Jesus Lives!

As you’ve probably gathered from recent posts, I’ve been reading, during Holy Week, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem. I’ve found it a very insightful and, in many ways, inspiring book.

As Holy Week concludes for 2008, I’d like to take this opportunity to share the following excerpt from that part of Crossan and Borg’s book that offers reflections on Easter Sunday.

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Two themes run through [the Gospel] stories that sum up the central meaning of Easter. The first, in a concise phrase, is Jesus lives. He continues to be experienced after his death, though in a radically new way. He is no longer . . . confined to time and space, but [is] a reality who can enter locked rooms, journey with followers without being recognized, be experienced in both Galilee and Jerusalem, vanish in the moment of recognition, and abide with his followers always, “to the end of the age.”

Together, the appearance stories in the gospels make explicit what is promised in Mark: “You will see him.” They underline the parabolic meaning of Mark’s story of the empty tomb: Jesus is not among the dead, but among the living. Indeed, this is one of the central affirmations of Easter: Jesus lives. He is a figure of the present, not simply the past. The presence his followers had known in Jesus before his crucifixion continued to be experienced and to operate after it.

. . . [T]he truth of the affirmation “Jesus lives” is grounded in the experience of Christians throughout the centuries. Not all Christians have had such an experience. It is not essential. To quote from one of John’s Easter stories, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” But some Christians to the present day have experienced Jesus as a living reality. For us, this is the experiential ground of the first of the central Easter affirmations: Jesus continues to be and to operate. The spirit, the presence, his followers knew in him before his death continues to be known. Jesus lives.

To state the second affirmation of the Easter stories in an equally concise phrase: God has vindicated Jesus. God has said “yes” to Jesus and “no” to the powers who executed him. Easter is not about an afterlife or about happy endings. Easter is God’s “yes” to Jesus against the powers who killed him. The stories underline this in different ways. In Luke and John, the risen Jesus continues to bear the wounds of the empire that executed him. In Matthew, the risen Jesus has been given authority over all the authorities of this world. Mark, writing most concisely among the authors of the gospels, says simply, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified; he has been raised.”

The authors of the gospels do not speak about Jesus’ resurrection without speaking about his crucifixion by the collusion between collaborators and imperial power. In the words of the earliest and most widespread post-Easter affirmation about Jesus in the New Testament, Jesus is Lord. And if Jesus is Lord, the lords of this world are not. Easter affirms that the domination systems* of this world are not of God and that they do not have the final world.

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Opening Image: A still from the final scene of the 2000 made-for-television film, Jesus. On her always insightful and interesting weblog, Perspective, Crystal notes that Jesus “had an unusual ending, one that [CBS Television] cut from the American version because it was thought too controversial.” That alone piqued my curiosity! Reading Crystal’s post further I learned that in the film’s final scene, set after the resurrection, Jesus tells his disciples that he will be with them always, even to the end of the world. The film than shows Jesus (played by Jeremy Sisto) in a modern day setting with a number of children. Hmm, I wonder who exactly the folks at CBS thought they’d be offending by retaining such an ending? The company’s decision to omit it seems to me to have been an unduly cautious and conservative one.


* According to Crossan and Borg, the phrase “domination system” is shorthand for the most common form of social system – a way of organizing a society – in ancient and pre-modern times, that is, in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It names a social system marked by three major features:

1. Political oppression. In such societies the many were ruled by the few, the powerful and wealthy elites: the monarchy, nobility, aristocracy, and their associates. Ordinary people had no voice in the shaping of the society.

2. Economic exploitation. A high percentage of the society’s wealth, which came primarily from agricultural production in pre-industrial societies, went into the coffers of the wealthy and powerful – between one-half and two-thirds of it. This was achieved through structures and laws about land ownership, taxation, indenture of labor through debt, etc.

3. Religious legitimation. In ancient societies, these systems were legitimated, or justified, with religious language. The people were told the king ruled by divine right, the king was the Son of God, the social order reflected the will of God, and the powers that be were ordained by God. Of course, religion sometime became the protest against these claims. But in most pre-modern societies known to us, religion has been used to legitimate the place of the wealthy and powerful in the social order over which they preside.

Crossan and Borg also point out that: “There is nothing unusual about this form of society. Monarchical and aristocratic rule by a wealthy few began about five thousand years ago and was the most common form of social system in the ancient world. With various permutations, it persisted through the medieval and early modern periods until the democratic revolutions of the last few hundred years. And one could make a case that in somewhat different form it remains with us today. In this sense ‘domination systems’ are normal, not abnormal, and thus can also be called the ‘normalcy of civilization’ . . . At a broad level of generalization, Good Friday is the result of the collision between the passion of Jesus [for God and God’s justice] and the normalcy of civilization.”


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
The Triumph of Love: An Easter Reflection
Light of Christ (Easter 2008)
He is Risen! (Easter 2007)
A Wretched Death, a Wretched Burial
Blaming the Jews, Canonizing Pilate
Palm Sunday: “A Planned Political Demonstration”
Palm Sunday Around the World (2007)
“Here I Am!” - The Lenten Response
The Lenten Journey

Light of Christ

The light of Christ surrounds us,
The love of Christ enfolds us,
The pow’r of Christ protects us,
The presence of Christ watches over us
Forever and ever, Forever and ever.
Amen!

Marty Haugen
(based on a prayer by James Dillet Freeman
and the Exsultet)

Images of Easter 2008 from around the world . . .

Above: Filipinos wait during Easter Sunday rites at the Santo Domingo church in suburban Quezon City, north of Manila, on Sunday March 23, 2008. Filipino Catholics mark Easter Sunday by getting up at dawn to witness the re-enactment of the Resurrection, before hearing Easter mass in this predominantly Roman Catholic country. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)



Above: Romanian Roman Catholic worshipers attend the Easter religious service at the St. Iosif cathedral in Bucharest, Romania - Sunday March 23 2008. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)



Above: Iraqi Chaladean Catholic Christians celebrate Easter mass at a church in Mosul. (AFP/Mujahed Mohammed)



Above: Prior to attending Easter mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City, a Christian worshiper prays at the Anointing Stone, where, according to tradition, the body of Jesus was washed after it was taken down from the cross. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)



Above: Syrian Orthodox worshipers celebrate mass in a chapel of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, traditionally believed to be the site of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, as Roman Catholics celebrated Easter mass in the central part of the church in Jerusalem’s Old City – Sunday March 23, 2008. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)



Above: Pope Benedict XVI at the Easter vigil mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican - Saturday March 22, 2008. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)



Above: A young girl admires a tree decorated with 9,000 Easter eggs in the garden of Christa and Volker Kraft in Saalfeld, eastern Germany - Sunday, March 16, 2008. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)



Above: Christians pray at the Easter service in Seoul - March 23, 2008. Thousands of South Korean Christians gathered for the daybreak service on Sunday to pray for “the life and sharing” in which they wished for recovery of the country’s west coast still suffering from last December’s oil spill as well as peace and unification of Korean peninsula. (REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won)



Above: A U.S. soldier of the 82 Air Borne arrives to attend to celebrate Easter at Camp Eggers in Kabul, Afghanistan - Sunday, March 23, 2008. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)



Above: A worshiper holds a candle and eggs during the Easter vigil mass in Cathedral-Basilica at the Vilnius, Lithuania - Saturday, March 22, 2008. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)


Opening image: Michael J. Bayly.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
He is Risen!
The Triumph of Love: An Easter Reflection

A Wretched Death, a Wretched Burial

I was tortured in the desert,
I was raped out on the plain.
I was murdered by the highway,
And my cries went up in vain.
My blood is on the mountain,
My blood is on the sand.
My blood runs in the river
That now washes thru their hands.
I am lost unto this world . . .

“Lost Unto This World”
Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois
(from Emmylou Harris’ 2003 album, Stumble Into Grace)

Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann writes:

[The Evangelist] John reports of a certain Joseph of Arimathea [who] took the corpse of Jesus down from the cross with the help of Nicodemus, who brought along a mixture of a “hundred pounds” (1 pound equals 1 Greek “litra,” which is 327.45 grams) of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39). The two men supposedly wrapped the body of Jesus in linen cloths, along with this enormous amount of spices, and buried it in a new tomb in a garden near the place of execution.

So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:42)

This description speaks, on the one hand, of a hasty burial and so conveys the impression that the tomb was only provisional. On the other hand, such an expensive, large-scale burial takes time. These two aspects don’t fit together, just as the whole time frame in John doesn’t fit: On a single afternoon the crucifixion, death, and burial were over by 6:00 p.m.

. . . But this Joseph of Arimathea is not a real person. He is a fictional character, though an ideal combination for the burial John describes: He is at once a disciple of Jesus and a member of the High Council, as well as someone who is on good terms with Pilate (John 19:38). Finally, he is rich (Matt. 27:57). This sort of combination is practically unthinkable. Hence, in his commentary on John, [Rudolf] Bultmann designates the entire scene (John 19:38-42) an “edifying-legendary formation.” And, of course, “in the place where Jesus was crucified” (John 19:41) there was no tomb of a rich man in a garden. There were tombs in the neighborhood of a place of execution. These, however, were presumably mass graves for the executed prisoners, which the Romans didn’t bury in a kind of boneyard but hastily dumped together.

Jesus was executed with two others, the so-called robbers, who presumably were executed, like Jesus, for political reasons. Hence, we may assume, first, that all three were condemned in one and the same trial, and that, second, all three were buried in the same mass grave. It is characteristic that according to all four Gospels, Jesus was buried neither by his family nor by his disciples (though in the Synoptics a few women witness his burial: Matt. 27:61; Mark 15:47; Luke 23:55). Instead, he was buried by a third party, a point that the description of the burial still clearly remembers. But it wasn’t two rich and pious men who buried him – why should his family and his friends have stayed away from [such a] burial? It was the Romans who buried him in a mass grave. And with the large number of the graves, which were immediately flattened, no one could say anymore where it was.

There was no splendor and glory hovering over Jesus’ burial. There were no hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes. After the most wretched and ignominious of all deaths, it was presumably the most miserable and wretched of all burials.

- Excerpted from Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith by Uta Ranke-Heinemann (translated by Peter Heinegg), (English translation: New York: HarperCollins,1994).




Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s commentary on the death and burial of Jesus reminds me of John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg’s reflection on the “human inevitability” of Jesus’ death.

In their book, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem, Crossan and Borg note that:

. . . [T]he execution of Jesus was virtually inevitable, not because of divine necessity, but because of human inevitability – this is what domination systems* did to people who publicly and vigorously challenged them. It happened often in the ancient world. It has happened to countless people throughout history. Closer to Jesus, it had happened to his mentor John the Baptizer, arrested and executed by Herod Antipas not long before. Now it happened to Jesus. Within a few more decades, it would happen to Paul, Peter, and James. We should wonder what it was about Jesus and his movement that so provoked the authorities at the top of the domination system of their time.

But Jesus was not simply an unfortunate victim of a domination system’s brutality. He was also a protagonist filled with passion. His passion, his message, was about the kingdom of God. He spoke to peasants as a voice of peasant religious protest against the central economic and political institutions of his day. He attracted a following and took his movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All of this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the kingdom of God, God and God’s passion for justice.

Jesus’ passion got him killed. To put this meaning of passion and a narrower meaning of passion into a single sentence: Jesus’ passion for the kingdom of God led to what is often called his passion, namely, his suffering and death. But to restrict Jesus’ passion to his suffering and death is to ignore the passion that brought him to Jerusalem. To think of Jesus’ passion as simply what happened on Good Friday is to separate his death from the passion that animated his life.

- Excerpted from The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).




On this Good Friday, I find myself reflecting upon the “wretched” death and burial of not only Jesus, but of countless others throughout time and across cultures. I think of the victims of the Inquisition, of the Holocaust, and of terrible acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. These and similar events have resulted in the torturous deaths of men, women, and children, and the unceremonious dumping of their bodies into mass and/or unmarked graves. I also think of the many cases where individuals met, like Jesus, such wretched fates as the result of their passion for “God and God’s passion for justice,” and thus for their challenging of unjust political and economic systems.

In particular, I think of the four American women murdered in El Salvador in 1980 by officers of that country’s National Guard. These four churchwomen were victims in a civil war that would eventually claim over 70,000 lives.

Perhaps you’re familiar with their story. It’s documented by one writer as follows:

On the evening of December 2, 1980, Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, lay missioner Jean Donovan and Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazell were abducted near the San Salvador airport. Ford and Clarke had just returned from a Maryknoll conference in Managua, Nicaragua. Along with four other guardsmen in civilian clothing, Sergeant Luis Antonio Colindres Aleman followed the women in a military jeep and detained them. After interrogating the four women, Aleman ordered that the women be taken to a remote field about 15 miles from the airport, where they were to be “eliminated” on the instructions of his superior officer. Each of the women was raped and shot in the head by men trained and armed by the United States [government, which is the most obvious contemporary form of the domination system that Crossan and Borg speak of]. The bodies were dumped along the side of the road. The next morning, when the bodies were discovered, a local justice of the peace ordered that they be buried in shallow graves. On December 4, the four women were exhumed after Ambassador Robert White learned of the murders.

Catholic priests, nuns, and lay workers were frequently accused by the right-wing Salvadoran government of aiding communist guerillas during the decade-long civil war; religious workers – particularly those from outside El Salvador – were routinely arrested, harassed, beaten and tortured for providing food, medical aid, and other forms of relief to the tens of thousands of people displaced by the violence. Jean Donovan, one of the December 2 victims, frequently picked up bodies of peasants left by death squads on the roadsides near La Libertad, the village where she worked. Donovan and her colleagues understood that their lives were at risk each day they remained in El Salvador.

During a liturgy held in Managua the night before she was killed, Ita Ford read a passage from one of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s last homilies, delivered shortly before he was assassinated in March 1980:

Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive – and to be found dead.

Under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the United States provided material assistance and training to the Slavadoran military that killed Ford, Clarke, Donovan and Kazel. Two months after the deaths of the churchwomen, Secretary of State Alexander Haig urged Ambassador White to publicly congratulate the government of El Salvador for conducting a thorough and prompt investigation of the murders. Haig was hoping to put the matter to rest so that full military assistance to the Salvadoran military could be resumed.

However, because the regime of Jose Napoleon Duarte was not in fact conducting such an investigation, White refused Haig’s request. As a result, he became the first ambassador to be fired during the Reagan administration.


I’m not “scandalized” (as some Catholics like to say) by the suggestion that the body of Jesus ended up in an unmarked mass grave after his torture and death. Indeed, given what scholars and historians tell us about those brutal times under Roman occupation, and given Jesus’ own identification with those oppressed and targeted by the domination system that was imperial Rome, such a fate was inevitable - and at some point Jesus must have known it. Yet he didn’t back down. And the horror of what followed, and of what we thus remember as Christians on this day known as Good Friday, leaves me feeling devastated and numb.

Can I get no witness, this unholy tale to tell?
Was God the only one there watching
And weeping as I fell?
O, you among the living
Will you remember me at all?
Will you write my name out
With a single finger scrawl
Across a broken window
In some long forgotten wall
That goes stretching out forever
Where the tears of heaven fall?

“Lost Unto This World”
Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois
(from Emmylou Harris’ 2003 album, Stumble Into Grace)

____________________________

* According to Crossan and Borg, the phrase “domination system” is shorthand for the most common form of social system – a way of organizing a society – in ancient and pre-modern times, that is, in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It names a social system marked by three major features:

1. Political oppression. In such societies the many were ruled by the few, the powerful and wealthy elites: the monarchy, nobility, aristocracy, and their associates. Ordinary people had no voice in the shaping of the society.

2. Economic exploitation. A high percentage of the society’s wealth, which came primarily from agricultural production in pre-industrial societies, went into the coffers of the wealthy and powerful – between one-half and two-thirds of it. This was achieved through structures and laws about land ownership, taxation, indenture of labor through debt, etc.

3. Religious legitimation. In ancient societies, these systems were legitimated, or justified, with religious language. The people were told the king ruled by divine right, the king was the Son of God, the social order reflected the will of God, and the powers that be were ordained by God. Of course, religion sometime became the protest against these claims. But in most pre-modern societies known to us, religion has been used to legitimate the place of the wealthy and powerful in the social order over which they preside.

Crossan and Borg also point out that: “There is nothing unusual about this form of society. Monarchical and aristocratic rule by a wealthy few began about five thousand years ago and was the most common form of social system in the ancient world. With various permutations, it persisted through the medieval and early modern periods until the democratic revolutions of the last few hundred years. And one could make a case that in somewhat different form it remains with us today. In this sense ‘domination systems’ are normal, not abnormal, and thus can also be called the ‘normalcy of civilization’ . . . At a broad level of generalization, Good Friday is the result of the collision between the passion of Jesus [for God and God’s justice] and the normalcy of civilization.”


Image 1: Mass grave in Liberia, photographed by Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times, 2004.
Image 2: Mass grave at the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. The clothed body on the left is of a prisoner who died after the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945, his body added to the mass grave on May 1, 1945.
Image 3: Recovering the bodies of the four churchwomen murdered in El Salvador on December 2, 1980.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
“Here I Am!” – The Lenten Response
Palm Sunday: “A Planned Political Demonstration”
Blaming the Jews, Canonizing Pilate
Revisiting a Groovy Jesus (and a Dysfunctional Theology)
Uta Ranke-Heinemann on the Future of the Catholic Church
In the Garden of Spirituality: Uta Ranke-Heinemann
Praying for George W. Bush

Blaming the Jews, Canonizing Pilate

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The rector of the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, Rev. Michael O’Connell, had a topical and informative letter published in today’s Star Tribune. As you’ll see, it concerns the controversial Good Friday prayer for the Jews contained in the Tridentine mass.

A Step Back on Friday

Having received permission by Pope Benedict to return to using a 1962 version of the Roman Catholic liturgy, an extremely small number of ultra-traditionalist Catholics will pray in Latin for the “conversion of the Jews” during the upcoming Good Friday solemn liturgy.

The history of this prayer clearly reflects the attitude of Catholics toward Jews during the past two millennia. In its “Tridentine” version dating back to 1570, it called for the conversion of the “perfidious Jews.” Pope John XXIII struck the offensive adjective from the prayer in 1962. Responding to the theological advancements of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), his successor Pope Paul VI removed all references to conversion from the prayer in 1970. This version, which has been used ever since, acknowledges that the Jewish people were “the first to hear the Word of God” and asks that they “may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant” and that they “may arrive at the fullness of redemption.”

John XXIII, Paul VI, as well as John Paul II (the Polish pope who lost friends in the Nazi Holocaust) were keenly aware that more than 6 million Jews were murdered during their own lifetimes. These same popes also knew that 2,000 years of Christian teaching of contempt against Jews didn’t necessarily cause the Holocaust, but clearly enabled it. As a result they made great efforts to encourage reform in church theology about the Jewish people. This culminated in John Paul II asking forgiveness for Catholic teachings and actions that dishonored Jews and caused Jewish persecution during the past 2,000 years. In addition to these popes, many respected Catholic theologians have defended the legitimacy of Jewish faith to stand on its own without Catholics seeking their conversion.

I pray that our Jewish friends will see the progress in Catholic teaching since the Second Vatican Council and understand that our church moves very slowly, sometimes taking a few steps back, but ultimately moving toward the light.

Thank God millions and millions of Catholics [presumably a reference to those Catholics not participating in the Tridentine mass] will pray this Good Friday, not for the conversion of the Jews, but that “they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.”

The Rev. Michael J. O’Connell,
Rector, Basilica of St. Mary, Minneapolis

O’Connell’s remarks remind me of theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s examination of the story of the Passion as “a tale full of political bias.”

In her book, Putting Away Childish Things, Ranke-Heineman writes:

The Gospels were able to serve as a welcome support for Hitler’s hatred of the Jews because the Evangelists’ picture of the Jews is negative and distorted. Whatever else it may be, the story of the Passion is a tale full of political bias. It was written to clear Christians of their reputation for hostility to the state. Hence, it flies in the face of the truth by claiming that the Jews were responsible for the whole thing. It was not Pilate, the Romans, but the Jews who killed Jesus. The Jews are the enemies of the Christians, and the Christians are not the enemies of the Romans.

Elsewhere in the book’s chapter on Good Friday, Ranke-Heinemann examines the “Christian canonization” of Pontius Pilate:

While [Jesus’] trial before the Sanhedrin [the Jewish High Council] never took place, [his] trial before Pilate certainly did. But this doesn’t mean that Pilate personally took charge of the case (which was only one of many). None of the Evangelists can erase the fact that the Roman trial actually occurred. But all four Evangelists take pains to whitewash Pontius Pilate as far as possible.

Over the years from 70 to 95, we can watch the process from Mark to Matthew and Luke (the latter two are dependent on Mark), all the way to John, the last of the four Gospels. The bottom line is that Pilate is increasingly excused, while the guilt of the Jews is depicted in ever more glaring colors.

. . . The Christian canonization of Pilate in the New Testament reaches its zenith in the fourth Gospel. While Mark and Matthew report that Jesus gave Pilate no answer . . . in John Pilate and Jesus almost engage in a friendly conversation. In the course of this discussion Jesus explains the nature of his kingdom as the reign of truth, and Pilate raises himself to philosophical heights with the question, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). As a result of this exchange, Pilate says three times that he finds no guilt in Jesus. (John 18:38; 19:4, 6).

John may not be able to cancel the historical fact that Jesus was executed by the Roman procurator, suffering capital punishment in the Roman style, by crucifixion. But he brings a factor into play that is designed to prove that the crucifixion took place entirely against Pilate’s will. According to John, Pilate was blackmailed by the Jews, who threatened his career: “‘If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend’; . . . when he heard these words, he brought Jesus out” (John 19:12-13). What John wants to say is that, practically speaking, Jesus was crucified “under” Pontius Pilate, but not by him. “Under Pontius Pilate,” as if merely citing a date, is the Nicene creed’s way of downplaying Pilate’s importance. But Pilate had Jesus executed, in the Roman, not the Jewish, fashion.

In this respect Tacitus is an unbiased reporter when he correctly says, “Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplico adfectus erat” (Christ . . . had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate [Annals XV, xliv; LCL, p. 283]).

Thus the Christian judgment of Pilate grew more and more favorable from Gospel to Gospel. Bad as the development of the legend of Pilate has been for the Jews, Pilate later came off very well with the Christians. In the period after the New Testament, he continued his Christian career. Pious apocryphal writings were composed in his name, for example, a letter to Emperor Claudius and a correspondence with Herod. His wife acquired even greater prestige, since in Matthew’s Gospel she had sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream” (Matt. 27:19). Origen (d. 253) says that she converted to Christianity (Comm. In Matth., n. 122). In the so-called Paradosis, the “tradition” of Pilate (5th century), which describes how Pilate, too, came to believe in Christ and was beheaded for his faith by order of the emperor, we even learn her name: Prokla in Greek, Procula in Latin (cf. Chapter Fourteen, “The Apocrypha”). And, to bring this tale to a happy ending, both Pilate and his wife were honored as saints (on 19 or 25 June) in the Ethiopian calendar (Heinrich Joseph Wetzer and Benedikt Welte, Kirchenlexikon, X, 4).

The Gospels’ story of Pilate proclaims no “good news”; it sows the seed of hatred. Almost two thousand years after the fact, people can still quote the Jews as saying that their persecution by Christians and their annihilation in the gas chambers was a fate they deserved. That such a statement is even possible shows the maliciousness of a bias (evident back in New Testament times) that claims to be representing the cause of Christ but that constitutes its perversion: The calumny against the Jews in the New Testament became the Christian legal title to their persecution and destruction.

In Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (1974), the American theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruether, correctly points out that these anti-Jewish trends were not an accidental excess of later Christian generations. They did not derive from later developments; they were present in the Gospels from the very beginning.

– Excerpted from Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith by Uta Ranke-Heinemann (translated by Peter Heinegg), (English translation: New York: HarperCollins,1994).

Image: Ecce Homo (“Behold the Man!”) by Antonio Ciseri.

Recommended Off-site Links:
Pope Benedict to Reformulate Good Friday Prayers for Tridentine Mass – Catholic News Agency, February 5, 2008.
Pope’s Prayer Change Disappoints Jews, Some Traditionalist Catholics – FaithWorld (Reuters), February 6, 2008.
Praying for the Jews: Two Views on the New Good Friday Prayer – John T. Pawlikowski and Judith Banki (Commonweal, March 14, 2008).
Restorationist Skulduggery by Joseph O’Leary.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Revisiting a Groovy Jesus (and a Dysfunctional Theology)
Palm Sunday: “A Planned Political Demonstration”

Palm Sunday: "A Planned Political Demonstration"

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Today is Palm Sunday, and to commemorate this important day in the life of Christ and the Christian church I’m sharing an excerpt from The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.

Some Christians – including Catholics – give the impression of being quite threatened by the biblical scholarship of folks like Borg and Crossan. Personally, I find such scholarship to be both liberating and inspiring.

Others, however, dislike the portrait of Jesus that Borg and Crossan reveal – a portrait that seems to emphasize his humanity above his divinity. I say “seems” because it all really depends on how one defines the divinity of Jesus! (For more on this, see the homily I delivered in January 2000).

Then there are those who maintain that the scholarship of Borg, Crossan, and others associated with the Jesus Seminar demythologizes Jesus. Yet this is only true if one’s understanding of myth is related to the magical. It’s a totally different (and non-threatening) story when one understands myth as having to do, not with the magical, but with the archetypal.

Much more could be said about all of this, but for now I simply want to share some of what Borg and Crossan have to say about Palm Sunday.

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Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30. It was the beginning of the week of Passover, the most sacred week of the Jewish year. In the centuries since, Christians have celebrated this day as Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week. With its climax of Good Friday and Easter, it is the most sacred week of the Christian year.

One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, his message was about the kingdom of God, and his followers came from the peasant class. They had journeyed to Jerusalem from Galilee, about a hundred miles to the north, a journey that is the central section and the central dynamic of Mark’s gospel. Mark’s story of Jesus and the kingdom of God has been aiming for Jerusalem, pointing toward Jerusalem. It has now arrived.

On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’ procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’ crucifixion.

Pilate’s military procession was a demonstration of both Roman military power and Roman imperial theology. Though unfamiliar to most people today, the imperial procession was well known in the Jewish homeland in the first century. Mark and the community for which he wrote would have known about it, for it was standard practice of the Roman governors of Judea to be in Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals. They did so not out of empathetic reverence for the religious devotion of their Jewish subjects, but to be in the city in case there was trouble. There often was, especially at Passover, a festival that celebrated the Jewish people’s liberation from an earlier empire.

The mission of the troops with Pilate was to reinforce the Roman garrison permanently stationed in the Fortress Antonia, overlooking the Jewish temple and its courts. They and Pilate had come up from Caesarea Maritima, “Caesarea on the Sea,” about sixty miles to the west. Like the Roman governors of Judea and Samaria before and after him, Pilate lived in the new and splendid city on the coast. For them, it was much more pleasant than Jerusalem, the traditional capital of the Jewish people, which was inland and insular, provincial and partisan, and often hostile. But for the major Jewish feasts, Pilate, like his predecessors and successors, went to Jerusalem.

Pilate’s procession displayed not only imperial power, but also imperial theology. According to this theology, the emperor was not simply the ruler of Rome, but the Son of God. . . . For Rome’s Jewish subjects, Pilate’s procession embodied not only a rival social order, but also a rival theology.

. . . Jesus planned [his entry into Jerusalem] in advance. As [he] approaches the city from the east at the end of the journey from Galilee, he tells two of his disciples to go to the next village and get him a colt they will find there, one that has never been ridden, that is, a young one. They do so, and Jesus rides the colt down the Mount of Olives to the city surrounded by a crowd of enthusiastic followers and sympathizers, who spread their cloaks, strew leafy branches on the road, and shout, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” As one of our professors in graduate school said about forty years ago, this looks like a planned political demonstration.

The meaning of the demonstration is clear, for it uses symbolism from the prophet Zechariah in the Jewish Bible. According to Zechariah, a king would be coming to Jerusalem (Zion) “humble, and riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (9:9). In Mark [the earliest known gospel], the reference to Zechariah is implicit. . . .

Jesus’ procession deliberately countered what was happening on the other side of the city. Pilate’s procession embodied the power, glory, and violence of the empire that ruled the world. Jesus’ procession embodied an alternative vision, the kingdom of God. This contrast – between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar – is central not only to the gospel of Mark, but to the story of Jesus and early Christianity.

The confrontation between these two kingdoms continues through the last week of Jesus’ life. As we all know, the week ends with Jesus’ execution by the powers who ruled the world. Holy Week is the story of this confrontation.

- Excerpted from The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 2-5.



Image 1: Giotto di Bondone.
Image 2: Artist unknown.

See also the previous Wild Reed post:
Palm Sunday Around the World (2007)

Time and the River

Yesterday’s gone, love lead me on.
I won’t ask why.

Roll away – it’s only time and the river.
Roll away – to the endless sea.
Roll away – it can all change tomorrow.
This is life in its glory,
And the river runs free.
Oh, roll away. . .

Friday nights are often music night at The Wild Reed, and so tonight I’m sharing the rarely seen music video for Dusty Springfield’s 1995 single, “Roll Away.”

But first . . . Here’s what I’ve written about this song and its accompanying video on my website, Woman of Repute:


In the summer of 1995 Dusty traveled to the windswept Atlantic coastline of Ireland to shoot the promotional video for “Roll Away,” the second and final track released as a single from her 1994-recorded album A Very Fine Love.

Directed by Sean O’Hagan and Seamus McGarvey, and inspired by the film Into the West, the video places Dusty amidst the flowing streams, standing stones and picturesque Celtic ruins of County Clare and the Galway coast as she knowingly acknowledges life’s uncertainties and disappointments while nonetheless imparting a transcending message of hope:

My dreams build the walls of the city,

Broken hearts tear them all down
It ain't always easy and pretty,
But that’s just the world turnin’ around.
Give us this day, give us this night,
It’ll be all right . . .

As an ode to both the inherent mystery of life and the soul’s meandering journey to wholeness, “Roll Away” resonates with a spirit of trusting openness to all that may come. It was a fitting song for a woman who had come to accept the ambiguities of life; who could look back on a time of “wilderness years"’ in California and declare that: “It was very, very good to me and very, very bad to me, and it needed to be both for me to be here now.”

Such wisdom and serenity were evident throughout Dusty’s promotional work for A Very Fine Love, as, perhaps for the first time, she appeared at peace with herself and her artistry. More than once she acknowledged that it had been her experience of a life-threatening illness that had facilitated a re-prioritizing of her life and values.

Noted Dusty in a 1995 interview: “'Roll Away' [means a lot to me] because of the line Roll away, it’s only time and the river. . . . For the last year I’d been obsessed with going to the Shenandoah River. And I did it this year [1995], in the snow. I don’t know whether it was a previous life or whatever, but I had to be there. I stood there and wept. And I have no idea why. I felt so still, so happy. The tears were not sad at all. They were: “I’ve done it. I’m here.” This last year has been pure shit, but . . . I’ve done the record. The cancer is over. I’ve done it! That was a genuine spiritual experience, watching the flow in utter silence.”

Sadly, “Roll Away” would became Dusty’s swan song as, within two years of its release, the cancer she believed she had conquered returned. She died on March 2, 1999 – the day she was to have been honored with the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II, and thirteen days before her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.


I’ve always resonated with the lyrics of “Roll Away.” The song was actually released as a single in the United Kingdom on my 30th birthday – October 23, 1995. In the video, Dusty, standing in her robe-like black coat, gives the impression of a Celtic priestess or oracle of old; the green door beside her symbolic of new pathways and opportunities for growth and new life. (In September 2007 I was invited to facilitate a session on “Remembering and Celebrating Our Spirit-led Journeys as Catholic LGBT People” at a retreat in Stillwater, Minnesota. While planning the retreat with the organizers, I played them “Roll Away” and said that I was considering using it as part of my session. Upon hearing it, they liked it so much that “Roll Away” became the retreat’s theme song!)

Upon its release in 1995, “Roll Away” reached #68 on the UK charts, yet for some reason its promotional video was never officially released. Fred Perry, Dusty’s lighting manager for much of her career, contacted me via my Woman of Repute website and sent me a copy of the video a few years before his death in January 2001. Over the years others have obtained copies, and a good quality version was recently posted on YouTube.


So here, my friends, is the great Dusty Springfield and “Roll Away” . . . or, as I like to call it, “Time and the River.”





Following is what Paul Howes says about “Roll Away” in his excellent book, The Complete Dusty Springfield:

“Roll Away” was . . . the very first track previewed from [Dusty’s Nashville-recorded album, A Very Fine Love]. At the end of the 1994 documentary Full Circle, the song could be heard in the background while Dusty talked about Nashville. The scene shifted to a mock recording session in a Nashville studio to reveal Dusty performing it while theatrically tossing a music sheet behind her; finally the song continued over the closing credits.

Unlike many of the tracks on A Very Fine Love, Dusty’s recording of “Roll Away” is the original. Dusty said that the demo she had been given was much more raucous and was sung by a gravel-voiced rock chick. In all probability, that gravel-voiced rock chick was the co-writer Martee Lebow, a singer in her own right. [Note: The song’s other co-writer is Will Jennings]. The song was chosen as the second single from the album, both in the UK and the US, and that was the big mistake. It should have been the first. By the time “Roll Away” was released, a lot of the media attention over a new Dusty Springfield album, as well as her illness, had subsided.

. . . The [song’s promotional] video was never used except for a few brief clips. Dusty did, however, make a couple of TV appearances to promote the single and it managed to get into the lower regions of the charts for one week, which suggests that it was only her fan base who bought the record.

For my 2002 interview with Paul Howes, click here.

For an article about the making of the “Roll Away” music video, click here.

Every day when I look in the mirror,
I try to see where my soul’s at now.
Happy day, is it further or nearer?
On the way, will I find it somehow?
Yesterday’s gone, love lead me on.
I won’t ask why.

Roll away – it’s only time and the river.
Roll away – to the endless sea.
Roll away – it can all change tomorrow.
This is life in its glory,
And the river runs free.
Oh, roll away. . .

For other Dusty-related posts on The Wild Reed, visit:
• Soul Deep
• Classic Dusty
• Remembering a Great Soul Singer
• Shelby Lynne Celebrates Dusty Springfield

Recommended Off-site Link:
• Woman of Repute

Reading the Documents of Vatican II (Part 2)

In this second excerpt from the preface of The Church in the Making, theologian and author Richard R. Gaillardetz explains why it is a mistake to attempt to lift out of the documents of the Second Vatican Council “a systematic and internally coherent ecclesiology” (i.e., model of church).

Gaillardetz’s words of caution echo theologian William Hunt’s recent observation that “the Vatican II documents, in many places, are compromise documents that smooth over some of the major conflicts without resolving them.”

Despite this rather problematic reality, Gaillardetz, in the excerpt below, identifies and describes “two impulses” that were shared by the bishops at Vatican II and which impelled them to seek ecclesial reform and renewal.

As I noted in Part 1, Richard Gaillardetz will be the keynote speaker at next month’s Call to Action Minnesota conference. The topic of his presentation will be: “Rethinking Hierarchy: Becoming a Community of Conversation.” For more information about this event, see the “Upcoming Events” section in the latest issue of The Progressive Catholic Voice online journal.

______________________________________

As we study the documents of the [Second Vatican] Council, it would be a mistake to try and lift out of those documents a systemic and internally coherent ecclesiology. Attempts at developing a nascent conciliar ecclesiology around a particular biblical image, like the people of God, or one theological concept, like that of communion, risk imposing on the texts a theological unity that simply is not there. It is unrealistic to expect that a council in which between two and three thousand bishops and numerous other theologians played some part would be able to construct a rigorously systematic theology of the church.

The work of the council was grounded less in a common theology of the church than in a shared commitment to two impulses that impelled the bishops to seek ecclesial reform and renewal. One is captured by the French term ressourcement, a “return to the sources.” This term referred to a commitment to recover the theological vision of the early church that had been eclipsed by the static neo-scholastic view dominant on the eve of the council. This ressourcement led to a recovery of a more theological understanding of the church grounded in baptism and Eucharist rather than in law and jurisdiction. It meant a return to the liturgical spirituality of the first millennium in preference to the arid mechanistic view of liturgy and sacraments that dominated in neo-scholasticism.

The second impulse for renewal is captured in the Italian word aggiornamento, which can be translated as “bringing up to date.” Advocates of this view feared that the church had become largely irrelevant to the concerns of the modern world. The work of aggiornamento demanded a policy of active and respectful engagement with the world out of a confident expectation that the hand of God was at work in the world. It called for a new ecumenical impulse. This theological perspective, with its relatively greater confidence in God’s action in the world, reflected not so much the patristic theological vision of the first millennium as the theological vision associated with the thirteenth-century Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Pope Paul VI, early in his pontificate, expressed a concern that the documents of the council might engender harmful church divisions. Consequently, though the rules of the council allowed a document to be approved with a two-thirds majority, Pope Paul made it known that he wished the documents to be approved by a moral (rather than absolute) unanimity among the bishops. A cursory review of the final voting suggests that the pope got what he desired, as no document was opposed in the final vote by more than a handful of bishops.

But there was a price to be paid for this high level of unanimity. Significant compromises were made. When achieving full consensus was unlikely, one way of obtaining approval of a document was to juxtapose, sometimes in the same paragraph, alternative formulations. Sometimes this juxtaposition occurred merely at the level of formulation, with diverse formulae employed to express a deeper consensus. At other times the compromise required was much more profound, occurring at the level of content, where two or more fundamental views which could not be reconciled were placed side by side. Some of the tensions in post-conciliar interpretation were a direct consequence of this latter form of juxtaposition or compromise.

To some extent this form of compromise is evident at every council. It is why conciliar documents should never be considered to be systemic treatises. Indeed, anyone who has ever served on a committee to draft a common document is aware of this fact. However, because of the uniquely transitional character of Vatican II, juxtaposition appears particularly striking in its documents. At the council, the advantages of this method of juxtaposition was that it ultimately enabled passage of sixteen conciliar documents. The disadvantage was that it would become possible for various ideological camps to appeal to certain passages that appeared to support their particular ecclesiastical agenda.

In an influential study, Antonio Acerbi maintained that in Lumen Gentium two fundamentally different ecclesiologies were being juxtaposed, one more juridical in character and the other orientated toward the priority of baptism and the church as communion. The result has been the creation of a “canon within a canon,” in which each group cites texts in justification of its agenda without any consideration of the whole corpus of documents.

- Excerpted from The Church in the Making by Richard R. Gaillardetz (New York: Paulist Press, 2006).

For Part 3 of “Reading the Documents of Vatican II,” click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Reading the Documents of Vatican II (Part 1)
Truth About “Spirit Vatican II” Finally Revealed
Libertas Ecclesiae
The Shrinking Catholic Tent

A Day at the Abbey

My friend Eduard (above right) is currently visiting me from Chicago. On Monday we went with my friend Rick to St. John’s Abbey, a Benedictine abbey located in Collegeville, just outside of St. Cloud, Minnesota.



Above and below: The original abbey church.

For many years this church had two steeples - one atop each of its two bell towers. At some point however, they were removed. Perhaps it was around the time of the construction of the new, post-modern styled abbey church (see images further down). Maybe the designer of this new church didn’t want too much competition from the old!




Above: The beautiful interior of the original abbey church.



Above: The abbey is home to the St. John’s Bible - which Eduard found particularly interesting.



Above and below: St. John’s University is located next to the abbey.

While on the university campus we visited the Liturgical Press bookstore where I bought three books: By What Authority: A Primer on Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Sense of the Faithful by Richard R. Gaillardetz, Clericalism: The Death of Priesthood by George B. Wilson, S.J., and Feminist Liturgy: A Matter of Justice by Janet R. Walton. Eduard also found a couple of titles that interested him, including The Ceremonial of Bishops and The Byzantine Rite: A Short History.




Above and below: Side views of Saint John’s Abbey Church.



The bell banner (above at left) stands 112 feet above the pavement and is 100 feet wide at its apex. It’s made of 2,500 tons of concrete and heavy steel reinforcing rods. The footings extend twenty feet into the ground.



Saint John’s Abbey Church is certainly a unique building. Designed by Marcel Breuer, it was built between 1953 and 1961. The original abbey church can be seen at right.



Above and below: The interior of St. John’s Abbey Church.

In the book, Marcel Breuer: Buildings and Projects 1921-1961, Cranston Jones notes that: “The main floor plan [of the church] reflects the basic liturgical concepts of the [Benedictine] Order: one enters the symbolic center doorway, down the center aisle to the altar and abbot's throne, around which is placed the very large choir for 300. The relation of abbot's throne and monks’ choir to the congregation of 1,700 defines the shape of the plan with the altar near the center of the church in plain view of congregation, choir, and large balcony.”

Although I can appreciate certain aspects of the interior of St. John’s Abbey Church, its overall utilitarian look nevertheless reminds me of a Soviet-era train station!



Above: The honeycombed stained glass window of the church’s facade is perhaps the most beautiful component of St. John’s Abbey Church.

This massive window was designed by Bronislaw Bak, a former member of the art department of St. John’s University, and is said to represent the “splendor of the liturgical year.”



Above: Rick with a statue depicting Mary, the Christ Child, St. Benedict, and St. Scholastica.




Above: Eduard in the darkened interior of the Cathedral of St. Mary in St. Cloud, Minnesota - Monday, March 10, 2008.

For a picture of the abbey in summer, click here.