By the Numbers

 By the Numbers                                            

It’s a job he relishes. Crying “peace” but waging battle, Gaspar Stephens makes me aware again and again of the hypocrisy of the church, an institution he both disdains and holds in very high regard or, at least, to a very high standard.

          I didn’t remember this story – I don’t think I ever knew this story – until I joined a group of like-minded church fools reading, for reasons none could explain, 1 and 2 Maccabees. There the furiously angry Mattathias* is likened to Phinehas, with whom God made “the everlasting covenant of priesthood,” from which Mattathias – and his sons – descended. But with Phinehas also God made an everlasting covenant of peace.

Here it is, then, Phinehas’ story, from the TRV.

04.06.16

For links to other TRV stories, click here.

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* On Mattathias’ anger, no his fury! see 1 Mac 2:23-26 and 2:42-48, where after swearing neither he nor his sons would be turned aside to anything other than the way they should go, when a “a Jew came forward . . . to offer sacrifice upon the altar in Modein, according to the king’s command,” Mattathias “gave vent to righteous anger” and ran to kill him upon the altar, which he then tore down – dammit! – because “he burned with zeal for the law, as Phinehas did “against Zimri the son of Salu.” After this, Mattathias and the sons flee into the wilderness, where they decide the laws of the Sabbath can be violated, so they can go to war on the Sabbath day; and they organize an army to strike “down sinners in their anger and lawless men in their wrath,” to tear down Gentile altars, and to forcibly circumcise all the uncircumcised boys that they find within the borders of Israel. It must be so, because you can “never let the sinner gain the upper hand,” lest he become filled with arrogance. “It is a time of ruin and furious anger,” Mattathias says, again and again.