From John_Dominic_Crossan@info.harpercollins.comThu Mar 7 15:17:46 1996 Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 15:54:29 -0500 From: John Dominic Crossan To: JESUS2000@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Reply Message (Crossan) to Week 3 Primary Message (Borg) Dear Marcus and Luke: FIRST QUESTION. You asked me, Marcus, "Do you think God was important to Jesus?" Yes: totally, fully, completely, and absolutely. But Jesus, whether we like it or not, talked not just about God but about the Kingdom of God, that is, in Matthew's gloss on the Lord's Prayer, about the will of God for this earth. It was never a question of Kingdom without God (social activism) or of God without Kingdom (abstract theodicy). Call it, to emphasize that necessary interaction: TheKingdomOfGod (HarperCollins likes that type of writing). The Kingdom of God meant for Jesus, in my best historical reconstruction, that the standard political normalcies of power and privilege, hierarchy and oppression, debt foreclosure and land appropriation, imperial exploitation and colonial collaboration were in profound conflict with the radical justice of Israel's God. I am thinking of how the land (food) appears, for example, in Deuteronomy 15, with the Sabbath Year's remission of incurred debts, or in Leviticus 25, with the Jubilee Year's return of dispossessed property. I am thinking of Amos' repeated threats of doom for how the poor were handled or Micah's assertion that Israel's God wanted social justice rather than cultic worship. Before I rush to interpret that as meaning that God wanted both justice and liturgy (which is true), I note that while there are several places where God rejects liturgy for want of justice, I know of no biblical location where God rejects justice for want of liturgy. Liturgy is the symbolic celebration of divine justice so that in the latter's absence the former is empty. That focuses, as I understand it, a claim for eternal truth (God's radical justice) on a terribly precise and local situation: the peasant slippage from poverty (the subsistence-level but freehold family farm or even the tenant farm) to destitution (landless day-laboring or beggary) in Antipas' urbanization of Lower Galilee within the boom economy of the Roman Peace in the first quarter of the first common-era century. Without that empowering vision in which divine justice absolutely opposes human violence, I cannot understand Jesus' program of peasant resistance. I consider the preceding statement to be an historical one, that is, an historical reconstruction open to public debate. I also think that Jesus' understanding of God was profoundly correct but that is a statement of faith. I make it as a Christian or, more accurately, it makes me as a Christian. You use the expression "God-intoxicated," Marcus. That expression may well be quite appropriate (as is "Spirit-person") but I will always want to ask, of Jesus and of anyone else, this question. When the divine hangover or spiritual inebriation is past, what vision and/or what program do you derive from your experience? If you, Marcus, say that Jesus was "God-intoxicated" or "Spirit-empowered," and you, Luke, say that Jesus gave his life for others in obedience to God, I will not accept either of those descriptions until you tell me whether it is important to distinguish the non-violent Jesus from the programmatically Christian terrorist in a suicide car-bomb. The latter may also be "God-intoxicated," martyrdom-bound, totally sincere, and absolutely inhuman. Jesus stood firmly within Israel's most ancient tradition of covenantal justice and, no matter how important ecstatic experience or altered consciousness was for his private experience, it is that tradition of radical divine justice standing flatly against normal human violence that is of importance for his public discourse then or our public discourse now. SECOND QUESTION. You asked me, Marcus, about healings, cures, and, although you did not use the word, about miracles (I think). I visited both Fatima in Portugal and Lourdes in France, healing shrines of the Virgin Mary, in the summer of 1960, and also Epidaurus in Greece and Pergamum in Turkey, healing shrines of the god Asklepios, in the summer of 1965. Testimonials from all those places spoke of very similar types of cures: of the deaf, dumb, lame, blind, etc. I conclude: faith heals. Certain people with certain diseases are healed by their faith in that very possibility in certain places under certain circumstances. I know the outside limits of such cures only by what HAS happened (that's history). I leave relatively open what COULD happen (that's theology). I noticed, for example, that the grotto at Lourdes held innumerable crutches but no prosthetic arms or legs. There were also no empty coffins in those Christian sites nor monuments to empty graves among the pagan testimonials. Those ancient and modern absences served me as warning where limits may lie. My conclusion is historical: faith heals and faith cures. But not anything or everything and not for anyone or everyone. It does so for (some) Christians at Lourdes, for (some) pagans at Epidaurus, for (some) Hindus at Benares, and, I presume, for (some) others at any sites with similar traditions. That is exactly what Jesus tells people in the gospels: your faith has healed/cured you. His healings, moreover, fit very closely with those from Lourdes and Fatima to Epidaurus and Pergamum. But, leaving aside fraud, deceit, and connivance, we must surely allow for competition, propaganda, and public relations. Once a person or site is effective, it is to be expected that its effectiveness will be steadily upgraded by devotees over against other persons or sites. Jesus in the gospels, for example, raises a dead person first from bed (Mark), then from bier (Luke), and finally from tomb (John). Of course: our Jesus can even or especially bring the dead back to life, bring life out of death, and that is the supreme healing/curing. Take that, Asklepios! But, once again apart from sheer fraud, some reality always lies behind such claims no matter how overdone or overblown they may be. But why did their faith bring them to Jesus? What convinced people that HE could heal/cure? Jesus' first healing was ideological, without which no further healing would have worked. Peasant poverty and destitution led through overwork and malnutrition to disease and illness. But here was one who claimed that Israel's God was absolutely against such a situation. It was not they who were at fault but the systemic evil of human injustice (I'm back there again!). Bluntly: God says Caesar sucks. It is that initial ideological healing that makes further healing of illness possible and even, thereby and indirectly in some cases, the curing of disease. If the Kingdom of God was actually on THEIR side, then who could tell what might happen to them. But, first, Jesus had to persuade them that it was on their side, by word and deed, by life and, eventually, by death.