Old Gods

El, by oldworldgods

Propers: Christ the King, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Early Israelite religion arose in a Canaanite context. We know the Hebrew Bible tends to cast the Canaanites as Israel’s ancient enemies, but it also admits that they were all related peoples. They shared semitic languages and ancestors and cultural ideas. Indeed, their enmity is treated, in accounts both classical and contemporary, as a sort of family feud.

While influenced by Egyptian monotheism—the story behind the story of the Exodus—and shaped into what we would recognize as Judaism during the Babylonian Exile, Israel was Canaanite at heart, even if she proved herself the black sheep of the family. Understanding this can help us to read the Bible, because a lot of our early Scriptures are Mesopotamian and Canaanite stories flipped on their heads.

The first chapters of Genesis, for example, are reinterpretations and even reversals of earlier myths. The Canaanites acknowledged that the gods arose from chaos, that the world is a hostile place, and that humanity was an afterthought, washed away in a Flood by irritable deities. Genesis undoes all of that. Here God creates first chaos, then order; He makes the world good at every stage; human beings prove to be the crown of His Creation; and the Flood myth gets rewritten, corrected, to show God’s saving love, rescuing humanity from utter corruption.

Some people imagine that modern scholarship doesn’t take the Scriptures seriously, but I have found the opposite to be true. Peeling back the layers, placing biblical books in their proper historical, literary, and archaeological context, opens a trove of treasures old and new. Overly simplistic, overly literalistic readings fail to take the Scriptures seriously, to treat them with the reverence they deserve. God, who is the Truth, has never valued ignorance.

In our reading this morning from Daniel, an Ancient One with clothing white as snow and a throne of fiery flames takes His place amidst the Council of Heaven, served by thousands upon thousands and myriads upon myriads of lesser divinities. Before Him stands a heavenly hero “like a Son of Man,” “coming on the clouds,” to whom the Ancient of Days grants all dominion and glory and kingship, an everlasting, all-encompassing Kingdom, which can never be destroyed.

Now, the Book of Daniel is an apocalypse, a highly symbolic literary genre written to offer hope and spiritual succor to beleaguered peoples in times of crisis. I preached on that last week. It’s a relatively late book in its current form, though some have argued that its core prophecies predate the framework narrative into which they have been edited. Christians place Daniel amongst the Major Prophets because we apply his visions to Jesus. Modern Judaism, meanwhile, catalogs this book as a Writing.

The imagery here is Canaanite. Ancient semitic peoples believed in a council of the gods, an assembly in the heavens, rather like Valhalla or Mount Olympus. The father god, the ancient one, they called El, which just means “god.” And he had a champion, a warrior-god, a storm-god, named Baal, which translates to master, lord, or husband. We might think of their relationship as something like Odin and Thor, Herakles and Zeus.

As Israelite religion developed, as they gradually came to see that there are not many limited gods but one eternal and infinite God, local deities such as El and Ya and Baal became assimilated into the One. The Council of Heaven then became not other gods but angels. The old images remained, but now with greater depth, greater meaning. The Psalms still sing of God as a warrior, with weapons and a body and a chariot; Job shows Him presiding over the council of the gods; Daniel still presents Him as an old man robed in white; but people then knew very well that such notions were not literal.

God doesn’t have a spear. God doesn’t lose His temper. God doesn’t regret and repent of the things that He’s done. If He could do any of that, then He wouldn’t really be God. It’s poetry. The question then becomes for us: What is Daniel doing, digging up these old ideas, these bygone Canaanite images? What is he trying to tell us, with his Ancient One and Son of Man?

This, my friends, is a messianic text. It is written to a people who are looking for a Savior. Apocalyptic, remember? Daniel is here to offer us hope. In the story, Daniel lives during the Exile, under the Babylonian and then the Persian Empires. The form of the book as we have it today was likely compiled and edited under the Greeks. Israel, in other words, has been under somebody’s thumb for generations, for centuries. And so they want what anyone would want: freedom. They want God to keep His promises.

Back in the day, before they were conquered, they had had it all: their own land, their own king, their own priesthood. But that whole system failed. Israel now dreamt not of a restoration to how things used to be—to the old anointed priests and kings who failed one and all—but instead they clung to the prophetic promise of a new and heavenly Kingdom, led by an Anointed One, a Priest and King, descending from above. Who would this be? A man chosen by God? An angel on the earth? Or would God alone be Israel’s King once again?

One thing was for certain: this cosmic Christ would succeed where mortal flesh had failed. His dominion would be everlasting, not just over Israel, but over all peoples, nations, and languages forevermore. That is whom Daniel is promising: the Anointed One, the Christ. As Baal once stood before El, so in Daniel’s prophecy the one who looks like a Son of Man, coming on the clouds, stands before the Ancient One in Heaven: His champion, His chosen, His Messiah. And people understood this. People got the message.

This is why the Book of Enoch speaks of the “Son of Man” not as some literal human but as a preëxistent divinity tasked with final judgment. In the Gospels, when Jesus speaks of His messianic mission, He refers to Himself quite scandalously as “the Son of Man.” And the Book of Revelation clearly holds this text fulfilled in Him, because it quotes wholesale from the Prophet Daniel when revealing Jesus Christ as the Alpha and Omega—the Beginning and the End of everything.

But here’s the kicker. Jesus Christ isn’t just some angel whom God sends. Right? God doesn’t task someone else to do His dirty-work. That’s the wrong way to interpret this. Daniel presents us with an old man sitting on a throne, who grants to a young man ultimate authority. Yet in digging up this image, in re-presenting to us the Canaanite Council of Heaven, remember that Daniel is sitting on the other side of that theological divide. He knows that there is and could only be just One God. He knows that El and Baal are both the same.

The One whom God sends is Himself. Not a middle-man, not a lesser divinity, not an angel. God Himself comes down. God Himself is King. God is the Messiah whom He’s promised to us all. That’s the whole idea behind the Johannine corpus, the Gospel and Revelation of St John, that the intermediary between God and Man—the λόγος, the Word—is God Himself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

This is not to confuse the Father, who is the Being of God, with the Son, who is the Mind of God. Yet Jesus Himself says that “the Father and I are One.” It isn’t that one is an old guy, and the other is a young guy; that’s poetic, not literal. God the Father and God the Son are not different Persons in the way that you and I are different persons. God Himself has come to save us, God Himself has come to reign, and God Himself has died upon that Cross. In doing so, He has broken death, and He rules forevermore.

That is what we mean when we say that Christ is King. He isn’t a King like the ones we know, nor any known before. His Kingdom is the unity of God and Man in Christ; the abolition of sin and death and hell; the conquering of every divide that separates us from His love. God has come to save us in this world, in our flesh—not by violence, not by terror, nor to burn in righteous wrath—but by an undeserved forgiveness, a superabundance of grace, and a mercy that we simply cannot kill. Lord knows we’ve tried! He just keeps getting back up.

Christ is King, so that God now is with us forever. Christ is King, such that nothing can take us from Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.










Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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