That Your Days May Be Long

Every Lord’s Day my church recites the Ten Commandments, acknowledging the God’s Law as the standard to direct our lives. The fifth commandment in particular is something I’ve wanted to write a bit about for a while. “Honor your father and mother,” the commandment says. But then, as Paul points out in Ephesians, it adds something. It is the first commandment with a promise attached to it: “that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”

This is saying something quite different from how it is rendered in some translations. The NLT, for instance, says “Then you will live a long, full life in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”  While it may be true as a general principle that those who honor their parents and heed the wisdom of the past generation are more likely to healthy, prosperous, and long-lived, I don’t think that is what the promise is getting at.

God is addressing His people as an assembly in Exodus 20.  The third commandment is followed up with an expression of God’s wrath and blessings upon generations.  We see immediately that God is very concerned about covenant faithfulness over generations.  And now, when we come to the commandment that is addressing the relationship between two generations, are we to presume that the blessings are primarily individual in nature?

I would argue that the blessings promised are also generational, to fit the commandment and the concern that God shows repeatedly in urging faithfulness.  That is, in this commandment God promises not so much that you’ll have long life if you honor your parents as an individual (which nevertheless may be true), but He is promising that a nation or assembly (or church) that is characterized by covenant faithfulness and honor from one generation to the next will likewise be blessed over generations.  If Israel were to be faithful in honoring past faithful generations, God would extend their days in the land.  That your days may be long in the land.

Today, this applies to the Church just as much.  If we as a Christian culture disregard the wisdom of our parents and are characterized as rebels, thinking we know better and have nothing to learn from those who have gone before, then we may forfeit blessings.  God’s kingdom will march on, but we or our children may be left out.  A generation of rebels will beget a generation of monsters.

But if we honor past faithful generations and teach our children to do likewise, then God’s promise is that He will bless in a broad generational way through His covenant with us.  Our days will be long and He will prosper us.  God’s blessings are not for individuals only.  They are from one generation to the next.

Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria” sung by 500+

The University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club, 150th Anniversary Concert
April 10, 2010, Hill Auditorium, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
“Ave Maria” by Franz Biebl

Recorded from the audience and mastered by Christopher Kou.

If you squint, you can see my dad standing center stage (click on the image to enlarge).  Also, there are more singers from the current glee club membership on the balcony above, not pictured here.

Anamnesis: “Make Present,” or just “Remember”?

There are basically two ways of translating “anamnesis,” which is the word Christ uses in the institution of the Lord’s Supper when he says “do this in remembrance of me,” or “do this as my memorial.”

They mean basically the same thing, but the emphasis is different.  In any case, tied to the word anamnesis is the issue of remembering.  In a Eucharistic or Old Testament sacrificial context, it is the remembering of what God has done for his people and offering of oneself to him in return.  It is thanksgiving.

But what does it mean to remember?  Is remembrance a mere cognitive exercise, or is there something more to it?  Of course today, when we use the word, we generally mean simply to bring a past event to mind.  But is this a Biblical view of remembrance?

In his milestone work, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix modified the Roman Catholic suggestion of re-sacrifice¹ in the Eucharist to something a little less offensive to the Biblical mind.  Or much less so.  He defines remembrance as the act of making present.²

According to Dix, when the church remembers the sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist, they are recalling it not only to mind, but also to present effect.  Remembrance brings the effects of a past event to bear on the present.  It identifies one directly with those people for whom that past event was a present reality.

Of course, since the popularization of this view, Roman Catholics have been using it to stump their Protestant friends who accuse them of viewing the Eucharist as a re-sacrifice.  “Why, no we don’t!  We believe it is simply a making present of the past sacrifice.”

Well, yeah, that’s true as far as it goes, but that’s only because they changed their tune.  Of course, they still believe it means to make physically present . . . though not locally, and that is where we go down the rabbit trail of medieval categories.

But aside from the dissonance, what about the basic melody of this new tune?  Is it any more pleasant than the last?  Let’s take a look.

First there is the language of how God himself remembers.

Genesis 9:15
I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.

Exodus 2:24
And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

There are many other similar examples.  And there is one interesting example that seems to have a very strong relation to God’s presence.

Numbers 10:9
And when you go to war in your land against the adversary who oppresses you, then you shall sound an alarm with the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the LORD your God, and you shall be saved from your enemies.

We should realize by now that Biblically speaking, remembrance is more than a cognitive recollection.  God certainly does not need to be cognitively reminded of his people or covenants.  He knows all, and he does not forget.  We should also note that when God remembers, it is always a catalyst to action.  The remembrance and the resulting action are so inseparable as to be one and the same.

So what about human remembrance?  How does God command us to remember?

Deuteronomy 15:15
You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today.

Was this command for that generation of the Exodus only?  This is after the forty years wandering in the wilderness.  An entire generation perished because of unbelief.  Most of those to whom Deuteronomy was given never saw slavery in Egypt.  How can they then rightly remember that God delivered them?  This is a question made all the more stark when we consider that the memorial sacrifices and feasts were to be observed by Israel continually.  Was the celebration of Passover by succeeding generations a mere cognitive exercise or was it an act of identification with God’s deliverance?

I read this passage a couple weeks ago, and found it quite interesting.  Pay attention especially to the pronouns.

Deuteronomy 26:3-10
“And you shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, ‘I declare today to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our fathers to give us.’ Then the priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down before the altar of the LORD your God.

“And you shall make response before the LORD your God, ‘a wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground, which you, O LORD, have given me.’

Notice how the perspective shifts in the act of remembrance.  The one offering thanksgiving here moves from a sort of separation between himself and his fathers to the point where speaks of himself and his fathers as one identity.  “A wandering Aramean was my father . . . he went down into Egypt” becomes “the Egyptians treated us harshly . . . the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand . . . and gave us this land.”

See how the identity of Israel as a people converge into one identity.  What God did for the fathers he did for the one who offers thanksgiving.  The suffering of the fathers is to be remembered as the suffering of the one who makes sacrifice, so that the deliverance of God might be known for all generations.

How does this apply to us?  Well, if Abraham is our father, we must do the same.  The deliverance of Israel we must recognize as our own.  The word of the prophets called us to repentance.  And finally, Jesus died and rose again for us.  When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we make present that reality in the sense that we identify ourselves with the sacrifice of Christ.  In remembrance, the Holy Spirit really (spiritual realities are real no less than the physical) applies to us the effects of the sacrifice.

Benjamin Warfield, in speaking of the Lord’s Supper, wrote this:

Assuredly, for example, the sacrificial feast is not a repetition of the sacrifice; and equally certainly it is something more than a mere commemoration of the sacrifice: it is specifically a part of the sacrifice, and more particularly this part—the application of it. . . . Precisely what our Lord did therefore . . . he, the true Passover, the Lamb of God, that takes away the sin of the world—was to establish a perpetual sacrificial feast, under universal forms, capable of observation everywhere and at all times . . . All who partake of this bread and wine, the appointed symbols of his body and blood, therefore, are symbolically partaking of the victim offered on the altar of the cross, and are by this act professing themselves offerers of the sacrifice and seeking to become beneficiaries of it. That is the fundamental significance of the Lord’s Supper.  Whenever the Lord’s Supper is spread before us we are invited to take our place at the sacrificial feast, the substance of which is the flesh and blood of the victim which has been sacrificed once for all at Calvary . . . ³

So then, with Dix, we might affirm that remembrance is indeed a making present to us the reality of Christ’s one sacrifice, and with Warfield, who it appears would agree with that, we say that it is the application of the sacrifice to the one who partakes.

Anamnesis, then, is the recollection to us the realities of the past in such a way that they may no longer be thought of to be a mere past reality brought to mind, but a present one as well.

There are more things to look at in this.  For instance, how our celebration of the Supper brings us to God’s remembrance, and so into his presence.  I don’t want anyone to think I overlooked that.  Dix deals with this at length, and to properly address Dix, we have to consider that sense of the word.  But this is enough for one post.  I’ll probably look at this again.

What Luther (et al.) Didn’t Know

When Luther and many of the Reformers read Galatians, they naturally saw it in the light of their contemporary situation.  The Roman Catholic Church was in effect perpetuating a practical doctrine of works righteousness.  Do this, and have assurance of salvation.  Pay your indulgences, and shave years off your time in Purgatory.¹

So when the Reformers read Galatians and how a man is justified through faith in Jesus Christ, rather than by “works of the law,” this naturally seemed to be speaking directly to the abuses of the church in their day.  Is it a legitimate application of Galatians?  Certainly!  Paul’s epistle does indeed condemn any doctrine that would claim grounds for justification other than faith in Jesus Christ.

But another question is this: was that the situation of Paul’s day?  Was Paul dealing with 1st century Jews who were attempting to earn (merit) their way to heaven through good works?  I think not.  Reading Paul with the assumption that he was dealing with the same abuses in his day as the Reformers were in the 15th century led Luther and others, and still leads many, to stumble over other passages, such as the book of James.

Some recent discoveries in the last century shed new light on the 1st century Jewish situation and their general attitude toward the Law and justification.  The one I want to focus on here is a Jewish hymn from the “Community Rule” scroll (1QS11) found at Qumran in 1949.  This was one of the first discoveries of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls.

First some background.  The Qumran community is thought by most to have been a community of Essene Jews.  Of all the Jewish sects, the Essenes were the most conservative.  They separated themselves from the rest of the world in order to remain pure, they abstained from sexual relations, they kept strict community rules that even the Pharisees would have balked at, they had complex systems of ritual purification, and they did not recognize the Hellenized Temple cult because they considered it corrupt.

They were the strictest of the strict in the 1st century Jewish world and had harsh penalties for violations.  If anyone would espouse a doctrine of justification by works, it would be them.²  So if we read their writings, we would expect to get merit x10.  Earn your way straight into the Kingdom (or else)!

Instead, in one marvelous example of 1st century Jewish hymnody, we get this:

As for me,
my justification is with God.
in His hand are the perfection of my way
and the uprightness of my heart.
He will wipe out my transgression
through his righteousness.

For my light has sprung
from the source of His knowledge;
my eyes have beheld his marvelous deeds,
and the light of my heart, the mystery to come.
He that is everlasting
is the support of my right hand;
the way of my steps is over stout rock
which nothing shall shake;
for the rock of my steps is the truth of God
and His might is the support of my right hand.

From the source of his righteousness
is my justification,
and from His marvellous mysteries
is the light in my heart.
. . .

My iniquities, rebellions, and sins,
together with the perversity of my heart,
belong to the company of worms
and to those who walk in darkness.
For mankind has no way,
and man is unable to establish his steps
since justification is with God
and perfection of way is out of His hand.
All things come to pass by His knowledge;
He establishes all things by His design
and without Him nothing is done.

As for me,
if I stumble, the mercies of God
shall be my eternal salvation.
If I stagger because of the sin of flesh,
my justification shall be
by the righteousness of God which endures forever.
When my distress is unleashed
He will deliver my soul from the Pit
and will direct my steps to the way.
He will draw me near by His grace,
and my His mercy will He bring my justification.
. . .

Blessed art Thou my God,
who openest the heart of Thy servant to knowledge!
Establish all his deeds in righteousness;
and as it pleases Thee to do for the elect of mankind,
grant that the son of They handmaid
may stand before Thee forever.
For without Thee no way is perfect,
and without Thy will nothing is done.

When I first read this years ago, it was a real eye opener.  Wow, where did that come from?  This does not look like the picture of Judaism that Luther and so many others painted. This hymn could almost have been written or sung by the apostle Paul.  Writings like this should make us think again about how we view the 1st century Jews.

And in all fairness, it isn’t the fault of Luther and the Reformers that they did not have a better understanding of 1st century Judaism.  They didn’t have the benefit of discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls.  And many of the Jews in the time of the Reformation, in a post-Temple existence did in fact hold to a merit-based view of the kingdom.³

And I think therein lies the key.  There is a marked difference between the pre and post-Temple Jewish existence, and so we should read phrases like “works of the law” with this in mind.  I am not saying that we should force an extra-biblical view onto the biblical text.  Rather, we must hear the biblical text with 1st century ears.

What would a man who wrote or sang the hymn of 1QS11 have said is necessary for justification?  Would he say that one needed to do enough good works to earn or merit salvation?  Certainly not!  The text of the hymn is clear.  It’s almost proto-Pauline in its view of man’s basic relationship to God.  Man is totally unable to establish his way, and he “belongs to the company of worms.”  Salvation is of God’s mercy alone.  Only God is able to justify, and the grounds for man’s justification is God’s own righteousness!  So to the 1st century Jews, the idea that one could not earn salvation was by no means a new idea, nor one with which they really would have had any disagreement.

On the other hand, would the writer of this hymn have said that the “works of the law” were necessary for justification?  If he were an Essene, or anything close to it, I think he would have.  And this is what Paul takes issue with.  Even as the Jew sings of justification coming from God, he assumes one thing: in order to attain to the the glorious state that the hymn expresses, you must be Jewish.  And to be a Jew, you obviously must be of the circumcision, which is the first basic “work of the law.”

This is clear from the context of the hymn.  The rest of the “Community Rule” scroll is filled with condemnations against apostates (the Sadducees and Pharisees of Jesus’ day) and reveals the stifling sectarian exclusivity of the community, which they considered to be the only pure assembly.  Is that in conflict with the hymn itself?  A Qumran sectarian would not have thought so (though we certainly would, reading through the lens of Paul).  Jewishness was basic to them, not because of some ethnic megalomania, but because it was the Jews who were under the blood of sacrifice.  Even the Qumran sect, while rejecting the Hellenized Temple cult, looked forward to the coming of “The Righteous One” who would purge and purify the Temple.  To Israel belonged the Temple and the sacrifices to atone for sin, or so they thought.  And that was why they believed they could claim that God justified them apart from their own righteousness and yet at the same time require that Gentiles become Jewish (come “under the law”) in order to enter the Kingdom.  Because in their mind, the sacrifices applied to those of the circumcision.

This is where Paul interjects.  No, he says, you do not have to be Jew!  With the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who was prefigured by the Old Covenant sacrifices, the shadows are passing away.  The realization of all that was promised has come.  The circumcision is not the line that separates the justified from the unrighteous, and it never really was.  Rather, it is and always has been faith in Jesus Christ.  The blood of Jesus’ sacrifice applies not only to those of the circumcision, but rather to all who believe in Christ and confess Him.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:28

Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
Colossians 3:11

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Romans 10:12-13

So were the Reformers wrong?  What does this say about our traditional application of Paul against merited salvation and works-righteousness?  Is it still valid?  I think it is.  Paul’s insistence on faith in Jesus Christ as the instrument of justification does indeed by necessity exclude a meritorious role for our righteousness.  Even if that is not the exact issue that he is addressing.

What difference does it make?  Well, it gives us a more nuanced understanding of what Paul means by “works of the law.”  He is not speaking about a belief that one can earn their way into heaven.  He is not even speaking of “good works” in general.  And so we need not pull our hair out and engage in mental and exegetical gymnastics to synthesize Paul with James. The “works of the law” that Paul talks about are not the same thing as the “works” that James speaks of when he says “a person is justified by works, and not by faith alone.”

As when we read the 1st century Jews, we should not take the plain sense of James 2:24 to mean that one might earn or merit their salvation.  I believe the basic difference between Paul’s “works of the law” which do not justify and James’ “works” which do, is this:

Paul’s “works of the law” deals with those who would make being Jewish—being “under the law”—a requirement for justification; James is dealing with those who espouse belief and show no fruit.  Paul’s theme is faith in Jesus Christ apart from the “works of the Torah”; James’ point is faith in Jesus Christ that results in good “works.”  “Works of the law” cannot justify; good “works” flowing from faith in Jesus Christ are required for justification.

Does that imply meritorious earning?  Not at all.  It is all of grace, through faith.  And so we may say with the Reformers: Sola Fide . . . just as long as we qualify that fides sine operibus non fide.⁴

FOOTNOTES: