Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict, stunned the world, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, when in 2013 he announced he would step down as head of the Roman church. Historians quickly pointed out that it had been done before, and was a possibility created by a Medieval pope, Celestine the Fifth, who served just five months at the end of the 13th century, stepped down, and then was imprisoned for the rest of his life by his successor, Boniface the Eighth.
The times being what they were, Boniface didn’t end so well himself. He was a proponent of papal authority, not just in the affairs of the church, which had experienced the Great Schism between east and west just three centuries earlier, but also papal authority in temporal affairs, meddling in the business of kingdoms and kings. Philip the Fourth, ruler of the emerging nation of France, took issue with papal interference, leading to heated dispute, an excommunication, and the eventual capture and beating of the pope, by French agents. Boniface died soon thereafter.
French kings would force a frightened church into a series of French popes and the relocation of the Papal Court to the French city of Avignon, a period that some call the Babylonian Captivity of the Roman church, after the ancient captivity of the Hebrews. It was a conflict-filled age that would see popes and anti-popes, and even a posthumous trial of Boniface’s corpse, which was disinterred for the occasion.
It is there in Avignon that we find a Franciscan monk named William of Ockham, originally from that small English village. Educated at Oxford, historians are unsure what brought him to the Papal Court, but he would soon become a major player in a growing dispute between the Holy See and the recently created Franciscan order, for the Franciscans preached poverty, simplicity, and service, something that didn’t please the pope, John the Twenty Second, who lived in superfluous luxury. Friar William and the other Franciscan leaders would be forced to flee Avignon and find refuge in Bavaria under a Holy Roman Emperor named Louis the Fourth, an enemy of the French pope.
You may remember little of this, the flurry of names and dates, though the disputes, between nation-state and the church, between proto-reformers like the Franciscans and the excesses of the Medieval church, would bear fruit in the Protestant Reformation that is our own heritage. But it is worth remembering William. He was a remarkable character, and if you have seen the film “The Name of the Rose,” where Sean Connery portrays a thinly veiled version of the monk, or read Umberto Eco’s masterpiece of the same name, you’ll have an idea what he was like, his towering intellect and commitment to the truth.
But even if you find the esoteric debates of the Medieval Roman church boring and have never seen the film or read Eco’s novel, you are probably familiar with an idea attributed to William, one that still has currency, something called Ockham’s Razor.
Inspired by William’s theological work, it has been applied universally, especially in the sciences. William expressed it as “Plurality must never be posited without necessity.” It is an argument for simplicity. I particularly like its expression by the great American medical researcher Theodore Woodward, a Nobel laureate for his work on typhus and typhoid fever, who famously said “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras.”
In essence, Ockham’s Razor calls on you to choose the simplest explanation, the most logical explanation, the one with the least number of contingencies that might be disproven. In the case of Woodward, operating in an American context, hoofbeats from zebras would require an escape from a zoo, while horses are not all that uncommon, at least in some places.
This doesn’t mean it isn’t zebras. It just means you don’t start with zebras.
If Ockham’s Razor forces us to cut away the unnecessary and improbable, hence the term “razor,” we might look at today’s passage as Micah’s Razor, for this famous Hebrew Scripture text seems to cut through the six hundred and thirteen mitzvot, or commandments, of the Torah, to create a simple formula for the faith.
Micah was a prophet in the 8th century B.C.E, roughly the same period as Isaiah Bin Amoz, the first to preach under that name, as well as Hosea and Amos. The Assyrians were the aggressive and dangerous superpower, and the Northern Kingdom, called Israel or Samaria, would soon fall, destroyed and scattered, the Ten “Lost” Tribes of Israel.
The prophet was from a small town, not the capital, and he set his sights on the urban elite of Jerusalem, chiding them for pretension and corruption. Like most prophets, the message of Micah was fourfold. He described the unethical behavior of the people, and especially of their leaders. He predicted the terrible consequences of such misconduct. He called the people to repent and reform. He offered hope for a future under this new regime of repentance and righteousness.
The passage reads like a legal case, and that is intentional. The prophets asks what the Lord requires for forgiveness of the peoples many trespasses. He starts with burnt offerings, the kind used in a ritual of atonement, then goes bigger and bigger, taking in the economic activity of the Temple… thousands of rams, myriads streams of olive oil. The final blow comes when he asks if God might require a child sacrifice, never as far from ancient Hebrew practice as we’d like to pretend, something that would be documented again two centuries later during the time of Jeremiah.
Then, having over exaggerated what God might demand, the prophet gets to the real point.
God demands that you do justice.
God demands that you love kindness.
God demands that you walk in humility with your Creator.
It is one of my favorite passages in scripture, though it is way more than it appears to those with a shallow faith, those unfamiliar with Hebrew Scripture. This is not “be nice” and “do good.” The ancient Hebrews hearing this would be mindful that God’s justice and kindness are extravagant, that God’s justice is welcoming the immigrant, caring for the vulnerable, paying a just wage, declaring jubilee and freedom. They would know a humility that comes from living on the edge, being themselves vulnerable, for epidemic and famine and armies of slaughter were always a threat. They knew that they had not formed themselves from the dust, called their nation into existence, and that they needed all the help they could get.
By itself, out of context, Micah’s Razor is a helpful summary of the whole spirit of the Hebrew Law, much like the greatest commandment repeated in the gospel, love God above all things and love your neighbor as you love yourself, three-fold love.
But we should be mindful that Jesus, like Micah, has in mind reforming the Hebrew religion, not creating a new religion, and states explcitly that no one is to alter even a single letter of the Law, which he is not abolishing, even if he does see a time, coming very soon, when the Temple itself will be razed. That Gentiles would be given access to the radical preaching of Jesus and the living Hebrew religious tradition in which he lived is pure grace.
By itself, be good, do nice, but in the context of the whole work, in the context of the entire gospel story, in the context of every single prophet, the point is not that ritual and sacrifice are wrong. It is that ritual and sacrifice can be excessive and are meaningless if not accompanied by ethical behavior. The ancient debate between faith and works misleads, for we are saved by grace but we are expected to act as a saved people.
Every single prophet says the same thing. You make a mockery of your religion, you offend God, if you then go out and behave in unethical ways.
The prophets call out greed, neglect, hypocrisy, self-righteousness, again and again and again.
I can find no command that tells us to abolish ritual. Jesus uses ritual. Paul instructs us on ritual, practices ritual. The Hebrew people understood their religious practice as creating a thin place where the divine and the mundane came together. Jerusalem’s great Temple on the height, Samaria’s worship on Bet-El, these thin places are not abolish by Micah, by Jesus. William of Ockham and the Franciscans were not calling for the abolition of worship. They were calling for the abolition of hubris, of greed.
Religious ritual is still meant to create a thin place, a term borrowed from Celtic spirituality. Done well, we enter a place out of time, where we move into God’s story, attend to God’s Word, make a joyful noise unto the Lord, our voices lifted to that high ceiling and beyond.
But it matters what we do when we leave this place. It matters whether we walk through the world with a sense of entitlement. It matters if we cheat and steal. It matters if we support those who cheat and steal.
Do justice. Not retributive human justice, but redemptive divine justice.
Love kindness. Not transactional human kindness, but transformative divine justice.
Walk humbly with your God, for you God has walked with us, and walks with us still.
If we idolize bullies, our children will learn that bullying is the natural order of things. If we idolize corruption, our children will become corrupt.
I don’t care what kind of Sunday morning Christian you are. I care what kind of Tuesday morning Christian you are. And that is hard stuff. It is why we pray, and study, and support one another. It is why we listen to the Word, why we come to the Table, why the concerns of a prophet from the eighth century B.C.E. still matter. May it always be so.