God Among the Ruins

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels while the Gospel According to St. John, soaring above the others, frankly records the Advent of God without apology. The Gospels of St. Mark and St. Matthew share a special closeness telling roughly the same story. In fact, Matthew contains 89% of the content in St. Mark's Gospel. St. Luke's Gospel contains roughly 50% of the same material. But we should not assume that these Evangelists sat down with manuscript of Mark's Gospel and transcribed from it. The Gospels in their early days were not books. Nor were they sheafs of paper passed from one reader to the next. First of all, this would have been pointless if their purpose was to to evangelize. Scholars estimate that only 3% of the first-century Levant could read or write. No. The Gospels were stories told.

When teaching on the subjects of Sacred Tradition and Holy Scripture, the Orthodox Church holds the obvious view: Scripture proceeded from Tradition. You see, these two are not co-equal companions. One proceeded from the other. The Gospels were communicated for years as a part of a living oral, tradition long before they became books. St. Luke says in his opening sentences that he was acquainted with the accounts given by "eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered to us" (Lu 1:2). That is, he received the living breath and lively tones of people who had heard and seen Jesus the Christ. You know, Robert Browning wrote a poem about sharing the same air with a man who seen Shelley. Think of sharing the same living, breathing air with someone who had spoken with Jesus! And these people had been selected by God to receive Divine Inspiration. As St. Paul told the Galatians (our Epistle lesson today),

And of course, in the famous scene of Saul of Tarsus riding on his horse down the Damascus Road, Jesus doesn't rush over and give Him a book. No. Saul has an intense encounter with the Living Lord Who speaks, sharing the Living Breath with Jesus the Word.

The Gospels were stories told. They were heard. They were not written down until later and then only for the purpose of preservation. The Master Himself before He spoke did not circulate handouts as I did when I was a college professor. People gathered and received the Living Word. And while the Son of God was the story-teller, the teacher, the homilist, the minister par excellence, He left not a single written word. As late as the Middle Ages, a written contract was held to be poor substitute for the living pledge of a spoken promise.

We are misled by gauging what is possible on the basis of our puny powers of memory. Even people as recent as the twentieth century could perform feats of memory that, prima facie, we would have thought impossible. Professor Milman Parry and his distinguished student, Professor Albert Bates Lord (both at Harvard), traveled into the Balkans recording men who were able to recite whole epics without the aid of written cues (The Singer of Tales, 1960).

How long is an epic poem? The epics of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey, are twenty-four books each. The Odyssey is a poem of over 12,000 lines.

As an aside, I have always doubted that the so-called "Q Text," posited as a written source for the Gospel, ever existed. Small wonder, no instance has ever been discovered. When we say that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke contain sections from Mark, we mean (I believe) that remembered sections were retold based on previous hearings of these stories.

We have explored the Gospel of Luke in recent years likening discrete sections of his Gospel to icons bearing in mind the importance of icons to the Orthodox faith and mindful of St. Luke's influential role as an icon painter (or "icon writer," we would say). This rich pictorial style is attested, for example, in Chapter 6, depicting the Sermon on the Mount and in succeeding chapters where other mountains of God are envisioned.

Elsewhere, St. Luke's depiction of the Descent of Holy Spirit is, of course, one of a kind. But it his pictorial conception that captures our attention suggesting an expansive stage opening out onto a city square from a locked room, Peter standing up and delivering his aria, so speak. invoking grand opera (which of course would not be invented for fifteen hundred years). From the beginning, the Christian faithful have been stirred to sing his canticles, even singling them out with names: the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Gloria in excelsis, the Nunc dimittis.

We do not know much about St. Luke. From St. Paul we hear that he was a physician and that he was circumcised. From his vocabulary, allusions, and writing style, we surmise that he was well versed in Greek literature and in the Greek Septuagint. Commentators have surmised that he was a Hellenized Jew, but that is unwarranted. We should stick to what we know and stray into speculation not grounded in evidence. Let us simply say that St. Luke, like St. John, was obviously antipathic to the cult of Judah-ism as were the followers of Jesus generally.

Hearing his grounding in Greek literature (which we infer from allusions) one plausible background for his writings is Homer's epic the Odyssey, a poem Luke would have known as among the highest literary works attained by man. Accordingly, let us consider the elements of epic bearing in mind Luke's two-volume opus, Luke-Acts. (I borrow from the Harmon and Holman's Handbook to Literature).

— The epic begins in medias res ("in the middle of things"). Luke's Gospel begins with an angel boldly interposing the Divine Will in a general story about the colossal fact of the Creator entering the Creation. We get right to the heart of the matter with Gabriel confronting Zacharias, a priest of the Temple, which has dismissed the possibility of angels. The upshot is that God has acted, brushing aside the opinions of men.

— The setting in epic is expansive touching many nations. Luke-Acts will involve Jesus and then the Apostles traveling to many lands, but, more important, its setting stretches from the darkest valleys of the earth unto Highest Heaven.

— Epic involves the invocation of a muse, or inspiring supernatural intermediary. We say that an essential element of any Gospel is that it is inspired by God, in the Person of the Holy Spirit.

— An epic announces a great theme. St. Luke's Gospel, of course, begins with the mind-bending fact of God entering world.

— An epic discloses the Divine intervening in human affairs. From the Annunciation to the Nativity to the Transguration, St. Luke's Gospel is about the Divine breaking into the world which we know.

— Epic poetry includes major historical figures. You must depict great men in your work if it is to be epic. St. Luke cast of characters includes Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Herod Agrippa I, Herod Agrippa II, Felix, Festus, St. John the Baptist (a towering figure in the Levant), and the Son of God, to name but a few.

— Epic frequently features a depiction of Hell. St. Luke's Gospel certainly features scenes from Hell. Only recently we saw the vivid depiction of the rich man suffering the flames of Hades with his anguished (and memorable) detail, if only Lazarus "would dip his finger in water and cool my tongue" (Lu 16:24). (Talk about a pictorial style!) But Hell can take many forms: common to all is the complete absence of God.

By the first century A.D., no genre of literature ever existed called a Gospel. Moreover, while there were collections of so-called Mosaic materials, called Torah, or collections of books of the Prophets, called Nevi'im, there was no concept of a Bible by the time of Jesus' birth. Now, of course, there were compilations. The Septuagint comes to mind. But this compilation and translation was done by an Egyptian king for literary purposes. There was no incomparably holy book, such as our Evangel, which we kiss and reverence and process with.

Finally, I am certainly not suggesting that the once-for-all-time and incommensurably holy events surrounding the Advent of God were inspired by secular literature. Of course they weren't! But we must concede that the Evangelists drew on the materials of their time and culture to express themselves no less than we rely on our own language, which is unavoidably embedded with artifacts from our own culture. St. Luke has manifestly done just that. The most elevated and exalted form of expression by the lights of Antiquity was the epic.

But let us return to our beloved masterpiece, the Gospel According to St. Luke. As we have said, the work begins in medias res with the intervention of the Divine into human affairs. Two births are announced. The more imposing of the two is that of our epic Hero, Jesus the Christ, Son of God. The other is His royal herald, St. John the Forerunner.

In the early chapters, the Son of God has drawn back His cloak, the cloak that has disguised His true Identity and by and by speaks and acts plainly as God, for example, causing the Pharisees to gasp:

Only God can forgive sins!

Drawing back the veil a little further, He explains the purpose of the parables telling His disciples,

He denies the quotidian meaning of the world, insisting now on the Divine view:

He then embarks with certain of His disciples to a land across the Sea of Galilee and sails into a mighty tempest. Being roused from His nap, He sees that the boat is near sinking and He

His disciples are rightly amazed

By this time in the narrative, Jesus had already raised the dead in Nain. And before this, He had appeared on a mountaintop clearly apposite to Mount Sinai, giving the Law, no less. Still ahead are the Feeding of the Five Thousand, where He feeds the people Israel with manna in the wilderness, the Sending Out of the Apostles, and the Transfiguration. He has left no doubt about Who He Is.

His Divine purposes press constantly upon Him. The people languish under a double yoke, the most perilous of their history. On one side they are surrounded by paganism with many defecting to the Graeco-Roman world and its practical advantages. On the other, His people have been dominated by a Babylonian religion with its worship of a false god.

He dismisses the former as simply Mammon or "the world":

But the latter is less straightforward. Judeans for generations had been taught that the figure to which they have offered blood sacrifice is God. The only remedy is to expose the false by revealing the true, which is Himself, the Son of the Living God. And He goes out across the Hebrew and Jewish lifeworlds of the Levant and beyond to inspire and to gather the lost Tribes of ancient Israel.

He sails across Lake Genessaret directly opposite Galilee into the wrack and ruin of a storm, which He easily calms. His destination is the lost Tribe of Gad. In a sense He sails to the Gad of the thirteenth-century B.C., which was settled as the Hebrews entered the Land of Promise. Yet, inevitably, He must enter the thoroughly Hellenized world of first-century Gad, with the Decapolis (the ten cities) which today look like the ruins of ancient Rome. For Gad had become thoroughly paganized.

The scene is reminiscent of Odysseus sailing to the Isle of Aeaea. His men have preceded him there, on their way home following the ten-year siege of Troy, the war "that launched a thousand ships" (Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe). Coming to save them, Odysseus encounters the same charms that have turned them into demon-possessed creatures. They have been transformed, you see, into pigs suggesting their carnal state of mind feeding on the garbage of human animality. Odysseus himself is subject to seduction and the potential chains of sensuality. But first Odysseus encounters Hermes, messenger of the gods (we would say "an angel of the Lord"), who tells him how to proceed.

Certainly, Gad is a spiritual landscape. As with all spiritual landscapes, it is about the choice between the false and the true. If stampeding horses represented untamed passions to Antiquity (as they did), then how much more do stampeding pigs signify the chaos of particularly vile and disgusting passions, which would have been well-understood by Luke's audience. And who could argue that Gad represents the most extreme range of choice: choosing the embrace of God or choosing the rejection of God and the culture of death. One man is freed from these chains and gratefully devotes himself to Jesus. But the the rest, craving garbage, reject God.

You know, this is a famous scene, reprised (much later) in the Fairie Queene of Edmund Spenser. A holy man of deep arts is able to transform these horribly disfigured men from their pig-like forms back to men again. But one man preferred garbage. Spenser writes of him, "Let Gryll be Gryll and have his hoggish mind." And they left for their ship.

"Hoggish minds." Is not this the case with our culture?

Thus, St. Luke completes yet another icon in his collection: an unforgettable depiction of Hell, or at least a foretaste of dark kingdom .... with people utterly possessed by demons (a legion is 4,500), with the thunderous hoofbeats of manic pigs stampeding into the sea, and a raucous mob driving our Hero (Who came to save) back to His ship.

From there He sails to the other side where He will heal the sick, feed thousands with manna, raise the dead, and announce the good news that God, the true God, has visited His people.

We are left with a haunting scene deftly executed by the master icon painter, St. Luke. The title of this icon might be "Abandon All Hope," which are words written over the gates of Hell.

I say "haunting," for this is a true image of our own place and time. Our mainstream cultural media are regularly stampeded by pigs. Our young people habituate this graphic material as a matter of course. Their world is flooded by it. What shall we do?

We must surround ourselves with daily prayer and fasting in due season. We must reflect on the Holy Scriptures. We must habituate the traditions and customs of the high holy days. We must be instructed in Christian teaching. And we must receive the God Who Alone is Life and introduce Him to our children from their earliest memory.

And if your Church has given itself over to the world, preaching tolerance to the point of becoming what it was founded to resist, then it is not the Church .... but something else. It is your sacred duty to find a godly community which is grounded in the sacraments and mysteries of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles and a place of rigorous faith. For the love of Christ and for the good of your family, move on until you have found pastures where sheep may safely graze. The Lamb of God will be satisfied with nothing less. For He stooped down from Heaven, setting aside His Heavenly life, and then gave His earthly life for just this reason:

His rod and His staff they comfort me, for they guide me and lead me away from danger and into the safety and peace that He Alone possesses.  

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.