[Dialogue] Spong 6/25/08

[KroegerD at aol.com]

June 25, 2008 
Beauty, Wonder and Excitement  in New Mexico  

I am now convinced that there are no sunsets more beautiful than those that  
blaze through the evening sky in New Mexico. Perhaps it is the juxtaposition 
of  the New Mexico desert with its high sky against mountains that rise to 
7,000  feet in the Santa Fe-Los Alamos area that makes these sunsets so exquisite. 
 Perhaps it is the friends with whom one shares them. Sunsets were, however, 
only  one highlight of the lecture tour that took me recently to this 
magnificent  state.  
The anchor for the tour was a series of lectures delivered at the Reformed  
Temple Beth Shalom Synagogue in Santa Fe. Sponsored by the Santa Fe  
Jewish-Christian Dialogue, capacity crowds came to fill that holy space. The  lectures 
were introduced with a Shabbat service on Friday evening for the  religiously 
mixed audience. Led by a remarkable and winsome rabbi named Marvin  Schwab, it 
gave Protestants, Catholics, believers in exile and, I suspect, a  number of 
people who might call themselves non-believers, atheists, deists, or,  as one 
described herself, a "Jesustarian" a chance to experience Jewish worship.  We 
all turned to the door of the synagogue to welcome the Sabbath. I knew that  
this was a very special rabbi when I used his office for a few minutes of quiet  
concentration before the Sabbath service began and could not help but see a  
picture above his door. It was of Mount Rushmore with the likenesses of the 
four  presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt clearly 
visible.  This picture, however, had five heads. Who was the fifth? None other 
than Rabbi  Schwab! Only someone with profound ego strength could display such a 
picture. He  opened the Sabbath liturgy by telling the assembled host that 
the synagogue did  not take an offering at Sabbath services. He went on to say 
how much he  regretted that practice since on this night there were some 500 
people present!  
My opening lecture followed the Sabbath service, with the other two coming  
the next day. They were focused on the influence of the synagogue in the  
formation of the synoptic gospels, namely Mark, Matthew and Luke. My goal was to  
help the Christian part of my audience reconnect with their Jewish roots by  
opening their eyes to see that the story of Jesus had been intertwined with and  
interpreted through the Jewish Scriptures long before the gospels were 
written.  My goal for my Jewish audience was to make them aware that Christianity 
was  their child, born in the womb of Judaism. My hope was that people in both  
traditions might face the tragedy of our separation. This meant that both 
groups  were required to look at the gospels quite differently. For example, the  
narratives that literalistic Christians think of as miracle stories, such as  
Jesus walking on the water or feeding the multitude in the wilderness with 
five  loaves and two fish, are in fact nothing more than Moses stories taken from 
the  Hebrew Scriptures, magnified by the Jewish disciples of Jesus and then 
retold  about Jesus. Other narratives, related only in Luke, such as Jesus 
raising from  the dead the only son of a widow in the village of Nain and the 
account of both  Jesus' ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, 
are in fact  nothing more than Elijah stories, once again taken from the 
Jewish scriptures  and magnified by the Jewish disciples of Jesus and then retold 
about him. Even  the healing stories in which Jesus is said to have given 
sight to the blind,  hearing to the deaf, the capacity to walk to the crippled and 
the ability to  sing to the mute, turn out, on careful study, to be nothing 
but the messianic  signs of the Kingdom of God dawning in human history as 
spelled out in Isaiah  35. These gospel stories, designed to interpret Jesus by 
his Jewish disciples,  were not things that actually happened, but were rather 
narratives that affirmed  their conviction that Jesus was the messiah who would 
usher in the Kingdom of  God. In these lectures I went over the earliest 
story of the passion of Jesus,  as told us by Mark, and showed how even this was 
not eyewitness reporting, but a  carefully crafted early Christian Passover 
liturgy based on Psalm 22 and Isaiah  53 through which the followers of Jesus 
interpreted the meaning of the cross.  
My next task was to introduce my Christian audience to the calendar of  
observances used in the synagogue at the time of Jesus and to demonstrate how  his 
disciples interpreted him through this Jewish liturgical year, beginning at  
least in Mark's gospel at Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) in the early fall and 
 stretching through Yom Kippur, Sukkoth, Dedication (Hanukkah) to Passover in 
the  early spring. Then, anchoring the story of the crucifixion to the 
observance of  the Passover, I proceeded to roll Mark backwards over the Jewish 
liturgical  year. Suddenly, as if by magic, they began to grasp the startling 
truth that  Mark is organized to provide the Jewish disciples of Jesus with a 
Jesus story  appropriate to the meaning of the annual celebration of these Jewish 
holy days.  The story of Jesus' transfiguration, in which the light of God was 
said to have  come upon Jesus, occurred on the day when the Jews remembered 
the light of God  returning to the Temple in the liturgy of Dedication, or 
Hanukkah.  
Continuing to roll Mark backward, we came in chapter four to Jesus' parable  
of the sower who sowed the seed on four different kinds of soil and received  
four different kinds of harvest. The disciples did not understand this parable 
 so Jesus had to repeat it and to explain it. That narrative falls exactly at 
the  point in the Jewish year when the synagogue was observing the eight day 
harvest  festival called Sukkoth. A long parable was needed for eight days! 
Continuing to  stretch Mark backward over the Jewish year, we came to a series 
of healing,  cleansing stories in chapters two and three in which Jesus brings 
wholeness and  purity to things unclean. In this series of stories, he even 
calls Levi, a Jew,  from the receipt of customs where he is in the employ of 
unclean Gentiles. At  this same time, the Jews would be observing Yom Kippur, the 
day of atonement,  when the High Priest covers the mercy seat of God in the 
Holy of Holies with the  blood of the sacrificed animal and places the sins of 
the people on the back of  the scapegoat, which is then driven into the 
wilderness bearing those sins,  leaving the people, not just cleansed, but now at 
one with God. Again this is a  perfect correlation for the Day of Atonement, Yom 
Kippur.  
Continuing this exercise of laying out Mark's gospel against the liturgical  
year of the Jews, we arrive at Rosh Hashanah when the Jews would blow the 
ram's  horn, the shofar, gather the people and announce the coming of the Kingdom 
of  God, urging the people to repent and to prepare for that Kingdom. Here we  
discover that Mark has John the Baptist deliver the Rosh Hashanah message.  
Suddenly we embrace the fact that the organizing principle of Mark's gospel is  
the adaptation of Jesus stories to the liturgical life of the synagogue.  
I wonder why most Christians never ask why Mark is the shortest gospel. The  
answer is that Mark told the story of Jesus only from Rosh Hashanah to 
Passover,  which is but 6 1/2 months of the calendar year. The reason both Matthew 
and Luke  expanded Mark and are, therefore, considerably longer than Mark, was 
that each  of these gospel writers wanted to provide Jesus stories for all of 
the Sabbaths  of the year including the 5 1/2 months that Mark had omitted. 
People still say  that the public ministry of Jesus lasted only one year, not 
realizing that  Matthew and Luke were expanding Mark to cover the entire one year 
Jewish  liturgical framework as the basis upon which to tell the Jesus story. 
 
In order to cover the time that Mark omitted, both Matthew and Luke had to  
provide a proper narrative for Shavuot, which comes between Passover where  
Mark's story ended and Rosh Hashanah where Mark's story began. Shavuot marked  
the remembrance of the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. It was  
observed with a 24 hour vigil for which Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the  
Psalter, was composed. Matthew provides the ideal Jesus story for Shavuot by  placing 
Jesus on a mountain to have him deliver a new interpretation of the law  in 
what we now call the "Sermon on the Mount." It was also based on Psalm 119.  
Luke has no such sermon in his gospel, but at this point in his narrative he  
does have John the Baptist predict the content of the Pentecost story that Luke  
will include in his second volume, which we call the book of Acts. So at this 
 point in Luke's story John says "I baptize with water, but one comes after 
me  who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire." Both narratives were  
appropriate for use on Shavuot.  
Matthew and Luke had one other problem. If they were going to begin their  
story of Jesus 5 1/2 months earlier than Mark did, they cannot save John the  
Baptist to be their symbol of Rosh Hashanah, since they must tell the story of  
Jesus' baptism by John at the beginning of their narratives. This means that  
when they finally get to Rosh Hashanah they have to find a way to reintroduce  
John the Baptist and they do just that. Only in Matthew and Luke is the story 
 told of John, now in prison, sending a message to Jesus to ask, "Are you the 
one  who should come or do we look for another?" Both Matthew and Luke have 
Jesus  respond by quoting the Rosh Hashanah text from Isaiah 35 telling them 
that the  signs of the Kingdom are in fact present in Jesus. In him they assert 
that the  blind see, the deaf hear, the lame leap and the mute sing. Cecile B. 
DeMille  would have been pleased at the technique of flashback. At every 
point, if one  knows the outline of the liturgical year of the synagogue, the 
Jesus stories in  the synoptic gospels fit the themes of the seasons. These 
gospels were born in  the synagogues. They are liturgical books, not history, not 
biographies. They  were designed to interpret the Jewish Jesus to a Jewish 
audience of which the  disciples themselves were still members. The split that 
separated the disciples  of Jesus from the synagogue did not occur until the year 
88 CE. by which time  the synoptic gospels (certainly Mark and Matthew) were 
probably already written.  The response to these lectures was deeply 
gratifying. My religiously mixed  audience in Santa Fe looked at each other in a new 
way. It made the Santa Fe  sunsets even more beautiful.  
JSS  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Ned Dick from Tryon, North Carolina, writes:  
You continue to write articles that both excite and amaze me. My respect for  
you, as I have often said, started when you were my bishop in the Diocese of  
Newark. Every time I heard you speak you challenged me and widened my 
spiritual  world. I find today that often in my prayers I fall back into the 
humanizing of  God to assist me in relating in some way. When I watch our church being 
torn  apart, however, I realize how limiting my humanizing is. In your 
columns I see  in the Episcopal Church a way to a new Christianity and that enables 
me to enter  my parish and celebrate the Eucharist interpreting what I hear 
said so that  worship becomes much more personal for me.  
I feel that the Church must believe what we say every Sunday, "Thou shalt  
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, and with all thy  
soul. This is the first great commandment and the second is like unto it, thou  
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the 
law  and the prophets."  
Dear Ned,  
Thanks for your letter. I'm glad that this has been your experience. Raising  
consciousness is not easy. It brings deep appreciation from people like you, 
but  it also brings deep hostility from those who do not see. Every change in  
thinking involves the death of a previous way of thinking and human beings do 
 not do well in the dying — even when death turns out to be the doorway to  
resurrection.  
It always helps to see progress in the human value system, but sometimes it  
takes a lifetime before people notice.  
I grew up in a radically segregated Episcopal church in North Carolina. I  
lived through wrenching battles in that church as racism began to die. I lived  
to see the Episcopal Church in North Carolina elect as their only bishop a  
gifted African-American priest, Michael Curry, who was at that time the rector  
of a Baltimore church. He has been directing the affairs of the Diocese of 
North  Carolina now since 2000.  
I grew up in a sexist church where girls could not serve as acolytes and  
women were not allowed to function liturgically or to sit in on any decision  
making body of church life. I lived long enough to see 40% of our clergy become  
women, 60% of our seminary students become women and to see my church choose a 
 woman bishop (in Nevada), Katharine Jefferts-Schori, to be our Presiding 
Bishop,  the highest office our church has..  
I grew up in a homophobic church where gay and lesbian people were treated as 
 if they were either mentally ill or morally depraved. I have lived long 
enough  to see openly homosexual clergy serving our church with distinction and 
honor,  and one of them, Gene Robinson, to be elected and confirmed to be the 
Bishop of  New Hampshire. Bishop Robinson is not either the first or the only 
gay bishop in  my church, as the press likes to pretend so that it looks like 
news; he is our  first and only honest gay bishop.  
Those are the things that make it worthwhile to endure the tension, the  
conflict and the hostility that change always brings. Thanks again for your  
letter.  
John Shelby Spong 



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