The Tale of Two Gardeners, An Easter Parable

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. ~ John 12:24

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ~ John 6:53

Once there were two men who longed for real tomatoes with good flavor – unlike the bland, waxy variety found in the chain supermarkets. So they both decided to start their own home gardens.

The first gardener bought the best seeds in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too. He dug in the hard soil (there was a lot of clay in their area) and planted and watered his seeds, careful to space them apart properly, and reflecting on how – in a sense – the seed had to die before new life could spring from it.

Every day he was diligent to water and weed his garden and, sure enough, in about a week little sprouts poked through the surface. But neither the tomatoes nor the others plants grew as big as those in the catalog pictures, and although his tomatoes tasted far better than the waxy supermarket variety, they looked a bit scrawny and didn’t produce very much.

The second gardener bought the best seeds in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too.

Because there was a lot of clay in their area he rented a roto-tiller and spent a day plowing up the hard dirt for his garden bed. The tiller violently ripped into the hard soil about a foot deep, churning everything over and deeply cultivating the topsoil and clay into a soft new mixture. Then he went to the local compost facility where grass clippings, pulled weeds, and other yard waste from all over the city was allowed to rot and decay into smelly black piles of rich organic matter. He filled his truck bed to the brim with this living-dead dirt and shoveled it onto his freshly-tilled planter beds. To this he added earthworm castings (worm poop!). He then folded all this deep into the soil turning it over and over again one shovel-full at a time.

Then he added organic fertilizer, made from decomposed bone, kelp, and fish meal. He sprinkled the ashy white powder all over the planter beds and raked it into the dirt, shaping the beds into gently sloping mounds, which were now smelly, soft, and a deep dark brown color. Into this graveyard of decomposed animal and vegetable waste he planted and watered his seeds, and reflected on how they would have to break open and “die” in order for life to spring from them. And he thought, too, of how the young plants would be – in a sense – eating the flesh and drinking the blood of all the animals and plants that were sacrificed and given on their behalf, and he marveled at how much death was required to produce rich, full life.

That summer his tomatoes outgrew their cages, and the pepper plants were so full they crowded each other in the beds. He picked so many big, beautiful tomatoes and peppers that he had to share them with his friends and neighbors since it was more than he could possible eat all by himself. And his tomatoes were very tasty.

Technorati Tags: Easter, Gardening, Jesus Christ, John, Parables

After SVS 2010: Matt Croasmun, The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John

Today is our final installment. After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Matt Croasmun: “The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John”

Abstract
This paper consists of two parts. The first is an exegetical exploration of the “missing Eucharist” narrative and peculiar chronology of the passion narrative in the Gospel of John in a literary-canonical mode. Here, it is shown that the Gospel of John indeed includes a Eucharistic narrative and that this event takes when it does in the Synoptic accounts, though, in John’s chronology, Eucharist happens on the cross, as Jesus eats his food (bringing to completion the work of the One who sent Him) and drinks the cup which He obediently receives at Gethsemane. Using the foot-washing narrative as a lens through which to interpret this displaced Eucharist, the mimetic significance of Jesus’ death and His Eucharist is contrasted with the mnemonic function of Eucharist in the Lucan-Pauline tradition. The second part of the paper considers the systematic coherence afforded Vineyard theology as a whole in emphasizing the mimetic function of Jesus’ death. Here, it is noted that Johannine texts have long served as the source for the Vineyard’s basic mimetic stance towards the ministry of Jesus: that is, the Vineyard reading of the gospels has been a call to Johannine imitation of the Synoptic Jesus. The exclusion of the Cross from this exegetical program is a result of a confusion regarding the inimitable nature of Jesus’ death, understood exclusively as once-for-all atoning sacrifice. Receiving from John a Eucharistic theology that regularly invites us into imitation of Jesus’ obedience to the will of the Father and self-lowering love of others exhibited on the Cross promises to bring greater systematic unity to the Vineyard’s hermeneutical strategy in the gospels and to provide the Cross a more central place in the movement’s theology as a whole.

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Several years ago, before I started Divinity School, I sat in on Harry Attridge’s course on the exegesis of the Fourth Gospel. Harry has substantial interest in the sacramental theology of this text. And, of course, the key problem with thinking about sacraments—especially Eucharist—in John is that there is no institution narrative. So we puzzled over this problem quite a lot in that course and I remember continuing to puzzle over it long after.

Around the same time, I was reading Bill Jackson’s history of the Vineyard church and noted there that the Vineyard had taken some flack for not teaching the Cross as much as the critics would have liked. I suppose it’s a sign of the times, but I’m really interested in the ways that larger narratives frame and in some sense control our theological reflection. So, in thinking about the problem Bill Jackson had highlighted, it occurred to me that perhaps integral to this problem was the Vineyard’s narrative of the Kingdom. Was there something about the way the Vineyard was understanding the Kingdom that left the cross on the sideline? When I went and read the Vineyard Statement of Faith, my suspicions only grew. Eventually, I stumbled upon the possibility that it is the radical imitation of Jesus (which is really the heart of Wimber’s hermeneutic of the gospels) that could provide the “hook” in the Vineyard’s meta-narrative on which to hang a distinctively Vineyard—distinctively “Kingdom”—theology of the cross.

The last piece of the puzzle for me is the methodological approach I’m trying to take in the paper. A mentor and friend of mine gave me Stephen Moore’s God’s Gym to read when I was in Divinity School. Of course, Moore’s conclusions are profoundly troubling—though, I think worth wrestling with. But I found his method of interpretation absolutely exhilarating. It was playful, it was deadly serious at times. It broke down the walls of historical criticism that have always seemed fundamentally out of touch with the ways that actual people of faith read the biblical text and encounter God there. So, I guess I wanted to try my hand at something that might skew toward the “literary” in approach. Interestingly, I was surprised at how little push back I got on this at the SVS conference. I thought for sure some large number of folks would want to skewer me for going right at the fissures in the biblical text, making much of them, and playing out their tensions exclusively in a stubbornly non-historical, literary way. Does this count as “exegesis”? Is “exegesis” a good description of what people of faith are actually after in their encounter with God in the biblical text to begin with?

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: First, on the meta-level, I think the paper is relevant inasmuch as it might serve as a invitation to further reflection on the Kingdom and the Cross. How does the Cross fit into the Vineyard’s narrative of the Kingdom? I think I’ve offered a textual way into something like an answer to this question, but, presumably, there are others.

Second, in terms of the specific answer I offer, I really do think that it’s crucial when we talk about “doing the stuff” to consider Jesus’ death as an integral part of “the stuff” that Jesus was doing. We need to anticipate that imitation of Christ’s rejection, humiliation, and death is an integral part of imitatio Christi. I suggested in broad strokes in my paper that this mostly looks like self-lowering love of others; obviously, there’s so much more to explore there. A necessary caveat to that—the response I should have given to the excellent question posed from the feminist point of view—is that, of course, Jesus’ death is precisely also His exaltation—John uses the pun on Jesus being “lifted up.” So our imitation of Christ in his death is not fundamentally self-destructive; it is our salvation and access to true power and authority.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: In our church, we’ve changed some of the ways we do communion. First of all, we take communion every week—partly because we want to make sure that the cross is shaping everything we do and are becoming. We receive communion right after the sermon, which has given us the discipline of having to have every talk land us back at the foot of the cross. At the same time, because we do communion every week, we have freedom to let the invitation to the table look radically different from week to week. That’s been a great practice for us. And, certainly, a fair number of communion invitations in our church are invitations to imitate, rather than simply “remember.”

Matt will be available for questions and interaction in the comments below

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Matt Croasmun lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is a PhD student in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University. He is studying New Testament, focusing on mythological language in the Pauline epistles. He has been in the Vineyard for 12 years, serving in worship and youth ministry, and helped to plant the Elm City Vineyard in New Haven where he and his wife Hannah provide senior leadership.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, John, Matt Croasmun, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

God's Missionary Incarnation

(This is part of the continuing conversation we started this week about the vision of Ikon Community)

Jesus Christ is the prototype of the Church.

Theologian Chris Wright says Jesus is the “hermeneutical coherence” through which all disciples must read the texts that “lead up to” and “on from” Christ. In our case, this means developing a prophetic imagination that is able to grab hold of Christ’s example to be a foundation for our own gathered lives as missional pilgrims in 21st century America.

Not surprisingly, examples of Christ acting as a missionary to his own culture are everywhere in the gospel narratives, but I’ve chosen a specific passage to highlight because I believe it reveals so much about Christ’s overall posture toward the people of God, the world, and the gospel itself: John 5:1-30.

In this passage Jesus comes to the pool at Bethesda and encounters a cadre of sick and disabled people. This is much like the world in general – broken and in need of redemption – and Jesus meets those needs, bringing healing to one lame man in particular, liberating him to walk (John 5:5-8). This is the powerful demonstration of the eschatological Kingdom breaking into the present; the good news has come.

That alone is an expression of God’s mission. However, we learn something of Jesus’ theology in this passage as well. When pressed by the Jewish leaders to answer for his Sabbath-breaking healing efforts, Jesus responds, saying, Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Christopher Wright, Church, Jesus, John, mission, missional