Bad Teaching Can Kill You. This Must Change. And That Will Kill You.
“Then they got it: that he wasn’t concerned about eating, but teaching – the Pharisee-Sadducee kind of teaching” (Matthew 16, The Message Bible).
With the knowledge of Herod Antipas’ takeover of the Sea of Galilee for commercial fishing (the takeover of the lake’s fishing resource by starting up a commercial enterprise that out-fished the small business fishers and overfished the lake in order to provide food product that could be shipped to other parts of Caesar’s Empire) Jesus had some specifics in mind when it came to trying to get his team (disciples) to know what was going on behind the Temple leadership’s wariness and spiteful defamation of Jesus’ itinerate teaching and storytelling.
Some more important background: Herod Antipas had moved his home, his palace, from Sephorris to his totally newly constructed town and palace on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, the large and economically and socially significant lake, not technically a “sea.” Herod renamed the lake the “Sea of Tiberius” and his new town and palace on the lake’s western shoreline, “Tiberius,” all in honor of Tiberius Caesar. Antipas was not, however, simply honoring his liege. He was working hard to impress Caesar in order for Caesar to grant him a larger territorial and governing piece of the Palestinian pie than he got (Galilee and Perea) when his father Herod the Great died in 4 BCE.
So, Jesus had all this going on in his head and his heart, this knowing what the political and economic antics of Herod Antipas were doing to the local folk. And he knew that the ruling Religious of the region, from Galilee south to Judea’s Jerusalem (there being the Temple and the center of power), the Pharisees and the Sadducees, had a political reason (maintaining significance, position, wealth, power) to keep Herod Antipas, and therefore too, Tiberius Caesar, content and happy.
With all of this background, this focus of Jesus’ on the bad and toxic Temple Teaching (from the Pharisees and Sadducees) becomes clear. Yes, Jesus’ disciples were concerned about actual and physical bread for their stomachs. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, when crowds approached Jesus for more healing miracles (and perhaps for more iconoclastic teaching and speaking?) the first thing Jesus did was tell his disciples, his team, to make sure the people had something to eat (John 6:5). Jesus here (in Matthew 16) is not begrudging his team’s concern for a meal. He is rather taking their real concern and taking it to the level where the serious and systemic challenge lies: the collaboration of the religious authorities with Tiberius Caesar’s minion ruler Herod Antipas in Galilee and Caesar’s Governor of Judea (including Jerusalem, wherein, remember, the Temple), Pontius Pilate. It was in the interest of Antipas and Pilate, both, to protect Tiberius Caesar’s interests at all costs. And why this collaboration of the Temple Leaders? No surprises here: they had jobs and families and social and economic and political position and authority, not to say power, to which to pay attention.
The reason the Pharisee-Sadducee teaching was toxic, “bad yeast,” was that they forgot about the justice and righteousness of Yahweh (God) that lifts the poor and marginalized and instead honored the justice and righteousness of Caesar.
This focus on systemic change is hard to identify and uncover because the evil that is targeted is not the kind of evil that is expressedly experienced as cause and effect. This makes me think of the difficulties we have today in clarifying and naming systemic racism. It’s one thing when a person says another person of another skin color is inferior. That’s easily enough racist. It’s another thing when a person owns a company and decides in their business human resource practices, without ever stating such, that they are not going to hire persons of another color because of their color. The company owner does not consider this racism. They consider this good business because they see it as benefiting their business.
In the case of the work, jobs and economy around the Sea of Galilee, ahem, Tiberius, one does not go out and abscond the local fisher’s boat. You instead simply bring in your own boats and overfish the waters for your own short-term business gain and put the independent and small fisher businessperson out of business in the process. Taking the other fisher’s boat would be stealing. We can’t have that.
Just like calling a black person the “N word” is racist, fishing for your own benefit at the expense of the local economy is stealing, but it’s not called that. It’s called good business in the free market. Setting up your business to only hire person of color you favor so that the other persons of another color are not allowed to be employed, grow wealth and prosper because they are of that other color is not called racism by the favored person of color. But it is.
Systemic racism is more profound and damaging than individual racist persons. For Jesus, economic and social exploitation and oppression was more corrosive on the systemic level than it was on the individual level. He could heal individuals of disease or discomfort, and did. But the evil that consumes the community, society, has to be eradicated, killed, by calling it what it is, evil, and loving to death those evil persons that perpetuate it. Literally loving them to your own death. Jesus did that too.
