Haggai 1:15b-2:9

Another minor prophet is presented as we end the liturgical year. Unlike Jeremiah or Isaiah, whom we have spent weeks with and the Bible spends years with, Haggai gets a short book about his few months of fame. But what an important few months it was. The Judahites are returning home from exile in Babylon and they are going to build a Temple, some would say "rebuild" "the" Temple. The Babylonians are losing to the Persians, and the Persians prefer keeping local rulers that the people accept, then controlling those rulers. The names of these governors are listed in this lection.

I don't usually bother with pointing out contradictions in the Bible, since I would rather concentrate on the symbolism of the stories themselves. But Timothy F. Simpson pointed out an interesting one here, that is more of a change in culture than a contradiction. In 2 Samuel 7:5, God speaks to King David through his prophet Nathan, about the idea of building a Temple:

5 “Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says: You are not the one to build a house for me to live in. 6 I did not live in a house at the time I took the Israelites out of Egypt. No, I traveled around in a tent. I used the tent for my home. 7 I never told any of the tribes of Israel to build me a fancy house made from cedar wood.’

Now, in Haggai 1:7 (yes, you'll have to look back one page to get the context), Haggai tells us:
7 The Lord All-Powerful said, “Think about what you are doing. 8 Go up to the mountains, get the wood, and build the Temple. Then I will be pleased with the Temple, and I will be honored.” This is what the Lord said.

Haggai seems to be saying, "We aren't flourishing, because we have our priorities wrong. We need to put God first, then our economic conditions will improve." Then, once the project gets going, as anyone knows who has done just about any project, it gets to be a drag, it doesn't look like it's going to be such a great inspiration after all. It's not as good as what our grandparents had. From this week:

2:3 Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?

So Haggai has to return to cheer leader. He says no matter what gets done, it's about the greatness of their Kingdom. Getting this temple done is going to shake things up. This is the fine line leaders have to ride. They want to inspire people with shining examples of what they can accomplish, but the people themselves have to do the work and the results aren't always so glorious. This symbol is still there for us today. The temple they are speaking of was destroyed in 70 AD and it is nothing but a partially broken wall now. However it continues to inspire. It continues to be a symbol of something that could be rebuilt.

Job 19:23-27a

Job will be studied more in Year B. This is a pivotal passage in the book of Job, but Job is one of the most argued about books in the Bible, so I dont' know if I can add much. Some use this passage to speak to the idea of a living God, one that we will see after life. That idea is not yet discussed anywhere else in Jewish writing at the time of Job, but that doesn't bother those who believe that's what is being said here. I would probably lean to another theory, that Job is saying he will be "restored" in this life. That is, more like "vindicated". He wants his words "written", although again, that's not really known in this time. Writing is done by chiseling words into rocks, as he says in the next line. Either way, he seems to think justice is possible, even though at this point in the story, he's not getting it.

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

We get the details of the argument for the second coming this week. The sign is that the "lawless one" has to come first. This is in contrast to 1 Thessalonians where Jesus comes "like a thief in the night", at an unexpected time. In this verse, there seems to have been some false statements made, possibly attributed to Paul, but scholars today suspect this letter itself is not written by Paul. Even the verse at the end, where he says he has signed it in his own hand is dubious. Paul normally doesn't say such a thing. And if this is a later forgery, no one who knew his handwriting would be around to verify it anyway.
The letter is saying to ignore this talk of the end coming soon and to stop worrying about being alive when it happens. Whether real or forgery, that's good advice.

If you want more on Pauline forgeries, I recommend Bart Ehrman.

Luke 20:27-38

First, if you aren't familiar with levirate marriage, you're probably having trouble following this from square one. Verse 20:28 explains it just fine. If a man dies and his wife was childless, it's up to his brothers to marry that woman and get her to bear children. This is the "sanctity of marriage" that people still talk about today and that I'll never understand. They explain this bizarre scenario that seems to setup an unworkable scenario that will occur when all those people come back to life as part of the second coming. This sounds like the kind of thing non-believers confront fundamentalists with.

And what we get is a fundamentalist like dismissal. The people worthy of "a place in that age" are "like angels", so the whole question doesn't matter. If this is Jesus talking, this is a strong statement that he believed in the end times an that they were coming soon, and what you believed mattered more than your daily routines. This is of course some author, that was given the name Luke, and he's writing sometime after the Jews were brutally defeated by the Romans in 70 AD. This is probably a story about how those who died are still part of the better kingdom, and that better kingdom will return.