-the-gods, God who is more unlike the gods than like them, and therefore is more like no-god-at-all than like a god. […] Because God is not among the universe of existing things, God is not in rivalry with anything that is, and is able to create, move and sustain everything that is without displacing it. God is not an object within our ken, something about which we can know, like a distant galaxy through a telescope or a virus under a microscope. On the contrary, everything that is is an object in God’s ken. Which means that everything that is is secondary. And that this is not a form of diminishment or passivity as though there were a non-secondary way of being that might be possible if only we were to fight against some power which is holding us back. It is the condition of possibility of being a member of the universe of existing things, including, in the case of humans, the condition of possibility of growing in freedom, authenticity and discovery of who we really are. This understanding is first and foremost something sunk into: a form of knowing relaxation which is appropriate to finding yourself, as part of everything that is, held in being, as it were from behind. Thus you are able to enjoy the ride and praise both the experience and the One holding it all in being and taking it somewhere.

So what’s at stake here in Josiah’s reform?  What’s at issue here for us?  Not God’s honor which is unimpeachable, nor God’s power which is unassailable, nor God’s Oneness which is not even numerical (a numerical Oneness would make of God merely another numbered and number-able thing [another god], and God is outside the order of things).  What’s at stake, as Alison hints at above, is whether or not we are becoming who we really are.  What’s at issue here are the ways by which our devotion shapes and creates us, whether or not we’re being formed by reflections of our own self-regard, instantiations of our vanity, expressions of our desire to be primary rather than partner; or whether we’re being formed by One who really is Other-Than-Us, who sustains us and is deeply in love with us.  What’s at stake is whether or not we are becoming a people of love or a people of rivalry and violence.  Idolatry in scripture is always about the ways by which we become embedded in patterns of violence, strangers to ourselves and each other, when we remove ourselves from the embrace of the One who, unlike anything, is both beyond us and near us; who loves us infinitely, like nothing can love us, because that One is infinitely not-us, intimately unopposed to us, and who, in Jesus Christ, wondrously and mysteriously chose, in love, to share our life with us so that we could come to live a life of love that was Not Ours. 

My dear Friend!  What idols in our own lives and souls can we throw down in order to be fully available to the Truly Living and Loving One?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+