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Charting A New Reformation
Part XVIII - The Fifth Thesis, Miracles (continued)
Following the Exodus, Moses’ miraculous power was never again so powerfully displayed in the biblical story, but it did not disappear. In a battle against the Amalekites (Exod. 17:8-14) when Moses held his hands up, the Hebrew army won the day, but when fatigue forced him to lower his arms, his enemies prevailed. This problem was solved when Aaron and Hur stood by his side and held his arms up. God was still directing the affairs of human beings from above the sky and Moses was God’s vessel. Other nature miracles adorn the Moses story. When the Hebrew people had no food in the wilderness God, at Moses’ request, rained heavenly bread called manna, upon them. When there was a shortage of water, Moses struck a rock at a place called Meribah and water flowed forth in abundance (Exod. 17:1-7). This was, however, a strange miracle for although God appears to have ordered it, a Hebrew norm was violated. Moses demanded that God bring water out of this rock. It was not proper for a human being to give God orders. The norm was for God to command and for human beings to obey. Moses had, quite improperly, put “God to the test.” God was not pleased. The story said that God had clothed Moses with miraculous power, but because of this serious indiscretion, Moses was to be punished by being forever prohibited from entering the “Promised Land.”
While miracles were clearly associated with the memory of Moses, it would not have occurred to anyone to speak of him as “the son of God.” He was simply a human channel through whom God’s power was allowed to work. There was no confusion of the medium with the message. Miraculous power belonged to God; it was not thought of as Moses’ possession.
When Moses died (Deut. 34), he was succeeded by Joshua, who had been his military captain. There is always great anxiety in a nation when it loses its leader, especially a long time and successful leader like Moses. One of the ways in the story-telling tradition of the Jews that anxiety was dissipated was to wrap stories about the deceased leader around his successor. The ancients did not see this as dishonest. What this practice was designed to do was to convey the message that the God of Moses was still with them, but now as the God of Joshua. So Joshua’s life was said to be marked with the same power that had once marked the life of Moses. The power to manipulate the forces of nature had been a sign of God’s presence with Moses. Moses had been portrayed as able to command the forces of nature. Joshua would now exhibit a similar power. He would command the sun to stand still in the sky on its journey around the earth (Joshua 10). This would enable Joshua’s army more daylight in which his soldiers were able to kill more retreating Amorites before they found safety under the cover of darkness. It was a power similar to that of Moses.
The second example was an even more obvious Moses story. Moses had split the waters of the Red Sea to allow the children of Israel to escape death at the hands of the Egyptians and to walk through that sea into the safety of the wilderness. Joshua confronted another body of water that impeded the Israelites’ progress. This time it was the Jordan River. Those who have seen the Jordan River are not impressed with either its size or its difficulty to navigate. In some seasons of the year, one can literally step across the tiny stream in the midst of the river basin. So the author of the book of Joshua had to heighten the size and degree of difficulty. He states that this miracle occurred when the river was in flood season and was a massive body of rushing water. In Moses-like fashion, Joshua stepped into this flooded river and the waters parted so that Joshua and his army could invade the territory populated by the Canaanites by walking on dry land. In these narratives, Joshua, like Moses, was seen as possessing supernatural power, but he too, was simply a vehicle, a channel, through which the miraculous power of God could be made available in human history. Thus, miracles in the Bible were originally not a sign of the human becoming divine, but rather the sign that God could work through a human life to establish God’s power over nature.
It would be about four hundred years before miracles would make a second appearance in the biblical story. Once again miracles were associated with the lives of Jewish heroes. These heroes were also a connected pair of figures, who were at the heart of Israel’s national life.
While Moses would become known as the father of the law, this man, Elijah, would become known as the father of Israel’s prophetic movement. He would be linked with his successor, Elisha, to form the second tandem to which miracles would be attached. What constituted a miracle, however, began to be greatly expanded.
First, there was in the lives of these two figures a repetition of the nature miracles that marked the previous heroes, Moses and Joshua. For example, Elijah and Elisha had the power to expand the food supply, a cruse of oil and a supply of grain were not diminished with use. Perhaps the most obvious sign of the continuity of the Moses-Joshua tradition was seen in that both Elijah and Elisha, when impeded from their goals by the Jordan River, responded by sweeping a mantle over the water of that river and standing back to watch the waters part, which enabled them to overcome this watery barrier and to walk across the river bed on dry land. This Moses story, wrapped originally around Israel’s founding hero at the Red Sea, was later wrapped around Joshua, then wrapped around Elijah and finally wrapped around Elisha. There are thus four-splitting-of-the-waters stories in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Other miraculous acts were attributed to this 8th century BCE duo of Jewish heroes. Elijah and Elisha could both perform supernatural acts of healing that were seen as miracles. Both were also said to be able to raise the dead. Elijah raised the only son of a widow from the dead. Elisha raised a child from the dead. So by the eighth century, before the Common Era, the Hebrew Scriptures spoke of the miraculous power being within the capability of the lives of the foremost heroes of Israel. Once again, it was God’s power acting through God’s servants in the Hebrew Scriptures, although increasingly as the stories were told, that power was more and more attributed to the people themselves.
After Elijah and Elisha, we note that miracles largely disappeared from the biblical story until the first century when they were told again, first about Jesus of Nazareth in the gospel tradition and then about his immediate successors, the apostles, in the book of Acts. The patterns were quite similar. The supernatural acts fell into three categories. First, there were nature miracles: the stilling of the storm and the ability to walk on water. There were also narratives about the ability to expand the food supply. Six times in the gospels an account was given of Jesus feeding an almost unlimited multitude — 5000 on four occasions, 4000 on two occasions — with a limited number of loaves and fishes.
Next in the Jesus narrative were the raising of the dead stories, five to be specific are related in the four gospels, but only three people were said to have been raised from the dead. That was because the narrative of Jesus raising a child, the daughter of Jairus, from the dead, was told three times, once in Mark, once in Matthew and once in Luke. The details vary, but only slightly. The main story line is, however, almost identical with the account of Elisha raising a child from the dead. The second raising of the dead story is told only by Luke and involved Jesus raising from the dead the only son of a widow, which supposedly took place in the village of Nain. This narrative, upon a closer examination, appears to be based on the story of Elijah raising from the dead the only son of a widow. The third raising of the dead story is only told by John and is the familiar account of the raising the four-days-dead Lazarus, who was said to have literally walked out of his tomb. This story appears to have had no antecedent in the Hebrew Scriptures whatsoever, but perhaps it was based on Luke’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Finally there is a series of miracle stories associated with Jesus that are the most familiar of the miracle stories in the Bible. I refer to those narratives in which the blind are enabled to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to sing and the crippled or lame to leap. Many of these healing miracles are later attributed to the disciples in the book of Acts, which serve to give us the third pairing of miracles stories to keep the pattern intact. Clearly the same power, observed in Jesus, was said to have been present in the leaders of the early Christian Church.
Is there a source in the Hebrew Scriptures that might give meaning to this final type of healing miracles attributed to Jesus? I think there is. In the 35th chapter of Isaiah, the prophet is addressing the subject of the signs that will mark the emergence of the Kingdom of God on earth. This was, in apocalyptic Jewish thought, nothing less than the birth of the messianic age. Isaiah responded that the world would recognize the in-breaking of the Kingdom in these ways: water would flow in the desert, the crocuses would bloom in places where they had never bloomed before and human wholeness would appear in places that had been marked with human brokenness. That is “the blind would see, the deaf would hear, the mute would shout and the lame would leap.” For Isaiah these would be the signs that would signal the messiah’s arrival on earth to inaugurate the “Kingdom of God.” Are these miracle stories then interpretive signs rather than literal events? I think they are. We will pursue this conversation further next week, when we discover that Jesus himself is said to have made this identification. When one really reads the text of the gospels, much of the miraculous framework that we have traditionally placed on the Bible gives way to a very different understanding.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Albert Ringewald of Cocoa Beach, Florida writes:
Question:
I would appreciate it if you could provide me with your views on Christian forgiveness.
It seems to me on this issue that Christians are all over the map. Some are quick to offer forgiveness as shown to us recently over closed circuit TV by the relatives of the nine victims of Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to the shooter, who specifically expressed no remorse during his court hearing; to the author, Roxanne Gay, who wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed (June 23, 2015) that her Catholic upbringing had taught her that “forgiveness requires reconciliation by way of confession and penance.” I think the almost instantaneous expression of forgiveness by the relatives of the church shooter’s victims perplexed many of us as sincere, yet somehow contrived because of its suddenness.”
Complicating matters further, Kristin Neff, out of the University of Texas, has written extensively about self-compassion and to forgive is to lay down the burden of anger toward the offender and thereby changing your role as “victim” to finding compassion for yourself and possibly even for the offender.
Finally, we seem to be taught the essentials of forgiveness through the parable of “The Prodigal Son” contained in the gospel of Luke, in which the father forgives the wayward son only after the son acknowledges his wrongdoings and begs for forgiveness. Would forgiveness have been proffered by the father without contrition on the part of the son?
Does forgiveness require acknowledgement of the wrong doing by the offender? Does forgiveness require the offender to ask for it in order that it be effective? Psychologists are quick to describe the benefits of forgiveness, but they fail to describe the requirements, if any.
Answer:
Dear Albert,
Thank you for your questions and for posing the issue so powerfully with your very contemporary examples. Let me try to separate the wheat from the chaff. First forgiveness is in my opinion, ultimately a godlike response. As such it is freely given, always available and requires nothing. Our ability to receive or to access this ever-present forgiveness may require repentance and an attempt at restitution, but that is a requirement of our receptiveness, it is not a requirement located in forgiveness itself. So it seems to me that the families of the victims of the shooting in the Charleston, S.C. African Methodist Episcopal Church acted out of a profound understanding of what the forgiveness of God is like. It was that very powerful witness to this ultimate meaning of forgiveness that moved the people of South Carolina to look at their own behavior vis-à-vis people of African descent and to bring to the ground the long-flying flags of the Confederacy. The forgiveness of God, which they articulated, does not require confession from the guilty one in order for it to be given; but it may require confession in order for that forgiveness to be received by the guilty one to whom it was so freely offered.
That is the picture of forgiveness I find in the New Testament. In the episode of the woman taken in the act of adultery, forgiveness is offered long before she was told, “go and sin no more.” Jesus is portrayed in Luke as offering forgiveness to the soldiers who crucified him. There is no indication that he required them to repent first. Forgiveness is a gift of God. It is grace; no prerequisites are required.
The life of Jesus reveals this to me quite powerfully. He was betrayed and he loved his betrayer. He was denied and he loved his denier. He was forsaken and he loved those who forsook him. He was tortured and he loved his torturers. He was murdered and he loved his murderers. That is a portrait of the forgiveness of God being lived out in a human life. What the God presence in Jesus says to each of us is this: “There is nothing you can do and nothing you can be that will place you outside the boundaries of God’s love.” We are loved as the hymn says: “Just as I am without one plea.”
It is not your business or mine to judge whether forgiveness is deserved. It is not your business or mine to determine whether repentance is adequate. Those are the results of the rules of religion that often appear to have been elevated to a status they have never merited.
Even in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which you cite, the wayward son “comes to himself,” that is, he turns toward the forgiveness that was always there even when he could not see it.
It is human to judge, but judging is finally an act of idolatry. It assumes that you have the right to judge. It assumes that you can place limits on the forgiveness of God. It assumes that your righteousness is greater than God’s righteousness. The response of religion is never to be identified with the response of God. Religion gave us anti-Semitism, the Muslim-hating Crusades, the moralistic Puritans, the justification of slavery, segregation and Apartheid, the diminution of women and the repression of homosexual persons. Judgment arises out of the human tendency to place onto God the limits that you yourself cannot transcend.
“How often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?” asked the disciples. Then trying to answer their own question, they said, “until seven times?” Jesus’ response was “Until seventy times seven.” Did he mean that we must forgive 490 times, but not 491? No, he was calling his disciples beyond any limits because forgiveness with limits is never forgiveness.
There are no requirements in the forgiveness of God. That is the truth that calls you and me beyond our own limits and beyond the perilous suggestion that you or I have the right to judge anyone.
~John Shelby Spong
Announcements
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He will also be the guest of honor at an intimate VIP reception limited to only 30 guests.
This is a rare opportunity to meet at chat with him, so reserve your tickets early!
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