On the Plain Part 3: Rocks, Sand, Word, and Dance

Text:  Luke 6:39-7:35

“Can the Blind lead the blind?” prefaces the rest of Luke’s version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.  “Students are not above their teachers,” Luke’s Jesus says.  Then the lecture becomes sarcastic: “Why do you notice the sliver in your friend’s eye, but overlook the timber in your own eye? . . . each tree is known by its fruit.  Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from brambles.”   Finally, he ends the sermon – by now close to a diatribe –  with “Why do you call me Master, Master, and not do what I tell you?”  Do what Jesus says, and your life will be like a house built on a rock, not on shifting sands.  

But what are we supposed to do?  As though in answer to that implied question, Luke sends Jesus into Capernaum, where he performs two miracles.  The first is healing a slave who is ill and about to die.  The slave’s owner, a Roman officer, turns out to have more trust in Jesus than “all Israel.”  The other miracle is a resurrection.  In a scene reminiscent of Paul's description of an imperial visitation, a large crowd accompanies Jesus to the gates of the city of Nain, where they meet another crowd coming out of the city, carrying the dead son of a widow.  Jesus tells the widow to stop crying, touches the bier, and commands the man to get up.

Immediately afterwards, Luke says that in the crowd with Jesus were two of the Baptist’s disciples.  John the Baptist – now in prison – has sent them to find out for sure whether Jesus is the “expected one.”  Luke’s Jesus repeats the words from Isaiah, which he had read in the synagogue back in Chapter 4: “Go report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news preached to them.”

If we follow the Revised Common Lectionary, we may not notice the underlying motif in this section of Luke.  The RCL breaks up the sequence, and scatters the verses from Epiphany to after Pentecost.  The RCL does make sure that the healing of the Roman officer’s slave and the resurrection story known as “the Raising of the Widow’s Son at Nain” are covered in Year C.  But Luke’s placing of the visit from the Baptist’s disciples and Jesus’s ambiguous praise for him are never read.  Instead, Matthew’s version of the story is read on the Third Sunday of Advent of Year A.  

When Luke’s story is read in sequence, we see that he describes crowds moving out of the city (the funeral procession of Nain; the crowds hoping to hear John the Baptist), and into the city with Jesus.  Is this a foreshadowing of Jesus’s Palm-Sunday demonstration that counters the visitation (parousia) of Rome’s imperial representative to Jerusalem?  
Is this an illustration of the Apostle Paul’s theology of resurrection, spelled out in 1 Thessalonians?

Biblical scholars generally agree that the story of the raising of the widow’s son at Nain evokes Elijah’s raising of the widow’s son at Zarepath (1 Kings 17:17-24; see also Luke 4:25-26).  Sure enough, the Revised Common Lectionary pairs both widows’ stories for Proper 5, Year C (after Pentecost).  Biblical scholars also generally agree that Luke/Acts is a continuing saga written by the same person.  Richard I. Pervo  has proposed that Luke “conforms the stories of Jesus’ passion to the story of Paul in Acts 21-26” (“Dying and Rising with Paul,” The 4th R, vol. 23, number 1, pp. 3-8; see also Richard I. Pervo, The Mystery of Acts Polebridge Press 2008).  While the idea may not necessarily follow from Professor Pervo’s theory, if the writer of Luke was familiar with the letters and travels of Paul, the metaphor of crowds and parousia may not be off track.

In a continuation of the parousia reference from 7:11-15, Luke’s Jesus asks the crowds what they thought they would find when they went out to the wilderness to see John the Baptist.  “A reed shaking in the wind?” – like the usual official leadership that goes whichever way the political winds might blow?  “A man dressed in fancy clothes?  But wait!  Those who dress fashionably and live in luxury are found in palaces” not at the edge of town, ranting among the graves and the trash dumps.  He says that no one is greater than John the Baptist, but then adds a devastating caveat: “the least in God’s domain is greater than he.”  Is this the rival Jesus movement damning with faint praise?  Is Jesus suggesting that, try as he might, John the Baptist does not “get it” about the realm of God?  That all he can be is the messenger?  

Maybe“the least in God’s domain” are all the people who had been baptized by John and “justified [defended?] God’s plan.”  (The NRSV says “acknowledged the justice of God” or, alternatively, “praised God.”)  But the “Pharisees and legal experts subverted [NRSV: rejected] God’s plan for themselves.”  Those fashionably dressed leaders, living in luxury, turned it around to suit their interests.  It seems the 1st Century was not so different from the 21st.

Suppose that John Dominic Crossan and Marcus J. Borg (and others) are correct, and Luke’s purpose was to show that Jesus the Christ/Messiah was Lord and not the Roman Emperor.  Suppose further that Professor Pervo is onto something when he finds parallels between Luke’s version of Jesus’s death and resurrection and Luke’s version of Paul’s spiritual journey through earthquake, storm, and shipwreck.  What are Christians to make of all this today?

We can be fairly certain that none of the incidents Luke writes about actually happened.  Some of the words Luke’s Jesus says may have actually been said by the historical Jesus.  We know that because many of them are found in Mark, the sayings Gospel Q, and lifted sometimes verbatim from Matthew.  The problem is, that “Q” gospel was never written down.  It was part of an oral tradition, preserved by rote memory, and circulated among the followers of Jesus’s Way for perhaps two generations (30 years) from the time of Jesus’s death.  So the best we can do is treat Luke’s gospel story as another parable about Jesus.

Luke’s story tells us who Luke and his non-Jewish community thought Jesus had been.  Luke – according to Crossan and Borg – was interested in preserving a non-Jewish, Christian way of life in the midst of Roman culture.  Luke’s readers and listeners were far more likely to be rich than poor, educated than not, and part of the Roman elite.  What is most important about the healing of the Roman officer’s slave is not the healing from a remote location.  Jesus does not enter the house, let alone touch the slave.  The important point is that the Roman officer trusted Jesus to “say the word and let my boy be cured.”  Jesus responds, “Let me tell you, not even in Israel have I found such trust.”  Luke was writing from Syria, not Palestine, to gentiles, not to Jews.  

The Emperor during the time Luke was writing his story was probably Nero – not the most reliable in terms of mental stability and political tolerance.  Still, Luke manages to maintain some of the radicality of the original Jesus.  “The one who listens to my words and doesn’t act on them is like a person who built a house . . . without a foundation. . . it collapsed immediately, and so the ruin of that house was total” (6:49).  Luke’s Jesus is very clear that lip service is not enough.  Outside the city of Nain, Luke’s Jesus breaks through convention, touches the coffin, and liberates both the son and the widow from death. Without action (Paul’s works?) Christian life collapses.  And what is the action that Jesus has in mind?  “The blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news preached to them.”  

Clearly, meaning cannot be found by cherry-picking verses out of context.  Perhaps some clue for 21st Century followers of Jesus’s Way can be found by going on to 7:31-35: Luke’s Jesus asks, “What do members of this generation remind me of?  What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to one another: ‘We played the flute for you, but you wouldn’t dance; we sang a dirge, but you wouldn’t weep.’  Just remember, John the Baptist appeared on the scene, eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He is demented.’  The son of Adam appeared on the scene both eating and drinking, and you say, ‘There is a glutton and a drunk, a crony of toll collectors and sinners.’  Indeed, Wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”  But the people “could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke” (Acts 6:10).

A parody of an official procession would be difficult to pull off in the 21st Century.  Paul’s argument in 1 Thessalonians is mind-boggling.  Who is going to meet the conquering hero outside the town gates and accompany him into the City today?  Who is going to meet Jesus and be raised from the dead?  If this is indeed where Luke is taking us, who is going to follow Paul’s metaphor, meeting Jesus in the sky, and accompanying him back to earth for a second coming?  

The Roman officer trusted Jesus’s word, and when his emissaries returned, they found the slave had been cured without Jesus being physically on the scene.  The word to be trusted is not only Jesus’s word.  It is our word.  When Paul talks about the second coming, he means the return of the risen Christ to an already transformed earth, not that Jesus will come again to finish the job.  

“[T]he blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news preached to them.” If Jesus is seriously dead, the ones who are going to do all that are the ones who hear the flute and join the dance.

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