HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Charting a New Reformation
Part XX - The #5th Thesis, Miracles (concluded)
The nature miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospel tradition were not supernatural events that marked his life as divine. They were rather Moses stories interpretively wrapped around Jesus to proclaim that the God who was present in Moses was even more powerfully present in Jesus, the messiah.
The stories in the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) about Jesus having the power to raise the dead are not historical happenings, they are Elijah and Elisha stories being wrapped around the memory of Jesus to proclaim that the God present in Elijah and Elisha was even more powerfully present in Jesus of Nazareth. They are not eyewitness accounts of historical events, they are interpretive portraits being painted of the messianic Jesus who, in the mind of his original Jewish disciples, was both the “New Moses” and the “New Elijah.”
The popular and extensive list of healing narratives found in the gospels and attributed to Jesus are also not descriptions of supernatural events that actually happened. They are attempts to solidify the truth about Jesus as the messiah and to demonstrate the fact that the signs that were to accompany the breaking in of the Kingdom of God were in fact present in Jesus’ life. The claim was made that the wholeness, which the prophet Isaiah had said would mark the arrival of the Kingdom of God, was in fact present in the life of Jesus. In the Kingdom of God, Isaiah had proclaimed, the blind would see, the deaf would hear, the lame would walk and the mute would sing! So stories of these signs began to be wrapped about the memory of Jesus as they were more and more convinced that he was the expected messiah. These are not historical events but interpretive signs. Every Jewish reader of the gospels would have known this. Only those who were not Jewish and who were not aware of the place of the miracles in the Hebrew Scriptures would ever have thought of the miracles as literal events occurring in history.
Matthew and Luke both related a story about John the Baptist that solidifies this conclusion and this interpretation of miracles. At a midpoint in both of their books, each of these gospel writers do what I call a flashback. They have both used the story of John the Baptist in his role as the forerunner of Jesus’ public ministry earlier in their narratives, indeed right after their stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth. Then as their gospel narratives moved on, John the Baptist faded into the background. Simultaneously the Jewish liturgical year had moved on, past the observances of Passover and Shavuot, to arrive at the fall festival called Rosh Hashanah or the New Year’s Day of the Jewish calendar. Rosh Hashanah had been observed as the time the Jews prayed for God’s Kingdom to come, which meant that it was the time for welcoming the messiah. Over the centuries, the figure of Elijah began to be the face of the one announcing the coming of the messiah, so it was said that Elijah must come to prepare the way of the Lord. John the Baptist had been quite consciously identified by the followers of Jesus as the one who had played that role. That is why the first time John the Baptist appears in the New Testament (Mark 1:4) he was dressed in the garments identified with Elijah (camel’s hair and a leather girdle about his waist – Mark 1:6). He was located in the wilderness, i.e. the desert, which was the location of Elijah (Mark1:4) and he was given the diet of the wilderness to eat (locusts and wild honey), the diet of Elijah (Mark 1:6). The identification was thus complete. That was where Mark started his story; it was a narrative appropriate to Rosh Hashanah. Matthew and Luke, however, started their gospels about five months earlier just after the Passover so they were forced to introduce John much earlier to mark the inauguration of Jesus’ public career. So when they finally got around to Rosh Hashanah in their gospels, they needed a new John the Baptist story and a new way to identify Jesus as the messiah. A Cecil B. DeMille-like flashback was their answer.
John, in prison before his execution, was said to have sent messengers to Jesus asking the messianic question, “Are you the one who should come or do we look for another?” In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus does not answer this question. Rather he tells these messengers to return to John the Baptist and to tell him what they see and hear. Then he quotes from Isaiah’s description of the signs that will mark the arrival of the Kingdom of God. That is the place where the healing miracles enter the story. Jesus gives sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to speak to those whose tongues were tied in muteness and the ability to walk to those with crippled or paralyzed limbs. That is how the healing miracles came to be added to the memory of Jesus. It was not because he had actually done these things, but because his disciples had come to understand him as the messiah. So miracles in the gospels were never intended to be objective events that rose supposedly out of Jesus’ divinity. The original Jewish readers would have understood this. Literalizing these narratives came as a result of an uninformed Gentile readership that did not understand Jewish symbols. This literalism would later be re-enforced in Christian art, which portrayed biblical events as if they were actual occurrences.
So, upon deeper reflection, the miracles associated with Jesus in the gospels turn out to be magnified Moses stories, magnified Elijah and Elisha stories and prophetic signs drawn from Isaiah, which solidify the claims his followers were making for him by attaching to his life and memory the signs that would accompany the dawning of God’s Kingdom. This was not eyewitness history being recollected, it was Jewish biblical interpretation and portrait painting.
The other list of supposed supernatural acts were recorded in John’s gospel as the “Book of Signs.” Five of these signs were quite similar to the miracles in the synoptic tradition (the feeding of the multitude, walking on water, the healing of a Gentile official’s child, the restoration of a cripple and giving sight to a blind man), but two of them do not fit into any previously discussed category. These two serve as bookends to his whole discussion of signs. The first is the story of Jesus changing water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee (John 2). The second is the story of Jesus raising from his grave the four-days-dead Lazarus (John 11). Clearly neither of these events happened in history. How do we know? Because there is no mention of them anywhere until 65-70 years after the crucifixion. Do you really suppose that someone at a public wedding could change water into wine or at a public funeral could call forth from his grave a person dead and buried for four days and no one would write about it for 65-70 years? Of course not! So these stories must have a different meaning that literal minds cannot understand. Surely the author of the Fourth Gospel was not deluded, nor did he claim that history was being described.
When we examine closely the details of each story then the original alternate meanings begin to appear. The water that was transformed into wine story was, we are told, the water used in Jewish rites of purification. The wine into which this water was changed was the wine of the Christian Eucharist. The person who stood at the point of transition between the Jewish water and the Christian wine was the mother of Jesus. She was clearly the symbol of Judaism, which would give birth to Christianity, for that is what a mother does. In his gospel, John also creates another symbolic character to serve as “the ideal Christian” calling him the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” Later John would bring these two literary characters together at the foot of the cross. There he would have Jesus commend the symbol of Judaism, his mother, to the care of the symbol of Christianity, the Beloved Disciple. Then in a reciprocal command, he would charge the symbol of Christianity to care for the symbol of Judaism. To paraphrase Jesus he was made to say: “Judaism, the mother of Jesus, behold your child, Christianity.” Then to the Beloved Disciple, the symbol of Christianity, Jesus said: “behold, recognize your mother, Judaism.” It was a powerful sign not a literal event.
The story of the raising of Lazarus was used by the author of the Fourth Gospel as the event on which Jesus would hang all of his teaching about both life after death and the meaning of resurrection. It was based not on an actual event, as biblical literalists inevitably claim, but rather on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, sometimes called Dives, which appears only in the gospel of Luke. In that parable, Lazarus, a poor beggar and Dives, a rich man both die. Lazarus goes to “the bosom of Abraham,” a uniquely Jewish conception of heaven. (Note-if I were going to spend eternity lying in someone’s bosom, I don’t think I would want it to be Abraham’s)! Dives goes to a place of torment. In his hell, Dives asks Abraham to have Lazarus bring him water. That is impossible, Abraham responds. You cannot get there from here. Then Dives asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn his brothers lest they too come to this place of torment. Abraham responds, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them heed them!” Dives persists, saying “but Father Abraham, if someone were to go to them from the dead they would repent.” To this Abraham gives his final word: “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” What John has done is to historicize that Lucan parable and the result is exactly what Abraham in the parable said it would be. Lazarus returns. In John’s gospel it becomes not an occasion for the birth of faith, but the actual event that led to the crucifixion.
The miracles are not events of history. They were never meant to be. They are symbols that the messiah, the new Moses and the new Elijah has come in Jesus. A new response is demanded. How badly warped have the texts of the gospels become by literalization.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
The Rev. James Carpenter of Kerrville, Texas writes:
Question:
I am a 79-year-old retired minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Your books have been crucial to my spiritual odyssey and have positively shaped my faith. I would like your help with a question that seems to me to be fundamental to progressive Christianity.
Like you, I, too, have been influenced by the writings of Bishop John A. T. Robinson of the Church of England. I can no longer remember the particular volume in which he made this point, but I have never forgotten what he said; he declared that the difference between humanism and Christian faith is this; Humanism says that Love ought to be the ruling principle of the universe, while the Christian faith affirms that, in Christ, we see that Love is the ruling principle of the universe. Or, in other words, in Christ God revealed that Love really is (not simply ought to be) the ruling principle of the universe. At that time, that statement was very reassuring to me. The older I get, however, the less I can believe that “love is the ruling principle of the universe.” It appears to me that there are three ways to view the universe’s attitude toward us human beings: (1) the universe is for us; (2) the universe is against us; or (3) the universe is indifferent to us. From my observation, I can only conclude that the universe is indifferent to us.
As I see it, it is up to us humans to shape the world so that it is for us; it is up to us to make Love the guiding principle of life, and that is something that humanists and other people of good will can do, just as well as Christians can.
I guess that leaves me wondering: Am I simply a non-theist or am I in fact an atheist? That is, am I simply a denier of the existence of a Supreme Being separate from the universe, or am I, in fact, a disbeliever in any “God” or “Higher Power” apart from us human beings? Am I a Christian or am I (just) a humanist?
Answer:
Dear James,
First, thank you for your letter and for your ministry. I have been impressed with the leadership of the clergy I have met, who are part of the Disciples of Christ Church. I am grateful for that witness. Thank you also for bringing my friend and mentor, John A. T. Robinson, back into my awareness. My new book, just published in February of 2016 (Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy), was dedicated to my three greatest mentors. John A. T. Robinson was one of the three.
If one defines God as an external being, as you appear to do, one must ascribe the power to change this world to this deity. The suggestion that “The universe is indifferent to us” results from the death of this theistic definition.
If, however, God is experienced not as a supernatural, intervening deity, but as the “Ground of Being,” as well as the Source of Life and the Source of Love, an understanding of God developed in the 20th century by the German Reformed theologian Paul Tillich, then you need to ask whether being, living and loving themselves, are expressions of the nature of reality and thus of God. It is a very different approach. There is no evidence, of which I am aware, that God can or will calm the winds and rains of a hurricane to spare the people of New Orleans or stop the collision of tectonic plates beneath the seas to prevent an earthquake in Haiti. Since earthquakes are deemed to be the cause of tsunamis in other parts of the world, the same thing applies to them. In that sense both nature and the universe do indeed seem to be “indifferent” to life.
If, however, we look into the heart of the universe, we find a bias toward life that is overwhelming. Without this bias, how could life have ever emerged out of lifeless matter? Next we look at every form of life from plants to trees to insects to reptiles and to mammals and we find every segment of life to be possessed by a drive to survive. To be alive is, by definition, to be survival-oriented. This reality has made it possible for life to have moved from a single cell at its birth some 3.8 billion years ago, to the self-conscious manifestation of complexity that human beings have become. An examination of the history of life will reveal the various stages through which life has traveled. We started as single cells and developed next into a composite of multi-cellular living things. Then this thing called life, divided into two major strains. One was called animate life and the other inanimate life. Then out of the animate side of life primitive forms of what we now recognize as consciousness appeared and began to grow. After hundreds of millions of years that thing called consciousness evolved into self-consciousness. In that journey through life, it is the presence of what we today call love that seems to have been the enhancer of life at every stage of our development, though that was not understood until self-consciousness appeared. Love, you see, is not always conscious. Sometimes it is instinctual behavior. Is it not love, however, that drives the bird from its nest in search of food for its young? Is it not love that moves a cat to lick the fur of a newborn kitten or a cow to lick the skin of a new born calf? Is it not love that enhances our humanity? Can anyone become human without love?
So if God is the name of the power in the universe, guiding us to life, love and being and if God is manifested in us when we escape our limits and love beyond our fears, is God not present in who we are? Is God separate from our life, our love and our being? Is this not the God we see in the life of Jesus – the one who lived fully, loved wastefully and who had the courage to be all that he was meant to be? If God is “a being” separate from us, we have to develop words like “incarnation” to enable this divine “being” to enter human history. If, however, God is the Ground of Being, then God is part of all that is, this means that the divine comes to our awareness in the acts that enhance life, expand love and increase our capacity to be.
So you, James, are quite correct to say it is up to us human beings to shape the world and to make love the guiding principle of life. In this process, you have moved experientially from God as “a being” to God as “Being itself.” Now all you need to do is to bring your theology into dialogue with your experience. An atheist is one who dismisses the theistic definition of God as inadequate; an atheist is not one who says that there is no God. That is a distinction that our language itself makes it difficult for us to see. The questions you need to ask, and indeed are asking, are these: “Can I be a non-theist and still be a believer in God? Can I be a non-theist and still be a Christian?” To both of those questions, I would respond with a vigorous Yes. It is too bad that the Christian Church in most of its institutional forms has never been able to talk about these things with any level of understanding.
You have, and for this I am grateful! Live well!!
John Shelby Spong
Read and Share Online Here.
Announcements
Bishop Spong speaks at Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center in Bangor, PA, June 10th - 12th, 2016.
In this conference, as in the book by the same title, Bishop Spong will seek to recreate the original Christ experience that opens us to walk into a New Christianity, one that sees biblical fundamentalism as a Gentile heresy.
For more information click Here.
