Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2005-2006
Session #8

Scripture Forum
Session #8
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
April 21, 2006

Texts:
     Luke 24:1-53
     Leviticus 23:1-22

Introduction to the texts (Dr. Randi Rashkover):

• Today we'll study the Luke text first, but I still want to propose the possibility of reading that text through, or in the context of, Leviticus 23.
• I thought it would be interesting to think about the economy of festivals, the ordering of festivals, and the ordering of the liturgical calendar. I like Leviticus 23 because it introduces us to the no-tion of calendrical ordering and to the relationship between calendrical ordering and the preparing of a holy convocation -- what is understood as a meeting with God.
• I thought it would be interesting to ask ourselves about the economy of time. What does it mean to have a time for meeting with God -- that is, a regularly ordered arrangement of when we meet with God?
• It is particularly interesting in the case of the Jewish festivals because when we meet with God is in part decided by God, or by the natural order: There are certain natural signs that determine when we meet with God. But it's also incumbent on the Sanhedrin to determine when that actually transpires in the calendar to make sure that the calendar accommodates those natural signs. So the economy of the liturgical calendar is covenan-tal. That is, there is already a meeting between God and humankind in the very formulation of this particular ordering.
• The second aspect of the economy of the festivals that I thought was interesting is the question of the relationship between the festivals and the real economy. In the biblical text the festivals are explicitly linked to an agricultural economy, which partially justifies their ordering.
• From the rabbinic perspective, however, you fre-quently hear that the purpose of the festivals is
  to incline Jews to stop their participation in the normal ordering, the normal economy, of the day. So I thought it would be interesting to ask these questions: To what extent do festivals situate us more deeply in our economies, or -- particularly in the biblical text -- what is the relationship be-tween the festival and the agricultural economy? To what extent are these festivals inclined to catapult us out of the monied economies in which we are situated?
• I was also interested in this text because of the particular time that is being ordered in Leviticus 23. The particular time that is being ordered is
  the counting of the omer -- a time bookended
  by Pesach and Shavuot. Thus, as a period of
  time bracketed by two agricultural offerings, the counting of the omer is situated in an economy. So in the text you've got the introductory ma-terial about Pesach, and then you've got the inauguration of the period of forty-nine days, or seven weeks, during which we count the omer.
• [Counting of the omer: "A sheaf, or omer, of the new barley harvest was offered up in the Temple on the second day of Pesach, the ‘day after the Sabbath’ (Lev. 23:11). This offering allowed the new cereal crop to be eaten. For the next seven weeks, each day was counted till Shavuot, which falls on the fiftieth day. This practice of counting, which is still maintained, was understood as repre-senting the ascent by the Israelites of the forty-nine steps from the depths of spiritual impurity in Egypt. They eventually reached the level of purity represented by the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, which took place on Shavuot. The period became one of semi-mourning in the Middle Ages, ostensibly because the pupils of Akiva died in the second century C.E. at this time. … The mourning is interrupted in the middle of the omer by Lag Ba-Omer." (Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend, by Alan Unterman, pp. 149-150.)]
• What is the meaning of this particular time? What does it mean to say that we count during this time? What are we counting for? Sometimes it's suggested in rabbinic commentaries that we're counting the days until we meet with God again. We count with expectation and with promise. The counting suggests that the meeting will happen. It's a counting up, not a counting down. But there's also a notion that the counting suggests that the meeting with God is not now. So the counting occurs in the context of a kind of loss,
  a lack of presence of the meeting itself. This period of time in Judaism is strange and very poignant, a period during which there is a nexus between optimism and loss. In addition, later Rabbinic Judaism designates this period specifically as a time of mourning because it was during this period of time that the Temple was destroyed.
• Finally, I want to suggest that this is the period of time that, in the Jewish encounter with God, marks the moment of redemption that we commemorate in Pesach and anticipates the giving of the Law celebrated at Shavuot. It is interesting to think about the relationship between redemption and the reception of the Law.
• The reason that I paired Leviticus 23 with Luke
  24 is because I began to ask myself about the relationship between the Last Supper -- the commemoration of Pesach in the Gospel narrative
  -- and the events of Pentecost. I asked myself: What is transpiring in this period of time, which would be for Jews the period of counting the omer? The Gospel texts do reflect on the paschal celebration, but they do not seem mindful of this other crucial spiritual period of time.

The first text: Luke 24:1-53 (NRSV translation)

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again." Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, "What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?" They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, "Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?" He asked them, "What things?" They replied, "The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him." Then he said to them, "Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?" Then be-ginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, "Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over." So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, "The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!" Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43 and he took it and ate in their presence.

Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you -- that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high."

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

The discussion begins:

• Remark: I find noteworthy the extent to which Jesus links himself to a reading of the Hebrew Scriptures when there doesn't seem to be any reflection at all on the calendrical context of the Hebrew Scriptures. There are many links back to the Scriptures: "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" "Then he opened their minds to understand the scrip-tures." "Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures." Then, at the end, they returned to the Temple. There are so many links back, and yet there is a whole new narrative here, and a whole new world of ritual.
• Remark: It struck me that in the context you gave us for the Leviticus passage, which begins with a description of Sabbath, this text begins by saying, "on the first day of the week." This starts immedi-ately after the Sabbath. There is something different here.
• Remark: Time is very important in this text. It be-gins on the first day of the week at early dawn. There is a refrain of "on the third day … rise again." Time is significant, but these are different demarcations of time than those with which Jews would be familiar.
• Reaction: My thought on that has always been that what we're demarcating here is the new time of creation; early dawn on the first day is a reset-ting of the creation story. The resurrection is not just a furthering of creation. It's almost a redo: You hit the reset button, and we're starting over again.
• Question: How do you then reconcile that to the repeated references to Moses and the prophets and to all the linkages to that rooting? If it's really de novo …
• Response: Except it's not de novo because even in the resurrection appearances there is a -- I don't want to say a wiping out of the old creation, but there is a fulfillment of the old order of creation. The new references to time let us know that we're doing something new that fits into the old frame-work. The old is not being erased; it's being improved. It's not improvement in the sense of superseding what has happened before but in
  the sense of fulfilling what has happened before.
  I think that comes out in the way that Jesus is described. He still has all the physical attributes and obeys all the physical laws that we expect. In this text he eats. In John you can see the wounds in his hands. Yet there is a mystical sense about him in that he appears and disappears; people don't recognize him, yet recognize him. It's a strange sort of new creation.
• Reaction: I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're making between the notion that it is not a supersessionist text and its operating with a dy-namic that what was promised or anticipated in the Hebrew Scriptures finds its fulfillment in the person of Jesus. It would seem to me logical that on your reading a person would conclude that there is a truth within the Scriptures that cannot be unlocked unless the Scriptures are read through the lens of recognizing Jesus as the Messiah. There is a dynamic that strips the Jewish commu-nity of its own interpretation, its own reading of the text, and suggests that the true spiritual core is inaccessible and incomprehensible in its spiritual integrity apart from that insight [i.e., that Jesus is the Messiah].
• Response: I think what militates against that for me is that there isn't really a reference to obliter-ating what has come in the past. The knowledge of the past is not invalidated. There is no claim in the resurrection that everything in the past is irrelevant, and everything from this point forward is what is relevant. What I see here is a sense of a fulfillment of what has come in the past without removing what has come in the past.
• Reaction: But your reading still has, to put it quite bluntly, an anti-Jewish edge to it because the underlying dynamic is that the Jewish community doesn't get it. They don't know what's really going on here because they don't know how to interpret the proleptic character of this text.
• Question: Or could it be that the past is giving light to the present, rather than the present giv-ing light to the past?
• Reaction: Do you mean that this is necessary for this particular community? They can't understand these events without recourse to the past?
• Response: To validate these events, they have to understand how they fit into what they have been taught, into their tradition. That tradition and what they've been taught gives light to what hap-pened here -- to why this happened and what it means about who Jesus was, and is.
• Remark: I think what's troubling me is something I can't link to this text except for the fact that the word is here -- the idea of fulfillment, that there need be a fulfillment; that is, the notion that the Law of Moses, the prophets, the psalms must be fulfilled. That there even need be a fulfillment of them suggests that they're not sufficient in and
  of themselves. That's controversial. What you're ultimately arguing is that this is not a text about the veracity of the value of Jewish observance or Jewish life, although the text is never explicitly negative about Jewish life. Why do we have to read an absence as a negative? Why can't we just understand that it's not about that? For this par-ticular community, in order to understand these events, the hermeneutical key is to situate them in the Hebrew Scriptures. I think that's a really interesting way of reading the text. But the notion that the Scriptures need to be fulfilled troubles me.
• Question: So would you not say that the coming of the Messianic Age, whatever that means, is not some kind of fulfillment for Jews?
• Response: The Jewish tradition does not suggest that the Law of Moses, the prophets, the psalms must be fulfilled. I think this really brings us back to the tension between these two texts. Jewish life is not so much about the fulfillment of the narrative as it is about the carrying on of certain performances and certain tasks. Carrying out these tasks is the labor of redemption, if you will. The labor of redemption isn't something that we occupy ourselves with in terms of narratively hoping for it. To the extent that Jews anticipate the Messianic Age, they do so in their practice.
  It would be interesting to ask ourselves whether
  or not in the counting of the omer we are actually enacting a longing for a sort of fulfillment, a long-ing for the fulfillment of our next meeting with God. Even if we were, it would still be different because we're performing that. And all the while that we're performing it, there is an extent to which we're realizing the kingdom of God here and now as well. We're both realizing it and anticipating it. But I don't think that we would look at these texts and say that there is some additional meaning here that we somehow have not captured.
• Remark: What you've just shared with us is a significant understanding for Christians. Christians need to understand what fulfillment means in the different communities because, as the scripture has come to us, we indeed see the fulfillment of
  it in a Messiah.
• Remark: Two things come to my mind. First, verse 27 says explicitly that from the point of view of the writer of this Gospel, "beginning with Moses and all the prophets [Jesus] interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures." The writer of this Gospel is presupposing, at least at this point, that the Scriptures as the early Chris-tians knew them were about Jesus. Does the Greek support that? (Response: Yes.)
• Interjected question: That suggests the question, does that understanding exhaust the meaning of those texts?
• Remark: Could I add my second point? I'm not saying this in order to say that therefore I say that's what Luke's Gospel is about. I'm just pointing out that it's another piece of the pie. That's the only point I wanted to make. My second point concerns an article that Ray Brown wrote on the Passion narratives. He makes the point that what is unique about Luke is that, because Luke has a volume two in the Acts of
  the Apostles, we can read this whole notion of fulfillment as Luke teaching us that we all fulfill the Scriptures by the way we live our lives. Just as we see in Acts that Stephen and Peter and Paul lived according to what the Scriptures taught them, so likewise they are setting an example for all of us to do the same. That's a much more relevant way for me to understand what is meant by the Scriptures being fulfilled. But I do have to point out that I am bothered by verse 27.
• Remark: Isn't it a possibility that, in a sense, Sweitzer was right that Jesus represented an apocalyptic mindset that did not become prev-alent except perhaps through Christianity, and that there were some people in the first century who were indeed looking for fulfillment? There
  was diversity in the first century. What we see represented in this text is one strain of inter-pretation, which Luke happens to adopt. Another thing is that Luke does have an anti-Jewish edge because he is trying to convince his gentile read-ers that he's not a subversive writer, and he does have a second volume that he wants people to read. That is also operating here in the way he shapes his narrative.



• Remark: It's interesting that the encounter takes place with their backs to Jerusalem; they're mov-ing away from Jerusalem. And the geographical dynamic of Luke-Acts is really quite important.
• Response: That's true, but the result of the en-counter is their turning around and going back to Jerusalem.
• Remark: An interesting point -- and this links to our earlier conversation about the dynamics of hospitality -- is that the person they encounter is a stranger, and in large measure the insights they have into both the Scriptures and the identity of who Jesus really is occur in the process of pro-viding hospitality to an unknown wanderer. The truth comes out in the context of study, so in that sense there is a dynamic that is very consistent with the Jewish matrix out of which this commu-nity emerges. The key insight is revealed with the breaking of the bread. That insight comes into play in the offering of nourishment to the one who is in need of sustenance. What I take from that is not simply that this is a story about Jesus, who was there in disguise, and they didn't get it until the very end; but that the Christian community gains access over and over again to its defining insight, its defining truth, by opening itself to the stranger, studying the core narratives of their tradition with him, and making sure that he is provided for. That dynamic of hospitality is the setting out of which insight into the tradition emerges.
• Reaction: That's an exquisite reading. I think that's really thought-provoking. I wanted to ask what transpires in this encounter. What are they learning? What is the rite of passage that they're going through here in terms of this process of breaking bread with Jesus and then recognizing him? I never would have even thought of this particular reading, which suggests that what's being provided here is a model of how to sit and study with a stranger. They're studying texts and that enables them to become more prepared to break bread together. They're studying texts and then they're engaging in hospitality. It's really poignant to consider it that way. That they're studying texts together is the opening; it's not unique to study with Jesus, or it's not exclusive
  to studying with him.
• Remark: The genius of Judaism, at least as Neusner and others maintain, is that when the Temple is destroyed, the obligations of reinsti-tuting the Temple become incumbent on every family in terms of how it establishes its table fellowship. The dynamics are different, but in a curious way there is an analogue here: Because their backs are turned to Jerusalem at this junc-ture, to a certain extent they're establishing a different kind of table fellowship here that weans them of the dependency on the Temple, even though they go back to the Temple at the very end.
• Reaction: But they go back only after this has been redesigned.
• Remark: They've discovered this is a possibility.
• Reaction: I think that's really insightful.



• Remark: I'm thinking of the focus in the introduc-tion on the importance of time in connection with ceremonies and celebrations, and I'm wondering if anyone here knows how many of the traditions from Jewish celebrations were continued in the early Christian church in the first century or two. Was the whole array of traditions observed for a period of time and, if so, when did that observ-ance stop?
• Response: Certainly we have in the Church Fathers the practice of observing the Jewish holidays as something they explicitly condemned as a sort of reversion to Judaism. In Paul's letters we have the question of observance of particular feasts as a sticking point between the Jewish and gentile followers of Jesus. Eventually, not observ-ing these holidays became a cultural boundary marker for the church. But I can't remember how early that would have happened.
• Another response: In John's Gospel you can see that there's a transposition of Jewish festivals and their absorption into the person of Jesus, so that the significance of those festivals and celebrations is now embodied in him. So again I think that there's a dynamic that what was proleptically given finds its fulfillment in Jesus.



• Question from a Jewish participant: Why is it that they don't recognize Jesus? When you talk about this, what does it mean to say they don't recog-nize him? Why wouldn't they recognize him? Is there a spiritual issue involved, or is this just a literary device?
• Response: There are three options here: rein-carnation, resuscitation, or resurrection. We're mitigating against the reincarnation of Jesus by having the body missing. So it's not the case that his spirit has migrated to being a butterfly or something like that. He's not resuscitated either, because he doesn't come out of the tomb looking exactly like he looked when he went into it. If he came out of the tomb and met these people on the road and they knew instantly who he was, then he would just have been resuscitated. There's a definite transformation, a metamor-phosis that happens in the resurrection. [Scribal note: That Jesus was not simply resuscitated is what Christians mean when they say that Jesus was raised to new life.]
• Reaction: What is interesting is narratively what their failure to recognize him prompts them to do. Failing to recognize who he is prompts them to be witnesses to the good news.
• Remark: Verse 16 says that "their eyes were kept from recognizing him." The verb is passive. So in a sense it was not a failure on their part that they did not recognize him. God kept their eyes from recognizing him so that this encounter could hap-pen. What I find to be anti-Judaic in this is that the revelation happens in the breaking of the bread; that is, there is a Eucharistic element in the text.
• Remark: I think the story is much less interesting if it's only about Jesus and Jesus' appearance -- that is, the encounter with the resurrection. For me it's much more disclosive of the reality of the Christian insight that the stranger who is in need actually embodies in some very profound way the presence of Christ.
• Reaction: I think that's played out in all the hos-pitality encounters in Luke's Gospel.



• Remark: I wonder if we could go back for a mo-ment to the way in which the economy of the liturgical calendar is set up. If I hear you right, the notion of fulfillment doesn't really come into play in the Jewish imagination apart from the experience of exile, apart from the experience of a profound dislocation. So what is given at Sinai, if you will, is a template for how to live that in a sense is not bounded by time and circumstance. The issue of its fulfillment just has to do with being in circum-stances that allow you to embody what the Torah is all about. Therefore, the notion of fulfillment has to do with the recovery of those conditions that allow the actualization, the realization, of Torah, rather than with the notion that we're in a sinful, fallen world and somehow we've got to climb out of the morass. There's a very different architec-ture to salvation history.
• Reaction: But wouldn't you say that in the pro-phetic literature there's also a concern that the observance of the festivals absent of the com-munity's real struggle to enact the realities that the Torah made possible is, in fact, not an authentic celebration of the festivals? I think of Amos: "I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies" (Amos 5:21). There is a real concern that, if religious observ-ance becomes so disconnected from the reality of what is to be embodied through these sacred texts, the observance becomes a kind of false worship.
• Reaction: But that bypasses the question of mes-sianic anticipation. You're right to speak of the prophetic texts, but what I was really hoping for was a revisitation of the conditions for the pos-sibility of living out the blueprint of Torah. That's really what is necessary. It's not that the blueprint is somehow missing a piece that it needs in order to be fulfilled. The blueprint is very well estab-lished. The blueprint instantiates its own fulfill-ment, if you will. Fulfillment is not a word that works in the context of the notion of a blueprint.
  A blueprint is a functional model whose function bespeaks its fulfillment, and its fulfillment is at-tested to by its functionality and the realization
  of that function. What's really the impulse of that is: We need the conditions for the possibility reclaimed, rather than that we're waiting for something to come along and fix things.
• Reaction: That is counterintuitive for most of us who were educated in Christian seminaries be-cause how we were taught to read the Hebrew Scriptures -- I don't know about all of you -- the way I was taught to read was with particular eye to seeing the thread that binds it all together be-ing some messianic expectation, a notion that there is a hope articulated in the Hebrew Scrip-tures that is anticipatory, and the messianic longings that flow through the Hebrew Scriptures naturally point to the New Testament. I've over-stated it, and our OT professors were a little more subtle about it than that.
• Reaction: You haven't overstated it if you think of the popularity of the Anglican service of Lessons and Carols, which does nothing but take a series of scriptures, starting from Genesis, and string them all together to show that they're all antici-patory of the Christmas story.
• Remark: The Easter Vigil does the same thing.
• Remark: Being a fairly recent graduate, I think there have been changes. I certainly wasn't taught that. To me the issue is the meaning of fulfillment, and that goes back, I think, to the fourth chapter of Luke when Jesus opens the
  scroll and reads from Isaiah. I would be more interested in approaching fulfillment from that question first, and then seeing how that in-
  forms what he is talking about in chapter 24.
• Remark: The way that I've set this up is to read the Luke text through the Leviticus text and to ask ourselves why we're even asking about the concept of fulfillment at all. Is there an extent to which we want to use the concept of fulfillment
  to understand what's transpiring through the counting of the omer? It's interesting to see a similar movement in both texts. In the Luke text, you have them meeting with Jesus and he's a stranger to them. That is, he's absent during this period of time. The Lukan text is telling us about a period of time when, in the community's eyes, this presence of God is absent from them, and they long for this presence of God. And they revisit this presence of God, in effect, by retelling the story. There's longing, there's acting, there's realization. Then you have in the counting of the omer a very similar thing. We count the omer as a way of try-ing to reinstantiate our anticipation of the return of God and Shavuot. It's interesting to consider that perhaps there is a kind of expectation or hope of a sort of fulfillment -- an anticipation of a fulfill-ment of the meeting of God in the next occasion of our holy convocation. We may want to be more sympathetic to the concept of fulfillment and allow ourselves to read the Leviticus text through this posture.
• Remark: Do we mean fulfillment as it has been taught in Christian theology, or do we mean simply the enactment of the expectation? I realize this is provocative for Christian theology, but is what Jews and Christians in some sense hope for -- not in the same way but in similar ways -- the enact-ment of promises that have been made?
• Reaction: That's really helpful. So one way of thinking about the fulfillment of a promise is not its completion or its exhaustion, but its validation. It means that what is hoped for is validated as an appropriate hope. Is that what you were getting at?
• Response: That's what I'm asking. I'd like to know more about fulfillment because I think that when we assume that fulfillment means completed once and for all, we're reading texts through Christian theology and not really digging deeper to know what Jesus is talking about when he says "ful-filled."
• Question: Aren't we talking here about a particular promise? Jesus is trying to validate that the prom-ise of sending the Messiah is fulfilled through the Scriptures in him.
• Response: One way of reading the messianic ful-fillment would be to say that the promise of the Messiah was an appropriate expectation and hope that helped orient a community. That is, Jesus was not necessarily the Messiah who brought everything to completion, but Jesus validates
  the messianic expectation as a way to orient the community. So one reading of the fulfillment of Jesus as the Messiah is to say, "He's the one who was anticipated all along, and everything in the Hebrew Bible has always point to him." The other alternative is to say, "What Jesus was validating
  in fulfilling the messianic promise was that this is a way to situate yourself in time and to work toward the ultimate fulfillment of the promise."
• Reaction: That's a really interesting claim, and it opens up the possibility that the messianic status of Jesus is to a certain extent a synonym for the notion of fulfilling the conditions for the possibility of the Mosaic blueprint. But we can't say that from this kind of text because the messianic status of Jesus here presents too many points of departure from the blueprint itself. There are too many new rituals. There is too much new time. It's a new calendrical ordering: It's the dawn of a new week; the three days matter. This should be the period of the counting of the omer, but that is not mentioned in this text. Generally speaking, as was said earlier, Jesus absorbs the liturgical temporality of the Hebrew Scriptures into himself. But it is interesting to play around with diminishing the notion of messianic fulfillment and understanding
  it in terms of registering it as a verification of the community's own modes of performance. The time is now to be hospitable in this way, to break bread in this way, to perform this new order. That's what it is to say it's fulfilled: It is to be done.
• Remark: In the liturgical context, between Easter and Pentecost there is a waiting, an expectation. In a sense, fulfillment has now opened up to an unknown future. It's a new encounter with God, but the church doesn't know what it will be like.
• Question: Do we see these whole fifty days as this time of waiting, or do we see just the last nine days before Pentecost as waiting?
• Response: I think there's only one Sunday when we really preach waiting: It's that Sunday be-tween the Ascension and the Seventh Sunday of Easter.
• Reaction: That's so, but not on the basis of this text. In v. 49 Jesus says, "stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." There is a sense of waiting there, and that precedes ascension in this narrative. In Acts it comes after the ascension. Go figure: Luke wrote both of them. Taking the idea about studying with the stranger, in Acts this whole period from resur-rection to ascension is a period of study. Jesus spends the time instructing the apostles. It's also a period of preparation and waiting until Pente-cost. So maybe liturgically we've caught the wrong emphasis at this point. This period is celebratory instead of being anticipatory. There should be a greater sense of expectation than there is.
  [Scribal note: Scholars have noted the chrono-logical discrepancy between the end of the Gospel of Luke and the beginning of The Acts of the Apostles. In his book Misquoting Jesus (pp. 169-170), Bart D. Ehrman accounts for this discrep-ancy by identifying the words "was carried up into heaven" (Lk. 24:51), which are missing in some of the earliest manuscripts, as a scribal addition intended to stress the physicality of Jesus' ascension. Such an addition would counter the docetists, who claimed that Jesus only appeared to suffer, die, be resurrected, and ascend into heaven.]

The second text: Leviticus 23:1-22 (NRSV trans.)

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: These are the appointed festivals of the LORD that you shall proclaim as holy convocations, my appointed fes-tivals.

Six days shall work be done; but the seventh day is a sabbath of complete rest, a holy convocation; you shall do no work: it is a sab-bath to the LORD throughout your settlements.

These are the appointed festivals of the LORD, the holy convoca-tions, which you shall celebrate at the time appointed for them. In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight, there shall be a passover offering to the LORD, and on the fif-teenth day of the same month is the festival of unleavened bread to the LORD; seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall have a holy convocation; you shall not work at your occupations. For seven days you shall present the LORD's offerings by fire; on the seventh day there shall be a holy con-vocation: you shall not work at your occupations.

The LORD spoke to Moses: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you and you reap its harvest, you shall bring the sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest. He shall raise the sheaf before the LORD, that you may find acceptance; on the day after the sabbath the priest shall raise it. On the day when you raise the sheaf, you shall offer a lamb a year old, without blemish, as a burnt offering to the LORD. And the grain offering with it shall be two-tenths of an ephah of choice flour mixed with oil, an offering by fire of pleasing odor to the LORD; and the drink offering with it shall be of wine, one-fourth of a hin. You shall eat no bread or parched grain or fresh ears until that very day, until you have brought the offering of your God: it is a statute forever throughout your generations in all your settle-ments.

And from the day after the sabbath, from the day on which you bring the sheaf of the elevation offering, you shall count off seven weeks; they shall be complete. You shall count until the day after the seventh sabbath, fifty days; then you shall present an offering of new grain to the LORD. You shall bring from your settlements two loaves of bread as an elevation offering, each made of two-tenths of an ephah; they shall be of choice flour, baked with leaven, as first fruits to the LORD. You shall present with the bread seven lambs a year old without blemish, one young bull, and two rams; they shall be a burnt offering to the LORD, along with their grain offering and their drink offerings, an offering by fire of pleas-ing odor to the LORD. You shall also offer one male goat for a sin offering, and two male lambs a year old as a sacrifice of well-being. The priest shall raise them with the bread of the first fruits as an elevation offering before the LORD, together with the two lambs; they shall be holy to the LORD for the priest. On that same day you shall make proclamation; you shall hold a holy convocation; you shall not work at your occupations. This is a statute forever in all your settlements throughout your generations.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the LORD your God.

The discussion continues:

• Remark: I just want to say as a follow-up to the emphasis on notions of hospitality in the Lukan text that it's lovely that this text ends with the same sort of emphasis: Make sure that while you're performing this calendrical moment, this covenantal engagement with God, that you are living situated in the economy and that you do not forget to give to the poor while you're harvesting.
• The following remark was made by a Jewish parti-cipant in response to an unidentified question that appears to have concerned how the omer is counted: Turn to page 237 in the weekday prayer book. Page 236 is simply a historical introduction, not part of the liturgy. The liturgy begins on top of page 237, and this is how it's done. There is an introduction explaining what it is you're doing. I'm ready to fulfill the mitzvah of counting the omer. I quote from the biblical text, then there is a bless-ing, and then the counting. If you look at the bottom of page 239, you see the exact formula: "Today is the thirty-second day, which is the fourth week and four days of the omer." That's it.
• Question from a Christian participant: In contem-porary observance is it merely counting, or is there some kind of setting aside of …?
• Immediate response: It's merely counting. Setting aside can only be done in Israel. Another problem is a calendrical one. When counting the omer was strictly agricultural, you waited until the first bar-ley was ready to harvest. Once the calendar was set, historical and theological considerations took precedence over the agricultural. Even if the har-vest is not ready, the festival begins on the day the calendar says it is to begin.
• Remark: Disregarding for a moment the agricultural task of marking the harvest, counting the omer becomes an invitation to remember and to tell the story of the passage from Pesach to Sinai. Count-ing the omer can be done by the individual; it doesn't have to be done as part of a regular con-gregation. In counting the omer you are linking these two significant periods of time. And you are, I think, demonstrating, not necessarily the notion of anticipation of any kind of messianic capacity, but the hermeneutical need of both Pesach and Shavuot. You can't really understand Pesach without Shavuot, and you can't understand Shavuot without Pesach. This raises a question about the Lukan text: To what extent is it nec-essary for the members of this community to understand the resurrection through the lens of what happens next, as well as through the lens
  of what happened before? Doesn't that also challenge our notion of fulfillment? Isn't there a moment of fulfillment here more complex and more similar to this kind of hermeneutical need -- that when you're counting the omer, you're thinking back to Passover, and you're also thinking forward to Shavuot? Isn't that more similar to what's going on in the Lukan text than maybe first meets the eye?
• Reaction: Yes, but the crucial part is Luke's perspective that the meaning of the Torah text foretells something. Jews don't read Torah as foretelling anything.
• Question from a Christian participant: Do you read prophetic passages that seem to be forward-looking as referring to the return from Exile?
• Response: I read them as political statements based on the reality of the time. I don't believe that the prophets foretold the future. They weren't fortune tellers.
• Remark directed to the respondent: Some years ago I can remember your saying in effect, "I'm not sure that Jews have an eschatology."
• Response: No, I think those were words you put in my mouth.
• Reaction: Those were not my words. But this speaks to the whole question of whether there is an envisioning of the future that is constitutive of how Jews behave and live in the world today.
• Response: Yes, there is, but when the Messiah comes, we're going to continue living the way we're living now with only God's word.
• Remark: Note the poignancy of the text when it says, "the appointed season."
• Reaction: That's a thin eschatology.
• Question: But how much eschatology do you need?
• Response: I need a lot!
• Remark: Part of the question has to do with how satisfied you are with the way we're living today.
  I think the Christian reading, for example, of the Old Testament prophets is that these men were speaking in the context of exile. Jeremiah writes, for example, that God says the day will come when "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts" (Jer. 31:33). This is responding to a deep sense of things not being right with the world, and there's a hope that the day will come when there will be a radical paradigmatic shift.
  God will be the one to accomplish that shift in fulfillment of who He is and of His nature as He is revealed in Scripture. So you'll have both radical continuity with God's action in the past, and discontinuity with the broken system that we're currently experiencing, right? I think there's a strong strain of Christian theology that argues that Jesus is articulating the notion that, even though the nation has returned from the Baby-lonian captivity, there is a sense in which exile continues because the nation is still under foreign domination. Things are not as they're supposed to be. We don't see the fulfillment of the lion lying down with the lamb, and so forth. So we're sup-posed to recognize that there is more that needs to be fixed, a return from exile is still necessary. So the idea is then that the prophets may not be telling the future, but they're pointing forward to a hope for a better future that we trust God is going to accomplish.
• Reaction from a Christian participant: Wouldn't you say, though, if we're fair to try not to read the Old Testament through a New Testament lens, that almost without exception those prophets were calling the people to return to a faithfulness to Torah? It's not necessarily a broken system from the standpoint of a broken blueprint; it's a failure of the community to remain faithful to the blue-print. (Response: Absolutely.)
• Another reaction: As a Jew, I can embrace the way eschatological hope was described, until the last four or five lines.
• Question: What struck me in the Luke text was the exposition of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms, which most Christians today don't read prophetically, but, obviously, the first-century Christians did. Did a significant minority of first-century Jews read all these things prophetically?
• Response from a Jewish participant: I've been assigned a book that suggests the answer is yes.
• Question: Which one is it?
• Response: It's How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? It was written by a very interesting Scottish Scripture scholar named Larry Hurtado.



• Remark: I want to go back to the text in consider-ation of the question of whether or not Jews need an eschatology. My reaction, by virtue of reading this text is, why would you need an eschatology? In part that's the beauty of having the Scripture Forum read texts like we find in Leviticus, and particularly texts in which we see the calendrical year in its order. What do we need an eschatology for? If you read Leviticus from an Augustinian perspective, the beauty of the Levitical text is the description of the harmony of the order of the City of God, if you will. It's interesting to consider this in Augustinian terms. Is it the case that the way that the Jews perform their liturgical calendar is similar to the way that Augustine understands the church living in the City of Man? The church lives as if the City of God were here; it anticipates that particular order. And yet we live in a time when that order is not completely instantiated. There is an extent to which, one could argue, that that's not a bad analogy for how Jews live in this calen-drical ordering. The import of the analogy, in this particular context, is less to verify an eschatologi-cal pole in Judaism, and more to verify the ability of Christians and Jews to adhere to these orders confidently and to recognize that there's a good dollop of realized eschatology in these orders. That's part of the benefit of reading the Gospel texts through the Hebrew Scriptures. We give ourselves permission to reconsider notions of fulfillment and to consider the possibility of real orders that permit us to do God's will here and now, minus eschatological anticipation. I think it's worth reminding ourselves of how different this is from an eschatological focus.
• Remark: And all of this presupposes having a Temple.
• Response: And a land.
• Remark: And a land. So part of my question has to do with the degree to which the meaning of this text becomes compromised or attenuated without those props. I think they're more than props.
• Response: That's suggested by what I said earlier, that in Rabbinic Judaism the period of the counting of the omer becomes a period of mourning because during this time we also mark the time of the destruction of the Temple.
• Remark: Christians and pagans observed that time, too. I think it's a kind of universal time of bad luck, as it were, grafted onto this period. We have the legend of Akiva's students being persecuted during this time. That's an accretion.
• Request: Say more about that.
• Response: There's nothing much more to say about it. Historically I can't verify anything. That his students were being persecuted is clear, but not necessarily that it happened during this time. That story was added to a time that was a bad luck time in the calendar. Once it became that, weddings were not permitted to be performed during that period. There are different laws concerning it.



• Remark: The connection with the land makes great sense. The connection with the Temple and the dynamics of the Temple … The original blueprint had the sacrificial system right at the heart of the matter. I hear some of my rabbinic colleagues say they hope that the Temple is never reconstructed, at least not in human terms. We've been playing with this whole dynamic of hope and fulfillment. To what degree is there an ordering of time and space that operates in a way that is impervious to the fluctuations of political problems that rise and fall from year to year because this is established for keeps? And yet it seems to me that there's a hole at the center; and what's missing, and would seem to be a kind of pivotal point of reference, is the Temple. Has the Temple been so reimagined and reconstituted through rabbinic reformulations that what would seem to be missing has actually been plugged up?
• Response: It's been plugged.
• Remark continues: The compensatory strategies developed by the sages now make the expectation or the hope of reconstituting the Temple kind of anachronistic. It strikes me that on this point there would be some very contentious reads in
  the Jewish community.
• Remark: Before anyone answers, can I just deepen your question? We have the counting of the omer, but we don't have an agricultural system anymore. We have the counting of the omer, but we're not in the land in this particular way anymore. We have the counting of the omer, and then there are the sacrifices, but we don't have the Temple any-more. So what is the meaning of the counting of the omer now? How do you ask about the meaning of these holy convocations if you don't have the rest of the fabric that is a part of them? What we still have is the narrative link. The counting still makes a significant difference for situating Jews
  in time. It was Abraham Joshua Heschel who understood that we don't just have spatial orders, we also have temporal orders. And we still have that in a very powerful way in this text, even though we don't have some of those other more obvious elements.
• Remark: It has to do with the nature of liturgy, too, and what the liturgical purpose is.
• Remark: Because those other elements are not there, the counting accentuates the expectation of the gift of Torah.
• Remark: Even before the destruction of the Second Temple, the Pharisees (or whatever they were called) were trying to move away from the centrality of the sacrificial cult to Torah. When
  the Temple was destroyed, the people went with Torah. Torah became the blueprint. It also became the portable sanctuary because you can take Torah with you when you go into exile. But you continued to pray for the land. Originally when you prayed for the land, you were also praying for the rebuilding of the Temple. With modernity a fair number of Jews stopped praying for the rebuilding of the Temple. It had nothing to do with the Mosque of Omar; it had to do with the notion that prayer was superior to sacrifice for a bunch of reasons. As far as the sages themselves were concerned, when the Temple was destroyed, they treated the table (in table fellowship) as an altar. They were very explicit about that. The table at which you ate was now an altar. The same rules that had applied in the Temple now applied at the table. So the holes were plugged that way. And they remained plugged. Fifteen hundred years later, the notion of going back to a Temple be-came harder and harder to imagine.
• Reaction: That would seem to imply that Jews who ratchet up eschatological categories are going to be more like Karaites. They're going to be putting a greater emphasis on the essential characteristics of having these different components in place, and therefore more inclined to say that the rabbinic system has a certain inadequacy built into it that can only be repaired by the reconstituting or the rebuilding of the Temple. So it strikes me that you have something very paradoxical going on: The ultra-Orthodox would seem to me to have less confidence and trust in the rabbinic system than those who are … No?
  [Scribal note: The Karaites are a sect that broke from mainstream Judaism in eighth-century Iraq. Karaites accept the Torah, and they celebrate most Jewish holidays; but they reject both the Talmud and rabbinical Judaism.]
• Response: No. Their eschatology is stronger be-cause the point they make is that God has to bring this to fulfillment. Jews returned to Palestine and created the State of Israel, but the ultra-Orthodox don't recognize it because it is the work of human beings. When Conservative, Reform, and Modern Orthodox pray the prayer for the State of Israel, the prayer contains the words "the beginning of our redemption." What that means exactly, I'm not sure. It doesn't say it's the time of our redemp-tion. It says it's the beginning of the flowering of our redemption. A right-wing Orthodox Jew could never say that because the State was not brought about by God. So it's quite the contrary
  of what you were saying.
• Reaction: There's such a plurality, such a diversity within the Jewish community on this very point. I was thinking of those religious Zionists who antici-pate the rebuilding of the Temple. They see themselves as being partnered with God to do that.
• Remark: As some of you know, my wife teaches
  in a yeshiva. One day when a funeral was taking place, she found herself in a room with a young man who, for reasons she couldn't comprehend
  at the time, was not permitted to participate. It turned out that he is a descendant of the priests. This led to a little conversation around this point, during which he said that he was earnestly praying that no one ever rebuilt the Temple. He was abso-lutely terrified at the prospect. Because of his knowing this all his life, he contemplated it frequently, but with a great deal of fear and trembling. It interested me that this was a real-
  ity he hoped would not be embodied.

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