From the Gospel of John:
You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 11:50 (NRSV) – February 26, 2014.)
The words of Caiaphas the high priest are reported by John as a prophecy that Jesus’ death would be an atoning sacrifice, that he would “die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.” (vv. 51-52) But I read them this morning as nothing more than political calculation.
More years ago than I care to remember I took a college class in political history. One of the things I learned is that nearly all decisions of government include two major components: political calculation, which is always based on past experience, and profound ignorance of current conditions and future potentials. Despite prodigious amounts of fact finding and data gathering, that ignorance remains a factor. There is always “one more fact” that could have been learned. And, more often than not, a “known fact” is not appreciated because prejudice, preconception, or inexperience blinds the decision-maker to its importance.
I suspect the lawmakers in Kansas and Arizona, where legislation has recently been enacted by one or both houses of the state legislatures permitting service providers, both private and public, to refuse service to gay, lesbian, and transgendered persons on the basis of “sincerely held religious belief,” have been surprised by the responses their actions elicited. They may have expected some reaction from the political left. It’s possible they anticipated some objection from more liberal religious bodies (such as the Episcopal Church). I don’t think they had a clue that the business community, represented by Apple, Delta, American Airlines, and other corporations, would oppose their action. I don’t know what data gathering they did before enacting those proposed laws, but they either failed to get the business data or failed to understand the data they got.
I could criticize what they did — these bills are, in my opinion, deeply flawed in several respects — but my thought today is that in our personal lives we do much the same thing. We make personal decisions on the basis of past experience in an atmosphere of profound ignorance; there is always something we don’t know. St. Paul was speaking of the eschaton, the end of time, about which we can know nothing when he wrote, “We see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV) but the truth is that our vision is always obscured. The glass through which we look at the present or the future is always darkened; there is always something we don’t see, some fact or bit of data of which we are ignorant either through lack or through misinterpretation.
So what does one do? Fail to decide? Fail to act? No, one cannot be paralyzed by fear. The only answer is to decide, to move forward in faith, to hope for the best. I don’t fault Caiaphas for his political calculation or for his ignorance; I am no different. I can hope I make better choices, but the process by which and environment in which human decisions are made has not changed in 2,000 years. Political calculation and profound ignorance are still the norm and probably will be until we get to the other side of Paul’s darkened glass.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
My favorite thing in the Book of Proverbs is the personification of Lady Wisdom. Perhaps because of the further development of her portrait in Chapter 8, where she is said to have been with God in the moments of creation, “daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (vv. 30-31), I see her as young, slender, and athletic, her rejoicing being manifest as dance.
How does one “test the spirits”? How does one divine the promptings of the spirit or determine the will of God? That’s always the question we must face. In the ancient tabernacle, the high priest’s vestments included a breastplate in which he kept a couple of stones called the urim and the thummim (Exodus 28:30). What those were is a subject of much speculation, but one theory is that they were sort of like dice. The belief is that the high priest cast these dice to determine God’s guidance, to “test the spirit” when faced with a difficult decision.
Jesus doesn’t ask much, does he? Only perfection! “Be perfect,” he tells us, “as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Of course, Jesus is simply echoing the words Moses spoke on God’s behalf delivering the Law to the Hebrews: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” What can this mean? How can we be expected to be perfect and holy like God? How can we do that, especially when both Moses and Jesus insist that that means, among other things, loving our enemies, not seeking redress, not holding a grudge, and not getting that to which we are sure we are entitled?
This, for me, is the issue of our day. It is the religious issue. It is the economic issue. It is the political issue. It is the moral issue. I think the answer to John’s question is, “It doesn’t.” 
It has been said that all human communication, even at its best, is an approximation of meaning. This is especially true of religious communication which is almost always analogic. When we try to speak of God we mean both more and less than we say; when we listen to others speak of God, we understand both more and less than we hear. 
“The Lord watch between me and thee. . . . ” Years ago (several more than forty) I graduated from high school at the tender age of 16 and announced to my parents that I was getting married. 
There’s been a dust-up in the press recently. A lot of ink (mostly secular press ink) spilled on the question of camels in the Bible. This is because some scientific, archeological evidence has been turned up suggesting that camels have been only relatively recently domesticated in the regions of the eastern Mediterranean, nowhere near as far back as the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs in the Books of Moses would put them. It is, says the scientific evidence, impossible that Jacob should have “set his children and his wives on camels” because there were no domesticated camels at the time, how ever far back we think that may have been.
When I was studying for ordination, one of the more interesting thinkers I read was the French Reformed theologian Jacques Ellul. Ellul was a lawyer and a sociologist; he was heavily influenced by the work of Karl Barth and of Søren Kierkegaard. He adopted a dialectic approach to theology and argued that only such a method could lead to understanding of Scripture; we cannot understand the Biblical text, he asserted, except be seeing it as a network of contradictions, a history of crises and the resolution of the crises, a series of apparent abandonments and the hope which arises from and resolves the abandonment.
