Jesus and Well Being: A Spiritual and Psychological Good News Story

By Thomas V. McGovern

The author begins and ends with the challenging question that many ask today: How do our lives make sense in light of the life of Jesus?

Drawing on Jesus's gospel parables and sayings and Paul's letters, each chapter invites readers to explore the virtues of wisdom, love, justice, courage, temperance and transcendence. Jesus's 1st century life deserves our continuing study as we develop a truly mindful spirituality for 21st century well being.

Professor McGovern's distinguished teaching and scholarly life work is clearly evident as he artistically weaves together so many threads to enable the reader to create their own spiritual tapestries. This book will inspire readers with lifelong traditional commitments as well as those who may currently identify as "spiritual but not religious." Thought provoking ideas. Pragmatic applications. A good story. Transformative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512791372

Thomas V. McGovern

A gifted teacher and thought-provoking writer, Tom McGovern illuminates the connections between Jesus and well being, inviting diverse audiences to discover deeper understandings of their lives and a mindful spirituality. He was a founding faculty member and arts and sciences director at Arizona State University West where he developed interdisciplinary liberal arts programs for multigenerational and multicultural students. After a career as a scholar-teacher and administrator at Fordham University, Southern Illinois University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and ASU, he teaches now at the University of Southern Maine's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association, his recognitions include: Professor of the Year in Arizona by the CASE / Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, VCU Distinguished Teaching Award, ASU Outstanding Service Award, Riese Melton Award for Cross-Cultural Relations, and Fordham's Jouin Award in Theology. The American Psychological Association named him a G. Stanley Hall Lecturer at their centennial convention. Author of "Memory's Stories: Interdisciplinary Readings of Multicultural Life Narratives" and "Faculty Virtues and Character Strengths: Reflective Exercises for Sustained Renewal", he has published on counseling psychology, undergraduate education, professional and personal development, and the virtues and character strengths. He reviews books on liberal arts topics for "America" and for "PsycCRITIQUES".

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Copyright © 2017 Thomas V. McGovern.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Cover photo, Adam and the Oak Branch, by J. Gerard Smith. www.jimsmithphotography.com

New Testament quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Gospel of Thomas quotations are from The Five Gospels. With permission from Polebridge Press, 1993.

Gospel of Mary quotations are from The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version. With permission from Polebridge Press, 1992.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9136-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9135-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9137-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017910244

WestBow Press rev. date: 6/26/2017

FOR

Margaret Ann Fitzgerald

Elizabeth McGovern Fitzgerald

her mother

Patricia Pausha McGovern

her grandmother

and

Audrey Mahrley Pausha

&

Margaret O’Connor McGovern

her great grandmothers

Contents

Preface

Prologue

I   Introduction

One   First and Twenty-First Century Well Being

Jesus

Well Being Seekers

Synthesis: Central Themes

Two   Global Transformation Stories

Axial Age Foundations

Axial Age Sages

Positive Psychology’s Virtues and Character Strengths

Synthesis: Virtues and Strengths and Well Being

Three   Good News for Well Being Strengths

The Good News Jesus

The Historical Jesus

Synthesis: An Anthology of Stories, Sayings, and Strengths

II   Parables and Sayings by Jesus

Four   Wisdom

Parables

Wisdom’s Strengths and Sayings

•   Curiosity, interest in the world, and openness to experience

•   Creativity, ingenuity, and originality

•   Open-mindedness, judgment, and critical thinking

•   Love of learning

•  Perspective and wisdom

Five   Humanity / Love

Parables

Humanity & Love’s Strengths and Sayings

•   Capacity to love and be loved

•   Kindness, generosity, nurturance, care, and compassion

•   Social / Emotional / Personal Intelligence

Six   Justice

Parables

Justice’s Strengths and Sayings

•   Citizenship, teamwork, social responsibility, and loyalty

•   Fairness

•   Leadership

Seven   Temperance

Parables

Temperance’s Strengths and Sayings

•   Forgiveness and mercy

•   Humility and modesty

•   Prudence, caution, and discretion

•   Self-control and Self-regulation

Eight   Courage

Parables

Courage’s Strengths and Sayings

•   Bravery and valor

•   Persistence, perseverance, and industry

•   Integrity, honesty, authenticity, and genuineness

•   Vitality, zest, enthusiasm, and energy

Nine   Transcendence

Parables

Transcendence’s Strengths and Sayings

•   Appreciation of beauty and excellence, awe, wonder, mystery

•   Gratitude

•   Humor and Playfulness

•   Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness

•   Spirituality, religiousness, sense of purpose, and faith

Summary

III   Memory’s Stories About Jesus

Ten   Apostle Paul’s First Field Reports

Saul of Tarsus

Paul’s Resume

An Apostle’s Syllabus of Strengths

•   Love, Above All

•   Wisdom’s Diatribes

•   Tempering Human Nature

•   Courageous Commitments

•   The Spirit of Justice

•   Transcendence in the Here and Now

Eleven   Evangelists’ Narratives of Discipleship Memories

The Evangelists’ Jesus

•   Gospel of Mark

•   Gospel of Matthew

•   Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles

•   Gospel of Thomas

Discipleship

•   Wisdom: Listen, Learn, and Probe Patiently

•   Love: Greatest Commandment

•   Courage: Follow Me

•   Temperance: Rules of the Road

•   Justice: Fishers of People

•   Transcendence: Mystery and Optimism of Discipleship

Jesus across the Centuries

Twelve   John’s Gospel and Mary’s Virtue

John’s Gospel

Characters and Episodes

•   Disciples

•   Bearing Witness at Two Events: Mary and the Money Changers

•   Wisdom’s Dialogue: Nicodemus

•   A Samaritan Woman

•   Death in Life: Mary, Martha, and Lazarus

Draw Me into your Friendship

•   Called to be Friends

Mary of Magdala

Epilogue

Central Themes

A Jesus Biography and Well Being

Creating an Anthology of Stories

•   Traits

•   Goals, Values, Motives, and Virtues

•   Narrative Identity and Redemptive Stories

Last Word

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgements

Preface

After a career teaching multiethnic and multigenerational students in urban public universities, my wife and I retired to Portland, Maine from Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to four seasons, an ocean to walk by, and an elementary school age granddaughter, we found an unanticipated treasure that is the wellspring for this book. There are Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI) on more than 100 American university and college campuses. Their mission is to offer senior citizens an accessible and stimulating community of ideas to enhance a love of learning and to be a social support environment of diverse peoples. At the University of Southern Maine (USM), academic courses in the arts, humanities, and sciences, discussion groups, and experiential workshop classes are offered year-round. Having been part of the early developmental stages of an OLLI program at Arizona State University (ASU), I volunteered to teach a course.

Spending eight weeks with well-read, liberal arts minded elders, I began with Augustine’s Confessions, written circa 400 CE, and described by literary scholars as the ur-book of memoir and autobiography. It was his account of a lusty adolescence, a loving relationship with a young woman, mother of their son, and his intellectual journey through compelling philosophies of life until he converted to Christianity as an adult. We explored what was known/believed about Jesus in the 4th century CE, and a key question emerged. To what exactly did Augustine make his declaration of faith and commit to spend his life years before all the creedal dogma and Church teachings that he was among the earliest to create? The group encouraged me to teach a next course focusing solely on the historical Jesus of Nazareth.

My last study of Christian scriptures had been 50 years earlier, as a Fordham undergraduate majoring in Theology, when the Second Vatican Council stimulated a new generation of Catholic biblical studies. With fresh eyes, I re-read my Jerusalem Bible and its dense footnotes. In the years since my leaving theology for psychology teaching and research, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts emerged into the light of day and generated vigorous analyses and debate. The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a term and methodology from Albert Schweitzer’s 1906 book by that name, had entered a new phase beginning in 1985 with The Jesus Seminar. Popular books by academics and public intellectuals appeared after the new millennium, and spoke to evangelical, traditional, and progressive Christian audiences. I had a lot of catch-up reading to do before offering a new course, Jesus: A Gospel and Historical Biography.

After teaching about multicultural life narratives, religion, and psychology, then publishing Memory’s Stories, evaluating interdisciplinary Jesus Studies texts became a thought-provoking project. It brought me back full circle to my Jesuit humanities roots. I offered courses on The Spiritual Genius of Jesus’s Parables, The Mystical Jesus in the Gospel of John and Re-Thinking Paul’s Epistles in the following years. Interdisciplinary workshops grounded in psychology on Virtues and Character Strengths for Well Being and Psychological Well Being and Spirituality were experiential programs on well being in aging and the mindful practice of virtues and character strengths. They built on ideas from my E-book, Faculty Virtues and Character Strengths: Reflective Exercises for Sustained Renewal, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

You will hear echoes from many authors and points of view I read to prepare these courses. You also will hear the OLLI participants’ insightful voices woven into my paragraphs, building on ideas shared with me each week as we created new understandings of Jesus, well being, and character strengths.

I hope this book invites, motivates, and sustains such a reflective journey for you, the reader.

Portland, Maine

2017

Prologue

Jesus lived a 21st century well being in the here and now of the 1st century CE. His anthology of stories and sayings became timeless. It took a century to transform the disciples’ shared memories into written texts that we now call the Good News. We draw inspiration from his life, story by story, saying by saying. We continue to debate his meanings line by line, word by word.

I taught Religion and Moral Issues in a public, research university, as an upper-division humanities elective for undergraduates with many major field interests. Plato’s similes for Socrates – to be a gadfly, midwife, and electric eel -- inspired my approach as I asked students to re-evaluate their current moral compasses and frame fresh questions about the recurring conflicts in their lives. Four touchstone perspectives anchored the course’s interdisciplinary readings: science, ethical philosophy, the Dalai Lama, and Jesus.

Over the years, we used various books for the Jesus section. The common denominator was to understand his life as a story from and made by 1st century sociocultural dynamics, but that had direct applications to the 21st century’s complex moral issues. Students’ own stories and their faith commitments led them to use theological, historical, literary, or spiritual lenses to understand Jesus. With probing questions and a portfolio of writing assignments, they experimented with different perspectives and became more sophisticated in comparing what they discovered and contrasting it with what they believed.

My own journey in discovering Jesus replicated the students’ challenges. Educated by Jesuits at Fordham University after the Second Vatican Council, Catholic theological authors were my primary guides for building a knowledge base about the gospels. Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ was described by Time magazine in 1960 as a searing, soaring, shocking novel. It was among the most radical positions about his divinity/humanity that we argued late into the nights. Protestant authors educated us about moral theology, especially the concept of situational ethics. Historical critical studies of scripture were new during my undergraduate years, but it was liberation theology and social justice responses to domestic and global issues that fired our imaginations.

When I returned to serious reading in the field in 2000 to prepare my ASU courses, I encountered Jesus Seminar founders John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and Robert Funk as they broadened their traditional academic and pastoral audiences to become New York Times bestselling authors. Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief introduced me to the Gospel of Thomas and Karen King to The Gospel of Mary of Magdala. I dug deeper into thicker books and denser footnotes like Crossan’s The Historical Jesus and The Birth of Christianity to update earlier readings composed as justifications for theology’s articles of faith.

Geza Vermes, the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, introduced me to a Jewish Studies perspective and 2nd Temple, intertestamental literature. Amy-Jill Levine, an orthodox Jewish, feminist scholar, who teaches New Testament Studies in a southern divinity school, deepened this appreciation immeasurably when I read her Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. Her co-edited project, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, with its cornucopia of essays on key concepts found in the Christian scriptures and their roots in Jewish scripture, tradition, and ritual observances, is a mainstay reference always on my desktop.

The social historian, Richard Horsley, arrived next in my progressive reading program and added another layer to my understanding in The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World. This work offers a people’s history of Christian origins, starting with a Jewish Jesus who lived and preached in Galilee and Jerusalem, but subject to the total domination system of the Roman Empire. Paul’s epistles took on new meaning after reading his seven authentic letters as not only statements of pastoral support and moral challenge, but as provocations to bear witness to Jesus’s Kingdom in the here and now, to stand in opposition to a prevailing civic religion and its ethic of aggressive interpersonal relationships.

Preparing for the OLLI course on the Gospel of John, I re-read my Raymond Brown books from Fordham days, appreciating now how prescient he was in the 1970s in deciphering the Community of the Beloved Disciple, speaking to its gender equality and transformative power. Contemporary Protestant and feminist scholars of the fourth gospel added a literary theory perspective to help me appreciate John’s brilliantly crafted characters and plot structure.

After reading down this discovery path that followed theological, historical, and literary methods to understand Jesus of Nazareth, I was ready to integrate a spiritual response perspective. Positive Psychology and other writing projects in lifespan, personal narrative gave me that dimension. I construed the life of the historical Jesus as an anthology of well being stories with roots in the Axial Age wisdom of the previous millennium. The Good News episodes illuminated in a bright contemporary light the common denominator virtues and scientifically validated character strengths. Moreover, the canonical and non-canonical gospels connected the story of the 1st century CE Jesus to our own compositions of well being story narratives in the 21st century.

The interactions among my elder students who responded to new ideas shaped this text profoundly. OLLI seminar participants are critical and courageous thinkers. We imagined together a Jewish Jesus talking to rural audiences who awaited a messiah while dominated by Roman rule. Itinerant preachers with apocalyptic and revolutionary messages, in the first years of that new century, challenged Yahweh’s chosen people. We read the Jesus parables and sayings, the evangelists’ narratives about his life and deeds, and Paul’s syllabi for discipleship written for fledgling Christian communities within the contexts of Jewish history and tradition and Roman civic religion. My OLLI groups became learning communities of curious, spiritual pilgrims, willing to consider anew long-held assumptions that began like mine in theology, but now explored new perspectives and interdisciplinary interpretations. They sought spiritual roadmaps to guide their responses to his life and deeper appreciations of their own.

The chapters in this book may serve as your well being map. They may help you fashion a redemptive story with episodes that stand out in memory, so that you can then re-create your story anew.

I

Introduction

What is bothering me incessantly is the question

what Christianity really is or indeed

who Christ really is, for us today.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Letters and Papers from Prison

One

First and Twenty-First Century Well Being

God made man because He loves stories.

Elie Wiesel

There are also many other things that Jesus did;

if every one of them were written down,

I suppose that the world itself

could not contain the books that would be written.

John 21:35

Jesus

Jesus told thought-provoking stories called parables. Oral tradition kept the Jesus memories alive after he died and were written down decades later in the gospels of Mark, Thomas, Matthew, Luke, and John. John Dominic Crossan, in The Power of the Parable, asked readers to imagine how a Jewish Jesus originally may have told his stories to Galilean villagers.

Jesus was, of course, an oral teacher with an interactive audience. Parables that we can read in a minute or two would have taken an hour or two to tell, would have been regularly interrupted by agreement and disagreement, and would have been intended to provoke – yes, provoke – discussion, debate, and thought. But always such challenges intend to shake the foundations of one’s world. Socrates did it with challenge questions, and Jesus with challenge parables. And in the long run, both processes proved lethal to the speaker—and immortal for the speaker.¹

Leslie Marmon Silko [Laguna Pueblo] reminded us in Storyteller that stories grow out of oral tradition. Small groups gather on family occasions to eat or to celebrate religious rituals, and someone tells a story. Do you remember the time when …? Someone responds: I remember it happening this way. The group trades versions and eventually nods assent when they get it right enough. The revised tale becomes the new starting point. Elders’ meaningful memories introduce future gatherings so that younger members will learn and perform them after they have departed. Silko reported that it was a tough task for her to translate oral tradition, like so many photos collected into a Hopi basket, into written text. The back and forth, the shifting emphases, the layered contributions of several generations in the remembering circle had to be re-captured and trapped as fixed, unchangeable words on paper, diminishing its interactive qualities.

In the following story, Jesus asked listeners to consider two recognizable characters, one a local religious figure and the other a Roman employee. You’ve probably heard this parable before or listened to interpretations of the two individuals’ motivations. Jesus’s challenge was to explore why both characters demonstrated an authentic integrity. Go beyond first reactions that the religious representative was only self-aggrandizing and righteous while the humble bureaucrat voiced his repentance and hoped to be saved.

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast saying: ‘God be merciful to me a sinner!’ (Luke 18:10-14)

The Pharisee prayed, fasted, and tithed. The tax collector, despite being employed by the occupying government, did not forget his roots and prayed at Temple. Jesus seduced listeners into making first judgments about what was external – what they heard out of the Pharisee’s mouth or what they saw in the tax collector’s posture and forlorn gaze. Did his story listeners think, proudly: How glad I am not like that Pharisee? Or were they honest enough to beg: Be merciful to me, a sinner? Can we respond to the parable by recognizing that the Pharisee’s genuine commitments to do good matched the tax collector’s recognition that more personal work remained to be done? Might we understand that these two characters represent separate halves of the same person in everyday life? Might we hope that in just and loving communities, there will be Pharisees AND tax collectors who are interdependent? That each may learn from the other about humility and worthiness?

Plato called Socrates a gadfly to describe his teaching method. Listeners had to think hard and felt differently because he didn’t spoon feed them with easy answers or tease them with veiled directions for an already solved, embedded allegory. Jesus, like Socrates, poked at staid assumptions and pre-determined resolutions. Listeners followed him from village to village and heard different versions of the same story as he interacted with different gatherings who may have imagined multiple meanings. Parables stimulate action. Listening and doing fosters healing, forgiveness, joy, compassion, and celebration. Think about Luke’s Prodigal Son parable and imagine being a parent the same night that you heard that story.

Horsley and Silberman researched the daily lives of those audiences in The Message and the Kingdom. Jesus understood the well being struggles of his people. The Galilean farm worker or artisan family were not the bucolic peasants seen in Renaissance portraits of Jesus. Their present and past lives were filled with the brutal suppression of dissent by Roman legions after the death of Herod the Great. Their daily reality was how to survive the relentless taxation programs of Herod Antipas who ruled Galilee for Jesus’s entire lifetime, from 4 BCE