[Dialogue] Spong and Passover and Resurrection Part 7

[KroegerD@aol.com]

March 16, 2005 
The Connection between  the Crucifixion and the Passover, Part VII:
But What Did Happen? 
The plaintive cry of traditional believers when they actually begin to delve  
into the scriptures from a critical, academic perspective is, "What then is  
left?" This cry comes when they become aware that God can not be identified 
with  either a 1st century Bible or a 4th century Creed, or that abandoning a  
childlike understanding of God is not the same as abandoning God. 
I am constantly amazed at the defensiveness of religious people, expressed in 
 their incessant need to define "orthodoxy," to control knowledge or to 
silence  alternative voices. I am startled at their willingness to claim 
infallibility  for a church leader or to call a human book 'the Word of God. Let me say 
it yet  once again: God did not dictate the Bible. These late 1st century 
books we call  gospels are neither a series of photographs about what Jesus 
actually did, nor  are they tape recordings of what he actually said. They are 
documents written in  a language that Jesus did not speak, some 40-70 years after 
his earthly life  ended. During that 40-70 year gap their content was 
dramatically shaped by the  worship life of the synagogue, for that is the place where 
the story of Jesus  was remembered and repeated until it was written down. 
When the biblical texts  did appear, the memory of Jesus had been deeply 
intertwined with the themes  present in the Jewish liturgy. Jesus' crucifixion was 
linked at an early date to  the slaughter of the Paschal Lamb of the Passover. 
The story of Jesus' passion  and death was crafted to conform to the servant 
passages of II Isaiah plus  certain messianic psalms like Psalm 22 and 118. The 
account of his  transfiguration in which he became luminous was tied into the 
various Jewish  accounts of the light of God being poured out on the Temple, 
which, for the  Jews, was the meeting place between God and human life. After 
the destruction of  the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, the Jewish followers of 
Jesus began to see  him as the new Temple, the new place where God and human 
life flowed together.  "Destroy this Temple and in three days I will rebuild 
it," the gospels quote him  as saying, when that identification is complete. 
So how do we respond to those who ask, 'what is left?' We assert quite simply 
 that everything is left but all of it needs to be understood in a very 
different  way. The gospels must be read as portraits painted by Jewish artists 
trying to  capture the essence of the Christ experience in their traditional 
story-telling  format. Their experience was that in some way, through some means 
in and through  the life of Jesus, they had confronted the presence of God. 
This presence was so  real they comfortably used the God language of their 
tradition to talk about  Jesus. After the Red Sea experience, the liturgies of the 
synagogues quoted the  psalmists and the prophets proclaiming that the God of 
the Jews had power over  water by saying 'our God can make a pathway for God's 
self in the "deep," the  sea, God's footprints can be seen upon the water.' It 
was a very short step for  those who believed that God had been met in this 
Jesus to describe him as one  who, like God, can walk upon the water. The God 
of the Jews had demonstrated the  power to feed people in the wilderness with 
manna from heaven, so they had no  difficulty asserting that Jesus, the God 
presence, can also feed the multitude  in the wilderness with heavenly bread. The 
Book of Isaiah (chapter 35) had  described vividly the signs that would 
accompany the coming of the Kingdom of  God on earth: the blind would see, the deaf 
hear, the lame leap and the mute  sing. So Jesus' disciples, believing that 
they had seen the dawning of God's  rule in him, related stories in which this 
Jesus made the blind see, the deaf  hear, the lame walk and the mute speak. 
Because in their Jewish history they had  learned of lives so holy that the 
barrier of death actually shrank before them,  they found it quite easy to assert 
that this is what also happened to Jesus.  Three such stories were in their 
tradition. The first was Enoch, the father of  Methuselah, about whom it was 
said, "Enoch walked with God; and he was not,  because God took him" (Gen. 5:24). 
Next, were stories of the departures from  this world of the two greatest 
Jewish heroes, Moses and Elijah, both of whom,  not coincidentally were said to 
have appeared with Jesus on the Mount of  Transfiguration. Moses died around 
1250 BCE. The Torah tells us that at the end  of Moses' life he went up the 
mountain alone to be in God's presence and there  died. God, we are told, 
personally buried him in a place no one knows (Deut.  34:6). However, later Jewish 
tradition said this story meant that Moses was  taken directly into the realm of 
God without passing through death. Elijah died  in the latter years of the 9th 
century, BCE. In the narrative about his  transition (II Kings 2), God simply 
took him into heaven with the help of a  fiery chariot, drawn by fiery horses 
and propelled by a heaven-sent  whirlwind. 
The disciples of Jesus came to believe that he was not just another Moses or  
Elijah, as Peter had suggested in the transfiguration story. He rather had a  
relationship with God that was so unique that they began to say that to meet  
Jesus was to meet God. 'God was in Christ,' said Paul (II Cor. 5:19 KJV). 
John  records Jesus as having said, "I and my Father are one" (10:30) and "He 
that has  seen me has seen the Father"(14:9). 
The experience always is first, the explanation second. The early Christians  
struggled to explain how it was that God was in Jesus. Mark said that God  
entered Jesus at his baptism, when the heavens opened and the Spirit was poured  
on him. Matthew and Luke said that God entered him at the moment of 
conception  through the action of the Holy Spirit. John said that the Word of God first 
 spoken in Creation was enfleshed in Jesus. Explanations always follow the  
experience, but explanations are always human, fallible, time-bound and  
time-warped. Explanations are always cast in terms of the worldview of the  
explainer. No explanation endures forever. If, however, the experience is real,  it 
has the power in every generation to create new words to convey its  
always-renewable reality. This is ultimately what the Resurrection of Jesus is  all 
about. 
The presence of God that people met in Jesus was so deep and so real that it  
swept away the barriers that divided human beings from one another. That is  
always what the God presence does. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek 
said  Paul. He was saying nothing less than that the most powerful 
self-definition of  the Jews, which separated them from the Gentiles had dissolved in the 
Christ  experience. That was a stunning statement. Perhaps that is why the 
first Gospel,  Mark, placed a Gentile soldier underneath the cross to gaze at the 
lifeless body  of Jesus and then to proclaim that this completely loving human 
being, who loved  even those who killed him, was nothing less than a human 
portrait of the meaning  of God. Perhaps this is why Matthew said that when 
Jesus was born, a star  appeared in the heavens that had the power to draw Gentile 
magi, beyond the  barriers of human prejudice, into his presence. Perhaps 
that is why Luke had  Jesus say, "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in 
Judea, in Samaria and  into the uttermost parts of the earth," where the Gentiles 
live." Perhaps that  is why in Christ there can also be neither male nor 
female, bond nor free,  heterosexual nor homosexual. Jesus was a God presence in 
whom every human  security-seeking boundary was set aside and through whom a new 
creation of a new  humanity was perceived and entered. 
Then Jesus was arrested and his crucifixion precipitated an enormous crisis  
in the hearts of his followers. How could he be a God presence and be dead? 
Even  the Torah called one cursed who hung upon a tree. The trauma inside their 
grief  was palpable. A God presence and a dead Jesus did not compute. Dreams 
were  dashed. Hopes were ended. The disciples were caught between the expanding 
God  experience to which Jesus had called them and the reality of his death 
with  which their world collapsed. Then something powerful and intensely real  
happened. What was it? We can only chart its effects. Whatever that experience 
 was it was sufficient to bring their inner turmoil into resolution and to 
enable  them to see things that they had never seen before. The Bible describes 
other  moments that might guide our imaginations. Isaiah, we are told, once 
had a  vision of God high and lifted up and was never the same. Something 
compelled  Jesus' disciples to see him in a dramatically new way. Some experience 
forced  them to redefine God so that Jesus became part of that definition. They 
also  perceived Jesus as no longer bound by mortality. In that moment they 
understood  why they had come to believe that in him God had been met. Instantly 
their lives  were changed, transformed; we might say resurrected. They came 
out of hiding.  They created a new holy day, the first day of the week designed 
to celebrate  their own transformation. They were now willing to die for the 
truth of their  vision, for they had seen death transformed in Jesus. They then 
began to search  for words to make sense out of their experience. Like the 
paschal lamb of  Passover, they saw Jesus as having broken the power of death. 
They thought of  his blood as like the blood of the perfect Lamb of God, who at 
Yom Kippur washed  away their sins. They saw him like a new Moses, giving a 
new law from a new  mountain. They saw him as like Elijah ascending into 
heaven. Elijah, however  they noted, was able to bequeath his enormous but still 
human spirit to a single  disciple, Elisha, while Jesus could bestow God's Holy 
Spirit on all people  throughout all the ages. 
This, I believe, was the experience that brought Christianity into being. Was 
 it real? Of course it was real, for it is still operative and it still  
resurrects. To portray it as the resuscitation of a three days dead Jesus,  
however, is to reduce something glorious to a shallow literalism. The reality of  
resurrection always breaks out of those limited, doctrinally imposed chains.  
That is why Easter is so important. The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed! Happy 
 Easter! 
-- John Shelby Spong 
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Jim, via the Internet, writes:  
Can you say if you think Karen Armstrong's book would be valuable or  helpful 
reading on the subject of religious fundamentalism?  
Dear Jim,  
I believe you are referring to Karen Armstrong's book on fundamentalism  
entitled, "The Battle for God." It is a broad and sweeping analysis of  
fundamentalism in the three religions that claim to root in Abraham: Judaism,  
Christianity and Islam. I commend it to you or anyone. 
Karen Armstrong, a former nun, is one of the best writers and religious  
commentators in the world today. She is clear and articulate as well as being a  
competent scholar. 
When you read or study this book, you will inevitably become aware that  
fundamentalism has little to do with religious truth. It is rather a security  
seeking, defense mechanism used by frightened people. Fundamentalism rises out  
of an inner need for certainty that the world will never provide. That is also  
why there is such anger in fundamentalism, as well as great hostility toward  
those who are not by their definition "true believers." The people who have  
written the most hate-filled letters to me, and almost all of the death 
threats  that I have received, have come from those who define themselves as "Bible  
based, true believers." That should tell us something about both their fear 
and  about the integrity of their belief system. 
I hope your study will help the participants understand these issues. If your 
 study is a clandestine attempt to convert fundamentalists to your point of 
view  you will not succeed, not because the sources you used were somehow 
lacking, but  because you have failed to understand the nature of fundamentalism. I 
wish you  well. 
-- John Shelby Spong