FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

 

  

Easter II - B  
 John 20: 19-31

 

By Harry T. Cook
4/9/12
   

Harry T. Cook
Harry T. Cook

 

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 ill-prepared prepared lectors -- followed then by a 10-15 minute -- or, God have mercy, longer -- homily the quality of which is often enough subpar.

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 that occur in the lectionary 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 that 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
δοκω meaning "to opine" or "to suppose" or "to seem." 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 a group study.  

 

* * * * *

  (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 2012, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


WHAT DO YOU THINK?

I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me: [email protected].



ARCHIVES AVAILABLE
To read previously published Findings, click on the link below.





Email Newsletter icon, E-mail Newsletter icon, Email List icon, E-mail List icon Add your name to our mailing list
For Email Marketing you can trust