The Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto leads a Synod of the Covenant webinar on reading Luke backwards
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
Photo by Tim Wildsmith via Unsplash
LOUISVILLE — In an approach that presents any number of spoiler alert challenges, the Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto nonetheless recommends that preachers read Luke backwards.
Barreto, the Frederick and Margaret L. Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, was the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick’s guest last week on the Synod of the Covenant’s monthly “Equipping Preachers” webinar. Listen to his 88-minute presentation here.
Barreto told the story of working on a Lenten series with the Rev. Dr. Dave Davis, the senior pastor at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, which Barreto attends and where he teaches adult education. Throughout that Lenten season, Davis preached on Lenten biblical passages while Barreto taught them, beginning with the cross and ending with the unusual Palm Sunday scene of baby Jesus in Mary’s arms.
Starting at the end of Luke’s gospel can be disorienting, but “sometimes disorienting us helps us see texts in a new light. I thought it was helpful to think about Mary in the Lenten season,” Barreto said. “It’s about revisiting an old story we have heard a million times before, only to be delighted and surprised there is so much to be learned.”
The cross of Jesus “is strange good news,” Barreto said. “It is news of the defeat of death with death, as the empire takes another innocent life. It is forgiveness shared at a place devoid of mercy. The cross is perhaps the strangest of good news.”
Barreto took a brief look at Luke’s prologue to uncover four keys to the third gospel: others wrote stories like Luke did, Luke was interested in presenting an orderly account of what had gone on, Luke’s intended readers are people who “already belong in the gospel,” and he intends to tell old stories again.
Then Barreto went straight to the crucifixion account in Luke 23. He said that Rome saw the two other men put to death alongside Jesus as terrorists, “like Jesus, seen as a threat to the order of the empire. It was a signal to the community not to mess with us,” Barreto said, for “if you do, this will be your destiny as well.”
“This is what power looks like,” Barreto said. “Grief and empire are all over the text.”
Why, Barreto wondered, does Luke quote the centurion saying, “Certainly, this man was innocent”?
“Is Jesus special? I want to say on the one hand, in the eyes of the centurion and maybe in our eyes, Jesus is not special,” Barreto said. “He’s not the first or the last innocent person killed by empire to keep order. I wonder if the centurion sees how remarkably ordinary his execution is.”
The United States had its own history of public executions, of course. “Not that long ago, white folks would go to lynchings in their Sunday best and take home souvenirs of what they’d seen. They came to see a spectacle, to be delighted,” Barreto said. “The spectacle of empire says, ‘We can use the weight of violence to keep you safe. Just don’t mess with us.’”
But members of the crowd witnessing Jesus’ execution go home beating their breasts “because they have seen something they should not have seen,” Barreto said. “The cross for Luke is just a blunt instrument of tragedy, a moment of deep trauma — cruelty and death and violence all wrapped up into one. Some say the cross is a mirror held up to us. What we are confronted with is our own love of violence, inflicted on others to keep us safe.”
Born in Puerto Rico, Barreto wonders if “being born in a colonial context helped prime me to see certain things in the text. What we bring to the text helps illuminate certain things in the text and makes it harder for us to see other things,” he said. “We need one another reading these texts faithfully and well.” Raised and nurtured in a Southern Baptist environment, “the scope of the cross was narrow: Jesus died for my sins. That was hopeful, but it seemed all too narrow,” he said.
The Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto
Headed backwards, Barreto turned to Luke 20, where those trying to trap Jesus ask him whether it’s lawful to pay tribute to Caesar.
“If you’re the emperor and you hear a Galilean peasant saying this, what do you think belongs to you if not the whole world?” Barreto asked. “If you’re an early Christian or a Christian today, what do we claim belongs to God? The whole world. There’s nothing left to give the emperor because the whole world belongs to God.”
“This is a story about possessions,” he said, “and the way empire worms its way into our lives, and about what counts.”
The Parable of the Great Dinner found in Luke 14 is more the story of a not-so-great dinner, according to Barreto. “A great dinner would look very different. It would not be about power and shame. It would be about feeding the multitude, about belonging and feeding those who most need it. It reminds us of what otherwise could be.”
Palm Sunday was the last Sunday Barreto and Davis teamed up to discuss Luke, and Barreto concluded with stories around Luke’s account of Mary.
The calling Gabriel gives to Mary “is a risk, a threat to empire that she will have to bear as well as her son,” Barreto said. “The angel responds with an explanation, and the proof the angel gives is her cousin Elizabeth.”
In Barreto’s imagination, “I wonder if Gabriel went to other women before Mary,” maybe “elite and educated women” who told him no, “that’s way too risky. Maybe Mary was at the end of a very long list. She said, ‘Here I am, the servant of the Lord.’ She sounds like a prophet.”
Mary hastily journeys to see Elizabeth, her cousin. She’s in a rush, he hypothesized, “because she needed to be with someone who would understand what she had just said yes to.”
When Mary sings her song of praise, “she becomes the first proclaimer of the good news. She starts with God and God’s character, the same way Jesus always did.”
“Mary prophesies the world turned upside-down,” he said. “I wonder if this is where Jesus learns the shape of his own faithfulness. Jesus was taught to walk and talk, how to pray, how to speak boldly and prophetically — and he learns it all on Mary’s lap.”
Barreto said the goal of reading a biblical account backwards is “to attune ourselves to these stories with the possibility we will notice something different we haven’t noticed before.”
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.