Jesus as Prophet: An Access to the Quest for the Historical Jesus of Nazareth. by Arthur Jones
Trinity Papers Number 11
Trinity College
The University Of Melbourne
The Right Revd Dr Arthur Jones is the Bishop of Gippsland. He holds two doctorates, and has taught theology in Australia and the Philippines, and has served in parishes in Panama, in New South Wales and in the Diocese of Gippsland. In this, the Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, delivered in September 1998, Dr Jones makes the case for Jesus as prophet as a power vehicle for understanding the role of Jesus in his time, and for his followers today.
This paper represents the 11th in a series prepared by Trinity College which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, politics, and science. Copies are available upon request from the Tutorial Office, Trinity College, Parkville, Victoria 3052 Australia.
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Introduction i. Barry Marshall George Caird, one of the valiant ones in my discipline, usually ended a lecture by turning it into a sermon. I will never reach his stature as a New Testament scholar, but I tend to do the same thing. Another hero is Brooke Foss Westcott. He sometimes ended letters with dovxa tw'////'/'/// Qew/', ‘glory to God’, even to his fiancee, and these words are the essential postscript to this lecture. Barry Marshall, Brother Timothy as a religious, took the retreat when I was made a priest. He heard my confession about a matter that had haunted me for years. It then vanished from my mind. He was above all else a priest. Bishop Kenneth Leslie, who was then my bishop, described him as a ‘spiritual master’. He asked us to listen intently to what Barry said. This was a practical necessity, because he spoke with lightning-like rapidity. He also had something to say in a manner that engaged people when he spoke. He was perhaps not a systematic thinker, but he was acutely insightful and implacable in dissecting sloppy thinking. Barry Marshall had an applied intellectual bent, but his real power was in his intuitive insights derived from learning, trust in experience, and contemplation at depth. I hope to honour his capacity for fresh insights, his courage to be himself, and his habitual focus on God in all that follows. I do not remember anything that Barry Marshall said in those retreat addresses thirty-one years ago, even if I did listen intently. I only remember a healing. The other ordinands would have different memories at different levels of intensity, or perhaps little or no remembrance. I have no personal knowledge of Brother Timothy’s work here at Trinity. I know of it only from others. My assessment of the mind and person of Barry Marshall may be slanted and incomplete and quite wrong in detail or substance. His memory is preserved in the recollections of those who knew him and in writings connected with him. ii. The Gospel Materials There is, in John Dominic Crossan’s words about the Gospels, an ‘interface between memory, morality, and literacy’.1 Crossan uses the talk between Frank McCourt and Patricia Madigan in Angela’s Ashes as a focus on one part of the sequence in this interface. 2 The scene is Limerick’s Fever Hospital where he is recovering from typhoid at ten and she is dying of diphtheria at fourteen. She reads him a stanza of a poem each day about the ‘highway man’ who came riding ‘up to the old inn door’. They strain to talk to each other from one room to another. He has to remember the stanzas and say them back to her. He is moved upstairs. because ‘typhoid doesn’t talk to diphtheria.’ She dies and he is left not knowing the end of the story of the poem. Seamus who cleans the floors knows little poetry, but he recalls a man in the local who recites the verses of the ‘highwayman’ poem. He will get the closing stanzas from the man in the pub and carry them back in his head. After doing this, Seamus stands in the middle of the ward leaning on his mop and recites the end of the story. This begins with a written poem, is committed to memory, no matter how briefly, and is shared and preserved orally for a moment in time. This process can be reversed, and indeed it has been in the inter-connections between Church and Scriptures. It has been put that the Church produced the Scriptures and also that the 1 2
John Dominic Crossan. The Birth of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1998, 79. ibid., 88-89 3
Scriptures produced the Church. Both positions are wrong in part. The Scriptures and the Church grew up together in an encounter with Jesus in Ruach, ‘Spirit’, after his resurrection. Recent research on Ruach indicates that ‘breath’ and ‘wind’ do not cover its meaning in full.3 It is also an ‘open space’ the ‘field’ in which God opens up the dimensions of encounter. The Tanach itself, the ‘Old Testament’ as we persist in calling it, grew up in the encounter with the Ruach of God in the qahal, ’the assembly’, of Israel. The Tanach recalled for the Jews their encounters with God in the recalled events of their pilgrimage. The role models, the heroes and heroines, the loved and despised ones, the saints and the slime of their history also appeared in the Tanach. These chunks of ‘matrix and format’4 as Crossan describes them with his own careful distinctions, make up the complex jigsaw of the ‘social memory’ 5 of Israel. ‘Jigsaw’ is not used here in any sense of a neatly arranged pattern. Some pieces will always be missing, though I think that we can trace the major components. I am going to take one of those chunks, that of the model and role of the prophet from the Tanach. I will apply it in its own complexity to the ministry and passion of Jesus in the Gospels. I will assert that the gospel form, clustered in diverse strands around the person of Jesus, does reveal insights into the historical matrix of his life and ministry. Anthony Harvey has described these hard-won insights as ‘something overheard’, as if one is overhearing a conversation, hearing bits of it without being able to ascertain or describe it in full or to actively participate. 6 This difficulty remains, and it constrains us. However, there is still much to work with, so let us take the chunk of ‘prophet’ out of the jigsaw without separating it from the whole pattern. Let us see if it can help us to place Jesus among his people so that the quest for the historical verities attaching to the prophet from Nazareth can be entered afresh. Whether it is about the real Barry Marshall, or the probably fictional Frank and Patricia, or the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, some of the interfaces remain. iii. Prophets in Israel The startling fact about the emergence of the prophets John the Baptiser and Jesus on the first-century Palestinian scene is that they have no identifiable prophetic contemporaries. The strenuous efforts of Sean Freyne and Richard Horsley in particular have produced revolutionaries and bandits with occasional prophetic traits rather than prophets verifiable as prophets of Israel. But Jesus and John are prophets, even if it is really Jesus who is ‘more than a prophet’ rather than John. Moreover, it is apparent that the Gospel writers have used a prophetic base for the gospel genre. This also introduces a prophetic foundation associated with Jesus. The Elijah-Elisha cycle in I Kings 17-II Kings 13 with its cycle of miracles attached to their prophetic roles is a foundational plank in the gospel genre. The Moses paradigm with its linkage of prophecy, lawgiving and notions of divinity applied to Moses, particularly in Philo, also makes a significant contribution to the gospel genre and composition. The work of Roth,7 Swartly, 8 Derrett9 and others has affirmed that the gospel genre is tanachian-shaped. It takes forms from the Tanach and transform them into another dimension in an effort to encompass the strange figure of Jesus. The past roles and models of being persons in Israel are repeated over and over in the New Testament. They are repeated to ensure foundations rather than to encapsulate the fresh structures that would be erected. Yet without them there would be no point of facilitation for the superimposing of the new paradigm on the old.
H. Cazelles, Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible (Paris: Letouzey & Ane, Editeurs, 1986), 131-138. ibid., 85. 5 ibid., 88. 6 Anthony Harvey, Something Overheard (London:Billing and Sons, 1977), 1-5. 7 Wolfgang Roth, Hebrew Gospel; Cracking the Code of Mark ( Oak Park: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988). 8 William M. Swartley, Israel’s Scripture traditions and the Synoptic Gospels (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994). 9 J. Duncan M. Derrett, The Making of Mark: The Scriptural Bases of the Earliest Gospel (Shipston-on-Stour: Drinkwater, 1985). 3 4
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John the Baptiser is clearly a prophet of wrath in company with Zephaniah and Zechariah. He is also reported as being intent on making the ‘one who is to come’ in his own fiery image. It is Luke who gives this image its clearest eschatological contours: ‘I baptise you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork will be in his hand, to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’ .10 Juan Luis Segundo, in his later attempts to recapture the Jesus of history, sought to separate sharply John the Baptist and Jesus as prophetic types. That is, John as a prophet of wrath and Jesus as a prophet of the ‘good news’.11 He succeeded only in part. After all, Luke and the other gospel writers do not disown the Baptiser’s predictions about Jesus as an eschatological figure. Moreover, in the verse following the passage quoted above, Luke comments that the Baptiser ‘with many other exhortations proclaimed the good news ( eu*hggelivzeto ) to the people’ (3:18). Jesus fulfills in some sense the predicated role of ‘baptising’ with the Holy Spirit after entering the river boundary and being drenched with Spirit at the Jordan. But fire does not come until Pentecost, except as a threat against a few unfortunate Samaritans.12 Wherever Jesus walks, there is the Spirit: but baptising in Spirit and fire belongs to the description of Pentecost and wherever the sparks of the Spirit-fire of Pentecost fell. Jesus is a messianic prophet. He is depicted as consciously thrusting himself and his preaching into the focus of the inbreaking reign of God. Like Elijah and Elisha before him, Jesus has a prophetic band who gather around him. They are the witnesses of the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. The continuing witness of those who sat at Jesus’ feet was crucial for the confirmation of the resurrection.13 It was also the imprimatur for those who translated witness into the first messages of the movement that I have called the ‘Fifth Way’ in Judaism. At the heart of the ‘Fifth Way’, the Jesus Movement, is the notion that Jesus shows that Imago Dei is more about love than dominion. Jesus points to something missing: Abba. But it is Abba defined by Jesus’ humanity and intimacy with Abba. Our humanity is defined by Jesus’ humanity grounded in his intimacy with God. Jesus and Paul travel on parallel tracks about a number of matters, but they are at one in defining our very being and our sexuality through our humanity, rather than the other way around. The Imago Dei is a prophetic connection via call within God and with the recipients of the prophet’s message. The prophet is nothing without God and the participants in the prophet’s story. The prophet demands the freedom to cut to the heart of matters. This caused the Pharisees and Sadducees great uneasiness about Jesus, though they also had people who cut through religious red tape. The new sacral-world model after the destruction of the Temple and the later literary focus at Jamnia was tightly-drawn. It was tighter in its web of connections than the model that Jesus was decidedly uncomfortable with in both Judah and Galilee. We can speculate that he would not have agreed with Judah the Prince! He would not have agreed with us, either, in that those of us who have faith in God tend to see life from the side of religion. Jesus sees religion prophetically, from the side of life, though it is life grounded in God. We repeat, the gospels are prophetically intentional. So is the ministry of Jesus. In fact it could not have been otherwise if Jesus was to model himself on any of the established roles in Israel. Given the role-repetition expectations of the Jews, then a choice had to be made. There was no way of predicting how a Messiah would operate in relating to the people in everyday life. That Luke 3:16-17. Juan Luis Segundo, La Historia Perdida y Recuperada de Jesus de Nazaret (Montevideo: Editorial Sal Terrae, 1990), 173. 12 Luke 9:54. 13 Acts 1:22. 10 11
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is, apart from cataclysmic or not-so-devastating comings and the predicted results of such breakthroughs. The choice made by Jesus was that of the modus operandi of a prophet, given his own transformation of that role. iv. Methodology I propose to use a prophetic ‘triad’ suggested by Elouise Renich Fraser as an analytical tool applied to key areas in the reported ministry of Jesus in the Gospels. This triad was outlined by Fraser in a seminal article. 14 Fraser noted that the binding of nephesh, ‘life in the body’ with the words and the symbols/deeds of the prophet is utterly crucial to the identity of the nabi, the ‘prophet’ of Israel. Sumbollein means to ‘gather together’. So much is poured into the symbols used by the prophets, and so much is refracted from them. The prophet’s claim to speak for God always provokes a crisis of identity as it did with John the Baptist and Jesus. If the triad does not hold together, then the prophet is false. The wise person has the same requirements, but the heavy emphasis on symbols/acts aligned to the words of the prophet and grounded in their nephesh is distinctive. 15 It identifies the role of a prophet or if it is lacking, it destroys it. If Jesus is not a true prophet then he is not accessible as the Son of Man or the Son of God. 1. Jordan: The Call and Commissioning of a Messianic Prophet Jesus came to the Jordan to be baptised. We are not told of the inner stirrings that brought him there, but it is clearly intentional on his part. The dialogue in the Matthean account between Jesus and the Baptiser may have had an underlying kernel where Jesus expressed his call in the presence of another prophet. The whole scene is full of symbols in terms of the Jordan River as a marker of entry into the promised land, the dove of creation and Spirit, the bath qol, and water at a river rich in symbolic significance in itself. . Jesus comes unknown to the Jordan according to the record, and he leaves it ‘draped’ in a rich array of concepts which will shape the rest of his life. He leaves the water as a messianic prophet whose proclamation of the reign of God includes his own royal role in the kingdom. This is given its most divine shape by the bath qol utterance at Mark 1:11, ‘You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased’ (Psalm 2:7; Isaiah 42:1, 44:2, 62:4; Genesis 22:2). Mark’s use of Scripture for the voice of God brings a divine prophecy to the event at the Jordan. I have used the term bath qol, in some sense a circumlocution for the voice of God, but it is clear in Mark that the voice is directed from God to Jesus. There is no notion of mediation. It is Scripture which is the circumlocution rather than the bath qol. The use of an allusion from the Servant Songs meshes Jesus’ ministry with the Servant of Israel. The Jesus of the Gospels is the Suffering Servant of God long before the Cross. The first suffering comes almost immediately in the temptations. The symbols of the settling dove (one of creation’s most beautiful pause moments), water, wilderness, river boundaries, the participation of the Baptiser who has the ‘word of the Lord’ as his own commission (Luke 3:12), are caught up with the integrity of the risk-taking God invested in Jesus. The framework and content of God’s prophetic ‘intervention’ at the Jordan initiates the integrating conceptual framework of Jesus’ own prophetic ministry. Nephesh, words, and symbols/deeds hold together. It also gives us an analytical access to the baptism of Jesus that we do not have in any other way. We catch a glimpse of the actual event.
Elouise Renich Fraser, ‘Symbolic Acts of the Prophets’. Studia Biblica et Theologica, 1974, Vol. IV, 45- 53. 15 Morna Hooker, The Signs of a Prophet (Harrisburg: Trinity International Press, 1997), 57-58. 14
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2. Temptations in the Wilderness: The Testing of a Messianic Prophet The temptations hinge on the scenario created in the Markan account, and that scenario as expanded in Matthew and Luke. The narratives express both the testing and the symbols of Israel’s prophetic mission and the mission of the messianic prophet from Nazareth: forty days, the testing of people and prophet in the wilderness, and the message of God to prophet and people. The prophetic nuances are there in the temptation accounts, but prophets are ostensibly grounded in history, whereas the temptation accounts are not history in any definitive sense. Their claim to history in any sense is linked to the Church’s interpretation of the humanity and divinity of Christ and his ultimate testing at Gethsemane and the Cross. The brief analysis here is an attempt to establish a prophetic gestalt in the temptation accounts. i. Integrity This ‘testing’ before the ministry begins is as crucial as the testing at Gethsemane that is a prelude to the end of Jesus’ ministry. ii. Words Jesus responds in the Matthean and Lukan accounts in words of Scripture to the Tempter’s taunts. This is ‘the word of the Lord’ to him from the Tempter, even though the Tempter uses Scripture as a means of ensnarement. Jesus does not deny the veracity of the text used by the Devil, but refutes its misuse with another text.16 This crucial battle over words decides who is true or false in the situation: as in the prophets of Israel, the word of the Lord must be seen to be true in concrete situations. iii. Deed/Symbols The deeds/symbols of the temptation accounts are the fusing of Jesus’ overcoming of various forms of testing, with a richness of symbols. The wilderness itself is a testing. The stones that crunch underfoot in the wilderness are referred to by the Devil in quoting Psalm 91:12. Symbols are not just for prophets! The mountain in Matthew is a symbol that recurs after the Temptation, and in particular at the Sermon on the Mount (5:1), and the Transfiguration. (17:1). It also occurs at the end of this Gospel at the commissioning of the disciples in prophetic terms for their mission (28:16). The mountain is a symbol for the numinous in Judaism because of its links with Sinai/Horeb and all that occurred there on Israel’s pilgrimage. Assessment The Temptation accounts are undoubtedly linked to ‘Moses and all the prophets’, particularly in view of the wilderness, a mountain, forty days, and the emphasis on the word of God. Jesus the messianic prophet emerges from this experience with his integrity preserved and his prophetic mission intact and open before him. 3. Preaching in Parables: Teaching; Amen, Amen i. Integrity The declaration of Jesus that ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news’ (Mark 1:15) opens the ministry in Galilee according to Mark. At once, Jesus associates his own integrity with his proclamation, and this continues in the description of his preaching and teaching as we have received it. The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount probes the motivational sources of words and deeds. It does it in such a way that the integrity of the teacher is also placed on the line at once. The parables are not unique to
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cf. Psalm 91:11-12; Deuteronomy 6:6. 7
Jesus as Brad Young has shown,17 but the way in which he stands inside his parables as part of their rationale is distinctive. ii. Words The preaching and teaching of Jesus, whether in proclaiming the ‘reign of God’ or in response to concrete situations and probing questions, is always associated with his own integrity. The words are either true to Jesus’ identity, to his perception of the will of God, to the situation at hand, or they are not. The rejection of his teaching, e.g. in the reaction to the parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mark 12:1-12), is also a rejection of his person and role. The prepositive use of ‘amen’ and the doubled ‘amen, amen’ is distinctive in Israel, as Jeremias said.18 It is the nearest that Jesus gets to saying ‘Thus says the Lord’ as in the prophets, though Witherington and others want to minimise this connection19. The call for justice in the prophets is spelled out in concrete terms in the Last Judgement scene described in Matthew 25:36-41. iii. Deeds/Symbols Meier is correct in asserting that ‘the most significant sayings of Jesus about the kingdom’s presence contain references to significant actions of Jesus that communicate this presence.’20 The ‘mount’ of the Sermon is undoubtedly linked in Matthew’s hermeneutic to the mountain in the wilderness of the Exodus. The ‘kingdom’ proclaimed and taught in the Sermon is itself symbolic of the total context of God’s dealing with his people in ‘heaven and earth’ (Matthew 6:10). 4. The Nature Miracles and the Healer The ‘nature miracles’, such as the Stilling of the Storm and the Feeding of the Multitude are demonstrations of signal power in Jesus. They are taken as signs of his being the Messiah in the Gospels. However, the access to these miracles is through the prophetic word that issues in a ‘miracle’ in the Tanach and particularly in the Elijah-Elisha cycle. The healings are not only important in the Gospels: they are also presented in Acts of the Apostles as a continuation of the historical ministry of Jesus, in his ‘name’.21 The Gospel of Thomas links prophet and healer in one of its sayings: ‘No prophet is accepted in his own village; no physician heals those who know him’ (31). This appears to be a conflation of Mark 6:6 and par. It may be either an allusion to a fuller saying of Jesus about physicians (Mark 2:17 and par.), or a distinctive saying in its own right. Whether in the nature miracles or in healings, Jesus is intentionally revealed by the gospel writers as ‘more than a prophet’. But the person and work of a prophet gives the access in a way recognisable in Israel. i. Integrity The nature miracles and the healings put the integrity of Jesus on the line in a crucial way: he either succeeds in what he does, or he does not, and his symbols/deeds are conjoined to his person and word, as in the prophets. The only qualification about his capacity to heal is given at Mark 6:1-6 and par., cf. Matthew 13:58. However, the real issue there is not his capacity to work a miracle, but the question of whether the source of his power is in God. ii. Words The ‘prophetic interchanges’ or dialogues are intense in both the feeding of the five thousand and the stilling of the storm on the Lake. The ‘interchange’ often tests the person concerned. Brad Young, Jesus and His Jewish Parables (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 55-128. Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology (London: SCM Press, 1971), 35. 19 Ben Witherington III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 188. 20 Meier, Vol. II, 451. 21 Acts 3:1-10; 8:12-13; 9:32-35. 17 18
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But the word of the prophet-Messiah is also crucial. He must do what he says he will do, or he is a false prophet. If he is a false prophet, he is also a false Messiah: the interconnection is clear enough. iii. Deeds/Symbols The deeds are clear in that both the nature miracles and also the healings occur after Jesus commits himself. The symbols vary from the ‘taking’ of bread and fish to the use of spittle and mud, to ‘touching’ in some way: This ‘touching’/healing is taken to the extreme of touching/healing a leper (Mark 1:40-43). Assessment Taking the nature miracles and the healings in tandem demonstrates that they have a similar access in terms of Jesus’ modus operandi: that of a prophet who performs miracles and heals the sick as in the comparative aretalogical sequences in the Elijah-Elisha cycle. Meier notes that ‘Regular miracle-working by an itinerant prophet active in northern Israel would naturally conjure up thoughts of Elijah and Elisha.’22 The gospel writers plainly see these miracles as an authentication of the person of Jesus as Messiah. The space given to them in the Gospels and the significance attached to them in editorial comments confirms this application. But the access to all that happens is the way in which the miracles unfold through the participation of Jesus and his ‘interchange’ with others. This ‘participation’ and ‘interchange’ bear the marks of the prophets of Israel, especially the Mosaic eschatological prophet who links both divine and human concerns. This goes back inevitably to Moses and to his special relationship with God, with occasional glimpses of divinity being conferred on Moses himself. As Kee says, ‘the role of Jesus as healer was in direct continuity with the Old Testament prophetic understanding of what God was doing in the New Age...Jesus is presented in the Gospels as the agent of Yahweh the healer - a theological perspective which reaches back to the Exodus and pervades the prophetic tradition...’23 If this applies to the healing miracles, then it also applies to the ‘healing’ aspects of the nature miracles, and indeed to the source of power that effects them. We now turn to brief reflections on the way to the Cross. The analytic tool is set aside now for reflections that enter our scene more fully. I cannot be true to the unseen guests at this lecture unless I make this application. 5. The Way of the Cross i. Transfiguration The Transfiguration prefigures the Cross and Resurrection. The mountain, the ancients Moses and Elijah, the eternal Exodus that is to be renewed and the ‘bright’ cloud that overshadows are links with the past that shape the future. They are not what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called ‘the idols of a prevailing fad’,24 but rather recapturing enduring symbols and abiding memories capable of motivating and restructuring fresh beginnings. Perhaps we could learn from this and become truly prophetic. I like what Gore Vidal says of past writers, ‘They prized not novelty, but mastery’ 25 of their sources and connected them to their dreams for the future. ii. The Entry to Jerusalem The figure on the ass symbolises the dream of another day: ‘Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’.26 I always bow my head when these words are said in the liturgy. Not because of any pious reasons, but because I cannot bear to look in the face of the one who rides by. There is a saying in Matthew, which contains an insight that is as clear as a modern Meier, Vol. II, 1044. Howard Clark Kee, Medicine, Miracle & Magic in New Testament Times (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1986), 129 24 Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978. 25 Quoted in L. Fattorosi, The Golden Lyre (Lakewood, New Jersey, 1996, revised edition, 11). 26 Mark 11:9 and par. 22 23
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snapshot: ‘When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ’Who is this?’ The crowds were saying,’This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee’’(21:11). The writer does not correct the statement. When the widow’s son is raised at Nain, the people say that, ‘A great prophet has risen among us’ (Luke 7:16). Again, no correction is made by another gospel writer. The destructive symbolic actions in the Temple gather together fears about its future. The tears over Jerusalem in the Lukan entry narrative fall to the ground and issue in anger at the Temple. The fig tree withers as a sign of another day, and the anointing at Bethany leaves a gospel memorial for the woman who does it in a prophetic manner. iii. The Last Supper Jesus enters the Upper Room as a Messianic prophet: he leaves it as the Messiah. No prophets say words that translate physical entities into ‘Here I am; now my active presence in the world is to be shared out among yourselves’. ‘This is my body’ refers to bread that ‘gathers together’ in symbollein the person of Jesus. The connection between wine and h‘ aima’/’dam’, ‘life-blood’, indicates being, life itself, in devastating words of absolute connections. The attempts to picture this in Anglican liturgical definitions or to deny the implications have failed. The Supper is prophetic, and so are the words. We can only live out the experience there in the Spirit. If we cannot reveal Christ’s presence in our world with our own bread and wine held in his hands and ours, we are unable to articulate the last words of the Eucharist in ‘living to serve in order to serve the living’ (Boff). We have attended the Eucharist, but we have not entered it if we do live out the injunction: ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’. The response is crucial: ‘In the name of Christ, Amen.’ Christ welcomes us at the Supper, as he welcomed the apostolic band long ago. Too much of our attention and discussions have been given to how we define our welcome of him at what is his Supper. Welcomes are of spontaneity and life, not definitions. Let us make the prophetic words in the Upper Room that reveal Messiah come true by being Christ’s body and blood in the world. iv. Gethsemane The numinous garden called Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives is the setting for the realisation that the prophet will die. It is an exchange with God that we all must enter at one time in our lives. ‘All the prophets have died’, and so does Jesus. The apostles do not enter his experience here, but one day it will come to them. How a Messiah might contemplate death did not resonate in the tradition with any clarity. The prophets had been killed: they had been there and they had perished. The model of prophet prevails in Gethsemane. Someone has carved a wooden crown of thorns and placed them around an unlikely rock in Gethsemane to mark the words of Jesus about entering the Father’s will. The location is probably wrong. The symbolism is brilliant: the decision in Gethsemane lead to the Cross. v. The Trial of Jesus We are all on trial in one way or another, especially with toxic people. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had to look every day at graffiti on the wall of his episcopal residence in Capetown: ‘I was an Anglican until I met Desmond Tutu’. The graffiti said more about the writer than Tutu. Jesus too is mocked, as he said he would be. It is at his trial that we have the most vivid description of Jesus as a clown prince in mock array. ‘Behold the man’, says Pilate, or rather, ‘the caricature that we have made of him’. Behold what is left after we have tortured and mocked him. Every time someone is tried unjustly, every time that someone is robbed of possessions and dignity, tortured, murdered, then we hold Jesus ‘up to contempt’ once more. Jesus is bullied and told to ‘prophesy’, but no effective words can be said in the face of absolute power. That comes later in the inevitable reaction from the praus people, those of ‘gentle strength’ in the world. Amidst the few words of Christ at his trials is a prophecy about the Son of Man and his coming. I saw Bishop Frederick Borsch recently. I told him that his work on the Son of Man 10
still holds in my estimation. I can only say here that my contention is that Son of Man is a bridge term applied by Jesus to himself as it became clearer to him and those around him that he was ‘more than a prophet’. Jesus’ prophecies about what would happen to the Son of Man point to his violent death, and we now turn to it. vi. The Cross The Cross and the Empty tomb may be the starkest symbols of Jesus’ prophetic ministry. The Suffering Servant of Isaiah is certainly in the mind of the gospel writers as they describe the scene, and it may have been in the mind of Jesus. However, the Cross is not only about living out other people’s expectations. It also points forward. The ‘words’ from the Cross are a stylised attempt to convey his words there. The essence of the words is found in abandonment, questioning of vocation, anguish, bodily pain, care for others, and ultimately hope in God. This ritual murder haunts history. However, we remember his words there more than his pain: such is the lot of prophets and real messiahs. It is the lot of the Messiah. vii. The Resurrection ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. Kirsopp Lake and others had trouble with these words long ago. The trinitarian ascription was too early for acceptance as a genuine saying in the mind of some scholars. I think that it was a prophecy of the risen Lord. The role of a prophet in Israel still provides some access after the resurrection. We have to live out life in the glory of the raised, exalted and broken one. Like him, we have to ‘weep with one eye’, one eye brimming with tears of compassion and yet one eye clear-eyed about realities and open to perceptions that reveal and heal. Either his body was transformed in the tomb or it was not. Subtle evasions will not make it more real or secure an expectation that engenders peace at the hour of our death. viii. Conclusion Through it all, the triad of prophetic integrity remains. So does the person of Christ who stands revealed as a prophet who is Messiah-in-becoming. This has no identifiable point of beginning or end, but is articulated in a process that draws together prophetic and messianic lifestyles, using Jesus’ particular use of Son of Man to effect the interconnections. It is in the cross-meshing of these ‘connections’ that the prophet becomes more clearly identified as Messiah by the gospel writers. The search for such interconnections will never end, but in finding them again and again we will be enriched and sustained. This will begin to ‘raise us up’ more than we will ever be in the necessary but abstract theological definitions that are deduced rather than encountered. If we have entered the historical ministry through our analyses, however tentatively, we may have glimpsed the actual historical person of the prophet from Nazareth. This is an access that is needed at this time in the face of so much negative critical study. Sir William Gregg said that there is a time when textual criticism stops being critical and ‘becomes metacritical’.27 Leonardo Boff and his family wrote an epitaph to their father, an epitaph already briefly alluded to: We heard from your mouth. We learned from your life. Whoever does not live in order does not serve in order to live.28
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ibid., 20. Leonardo Boff, Una Espiritualidad Liberadora (Pamplona: Editora Verbo divino, 1992, 11
This could also be said of Jesus, prophet of Israel, held in reverence by those who entrust all of life to him as ‘more than a prophet’. I offer this as a contribution towards what is called the third quest for the historical Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth called Lord and Christ in the Church. I also offer it in honour of Barry Marshall, a priest who lived a prophetic life. I offer it also to all those who want to maintain the triad of soul/integrity, words, and symbols/deeds as a unity of belief that opens doors to future. We don’t need a blueprint then. Neither does the Church, though many things that we do in the Church may be threatened by the prophetic triad. We need the courage to be, to know that we cannot drown while we swim towards the Spirit of life that is already changing our world. We are not waiting for the second coming. For those who have eyes to see, it came some time ago, and it continues, perhaps into an awesome beginning afresh that ‘gathers up the fragments that remain.’ It breathes words like justice, wisdom, love, sacrifice and hope. In Goethe’s words, we mustn’t ‘crawl into dark corners and carve upon nutshells.’ 29 Rather, as Meister Eckhart said, ‘If you want the kernel, you must break the shell’.30 What we then find may be life in its becoming, a kernel that explodes into new being and another dawning. dovxa tw'/ Qew'/
29 30
Fattorosi, ibid., 13. Frank X Tuoti, The Dawn of the Mystical Age (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 76. 12