‘Midrashic’ style

So for a taste of how the Jewish writers operated, I would like to tell of their ‘Midrashic’ style (and I’m paraphrasing John Shelby Spong here). Midrash is the Jewish way of saying that everything to be venerated in the present must somehow be connected with a sacred moment in the past. It is recognition that the truth of God is not bound within the limits of time but that its eternal echoes can be and are heard anew in every generation. For example, the power of God working through Moses was seen in the parting of the waters to allow the Hebrew people to walk into God’s promised future beyond the Red Sea. But Moses died, and God’s people needed to validate God’s continuing presence in Moses’ successor, Joshua. That validation was established by retelling the parting of the waters story in the saga of Joshua. This time it was the waters of the Jordan River rather than the Red Sea, but the affirmation of the parting of the waters was equally real—God was still at work among God’s people in the time of Joshua, still calling them into God’s promised future. The Midrash tradition continued when Elijah was also said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River when he exercised his authority as the leader of God’s people. When Elijah died, the story was repeated in the cycle of stories about Elisha. The ability to part the waters told the Jewish people that Israel’s history was one continuous story.

This same Midrash tradition sought to tell the story of Jesus, who was believed by his followers to have both fulfilled and expanded the symbols of the Jewish tradition. The Gospel writers had Jesus begin his career by walking into the waters of the Jordan River and parting, not the waters, but the heavens themselves so that the spirit of God, which was linked with heaven and water in both Jewish mythology and in the Gospel tradition, could visibly descend, rest on, and validate Jesus as the new expression of God in the ongoing story of God’s people. The question to ask of this Midrash tradition is not, did it really happen? That is a Western question tied to a Western mind-set that sets up a yes-or-no answer, for it either happened or it did not; it was either real or it was not.  The proper questions are: what was the experience that led, or even compelled the compilers of sacred tradition to include this moment, this life, or this event inside the interpretative framework of their sacred past? And what was there about Jesus of Nazareth that required the meaning of his life to be interpreted through these Jewish stories of antiquity?

Our battle is not between good and evil...but between ignorance and enlightenment - Mark Ruser