With apologies. I was out of town for a few days and just getting back my energy levels. So this is my thoughts on the previous passage.
First I want to thank Jeff for bringing in the Cloud of Unknowing. I've read it maybe five times before and it never occurred to me to see the connection with this scene. But Christ is hidden by clouds. It seems to me it is there -- though how to play that out in my mind I don't know. Perhaps its time for reading number 6.
What interests me is the line, Lord, is this the time when you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?
Much is made of this line. The disciples expected a political kingdom. But Jesus' kingdom isn't political its spiritual. I've heard this so many times before. In sermons and in books. I'm just not sure I buy it.
How could the disciples of all people get this so wrong. I mean I get the wider Judean population getting it wrong. I do. But the disciples? They who ate and slept with him for -- what? -- 2 - 3 years? It is of these same disciples that Luke, author of Acts, has Jesus say, To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that 'looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.'
So what's going on?
I think one or both of two possible things are happening here. I think maybe Luke is using the disciples incredulity as an object lesson for his intended audience. Luke is writing Acts in maybe 85CE. That would be roughly 50 years after the events he narrates. What if his audience was expecting a political kingdom no less than the disciples may have years earlier. To this add the disheartening facts that in 70CE Jerusalem fell to Roman armies and the temple razed. Then the revolt ended with a mass slaughter at Masada in 72CE.
So maybe Luke invented this scene for them. Who were giving up faith when Jesus' soon return on clouds of glory didn't seem to be happening. And maybe, just maybe, was writing it for pagan potentates like his Theophilus, encouraging them not to worry, you wouldn't see any Masadas coming from them. This also maps curiously into the next passage if Judas Iscariot is translated as Judas the Sicarii -- i.e., Judas the terrorist. His horrible death could also be a disavowal of sorts.
Which leads me to the second of my two thoughts. Why would these Christians be expecting a conquering messiah to redeem Israel by force if the disciples were let in on all the secrets of God's kingdom as Luke asserts?
Maybe because Jesus promised them he would. Maybe Jesus gentle and mild preached the violent overthrow of the Roman empire. Maybe Jesus wasn't who we really want him to be after all.
And what then do we do with it? And with him?
4 comments:
Interesting thoughts, David. I'm not sure Jesus would have been for the violent overthrow of Rome ... would he not have joined the zalots in that case? But the idea is interesting ... have you seen this online interview with JD Crossan -
"Paul and Empire" - he says in part ...
... (in) 1907, two different scholars, a British scholar named William Mitchell Ramsay and a German scholar named Gustav Adolph Deissmann, got on a train and a boat and a horse and went around the Pauline sites and saw the inscriptions that say that Caesar Augustus was divine, was the son of god, was god, was lord, was redeemer, was savior of the world. They saw all that and they said, as it were: Oh, my God! That is what it's all about! They saw that when Jesus was called by those same titles it was not simply the result of picking up the cultural debris of his contemporary world. It was saying, in effect: these are the titles of Caesar, but we refuse them to Caesar and assign them instead to Jesus. They were not simply applying to Jesus ordinary words in everyday language. So in 1907 these scholars saw the implications. But instead of the twentieth century building a theology on this realization - which of course would have been one-hundred percent political and one-hundred percent religious, something capable of pointing to that deep basis where religion and politics coincide - we went off into existential demythologization and it was the last thing the twentieth century needed. We went into a kind of personalized, existentialized individualism when what we needed was the kind of powerful political/religious understanding of Christianity authentic to the first century .... This is not just talking politics but talking about what Jesus called the kingdom of God, what Paul called the Lordship of Christ, which is simply a way of saying who is in charge of the world.
Really neat quote Crystal.
I want a pacifist Jesus. I'm scared I read that back into scripture to excess. So I look for contrary evidence as a kind of sacred medicine and then try to integrate it into what I already know. So my terrorist Jesus is a what if exercise for me at this point.
Having said this, if Judas was a sicarii as manys cholars believe, and another follower is labelled a zealot. We have at elast some reason to suspect Jesus' views were attractive to zealots and other violent radicals. We also have a collaborationist tax collector and records of supportive centurions to consider.
The canon never records Jesus speaking against Rome. Only against the Jewish establishment. Its really quite muddy.
Jesus was too smart to advocate violent resistance against Rome. He knew what would happen; he predicted it(the Fall of Jerusalem).
But in the long view he was against Rome and all her descendants. He believed in peace, not war, and he also believed that peace would eventually overcome all the Romes and all they represent.
Whose Jesus predicted the fall of Jerusalem? Matthew's -- written after Jeruslaem's fall? Or the eartly historical fellow following in the footsteps of Jeremiah who had disaster as a motif?
Can't get very far without running into Jesus's question: who do men say that I am? who do you say that I am?
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