by Jack Miles
The question of why God the Father saw fit to proceed in this way, choosing to experience human birth and death as God the Son, is best dealt with later. Suffice it to say, for now, that it is the adult Jesus who was first recognized as Messiah and as God Incarnate. All four of the Gospels initially began with Jesus, as a grown man, being baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. All four recognized the descent of the Spirit of God upon him at that moment as the inauguration of his career if not of the Incarnation itself. This, they all agree, is the moment when the Gospel story begins in earnest. Postponing genealogies and Christmas legends to a later, retrospective moment, we may enter the Gospel story at the dramatic moment when God Incarnate appears full-grown and as if from nowhere like the Lord Commander of Joshua 5, but this time without a sword.
In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of the territories of Ituraea and Trachonitis, Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during a term when the high-priesthood was held by Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah, in the desert. He went through the whole Jordan Valley proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the sayings of Isaiah the prophet:
The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
Clear a way for the Lord!
Make straight his paths.
Let every valley be raised,
Every mountain and hill lowered,
The crooked made straight
And the rough smooth
So that all flesh will see the salvation of God.
(Luke 3:1–6; passage in italics from Isa. 40:3–5)
The action of the New Testament begins with the memory of a broken promise. Isaiah’s language is wonderful, but he describes a triumphal march that never occurred. Mountains were going to be leveled and valleys filled to create a parade route for the Israelite exiles marching home from Babylon to Jerusalem—but the parade was canceled. The exiles to whom the Lord spoke through Isaiah did not return home in glory. Many of them never returned at all, and those who did merely exchanged one imperial ruler for another. The Persians defeated the Babylonians, but Israel was just one part of the spoils of war. Yes, a new temple of sorts was built by imperial order in the tiny, Persian-governed province of Yahud, but no Psalms were ever written in its praise. For those old enough to remember, the sight of the Second Temple was a cause more of grief than of joy: “Many of the priests and Levites and the chiefs of the clans, the old men who had seen the first House [Temple], wept loudly at the sight of the founding of this House. Many others raised their voices in a shout of joy. The people could not tell the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping” (Ezra 3:12–13). The Lord himself had to apologize for the paltriness of the Second Temple:
Who is there left among you who saw this House in its former splendor? How does it look to you now? It must seem like nothing to you. But be strong, O Zerubbabel, be strong, O high priest, Joshua son of Jehozadak; be strong, all you people of the land, and act! For I am with you.… The glory of this latter House shall be greater than that of the former one. (JPS; Hag. 2:3–4, 9)
But the glory of the Second Temple never did become greater than—in fact, it never approached—the glory of the First. The Zerubbabel whom the Lord exhorted through Haggai was a son of David, an anointed son of David—that is, a messiah—but he was a failed messiah, and his name was half-expunged from the record.
As the Baptist speaks, five hundred years have passed, and a spectacular Third Temple is nearing completion in Jerusalem, but this Third Temple, King Herod’s Temple, whose remains can still be seen in Jerusalem, is the work of a Roman puppet, an Idumaean married into a collaborationist Jewish clan. Is this Temple the fulfillment of the Lord’s ancient promise? Many in the Baptist’s day are impressed by it. Indeed, the entire ancient world is impressed by it. But dissident Jewish groups—notably the Pharisees (forerunners of the Judaism of today) and the Essenes (who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls)—keep their distance. John does the same, preaching in the desert rather than on the steps of Herod’s monument to himself. The memory of the past and the reality of the present—the great and holy temple that never was and the great and unholy temple that is—conspire against elation of the sort heard in Isaiah. That promised triumph did not happen the first time. Will it happen this time?
What the Lord says through the Baptist, moreover, is disturbing in another way:
He said … to the crowds who came to be baptized by him, “Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear the fruit that accords with repentance, and do not start telling yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ because, I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. Yes, even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Any tree that fails to bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3:7–9)
It is not that the rhetorical question “Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” is particularly disturbing. This is the usual prophetic idiom for a call to repentance. The Lord is accustomed to saving his friends by destroying their enemies. What disturbs is the fact that the Lord seems audibly irritated with Israel for making so much of its national identity—which is to say, of course, for insisting so much on being his people: “I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.”
The Baptist is identified elsewhere in the Gospel of Luke as the Old Testament prophet Elijah come down to earth in fulfillment of a prophecy made in the very last verse of the Old Testament:
Behold, I shall send you Elijah the prophet,
Before the great and awesome Day of the Lord.
He will reconcile parents to their children,
And children to their parents,
Lest I put the country under a curse of total destruction.
(Mal. 4:5–6; some editions, 3:23–24)
When the Baptist speaks—prophetically, in the name of the Lord, just as Elijah did—what he says is not altogether unlike things that the Lord has said before. The Lord has shown himself capable of mocking his chosen people for ethnic pride on more than one previous occasion. Speaking through Ezekiel, he said with blistering contempt for mere pedigree:
Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. At birth, on the day you were born, there was no one to cut your umbilical cord or wash you in water to clean you, or rub you with salt, or wrap you in swaddling clothes. No one looked at you with kindness enough to do any of these things out of pity for you. You were dumped in the open fields in your own filth on the day of your birth. I spotted you kicking on the ground in your blood as I passed by, and I said to you, lying there in your blood: “Live!” And I made you grow like the grass of the fields. (Ezek. 16:3–6)
Ezekiel is a fairly ferocious precedent for what the Baptist says, yet the Baptist’s tone is still jarring when directed at an oppressed people living in an occupied land. The passage from Isaiah that Luke uses as keynote for this episode is, after all, an oracle of consolation, not mockery. It says, to quote the King James translation familiar from Handel’s Messiah, that God is done punishing Israel:
Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,
saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,
and cry unto her
that her warfare is accomplished,
that her iniquity is pardoned.
(KJV; Isa. 40:1–2)
The Baptist, however, seems intent less on building confidence that God will eventually save his people than on undermining it.
Finally, there is the surprise that the Baptist’s message is preached to the oppressor as well as to the oppressed:
There were tax collectors [Romans or Jews in Roman employ], too, who came for baptism, and they said to him, “Teacher, what must we do?” He said to them, “Exact no more than the appointed rate.” Some soldiers [Jewish mercenaries under Roman command
and perhaps a Roman officer or two] questioned him as well: “What about us? What should we do?” He told them, “No intimidation! No extortion! Be satisfied with your pay.” (Luke 3:12–14)
When the Lord spoke to Isaiah of Israel’s redemption, did he confine himself to predicting that the mercenaries of Nebuchadnezzar, the Caesar of the day, would be content with their pay and merely abstain from intimidation and extortion? Did he proclaim the glorious day when Jews collecting taxes for Babylon would collect no more than the going rate? Far from it: The Lord gloated savagely over the prospect of reducing such minions of the oppressor to bloody cannibalism.
The warrior’s captive will be taken back,
and the tyrant’s prey set free.
I myself will fight those who fight you,
and I myself will save your children.
I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh;
they will be as drunk on their own blood as on new wine.
And all flesh will know
that I am the Lord, your Savior,
your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.
(Isa. 49:25–26)
Drinking one another’s blood: Israel’s vision of ultimate, unspeakable horror. This rather than anything gentler or more benign is what was to be understood in the divine promise that Luke quotes: “All flesh will see the salvation of God.” Israel was not to be amiably reconciled with the Lord’s enemies, but spectacularly and crushingly victorious over them and gloriously rewarded at their expense.
You shall suck the milk of nations,
You shall suck the breasts of kings.
(Isa. 60:16)
Yet, to repeat, nothing like that happened. God’s promise of victory was broken. Now, as the oppressors in the crowd are noticeably not warned that theirs is the root to which the divine axe is most especially to be laid, how can the suspicion not arise that the promise will be broken again? And yet John clearly expects the Lord to arrive in power.
If the Lord is about to intervene massively in human affairs, if the “Day of the Lord” is at hand, who will be the agent of his intervention, and what will the agent be like?
A feeling of expectancy had arisen. People were beginning to wonder whether John might be the Messiah. But John told them all: “I baptize you with water, but one more powerful than I is coming, and I am not fit to loosen the strap of his sandal. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. The winnowing-fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the grain into his barn. The chaff, however, he will burn in an eternal fire.” (Luke 3:15–17)
The threshing floor, where the kernel is violently separated from the husk of the harvested grain, is frequently a biblical metaphor for the battlefield. In this metaphor, the Lord is the miller; his enemy is the husk or chaff; the grain is ultimately his cherished prize, the spoils of his war, though it may suffer in the process. By employing this imagery to speak of the soon-to-arrive “one more powerful than I,” John transfers to that still unidentified one both the large hopes and the inescapable doubts that attach to the ancient image of God the Avenging Warrior, the Mighty One of Jacob. Hope contends with memory. How wonderful it would be if the divine warrior should again come righteously to Israel’s rescue! But will he?
JOHN HAILS HIM, STRANGELY, AS “THE LAMB OF GOD”
This question becomes acute when the “one more powerful than I” appears in person and is acclaimed as the very antithesis of a warrior:
The next day, [John] saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. It was of him that I said, ‘After me comes one greater than I,’ because he existed before me. I did not know him myself, and yet my purpose in coming to baptize with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.” (John 1:29–31)
The Lamb of God? A lion would be more to the purpose, a rapacious and terrifying cat of the sort that still prowled the Jordan Valley when God, speaking through Jeremiah, promised to maul the Edomites “as when a lion comes up from the jungle of the Jordan to the perennial pasture. Thus, in an instant, will I drive them from her [Israel]; and over her I will appoint whom I choose. For who is like me? Who will challenge me? What shepherd can stand before me?” (Jer. 49:19).
The Lamb of God? What is the meaning of this strange phrase? Occurring where it does in the Gospel, it is at once novel, familiar, and ominous. The phrase is novel in the ears of the Baptist’s audience simply because, in just this formulation, it has never been used before. It is vaguely familiar because the sacrifice of lambs in the Jerusalem temple is a well-known practice, based on passages in Torah that require such sacrifice for the expiation of certain kinds of sin. In some sense, these lambs could be described as “lambs of God,” but Jesus is a man, not an animal. Addressing him as an animal, what does the Baptist imply about him? Something unspeakable has suddenly been half-spoken.
Most of the countless millions who have read or heard the acclamation “Behold, the Lamb of God” since the Gospel According to John was written have heard a reference to Christ sacrificing himself on the cross, but the scene derives much of its power from the fact that the onstage participants cannot begin to dream of such a thing. By vicariously sharing their ignorance, the reader can experience, as in Greek tragedy, mingled terror and pity at the inexorable approach of an atrocity. The Gospel story intends, ultimately, to go well beyond the catharsis of tragedy, but innocent incomprehension in the Gospel narrative has much in common, at any given moment, with its counterpart in Greek tragedy.
Expiation by animal sacrifice is a notion whose background, in the Bible, goes all the way back to the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. During the brief, happy period before it occurred to God to forbid anything, the first human couple were given only two commands, both so positive that they were, in effect, two blessings: The pair were to be fruitful and multiply, and they were to have dominion over the earth. Later, after the Lord issued a prohibition and they violated it, he turned his double blessing into a double curse. The blessing of dominion over the earth became the curse of endless labor—in effect, slavery to rather than dominion over the earth. The blessing of fertility became the curse of involuntary reproduction—in effect, a slavery to lust and its consequences. The first curse was spoken against the man, the second against the woman, but obviously both were cursed each time. Having cursed his creatures with these two great sorrows, the Lord added the curse of death: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19).
What these old curses have to do with the acclamation of Jesus as the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” is that they and their consequences are the “sin of the world” that will finally be taken away.
In Israelite and Jewish ritual, what the sacrifice of a lamb took away was indeed more curse than sin. Little in the Book of Leviticus strikes the modern reader as more alien than the notion that there is something not just unclean but morally offensive about a variety of natural conditions, including those of a woman during or after menstruation, a man and woman after the transmission of semen, anyone experiencing incontinence or any other involuntary discharge (including the involuntary emission of semen), or anyone afflicted with a skin disease. According to Leviticus, anyone in one of these conditions was required to make amends to God by sacrificing a lamb. Yet, however alien this requirement may seem to the modern mind, it was not irrational in its original context. It represented ancient Israel’s acknowledgment that the Lord had not yet reversed—if he ever would—the curse that he had spoken against all his human creatures shortly after making them. All human misfortune originated, ultimately, in the disobedience that provoked God so drastically and impulsively to undo his own work. Thus, in Leviticus 14, when a poor leper was required to sacrifice an expiatory lamb (a rich leper had to sacrifice two lambs and a ewe), the ceremony functioned as expiation not really for any sin of the leper himself but effectively for the sin that brought the primeval curse. The sacrifice is, in the end, an acknowled
gment of the human condition as an experience of continuing punishment.
Illness does feel, whether one would wish it so or not, like punishment for a crime one has not committed. “Why is this happening to me?” one asks involuntarily. “What did I ever do to deserve this?” Dismissing the question does not mean escaping it, for there is no escaping it. The ritual of Leviticus gives external expression to the experience of entrapment in an involuntary condition. As for sexual “pollution,” the same ritual externalizes the universal experience of passion as passivity, as an impulse running so far out of control that it feels less like anything that a couple does than like something done to them or through them. The involuntary emission of semen and the involuntary discharge of blood (sometimes even now called “the curse” in an unrecognized allusion to Genesis) are perfect natural symbols for this condition.
This human vulnerability to mortal illness and this human helplessness before an uncontrollable impulse are ritually acknowledged by, first, slaying an animal—that is, inflicting gratuitous, terminal punishment upon its innocent vulnerability—and, second, linking the slain animal ritually to the particular human beings whose analogous helplessness and vulnerability are to be acknowledged. This linkage is enacted in Leviticus 14, when blood from the sacrificed animal is smeared on the ear, thumb, and big toe of the leper for whom the lamb has been slain. In Exodus 24, the vulnerability of the entire nation of Israel, captive in its involuntary covenant with the Lord, is acknowledged when Moses fills basins with the blood of slain oxen and then flings the blood over the heads of the assembled people. These ritual actions are almost unimaginably wild and primitive, yet the driven and desperate human condition that they so vividly acknowledge remains essentially unchanged. Therein lies their intuitive brilliance, and “Behold, the Lamb of God” builds directly upon it.