[Dialogue] {Disarmed} Spong on miracles and Good Friday

[KroegerD at aol.com]

August 15, 2007 
The Fourth Fundamental:  Miracles and the Resurrection, Part III  

In this series we first sought to identify the places in the Bible where  
miracles seem to appear in groups. There are only three: The Moses-Joshua cycle  
of stories, the Elijah-Elisha cycle and the Jesus-Apostles cycle. We then 
raised  the question of whether there might be a connection between these three 
biblical  collections. To destabilize the literal approach to the Bible, we 
noted that  there is no evidence anywhere that we are able to locate that Jesus 
performed  miracles until we come to the 8th decade writing of the earliest 
gospel, Mark.  That means that it was at least forty years after the crucifixion 
before miracle  stories appeared in the Jesus tradition. Next we examined the 
Moses miracle  stories, which had to do with the power to change the world of 
nature. We then  pointed out the many similarities between the nature miracles 
ascribed to Jesus  and the nature miracles ascribed to Moses, concluding that 
these narratives may  have been a deliberate attempt to interpret Jesus by 
magnifying Moses stories  and retelling them about Jesus. A new pathway into the 
interpretive process is  thus opened.  
Today we take the second step by looking at the cycle of miracle stories told 
 about Elijah and Elisha. Here once again we find primarily accounts in which 
 nature is manipulated to serve the needs of Israel, making them strongly  
reminiscent of Moses stories. Elijah and Elisha call down fire from heaven on  
their enemies, cause both rainfall and drought and both expand the food supply  
to prevent starvation. One healing story, however, does make its way into 
this  cycle, the account of Naaman, the Syrian being cleansed of his leprosy by  
washing in the Jordan River. This is the first time that a personal healing  
miracle is recorded in the biblical story. It would be almost a century later  
before healing stories came to be a part of the thinking in the Jewish world,  
but when that happened it was not as miracles that happened in the here and 
now,  but as signs that would accompany the coming of the anticipated Kingdom 
of God  at the last day. That is, healing episodes entered the Jewish mindset 
on a  regular basis only when they were associated with the end of the world or 
 eschatology.  
This idea makes its first appearance in the Hebrew Scriptures in the writing  
of the prophet Isaiah who lived in the eighth century BCE about a hundred 
years  after Elijah-Elisha. At that time the Assyrians were the dominant power in 
the  Middle East. They had built a mighty army with horse drawn iron 
carriages  providing history's first "panzer divisions!" Their ruler Sennacherib was 
both a  great military leader and a fearful tyrant. The Assyrians swept over 
all  competition in the area. The opposing tribes fell one after another. In 
721,  after a pitiful attempt at resistance, the Northern Kingdom of Israel 
became one  more victim of Assyrian power. Samaria, the capital of the Northern 
Kingdom  fell, the king was executed and the people were marched off into 
captivity never  to be heard of again. They simply disappeared into the DNA of the 
Middle East  and became known as the "ten lost tribes of Israel."  
The little kingdom of Judah seeing the hopelessness of their situation and,  
in large measure under the influence of Isaiah the prophet, accepted vassal  
status instead of resisting. Isaiah seems to have been of a royal family and he 
 clearly served as an advisor to several kings much like Bernard Baruch of a  
generation ago who served several presidents from Roosevelt to Eisenhower or 
in  our time David Gergen who served Presidents Nixon, Ford, Bush and Clinton. 
 
With half of the Jewish nation gone forever, and the other half now an  
Assyrian puppet with no realistic hope of ever being independent again, the  people 
of Israel no longer seemed to expect God's vindication inside history.  Now 
they began to dream about the end of the world when the Kingdom of God would  
dawn. Isaiah, in the 35th chapter of his book, spelled out the signs that would 
 announce the coming of the Kingdom of God. You will know that the Kingdom of 
God  has arrived when the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame leap and the 
mute sing,  he wrote. It was a powerful image and it became part of Jewish 
messianic  thinking, later becoming one of the ways through which the gospel writers 
 interpreted Jesus of Nazareth.  
To understand how this passage from Isaiah shaped the gospel story is  
insightful. In both the gospels of Matthew and Luke, we are told that John the  
Baptist, who was in prison, began to despair that he might perish before the  
Kingdom, about which he had preached, actually arrived. As these gospels tell  
that story, Jesus was the object of the Baptist's hopes and now perhaps he was  
also the cause of his despair. So they portray John the Baptist as sending  
messengers to Jesus with a simple question, "Are you the one who should come  
(i.e. the messiah) or do we look for another?" These gospels say that Jesus did  
not answer that question directly. Rather he told the messengers to return to  
John and tell him what they saw and heard. Then Jesus quoted directly and  
specifically from Isaiah 35. That is, Jesus claimed that the signs of the  
Kingdom's arrival were present in him: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame  walk 
and the mute sing. Then Jesus was said to have added two other details to  
Isaiah's list that reflected quite specifically Christian values, "The dead are  
raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them."  
The synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke depict Jesus as being  
surrounded by and even causing these signs of the Kingdom. There were the  stories of 
the blind man from Bethsaida, whose blindness was healed in stages,  and of 
Blind Bartimaus, the son of Timaus, who received his sight. There were  stories 
about Jesus restoring hearing to the deaf, about Jesus loosing the  tongue of 
the mute so that they could speak and stories about Jesus making the  lame, 
the paralytic and the withered capable of walking. The point of this brief  
analysis is to suggest that the miracle stories that involve healing might well  
not be accounts of remembered supernatural deeds that Jesus did at all. It  
suggests that by treating them as literal stories we have badly misinterpreted  
the gospel writers' intentions. The more probable explanation of the healing  
miracles is that when the gospel writers began to interpret Jesus as the 
messiah  who came to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, they wrapped these signs of the 
 Kingdom around his memory. The Jewish audiences for whom the gospels were  
originally written would have recognized the words of Isaiah that lay behind  
these narratives. If these stories were added to the tradition by these gospel  
writers as a way to identify him with the expected messiah, it would be easy 
to  understand why there were no miracle stories in any earlier source, Paul, 
Q or  Thomas, the only three sources that anyone suggests might have been 
prior to  earlier the gospels.  
If you have journeyed with me this far, one final thing needs to be done. We  
must look deeply and critically at these miracle stories and ask what kind of 
 blindness or deafness it was that Jesus actually cured? Is it the physical  
blindness or deafness of those whose eyes do not see or whose ears do not 
hear?  Or is it the spiritual blindness of those who have eyes to see but see not, 
 those who have ears to hear and hear not? Is Jesus talking about sight or  
insight, hearing or understanding? To focus this question look, for example, at 
 the story of the blind man from Bethsaida, whose seeing is cured in stages. 
A  close reading of Mark's context makes us wonder whether Mark actually 
intended  this to be a miracle story. I see it, rather, as a parable about the life 
of  Peter. Please be aware that Peter hailed from Bethsaida, and that Mark's 
gospel  has, prior to this story, just told us that at Caesarea Philippi Peter 
had  identified Jesus with the expected messiah, by naming him 'the Christ.' 
As that  story continued, however, Jesus began to explain that the messianic 
role, which  he was claiming, had to be lived out through the pathway of 
suffering and death.  That was a concept Peter was not willing to accept and so 
Peter said: "No, No,  Jesus that is not what messiah will be," revealing that he 
did not really see.  His sight had to be restored in stages. Indeed the gospels 
are clear that Peter  was destined both to deny Jesus and forsake him before 
he would see. So my  conclusion is that Peter was the blind man from 
Bethsaida. This would mean that  it was a very different kind of blindness about which 
Jesus was concerned. It  may also have been a very different kind of deafness, 
crippled status and an  inability to speak the truth that was the real 
meaning of the miracles.  
Are miracles understood as supernatural interventions necessary to the Christ 
 story? I clearly do not think so. Paul apparently did not think so. The 
world we  live in today does not operate on the basis of miracles. Ours is an 
ordered  world, not a chaotic world. There is, however, a force that is driving 
this  world toward life, wholeness and, dare I say, toward God? God is the love 
that  heals, that expands, that binds up our wounds, that sets us free to be. 
This is  the God we meet in Jesus. That is why the disciples of Jesus who 
composed the  first gospels claimed for him the role of messiah and then added to 
his life  story healings, that were first introduced in the Elisha cycle and 
then later  portrayed as the signs that Isaiah said would mark the inbreaking 
of the Kingdom  of God. We misread them as literal events, rather than what 
they are,  interpretive signs.  
Do miracles happen today? Do prayers get answered by an intervening deity in  
miraculous ways? Something deep in us yearns to believe that, but such ideas  
have lost their credibility in our world. What has not lost credibility is 
that  the God, who is the source of all our life, infuses life with the power to 
 transcend our limits. The God who is the Source of love expands our capacity 
to  love and thus to become more human, more loving, more whole. God who is 
the  ground of being gives us the courage to be all that we can be. This is the 
God  that people claimed they saw in Jesus. When we experience this God we do 
see, we  do hear, our lameness gives way to wholeness and our tongues are 
loosed to speak  of truth far beyond its normal limits. Others might call this a 
miracle. I call  it entering the experience of God, which is the same thing as 
entering the  fullness of your humanity.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Hank Tomarelli, via the Internet, writes  
Why is the Friday before Easter called “Good Friday”? Where did the term  
originate?  
Dear Hank,  
Words do convey strange meanings, don’t they? I can remember asking my rector 
 the same thing when I was a lad. The Friday that observes the crucifixion of 
 Jesus was the most somber day of all to me as a child. To call it “good” 
seemed  strange indeed.  
The word good reflects the rescue and atonement theology of the  Church. It 
was an attempt to say that the result of what happened on that Friday  was 
good. The death of Jesus was thought of as good, since it broke the power of  
evil, rescued us from the original sin of the fall and restored us to the  
original relationship with God. That is how the word good became part of  the title 
of the day of the Crucifixion.  
Today, that theology is badly dated and has been abandoned by all but the  
fundamentalist elements of the Christian Church — which come, as I always remind 
 people, in both a Catholic and a Protestant form.  
As post Darwinians, we no longer believe we were created perfect. We were  
created as single cells of life and evolved into our present complex, conscious  
and self-conscious forms. Since we were never perfect, we could not fall into 
 sin. Since we could not fall into sin, we could not be rescued. How can one 
be  rescued from a fall that never happened or be restored to a status we 
never  possessed?  
Of all the symbols of the Christian faith, these are the ones most in need of 
 rethinking and reformation since our theology, creeds and liturgies all 
infected  these dated concepts. This change will cause a mighty upheaval in 
Christian  understanding. Indeed it will signal the beginning of a mighty 
reformation.  
Until then, I doubt if Good Friday’s name will be the subject of debate. It  
is too far down the consciousness ladder – so just keep using it.  
John Shelby Spong 



************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at 
http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20070815/a5d63046/attachment-0001.html