Thursday morning and afternoon end the First Day of Unleavened Bread in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Jesus sends Peter and John into Jerusalem to make preparations for the Passover. They find a man with a jar who meets them and takes them to an upstairs guest room. This appears to be an arranged in Matthew (26:18). Is this the upper room where the Spirit later came? Is this the house where Mark lived and where they were praying when Peter was freed from prison?
Part of the preparations would of course be the killing of the lamb for dinner. In John, Jesus seems to die at the same time as the Passover lambs are killed (19:14), which fits with his teaching that Jesus is the Lamb of God (1:36).
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3 comments:
It seems John likes to project faith "meanings" on his interpretive "story". As you say, lambs were being killed for dinner, a common occurance for Passover dinner. Jesus dying at the same time "redeems" the evil of Jesus death. We always look to understand "evil" by giving it "new meaning", so that we can bear it. These are the idealistic realists. These are the "prophets who see meaning when there seems to be none". But, it still takes faith to embrace the interpretation. And then there are the critical realists, who understand that life is what it is and construct their own meaning, which is not universal, but individually specific! These are people who help us accept that we are responsible for our own lives and help us come to a crisis of choice to "make meaning for us" out of life's "messes".
When I speak of critical realists, I mean someone who believes that reality exists and that there are better and worse functioning understandings of reality, but that we are still doomed to apprehend that reality from a particular perspective... just to make it clear what I mean by critical realism.
The question of whether John shifted the day of Passover to bring out the symbolism of Jesus' death is a longstanding one. Three types of resolutions come to mind:
1. To harmonize John with the Synoptics. So it has been suggested that Jesus was following a different calendar than mainstream Jews or that Mark was following a Roman rather than a Jewish calendar, etc. I feel very uncomfortable with these sorts of harmonizations because they generally result in a kind of "fifth gospel" that is different from all of the four gospels! They seem to reflect a greater interest in a certain idea of Scripture than with listening to what Scripture itself seems to be saying at any given point.
2. That John is actually the one giving the more historical dating, perhaps that the tradition behind Mark didn't understand the fact that Jewish days begin at sundown? This would of course require that Mark was not written by Mark. Very uncomfortable hypothesis.
3. To suggest that John has shifted the calendar to bring out symbolism. This would not imply error on John's part if John was doing this with everyone knowing it, something you could easily argue since the other gospels would be out there and well known. But this requires us to see John as a more spiritual than straightforwardly historical gospel, and many feel very uncomfortable with this.
Of the three, this last one seems to take Scripture most seriously while considering it truthful. Any thoughts, anyone?
eisKen,
The early church was looking for the parousia (second coming) to be imminent. After a period of time, they "settled in" with a forthcoming "tradition" in Paul's writings. But, Church history seems to continue this pattern of re-interpretation, which has been the resulting "tradition of the Church". I'm not swift on Church History, but I can re-call the "major ones"; Augustine, Constantine, Luther. These are all political challenges to the Church, while the philosophical challenges also seem to bring about re-interpretation, or maybe re-clarifications to the Church's meaning, message and "vision".
As far as realism, all realists believe in "reality", that is that it truly exists. It is just how they understand "truth" and its intersection/interaction with the "material realm". With the idealistic realist, it just seems to me that those that are Platonic (correspondance view of reality) in their view of "truth" interpret reality with the "form" in mind. The critical realist would adhere to a more materialistic view of reality (pragmatic view of truth) and that would view more of the way the world "is" and work with that.
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