An Unconventional God

The Spirit according to Jesus

Jack Levison

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781540961198
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493427260
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Popular author Jack Levison offers a fresh take on the Holy Spirit through a careful reading of every reference to the Spirit in the Gospels. Viewed through the lens of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, the Spirit shows up at odd times and in odd teachings--in desert sojourns, a strange saying about scorpions and snakes, and puzzling sayings about birth from above and springs from below. Grounded in scholarship, yet accessible and inviting, this companion volume to Levison's A Boundless God analyzes key aspects of Jesus's experience of the Holy Spirit, offering nuggets of insight on every page.

1
Spirit and the Swell of Expectation

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ took place. When Mary his mother was engaged to Joseph, before they were married, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband was a righteous man. Because he didn’t want to humiliate her, he decided to call off their engagement quietly. As he was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit.”

Matthew 1:18–20 CEB

The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah. Your prayers have been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will give birth to your son and you must name him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many people will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the Lord’s eyes. He must not drink wine and liquor. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before his birth. He will bring many Israelites back to the Lord their God. He will go forth before the Lord, equipped with the spirit and power of Elijah. He will turn the hearts of fathers back to their children, and he will turn the disobedient to righteous patterns of thinking. He will make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Luke 1:13–17 CEB

When Elizabeth was six months pregnant, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a city in Galilee, to a virgin who was engaged to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David’s house. The virgin’s name was Mary. When the angel came to her, he said, “Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you!” She was confused by these words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. The angel said, “Don’t be afraid, Mary. God is honoring you. Look! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and he will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of David his father. He will rule over Jacob’s house forever, and there will be no end to his kingdom.”

Then Mary said to the angel, “How will this happen since I haven’t had sexual relations with a man?”

The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come over you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the one who is to be born will be holy. He will be called God’s Son. Look, even in her old age, your relative Elizabeth has conceived a son. This woman who was labeled ‘unable to conceive’ is now six months pregnant. Nothing is impossible for God.”

Then Mary said, “I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.” Then the angel left her.

Luke 1:26–38 CEB

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. With a loud voice she blurted out, “God has blessed you above all women, and he has blessed the child you carry. Why do I have this honor, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as I heard your greeting, the baby in my womb jumped for joy. Happy is she who believed that the Lord would fulfill the promises he made to her.”

Luke 1:41–45 CEB

John’s father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied,

“Bless the Lord God of Israel

because he has come to help and has delivered his people.”

Luke 1:67–68 CEB

A man named Simeon was in Jerusalem. He was righteous and devout. He eagerly anticipated the restoration of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. The Holy Spirit revealed to him that he wouldn’t die before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. Led by the Spirit, he went into the temple area. Meanwhile, Jesus’ parents brought the child to the temple so that they could do what was customary under the Law. Simeon took Jesus in his arms and praised God. He said,

“Now, master, let your servant go in peace according to your word,

because my eyes have seen your salvation.

You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples.

It’s a light for revelation to the Gentiles

and a glory for your people Israel.”

His father and mother were amazed by what was said about him. Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “This boy is assigned to be the cause of the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that generates opposition so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your innermost being too.”

Luke 2:25–35 CEB

Two Stories, One Source

The story of Jesus’s birth is really two stories. The first two chapters of Matthew’s Gospel could hardly be more different from the first two of Luke’s Gospel.

Matthew’s birth stories are taut with mathematical precision, like the work of the ancient astrologers who navigated deserts and seas, oceans and mountains, by calculating the stars and their movements. One miscalculated degree could bring devastation and disaster. Matthew writes of magi and a brilliant star settling over a nondescript house; he writes, too, as if he were one of the magi, with astronomical fastidiousness, with immense control, as if life depended on it, which it did for ancient sailors and nomads. Even Matthew’s genealogies occur in three precise sets of fourteen generations each, as if to say, “You should have known this would happen! You could have counted on it.” The stories he tells are crisp and methodical. He tells five of them—this number evoking the five books of Torah, the Pentateuch—each one bristling with accuracy. These are not random stories collected ad hoc but stories collated, specially selected, gauged to drive home one point: the events surrounding Jesus’s birth, five in all, happened to fulfill what had been spoken earlier by Israel’s prophets. When we read Matthew’s genealogies and birth stories, which open the curtain to the drama ahead, we are audience to an algorithm, captives to theological calculation. Numbers don’t lie—at least not these numbers. Matthew points this out with forty-two generations, five stories, two parents, and one child.

Compare this with Luke’s take on the action surrounding Jesus’s birth, which, so unlike Matthew’s Gospel, bursts with the unfathomable. The birth of a baby to an old couple is so shocking that the old man is struck dumb until his son’s birth; he simply cannot fathom what has happened through his own rumpled frame or what is happening to his wife’s geriatric body, in which the Holy Spirit has concocted a strange alchemy of life. Then there is the young unmarried woman, who is just as shockingly pregnant. “How can this be?” she asks. It’s a wonder that leaves one wondering. All of these people, old Zechariah and Elizabeth, along with young Mary—Joseph is nowhere to be seen (not yet, anyway)—are shocked and elated at this pair of births. Each of them also has something to say—something full of praise and blessing and joy and glee. So does Simeon, another old man who has waited and waited for this day—Simeon, who meets the poor young parents in the temple and thanks God that his eyes have finally seen God’s salvation. This is a time of yearning and surprise, expectation and bewilderment. It is a time of birth and babies, of pregnancies and praise. Angels sing above; shepherds scuttle below. The joy is immeasurable.

Luke’s Gospel begins with an infinity of grace, Matthew’s with the calculus of hope. At the center of both sets of stories—Matthew’s measured five and Luke’s rush of canticles—lies an uncannily similar perspective. Not just the baby Jesus, whose birth is the glue. There is also a hue, an atmosphere, an ambience. For both Matthew and Luke, the Jewish Scriptures are essential, indispensable for grasping what went on in those early, heady days. They are the leaven, the bread that is baking in the oven. They are a background scent, yes, rich and undeniable and welcoming. Yet there is something more to these stories. The Holy Spirit is also essential, indispensable for grasping what went on with the first glimmer of inspiration. And here is the rub: the Spirit is essential not because something altogether new was happening—the birth of Christianity, let’s say—but because something old, ancient, yet timeless was coming to fruition. The Holy Spirit is central to the birth of Jesus not so much to spawn something new as to spark something old, not so much to invent as to ignite.

Born of Holy Spirit

In Matthew’s Gospel, there is no gush of the Spirit, no filling, no songs of celebration. There is, however, political intrigue: a paranoid king destined to destroy his family and anyone else who gets in his way—the Jewish historian Josephus tells us as much. There is propriety too: the impulse to divorce a woman like Mary, who seems patently promiscuous to her betrothed. There is urgency as well: the struggle to survive as refugees in Egypt. Whereas angelic canticles in heaven, the poetry of wonder on earth, and an uncommon concatenation of praise and prayer belong in the Gospel of Luke, Matthew’s Gospel features unforgiving lines of political and personal scandals.

It is here, at risk of personal scandal, that a staid Matthew introduces the Holy Spirit. Matthew’s Jesus dots his i’s and crosses his t’s: he claims that not a jot or tittle will pass away from Torah. So does Joseph before him. Joseph, too, wants to get it right in the face of potentially ruinous scandal. He will dismiss Mary properly, inconspicuously—but Joseph’s plans are shattered. Enter the Holy Spirit, who changes everything by transforming a disgraceful pregnancy into a virtuous birth. The Holy Spirit does not just avert scandal; the Holy Spirit converts scandal into virtue. When Joseph resolves to dismiss Mary quietly—itself an exercise in constraint—“an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from (the) Holy Spirit’” (Matt. 1:20 alt.).

There is something surprisingly eerie and inexact about Matthew’s language here. He does not say that what is conceived is from the Holy Spirit but “from holy spirit” (Greek, ek pneumatos estin hagiou). At no time in this short scene does he deploy the definite article so that we can say, “Oh, that Holy Spirit.” Matthew could just as well be saying, “The child conceived in her is from a holy spirit.” It may be that mystery has eclipsed accuracy, and we should leave it at that. Probably not—because lying in the background of this story wafts the inevitable scent of the Old Testament.

Two passages in the Old Testament—and only two—refer to “holy spirit.” They are so different from each other that they call for entirely different interpretations of Jesus’s birth, depending on which one you think lies behind Matthew’s Gospel. Both Old Testament passages endow this story with richness and resonance—without them our understanding of Jesus’s birth sounds tinny by comparison.

The first passage occurs in a lament in Isaiah 63, where the prophet pleads, “Where is the one who put within them his holy spirit?” (Isa. 63:11). The prophet is perplexed by the absence of the Spirit in his day, especially when he looks back to the exodus, the story of Israel’s liberation, when God put God’s Holy Spirit within Israel. At that distant time, he believes, God led the people from Egypt into the promised land by means of God’s Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit took on the role of the pillars of cloud and fire and of the angel God authorized to lead the people to safety.1

Is it any surprise that the Holy Spirit, who inspired the exodus, should now show up to inspire the birth of the Messiah? After all, Matthew himself sees the parallel between Israel’s secure ascent from Egypt over a thousand years earlier and the ascent of Jesus’s family from Egypt in safety (Matt. 2:13–23). Imagine this: Mary’s pregnancy is not due to happenstance or infidelity—not at all! The Holy Spirit in her is the same Holy Spirit that liberated Israel from an irascible tyrant; Herod the Great stands no chance against the sway of this Holy Spirit. From the vantage point of Isaiah 63, the birth of Jesus, occasioned by the Holy Spirit within Mary, is the culmination of a long story of leading, designing, and delivering. Is it too much to say, in light of Isaiah 63, that the water of Mary’s womb, awake now with the Holy Spirit, is like a latter-day Red Sea, through which Israel, alert to the Holy Spirit within them, can be liberated? This is a great deal to invest in a single birth, but this is the birth of the Messiah (as Matthew puts it), after all.

The lament in Isaiah 63, then, is a perfect backdrop to Jesus’s birth—or is it? Psalm 51 also refers to holy spirit, but this poem from the Old Testament understands this spirit in a dramatically different way from Isaiah 63. The psalmist begs God,

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and put a new and right spirit within me.

Do not cast me away from your presence,

and do not take your holy spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation,

and sustain in me a willing spirit. (Ps. 51:10–12)2

The sacrifice acceptable to God is “a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart” (Ps. 51:17).

In this Old Testament poem, the spirit is something within a human being—...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Spirit and the Swell of Expectation
• 2. Spirit, Fire, and a Vital Message
• 3. Spirit and the Sway of Baptism
• 4. Spirit and the Torment of Temptation
• 5. Spirit, Promise, Praise, and Prayer
• 6. Spirit and the Threat of Blasphemy
• 7. Spirit and the Hazard of Hostility
• 8. Spirit, New Birth, and Living Water
• 9. Spirit and Inspired Memories
• 10. Spirit and Our Future
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Relevant References to Pneuma in the Canonical Gospels
• Scripture and Ancient Sources Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover