gregoryjenks

Author: Gregory C. Jenks

  • Pentecost (8 June 2014)

    Contents

    Lectionary

    Year A

    • Acts 2:1-21 (or Numbers 11:24-30) and Psalm 104:24-34,35b
    • 1Corinthians 12:3b-13 (or Acts 2:1-21)
    • John 20:19-23 (or John 7:37-39)

    These readings are from the Revised Common Lectionary and may vary in other lectionary systems. For further details and complete texts, see the RCL site.

    Introduction

    The origins of this festival go back into ancient biblical times, and beyond.

    On one level the festival is simply the Jewish version of the universal celebrations to mark the completion of the grain harvest at the end of Spring. The fact that this happened seven weeks after Passover, which coincided with the beginning of the harvest, assisted in the development of the idea that this festival brought to a solemn conclusion a “week of weeks”.

    The observance of the “festival of harvest” is stipulated in the ancient Covenant Code now found in Exodus 20:22-23:19, but there are very few references to this “feast of Weeks” (shavuot) in the Hebrew Bible:

    • Exodus 19:1 (Sinai revelation coincides with date of Shavuot)
    • Exodus 23:16 (Shavuot is one of the three pilgrim festivals)
    • Exodus 34:22 (Shavuot is one of the three pilgrim festivals)
    • Num 28:26-31 (details of the sacrifices to be offered at Shavuot)
    • Deut 16:10 (freewill offering proportionate to the harvest is expected)
    • Deut 16:16 (Shavuot is one of the three pilgrim festivals)
    • 2Chron 8:13 (Shavuot is one of the annual feasts)

    We find casual references to the festival in Tobit 21 and 2 Macc 12:32, as well as the first use of the Greek term pentekoste (fiftieth), and there are a few references in Philo (Decal. 160; Spec. Leg. 2,176) and several in Josephus (Ant. 3,252; 13,252; 14,337; 17,254. Bell. 1,253; 2,42; 6,299).

    Only Luke-Acts gives the 50th day after Easter a special significance in the Christian calendar, and it now seems that Luke was following an older Jewish tradition that considered the Spring harvest festival of Shavuot (“Weeks” or 7 x 7 days) to mark the end of a sacred period that began with Pesach (Passover/Easter). Gunther Plaut (ed), The Torah. A Modern Commentary (New York, 1981), notes that the Rabbis spoke of Shavuot as “the Atzeret (solemn gathering) of Pesach” —€” suggesting that the two festivals were linked by their connection to the beginning and the end of the grain harvest.

    Plaut (1981:924) continues:

    The Bible describes Shavuot only as an agricultural festival. Later tradition regards it as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Sinai. According to Exodus, chapter 19, the revelation occurred early in the third month; but an explicit identification of the festival as anniversary of the revelation is not found until well after the beginning of the Christian era. Thereafter the stress on the historical meaning of the holiday overshadowed the agricultural aspect. The latter survived only in the custom of decorating the synagogue with greens and flowers. The prayers and hymns of Shavuot all glorify the Torah. And the occasion was fittingly chosen by Reform Jews for the ceremony of confirmation, at which the pledge of Sinai is renewed.

    Pentecost in the New Testament

    In the account of Christian origins crafted by Luke, we find this festival elevated to conspicuous significance although even his own later acount in Acts does not ever make anything of this event; and we find no hint of such a special Pentecost soon after Jesus’ death in any other NT writing.

    Acts 20:16 does impute to Paul an eagerness to be in Jerusalem, if at all possibe, in time for the celebration of Pentecost but that appears to be no more than a creative flourish by Luke as author:

    For Paul had decided to sail past Ephesus, so that he might not have to spend time in Asia;
    he was eager to be Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost.

    There is no convincing reason to think that Luke had direct knowledge of Paul’s personal wishes. Even if Luke had access to a travel narrative written by a companion of Paul, Luke does not suggest any specifically Christian reason for Pentecost being a special observance. The wording we have in Acts 20:16 is quite in keeping with his description of Paul as a faithful Jew who honored traditional observances (cf. 21:26).

    Likewise, Paul’s own reference to Pentecost in 1Cor 16:8f suggests nothing more than a simple chronological marker:

    But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost,
    for a wide door for effective work has been opened to me …

    Actually, that authentic Paul reference to Pentecost sits most oddly with the way Luke develops the Ephesus sojourn (or lack thereof) in relation to Pentecost. Where 1Cor has Paul planning to stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, Acts 20 has Paul bypassing Ephesus in his haste to get back to Jerusalem for Pentecost. These two NT references to Pentecost seem at odds with each other and both are blithely unaware of the special charcater of Pentecost in the narrative of Acts.

    It may also be significant that both volumes of Luke-Acts begin with an impressive public event that sets the stage for what is to follow. In the Gospel of Luke, we find Jesus beginning his public activity with an otherwise unattested appearance in the synagogue at Nazareth.

    When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

    18″The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to bring good news to the poor.
    He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
    to let the oppressed go free,
    19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

    20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” 23 He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” 24 And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. 25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27 There were also many lepers4 in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. (Luke 4:16-30)

    It is is most unlikely that a small Galilean village like Nazareth would have had a synagogue around 28 CE. In addition the village was not built on the brow of a hill. Like the crisis at the edge of the cliff, the liturgical functions peformed by Jesus in the synagogue seem to be a figment of Luke’s imagination. Whatever their historical value, however, they set the scene for the ensuing narrative.

    It is no surprise, then, to discover that some NT scholars point to the similar function that the Pentecost scene plays in the Acts of the Apostles, part two of Luke-Acts:

    When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
    5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs–in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” (Acts 2:1-13)

    In both Luke 4 and Acts 2 these impressive scenes also provide the occasion for the key character (Jesus/Peter) to deliver a programatic speech that outlines what the reader can expect to encounter in the narrative that follows. The Pentecost episode (Acts 2) has a similar function within the narrative of Acts to the part played by the Nazareth synagogue scene (Luke 4:16-30) in the narrative of Luke.

    • Both set the scene for the longer narrative that will follow.
    • Both revolve around the Spirit’s presence (upon Jesus in Luke 4, and on the gathered community in Acts 2).
    • There is an appeal to prophetic texts in both cases.
    • The Jewish religious community misunderstands and rejects the prophetic word.

    In both cases we have reason to suspect the narratives are the result of Luke’s own literary creativity, since Luke seems to be developing strategic scenes without support in parallel traditions (cf. Mark 1:14-15 + 6:1-6a and Matt 4:12-17 + 13:5-58 for the more traditional description of Jesus beginning his ministry and his homecoming in Nazareth).

    This is the same author who provides Jesus with an impressive infancy narrative, complete with angelic annunciations and a Jerusalem location for the key scenes. Luke will also relocate all the Easter appearances so that everything happens in Jerusalem and its environs, as befits the Holy City (and his own careful literary design).

    In Acts 2 it is likely that Luke is developing a scene to exploit the significance of Shavuot as the solemn conclusion of the Paschal season. The occasion connects the proclamation of the resurrection to the tradition that angels announced the divine Torah to all the nations of the earth, proclaiming God’s requirements in seventy different languages.

    Peter himself suddenly emerges in this scene as an eloquent speaker and a gifted scholar of the prophetic writings. There have been no hints of such a depth to his character in the earlier traditions, but he will deliver several significant speeches in Acts.

    Given its single attestation in Acts, and its inherent contradiction by the Pauline and Johannine traditions, we have to conclude that Luke’s powerful scene, which has shaped Christian consciousness for almost 2,000 years, has no basis in history. It remains, nonetheless, a powerful parable of the new faith’s self-understanding around 125 CE.

    The Christians for whom Luke is writing understood themselves to have a heritage reaching back into the biblical times, but they also know that Jerusalem and its temple had been destroyed by the Romans. For them Jerusalem now exists only in the imagination of the Christian community. It is not a physical site to be visited, but a memory to be invoked. Jesus could be imagined as presented in the Temple for circumcision. The 12 year old Jesus, his bar Mitzvah being presumed by the narrative, could be imagined visiting the Temple and engaging the learned scholars in discourse on religious themes. All the Easter events take place at this sacred site. And the church itself is inaugurated on the day when the tradition had the divine Torah revealed to the nations and entrusted to Israel.

    Luke was not afraid to use story to communicate meaning. Unless we consciously put it to one side, our obsession with historicity may prevent us from enjoying the story and embracing the message.

    Jesus and the Spirit

    It may be interesting to note the very different approach taken by James D.G. Dunn in his classic 1975 study, Jesus and the Spirit (and especially chapter VI).

    Dunn begins by noting that the experiences of the Spirit which are attributed to the primitive Christian community differ in significant degree from the claims of various resurrection appearances by Jesus. These less personalised experiences of the divine Spirit might be understood as more like the experiences of the Spirit which Jesus himself had enjoyed. That is a tantalizing prospect and it transforms this discussion from academic historical inquiry into a quest for authentic encounters with Spirit in the life of the Church.

    Of course, Dunn is well aware of the range of views on the historical character of the account in Acts 2:

    The range of scholarly options stretches from the more traditional view at one end, that Acts 2 is a more or less accurate account of what happened on the first Christian Pentecost, to the more radical thesis maintained most forcefully by E. Haenchen at the other, that Acts 2 is wholly the construct of Luke’s theological expertise. (p. 136)

    One Pentecost or many?

    The first question that Dunn addresses is whether there were actually many separate occasions when the early Christian communities experienced dramatic manifestations of the divine Spirit in their midst, or whether there was just a single event something like the general picture given by Acts 2?

    Is it possible that such ecstatic experiences were part of the primitive Jesus movement, possibly even before Easter? Might such experiences have continued to be characteristic of groups outside the Jerusalem area (e.g., the Q communities in Galilee where itinerant prophets continued to act in ways that seem very much like Jesus’ own actions)? The description of charismatic phenomena in Samaria (Acts 8), in Damascus (note the role of Ananias in Acts 9) and at Antioch (recall the activity of the Spirit in the sending of Barnabas and Saul in Acts 13) seem to suggest a more dispersed charismatic expression of Christianity. The ready acceptance that disciples of John (such as Apollos in Acts 18) could be “aglow with the spirit” despite knowing only the baptism of John seems also to suggest this.

    Dunn concludes as follows:

    It looks … as though there were several individual and groups whose experience of Spirit and faith in Jesus was initially at last independent of Jerusalem. At the same time it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jerusalem was the main growing point in the first instance — that the main impulse to the growth of a community rejoicing in rich experiences of Spirit and centring faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of Man stemmed from Jerusalem. (p. 139)

    Dunn seeks to incorporate biblical evidence for a more complex distribution of “pentecostal” phenomena without discarding the claim of Acts 2 that the definitive and epochal events took place in Jerusalem.

    The timing of Pentecost?

    The next question that Dunn addresses concerns the timing of the event recounted in Acts 2.

    Would such experiences have been delayed for seven weeks (50 days) after Easter, or would they have even been part of the “evidence” that convinced Jesus’ followers that he was still alive and perhaps even now exalted (one greater than Elijah) to heaven and able to pour out the divine spirit on his followers (just as Elisha had inherited a double share of Eliajh’s spirit)?

    Dunn will argue in favor of just that kind of delay, as he foreshadows:

    The main problem indeed is not the earliness of the Pentcost dating for the first great communal experience of the Spirit, but the lateness (cf. again John 20.19-23; also Acts 2.33). Was there really such a lengthy gap between the first appearances and ‘Pentecost’? In fact, the answer is quite probably, Yes. Indeed, it is quite possible, even likely, that the events of Acts 2.1-13 did fall on the day of Pentecost. (p. 140)

    Dunn acknowledges that the closest parallels to the symbolic interpretation of Pentecost as a festival that celebrated the gift of the divine Torah at Sinai come from Jewish sources in the mid-2C CE, but he presumes these to be significantly later than Acts. (Recent studies that date Luke-Acts in the early/mid 2C would give greater significance to these symbolic parallels.) Dunn also dismisses the Johannine description of the Spirit as part of the Easter blessing from the beginning (“John’s presentation of the gift of the Spirit is almost wholly inspired by theological considerations”), asserting simply that “Luke’s dating must be judged to have the superior claim to historicity.” (p. 141)

    His proposed reconstruction of “what really happened” is nonetheless an interesting example of informed speculation, even if it cannot be persuasive as historical account:

    … if we may assume that the earliest appearances, to Peter and the twelve, took place in Galilee, as seems most likely, then the timing and occasion of the return to Jerusalem becomes a relevant issue. The reason for the return to Jerusalem was presumably the eschatological significance of Jerusalem, the city of God, the expected focus of God’s final acts. The most obvious occasion to return would be in time for the next great pilgrim festival (Pentecost); and since Pentecost seems already to have become regarded as the feast of covenant renewal, the disciples may have expected the decisive eschatological intervention of God on that date. This is all the more likely in view of the fact that Pentecost marked the end of the festival which began with the Passover; it was regarded as the closing feast of the Passover. It would be very natural if the disciples cherished some hope that the sequence of events which had begun on the Passover would end on the day of Pentecost — that the last day of the feast which had been marked by the death and resurrection of Jesus would itself be the last great day of the Lord. The gathering together of the disciples in the sort of numbers mentioned in Acts 1-2 and the increasing anticipation and psychological preparedness which presumably led up to the experience of Spirit and glossolalia certainly makes it more than plausible that the climax was reached on the day of the festival itself, the hopes of the last age beginning to be fulfilled in the outpouring of the Spirit. (p. 141f)

    Pentecost and the Appearance Tradition

    Another question addressed by James Dunn concerns how the Pentecost event (sic) relates to the appearances tradition. He asks whether Pentecost was really a resurrection experience, and then seeks to eliminate that interpretation of the story in Acts 2. Having taken Luke’s general depiction of the disciples in Jerusalem some seven weeks after Easter as authentic, he now dismisses Luke’s underlying scheme of appearances — ascension — Pentecost as “theologically determined.”

    The resurrection appearance to Paul certainly took place long after the forty days were past. If there had been an “ascension” which brought the resurrection appearances to a decisive end, or if there had been some other full stop to the resurrection appearances which was recognized by the primitve community as closing the circle of apostles, then Paul would never have been accepted as an apostle. It is Paul himself who seems to be the first to write finis under the list of resurrection appearances (‘last of all’). The real dispute over his own claim was not whether he really had experienced such a commissing appearance of the Lord, but whether he had understood his commission aright. The obvious implication is that the sequence of resurrection appearances listed in I Cor. 15 ran far beyond Luke’s forty days, and that Paul’s own ophthenai was recognized, initially at least, as just another link in the chain. (p. 143 emphasis original)

    After a careful analysis of suggestions that Acts 2 represents nothing more than a variant tradition of an appearance by Jesus “to more than 500 of the brethren at one time” (1Cor 15:6), Dunn concludes that the events described (doubtless with some theological elaboration by Luke) in Acts 2 probably took place between the appearance to the twelve and the appearance to the crowd of 500+ persons. He draws out the significance of this suggestion as follows:

    The not unimportant corollary follows that the gift of the Spirit was not something quite so distinct and separate from the resurrection appearances as Luke implies. Although Pentecost does not itself seem to have involved a resurrection appearance or even a vision of Jesus, it would seem that after the initial resurrection appearances, charismatic and ecstatic phenomena became a not uncommon feature of the communal gatherings of the young church together with occasional visionary appearances of Jesus, on one occasion at least to the whole company. In other words, we can only go so far in distinguishing experiences of Spirit from resurrection appearances in the earliest Christian community. The problem of how the exalted Jesus and the Spirit of God were related in the religious experience of the early churches is by no means solved. (p. 146 emphasis original)

    Jesus Database

    The Pentecost miracle in Acts 2 does not form part of the Jesus Database inventory, but it may be related to the following items:

    Liturgies and Prayers

    For liturgies and sermons each week, shaped by a progressive theology, check Rex Hunt’s web site

    Other recommended sites include:

    Music Suggestions

    See David MacGregor’s Together to Celebrate site for recommendations from a variety of contemporary genre.

     

    Sermons

  • Easter 7A (1 June 2014)

     

    Contents

    Lectionary

    • Acts 1:6-14 & Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35
    • 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
    • John 17:1-11

    First Reading: Jesus ascends to the Father

    The account of the ascension in Acts 1 has a close echo in Luke 24:

    Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:50–53 NRSV)

    So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:6–11 NRSV)

    Clearly these two sections need to be read together, and—just as clearly—what we have in the closing sentences of Luke 24 is a summary of the information provided (with more detail) in Acts 1.

    Interestingly, nowhere else in the NT do we find such an explicit description of the ascension/exaltation scene from the Easter tradition. The idea that Jesus was raised to glory with God, including variants that simply describe Jesus as being with the Father, is widely-attested in the NT. But no other NT writer attempts to describe the moment of glorification/exaltation.

    Turning a metaphor into a physical reality is a classic Lukan characteristic, but the desire to provide a witness statement attesting to the ascension (and deification) of Jesus may reflect Luke’s context in second century Roman society. Such statements were an essential part of the process for the Senate’s confirmation of the apotheosis of a recently-deceased emperor.

    Fur further discussion of the Ascension, see:

    Second Reading: 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

    This week concludes the series of readings from 1 Peter that have provided the Second Reading through the Easter season.

    As is often the case, the lectionary verses reflect some careful editing with the verses shown below in italics being omitted from the lectionary:

    Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.

    But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, a criminal, or even as a mischief maker. Yet if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name. For the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God; if it begins with us, what will be the end for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And “If it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinners?” Therefore, let those suffering in accordance with God’s will entrust themselves to a faithful Creator, while continuing to do good.
    Now as an elder myself and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders among youto tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it—not for sordid gain but eagerly. Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away. In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

    Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.” (1Peter 4:12–5:11 NRSV)

    This passage reflects the experience and the perspective of an emerging Christianity community that is sufficiently established to be noticed (and persecuted) by their contemporaries, but does not yet have the protection offered by antiquity or allies in high places. Respectability matters, but there remains a willingness to embrace ostracism—even martyrdom—as the cost of membership in the sect.

    Gospel: Re-imaging Jesus in the twenty-first century

    This week’s Gospel reading from John 17:1-11 continues the recent lectionary focus on the farewell discourse in John 13:31-17:26. This sets the action in the time prior to Jesus’ arrest and execution. However, the lectionary is correct in choosing these passages for the time during Easter as the underlying assumptions are those of a risen and ascended Lord.

    After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

    This week, in particular, we have Jesus portrayed as a victorious hero who has (or will shortly) take his place among the Immortals and who will then be in a position to reward his followers with salvation and honors of various kinds. This representation offends our modern sensibilities which regard such personal distribution of the rewards of power as a form of official corruption, but in the ancient social order of the Hellenistic empires such action by a patron on behalf of their clients was both expected and accepted. We see much the same set of expectations in the devotional practices of the medieval church as saints were imagined to be powerful patrons who would intercede on behalf of their supplicants to secure additional benefits not otherwise available to the pious.

    The traditional ways of imagining the ascension of Jesus and the significance for humanity of Jesus taking his seat at the right hand of God reflect specific ancient perspectives which we for the most part no longer accept:

    • The universe as a muti-layered reality, with God being located in the highest level and various demonic powers inimical to our spiritual progress located at the intermediate levels to form a kind of psychic obstacle course that we must complete successfully before gaining access to God.
    • Jesus as a true Hero who has not only overcome those obstacles (and defeated the powers and rulers in the process) in order to claim his place at God’s right hand, but who can now act as a classic “Lord” (Gk: kyrios) and come to the aid of his devotees as a “Saviour” (Gk: soter).

    It is clear enough that our traditional images for telling the Jesus story (or even the God story) rely on ancient assumptions that simply do not function in our culture. The challenge is to go beyond the task of deconstruction and to find new ways to speak of God, new narratives to express the significance of Jesus, new lexicons for the liturgy and new phrases for our prayers.

    One way in which this is often done these days is to translate the spatial imagery of the external cosmos into the psychological categories of inner space. Those categories have their own limitations, but for many people they seem to work better than traditional metaphors.

    Richard Bruxvoort-Colligan is a contemporary composer and theologian whose work invites us to imagine God differently and to experience faith with some different accents. Richard’s song Ground and Source of All that Is just one of several new pieces that you may like to check out.

    Ground and source of all that is,
    one that anchors all our roots,
    Being of all ways and forms,
    deepest home and final truth.
    We live and move in you.
    We live and move in you.

    Lover of ten thousand names,
    holy presence all have known,
    Beauty ever welcoming,
    Mystery to stir the soul. We live …

    Nature by whose laws we live,
    author of our DNA,
    All compelling call to life,
    drawing one and all the same. We live …

    Energy of heav’nly sphere,
    spark within the insect mind,
    Unseen pulse to charge our plans,
    bringing order and surprise. We live …

    Call to kindness, call to serve,
    freedom for our chosen course,
    Guide and friend for all who dream,
    nourished by our ground and source. We live …

    For details of Richard’s work, including online ordering and sample sound tracks, visit Rivers Voice

    Jesus Database

    Liturgies and Prayers

    For liturgies and sermons each week, shaped by a progressive theology, check Rex Hunt’s web site

    Other recommended sites include:

    Music Suggestions

    See the following sites for recommendations from a variety of contemporary genre:

  • Jesus Then and Jesus Now: A Sermon

    Introduction[1]

    Audio of the sermon at the 5.00pm Mass
    Opening Prayer
    Jesus, son of Mary, you come among us
    as one we think we know all too well.
    Open our eyes
    to see you again for the first time.
    Open our hearts
    to see God in one another.
    Open our hands
    to live with compassion.
    Amen.
    First Reading: Rumi, “What Jesus Runs Away From“
    Gospel: Mark 6:1–6a
    Blessing
    With open eyes, open hearts, and open hands,
    may we be a blessing to all we meet this week,
    in the name of Jesus. Amen.

     

    Let me begin by bringing greetings from the Christian community in Palestine, and especially those communities with which I am most familiar: St Luke’s Anglican Church in Haifa and the Sabeel community in Nazareth. This is a difficult time to be a Christian in the Middle East, and I would seek your prayers for my friends there, just as they offer their prayers for us.

    My task in the homilies this weekend is to reflect with you on the significance of Jesus for our kind of faith community here at St Mary’s in Exile. Rethinking Jesus is a big part of our project, I suspect; even if not always at the top of the agenda.

    As we say at the beginning of most liturgies, “We gather to reflect on our lives in light of the Christian mystery …”

    After five years, the conversation about what kind of community we are at SMX is not yet finished. My focus in this homily today is the part that Jesus plays in our collective and personal lives.

     

    The Book

    First of all, and especially in this context, it seems appropriate to begin with my recent book, Jesus Then and Jesus Now: Looking for Jesus, Finding Ourselves.

    Yes, it is yet another ‘Jesus book’—and there have been quite a few of them in recent years. As the sub-title seeks to suggest, this one has its own character and focus. It is as much about the meaning of Jesus for today, as it is about Jesus in the first century.

    A few times recently I have asked to describe the book. When that happens I like to outline the three major sections of the book in order to indicate its own particular logic:

    The first section draws on my involvement with historical research:

    • history of the Galilee and Second Temple Judaism more generally
    • the work of the Jesus Seminar, of which I am a long-time member
    • and my involvement with the archaeology dig at Bethsaida

    This part of the book is very much about getting a fix on ‘Jesus back then’ in first-century Galilee.

    The second section draws on my work as a lecturer in Biblical Studies, and focuses on selected Jesus themes in the NT Gospels:

    • Jesus and the kingdom of God
    • Jesus and the afterlife
    • Calling Jesus names
    • The death of Jesus

    This middle section of the book is very much about getting a fix on the Jesus tradition during first 100 years after Easter. What were people thinking about Jesus and saying about him in that formative period for Christianity?

    The final section draws on my personal perspectives as a person of faith myself, and it deals with the relevance of the person of Jesus and the traditions about Jesus for us here and now:

    • Jesus as one of us
    • The significance of Easter
    • Jesus in a world of many faiths
    • Being a follower of Jesus today

    This part of the book is much more theological and much more personal. It is probably also more controversial.

    Brevity is a key virtue in this context, so let me just say a few words about my reading of Jesus as a first-century Galilean Jew and then offer some reflections on the significance of Jesus for me as a progressive Christian.

     

    Jesus Then

    I locate Jesus within Torah-observant Jewish settler communities in the Galilee. “Settler” is a term I have chosen with intent. It disturbs both my Jewish and Palestinian friends, not mention other Christians.

    It is important to keep in mind that Jesus was neither an eco-theologian nor a first-century feminist. He was a person of his time and place, and he is a stranger to us and our values.

    We may well criticise creedal Christian for divinising Jesus too easily, but we also tend to domesticate him. We recruit Jesus into our social and political agendas.

    In very brief terms, then, I see Jesus (‘back then’) as coming from a small Jewish settler community at Nazareth, with maybe not more than a dozen or so families in the settlement. The people of that newly-established community were deeply attached to their Jewish identity. This included loyalty to the Temple and cultural resistance to Hellenism.

    Jesus of Nazareth was more like a prophet (Elijah, Elisah, Hosea, Jonah, et al) than a sage or rabbi.

    ‘Prophet’ may not be a perfect category, but it is better than most others and no better one comes to mind. This seems to have been his preferred self-description and to get us about as close to his own self-understanding as we are ever likely to reach.[2] His prophetic mission put him on a collision course with imperial Rome and its local puppets.

    However we may care to label him, Jesus seems to have been a catalyst for a Jewish renewal movement centred on the “reign of God”. He was, after all, a disciple and successor to John the Baptiser, so a focus on the kingdom is not surprising.

     

    Jesus Now

    Assuming that this description is reasonably accurate, and even if it is not, I still need to address the relevance of such a Jesus here and now.

    Because I am a Christian, Jesus is central to my understanding of God and my understanding of myself. To be like Jesus and to see the character of the Christ develop within me is my religion in a nutshell.

    It could have been otherwise, and most likely would have been otherwise had I not been born and raised in a family that took its Christian faith very seriously. But my family set me up to experience life through the lens of Christian faith, and thus Jesus has been at the very centre of my worldview from as early a stage as I can recall.

    One helpful way to explore the significance of ‘Jesus then’ and ‘Jesus now’ is offered to us by Marcus Borg, who speaks of the difference between  “Jesus before Easter” and “Jesus after Easter.”

    I think Borg is onto something very important for Christian faith in this idea, as the formula upholds the essential continuity of Jesus on both sides of Easter while also recognizing that Jesus is ‘something else’ after Easter than he had been before Easter. In using these terms we are not speaking about the ontological essence of Jesus, but rather our perceptions of Jesus and our reception of the blessings that God offers us in and through Jesus.

    The prophetic identity and mission of Jesus before Easter was expressed in his actions as he healed and exorcised, taught in private and public spaces, called disciples and sent them on mission to act on his behalf, as well as when he challenged and confronted those with privilege and power. His prophetic role is seen in his teaching activity, and especially in his aphorisms and parables. In addition, his prophetic character is anchored in his personal integrity; culminating in his death on the cross.

    That Jesus—the one we knew before Easter—continues to be a significant prophetic figure with much to say to us today. That faithful humanity is enough for us, and it is as a prophet that Jesus is honoured within Islam.

    Indeed, as I see it, the faithful humanity of Jesus is itself a prophetic act that cuts across the centuries and invites us to get ready for the coming reign of God. Jesus speaks for God, and he does not always need to use words.

    But something happened to Jesus at Easter.

    This is not the moment when Jesus became God, but it is the moment when we see Jesus differently. Jesus after Easter is a combination of radical transformation and profound continuity with Jesus of Nazareth.

    It is the same Jesus. The Jesus who cared about the poor and the sick, is the Jesus in whose face shines the eternal light of God. Yet something significant has changed.

    Jesus after Easter relinquishes his role as prophet, becoming instead an epiphany (revelation) of God. Not surprisingly then, the Easter traditions in the New Testament are as much about epiphany as they are about resurrection.

    Almost certainly none of the first disciples stopped to ask themselves what had become of Jesus’ flesh and bones. It seems crass even to contemplate such a question in this context. They had glimpsed the human face of God.[3] They knew the truth of the saying that to see Jesus is to see God (John 14:9).

    Perhaps we could modify this statement slightly. Can we suggest that to see Jesus after Easter is to see God, while to see Jesus before Easter is to catch a glimpse of God?

    Jesus after Easter is the Christian encounter with God.

    This God has a human face, and it is a Jewish face..

    This God is not just compassionate, but suffers and dies and rises again.

    This God knows what it is like be alone, cold, hungry, loved, mocked, and touched.

    This God sets a table and calls us to eat.

    This God overturns the crass transactions at the centre of our lives and challenges us to become houses of prayer for all nations.

    This God has become the Spirit poured out on all flesh, so that Paul could also say, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17).

     

    Conclusion

    As disciples of Jesus, as people who responds to the call of God who was deeply present in Jesus of Nazareth, how do we live out from that encounter with God in Jesus in our own time and place? This encounter with grace and love and forgiveness and life transforms and radicalizes my own life. How am I to put it into practice?

    However I answer that question to myself, it will not be a solo project. It will involve others and it will require me to be part of a community people seeking to fashion their own response to God in Jesus.

    We see this dynamic in the story of Jesus. The human face of God did not drop out of the sky in splendid isolation. Rather, the Word of God was born into a human family and nurtured within the village life of first-century Nazareth. Even in his death, Jesus was surrounded by people: the other victims, the perpetrators of the violence, the vested interests that stood to benefit from the violence, and the intimate circle of those who would most deeply feel the impact of his violent death.

    In between that communal birthing and dying we have the public years that leave no mark on the creeds and confessions of Constantine’s church. The hallmark of those years was that Jesus gathered a community of people around him. Our God is a gregarious god. She likes company!

    God’s preferred company are the broken and the misfits, the blind and the lame, the poor and the outcasts, widows and hemorrhaging women, parents with sick children, collaborators, and women with reputations. Cast the first stone, our God says, if you have no sin! Come as you are. Come and eat at my table.

    Given the importance of community in the life and ministry of Jesus, this is going to be a priority as I respond to my experience of God in Jesus. I am looking for a community of disciples of Jesus that is committed supporting each of its members in their personal and collective response to their encounter with God. As a priest I long to shape and serve such a community. As a Christian I want to be a part of such a community.

    In fact, I think I have found such a community here at SMX.

    Our is a community that reflects the character of our God, the God encountered in Jesus. We seek to be generous community, a church that takes our humanity seriously. This will not be a church where everything is tidy and all the questions have been answered. Most likely this will be a messy church, a church that is living with the questions rather than clinging to traditional answers, and a place where we do not have to be right in order to be loved.

    I suspect it is also the kind of church where God likes to be seen.

     

    Endnotes

    [1] A sermon for St Mary’s in Exile, Brisbane (24 & 25 May 2014).
    [2] For a more detailed discussion of this suggestion, see “One of the prophets,” chapter 4 in Gregory C. Jenks, Jesus Then and Jesus Now.
    [3] This phrase is an intentional homage to the influential book by Bishop John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (London: SCM, 1973; reprinted, 2012). I read this book as a theological student and the phrase has been a part of my personal perspective on Jesus ever since.

  • The Human Jesus

    [An extract from my recent book, Jesus Then and Jesus Now: Looking for Jesus, Finding Ourselves. Melbourne: Mosaic Press, 2014), pp. 124–30.]

    The humanity of Jesus is not to be considered as a philosophical puzzle and carefully dovetailed with his preexistent divinity, but observed in its ordinary expressions in everyday life. Taking the humanity of Jesus seriously means that we notice his ethnicity, his religion, his economic status, and his political situation. If such categories seem odd for a discussion of Jesus it may well be an indication of just how little significance we have attributed to the humanity of Jesus.

    A Palestinian Jesus

    This first attribute of the historical Jesus may come as a surprise since ‘Palestinian’ has largely become a pejorative term in recent Western discourse. I am, of course, using the term as a geographical descriptor, rather than an ethnic or a political identity. Jesus was indigenous to the land of Palestine,[1] and he lived there at a time when it was—once again—under the control of a foreign imperial power exercising its authority through local puppet rulers.

    One of the continuing tragedies of our time is the theft not only of the Palestinians’ land, but also their culture and history, so essential for their identity.[2] In the struggle for possession of their historical lands, the Palestinians have been represented as violent extremists, while the systematic violence directed towards them is overlooked or excused.[3]

    If we put aside the caricature of Palestinians as anti-Semitic terrorists, what might it mean to consider Jesus as a Palestinian? The first and most significant element may simply be to dislodge traditional assumptions and expectations. A ‘Palestinian Jesus’ is as incongruous to many people as the term ‘Palestinian Jew’ even though the latter term was not unusual prior to 1948.

    Yet, as Naim Ateek reminds us,[4] Jesus the Palestinian was an oppressed and marginalized person, as well as a liberation theologian. There are few peoples in the world more marginalized than the Palestinians, and Jesus shares their experience both as someone indigenous to Palestine and as someone who suffered undeserved violence from the imperial powers of his own time.

    Jesus the Palestinian is God doing theology from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. The imperial churches of Rome, Geneva, and Canterbury—to name just three historical expressions of Christianity—have always preferred to do their theology the other way around. The Palestinian Jesus challenges his followers to lay aside our inherited privileges and stand among the poor and the dispossessed, where God is more often to be found than in the cathedrals and chapels of Christendom.

    A Jewish Jesus

    Alongside the Palestinian Jesus we place the Jewish Jesus. They are the same person. Why does this surprise us? What assumptions and stereotypes continue to control our thinking if we find this a strange combination? Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. (Paul, on the other hand, was a Diaspora Jew.)

    For almost two thousand years the Jews were the despised ‘other’. In the Christian West, the devotees of Jesus the Jew hated his people and subjected them to shameful discrimination and violence. The horror of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany was not so much an aberration as the most extreme example of Christian anti-Semitism. Jesus would have been sent to a Nazi death camp had he been found in occupied Europe during the 1940s. Jesus was sent to the death camps. He was crucified again and again in the gas chambers and the ovens.

    The Jewish Jesus confronts our suspicion of the Jew, and of anyone who is different from us. The Jewish Jesus compels us to see that God’s mercy is more ancient than Christianity. The Jewish Jesus invites us to imagine a way of being religious that is not about orthodoxy, but service; forming communities that—in their best moments—live the covenant and provide a light to the nations.

    Jesus was a particular person, with a distinctive culture and a religion that refused to be domesticated by the dominant cultural and political powers of his day. As a Jew, as someone who shared the Jewish historical experience of oppression and loathing, Jesus challenges his own followers to embrace their own religious tradition without rejecting, fearing, or persecuting those of other faiths.

    Jesus the Jew resisted power and privilege, and that cost him his life. On Good Friday it seemed that privilege and power had won the contest, but three hundred years later the emperor of Rome was a devotee of Jesus. Exiled from their lands and dispersed among the nations, it seemed that the Jews were condemned to a destiny of diaspora and discrimination. Crucifixion was not the final word on Jesus, and dispersion was not the final word on the Jews.

    As a Palestinian Jew, Jesus holds together two identities that many Palestinians and Jews today see as opposed. To his Palestinian brothers and sisters, Jesus offers hope and an invitation to nonviolent resistance in the cause of human liberation. To his Jewish sisters and brothers, Jesus presents a Palestinian child and invites them to see in her a daughter, a sister, a beloved, and a child of Abraham.

    Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:36–37)

    A Small-Town Jesus

    Jesus of Nazareth was not a city person. In a world where so many people now live in cities,[5] with our toes touching concrete but rarely the bare earth, this makes him a stranger to us. Our unnatural lives also make us strangers to the earth. We are like caged chickens isolated in wire cells to make us more productive, and no longer able to follow our natural desire to scratch in the dirt.

    As we have seen, there were cities in the world that Jesus inhabited. Close to hand were modest Jewish cities such as Sepphoris and Tiberias. Not much farther away were the cosmopolitan cities of the Decapolis, as well as Caesarea Maritima, Ako-Ptolemais, or Tyre. The only city Jesus seems to have visited was Jerusalem. He died there.

    Back then, cities were places that promised opportunity, but delivered disease, exploitation, and poverty. Cities were the haunts of the powerful and the criminals. Cities were where the taxes went. Cities celebrated the international culture of the mobile and the privileged with their academies, their gymnasia, and their theatres. Cities offered palaces, temples, hippodromes, and the circus.

    Lots of village people were drawn to the city. Like the prodigal son, they consumed their inheritance and sank into the crowd of expendables at the bottom of the social order. Few of them made it back home to the embrace of a loving parent. Even fewer were laid in a new tomb when their lives were cut short by disease and violence.

    Soon after Easter, Christianity became—and has remained—a religion of the cities. From as early as the ministry of Paul, the centre of gravity for the Jesus movement shifted from the villages of Galilee to the cities of the Mediterranean rim. The word ‘pagan’ derives from the Latin paganus, a term for villager, rustic, or rural person. We have forgotten our roots. Jesus was a pagan, a rustic from an exceptionally small village. Yet we are so sophisticated, so at home in the city, so comfortable in the corridors of privilege.

    Luke’s version of the beatitudes strikes us as harsh and extreme, but for the vast majority of the world’s population these words may sound like good news.

    Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

    A Third-World Jesus

    From all that has been said so far, it is clear that Jesus seems to have more in common with the so-called ‘Third World’ (better said, the ‘Two-Thirds World’) than with either the big end of town or the aspirational suburbs of contemporary urban life. The kind of human being that Jesus seems to have been would be a beneficiary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG),[6] rather than a celebrity using his ‘name’ to raise donations to assist the poor. Looking at Jesus through the lens of the MDG is a worthwhile exercise, employed below.

    1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Jesus seems to have understood God’s compassion as especially directed towards the poor and the hungry. His program included meals where all were fed regardless of status or assets. At the heart of the so-called Lord’s Prayer is a petition for bread, along with the forgiveness of debts.[7] In every Eucharist we break the bread and share the cup, but the agape meal of earliest Christianity has been reduced to a symbolic taste.

    2. Achieve universal primary education. Growing up in a small village with no access to education, Jesus would have benefited from such a program. He seems to have been technically illiterate, as he read no books, cited no books, and wrote no books.[8] At the same time, he seems to have been a gifted oral poet.

    3. Promote gender equality and empower women. As religious progressives we would like to imagine Jesus as an advocate of gender equality and opportunity for women. Such a Jesus would be most congenial to us. It is not clear to what extent Jesus encouraged the participation of women in his covenant renewal movement, but we see the legacy of his kingdom message in Paul’s assertion that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).

    4. Reduce child mortality. High rates of child mortality were sad realities for Jesus and his contemporaries. It has been estimated that half of all live births ended in death within the first twelve months, and that only half of those who survived the first year would live to see their fifth birthday.[9]

    5. Improve maternal health. This goal is closely related to the previous one, and it is surely a gift to us that the NT Gospels represent Jesus as consistently respectful to women and concerned for the well-being of his own mother. Whether or not that reflects the historical reality,[10] Jesus can serve as a model for other men to be concerned for the women in our families and our communities.

    6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Jesus acquired a reputation as a healer.[11] As with a modern disease such as HIV/AIDS, the problems Jesus cured were as much psychosocial as medical. He declared people clean and restored them to their communities.

    7. Ensure environmental sustainability. Jesus was not an environmental activist. However, he does seem to have lived close to nature. Poor people have little choice. A great many of his parables and aphorisms express his profound reflection on the natural world as a source of wisdom for the spiritual life. His underlying outlook of simple reliance on the generosity of the good father[12] suggests a relationship with the environment that rejected the dominion paradigms found in the Genesis creation myths.

    8. Global partnerships for development. This goal would have been incomprehensible to Jesus, yet central to his vision of the kingdom of God was a community that transgressed the conventional boundaries of family, village and ethnicity. He imagined the kingdom as an experience of community to which many would come from East and West (Matt 8:11). The double accounts of the feeding of the multitude in Mark and Matthew suggest that his ‘good news’ was understood to embrace both Jews and Gentiles. In his encounter with the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:24–30 = Matt 15:21–28) Jesus seems to accept her instruction as he embraces the idea that God’s compassion extends even to those outside the covenant community. That is an insight many of his most enthusiastic followers have yet to grasp.

    An Expendable Jesus

    It is no surprise that a Jesus such as I am sketching here was also an expendable Jesus, like so many of his poor sisters and brothers back then and ever since. An expendable human is one whose worth—as perceived by those who are in a position to act upon it—is calculated on the basis the benefits that others can derive from them: economic production, consumer spending, military recruits, church growth statistics, and so on.

    As an expendable person, Jesus was eventually a victim of the systemic violence that was embodied in the Roman Empire and its Herodian puppet regimes. From the perspective of power and honour in his own time and place, Jesus was a failure, while someone such as Herod Antipas was a success. Antipas had John the Baptist killed and may have done the same to Jesus had Pilate not preempted him. The crucified Jesus dies in profound solidarity with the poor and the expendables across human history.

    The human Jesus is in many ways a forgotten Jesus. Recovering his legacy may be a precious gift that the Christian community can offer to a world that is in real need of spiritual wisdom about what it means to be authentically human.

    Footnotes

    [1] While it is sometimes asserted that the name ‘Palestine’ was only applied to these territories after Rome had suppressed the Bar-Kokba Revolt (132–35 c.e.), in fact the new Roman name for the former Jewish territories reflected ancient local practices going back to the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt (ca. 1150 b.c.e.). Herodotus (ca. 484–425 b.c.e.) refers to a “district of Syria called Palaistine” (Hist. 2:89), while Aristotle refers to the Dead Sea as “a lake in Palestine” (Meteorology 2.3).
    [2] For a recent attempt to reclaim the history of Palestine, see Whitelam, Rhythms of Time. See also his earlier work, Invention of Ancient Israel.
    [3] Revisionist Israeli scholars such as Ilan Pappe are doing both Jews and Palestinians an immense service by bringing much of this suppressed history into the public domain. See Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
    [4] Ateek, “Jonah, the First Palestinian Liberation Theologian”.
    [5] The UN Population Fund reports that in “2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will be living in towns and cities. By 2030 this number will swell to almost 5 billion, with urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia.” http://www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm
    [6] See http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.
    [7] For texts and discussion, see 120 The Lords Prayer in the Jesus Database online. The version in Matt 6:9–13 seems more spiritualized than the less familiar version found on Luke 11:2–4.
    [8] In this observation I follow the general findings of the Jesus Seminar, which tended to see such literary elements in the Jesus traditions as evidence of a later phase of development.
    [9] For a brief discussion of these demographics, see Meyers, Discovering Eve, 112–13.
    [10] For a critical assessment of the enthusiasm to promote Jesus as sensitive to women’s issues, see Corley, Women and the Historical Jesus.
    [11] See http://www.jesusdatabase.org/index.php?title=Jesus_as_Healer.
    [12] See 082 Against Anxieties in the Jesus Database online.

  • Easter 6A (25 May 2014)

    Contents

    Lectionary

    • Acts 17:22-31 & Psalm 66:8-20
    • 1 Peter 3:13-22
    • John 14:15-21

    First Reading: Paul proclaims the resurrection to the Athenians

    The speech attributed to Paul in Acts 17 tells us more about the theology of Luke than the rhetoric of Paul. In keeping with the historiographical principles of the time, Luke composes the kind of speech his hero (Paul) would have delivered had he enjoyed the opportunity of giving an address to the leading scholars of Athens. It is a classic scene, and the speech is certainly fitting for the narrative purpose although—like most of Luke’s compositions (eg. the Nazareth sermon in Luke 4)—rather thin on content when we examine it closely.

    Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:22–31 NRSV)

    In just a few words, Luke gives us the impression of Paul presenting a cogent apologia for the new faith at the very centre of the intellectual world of his time. This fits with his desire to present Christianity as a respectable option for his readers, and it is paired at various points in his narrative with depictions of both the Jewish and pagan opponents of Christianity as undisciplined rabble.

    Within the logic of the lectionary, this passage is the most universalistic of the proclamations of the resurrection message. Between last week and this week, we have travelled from Jerusalem to Athens; from Stephen’s dying vision of the risen and exalted Son of Man, to Paul’s invocation of the Greek sages in support of the Christian gospel. Where the Jerusalem authorities turn into a murderous mob (with even Saul/Paul acting as an accessory), here the sophisticated sages of Athens express a willingness to hear more—though some (most?) remained unconvinced:

    When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this. At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. (Acts 17:32–34 NRSV)

    Second Reading: Christ preaches to the spirits in prison

    If the representation of Paul preaching to the Athenian sages—and basing his address on pagan poets—can be understood as an appeal to universal spiritual wisdom, then this week’s excerpt from 1 Peter goes one step further by presenting Jesus as proclaiming salvation to the lost souls in Hades during the time between Good Friday and Easter morning:

    Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him. (1Peter 3:13–22 NRSV)

    The idea of Jesus’ Descent into Hell—also known as the Harrowing of Hell—is an interesting twist to the resurrection traditions. For a brief discussion of this traditional motif, which survives in the statement “he descended to the dead” in the Apostles’ Creed but flourishes in Orthodox iconography, see the Holy Saturday page. This ancient tradition survives as a marginal motif in Western Christianity, but surely implies there are no limits to the reach of the Good News since Christ himself has proclaimed the victory of the Cross to all the souls lost in Hades. Paul preaches resurrection to the Greeks, but Jesus preaches liberation to “the spirits in prison.” Can we imagine anyone not embracing such an opportunity for release? What limits dare we place on God’s generosity when the ancient traditions imagine not even death itself as a barrier to conversion?

    Gospel: The promise of the Spirit

    As we get towards the end of the Easter season the lectionary texts shift focus from the resurrection of Jesus to the presence of the Spirit as the mode of the risen One’s continuing engagement with the community that bears his name. This week we have the promise of an Advocate (the Spirit of Truth) to be a continuous presence with the community and/or the individual disciple. Next week the focus will be on the ascended Lord: the one whose departure/elevation is a prior condition for the Spirit’s outpouring. The following week is the feast of Pentecost when the focus falls directly on the presence of the Spirit of God/Jesus.

    There is some confusion within the NT gospels concerning precisely when the Spirit was gifted to the community:

    • MARK barely mentions the theme, but we cannot be sure just how the original version of the Gospel according to Mark ended. We know from chapter 13 that Mark is aware of the early Christian belief that they were blessed with an inner presence of God’s own Spirit:

    As for yourselves, beware; for they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them. And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations. When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. [Mark 13:9-13]

    • MATTHEW promises the presence of Christ himself, rather than the Spirit:

    Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [Matthew 28:16-20]

    • JOHN explores the theme of the promised Spirit through the extended monologue of the Supper Discourse and then has Jesus bestow the Holy Spirit on the disciples gathered in the locked room on Easter night:

    When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” [John 20:19-23]

    • LUKE-ACTS develops the theme of the promised Spirit so that the coming of the Spirit is delayed until the Jewish festival of Pentecost, some 7 weeks after Easter. In the meantime the Spirit is promised and the disciples are told to wait in Jerusalem for the blessing which God would send them:

    While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. [Acts 1:4-9]

    In these texts we can see the truth of a particular religious experience being expressed and interpreted with a mixture of history and metaphor. All these early Christian communities understood themselves to be the recipients of the Spirit’s presence. However, in creating stories to explain the origins of this experience and to guide their contemporary practice, they employed various combinations of metaphor and history. Neither the history nor the metaphor is consistent across the various canonical texts.

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  • Easter 5A (18 May 2014)

    Contents

    Lectionary

    • Acts 7:55-60 & Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
    • 1 Peter 2:2-10
    • John 14:1-14

    First Reading: Acts 7:55-60

    The death scene from the martyrdom of Stephen may seem an odd choice for a Sunday reading in the Easter season, but embedded in this story is the claim that Stephen had a vision of the risen and exalted Lord:

    But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died.” (Acts 7:55–60 NRSV)

    This story is also notable for its passing reference to Saul, who will later become known as Paul. This is the very first reference to Paul in a book which will be dominated by his character as the narrative proceeds. It is noteworthy that Saul/Paul first appears in the story as an accessory to the murder of Stephen.

    Second Reading: 1 Peter 2:2-10

    This week’s selection from 1 Peter is out of sequence, perhaps due to verses 19-25 being picked early to exploit the link with last week’s “good shepherd” theme.

    This passage continues to reflect the developing interest in Christianity as a self-conscious religion, with its own rituals, priests, etc. The theological method that comes through is one that weaves together isolated statements from the Jewish Scriptures to create the impression of deep continuity with ancient biblical “prophecies.” Such use of Scripture is close to the pesher hermeneutics of the reclusive community at Qumran, whose long-lost library is known to us as the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

    This is not suggest that there were formal links between the Qumran sect and the writers of the NT, but simply to observe that the kind of theological method underlying 1 Peter presupposes a scribal elite with the inclination and the opportunity to engage in pesher hermeneutics. Such a development is not likely to have happened in the earliest decades of Christianity, but is more likely to be a natural dynamic with a maturing Christian movement in the decades around the end of the first century.

    Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

    Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture:

    “See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
    a cornerstone chosen and precious;
    and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

    To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe,

    “The stone that the builders rejected
    has become the very head of the corner,”

    and

    “A stone that makes them stumble,
    and a rock that makes them fall.”

    They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.

    But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

    Once you were not a people,
    but now you are God’s people;
    once you had not received mercy,
    but now you have received mercy.” (1Peter 2:2–10 NRSV)

    Gospel of John

    Insiders and outsiders in the Farewell Discourse

    During the second half of the Easter season the major lectionaries draw heavily on John’s Gospel, and especially on the so-called Farewell Discourse in 13:31 to 17:26.

    • Easter 4: John 10:1-10
    • Easter 5: John 14:1-14
    • Easter 6: John 14:15-21
    • Easter 7: John 17:1-11
    • Pentecost: John 20:19-23 (or 7:37-52)

    Chapters 14-17 have no parallel in the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke). There is nothing like this is in any of the other Jesus traditions found in the canonical writings, although there may be close parallels in some of the gnostic writings outside the NT.

    The idea of a farewell discourse by a departing hero is well-known from biblical and non-biblical writings in antiquity. In particular, the many “Testament” texts among the OT Pseudepigrapha should be noted: TAdam, TJob, TMoses, TSolomon, T3Patriarchs, T12Patriarchs.

    Where the Synoptics chose to present Jesus delivering a farewell discourse on eschatological themes (predicting the end of the world and instructing his followers how to prepare themselves for its sudden arrival), GJohn has Jesus discoursing on themes closer to the interests of the Johannine communities.

    We know from the Johannine epistles (1John. 2John and 3John) that the groups associated with the name of John were divided over the humanity of Jesus and the question of how the Spirit’s anointing could be known. In response to a split that had apparently taken place in their ranks, the elder who writes the Letters of John urges them to keep the commandments held from the beginning, to trust that the Spirit has indeed been bestowed on them all, and especially to practice love for one another. In so doing they will know the truth and their joy will be complete.

    Many of those same concerns can be seen in John 14-17. However, rather than a simple line of thought that proceeds from one issue to the next, the materials seem to loop around and cover the same points over and over again. Some scholars have suggested that this reflects a process of development as these meditations on Christ were elaborated over a period of time:

    • (new) commandment: 13:34-35; 14:15; 14:21; 15:10; 15:12-14
    • untroubled hearts: 14:1; 14:27
    • going/coming: 13:33; 13:16; 14:2-4; 14:18-20; 14:28; 16:4-7,10; 16:16-24
    • promised Spirit: 14:16-17; 14:25-26; 15:26; 16:7-11; 16:12-16

    What we seem to have in these traditions are not recollections of things once said by Jesus, but reflections on the significance of Jesus as the divine Son present in the lives of his disciples and active in the life of the community through his Spirit. Not surprisingly, such themes also strike those responsible for our modern lectionaries as appropriate questions for the final weeks of the Easter season.

    As we draw closer to Pentecost during the second half of Easter, themes relating to the Spirit will displace stories of appearances by the risen Lord and the empty tomb. While that may simply be a function of the lack of new stories to use, it also reflects the ancient Christian tradition that the Spirit was the continuing presence of the risen One in their midst. For example, in 1 Cor 15:45, Paul writes: “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”

    If these texts, including this week’s Gospel, were shaped in a context of conflict between opposing factions of the early Jesus movement, it is not surprising to find some extravagant claims being made. In the heat of such conflict, extreme positions can be adopted (rather like a theological ambit claim) which do not really represent the considered position of the claimant.

    The (only) way, the (only) truth, and the (only) life

    John 14:6 may be one of those theological ambit claims that we would not wish to uphold in the contemporary multi-faith world at the beginning of the third millennium. It is, after all, widely recognized that Christian attitudes to other religions must undergo profound change as the churches come to terms with the results of historical Jesus studies—not to mention other domains of human discovery and experience.

    On the other hand, more conservative Christian groups may indeed wish to uphold traditional Christian claims to exclusive possession of truth and a monopoly on salvation.
    In his book, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to reveal the God of Love (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), John Shelby Spong includes John 14:6 in his list of “terrible texts” that have been employed to promote hate rather than divine love. These notes will draw on Bishop Spong’s discussion of this verse.

    Early in his discussion of John 14:6, Spong comments:

    “No one comes to Father but by me” is a text that invariably comes up when I am lecturing on the vision of an interfaith future. It seems to be a hurdle that people must get over to break the spell of their romantic imperialism. So the question becomes: Does this text actually support this claim? The answer to that question is simple: It does only if one is profoundly ignorant of the New Testament scholarship of the last two hundred years, only if one literalizes the Bible and finally only if one knows nothing about the Fourth Gospel in which alone this text occurs. (p. 233)

    Spong begins his discussion by noting that the first half of this verse (“I am the way, the truth and the life …”) is one of a series of “I AM” statements found in the Gospel of John, and which are integral to the highly developed christology that this Gospel offers the reader:

    • I am the bread of life (John 6:35)
    • I am the light of the world (John 8:12)
    • I am the gate of the sheepfold (John 10:7)
    • I am the good shepherd (John 10:11)
    • I am the resurrection and the life (John 11:25)
    • I am the way, the truth and life (John 14:6)
    • I am the true vine (John 15:1 NB: Spong actually cites 15:7 but 15:1 is a better example.)

    Allowing himself some licence to exaggerate, Spong continues:

    Of course, Jesus never literally said any of these things. For someone to wander around the Jewish state in the first century, announcing himself to be the bread of life, the resurrection or the light of the world would have brought out people in white coats with butterfly nets to take him away. None of the earlier gospel writers give us any indication that any of them had ever heard it suggested before that Jesus taught this way. The “I am” sayings are clearly the contribution of the Fourth Gospel. What then do they mean? Why did John add these sayings to the ongoing Christian tradition? The answer is found in the period of history in which the Fourth Gospel was written. (p. 234)

    The history that Spong then cites is the divergence of Torah-observant Jewish synagogue communities and the Christ-centered Kingdom communities during the second half of the first century, and especially in the aftermath of the Jewish war with Rome in 66-73 CE. That growing sense of mutual alienation is well-attested, but it does not really explain the high christological themes that are so typical of John and so different from what we find in Mark, Matthew and Luke.

    It seems to me that the particular form of the Jesus tradition found in John, and especially its exclusive claims to offer secure access to God’s salvation, reflect internal divisions and conflict within the Johannine communities, and between the communities of John and other Jesus communities (those groups associated with Paul and Thomas come to mind for starters), even more than the familiar tensions between Christians and Jews after 70 CE. Recognizing the intra-communal nature of the primary conflicts in the Johannine literature, also softens the implicit anti-Semitism of the Fourth Gospel.

    Even so, at least one of the communities with which the Johannine churches found themselves in sustained conflict was undoubtedly the Torah-observant Jewish synagogue. The familiar Johannine portrait of Jesus in dispute with “the Jews” (see 2:18 and numerous other examples) whose ultimate ancestor was none other than “the Devil” (8:44-47) and who typically expelled the followers of Jesus from their synagogues (9:22), must surely reflect the historical experience of some Christian groups in the final quarter of the first century.

    To the extent that all the various Jesus movements were variants of Judaism, this affirmation of Jesus’ unique status as the entry point to God’s salvation must be understood within the context of a “fierce conversation” about the most secure way for Jews of the time to experience God’s blessing. In the course of their engagement in that debate, the Johannine protagonists have tabled their ambit claim for Jesus:

    • Jesus is the eternal Logos in human form
    • Moses mediated the Torah, but Jesus brings grace and truth
    • ritual water becomes the new wine of the Spirit
    • rival claims by Judeans and Samaritans dissolve when he has come
    • the bread of heaven provided by him surpasses what Moses provided
    • Jesus is the source of the divine Spirit in his followers
    • a person born blind can see while the Pharisees are blind
    • as authentic shepherd Jesus cares for his people and they respond to his voice
    • not even death can resist Jesus
    • Jesus remains serenely in control of events as his trial proceeds
    • Jesus is the way, the truth and the life
    • no-one gets to God except through him

    The christology of the Johannine communities is highly developed and consistently expressed.

    Although Spong does not focus so strongly on the particular dynamics of the Johannine communities around the end of the first century, he sketches a similar account of their rhetorical strategy:

    So the battle raged on, as all battles do when religious feelings are at stake. The gospel of John was the product of these excommunciated revisionists. That is why references appear in this gospel to the followers of Jesus being put out of the synagogue (see 9:22 and 12:42). That is why this gospel reinterprets the opening chapter of the Torah (compare John 1 with Gen. 1). That is also why this gospel, over and over again, claims the divine name “I am” for Jesus of Nazareth. The Christians (formerly the revisionist Jews) were saying, “We have met the holy God who was once revealed to Moses and who has now been revealed anew, and perhaps more fully, in Jesus. We are not separated from the God of our fathers and mothers as the orthodox party was asserting. Jesus is the very way through which we walk into the same divine mystery that our ancestors in faith also knew. We know of no other way that we can come to the God of our fathers and mothers except through this Jesus.” (p. 236)

    Spong concludes with this reflection on the significance of this text then and since:

    That was a testimony to their experience. It was not a prescription claiming that they possessed the only doorway into the only God. It is amazing to me that this attempt on the part of the early disciples of Jesus to validate their experience journeying through Jesus into the mystery of the God they had known in Israel would someday be used to judge all other religious traditions as unworthy, wrong or even evil. Yet that is the path this text has followed as Christianity moved from minority status into majority power.
    There is a difference between my experience of God and who God is. There is a differece between affirming that I walk into the mystery of God through the doorway called Jesus and that in my experience this is the only doorway that works in my journey, [and] that I must then declare it to be the only doorway that exists for all people, the only doorway through which anyone can walk. Imagine the idolatry present in the suggestion that God must be bound by my knowledge and my experience! Yet that claim has been made and is still being made by imperialistic Christians today. The text written by persecuted minority members of the early Christian community to justify their claim to be part of the larger people of God becomes a text that is interpreted to be a claim that issues in religious imperialism. Is it not interesting how little attention is paid to a text that proclaims an open and inclusive faith? It is found in the words attributed to Peter in Acts 10:34ff: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
    We live in a religiously pluralistic world, but there is only one God. This God is not Christian, nor is this God an adherent of any religious system. All religious systems are human creations by which people in different times and different places seek to journey into that which is ultimately holy and other. Until that simple lesson is heard, human beings will continue to destroy each other in the name of the “one true God.” (p. 236f)

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