Postscript: Deliver Us from Miserable Toil!
No Debts, No Masters, No Laws, No Caesars
Dear All,
We’re at the end of the No Debts, No Masters series. I’m going to have a little summer’s repose for a month, before I return with the next thread, and new things for paid subscribers. Thanks all for reading and engaging. All your correspondences have been gratefully received and I’ll be glad to hear whatever thoughts and puzzles are on your minds in the between space.
By way of a postscript to these thoughts on the four refusals, I've found myself returning to where we began: to that messianic prayer that is chanted in sacred spaces everywhere. After its petitions against hunger and debt, it comes to its conclusion with these familiar lines:
“And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil...”
Since one often runs into the common variant “deliver us from the Evil One…” it's always seemed to me that this last line was to be associated with the Devil. It evokes a story that deeply inhabits the popular Christian imagination, where the good fight is fought in the conscience, in the inward realm. Satan wanders amid our interior landscapes, tempting us to put our souls at hazard through some misbehaviour.
This story chimes true enough with the human experience, religious or not, even if it has picked up a rather paternalistic and moralising energy over time. If I don't temper my grasping desires I might well pay for them later. Even so, I don't think that's what these lines of Jesus’ prayer are talking about.
The Greek word ponaerou doesn’t signify some personification of evil, but rather the evil of suffering. The root ponos denotes grievous toil and anxious labour. We might sketch the meaning something like this:
“Deliver us from the evil of miserable toil and subjection…”
This is not about individualistic religious piety. It’s about suffering under iniquitous power relations. This sits quite coherently with a prayer against poverty, hunger and debt.
Likewise, the word “temptation” usually points toward the individual’s inward struggle for purity, but the Greek word beneath it—peirasmon—points in various other directions besides. It means a trial or a test or an affliction: an attempt—as in, an attempt on ones life. “Temptation” is one possible thread within this web of meanings—to be decieved into one’s demise—and this slant certainly suits a religion of quietism and interiority, but in the context of this prayer about social, economic and material concerns, it might be better understood as a trial of deceitful subjection to power.
And so this prayer might be better translated something like this:
Give us today enough to live
And release us from all debts
As we release all those indebted to us
And lead us not into trial and affliction
But deliver us out of miserable toil and subjection
There is something else in these lines that speaks to the four refusals. There is, once again, a spacial imagination at work. We see it here in the words eis and apo, meaning “into” and “out of.” Bring us not into affliction, but deliver us out of miserable toil… The problem is something one gets stuck inside of. Salvation, or liberation, is most often understood as an exit, a way out of ponaerou.
What's the significance of this sense of space? Why does it matter that redemption is so often envisaged as an exit?
This word for the evils of miserable toils and subjection is also used by Paul. He writes in very similar language about the Messiah “who delivers us out of the present age of ponaerou…” There's a mystery here: a juxtaposition of spacial language with the language of time. How can one be delivered out of a time? I can’t move spacially out of a time; I can only wait until it ends.
The early messianics found language for these intuitions and enigmas in rituals.
The next series of writings here will be on Rituals of Exit. I'll be back with that in a month or so, alongside spaces for deeper engagement with paid subscribers. In the meantime, thank you all for reading and engaging with this series on the four refusals: no debts, no masters, no law, no caesars.
xaris kai eirene
DBB
Yes, I enjoyed reading this. Looking forward to the next series you are going to write about ‘exits’ 😊 I am constantly wracking my brain at the moment trying to work out an ‘exit strategy’ from my current employment! Am feeling like I am ‘subject’ to irritating employers WAY too much at the mo, crying out to Jesus for a new sense of liberation, not from myself or sense of internal sin, but from the powers that be.
For me evil is clearly residing in the powers, the social, economic and political structures. A floating around, homeless demon feels easier to trample on and combat, easy to laugh at from a higher place, laughing in it’s face is seriously NOT a problem, or dealing with a single person with demonic influences but what about National, global, and economic institutions!??? How do we trample on those? 😳🤯 It is this I am asking Jesus to liberate me from. Some great stories for the OT where this happens. But, Jesus was crucified by them.
In the reality of my life, annoyingly I still have to have a roof over my head, food to eat, and the necessity of giving to Caesar what is Caesars - or perhaps I should go all out and rely on finding gold coins randomly, perhaps in a fish’s mouth 🤔 or perhaps. I could live like St, Francis of Assisi? Not sure I have the courage, or inclination to do that 🤣
Such a wrestle. But, Jesus is here with us, in this age and he promised he always would be with us. And, he gets it. I get great comfort knowing he gets it. Only a God, also truly human, could ever het this. Get us. What life in July 2024 is actually really like, Jesus gets.
Thank you for these words, David. I love this one especially. It makes me think that becoming un-subjugated actually requires an immense amount of courage, and speaks directly to the current moment. Strengthening our atrophied relational muscles, our neighboring muscles.