Easter II - B
April 19, 2009

Harry T. CookBy Harry T. Cook
4/13/09


John 20: 19-31

A retired clergy acquaintance of mine wrote to say that these editions of FINDINGS II should be of considerable help to homiletic consumers. It is because, he says, it seems impossible to ask biblically illiterate persons to endure the reading of as many as three bible passages at a sitting (four if you include a psalm) - often delivered by inadequately trained or prepared lectors -  followed then by a 10-15 minute homily the quality of which is often enough sub-par.

The elucidation of a text's meaning, which has been rendered from Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek into all manner of English paraphrases (such elucidation supposed to be the purpose of the homiletic enterprise), cannot be a slap-dash thing done with the help of English Bible 101 CliffNotes - or at least not done well.

If sermons or homilies are to address the content and intent of biblical texts, history and context must be taken into account. That requires continued research. Normally members of the lay order do not have ready access to standard commentaries, much less the freshest work of scholars in the field. Clergy have or can have such access, but it takes dedicated time and effort to obtain and to use such resources.

The substitution of faith-based certainty for actual knowledge has ignorance as its net result, and ignorance passed on from pulpit to pew has been a major part of the church's undoing.

That said, let us move on to the gospel passage for Easter II - B: John 20: 19-31.

* * * * *

It is a pity that far fewer people show up for the Sunday morning liturgy in the weeks following Easter Day itself, because the so-called post-resurrection appearance stories give some needed texture and scope to the uncritical proclamation of the resurrection itself. Since all four gospels skirt the issue of a direct resurrection account, what else each includes about Jesus after his execution is important to understanding their theological agenda.

It is helpful to remember that Luke and John had different ideas about what the church came to call "the holy spirit." Luke in Acts 2 makes a production of the advent of the "spirit"and places it 50 days after the supposed resurrection of Jesus. John places it at the "evening of the day of Resurrection" - that day first mentioned at 20:1. Check out Luke 24: 36-49 for a kind of parallel. Both Luke and John see the conferring of the spirit in the context of forgiveness.

It is also important to note that the literal translation of John 20:22 is "receive a holy spirit," not "the" holy spirit, suggesting that doctrine in this respect was a matter for Christians of a later generation.

Are we to understand from John 20: 22-23 that, in possession of "a holy spirit," followers of the post-crucifixion Jesus believed themselves empowered both to remit and to retain the effect of offenses? Or is it a statement of the more obvious idea that offenses committed against human beings can only be forgiven by the offended?

The setting of this passage is "the house where the disciples met." It is not the "upper room" with its reputed intimate gathering of the 12. The word in the text here translated in the NRSV as "disciples" seems to refer to a general following or community and not exclusively to the close-in circle of followers named earlier in John.

That may afford a clue to what the author wanted his readers to see in this scene: Not so much the 12 quaking "in fear of the Jews", but a late First Century community probably composed of both Jews and Gentiles worried about the greater presence of synagogue Judaism which may have arrayed its forces, such as they might have been, against the more innovative and progressive movement of what I call "Jesus Judaism."

The scene John depicts is of a community hunkering down trying to create its own sense of legitimacy in trying to conjure up the presence of the dead Jesus by sharing the meal they apparently believed he had mandated for this very purpose. It is as if he is there among them with a blessing of shalom, which includes a mandate to sort out purposeful offense from unintentional mistake. "Whose sins you remit, they are remitted; whose sins you retain, they are retained."

Another factor in this passage has to do with the visual and tactile aspects of the conjured presence of Jesus with the invitation to a skeptical Thomas to "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side."(1)

Its use to the evangelist may have been two-fold: The first to combat the church's earliest "heresy" known as "docetism" because its proponents held that Jesus had only seemed to be human - the Greek δοκ�ω meaning "to opine" or "to suppose" or "to seem." If the resurrected Jesus bears on his body the wounds of his crucifixion, he must have been human.

But not too human. The second and somewhat contradictory purpose of 20: 24-25 may have been to put Thomas (and his gospel) in his place. Elaine Pagels treats of this subject in a most convincing way in her 2003 Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas in which she contends that the author of the Gospel according to John set forth to combat the thoroughly human Jesus as depicted here and there in the 114 sayings of the Gospel according to Thomas.

Meanwhile, the problem for the earliest followers of Jesus may not have been persuading the skeptical that Jesus had risen from the dead. Plenty of suffering, dying and rising sons of the gods in antiquity were reputed to have experienced all that. The problem or question was: Where was Jesus now, if he had been resurrected? And the answer was: among the community when they sat at table struggling to re-member his broken body.

There are several directions to go with this text for the homilist and his or her consumers. It is rich in possibilities.

Maybe readers will report back to me at [email protected] about what they heard their homilists say or about how these notes were used in group of private study. The Pagels work above mentioned remains in print and is readily available at such retail outlets as Barnes & Noble and Borders as well as through Amazon.com.


* * * * *

(1) Crucifixion, a grisly custom of torture and public humiliation used by both the Phoenicians and Persians and finally by Rome, did not necessarily entail the use of nails. Sometimes victims were bound with leather straps. In any event, death usually came through asphyxiation, exposure to the elements or sheer exhaustion. In no canonical gospel account of the crucifixion itself are nails mentioned. John obviously believed that nails had been used. It is not clear if Mark, Matthew and Luke thought they had.



� Copyright 2009, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

Readers Write 
 
Re Findings II - 4/6/09:

Paul Woodrum, Brooklyn, NY: Bait and switch tactics in the pulpit? And on Easter Day? How about an empty tomb for $19.95 plus S & H?
 
Fred Fenton, Concord, CA: Churchgoers deplore the commercialization of Christian holidays. Chocolate bunnies and baskets of colored eggs seem a distraction from the celebration of Jesus' resurrection. Yet rabbits and eggs, viewed as symbols of fecundity and new life, may better represent a postmodern view of Easter than the earthquake, angels, and empty tomb of the Gospel accounts.
 
The postmodern mind, a mind no better than any other mind, but a mind conditioned by a certain way of thinking, finds unconvincing both a literal reading of the Bible stories and modern explanations of what may have occurred. One modern version speaks of an "Easter moment" when Jesus' disciples realized he was in some sense "risen," and still a force in their lives. Post-moderns desire something more than that. They want their own lives "resurrected," transformed, made new.
 
That miracle begins with self-acceptance, knowing in our hearts we are of infinite worth. It involves stubborn belief in the capacity of the human spirit to triumph over adversity. It means facing an unknown future unafraid, trusting, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, there is ultimate meaning to human existence. Engaging life fully in this way cheats death of its power over our lives now and at the end of the journey.
 
Moreover, living life this way is contagious. It multiplies as fast as rabbits. It represents a renewable kind of energy, a rising of the human spirit, a whole universe of meaning in a single "new" life. We take a second look at the eggs in the Easter basket and smile.
 
Frances Spedding, Lady Lake, FL: While I can understand and appreciate your comments/reactions re congregations' reception of your sermons over the years, have your lay people ever been told that it was the hierarchy which kept us from hearing what scholarship was developing about the "First Century Myth"? In my own life, I have had years and years of bible stories told me without any indication of their source, the years in which they were recorded and, often I am certain, of the church's own spin in order to promote unquestioning acceptance. Perhaps there were some who did such research, but in my experience as a "cradle" Episcopalian it was only about 30 years ago that I first heard the word "myth" pronounced at a gathering of my fellow Christians who were commencing a four-year study of scripture. Is it any wonder that many struggle to accept what seemingly contradicts or even tries to destroy the foundations of their faith? I've spent more than one conversation with a priest teasing him about control of the laity.

Lauralyn Theodore, Naperville, IL: We used your FINDINGS II piece on Easter for our staff devotion today. Here's how it was reflected in the meeting minutes: "Devotion by Lauralyn, from an essay written by a friend of hers who is an Episcopal priest. The phrase 'eternal life' is a theme of the gospels, but should not be understood as a reward. Instead it reflects living your life in the best way possible, so that your aspirations enrich your life. Heaven, like hope, lives in you.
[ed. Note: Ms. Theodore is the administrator of Community United Methodist Church in Naperville IL.]








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