Searching for God # 122

 In a chapter entitled, Domesticating the Tradition and Marketing the Messiah, in his Honest to Jesus, Robert Funk writes: 

The tendency, from the very beginning, was to make Jesus’wisdom conform to popular expectations, to assimilate his vision to conventional wisdom and thus to ordinary ways of seeing and saying. In other words, his parables and sayings were domesticated. In concert with the tendency to make Jesus’ message conform, his admirers’ enthusiasm led inevitably to a shift in focus from the vision that mesmerized Jesus to Jesus the visionary. His followers fastened on him rather than on hi glimpse of God’s domain. The shift in focus from vision to visionary carried along with it a shift in his followers’ perceptions of themselves: they no longer thought of themselves as outsiders; as the tradition was domesticated they became insiders. At the same time, the believing community wanted to propagate its faith by making it appealing to others. They wanted to market the messiah. They did that by making Jesus do all the things other charismatic miracle workers did. In addition, they certified his stature, validated his standing, with a series of epiphanies, including appearances to themselves after his death. Finally, they set Jesus in a mythical narrative frame in which the Christ figure Replaced Jesus the Galilean sage. All of this was in the interests of missionary propaganda......God’s incursion into history was again anticipated as an event of the future rather than as a fact of the present. The apocalyptic mentality reasserted itself and sealed off Jesus’ naive sense of time. (Funk, op. cit. P.241) 

Given that the Jesus Seminar was composed largely, if not entirely, of American scholars, critics of this over-all thesis might argue that one could expect a collective projection of the national ‘anima mundi,’ the cultural ethos and the predominant archetype of the United States, that is archetypally money, business and the core of that mindset, marketing, onto the followers of Jesus, especially from the perspective of a follower shortly after the death and reported resurrection. There is little doubt that religion, theology, and all the plethora of images of both Jesus and God have all been bandied about both as mirrors and lamps of the contemporary cultures over time as well as various attempts to shine a light into the mystery of the kingdom of God. There is also little doubt that if anyone of us were among those who lived in the decades after the crucifixion (and reported resurrection) we too would have been mesmerized, amazed, incredulous and overwhelmed, and thereby vulnerable to any suggestion that the significance of those ‘events’ eclipsed whatever might have gone before in Jesus’ life.  

Nevertheless, Funk is prepared to answer some critics to his/their proposition primarily through a discernment of the relationship between the literal and the metaphorical as the stories of Jesus are passed from person to person and generation to generation. He writes: 

The interplay between the literal and the metaphorical is diminished and often eliminated. As a consequence, the ambiguities, the polyvalent possibilities of Jesus’ original language are replaced by specific, fixed interpretations. Once the domestication of the tradition has set in, the door is open to augment the tradition with folk wisdom proverbs, scripture citations, and other material extracted from the cultural context. Jesus becomes the repository of all the popular lore than can be endorsed by the new community....Jesus’ genuine aphorisms and parables are filled with images of hunger and poverty, food and clothing, begging and borrowing, oppression and homelessness, corrupt officials and unhearing and unseeing religious leaders. In his use of these images, Jesus maintains a tension between the literal and the nonliteral or spiritual. In one of his beatitudes, he offers congratulations to the poor as possessors of the kingdom: 

Congratulations, you poor! God’s domain belongs to you. (Luke 6: 20) 

No one really believes that Jesus meant that God’s kingdom was accessible onto to those who were literally poverty stricken. Matthew’s gospel certainly doesn’t: he expands the original Q form presented by Luke to reflect the spiritualizing tendency: 

Congratulations to the poor in spirit! Heaven’s domain belongs to them. (Matthew 5: 3) 

Matthew’s version dissolves the tension between the literal and spiritual by reducing the former to the latter. Real poverty no longer has privilege. And humility is no longer nurtured by the absence of figurative economic superiority. (Funk, op. cit. P 242-3) 

Funk proceeds to illustrate how ‘hard sayings (are) softened’ as the development of the interaction and mutual infusion of Jesus’ words with the contemporary needs and perceptions. 

Jesus words from the Didache, the first Christian handbook: 

Let the money sweat in the palms of your hands until you know to whom you are about to make a gift. 

Funk: The playful, nonliteral intent of Jesus original injunction has been lost, and is now interpreted quite literally. But in order to avoid the unwanted consequences of a literal interpretation, qualifications and safeguards are erected around the perimeter. The humor of hyperbole that protected the original has given way to blatant moralistic interpretations. And a new admonition, not derived from Jesus, has been appended to safeguard the new interpretation. Jesus seems to be equally clear about the fate of the wealthy: 

How difficult it is for those who have money to enter God’s domain! It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the needle’s eye, than for a wealthy person to get into God’s domain. (Mark 10: 23. 10:25) 

Such pronouncements are unequivocal. Yet the Christian tradition has labored over the centuries to blunt their edge. Fabric softeners have been applied. Some, for example, have imagined a narrow pass called the needle’s eye, where it is difficult but not impossible for a loaded camel to pass through. Other compromisers have suggested a gate in the walls of Jerusalem called the needle’s eye: at this gate a camel was required to squat down and wriggle through. Still others have argued that ‘camel’ is a misunderstanding of a similar sounding word meaning ‘rope.’ All such softening ploys are uncharacteristic of Jesus and subvert both the style and the content of his wisdom. (Ibid, p.245-6) 

Sadly, Funk summarizes: 

The focus of Jesus’ words was imperceptibly but steadily shifted away from his glimpse of the kingdom to a story in which Jesus was the center of attention. In that story, Jesus acts as God’s vice-regent on earth. (Ibid, p. 248)....As Jesus envisioned the kingdom of God, only outsiders were in a position to respond to the invitation. Now it is only the insiders who have ears to hear. The believing community has completely reversed the references of those terms. (Ibid, p. 249) 

The mutual interaction between the words of Jesus and the social perception of necessity serves as a model for the contemporary adamantine, literal, and dogmatic attempt by the white ‘Christian nationalists’ who seem to have seized the American government by the throat to impose their version of “God’s kingdom” on both their homeland, and, by inference and implication, the rest of the compliant parts of the world. 

The human proclivity to elide, confuse, confound, and to deploy whatever especially ‘religious’ or ‘theological’ sources to underscore whatever position any group might seek to believe and to ‘evangelize’ or propagate or to ‘market’ is one of the more enigmatic of the many gordion knots into which the Christian faith (perhaps other faiths as well) has been both compromised and bastardized. 

Whether Funk’s Jesus Seminar can begin the process of convincing thinking and dedicated men and women to re-open their minds and hearts to a perspective of ‘asking questions’ both of themselves and of the interpretations that have been passed down over the years remains a matter only time can answer. 

The more time in reading and reflection on the work of the Seminar, and the incontrovertible reductionism of the promise, in and through classical conditioning of a ‘blood sacrifice’ a crucifixion and resurrection as the narrative required for redemption, based on the fundamental evil of humanity have combined to render the Sunday school version of Christianity this scribe absorbed and integrated not merely obsolete, but actually counter-intuitive to a Christianity worthy of both Jesus and God, in very different ‘frames.’ 

Continued poring over the insights, speculations imaginings and general loosening of the literal, the dogmatic and the religiosity into which much of Christianity has been ‘ensnared is a path into which one enters without ‘knowing’ either the outcome or the precise, literal, historic and empirical supporting evidence. 

Suffice it to say, that the ‘take-over’ of contemporary Western culture by the scientific mind, by literalism, empiricism and rationality runs counter to any pursuit of an animated and animating and life-giving and sustaining faith in God’s domain.