Week 5 - Civil Rights Apocalypse

March - Vol 2 and 3 - John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell

Jesus the Baptist - Richard Vinson (my dad!)

   What is the apocalypse? A vision of the transition between the current world and the future one; out with the old, in with the new; in the end is our beginning; no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Is that an accurate definition?
   What is apocalyptic faith? Belief that the vision is true, accompanied by a lifestyle that prepares for, hastens, or participates in the end/beginning.
   A sample outline of apocalyptic faith:

• Step 1 - Suffering. A group of people, or the entire world, is suffering the effects of sin, oppression, corruption, demonic powers, an evil god or gods, the inevitable degeneration in the succesion of ages since the first Golden Age, or something like that.
• Step 2 - Vision. A prophet or many prophets have a vision of the end of this "evil and adulterous" generation and the beginning of a new world - a good and just world. The transition may be dramatic, violent, with lots of natural disaters - earthquakes, moon turns to blood, solar eclipse, stars fall from the sky. The transition may involve a final battle with lots of trumpets, and/or a final judgment where God clears everything up and sorts everything out. The transition may take a long time, or it may be swift and sudden. Perhaps the new world is really a return to the original Golden Age. Perhaps the new world continues in time, or perhaps it is eternal, with no death or change.
• Step 3 - Preaching. The prophets share this vision with their community.
• Step 4  - Preparation and Participation. The community gets ready for the end of the world! Prayer, mutual support, continued preaching to anyone who will listen, and actions that might hasten the end or help it along.

What am I leaving out? Does this look right?

   Reading March, that short selection Malcom X's speeches (week 2), and some of the debates about whether "historical Jesus" was apocalyptic or not got me thinking about this. So many of the famous civil rights sayings seem to fit this apocalyptic pattern. I dunno if it's accurate to call the following quotes "apocalyptic," but maybe they are on the spectrum.
   "The lie won't live forever." "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." "We shall overcome someday."
   Prophets and people had a vision of a just world, and a trust that God was working toward that end, and the combination of that vision and trust produced amazing strength, resilience, and perseverance.

   Have you read March? Go check it out from the library! Give it to your uncle for his birthday. It's awesome. A graphic novel in three volumes, March is the story of John Lewis's first 25 years. Actually the book opens with President Obama's Innauguration day, 2009, and Lewis starts to tell some growing-up stories to a mother and her two sons, constituents from his district in Georgia visiting his office early before the ceremony. The rest is history, jam-packed history. 
   Growing up on the farm in Pike County, Alabama (down the road from where my grandmother grew up); preaching to the chickens; obsessed with school; his stifled hope to integrate Troy State; seminary in Nashville; church at First Baptist (Capitol Hill) with Rev. Kelly Miller Smith (whose son is pastor there now); sit-ins, arrests, and beatings while working with the Nashville Student Movement; joining and later chairing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Freedom Rides with CORE; personally escorted by Bull Connor back to the Tennessee line in the middle of the night; arrested in Mississippi and jailed at Parchman Farm for a month; more beatings; more arrests; friends murdered; the march on Washington; the "big six;" a trip to Africa; Mississippi freedom summer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (that story blew my mind); Birmingham; Selma; so much more; all this by the time he was 25 years old.

   John Lewis is from Alabama, and he's written some books. Guess what, my dad is from Alabama and he's written some books too! How's that for a transition!
   Jesus the Baptist is unpublished but I think it would be a great introduction to a "historical Jesus" class or section. Dad sent it to me to help me get oriented. He gives a short and sweet review of the historical Jesus literature and methods, sets out his own historical and textual criteria for researching Jesus, and then dives right in to John the Baptist and Jesus. Some of his most fascinating points:

• Immersion in water is spelled out in Leviticus as part of the ritual cleansing process. In second temple Judaism, for some Jews at least, immersion developed as moral cleansing as well as ritual. And in the Qumran community, which rejected the Temple leadership and the efficacy of it's sacrifices, immersion was essential to atonement and righteousness. So, John the Baptist wasn't coming from way way out in left field with the "baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." But with immersion you dunk yourself, or wash yourself. John apparently dunked other people. That was wierd.
• How come John is called the Baptist, and Paul and Acts reference baptism with complete comfort, but Jesus barely mentions baptism? (a reference in John to Jesus and his disciples baptising - although it notes that his disciples were actually doing the baptising; and Jesus asking his ambitious disciples, are you willing to be baptised with the baptism I'm about to get dunked into?) Dad makes some good arguments that Jesus and his disciples continued John's repentance-baptism formula.
• Jesus seems to authorize and command his disciples to do everything he is doing (healing, exorcising, preaching). That is very wierd for a religious leader of his day or any day.
• Jesus' move from the wilderness to Galilee is loosely connected to John's arrest by Herod Antipas. If John's arrest had anything to do with Jesus' motivation, then Jesus was trying to stick it to the man, so to speak. Antipas' ruling seat was in Galilee. You might see the Galilean move as a precursor to "set[ting] his face to go to Jerusalem."
• Take up your cross. Dad did an extensive survey of literature from the Greco-Roman-Jewish world, pre-Jesus, to see if there was any metaphorical usage of "cross" or "crucifixion." Of the hundreds of entries, he found only one figurative usage - as a curse in one of Plautus' plays. All the other uses were literal. In fact, some authors avoided the word, calling it the "extreme penalty" or the "servile death." Crucifixion was an inefficient and labor intensive way to execute someone; everyone realized it was intentionally gratuitous. It was reserved mainly for rebels -- rebelious slaves or rebelious subjects. By law, roman citizens could not be crucified. So when Jesus told his disciples "if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross" (and the saying passes dad's historical-textual criteria [it doesn't pass in the Jesus Seminar]), he probably meant, "you need to be ready to die at the hands of the Romans." And dad's extension of that is, "you need to be ready to die, because we're gonna protest in the Temple at Passover (and everyone knew the Romans beefed up security then) and we will get killed for insurrection."