Читать книгу The Story of Jesus - Roy A. Harrisville - Страница 15

The Gospels record that Jesus begins his ministry with the summons to repent in view of the arrival of God’s Kingdom, or as Matthew persistently refers to it, “the Kingdom of heaven,” in typically Jewish fashion omitting use of the “Shem,” the Name. As always in the New Testament, “repentance” does not denote “change of mind” as in the Greek, but “return,” as in the Hebrew. As for the term “Kingdom,” “Rule of God” is a happier translation, allowing for contrast with earthly powers, as well as for emphasizing God’s Rule as a future as well as a present reality. In his summons and announcement of the Rule of God’s arrival Jesus clearly alters the preaching of the Baptist. John’s baptism is a sign of protection for those who return to a hope that threatens to be lost, hope in the future of God. More, for John this return occurs in view of the coming Judge (“His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire,” Matthew 3:12). On the other hand, for Jesus the Rule of God has already broken in; change in the world has already begun. God is beginning to win back the world that he made. The Rule of God is thus the constitutive event of salvation. Further, the judgment that John preaches is only the obverse side of the grace or favor of God which Jesus announces and makes explicit in his activity and mission. To the extent the Rule of God is not only a present but also a future reality, hastening toward a final consummation, to that extent, at least in a formal sense, for both John and Jesus those who receive the “good news are ranged alongside those who wait. Thus, in Jesus’ proclamation of God’s Rule a tension exists between its having “already” come, and its having “not yet” totally overcome what opposes it.

This Rule of God is not brought about by dint of human effort. It is not, as one noted early twentieth century theologian put it, transformed by Jesus into a “series of gifts which one is to receive by changed behavior according to the will of God,” does not occur “in such fashion that one follows the leading will of God by the deed.”9 Nor did Jesus, called to establish the Kingdom, altogether detach the idea of judgment from its future conclusion,10 totally subsuming the “not yet” aspect of the kingdom into the “now already” of an ethical action. According to the New Testament, the coming of the Rule of God Jesus brings is an event totally apart from human activity, whatever its consequences for human existence. The saving activity of God made concrete in Jesus must occur apart from human doing or willing able to taint or hinder it. One may indeed wait for it, place hope in it, long for it, as did old Simeon “for the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25), but, as the Reformer wrote in his Small Catechism, “the Kingdom of God comes indeed of itself without our prayer.” Jesus may act in response to human need, as the stories of healing indicate, but that he is or that he acts in response to a need is his own affair. In reply to the leper’s plea, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean,” Jesus answers “I do choose. Be made clean!” Let that “I do choose” (Matthew 8:3) or “I will,” as the older translation has it, serve as device over his life and career. And while there is no question that an ethical action is required in view of the Rule of God’s arrival—what else could the summons to repent mean?—that ethical action is in the nature of an answer, not an accompaniment to the Rule of God. Reduction of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God to a summons to ethical action according to a series of values, current in nineteenth and early twentieth century idealism, has stood godparent for that talk of “building the Kingdom” I heard so often in my youth. In the New Testament, the call to pray in the second petition of the “Our Father” that the Kingdom or Rule of God may come “also to us” is not a call to initiate or accompany its arrival.

Writing of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, the Fourth Gospel records two events not reported in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The first is Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, which may be assigned to the beginnngs of Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem. The second is his conversation with the woman at the well, in a context totally absent in the Synoptics, that is, a ministry of Jesus in Samaria. Both reports illustrate what is perhaps the greatest difference between John and his co-evangelists, that is, his recital of the language of Jesus. In John Jesus does not speak in parables, terse or brief statements, but in long, repetitive speeches which advance in spiral fashion toward a dominant theme and end in self-disclosure. Scholars tend to regard this feature as reflecting post-Easter influence on earlier Jesus-tradition. Obviously, the experience of Easter was bound to leave its mark on the Gospel tradition. Apart from that experience there would scarcely have been any gospel to record. The question is whether or not the Easter experience has so influenced the Gospel of John that it has substantially altered the memory of what Jesus actually said or did, and whether such alteration could be legitimized by invoking the Spirit who would “remind” Jesus’ followers of all he had said (cf. John 14:26). Such will always be a matter of debate.

The dialogue with Nicodemus opens with the nightly visit of the Pharisee, who addresses Jesus as “Rabbi,” or Teacher, as did Andrew and Peter earlier (John 1:38). Initially, the address is at considerable distance from the Baptist’s heralding of Jesus as “Son of God” (John 1:34, ), but then, as also occurs with Nathaniel, it is heightened to the acknowledgement of Jesus’ unique relation to God. In Nathaniels’ case the acknowledgement (“You are the Son of God!” John 1:49) is occasioned by Jesus’ foreknowledge (“I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you,” John 1:48), and in that of Nicodemus (“We know that you are a teacher who has come from God,” John 3:2a), by a conclusion drawn from Jesus’ activity (“No one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God,” John 3:2b). To this Jesus responds that none can enter the kingdom of God without being born “from above.” Nicodemus takes the adverb to mean “again,” and in utter confusion asks, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Actually, in the Greek the adverb may be taken to mean either “from above” or “again.” The same is true of the adverb in the Aramaic, the language of the dialogue. Nicodemus tripped over the double entendre, conceived the “birth” as a repetition. Jesus had in mind a “birth” distinct from human activity, a birth beyond and in contrast to the earrthly or fleshly: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). But if this “birth” is in contrast to what is earthly or fleshly, it occurs by way of what is earthly, by “water and Spriti.” Not a scintilla of the Gnostic’s hatred of the earthly here. Further, this birth is undiscoverble by those who have not undergone it. In a sentence reminiscent of the Jewish wisdom teacher, Jesus says, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). To all of which Nicodemus responds: “How can these things be?” only to be reprimnded for an obtuseness suggestive of deficient learning: “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” (John 3:10). Continuing his reprimand, Jesus appeals to the testimony of witnesses which Nicodemus should have allowed: “We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony.” According to Mosaic law, two witnesses sufficed to sustain a charge,11 and to whom would that “we” refer, if not “the one who descended from heaven” (John 3:13) and the one from whom he descended? The inability to understand hides a refusal to receive. Then, curiously, Jesus says: “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” (John 3:12). The refusal to receive has become a refusal to believe. But how could that “birth from above. . .by water and Spirit” be taken to be “earthly things”? Nicodemus has been conceded some grasp of the situation. The Pharisee has at least understood that the “birth” of which Jesus speaks has to do with being, with existence. He has tumbled to the ontological aspect of the event, though he construes it entirely in terms of an earthly, human activity, entrance into the womb a second time, an event he rejects, disbelieves. Then follows the first passion prediction in the Fourth Gospel, prefaced by the statement that “no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Whether a post-Easter titular use or no, “Son of Man” here is a self-reference, and the word of his ascent is a prolepsis, the anticipation of an event yet to occur, the hour of his “going to the Father” (John 14:12), the “hour” of his glorification, for this evangelist synonymous with his crucifixion (John 17:1). Faith in this “Son of Man,” not the apocalyptic figure of Jewish hope, masked, incognito, suspected of being this one or that, but the one “lifted up,” crucified, gives eternal life. “For,” Jesus continues (use of the indeclinable particle is argumentative, gives the reason for the statement preceding), it was love of the world that God gave his only Son, “gave” being another prolepsis, another anticipation of an event yet to occur. The term used for that event (“gave” = edoken in the Greek), willed by both Father and Son, would reflect the Old Testament concept of sacrifice as atonement. And if the evangelist was not only at odds with members of the synagogue whio refused Jesus as Messiah, but also with Gnostics and their notion of earth as evil, and the body as a prison, this was one more shot across their bow. Nor was this “sending” of the Son a condemnation of the world, but a salvation through faith in him. Faith, then, would decide the issue whether the world would return the love it had been shown in the “lifting up” or the “giving” or the “sending” of the Son of Man. And that lifting up, that giving or sending was a “light” to which those would come who “do what is true,” or as the original reads, “who do the truth.” This curious phrase appears nowhere else in the New Testament, and however construed it leaves no room for truth as an abstraction, a mere correspondence of thought and reality pursued with the mind, but a coherence realized in action, in something done, in a coming to “the light.” On the other hand, those who would not come to “the light” loved “darkness” because their evil risked exposure. “Light” and “dark” make up a pair used to illustrate every fundamental theological idea of the Old Testament. None better contrasts chaos and creation; none more adequately reveals glimpses of the holiness of God, expresses the experience of the Creator, or conveys the prophecy of the revelation of the Being of God and his judgment. The pair is forerunner of some of the greatest New Testament utterances. And so they appear here in a context which for many is the most signal utterance in the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). Ultimately, Nicodemus will have negotiated the hurdle, will have come to “the light.” With Joseph of Arimathea he brought myrrh and aloes with which to wrap the body of Jesus (John 19:39–40).

Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well occurs at Sychar, near Shechem, chief city of the Samaritans. The inhabitants of the region, the “Northern Kingdom,” originally comprised the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, Asher, and Zebulun. Led by their reading of II Kings, historians have traditionally described the Samaritans as a mixed race, resulting from a massive transmigration during the Assyrian occupation in approximately 721 BC Taking its lead from II Chronicles, current research tends to regard the inhabitants as retaining their Jewish identity, despite the Assyrian military campaigns. For example, in II Chronicles 30, King Hezekiah of Judah issues an invitation to “all Israel and Judah. . .also to Ephraim and Manasseh,” to come to Jerusalem to keep the Passover. The division between Judaeans and Samaritans may not have occurred till the third century BC when the Israelites of Samaria built their sanctuary to Yahweh at Mt. Gerizim. From that point the Samaritan religion as we know it began to harden, with its sole appeal to the Pentateuch as scripture mediated by Moses, appeal to the altar at Gerizim as built by Joshua at Moses’ command, and its prospect of a final day of vengeance and recompense initiated by the Messiah or Taheb. The New Testament as well as the Mishnah reflect ambivalence toward the Samaritans. For instance, the New Testament records that Jesus encountered resistance in the Samaritan villages (Luke 9:52–53), and instructed the disciples not to go there (Matthew 10:5–6), but it also notes that Jesus healed a Samaritan (Luke 17:11–19), and that a Samaritan figured large in his most famous parable (the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29–37). The Book of Acts, chapter 8, refers to Samaria as an early mission field. Likewise, the Mishnah allows the Samaritan to share the Common Grace, to pronounce the “Amen” after the Benediction, to care for produce and sell wine designated for tithing.12 But it also records the saying of Rabbi Eleazar ben Hyrcanus, one of the most prominent scholars of the first and second centures AD, and the sixth most frequently mentioned in the Mishnah, that “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like to one that eats the flesh of swine.”13 Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman on his way from Judea through Samaria to Galilee. Seeing her at the well he asked her to give him a drink, to which she replied “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (John 4:9), to which the evangelist adds his note that the one has nothing to do with the other, reflecting one of the coontradictories noted above. Then follows an extended exchange about water in which the woman, just as Nicodemus, trips over the double entrendre, construes Jesus’ reference to the “living water” he will give as one part hydrogen and two parts oxygen, and he without a bucket and the well deep. To Jesus’ correction, but this time without tracing the error to a lack of learning, the woman asks for a water that will never again need drawing from Jacob’s well. The woman has tripped again, but, just as Nicodemus, has caught at least a glimpse of Jesus’ intent. She acknowledges him as the one able to furnish such an uncommon element: “Sir,” she says, or “Lord” (Kyrie in the Greek), “give me this water” ( 4:15). Then Jesus abruptly breaks off the dialogue to tell the woman to go, call her husband. She replies that she has none, Jesus agrees, notes she has had five, and is not married to number six. Addressing Jesus as “Lord” for the second time, the woman in astonishment says, “I see that you are a prophet” (4:19), and proceeds to engage in a theological conversation reflecting the competition between Jews and Samaritans over the central sanctuary: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem” (4:20). Then, majestically (“Woman, believe me”), Jesus gives worship a character sufficient to render site irrelevant: “The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . .when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (4:21, 23). Curiously, between those two phrases, Jesus denies that to the Samaritan and asserts that only the Jew has a worship aware of its object: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” (4:22). Having just rendered worship sites irrelevant, it cannot mean that Judaism is an exception, but rather that despite its clinging to geography the reltivizing of site has its origin in Judaism, and God for its author: ”For the Father seeks such as these to worship him” (4:23b). To this the woman responds, “I know that Messiah is coming” (4:25). There is nothing askew in her response. Just as true worshp of the Father “in spirit and truth” is an event for the end-time (“the hour is coming”), so also is the coming of the Messiah. But that Messiah is not the Taheb or the Moses of Samaritan religion. In the sovereign predication originating in the revelation to Moses,14 and threading throughout the discourses in John, Jesus says “I am he” (4:26a). The narrative ends with the woman’s return to her city with news of the encounter, with the disciples’ tripping over yet another double entendre,15 and with the Samaritans’ independently coming to faith in “the Savior of the world” (4:42).

According to the first three Gospels, following a forty-day fast, Jesus was tempted of the devil. First of all, Mark’s account is extremely abbreviated when compared with that of Matthew and Luke. He merely notes that the Spirit “immediately drove” Jesus into the wilderness, the verb suggestive of a having been “thrown,” the very same as used in Mark’s exorcism narratives. In Matthew and Luke the solicitations of Satan begin with the temptation to turn stones to bread, an obvious opener in view of the forty-day and night fast, after which Jesus was “famished” (Matthew 4:2; Luke 4:2). In Matthew the second temptation consists of the devil’s taking Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and urging him to prove his sonship with God by throwing himself down, and the third of the devil’s showing him all the kingdoms of the world, promising to give it all away on the condition of Jesus’ worship. In Luke the sequence of the second and third temptations is reversed, with the promise to give Jesus all the world’s kingdoms in second place. For Luke and Matthew the temptation to turn stones to bread logically follows Jesus’ exhaustion at the forty day fast, but Luke’s assigning the temptation to assume the glory and authority of all the kingdoms of earth to the next position might match his interest in accenting the story of Jesus within a world-historical context.

Attempts on the part of scholars to wrest meaning from this narrative as “in some measure” corresponding to real experience, as symbolic, denoting a “conflict of soul,” or as an encounter and a conquest of ideas unworthy of Messiahship in Jesus’ own mind, only indicate anguish at having to deal with the narrative. Naturally, questions arise. If there were no witnesses to the event of the struggle, how did the news of it get out? Is it at all reasonable to suppose that Jesus told his disciples of it? Or, is the entire scene to be put down as legend, to which each of the evangelists adds his nuance? As will soon be shown, in Mark, for all its brevity, the narrative serves as engine for an activity threading through his Gospel. In Luke the event ends with the devil’s departure till “an opportune time,” (4:13), the time when “Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot” (22:3). If Luke does not intend that those comments serve as an “inclusion,” bracketing his Gospel as an extended passion narrative, then at least as omen of the passion to come. In addition, if the evangelists did not compose their writings simply to furnish their readers with factual knowledge, but to invoke faith, then the dialogue between Jesus and Satan, in each instance concluding with a Deuteronomic text, is calculated to remind the reader about the one from whom strength to endure in the hour of temptation derives. Thus Matthew and Luke 4:4 read: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God;”16 Matthew 4:7 and Luke 4:12 read: Do not put the Lord your God to the test,”17 and finally Matthew 4:10 and Luke 4:8 read: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”18

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, with its story-poem entitled “The Grand Inquisitor,” may be among the most thoughtful of expositions on the temptations. The story is told by Ivan, suspected atheist, to his brother Alyosha, a novice monk, with its setting in Seville, the city to which Jesus comes down after almost a hundred heretics have been burned at the stake. Everyone recognizes him. An old man blind from childhood cries out for healing, and the scales fall from his eyes. At the cathedral steps weeping mourners bring in a little white coffin containing a child of seven. The child’s mother throws herself at his feet, and at Jesus’ word the little girl rises and sits up. At that moment the Grand Inquisitor arrives, sees everything, orders the guards to take him, and shuts him up in prison. In the darkness the prison door suddenly opens, the Inquisitor enters, and proceeds to list his prisoner’s errors at the temptation. Only three powers, says the cardinal, are able to conquer and hold captive—miracle, mystery, and authority—but his prisoner rejected them all, and gave a freedom no one understands, only fears and dreads. If he had given men bread, they would have run after him like a flock of sheep. Next, refusing to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, he had rejected miracle, and finally, spurning the royal purple with which he could have founded a universal state, he had asked only for the free verdict of the human heart. Admitting he had once prized that freedom, the Inquisitor confesses he had awakened, and joined with those who had corrected Christ’s work.19 This story-poem, to say nothing of the interpretation of the evangelists from which it takes its origin, deserves hurling against the suspected historicity of the event. In the last century, and well into the present, we have witnessed what can only have been transcendent, from hell, not simply from an aggregate of human error. As for Jesus, the temptation never left him: “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe” (Mark 15:32; cf. Matthew 27:42–43).