Resurrection: A Reality or a Pious Dream? Part X The Story of the Ascension

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

 “Ideas Have Consequences.” That was the title of a book that I was required to read early in my theological education. It was not a profound book, but its title was memorable. We speak today about how certain decisions often produce what we call “unintended consequences.” The world of politics is filled with illustrations of both the fact that ideas have consequences and that there are unintended consequences connected with almost every decision one makes.

The same is true in the development of religious thought and tradition. In this series on what the Bible really says about the resurrection of Jesus, we have traced the pathway on which whatever it was that was experienced on the first Easter traveled among the earliest followers of Jesus. There was in these disciples a tremendous sense that somehow death could not contain that life. In time that sense, perhaps inevitably, created stories that put literal details into that experience. So it was that stories of a tomb, a symbol of death that could not contain that life, were developed.

Among the followers of Jesus, there was also a sense of his continued presence after the crucifixion. This experience ultimately created stories that suggested that this presence was literal and real. We noted that Paul used the word “ophthe” to describe these appearances. It was the same Greek word used by the translators of the Hebrew Scriptures to describe God appearing to Moses at the burning bush. What kind of appearance was that? Was it physical? Could it have been photographed? Could this experience be real and yet not physical? As stories developed about various people seeing the risen Christ, the authors of the gospels began to give narrative form to the ecstatic claims of those who said: “We have seen the Lord!”

This process, we have noted, grew slowly, starting with Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64 CE. He gave no appearance content. Paul was followed by Mark ca.72 CE, who never portrayed the risen Jesus as appearing to anyone. This note changed in Matthew ca. 85 CE, as the women saw him physically and the “eleven” saw him, but not physically. Physicality was, nonetheless, emerging as the new way to view the resurrection.

Luke, writing about a decade after Matthew, accelerated this process of physicality. Resurrection had become for him the resuscitation of a deceased body. That was the new idea that would bring with it not just consequences, but also “unintended consequences.”

Listen to Luke’s language. Luke has Jesus invite the disciples to observe his hands and his feet. His resuscitated body, he was seeking to demonstrate, was the same body as his crucified body. He had been restored to his pre-crucified self.

Resurrection was now understood to mean resuscitation from death back into the world of time and space, the only difference being that Jesus now bore the scars of crucifixion. If that was not perfectly clear, Luke then had Jesus invite the disciples to “handle him,” to note that he was not “a spirit,” the proof being that a spirit does not have flesh and bones. With this new, physically restored body, the continuous life of Jesus was established. Look, however, at the inevitable and unintended consequences of that new understanding.

How then does a resuscitated, physical body ever escape the world of time and space? The normal way that one departs this world is to die. Presumably, Jesus had done that, but it did not work. He had reversed death and had returned to life. Was he, therefore, destined to inhabit the earth forever? Luke had essentially created this problem by literalizing the Easter story until it meant not resurrection into the eternal life of God, but resuscitation back into the physical life measured by history.

Paul had recognized this potential problem and had even spoken to it when he said: “Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more. Death hath no more dominion over him” (Rom 6:9). Paul later would assert that “The life he (Jesus) lives, he lives to God” (Rom 6:10). Paul concluded this passage by saying that we, like Jesus, were called to be “alive to God” (Rom 6:11). Once Luke had turned the Easter story into a physically resuscitated body of flesh and bones, however, he could no longer fall back on this Pauline understanding. At the same time, however, the idea of a resuscitated Jesus inhabiting human history, unable ever to depart this life, became an increasingly inescapable problem.

Luke then proceeded to solve this unintended consequence by developing the Easter tradition in a dramatically different way. If Jesus had been raised physically then he had to depart from this world physically. He had to go to wherever God was thought to inhabit. This is how the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven was born. It was a 10th decade Lucan story, one that had never been mentioned up to this time anywhere in any other Christian writing.

The story of the ascension of Jesus made assumptions that you and I cannot make. It became, therefore, literal nonsense in our time. The story of the ascension assumed that God lived above the sky of a three-tiered universe. It assumed that to return to God physically meant that one had to rise into the sky. Its nonsensical quality was brought home to me quite overtly by the popular, late astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, who said that if Jesus had literally and physically ascended into the sky and even if he had travelled at the speed of light, approximately 186,000 miles per second, he had still not, as of this moment, escaped the boundaries of our single galaxy!

We know today that it takes light about 100,000 years to journey from one end of our galaxy to the other, we also know that our galaxy is only one of billions, perhaps trillions of galaxies that inhabit the infinity of space. Luke would have had no sense of those distances, he was only interested in getting the physically resuscitated Jesus back into the dwelling place of God. He had to address the unintended consequences of the idea that he had himself largely developed, namely that the resurrection of Jesus was a physical phenomenon. Did Luke intend for the story of Jesus’ ascension to be understood literally? Of course not! My reason for being certain that he had no such intention is that he borrowed the content of his ascension story from another ascension narrative found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Then he expanded this earlier biblical story until it was big enough and grand enough to carry the meaning Luke was going to assign to it.

In fact, Luke was doing something with which Jews were very familiar. He was engaging in something they called “Midrash.” The Jews understood that spiritual truth could never be captured in literal words so they become storytellers, practitioners of “Midrash.” The content of his ascension story Luke took from the cycle of Elijah stories in II Kings, specifically the story of the ascension of Elijah told in II Kings 2:1-11.

In this story, Elijah did not die. He was like one other unique figure in the Hebrew Scriptures, Enoch, mentioned only once in Genesis (5:24). About Enoch the text said: “Enoch walked with God and was not, for God took him.” His life was believed to have been filled with such holiness that he escaped death, which was viewed at that time as “the punishment for sins.”

As Elijah prepared to hand over the role of “the prophet of Israel” to his chosen successor Elisha, Elisha made a kind of deathbed request of his master. If I am to succeed you, he said, “I need to be endowed with a double portion of your spirit.” Elijah was nonplussed by this request. “I do not know if it is in my power to grant this request,” he said, “but if you see me ascending into the sky, then you will know that your request has been granted.” The text tells us that at that moment out of the sky came a magical, fiery chariot drawn by magical, fiery horses. It landed at that very spot where this transfer of power was taking place! Elijah stepped on board this chariot, bidding farewell to Elisha. Then, drawn by those fiery horses and assisted by a God-sent propelling whirlwind, the chariot rose into the heavens.

Elisha “saw” and he called out: “My master, my master.” He knew his request had been granted. All that was left of Elijah after this departure was the mantle that he wore around his shoulders. Elisha picked that mantle up and draped it around his own shoulders. He now had “Elijah power,” indeed a double portion of Elijah power. The sons of the prophets recognized that this transfer of power had taken place and so they proclaimed that now “the spirit of Elijah rests upon Elisha.”

Luke took that story and applied it to Jesus. Jesus, he said, ascended into the God above the sky, but he was so much greater than Elijah that he needed no help from magical chariots, horses or whirlwinds. He ascended on his own power. He did not give a “double portion” of his human spirit to his single disciple. He rather poured out the infinite power of God’s Holy Spirit on the Christian community in such measure that it would embrace all time and all people. Luke took the fire both from Elijah’s horses and his horse-drawn chariot and turned it into “tongues of fire” that danced upon the heads of believers. He took the propelling whirlwind and turned it into the “mighty rushing wind” of the Spirit that filled the room where the followers of Jesus were gathered. In the process, he also solved the problem created by making the resurrection a physical body, by getting this physically resuscitated body out of this world and into the realm of God, which is what the original idea of resurrection had been all about, in the first place.

Ideas do have consequences. If one turns resurrection into physical resuscitation, one has to create a means to get that physical body back into the realm of God. More than anyone else, Luke had created that problem. The story of the ascension of Jesus was the way he decided to solve it.

Theology grows in surprising ways. Next week, we will examine the meaning of resurrection in the Fourth Gospel.

Resurrection: A Reality Or A Pious Dream, Part IX Luke: Physical, Non-Physical Or Both?

By John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

Today, I want to focus on the ambiguity found in the conflicting aspects of Luke’s two resurrection stories in more detail and in more depth. It will help us to see why Luke had to develop a brand new dimension to his story of the resurrection.

We noted last week that this author, more than any gospel writer in the Bible, had turned the Easter story into a tale of a deceased body being resuscitated and restored to the normal patterns of life.

In Paul, resurrection was far more a rising into the being and the reality of God than it was a restoration back to this world of time and history. In Mark, the resurrected Jesus was not literalized in such a way as to suggest that he had appeared physically to anyone. In Matthew, there was a physical appearance of the risen Christ to the women near the tomb, but it was quickly followed by a non-physical appearance to the disciples on a mountaintop in Galilee. Yet, by the time Luke wrote, (ca. 88-93) the physicality of the risen Christ appears to have preempted all other possibilities.

When Luke’s risen Christ appeared to the disciples in Jerusalem for the first time, he was made to assert his physicality rather dramatically by inviting the disciples to examine his body: “A Spirit does not have flesh and bones,” he said. He asked for food to eat and proceeded to eat it in front of them to demonstrate that he now possessed a restored gastro-intestinal tract. He interpreted scripture to them to demonstrate that he had a functioning brain. He walked to the village of Emmaus to demonstrate that he had a viable skeletal system. This was a resuscitated Jesus, restored from the dead back into a physical presence in total continuity with the Jesus of history. That was Luke’s explanation of the resurrection and it was unique to Luke.

Most of the general “church consensuses” about the meaning of Easter, formed through the centuries, have come directly out of Luke’s minority position.

The liturgical year of the Christian church, which to this day dominates Christian worship patterns, was taken directly from Luke, who suggested a pattern of forty days during which the resurrected Jesus appeared to people, followed by the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven, which in turn was followed by the story of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

People are generally unaware that this regular liturgical pattern was only in Luke. Mark had only a messenger on Easter Day, nothing else. Matthew had an Easter Day experience at the tomb followed by a Galilean appearance within two weeks at most. John concluded his Easter story on the first day of two successive weeks making the resurrection season only eight days long. John’s epilogue (chapter 21), which most scholars regard as written by another hand well after the Fourth Gospel was concluded, added a Galilean appearance that could be dated anywhere from weeks after the first Easter up to a full year later.

So, without being conscious of it, the patterns of our liturgical practices, followed by almost all parts of the Christian church, have locked our understanding of the meaning of Easter into the Lucan order. Even a recent nationally televised religious program, involving well-known Christian scholars, was called “The Great Forty Days,” a title that makes sense only by excluding every biblical author’s story of Easter except Luke’s.

Luke, however, tempered his interpretation of the physicality of the resurrection with one unique resurrection story, recorded by no one else and then he drew the logical consequence to a physically understood resurrection by introducing a brand new narrative that we call “the ascension.” Today, we will look at the problem created by making the resurrection an act of resuscitation, namely how does a resuscitated body ever get out of this world?

The unique Lucan resurrection story involved a man named Cleopas and his unnamed traveling companion. The name Cleopas had never before occurred in any Christian writing of which we are aware; yet he starred in this crucial episode. In this narrative these two people were on a journey to a village called Emmaus on the afternoon of the first Easter day. They were said to be depressed by the reality of the crucifixion for they had placed their messianic hopes in Jesus. Now that he was deceased, however, those hopes had been destroyed. They were also said to have been intrigued, perhaps even mystified, by reports that Luke suggested they had heard, that some women had found the tomb empty that morning and furthermore that some “angelic beings” were present claiming that Jesus was alive.

As they journeyed, a third person was said to have joined them. Luke told his readers that this stranger was Jesus, but he was hidden from the eyes of these travelers. From where did this third person come? That question was left unanswered, but it was suggested that perhaps he had materialized out of thin air. Later he would be said to have disappeared into thin air. This stranger opened the dialogue by inquiring as to the subject of their conversation and was then brought up to date by them on the events of the past weekend, the fact of crucifixion and the rumor of resurrection.

The stranger then said to Cleopas and his friend: “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the messiah (Christ) should suffer these things and to enter into his glory?” Then Luke said that this stranger proceeded, beginning with “Moses and all the prophets” to interpret to them in all the scriptures, the things concerning “himself.” Cleopas and his companion did not yet know who this stranger was. The long explanatory process had, however, filled up all of the time of their journey. It was only a six-mile trip, perhaps four hours by foot.

As they drew near to the village, the stranger, we are told, acted as if he would continue alone. Cleopas and his companion constrained him, however, with an invitation to “stay with us.” He agreed and in this setting Luke narrated his first resurrection appearance story. It was at a meal, he said, with the three of them around the table. Strangely enough, the invited guest, not Cleopas, served as the host and presided over the meal, which was filled with Eucharistic symbols and language. In his ceremonial blessing, the stranger employed four well-known Eucharistic verbs, the same verbs used at the Last Supper in Mark, Matthew and Luke, the same verbs used by all the gospel writers when they related the story of the feeding of the multitudes and the same verbs used today by most Christian churches in the Eucharistic act. He took bread, blessed it, broke the bread and gave it to them.” In that Eucharistic action, it was as if the eyes of Cleopas and his companion were opened and they suddenly recognized that this stranger was Jesus, the crucified one. At that moment, the stranger vanished! Cleopas and his friend rushed back to Jerusalem to tell their story to the disciples, which concluded with the words, “He was made known to us in the breaking of the bread.”

This story is filled with symbolic language. It is also a portrayal of a non-physical resurrected Jesus, one who could appear and disappear at will and as such it offered a counterpoint to all of the other Lucan Easter narratives. The place where this meal was shared seemed to be in what might be called a “temporary dwelling,” a kind of tabernacle used by the Jews in the harvest festival known as Sukkoth. Perhaps it is also symbolic of the tomb of Jesus that was perceived as a temporary dwelling. The meal was clearly a Christian Eucharist, but it might also be representative of that symbolic meal that Jews had to consume inside those temporary shelters erected at Sukkoth. Finally, it suggested that the Eucharist might well be the original context of whatever the resurrection experience was.

In reenacting the words of Jesus at the Last Supper to “do this in remembrance of me,” their eyes were opened to see who he was. The opening of the scriptures from Moses to the prophets was surely part of the process through which the followers of Jesus had to go before their own eyes could “see messiah in Jesus.” That is why there had to be more than three days between the crucifixion and the proclamation that “Jesus lives.” Only then do all of the interpretive words about Easter make sense. The resurrected Jesus “was made known to us in the breaking of the bread.” The process that led them to these conclusions took time, perhaps months, calling into question the literal accuracy of the three day symbol, but this will be a factor we will examine in greater detail later.

Why did Luke tell this story? Why was this story not told anywhere else in the New Testament? Does it reflect an earlier memory? Does it relate the Last Supper to the crucifixion more closely than we had heretofore imagined? Does it offer Luke’s own counterpoint to the physical dimensions of his later story of the resurrection? Was it a clue to the reality of Easter in the experience of the disciples, which suggested that physicality must be transcended before resurrection would ever be understood? In some sense, this story is the one saving grace to the literalistic way in which resurrection was understood everywhere else in Luke’s gospel. It hangs inside that gospel like a glowing pearl, suggesting a proper way, even if a contradictory way, to understand Luke’s deeper meaning.

With the single exception of this simple story Luke had trapped himself inside the prison of fundamentalism. If Jesus had been raised back into the life of the physical world, then how would he return to God from whom he had come? Since it was a problem of Luke’s sole creation it had to be a problem that Luke himself would have to solve. Next week, we will see exactly how he did that and also just how it is that religious tradition grows and develops.

Resurrection: A Reality Or A Pious Dream, Part VIII: Luke – Mystery Recedes – Literalism Grows

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

When we come to Luke, the third gospel writer and, counting Paul, the fourth biblical witness to the meaning of Easter, we discover a dramatic shift in the language of resurrection. That language is now much more literal and much more physical. Jesus has clearly been restored, not just to life, but to the physical life of this world. He has a functioning gastro-intestinal system; on two occasions, Luke portrays him as eating. He has a functioning skeletal system; Luke portrays him as walking. He has a functioning larynx and a functioning set of vocal chords; Luke portrays him as speaking. He has a functioning brain; Luke portrays him as interpreting the scriptures, including Moses, the prophets and the psalms.

Clearly there has been significant growth and development in the language used to portray the resurrection. Luke is dated by most scholars at least a decade after Matthew, but there are some who contend that this gospel is actually a second century work. While I seriously question this later dating conclusion, it is clear that by the time Luke wrote, resurrection had ceased to be a vision and had become a physical reality. Jesus had been resuscitated. This would in time necessitate the subsequent development of a number of other additions to the story of Jesus that we shall look at before this series is completed. First, however, let me separate out from the rest of the New Testament Luke’s new and unique contributions to the growing Easter drama.

Luke, like Mark and Matthew, began with a story of the women coming to the tomb of Jesus at dawn on the first day of the week, but his list of the women was very different, including one named Joanna never mentioned before. They were bringing spices they had prepared, but for what purpose was not specified. Unlike in Mark, these women expressed no anxiety about how they might roll back the great stone in front of the entrance to the tomb, nor was there, as in Matthew, a supernatural explanation as to how the stone had been removed. Luke simply stated that, upon arrival, they found the stone rolled away and they were able to step directly into the tomb. At first, they found it empty, the body clearly missing. They were, said Luke, “perplexed” by this emptiness. Only after they had entered into this state of perplexity did “messengers” enter their awareness.

The number of these messengers had doubled from the earlier accounts in Mark and Matthew. Like Mark’s single messenger, Luke referred to them as “men,” but like Matthew’s elaboration of them, he has them clothed in apparently supernatural “dazzling apparel.” The progression over time was clear. In Mark, it was a young man dressed in a white robe. In Matthew, it was a supernatural being, who descended in an earthquake, whose appearance was “like lightning” and whose raiment was “white as snow.” Now in Luke, there are two messengers, both dazzling and clearly supernatural. The women, recognizing this, bow their faces to the ground in worship.

The announcement spoken by Luke’s angels, however, was dramatically different from earlier accounts. Mark’s messenger and Matthew’s angel both had announced that Jesus had risen and then had directed the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee, where the promise was made that Jesus would somehow meet them there. Luke’s angels have changed the message and any proposed return to Galilee has been suppressed.

The first thing Luke’s angels said to the women was: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” He appears to be saying that one should not seek the life of Jesus in the tomb, i.e. the tomb was not the proper place to look for him. Then instead of directing either the women or the disciples to go Galilee, these messengers simply recalled some things that Jesus said to them “while they were in Galilee.” He referred them to a recorded prediction, presumably made while they were still with Jesus in the Galilean phase of his earthly ministry. He told you there, the angels said, that “the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”

An interesting shift in the way the days are counted had also occurred, which most people do not notice. In the gospel of Mark, which Luke had before him, Mark never said “on the third day he will rise.” Mark had Jesus predict the passion three times and on every one of these occasions, the phrase Jesus used was “after three days” (Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:34). Please note that “on the third day” and “after three days” will not give you the same day. “On the third day” would place the resurrection on Sunday. “After three days” would place the resurrection on Monday. Was flexibility in regard to the time of the resurrection creeping into the story?

What might be pushing this change? Is this time change the product of memory or of liturgical practice? If the first day of the week had by this time become, for the followers of Jesus, the day on which the celebration of the resurrection was observed, then the words of Jesus must be made to be consistent. Actually, if one literalizes the time sequence in the gospels between the crucifixion and resurrection, it is not even three days! The burial of Jesus was accomplished before sundown on Friday, which would make it about 6:00 pm. From 6:00 pm on Friday to midnight on Saturday would be six hours. From midnight on Saturday to midnight on Sunday would be twenty-four hours. Add the two together and you have thirty hours. Then from midnight until dawn on Sunday morning would be six more hours, making a total of thirty-six hours or one and a half days. The symbol “three days” had become relative.

Perhaps that was why Luke omitted the directions for the disciples to go to Galilee in order to see the risen Christ. Galilee, less than a hundred miles away, was a seven to ten day journey from Jerusalem. If Galilee was to be the place where the reality of the resurrection was first experienced, it could not have occurred within the three-day parameter. When the risen Christ appeared to the disciples in the gospel of Luke, it was in Jerusalem and it was on the evening of Easter Day, the first day of the week. In Luke, there was never a Galilean appearance of Jesus to anyone.

At the start of Luke’s version of Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem he had Jesus set his face for that ultimate destination, which he would finally enter on what we call Palm Sunday. The narrative of Jesus’ ministry in Luke moved relentlessly from Galilee to Jerusalem without ever returning. Then, when Luke added the book of Acts to his gospel, which was simply Luke volume two, he would have Jesus and his message move from Jerusalem to Rome before his work was complete. From the provinces of Galilee, to the capital of the Jewish world, to the capital of the entire world would be the pathway that Luke would have Jesus travel.

So Luke located the Easter experience in Jerusalem, never in Galilee. Luke would go so far in countering the Galilee tradition that he would have Jesus order the disciples to “stay in Jerusalem” until they were empowered for mission. The Easter story had become, in what was probably now the 10th decade, “dramatically different.”

Luke then added three stories to his narrative not found anywhere else in the gospel tradition. I will list them and describe them briefly, but will return to them as this series unfolds.

First, there is the story of Cleopas and his traveling companion, who were walking toward the village of Emmaus on the afternoon of the first day of the week following the crucifixion. A person named Cleopas had, up to this moment, never been mentioned anywhere. In the Fourth Gospel, written well after Luke, there is one reference to a man named “Clopas” (19:25), who is identified as the husband of the sister of the mother of Jesus. It is a strange reference, however, for it says that Clopas’ wife was named Mary. Would two daughters in one family both be given the name “Mary”? Then we remember quickly that the mother of Jesus was never called “Mary” in the Fourth Gospel. The question we raise about Luke is why would he tell a story in which the first person to see the risen Christ, has never appeared in the Jesus narrative before? The Cleopas-Emmaus Road story was also quite mysterious and different from anything else in Luke.

Luke concluded this narrative by having Cleopas rush back to Jerusalem to share his experience with the disciples only to be told that the risen Christ had also appeared to Simon Peter. The primacy of Peter was preserved by a thread!

Then Luke turned briefly to his second story in which Jesus himself was said to have been standing in their midst. This was the first appearance of Jesus to those Luke called “the eleven;” Judas was clearly missing. It was set, however, specifically in Jerusalem, not in Galilee. The physicality of Jesus’ body has been expanded. Jesus invited them to handle him, to recognize that he was flesh and bones, not a “spirit.” He asked for food to eat and then ate it in front of them. Then he promised to send the Spirit upon them so that his message could be carried to all nations.
Then in his third story Luke had Jesus lead them out to Bethany, where he departed from them.

This was the moment when the story of the ascension entered the Christian tradition! Luke added it probably in the 10th decade of the Christian era.

That is Luke’s Easter story in its fullness. It is very different from anything that we have heard before. For now just embrace these differences. We will return to these Lucan episodes in more detail as this series continues next week.

Resurrection: A Reality or A Pious Dream, Part VII: Matthew Interprets and Expands Mark

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

Matthew is the first gospel writer to narrate an appearance of the risen Christ to anyone. This aspect of the developing Christian story does not begin until the middle years of the ninth decade, which means that appearance stories connected with the risen Christ are written some 55 years after the crucifixion. Is it not surprising to realize that almost three generations have passed since the first Easter experience before anyone tries to describe that experience in writing?

All Paul did, writing between 51 and 64, was to provide a list of those to whom the risen Christ had been “made manifest” or to whom the risen Christ “had appeared.” We have so clearly imposed a literal mindset on the bible that a closer study of its words will simply not sustain. Yet those, who have tried to discern the real message of the text are frequently attacked by the literalizers as the ones “who are dismissing the clear teaching of the scriptures.” It is a strange charge, since Paul, for example, does not support the idea of a physical bodily resurrection.

The first gospel to be written, Mark, an early eighth decade book, also tells the Easter story without ever once recording a narrative of the risen Christ appearing to anyone. What does this mean? Some suggest that this demonstrates that the resurrection is nothing more than an imaginative fantasy, born in the trauma of Jesus’ death. That is, simply not strong enough, however, to account for changed lives, radically new definitions of God and changed worship habits. Perhaps an explanation closer to reality was that the Easter experience, whatever it was, was so profound and so transformative that it took years before words were found that seemed appropriate to use in order to talk about that experience. Once those words were chosen the only thing that most people knew to do with them was to literalize them. Human beings are never at ease with mind-altering experiences that do not fit into traditional human explanatory categories. By the time Matthew was written in the ninth decade, the process of describing and explaining the appearances had gained great momentum.

The first of Matthew’s two appearance stories was so obviously an expansion of Mark’s that it needs no commentary. It bears all the characteristics of the tale of the fish that grows significantly after being caught. We have the original version in Mark and we can see the difference. In Mark the women feel impotent to remove the stone covering the tomb. In Matthew it is removed by a supernatural being that travels on the wings of an earthquake. In Mark after the messenger has given the resurrection message and instructed the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee in order to see the risen Christ, the women fled in fear and trembling from the garden and said nothing to anyone. In Matthew, however, the women go at once to the disciples, obedient to the command of the divine messenger. On the way to this meeting, which Matthew never described, Jesus appeared to them. Presumably, they were still in the garden. Jesus spoke to them, but he did it only to parrot, almost verbatim, the exact words of the angel. Nothing about this narrative rings with authenticity.

Next, Matthew told his second resurrection story, and with this narrative he drew his gospel to a conclusion. I doubt if this story is authentic. All Matthew did on this occasion was to fill in yet another of the blanks in Mark’s story. Mark said Jesus will appear. Matthew said Jesus did appear. This second narrative, however, gives us some new insight into the nature of the original resurrection experience. It also provides us with a better understanding of the original content and purpose of the early Christian movement so we look at it in detail.

This appearance story was set on a mountaintop in Galilee. The disciples, now said to be only eleven in number, climbed the mountain. Jesus, the raised and exalted Christ, came out of heaven or the sky, transformed. He was portrayed as wrapped in the symbols of the mythical “Son of Man,” a popular messianic figure, who appeared in Jewish history in the second century BCE in the book of Daniel. Jesus now spoke a second time, Matthew said. This time there was no verbatim repeat of an angelic message. His words were now intended to give the charge to the movement he had founded, which would articulate Matthew’s understanding of Jesus’ purpose in life.

It was actually introduced earlier in Matthew’s gospel in the story of Jesus’ birth, with which Matthew opened his gospel. Now, as he prepares to draw his gospel to its conclusion, we watch as he links together the themes of his entire gospel.

The connections between Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth and this concluding resurrection story were twofold and obvious. Matthew was not writing a literal story, he was painting an interpretive portrait. After his introductory genealogy, which filled the first seventeen verses of the first chapter of Matthew’s gospel, the author portrayed an angel appearing to Joseph in a dream. The angel was there to assure Joseph that the child his wife was expecting was the product of God’s Holy Spirit, not of an adulterous relationship. The angel buttressed this case by quoting Isaiah the prophet (14:7). One of the things that Isaiah said was, “his name shall be called Emmanuel,” which the prophet explained meant “God with us.”

The ultimate meaning of the Christ for Matthew was that he was a symbol of the fact that the divine is made known in and through the human, that God is revealed in life. God was thus not to be understood as an external being, supernatural in power, living somewhere above the sky and coming into the world as an invading presence. God was rather a permeating presence, the depth dimension of life itself, discovered as the ultimate meaning of the human. Emmanuel means God is with us, or God is within us. It is the presence of the divine in the midst of the human that would draw the human family beyond every human division into oneness.

Matthew made the truth clear in his birth story by the narrative of a star in the sky. This star was not a local star. It rather cast its light upon the entire world. It drew people beyond all their human fears of one another into the meaning of its light. That light had announced that Jesus’ birth would draw all people together. The symbol of this coming together was the wise men. They were foreign-born Gentiles, ethnically different people, but they were drawn to the light of God and thus beyond their known differences. Matthew then proceeded to tell the story of the life of the one he believed to be the messiah before drawing his story to a close. That classic conclusion included the story of Jesus’ death by crucifixion, which he interpreted as the attempt on the part of the divided world to thrust him from their midst.

The life and will of God could not, however, be so easily frustrated. So Matthew closed his gospel with a powerful story of resurrection, which needs to be seen and understood as the other side of the story of the wise men. The wise men were first drawn to the light of God in Jesus; now Jesus, as the risen Christ, was going to send those, in whom this light now lived, out to all others. So the disciples climbed the mountain to enter the presence of God and God, in the person of the risen Christ, came out of the sky to give them the final command.

Now that you understand who I am, the risen Christ said, you have a defining responsibility to go into all the world. That did not mean that you are to launch an effort to convert the heathen. That is to misunderstand the “Great Commission” totally. Matthew’s Jesus, rather, was saying that the followers of Jesus must go beyond their levels of security, go to those they have declared to be inferior by race, religion or by status, go to those regarded as unsaved, uncircumcised, unbaptized and unconverted. They must go to those they have pushed down in order to build themselves up. To them they are to proclaim the gospel to tell them that the love of God includes them also; that there are no boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or handicap that renders them unfit to be part of the human family. They are to baptize them in the name of the Father, the universal ground of all being in whom all are united; and of the Son, the incarnation of the infinite love of God by which all are embraced, and of the Holy Spirit, who fills us with life and empowers us to be all that we can be. For Matthew God is not a noun that we must define. God is a verb that must be lived.

This was Matthew’s truth, inside which he wrapped his gospel. Jesus was the symbol of the God who is with us, the God who is Emmanuel. The angel said to Joseph in the dream that Emmanuel means God with us. The final word of Matthew’s Christ to Matthew’s readers is, “Lo, I am with you always.” I am the ultimate promise of God. You live in me; I live in you. That is what resurrection ultimately means.

With that Matthew’s gospel ends. We turn next to see just how Luke, the third gospel writer, understood the meaning of Easter.

Resurrection: A Reality or A Pious Dream? Part VI: Matthew’s Story of the Galilean Appearances

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

Mark’s messenger of the resurrection, described in that gospel as “a young man in a white robe,” had promised a future appearance of the raised Christ to the disciples. It would not, however, occur in Judea or in the environs of Jerusalem. The messenger’s words were quite specific: “He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:7). In his brief resurrection chapter Mark gave no more details. It was an unfulfilled promise and, as such, was intolerable for Matthew. He was committed, it seems, to fill in whatever gaps he found in Mark’s narrative. For no one actually to see the risen Christ in Mark was for Matthew a huge gap, so he created the story of the appearance in Galilee. By doing so, he has given us insights, not anticipated, into how the experience of the resurrection was understood in the early years of the Christian movement.

Christianity was, first, a Galilean movement, not a Judean movement. In the first three gospels, called “the synoptics,” Judea was a province hardly mentioned until the final week of Jesus’ life. Mark never has Jesus or his disciples enter Judea until they go at the time of the crucifixion. Matthew did move the birth of Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee, where in all probability it occurred and the location that Mark assumed to be Jesus’ place of birth, to Bethlehem in Judea. This enabled him to claim the royal heritage of being a descendant of King David and thus to meet one more of the messianic expectations of Jewish history. Matthew, however, removes Jesus quickly from the land of Judah to save him from King Herod. Joseph, Mary and the baby first flee to Egypt, then return to their home in Bethlehem after King Herod has died, only to flee again when Herod’s son began to assert his father’s authority and thus to pose a threat. Guided by an angel speaking through a dream, the holy family left Judea for good. Matthew has Jesus grow up in Nazareth of Galilee, and he does not return to Judea until the week of the crucifixion.

Luke, in his birth story portrays Mary and Joseph as citizens of Nazareth, but he also couples his Galilean origins with the expectation that the messiah must be born in Bethlehem the city of David, by creating a story of Joseph taking his wife, described as “great with child,” on a 90 mile trip by foot or donkey, to Bethlehem. This, he said, was in response to an edict issued by Caesar Augustus that all the world should be “enrolled,” a reference to either a census or a registry for tax purposes. This enrollment, he said, had to be accomplished in one’s ancestral home. Joseph, as a descendant of King David, was thus required to go to Bethlehem.

There are many things factually wrong about this attempt to create Judean roots for Jesus, which reveal that this story is nothing but mythology. The first is that there were some fifty generations between Joseph and King David. After fifty generations, the direct descendants of King David, who had numerous wives, would have numbered in the millions to billions. The idea that anybody would know of this royal lineage or that this horde of people could be compelled to travel to Bethlehem, is more than slightly absurd.

A second comes with the suggestion that this enrollment occurred when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Why was that a problem? Because secular records reveal that King Herod died in 4 BCE and that Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until 6-7 CE. So, if Jesus was born when Herod was king, he would have been 10-11 years old when Quirinius became governor of Syria. There are many other problems with treating Luke’s birth stories as history, but these two must suffice to demonstrate that Jesus’ Galilean roots are quite accurate.

Luke also added the story of Jesus going up to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover with his parents when he was twelve years old. This looks like a kind of puberty rite, a pre-bar Mitzvah activity. For our present purposes, we note that these are the only times in Luke that Jesus or his movement journeyed out of Galilee until the final journey to Jerusalem.  In the earliest narratives, there appears to be some burning desire to make sure that the resurrection would be understood as a Galilean experience. The raised Christ is never portrayed as appearing to anyone who was not a follower, and those followers were overwhelmingly Galilean. Perhaps the insight was that the raised Christ could only be seen in the place where the movement itself had been born. Perhaps they wanted to assert that resurrection was not something external to life, something that invaded time and space from some other realm, but that the meaning of Jesus, including his resurrection, would be seen when one returns to one’s roots, to one’s home and looks for him there among the mundane and familiar things of life.

Matthew, however, is the first and the only gospel writer to describe this Galilean appearance until the unknown author of the Johannine epilogue (chapter 21) does it, probably in the early years of the second century. Matthew’s description is striking and startles people when they first read what he is saying.

The details are these. The “eleven” went to Galilee in obedience to the command of the angelic messenger. Note that this is the first reference to “the twelve” having become “the eleven.” The defection of Judas has now been woven into the story. That was not so when Paul wrote his first Epistle to the Corinthians, which is dated about 54 CE or 24 years after the crucifixion. Paul asserted that on the “third day” Jesus appeared to “the twelve” (I Cor. 15:3). In Matthew’s gospel the disciples go to a mountain “to which Jesus had directed them,” Mathew says, though there is no place where we can find such a direction given, to Galilee, yes, but not specifically to a mountain in Galilee.

In the ancient world in which the planet earth was believed to be the center of a three-tiered universe, God was thought to dwell above the sky. So to go to the top of a mountain was to come as close to God as a human being could get. That is why Moses received the law from God on top of Mount Sinai. That is why we call transcendent experiences “mountain-top” moments. So in search of God, the disciples climb a mountain to wait for the risen Christ to appear out of heaven. Please note in Matthew’s mind the Christ has been raised from death, not back into the world of flesh and blood, but into the life of God. It would be out of heaven or out of God that resurrection would be seen.

This story adds force to the argument that the original conception of resurrection was not that of a physical resuscitation, as biblical literalists and fundamentalists so vigorously proclaim, but was more a kind of transformative vision, perhaps more subjective than objective, more internal than external. We have historically read into this narrative the story of Jesus ascending into the heavens. The fact is that the story of the ascension of Jesus is the creation of the author of Luke-Acts, which was not written until about a decade after Matthew’s gospel was completed. Matthew’s story is the first account of the risen Christ actually appearing to the disciples and Matthew says it took place in Galilee and that it was of the nature of a vision, not the manifestation of a physically resuscitated life. In this episode Matthew notes, rather poignantly, that the disciples “worshiped him, but some doubted.” Is that the place where the story of “Doubting Thomas” was born? I would bet it is, but we can never be sure.

Then Matthew has Jesus speak. His words were not a verbatim repeat of the statement of the messenger of the resurrection, as they were when the risen Christ spoke to the woman in the garden at dawn on Easter day. They were rather considered, unique words that revealed Matthew’s understanding of resurrection.

If the disciples were in Jerusalem, as Matthew assumed, when he had the messenger direct them to go to Galilee in order to see the risen Christ and if they were now in Galilee on a mountain top, then we know that a number of days have passed, certainly more than three, before this scene became possible.

How do we know? We know because Galilee is a 7-10 day journey from Jerusalem. So, if resurrection was an event that occurred on the third day literally, then we have a serious conflict in timing. Resurrection appears originally not to have been bound by time.

We conclude, therefore, that according to Matthew a number of days have now passed since the dawn of Easter, before the disciples see the risen Christ on a Galilean mountain top. So we ask: “What did they see?” They saw a glorified and transformed Christ. Matthew has him claim that “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.” The reference seems to be based on the writings of the book of Daniel (7:14) in which the prophet states that “one like a Son of man came to the Ancient of Days,” which was Daniel’s name for God, and to this “Son of man” was given “dominion and glory and kingdom that all people and nations and languages should serve him.” Daniel also stated that the dominion given to this Son of man would be “an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away and his kingdom one that should never pass away.” In the book of Daniel the prophet then approached the Son of man asking that the truth concerning these things should be made known to him.

Matthew has the risen Christ do exactly that when he speaks the words that conclude his gospel. To those defining words we will turn as this series continues.

Resurrection – A Reality or a Pious Dream? Part IV: The Surprise Found in Mark, the Earliest Biblical Narrative of Easter

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

What did the Christian movement know about the resurrection of Jesus before the first gospel was written in the eighth decade of the Christian era? The answer to that question is “not very much.” As I have noted in the first columns in this series, the only records we have that emerge in the years between 30 CE, the date of the crucifixion, and 72 CE, the date of the writing of the first gospel, are found in the writings of Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64 CE.

From Paul we learned first that the resurrection of Jesus was always spoken of in the passive tense. “Jesus was raised,” said Paul. He did not rise. That use of the passive verb form appears to indicate that originally resurrection was thought of as an act of God being applied to Jesus, not an act of Jesus in charge of his own destiny. We learned that Paul believed that the raised Jesus had “appeared” to certain chosen witnesses.

We noted that the Greek word that has been translated “appeared” in our Bibles was “ophthe,” and that it does not necessarily refer to physical seeing or to the seeing of an objective reality. It was the word used in the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in 250 BCE, called the Septuagint, to describe what Moses “saw” of God at the burning bush in the wilderness as described by the book of Exodus. It is a word that could also be translated “was revealed to” or “was made manifest to.” It might better mean “insight” or “second sight,” not physical sight, as Christians have traditionally suggested.

We also learned that Paul asserted that he himself was one of those to whom the raised Christ “appeared.” Since Paul’s conversion is today believed to have happened anywhere from one to six years after the crucifixion (I think closer to one than to six), we must conclude that what Paul saw was not a physical body. Since Paul claimed that what he “saw” of the raised Jesus was identical with what everyone else on his list of witnesses “saw,” except that his was last, can we assert any longer with credibility that Easter had something to do with a physically resuscitated body?

Do not these biblical facts suggest that the way Easter has been traditionally presented to us by the Christian Church, as “an objective event that broke into history,” may not even be biblically accurate? Perhaps we Christians throughout history should have paid more attention to the biblical texts themselves, than we seem to have done to the literalized doctrines that formed the creeds in the 4th century and on the basis of which dogmatic Christian theology has been constructed. If the story of the resurrection of Jesus did not originally mean the return of the deceased Jesus to the life of this world, as most church leaders have constantly asserted, then what does it mean?

Is resurrection only a myth? A fantasy? A pious dream? If so, is not Christianity erected on a house of cards? Is not its demise, therefore, both predictable and certain? Or is there some truth, profound and life changing, about the meaning of resurrection that cannot be encompassed in this former literalistic understanding? Has some irrepressible truth managed to survive while the church for over two thousand years tried to force it into being a literal event that happened in history? Does whatever resurrection is or was disappear when that literal form collapses and breaks apart under the pressure of contemporary scholarship? Before we begin to answer any of these questions or to draw conclusions, let me continue to examine the biblical texts that purport to tell us of the meaning of Easter. Thus far we have looked at only one, the witness of Paul. There are four more. These are the witnesses of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. This study must not be short-circuited until it is complete. So today I bring into our spotlight, the witness of Mark.

The first thing that one notices about Mark is that this original gospel’s story of Easter is incredibly brief, even stark. It is only eight verses long. This was, however, quite clearly the way Mark intended it to be. Many early Christians found it so lacking in details that more than one wrote a new ending for this gospel. Two of those “new” endings were later incorporated into the text of Mark itself and they even appeared as part of Mark’s gospel in the King James Version of the Bible. Later scholarship, however, has demonstrated quite conclusively that these additions to Mark’s gospel (Mark 16: 9-20) were later and not part of the original text at all.

Today, New Testament scholars universally attest to that. Most modern translations of Mark’s gospel have dropped everything after Mark 16:8 into a footnote or they have separated 16:9-20 from 16:1-8 by a space and say in the footnotes that these verses “cannot have been part of the original text of Mark,” as my New Oxford Annotated Bible, known as the Revised Standard Version, states on page 1238 of its text. A cursory reading of these verses reveals that they were an attempt to harmonize Mark’s gospel with the texts of the later gospels. So, if we are going to be faithful to our stated task of examining what the New Testament literally says about the resurrection of Jesus, we must go next to Mark, but only Mark 16:1-8. This is the extent of first gospel’s text of Easter and as such is, therefore, the second witness to the resurrection, in the New Testament.

We notice first that there is no appearance of the raised Jesus to anyone in the first gospel to be written. There are also no angels and no supernatural signs. There is only an empty tomb, a messenger wearing a white robe, an announcement and an expression of existential fear. The first gospel’s narrative of the resurrection is hardly a picture of the birth of conviction and faith that we have long asserted.
Mark’s details are these. The Sabbath (Saturday) following the crucifixion on Friday has now passed. Dawn on the first day of the week has arrived. Three women, bearing spices, come to the tomb of Jesus. Mark identified them as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Fearing that the body was not properly prepared for burial in the haste of getting the deceased Jesus buried before sundown on Friday, they have come to anoint him.

We need to be aware that the Sabbath for the Jews began at sundown on Friday, not at 12 midnight as it does for us. With the arrival of the Sabbath at sundown, the work of preparing the body for burial would have been prohibited, as would have been the work of taking the body down from the cross. That was the reason for haste and with it the sense of incompletion. So these women approached the grave of Jesus at the first moment they were allowed to do so. The Sabbath has passed and the dawn has broken the darkness, announcing the arrival of a new day.

As these women walked toward the tomb, Mark says that their biggest concern was how would they manage the removal of the large stone from the mouth of the grave. Unless that stone was removed, they reasoned, it would be impossible for them to gain access to the body and thus to do the work of anointing for which they had come.

We are told, however, that when they arrived they discovered that the great stone had already been removed. No explanation as to how that removal had occurred was given. Entering the tomb, these women, we are told, saw a young man. He was described quite simply as “dressed in a white robe.” His role in Mark’s story was to be “the messenger of the resurrection.” Was he a supernatural figure? An angel? The text of Mark does not say that, though the later gospels certainly upgrade him to a divine status. Could he have been a religious functionary? They do tend to be dressed in white robes. Does this story reflect an early Easter liturgical event that was conducted at the supposed gravesite? Was the white robe simply a liturgical garment? Mark’s text gives no answer to these questions. For our purposes, however, it is clear that in this first gospel to be written, this messenger was neither an angelic being nor was he meant to be understood as supernatural.

Mark describes these women as “amazed.” The messenger speaks to their fear: “Do not be amazed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go tell his disciples, and Peter, (it is interesting how Peter is singled out) that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, as he told you.” The words: “as he told you,” are a reference by the author of this gospel to an earlier text in his narrative (Mark 14:28) where Jesus was said to have spoken these words to the disciples at the Last Supper: “After I am raised, I will go before you into Galilee.”

These words of the messenger did little, it seems, to calm the fears of these women. The text of Mark’s gospel tells us: “And they (the women) went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” That is all there is to Mark’s original story of Easter.

Human beings are confronted with an empty tomb, a tomb, which was symbolic of death itself, that they asserted could not contain Jesus of Nazareth. There was no birth of faith. There were no appearances of the risen Christ to anyone. It is easy to understand that this original story was almost scandalous to the early followers of Jesus, necessitating the creation of expanded and more faith-producing additions. We must embrace, however, that this was the way that the resurrection was understood when the first gospel was written some forty-two years after the crucifixion.

What does this mean? It is important that we know what the text actually says before we try to answer the question as to what the resurrection meant to the first Christians. It is apparently not exactly the way we have always thought. Next week we will look at the second of the gospel witnesses, the one we call Matthew. So stay tuned.

Compassion Fatigue

Mazin Qumsiyeh

Compassion fatigue is a term I heard many years ago perhaps when there were a number of natural and man-made disasters and conflicts in the late 1980s. The term came to my mind in the last few weeks. Another saying: think globally and act locally. So thinking globally, I was thinking how humanity could descend to such barbarity around the world.

How could African migrants risk their lives to leave countries wrecked psychologically and economically by colonial Europeans to seek to arrive in the same continent that subjugated them? How could Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims be slaughtered in the thousands by the majority Buddhists and surviving people end up in boats and sent back to starve and die at sea rejected by nearby countries including countries like Indonesia with Muslim majorities?

How could relatives of Jewish holocaust survivors engage in racism and ethnic cleansing for native Palestinians while relatives of Armenian holocaust survivors lead amazingly rich productive caring lives? How could a very wealthy country like “Saudi Arabia” (the quotes are needed because it is an imposed name for a country stolen by the Saud Family) spend billions to support the US/Israeli agenda of destruction and mayhem in countries like Yemen and Syria?

How could a pilot who claims being Muslim drop bombs on Muslim civilians? How could a powerful and rich country like the USA be so occupied by the Zionist lobby that they send their “police” to train in racism and oppression in Apartheid Israel and then go back to kill blacks in American cities? How does the world tolerate the continued siege on Gaza and its starving and dying population (the largest open air prison with 1.7 million inmates whose only crime is being born in Palestine)?

How could the world stand by and let Egypt execute political dissidents or imprison them for decades simply for demanding freedom from the entrenched military dictatorship funded by US taxpayers? The US and Canada Zionist lobbies just might succeed in getting unconstitutional laws passed to ban standing up for human rights (supporting BDS against the apartheid regime). It might get worse with the lobby getting the subservient governments to force the political neutered Palestinian leadership to accept a version of apartheid (and no refugees’ right of return). But then that is what the PA leadership knew would happen when they signed the articles of surrender known as the Oslo accords.

So did humans develop compassion fatigue and does this bode ill for our future as a species? I do not know and cannot predict the future. I can only act against the negative trends and draw closer to other activists. When we do find people who still care, we latch onto them and try to do something together to keep our sanity.

Palestinians were genuinely happy that the Pope decided to canonize two 19th century Palestinians nuns as saints and conclude an agreement recognizing “state of Palestine”.  Those positive people trying to do good things are so needed when so many are either apathetic or directly benefiting Israel while getting rich. Without the few lights in the darkness, we would all be lost and very depressed.

Perhaps this is why the presence of volunteers around us in the museum and the botanical garden/integrated ecosystem is so crucial to our health. When we walk or work in the garden with others, we feel reinvigorated physically and psychologically. In fact when we do any work together, we feel empowered. On Nakba memorial day last week we had a number of activities including installing a large visible plaque that included sections of the famous poem by Tawfiq Ziyad (“here we stay”). The next day, we hosted a workshop on trauma relief through herbal medicines and working on gardens.

We then hosed 44 Nazareth colleagues on a tour of Battir then lunch at the museum.  Yesterday we attended a meeting on biodiversity, did field work and got two Bedouin children to help us near their camp by picking up some round rocks we needed for our pool at the museum. They were so nice and so friendly and their smiles even after the sweaty job will always be with me.

Their community spirit is strong even when they are threatened as a community with evictions (was done to them before). So while thinking globally we are able to act on location and keep going based on a vision that all these borders and divisions and conflicts they foist on us will be gone one day. We dream of an interconnected free society and of traveling free from Bethlehem to Jaffa to Nazareth to Beirut and Damascus without anyone stopping us at any border.

On my desk is a quote from the Dalai Lama “Never give up. No matter what is going on around you. Never give up…”

Sometimes we do not know the best way forward, but we should never give up. I have a friend in Gaza whose son had spinal cord cancer and now partly paralyzed and the family constantly calls for support. But that is one of dozens of stories, needs fulfilled or unfulfilled etc.

It is natural occasionally to have doubts about our future as a species and frequently to reassess our methods. But we must keep the hope alive. We must keep dreaming, keep trying, keep working, and keep living. We must never give up. We must “stay human.”

http://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2015/05/dream.html

A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.”

Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate “reparative therapy,” as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired. I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.”

I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement. I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is “high-sounding, pious rhetoric.”

The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn’t. Justice postponed is justice denied. That can be a resting place no longer for anyone. An old civil rights song proclaimed that the only choice awaiting those who cannot adjust to a new understanding was to “Roll on over or we’ll roll on over you!” Time waits for no one.

I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a “new church,” claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.

In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by “fair-minded” channels that seek to give “both sides” of this issue “equal time.” I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.

I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world’s population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces.

We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women? The time has come for politicians to stop hiding behind unjust laws that they themselves helped to enact, and to abandon that convenient shield of demanding a vote on the rights of full citizenship because they do not understand the difference between a constitutional democracy, which this nation has, and a “mobocracy,” which this nation rejected when it adopted its constitution. We do not put the civil rights of a minority to the vote of a plebiscite.

I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church. No one should ever again be forced to submit the privilege of citizenship in this nation or membership in the Christian Church to the will of a majority vote.

The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the “Flat Earth Society” either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union.

I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church’s participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of color, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.

Life moves on. As the poet James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: “New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth.” I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.

This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.

Resurrection – A Reality or a Pious Dream? Part III The Witness of Paul, Continued

By John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

After Easter we opened a new unit of columns designed to study exactly what the Bible says about Jesus’ resurrection. We noted that while resurrection is assumed in every verse of the New Testament, the earliest attempts to say what resurrection actually was did not occur until some twenty-four years after the crucifixion. That came in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians written around the year 54 CE. Two things stand out in this first Pauline reference. First, the verb that Paul used to speak of Jesus’ resurrection was passive, i.e., Jesus was raised, Jesus did not rise.

In the first account of Easter, please note, the action, whatever it was, was imposed on Jesus, it did not originate with Jesus. So we are driven to ask: Who raised him? Into what was he raised? Second, this raised Jesus was said by Paul to have “appeared” to certain chosen witnesses. The Greek word translated “appeared” was “ophthe,” which seems to refer to insight, to second sight or even to mystical sight, more than it does to physical sight. No narrative details were provided for any of these stated “appearances,” but the names of those to whom he was supposed to have appeared were. The list is fascinating, but it raises more questions than it answers. Today we continue our probe of what the New Testament actually says about Easter. People are surprised to discover these things because that was not the way most of us were taught in our traditional Sunday schools.

Paul’s list of those to whom the risen Christ “appeared” began with Peter, who was called Cephas. When Paul wrote I Corinthians, the gospels were still years away from being created, so those who first read this Corinthian letter would have had no image of Peter, though clearly in Paul’s mind, he was a significant leader. When gospels finally do appear, Peter emerges as a person in a constant, internal struggle. He is regularly the spokesman for the twelve, but his words are frequently embarrassing and insensitive. He will be portrayed as the first to confess that Jesus is the Christ, but also and at the same time, not to have understood what messiah meant. He will collapse under the pressure of Jesus’ arrest, first by fleeing and then by denying. Yet he is always listed first every time the twelve are named. Paul was certainly aware of Peter’s status of being first among equals. Paul’s readers, however, were not.

Second on Paul’s list of those to whom the raised Christ appeared was “the twelve.” That is also intriguing for we note that Paul said Jesus was raised “on the third day” following the crucifixion. This means that these appearances would have come very soon after the crucifixion. Yet “the twelve” is still intact. That implies that Judas Iscariot was still part of this group. It is as if the betrayal never occurred or that Paul had never heard of this tradition. It is not until the ninth decade that the disciples begin to be thought of as “the eleven.” Have you ever wondered why? Had the Judas story not yet been developed? That would be an interesting proposition!

Next, Paul says the raised Jesus appeared to “500 brethren” at once, some of whom are still alive.” No narrative material is found in any gospel that puts content into this appearance unless Luke’s story of Pentecost was designed to be that. At best, that seems a big stretch.

Paul then proceeds to what seems like a second list with three more names on it. They too are intriguing. The first name on this second list is James. Who is he? There are three James’s in the New Testament, but only one of these appears to be a factor in the developing Christian story that Paul is describing. That James is James, “the Lord’s brother,” who is mentioned in both Galatians and Acts. Did Jesus have brothers and sisters? When the gospel of Mark was written the author did not question that fact. Indeed he referred to Jesus’ four brothers by name. They were: James, Joses, Judas and Simon. He also stated that Jesus has “sisters,” but he did not name them.” The brothers of Jesus were also referred to in the Fourth Gospel.

The consensus of current scholars is that the James on Paul’s list of those to whom the risen Christ appeared is none other than this James, the brother of the Lord.

The next name on Paul’s second list is “the Apostles.” Who are they? He has already named “the twelve.” Is this a different group? Apparently in Paul’s mind they were and “the apostles” appear to be related to James in the same way that “the disciples” were related to Peter. Is Paul’s list of witnesses a description of the authenticating authority of two different groups in the early life of the Church? That is clearly a possibility.

Finally came the most intriguing name of all. Paul claims that this raised Christ had also appeared to him. The only difference between the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to Paul and to all the others was, he says, that the appearance to Paul was last. If Paul’s conversion came one to six years after the crucifixion, as most scholars today believe, then resurrection is not and could not be the physical resuscitation of a deceased body. If resurrection was meant to have been understood as physical resuscitation, then surely many people would have seen the newly alive Jesus beyond Paul’s scant list. If none of these “appearances” was meant to have been understood as physical, as Paul seems to imply, then is not the traditional understanding with which we have lived for so long been simply wrong?

The book of Acts called Paul’s Damascus Road experience “a vision.” Paul himself speaks of one who was “caught up in the third heaven.” Paul says he does not know whether this person was “in the body or out of the body,” but he does assert, in what appears to be an autobiographical account being related in the third person, that this person “heard things that cannot be told, which man (or woman) cannot utter.”
Embrace now what these biblical details mean.

The earliest account of the resurrection we have in the New Testament is not a picture of a physical restoration to life. It is not a deceased body from a tomb being restored to life in this world. It is rather an indescribably mystical, transformative experience. Was it delusional? It does not appear to be. Its reality served to embolden those who experienced it, to alter their lives in dramatic, life-changing and life-affirming ways. The recipients of this experience were forced, by whatever resurrection was, to redefine the oneness of God in such a way as to include Jesus in their newly expanded understanding of God. This experience was so powerful that when it got connected with the first day of the week, it turned that day into a new holy day that rivaled the Sabbath in importance within one generation. Paul and the other witnesses were clearly convinced of the reality of Jesus being raised from the dead, but they did not see resurrection as the resuscitation of a physical body. With that point clear, we now go to the rest of Paul to see if he puts more content into what he means by the words, “Jesus was raised.”

In Romans, (circa 58 CE) Paul says, “Through Christ Jesus our Lord…we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God” (Rom 5:2). He goes on in this same epistle to say: “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom 6:5). Then, as if to clarify his thinking once and for all, Paul writes in this same epistle: “For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him” (Rom 6:9). To be restored to life in this world cannot, therefore, be what resurrection meant to Paul. A person called back to life from the grave will inevitably have to die again; that is the nature of mortality.

Whatever resurrection was in Paul’s mind, it was not physical resuscitation back into the life of this world. He was raised into something beyond death’s power. Death has no more dominion over him. The life he now lives, he lives to God. Jesus was raised for Paul into the life and meaning of God. He was raised into the timeless eternity of God. He “appears” out of God to those whose eyes were opened to see eternity in the midst of time, to see God in the presence of the human. Of course, words failed Paul as he tried to grapple with what this meant. He will try to explain it later by saying that the body of the resurrected Jesus was now appropriate to the new realm of life that the resurrected Jesus had entered.

Still struggling to find appropriate words, he described the transformation that was resurrection this way: “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a “spiritual body” (I Cor. 15:42-44). Paul concludes that the raised Jesus has become “a life giving spirit.” Resurrection for Paul was clearly not about a body walking out of a tomb alive again. It was about being transformed, about entering a new dimension of consciousness, about having one’s eyes opened to see the reality beyond the limits of our humanity.

Does this witness of Paul as now laid out, surprise you? What it reveals is that at the beginning of the Christian movement, resurrection was not about a physical restoration to life. That definition would come only later when literal minds would try unsuccessfully to embrace these new realities. At the beginning of Christianity, however, Easter was not a description of a supernatural miracle. It was about entering a new dimension of life, of truth and of faith. When people today reject the physical resurrection of Jesus as unbelievable, they are rejecting something that was never meant to be the meaning of Easter at all. Perhaps it would be wise to read what the Bible actually says before we begin either to talk about it or to reject it.

Next week, we will look at the witness of Mark, the first gospel to be written. Surprises will also meet us there.

Resurrection – Myth or Reality, Part II: The Witness of Paul

by John Shelby Spong
http://johnshelbyspong.com/

The first writer of what later came to be called the New Testament was a well-educated Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor. His name was Paul, although there is a later tradition that suggested that his original name was Saul and that the change from Saul to Paul was symbolic of the change in his life from being a highly-disciplined member of the Jewish religious elite to being a follower of Jesus. The adjective “Jewish” in that sentence is important because at this time in history, there was no such thing as Christianity or the Christian Church.

What we now call Christianity was still a minority movement within the synagogue itself called “The Followers of the Way.” These followers were also known by members of the Orthodox Party of Judaism as “revisionists.” That was a deliberately pejorative title. “Revisionists” in ecclesiastical circles means that they were “change agents” destabilizing the “True Faith.”

Paul began his rabbinic career as a strict adherent of the Torah. He said of his earlier life: “I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal.1:14). These words are from what was probably his second epistle written about the year 52 CE.

Paul tells us in this same epistle of his days as a persecutor of the Christians and of how he sought to destroy this movement. Since one does not react in such overt and hostile ways toward a new set of ideas, unless one is fearful of those ideas, attracted to them or both, one wonders what the personal threat was that Christianity posed for him, but that speculation is beyond the scope of this column. Paul alludes to his conversion once again in Galatians with these words: “But when he, who had set me apart before I was born and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia; and again I returned to Damascus.” (Gal 1:15-17).

It is of interest to note that Paul never mentions the dramatic events of his conversion on the road to Damascus, of his supposed blindness or of the role a man named Ananias played in his conversion. These details are all part of the narrative written in the book of Acts some thirty or more years after Paul’s death. This fact makes the literal accuracy of the Damascus Road story highly suspect. It is a fact, however, that there was clearly a transition in this man’s life between being a persecutor of the Christians and a champion of them.

When did that change occur? It is hard to be certain. In Galatians Paul says that after his conversion experience, he went to Arabia for three years. Then he went up to Jerusalem to confer with Peter and James, the Lord’s brother. Next he went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. He was clearly active in proclaiming Christ at this time for he notes that people said: “He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy” (Gal. 1: 23). The final note that helps us date his life and career is that he says: “After fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus to lay before those who were ‘in repute,’ but ‘privately,’ the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1: 1, 2).

So there were at least seventeen years between Paul’s conversion and the writing of his early epistle to the Galatians. If the date of the crucifixion is fixed around the year 30 CE and the date of Paul’s conversion is fixed, as historian Adolf von Harnack has sought to do, no earlier than one and no later than six years after the crucifixion (I would place it on the early side of that spread), we begin to get some clarity about time and history, so Paul’s conversion is believed to have come somewhere between 31 and 36 CE, his time in Arabia would then be between 34 and 39 CE and his fourteen years in Syria and Cilicia would fall between the years between 48 and 53 CE. Since I Thessalonians is generally regarded as Paul’s first epistle and is normally dated about 51 CE and his second is Galatians dated about 52 CE, we find ourselves in the range of high probability.

So Paul’s convictions regarding Jesus being both “crucified” and “raised” are recorded and fixed inside the first generation of Christian believers. That is not enough time for myths to develop that would create the life of Jesus out of whole cloth, as some critics of Christianity try to maintain today. So we enter our study of Paul’s understanding of the resurrection with the confidence that he was describing something he believed was real. The assumption that something about the life of Jesus had broken open the power of death permeates almost every verse of the Pauline corpus, but he speaks about it quite specifically only in the epistle called I Corinthians, which scholars tend to date in or around the year 54 CE. We read it carefully for it precedes by almost a whole generation any of the narratives of Easter that appear in the later gospels. We also note the fact that Paul died five to ten years before the first gospel was written.

Paul was very spare with details, covering all the events of the end of Jesus’ life in a mere six verses (I Cor. 15:3-8). He introduces these verses with a clear claim to their accuracy. He is citing a recognized authority. Listen to his words first in regard to just the crucifixion: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3). That is the totality of his description of the crucifixion. The phrase: “Christ died for our sins,” reveals that the crucifixion had by this time already been related to the liturgy of Yom Kippur, for the words “for our sins” are a direct quotation out of the Yom Kippur liturgy.

The crucifixion had thus already been invested with a theological purpose. It accomplished for us what the death of the “Lamb of God” in Yom Kippur accomplished. It opened to us a pathway into God. The blood of the Lamb, spread upon the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies in the Yom Kippur liturgy, made it possible for imperfect human beings to enter into the presence of God whether they were personally deserving or not. The blood of Jesus on the cross was thought to accomplish the same purpose. It is obvious that the death of Jesus had already been interpreted liturgically.

Paul also said that Jesus’ death was accomplished: “in accordance with the scriptures.” That means, that by this time, the death of Jesus had already been transformed from the tragedy it seemed at first to be into a triumph expressing the purpose of God in accordance with some of the messianic images. This interpretive framework was already in place before the year 54 when I Corinthians was written. Chief among those messianic images to which he referred were the ones found in the writings of II Isaiah (chapters 40-55) and II Zechariah (chapters 9-14). These were, quite obviously, the two most popular texts from the Hebrew Bible on to which the followers of Jesus leapt to assert that the death of Jesus was based upon the fulfillment of messianic expectations. Please note also that there is in Paul’s writing no mention of Judas Iscariot, Pilate, the two thieves or Barabbas. There are no details describing the crucifixion, no words said to have been spoken by Jesus from the cross, no darkness at noon and no interpretive details. All of that seems not yet to have been developed.

Paul then moved on to the burial which he covered in three words, “He was buried.” There was no tomb, no garden, no Temple guards and no Joseph of Arimathea. Paul was now ready to say his first words about resurrection. That too was quite spare. All Paul said was: “He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (I Cor. 15:4).

Note several things present in this text. First, the verb tense that Paul used is passive. Paul did not say Jesus rose, rather he said that Jesus “was raised.” Resurrection for Paul was not an action that Jesus did, it was an action that was done to him. The words, “he was raised” implied that some outside force operated on him. Paul will tell us later who that was. In his epistle to the Romans dated around 58 CE, Paul wrote that Jesus “was designated Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:3, 4). God “designated him.” This is not Trinitarian language. God is clearly the designator, Jesus is the designated one. God raised him, Jesus did not rise. That is not a relationship of “co-equality.”

This means that the earliest account of the Easter moment in the Bible did not assert that Jesus himself conquered death. It said that God raised him from death. Does that mean that God raised him physically back into the life of time and space? Does that mean that resurrection in its first biblical narration was understood as the resuscitation of the deceased body? No, of course not! It suggested rather that God raised Jesus into the life of God. Resurrection for Paul was far more like the later story of the Ascension that it was about the resuscitation of a physically dead body.

How do we know that? All one has to do is to continue reading Paul’s words. Paul provides us next with a list of those to whom the raised Christ was said to have appeared. The Greek word that Paul used that we translate “appeared” was “ophthe.” Literally it meant “was made manifest to.” It was the same word chosen in 250 BCE by those who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, in what we today call the Septuagint, to describe God appearing to Moses in the burning bush. That is more like a visionary experience than it is one person seeing another person after a three-day absence. Later Paul will tell us more about where the raised Christ was seen and experienced. It is not the way the church has talked about Easter through the centuries. We will develop that idea next week as this series on what the New Testament actually says about the resurrection continues. So stay tuned.