Revelations

December 6, 2015

This musing is kinda off-center amongst my recent musings.  But it sorta fits with some of my earlier ones, about churchy rather than secular stuff.  But after all, that was my upbringing and profession for most of my life.  So I’ll share this.

I misthought last evening when Nancy said this morning’s discussion topic was John.  I mistakenly thought, this being Advent, of the Revelation of John, for some unconscious, unknown-to-me reason.  That last book in the Christian canon I have always thought was a mistake.  Taken literally by some it trails off into some very weird directions, such as predicting the end of the world on a specific date, and drawing implausible notions, and finding Satan behind every metaphor.  Weird, incomprehensible stuff.  I was taught that the bishops fought long and hard over whether to include it in the canon.  They finally did in 370AD.  Bad mistake.  The book makes no rational sense, which leaves it open to all sorts of unreasonable interpretations....beasts with 666 imprinted on them, and whores of Babylon.  Who can make any sense of it?  Scholars have struggled to find some thread or reasonable meaning in it.

And then one evening something clicked into place for me.  I’d been reading and writing about John Spong’s latest book on the Gospel of John.  That gospel has always been a problem for me.  So radically different from the three synoptics.  Those seem to be three separate narratives about the same Jesus, albeit with idiosyncratic twists to fit the spiritual needs of the local communities to which they were written.  But with the same basic story line, and built mostly with the same little pieces.  Obviously the same story about tha same man, just with minor, local variations.  And then we come to John.  The fourth.  And so different that you could easily, reasonably conclude it was written about a different Jesus.  But the Fathers obviously thought it was about the same Jesus.  They included it.

The Greek of John is different than the Greek of the synoptics.  It translates much simpler and easier than the synoptics.  But in the end that’s a deception.  Misleading.  The story really is not simpler; actually it is considerably more complex.  It has always been the favorite among simple folks because it seems so simple.  But actually John’s language is seductively simple...and loose.  So loose that is open to multitudes of interpretations, and can seduce you into some very simplistic notions which are somewhat antithetic to the synoptics.  I spent several years early in my ministry trying to understand exactly how John’s thinking was different from the thinking behind the synoptics.  I thought for a while that John’s thought patterns were illogical, nonlinear, irrational, and instead very associative, somewhat akin to schizophrenic associative thought patterns.  But I finally was unable to convincingly demonstrate that.  So I backed off, still convinced that John’s use of the language was somehow not what it seemed to be: so loose and simple as to be open to multiple interpretations, but at the same time seeming to have layers upon layers of meaning veiled beneath its simplicity.  Very puzzling.  And on top of that the story line was so radically different from the synoptics, with exceptionally few overlaps, and even in those the stories were shaped differently and used in quite different ways to say quite different things.  

Then John Spong came along suggesting that the Gospel of John was the work of a Jewish mystic.  And (click !!) that made obvious sense of John’s gospel.  Spong goes to considerable length to show that behind each of the stories, and imbedded in each of the characters is Jewish lore, deeply Jewish lore, intensely Jewish lore.  And what we have in the Gospel of John is not a narrative about Jesus at all !!  Instead it is the attempt of a Jewish mystic, who had no knowledge of or contact with the earthly Jesus, nor great knowledge of Jesus’ earthly ministerings, but was trying to tell us about his mystical experiences of the risen Christ.  John’s gospel is not about fact at all.  It’s about his own mystical experiences, and should not be considered in the same context of the synoptics at all !!

From Evelyn Underhill I had learned that mystical experiences are far outside the rational realm.  They are experiences of the indescriptable, unlike anything we might experience in a normal state of awareness.  They occur in an ‘altered state/awareness.’  So when the mystic returns from his mystical state to a normal state of awareness, he remembers the mystical experience, but is very lost how to explain or describe that experience to us and to himself.  Underhill tells us that the mystic typically tells about his experience using the terms and metaphors of his own religion and culture.  I’ve tried to read some of the writings of a few Christian mystics.  The words and images and metaphors they use sound familiar, but they come out (to me) as sticky gibberish.  They make only a squidgen of rational sense.  Sometimes they feel only like an intensive parroting of the tradition.  And yet occasionally they are utterances of powerful, innovative insight. ...As if they have left our normal, conscious world, experienced some different, otherwise unobtainable reality, and then returned to our normal, conscious world with powerful, new insights which they are not really able to put into comprehensible language.

And that makes sense of the otherwise nonsensical Gospel of John. ...That he was a Jewish mystic who had some other-worldly experiences of the risen Christ, and came back from those experiences into our normal world trying to share with his Christian community his new and powerful insights using the only guise available to him, that of a narrative about an earthly Jewish Jesus.  And it comes out radically different that the synoptics’ stories, because John’s, while it appears to be about an earthly Jesus, is really about the risen Christ, and not about the earthly Jesus’ story at all.  But John attempts to share with us insights that the earthly story cannot embody, and so the story comes out loose, and impossibly layered and complex, because it’s about the indescriptable...some unearthly, insightful experiences that a well-versed and knowledgeable Jew had about a Christ somewhere outside this physical realm which he was compelled to share with his Christian community.  That is what John Spong revealed to me.  

And then it came to me the other evening, “Oh, that’s what the Revelation of John is about as well.”  Mind you, the scholars are clear that this John is not the same John who composed the gospel.  The vocabulary, the use of language, the imagery, the ideation, the way he tries to express the insights, all tell us these are two different Johns.  (And that same sort of analysis tells us that the writer of the epistles attributed to John are from an altogether different hand.  Three different Johns who we were allowed to assume were one.)  And this John tells us himself that “the revelation was given” to him.  It happened to him, was not something he sought or figured out or heard.  He is trying to explain for us unearthly things and events.  Oh, a mystical experience of that which is ultimately, perhaps absolutely indescriptable.  And he tries to share with us his insights out of that experience.  So his words are not to be taken literally; in fact, to take them literally is to completely misunderstand them.  We must instead look through his words and try to discern what insight about our world John is trying to share with us.  A tricky and very inexact undertaking.  

Such mysticism is not new to our Scriptures with John’s revelation.  Moses went up on a mountainside and saw a burning bush that was not consumed.  And it spoke to him!!  Ezekiel saw critters with hundreds of eyes that were utterly indescriptable...and wheels spinning within wheels.  I’m convinced that many, if not most of the prophets’ insights arose out of mystical experiences.  Jesus and Paul both were mystics.  So this is not new, strange stuff.  But it is strange to those of us who are not mystics... strange, and fairly incomprehensible... but sometimes (not always) deeply insightful and useful... if (a big “if”) we can step into the non-literal and allow the insight to be revealed to us.  Not easy... fraught with pitfalls.