Charting a New Reformation
Part XXVII – The Eighth Thesis, The Ascension of Jesus (continued)
The gospels of Mark and Matthew were composed while the Christian movement was still part of the synagogue. The gospel of Luke may well have been written after the fracture that caused the Christians to be expelled from the synagogue, but because Luke based his gospel largely on the gospel of Mark, his work still reflects the organizing form of the synagogue. All three of these synoptic gospels were originally created, we now recognize, to provide Jesus stories for the seasons and Sabbaths of the synagogue’s liturgical year. That is why the story of the crucifixion was told against the backdrop of the Passover and why Matthew placed the “Sermon on the Mount” against the synagogue’s observance of Shavuot or Weeks, the celebration of Moses receiving the Torah from God at Mt. Sinai. That is also why John the Baptist was turned into “The New Elijah” and associated so deeply with the synagogue’s observance of Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah, also called the Jewish New Year, was the time when people prayed for the messiah to come. John the Baptist was cast in the role of Elijah, who according to Jewish messianic thought had to prepare the way for the messiah’s arrival. So John the Baptist enters the gospel tradition not as a person of history, but as a Rosh Hashanah literary figure. The stories of Jesus engaging in physical healings were then read back into the memory of Jesus’ earthly life and told first as part of the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in which goodness of health overcomes the evil of physical distress. Being made physically whole was a sign that the Kingdom of God was breaking in and that the messiah was at hand. Next harvest parables were attributed to Jesus, like the parable of the sower, who sows his seed on four different types of soil, and the wheat and tares growing together. Not coincidentally they were placed into the gospel outline against the Harvest Festival of the Jews, known as Tabernacles, Booths or Sukkoth. That is also why the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, a story that only appears in the synoptic tradition, was told against the synagogue’s observance of Dedication or Hanukah, in which it was believed that the light of God was annually restored to the Temple. When the synoptic gospels were written (72-93 CE), however, the Temple had been destroyed by the Romans, and so the followers of Jesus suggested that Jesus had replaced the Temple as the new meeting place between God and human beings. That is what is reflected when the light of God was made to fall upon Jesus in the story of the Transfiguration. In this way Hanukah was reinterpreted. Once a crack opens into the original meaning of the synoptics, we begin to see just how it was that so many of the stories in the Hebrew Scriptures were simply lifted out of the text, magnified and wrapped around Jesus of Nazareth. They are very easy to identify once the pattern is clear.
The literary connections between Moses and Jesus was especially strong in Matthew’s gospel, and they become quite obvious once the principle has been established. Both Moses and Jesus were subjected to the attempt by a wicked king to destroy them in infancy. Both were said to have fed the multitudes in the wilderness. Both had Red Sea splitting experiences, wandering in the wilderness experiences and trials or temptations in that wilderness. Both went up on a mountain to get a new understanding of God’s law. I have examined these connections in detail in my recent book, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy.
Luke, a gospel written to a congregation of dispersed or diaspora Jews, which was just beginning to attract Gentile proselytes into its midst, had a rather different agenda from that of Matthew. So Elijah, the father of the prophetic movement, served Luke much better as the figure through whom Jesus was to be interpreted, than did Moses. So a close reading of Luke reveals this broader world into which Jesus, as the new Elijah, fitted so well.
In Matthew’s genealogy, the lineage of Jesus went back only to Abraham, who was regarded as the father of the Jewish nation. Luke, writing for his more expansive, more cosmopolitan audience, took his genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam, the father of all humankind. This way Gentiles as well as Jews could be included.
We also see in Luke a much deeper dependency on the Elijah narratives than anywhere else in the New Testament. In the Hebrew Scriptures we are told that Elijah raises from the dead the only son of a widow. In Luke Jesus repeats that Elijah story by raising from the dead the only son of a widow in the village of Nain. No other gospel relates that story. Elijah healed a foreigner, a Syrian, named Naaman, of leprosy. Luke has Jesus heal a Samaritan (also a foreigner) of leprosy in a story which no other gospel writer relates. The similarities abound.
The most obvious Elijah story that Luke has retold about Jesus, however, was the story of Elijah’s ascension. Here the way Luke has used Elijah to interpret Jesus becomes quite clear. I turn now to the story of Elijah’s ascension so that everyone can see these connections. This story is told in II Kings 2.
At the end of Elijah’s life, the text informs us, he took his single disciple, Elisha, and they journeyed together into the wilderness to have a rendezvous with God. On this journey they talk about Elijah’s imminent departure and Elisha’s succession to the role of the “prophet of Israel.” When they reached their destination, they began what would prove to be their final conversation. Elisha opens it by making a request of his master. I paraphrase: “Master, if I am to be your successor, can I make a final request of you?” Elijah responds by saying: “What is it my son? Speak on.” So Elisha continues: “If I am to do the work you have asked me to do, I need to be endowed with a double portion of your spirit!” To this request, Elijah responded: “I do not know that I have the power to grant you that,” he says, “but if you see me ascending into the sky then you will know that your request has been granted by God.”
At that moment, according to this magnificent Jewish story, a magical, fiery chariot, drawn by magical, fiery horses, appeared out of the sky and swooped down to the ground, coming to a halt at exactly the spot where Elijah and Elisha were talking. It was as if this was a regular stop on this heavenly chariot’s bus route! Without so much as a fare-thee-well, Elijah then stepped immediately into that chariot to begin his ascension into heaven, undoubtedly waving his hand in farewell.
Even the ancients, however, knew that some kind of propulsion was required to transcend the forces of gravity about which they knew nothing, but which they simply accepted as a fact of life. So the text says that God created a whirlwind that came roaring behind the fiery chariot. Pulled by the magical horses, this chariot bearing Elijah, was thus propelled into the sky and to heaven by a whirlwind.
Elisha standing on the earth below watched in wonder. He cried out: “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel.” The important detail in the story, however, was that Elisha saw this ascension, and because he saw, he knew that his request had been granted. He would be endowed with a double portion of Elijah’s powerful, unique and yet still human spirit. It was and is a lovely story. The people of the Middle East were second to none as story tellers. Luke saw Jesus as the new Elijah, but one far more filled with the presence of God than had been the first Elijah. So he magnified this story. The new Elijah did not need the help of a magical chariot drawn by fiery horses. He did not need the heaven-sent whirlwind. As one who was God-sent and God-filled, he would return to God on his own.
He also did not, as Elijah did, have a double portion of his enormous, but still human spirit to bequeath to his disciples. The new and greater Elijah was said by Luke to be in possession of God’s Holy Spirit, which he could bequeath not just to a single disciple, but to all of his disciples then and throughout all of the ages. Luke’s Jesus was Elijah magnified in the hope that by endowing him with these expanded images, he could capture and communicate to his readers the essence of this Christ, who had made God’s presence so near and so available.
So it was that Luke took the story of the ascension of Elijah and his gift to his single disciple of a double portion of his spirit and magnified it beyond all limits. The result was the story of the ascension of Jesus into heaven and the subsequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, both of which are uniquely Lucan stories repeated nowhere else in the New Testament.
When one sees who it was upon whom the Holy Spirit fell at Pentecost, one sees immediately the universal message of Luke’s gospel. “Men from every nation under heaven,” Luke said, were gathered there at Pentecost: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphilia, Egypt, Libya, visitors from Rome, Jews, proselytes, Cretans and Arabians.” Given the knowledge of geography available in the first century, this was a remarkably inclusive list, even if it did call human beings “men!”
Luke knew that this ascension story was not literal history, but he also knew that the inclusive love of God was universal so he told this story. Today we are invited to hear its meaning, and to escape its literal understanding. Gospel truth can never finally be contained in the vocabulary of our humanity.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
