All things to all People

Over the last few weeks I have been leading a series of conversation on Satan. We began by following the first uses of the word Satan, literally “to obstruct” as it appears in the Old Testament in passages like that of Numbers 22:22. Next we examined the use of the word Satan to describe a personification, as in the case of the angel of God in the book of Job. At some point one of the class member raised her hand quizzically and asked, “All this is nice, but where are the pointy horns and pitchfork?”

By way of answer we talked about ways in which the story of Satan evolved. We discussed passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel that each talk about the fall of an ancient king and which many people associate with the fall of Satan, and we talked about the influence of other religions, namely Zoroastrianism in which the Persian pantheon of gods are reduced to two, a God of good and a God of evil. We hypothesized that this influence during the period in Jewish history known as “the exile” may have fundamentally changed the way the Israelites thought of God.

Many passages in the Old Testament speak of God as being both the source of good and of evil. These include Isaiah 45:6-7, Job 9:22-23, Lamentations 3:37-38, Deuteronomy 28:20-23, or Jeremiah 25:37-38. However by the end of the 1st century BCE Apocryphal literature has begun to surface that clearly reflects a division of thought about the nature of God, namely one in which God is all good and Satan is all evil.

It is in this time period in which the figure of Jesus emerges, and in many respects I wonder if the central tenant of his theology, namely that God is love, wasn’t somehow an attempt to reconcile the conflict inherent in a question like “If god is all powerful and all good, why would he allow evil to exist?” Enter the first Gospel that narrates the life of Jesus, namely Mark.

The Gospel of Mark does not begin with Jesus as divine incarnate, that is, there is no story of Mary being impregnated with the Holy Spirit. Rather, Jesus receives the Holy Spirit though baptism “At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.” (Mark 1:13) It is interesting to note here that the Spirit of God is referred to here as both an absolute authority that direct Jesus into the wilderness, as well as the dualistic forces of good and evil that Jesus must confront in the wilderness. It is as if the author is trying to reconcile these two contrasting interpretation of the nature of God. Either way, from this moment on Jesus become the central figure in war between good and evil that is being waged here on earth, one that is ultimately a spiritual war that is being waged across the cosmos.

Jesus returns from the wilderness and immediately begins his teachings in the temple. There he is confronted be a man possessed of demons. Jesus demonstrates his power over evil by casting out the man’s demons. “The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.” (Mark 1:27) Elaine Pagels, in her book, The Origin of Satan hypothesizes that this construction sets up a major theme in the Gospel of Mark, namely one in which the battle between good and evil is epitomized in the struggle of the early Christian sect to identify itself up and against the larger Jewish majority.

In fact Satan is only mentioned a few times more in the Gospel of Mark, once in which Jesus asks, can a house divided stand against itself, as possible reference to the schism that existed between early Christian fathers and Jewish elders. A second time in a parable about the sowing of seeds, where seeds that fall on the existing path (Judaism?) “Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.”(Mark 4:15). And finally where Peter is rebuked because “"You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Pagels will use these instances to support a claim that the ending of the Gospel, the dual trials of Jesus, downplays the role that Pilate and the Roman authority played in the death of Jesus in order to villainize the Jewish establishment. She goes on to add in later chapters how the authors of Matthew, Luke and John will pick up on this theme and greatly expand it. I found her arguments compelling mostly because I have always been mystified at the behavior that many religions, including Christianity, exhibit in demonizing those that hold different views than their own.

In trying to turn this topic into a discussion class I thought for a while about how to phrase this as a question that would elicit conversation from the class. In the end I decided that in the next class I would phrase it in the form of two questions, the first being “Who killed Jesus?” to which I might expect most liberal minded Christians to respond, “The Romans.” And the to follow this question with a second, “But who is responsible?”

I tried these question on first one friend and then another. The first readily answered “Romans” to the first question, then paused and thought long and hard about the second question before answering “Romans”, but not, I might add, without muttering something about Judas. My second friend had a very different response, but one that none-the-less demonstrated the underlying confusion about this topic. Her answer was, “Pilate” to the first, and to the second she said “It seems like all those Aristotelian causes are at work: I could argue for Judas, a Roman Soldier, the Jewish Leadership, [even] God Himself.” An answer, I might add, that I loved because, just like the pause that my first friendgave to the second question, this more elaborate answer reveals the complexity of the problem, something that Pagels herself would probably agree upon. The matter is difficult.It is confusing. It is not cut and dry.

Difficult too is the idea that even as Satan evolves, so I imagine the idea of God evolves. Perhaps as little as fifty years later Sethian Gnostics will postulate the dualistic split that occurred between good and evil is not a division of God at all, but one that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the divine. The Old Testament god, they will argue, was not split in twain, but is actually the incarnation of a deceiver god, and the true god, the ineffable Divine, is one that defies our very comprehension…

As I think about these thing I am often remind of another saying, one that has little or nothing to do with a conversation about Satan, but one that is perhaps very applicable. I image that our idea of God has changed over the eons, certainly Jesus made that evident when he declare that “God is love.” “I am all things to all people” said the Apostle Paul summarizing the radical changes of his time. That about sums it up for me alright. God is going to make himself known, sometimes by wrath and sometimes by goodness, but so that all people may have a path to spiritual grace.