“Pride Month” has come to an end. And for the first two days of July, the first readings at Mass told the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I’d call that a coincidence—if I believed in coincidencesWhile he's correct that readings for Monday and Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I of the weekday Lectionary do center around the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah, this ready-made interpretation of what prompted the biblical destruction of these cities hits wide of the mark.
It is helpful to be reminded what the passage that underlies this smug assertion conveys (see Genesis 19:1-14). What's in this passage? Well, it tells of the angelic visitors who turn up at Lot's house in the city of Sodom. Lot invites them in and offers his guests extravagant hospitality. Learning of the presence of these mysterious visitors, a violent mob turns up at Lot's house. They demand that Lot turn his visitors over to them. The narrative makes clear the intent of the violent mob is to gang rape the visitors. Lot refuses to hand over his guests by bargaining with the mob. His bargain consists of offering the violent men his virgin daughters to do with as they pleased! Shocking stuff, I know.
Lot does not wind up turning his daughters over to be defiled and violently abused. Rather, after pulling him from the clutches of the angry mob and bringing him safely back inside the house, the visitors warn Lot to leave because the city is going to be destroyed. Heeding their advice, he leaves. As he leaves, the city is destroyed. According to the narrative, it was during this exodus that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar salt because she looked back at the destruction, something the fleeing family had been warned not to do.
It is important to note that, when considered sequentially, that is, in the order the narrative has been handed down, Abraham is interceding for Sodom with God in the previous chapter. If you remember, Abraham keeps lowering the number of righteous people God needed to find in the city in order not to destroy it (see Genesis 18:16-33). God accedes each time Abraham lowers the number. Inexplicably, Abraham stops at ten. You can't help but ask, Why didn't he humbly ask God to lower the number to one? Did Abraham, much like we are prone to do, short-sell God's mercy? My point is that the wickedness of Sodom was well-established prior to the incident in Genesis 19.
Note what the response was when Lot begged the violent mob not to violently gang rape his visitors and offered them his virgin daughters: "Stand back! This man [Lot]... came here as a resident alien, and now he dares to give orders! We will treat you worse than them!" (Gen 19:9). This, I believe, gives much insight into what is going on in the narrative- it also has bearing on the U.S.'s inhumane treatment of immigrants/refugees
The last section of Genesis 19 deals with Lot and his daughters. In short, the women see to it that their father is inebriated on successive nights and then each, in turn, have intercourse with him and are impregnated by him (Genesis 19:30-38).
In reply to the Tweet, I posted a six-part response. Before sharing those replies, it is important to note that in these chapters we are not dealing with strictly, or even mostly, historical material. While the saga of the patriarchs does not consist of myths, it is comprised of legends. These legends serve to make points, some are rather archaic. For example, is it really true that the Ammonites and Moabites were direct descendants of the sons incestuously conceived by Lot with his daughters? Below are my tweets:
1/6 To those who noted that the 1st reading for daily Mass 1-2 July- the days immediately after the end of Pride month- mentioned the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah (skipping Gen 19:1-14), last Sunday's Gospel [Luke 9:51-62] dispelled this kind of revenge fantasy for Christ's followers.Sections 76-77 of the Introduction to the Lectionary deal with Difficult Texts and The Omission of Certain Verses respectively. In the latter instance (sec. 77), some verses are omitted from passages to avoid the reading being "unduly long." However, "certain readings" are omitted because they are deemed to be "pastorally less useful" or involve "truly difficult questions." What is not meant is that "truly difficult questions" are to be avoided altogether. It's just that the homily is not the best medium for addressing some difficult questions. In the case of the former (sec. 76), "texts that present real difficulties are avoided for pastoral reasons." What are those reasons? Well, these reasons "may be objective, in that the texts themselves raise profound literary, critical, or exegetical problems; or the difficulties may lie, at least to a certain extent, in the ability of the faithful to understand the texts."
2/6 To the same people addressed in 1/6 with reference to Gen 19:1-14- isn't it important to differentiate between brutal gang rape and not only consensual but mutually affectionate relations, whether we're talking gay or straight?
3/6 To those who find some strange thrill, albeit by way of poor exegesis, that the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah is mentioned in the daily readings for Year I, again referencing Gen 19:1-14, did Lot act righteously in offering the sexually violent mob his daughters?
4/6 I am pretty sure if your exegesis includes both rank homophobia and horrific misogyny your method is flawed.
5/6 The lectionary deliberately leaves out a few passages that are too complex to briefly explain and that are subject to gross misinterpretations; one is Gen 19:1-14.
6/6 Another example of a difficult passage that is omitted is 1 Cor 11:27-32 about the Eucharist. Like the Sodom & Gomorrah episode, it has been the subject of very poor and misleading interpretations
Now, before anyone gets huffy about the faithful being dissed, as it were, let's also factor in the inability and/or unwillingness of many preachers, who are members of the faithful, to engage in exegetical study and thus unable to clearly articulate the meaning of a difficult passage. "But there could be no justification," the Introduction continues, "for concealing from the faithful the spiritual riches of certain passages on the grounds of difficulty if the problem arises either from the inadequacy either of the religious education that every Christian should have or of the biblical formation that every pastor of souls should have" (sec. 77). This inadequacy is on full display by those who take Genesis 19:1-14 to be something of a Pat Robertson-esque homophobic revenge fantasy. Ironically, people who take this view, it seems to me, put themselves in the place of the angry, violent mob vis-à-vis homosexual persons. How so? By affirming deadly violence against them as kind of malformed divine justice that is wholly incompatible with the God who Jesus taught to call "Our Father."
Oh, how we love reading our very late-modern pre-occupations back into Bible texts! It seems appropriate to discuss these matters on the eve of the liturgical memorial of St. Maria Goretti, whose canonization is the annual cause of much back-and-forth about whether Christian women, in order to be holy, are obliged to undergo death rather than be raped.
It's Friday. For no reason other than I heard it this week and remembered how much I like it and that I think an Erasure song might be over-the-top, our traditio is Blondie singing "Sunday Girl"-
Bingo! Excuse me while I rant.
ReplyDeleteBeing an American, born during the Truman administration and growing up in the late-middle 20th century, I'd assumed that the cities of the plain had been wiped out for sex-related offenses.
It seemed obvious. On the rare occasions when radio preachers frothed on the subject, that's what they mentioned; and movies about Sodom and Gomorrah backed up that view.
The sexy view of S. & G. is 'Biblical,' as far as it goes. There's the account you discussed - and Jude 7:7. I figure that folks in those cities were not handling human sexuality correctly.
However, Genesis 18:20 and 2 Peter 2:6 mention "their sin so grave," and say that what happened to them should be a heads-up for the rest of us. No details.
Ezekiel 16:49 fills in at least part of the gap. looks like they were "...complacent in prosperity. They did not give any help to the poor and needy."
Small wonder movie studios didn't make Bible epics out of that. It's not 'box office,' and might even make audiences uneasy.
That sort of thing is one reason I'm not sorry to see "Christian America" become part of history.
Telling folks who our Lord is and how our faith works may be easier when we're not in a culture that's saturated with the Gospel According to Hollywood and 57 varieties of McBible franchises.
Rant over. Thanks for posting this.
You're welcome. I always appreciate your thoughtful responses.
DeleteTo wit: homosexuality per se was not the reason, even according to the text, that Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah was destroyed. In the narrative arc, it seems pretty clear that the incident at Lot's house was the last straw, as it were. But the incident seems to be part of an all-pervasive wickedness that resulted in the kind of violence the mob sought to inflict on the mysterious visitors. Another aspect to their wickedness is made manifest when they make it clear, in response to Lot's attempt to dissuade them from their intended course, they held in contempt folks who weren't from around there.
To this day, homosexual rape, whether in warfare or prison, is about humiliation and the assertion of power and dominance. But then, heterosexual rape (i.e., men raping women- the other way 'round doesn't happen) is also part of the same dynamic in warfare as well, whether in the Balkans, Rwanda, etc. - think of the "Joy Division" in German concentration camps. As such, "the sin of Sodom" has nothing whatsoever to do with mutually consenting and mutually affective same-sex relations.
It's difficult to imagine Jesus calling down fire from heaven to destroy anyone, let alone a whole city of people. He is the interpretive key to all the Scriptures. I preached last Sunday, as I prepared I was struck by Jesus's rebuke to James and John when they wanted to destroy a village of those despicable Samaritans. This happens in the same Gospel that contains the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Truth be told, due to the pervasiveness of a distorted application of natural law to human sexuality, most Christians don't have a clue about New Testament sexual ethics. In the present moment, it seems to me that the excesses of sexual libetine-ism is perfectly matched by the opposing conservative ideology, which has no more to do with the Gospel than its opposite.