Advent 3, 2011

Advent Readings for the 3rd Sunday in Advent:
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

Eternal God, in your providence you made all ages
    a preparation for the kingdom of your Son.
Make ready our hearts for the brightness of your glory
    and the fullness of your blessing in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

(The Book of Worship 1944, Alt.)

Lighting of the Advent Candles: Third Sunday

We light this candle as a symbol of Christ our Joy.
May the joyful promise of your presence, O God,
    make us rejoice in our hope of salvation.
O come, O come, Emmanuel.

(United Methodist Book of Worship)

This week I am discussing the environment that Jesus was born into: not in terms of politics and economics, but the physical environment, the land. I do not have any direct references to these conditions, so I will have to extrapolate.

Peasant is an interactive term for farmers who are exploited and oppressed - a definition presuming that somewhere there must be exploiters and oppressors. ... aristocrats "live off" peasants. Granted that they so live off, where, then, did they live off? In cities, of course. In agrarians empires, peasants and elites imply, in other words, peasants and cities. A peasant without a city is simply a happy farmer. To rephrase Kautsky: cities "live off" peasants.*

Three final comments on peasants and cities. From Robert Redfield: "There were no peasants before the first cities. And those surviving primitive peoples who do not live in terms of the city are not peasants" (31).  From George Foster: "The primary criterion for defining peasant society is structural - the relationship between the village and the city (or the state)" (8). From Moses Finley: "The peasant was an integral element in the ancient city" (1977:322). It is necessary, once and for all, to stop confusing isolated with rural with peasant and to start taking the term peasant as it is used in cross-cultural anthropology and archeologists who do not will simply talk past one another forever. Peasants and cities go hand in hand. They are the necessarily twin sides of an oppressive or exploitative system. **

I know this is "political" rather than "land" based, however, it is necessary to see how cities and peasants interact. Take a look at how much "land" a city would have required in the Galilee to survive, especially when the cities are Roman in nature.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill ... notes the symbolic interaction of water, aqueduct, and bath: "The relationship [of town and country] is more visible if we picture the tentacles spread out by the Roman town into its hinterland in the forms of aqueducts [rather than roads]: symbolically siphoning off ... the resources of the land into the urban center, to feed the public baths where the imported water acts as a focus of sociability, and as a symbol of the 'washed' and civilized way of life that rejects the stench of the countryman. Implicit in the aqueduct is a dynamic of power, flowing between country and town; and if we wish to represent the dynamic as exploitative, we may extend our picture to the sewers to which the water eventually flows ... as an image of the wasteful consumption of the city" (x). Even if the peasants did not miss the water, the high material viability and great costs of aqueducts underlined another flow from country to city, that of taxes and supplies. ... Mireille Corbier adds, "Among the images which evoke the way cities siphoned off resources from their territory, we may briefly recall two centripetal movements: the channeling of water and the stockpiling of grain" (222). ***

Even if the peasants may not have needed the water, I'm sure the land noticed. Crossan spends an entire section on looking at the resources that the two Galilean cities (Sepphoris and Tiberias) consumed, the result being that these two towns, strangely omitted from the Gospels, consumed more than the surrounding countryside could produce.

One more distinction that bears repeating, the land was now seen as a commodity itself, and the peasants were becoming landless and watching things turn for the worse.

When one knows that one's own live depends upon the land, one tends to it as best one can. I don't imply that one cannot know more about caring for one's own land. Merely, I am pointing out that the relationship between a piece of land that will be passed down to heirs and has been inherited is different than land one is only working for someone else. It is the exceptional farmer who treats both sets of land similarly, if not the same. Nor am I implying that the Romans didn't have anything to contribute. Apparently erosion has been a long standing problem in the region. Roman terraces are still in evidence in the region.

We are left with a feeling that the land was deeply under stress in this period. A period into which Jesus was born.

Here's a pdf link I found that examines the current "land" issues in the region: www.kintera.org

Next week, I plan on briefly presenting how Jesus responds.

__________

* Crossan, John Dominic. The Birth of Christianity. 216.
** Crossan. 218 (quoting: Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformation; Foster, "Introduction, What Is a Peasant?" Peasant Society: A Reader; Finley, "The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond" Comparative Studies in Society and History.
*** Crossan. 215-6. (Wallace-Hadrill. "Introduction" ; Corbier. "City, Territory and Taxation" )