A Gospel Reading Believing Jesus of Nazareth ROGER KOJECKÝ © 2001 Roger Kojecký E-mail [email protected] All rights reserved. IN MEMORIAM Gordon Anderson-Smith 1940 − 1980 CONTENTS 1 The Discipline of Reading 5 Reading Narrative 8 Reading the Gospels 16 Reading and Discovery 22 2 The Acts of Jesus 29 The Baptism 30 Temptation in the Desert 34 Miraculous Signs: Healings and Exorcisms 38 Other Signs 45 Transfiguration 50 His Death 53 Resurrection 58 Mark 16:1-8 59 Matthew 28:1-10 59 Luke 24:1-12 59 John 20:1-18 60 Last Meetings and Ascension 61 3 The Teaching of Jesus 67 The Kingdom 72 The Parable of the Weeds 72 The Sower 73 The Mustard Seed and the Yeast 76 Judgement 77 The Talents 77 The Lost Son 81 Love 83 The Good Samaritan 85 Discipleship 89 Mission 94 The Twelve 94 Mission of Seventy-Two Others 98 The Great Commission 102 Farewell Discourses in John 105 4 What Happened to the Gospel? 107 Kingdom Prospects 108 The Contest with Evil 111 Titles 114 Contexts 118 The Last Things 128 Interpretation in John 136 Gospel Gradations 141 The Public Ministry of Jesus 142 The Mission of the Twelve 142 The Mission of the Seventy-two 142 The Trial 143 The Great Commission 143 Pentecost 143 The Gentile Mission 144 The Gospel: Seven Stages of Proclamation 145 Bibliography 147 Index 151 1 The Discipline of Reading ‘How do you read it?’ − Jesus, to an expert in the law.1 ‘While all can read it with ease, it also has a deeper meaning in which its great secrets are locked away. Its plain language and simple style make it accessible to every one, and yet it absorbs the attention of the learned. By this means it gathers all men in the wide sweep of its net, and some pass safely through the narrow mesh and come to you.’ Augustine, Confessions.2 ‘Literary criticism cannot provide a gospel’ − T S Eliot, the Clark Lectures, 1926.3 Characteristic of literary reading is awareness that, as in Jesus’ question to the lawyer, a book may be read in more than one way, that a story may yield several meanings, and that such readings are a matter for discussion. The text Jesus was speaking of was the Torah, a medley of history and commandment, but the inference applies to all narratives, and a fortiori to his own parables, which often leave the hearer to think, or puzzle on, after their end. Literary reading considers the alternatives, brings into play awareness of other stories and texts, and generally puts the reader into a position of responsibility. It contrasts with non-literary readings, literalistic or authoritarian for example, which claim ownership of a single interpretation, or set up restrictive lines of demarcation for what is and is not to be talked about in relation to the text in question. If this seems to risk making the literary reader into an autocrat, with a consequent demotion of the text, it is worth recalling the power of the written word to alter thinking and to bring down strongholds. Mukarovský pointed to a function of major works of art beyond their quality, often, of multivalency, namely to confront collective worldviews in a process of ‘permanent reconstruction’.4 And T S Eliot’s remark above came not many months before his baptism at the age of 39 into membership of the Church of England. Literary criticism may recognise or commend, but it takes a gospel to make the earth move. Or a Gospel. For what if, to adopt Augustine’s figure, the great secret remains locked away in the gospel text, whether by inattention, or by learned attention that is somehow of the wrong kind, so that the luminous idea of it, the transcendent form, is not discerned? Then, even though they hear, readers will neither hear nor understand. We read, sometimes naively, for bare information, or out of interest or for enjoyment. Often though, there are larger purposes, our own, or in the cultural matrix, of which we are only intermittently conscious. Interest may be innocent or not, may be disinterested or not, for we read in order to do something with what we have read. First, however, is the matter of understanding, which is often bracketed with reading, so that the reading of a text or a situation is a 1 Lk 10:26. Quotations are from the New International Version. 2 Book 6, Chapter 5. 3 The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard, London, Faber, 1993, p. 228. 4 Jan Mukarovský, Esteticka Funkce, Norma a Nota jako Socialni Fakty, Prague, 1936. 6 A GOSPEL READING: The Discipline of Reading person’s, or perhaps an institution’s, understanding of it and specific to a moment or a state of affairs. In its elementary model reading, like listening, is essentially private and passive. Words bring ideas to the subject whose receptive mind is a tabula rasa. But with literary reading the subject is active, establishing lateral connections intrinsic and extrinsic to the text, and trying provisional understandings for fit, consonance and application. By a natural extension reading becomes discussion, as understanding is articulated or information about a text or its topic is exchanged. Thus reading becomes a collective enterprise subsisting in a matrix of synchronic relations horizontally, and diachronic relations, derived from tradition. Moreover the individual reader may work with a range of voices and points of view in a virtual discussion inside his or her own head, with verbalisation and application of the later stages of the process deferred. Memory and imagination are evidently essential to reading, as they are to language and thought. With memory we bring up what has gone before in the text or discourse, in related texts, in experience. With imagination we develop, extend, modify and test perception so as to place what we read, positioning it for further use or reference. Imagination conjures possibilities and things that are not, leaving as a separate task the discrimination of alternatives. Not always consciously reviewed, but always bearing upon the reading of a particular text, is the question of what is to be discussed in relation to it. ‘How do we know what can be said of a poem and what cannot?’ asks Sir Frank Kermode,5 and the answer he gives has much to do with consensus, often of an institutional kind. In respect of the Bible we are able to look back and see how very different the answer to the question has been in different ages. Institutional control has long been exercised by the church, or by churches, and more recently much of this power has devolved to the academy. Here all sorts of new questions have been raised, about historical origins for example, or modes of composition, or social context, resulting in a radically different critical discourse, for the most part deliberately distanced from the interests and beliefs of laymen, or indeed, of the original writers. Disjunction of this kind is not however a necessary characteristic of the literary enterprise, which is broad enough to accommodate many voices. Robert Alter for example, proposes a closer attention to the language, the narrative detail and the structure of the Bible than has been customary in much recent scholarship. ‘To read the Bible with literary eyes would seem to complete a long process of secularising Scripture. On another level . the literary reading of the Bible provides a means of getting into touch again with the religious power of Scripture and so reinstates scriptural authority in new terms.’6 Or on its own terms. Alter gives an example in relation to the reunion of Jacob and Esau, ‘surely one of the great surprising climaxes of the patriarchal narrative’. What is to be discussed? For E A Speiser, author of the Anchor Bible commentary on Genesis, the narrative aspects can be perfunctorily dismissed. ‘In Speiser’s commentary it is not Jacob and Esau but E, J and P who become the subject of investigation.’7 5 ‘Can We Say Absolutely Anything We Like?’, Essays on Fiction, 1983, p. 157. 6 The World of Biblical Literature, 1992, p. 202. 7 Ibid., p. 206. 7 A GOSPEL READING: The Discipline of Reading Nor is it merely a desire for novelty that produces a widening of the range of matters discussed. ‘Some of the new literary analysts of the Bible simply set aside any consideration of hypotheses about the composite origins of the text because they find other issues more productive to discuss.’ Alter’s own interest leads him towards enduring human concerns: ‘A literary approach directs attention to the moral, psychological, political, and spiritual realism of the Biblical texts,’8 whether these are deemed to be of human or transcendent origin. Or it may explore latencies that remain undetected by other techniques. Kermode has made something of this, roundly declaring in The Genesis of Secrecy that ‘the gospels need to be talked about by critics of a quite unecclesiastical formation.’9 Some years earlier an assault on Biblical scholarship narrowly defined had been mounted by C S Lewis, who took aim from the vantage point of a contiguous discipline: A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people’s studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them.