by Jack Miles
Later, when a helpless paralytic is laid before him, Jesus will say, surprisingly, “Friend, your sins are forgiven” (Luke 5:20). The man’s paralysis, like the leprosy of Leviticus 14, is not a punishment for any sin of his own but for the original sin that led God to curse his world with afflictions like leprosy and paralysis. When Jesus cures the paralysis, God demonstrates that he intends to revoke his ancient curse. Consistent with this vision, Jesus demands of those whom he heals not prior repentance but faith—faith that God has both the will and the power to take away this “sin” and remake his world.
Having gone this far, however, one must immediately add a qualification. According to the same ancient texts to which the Baptist alludes, the sacrifice of a lamb cannot effect expiation for the kind of deliberate and avoidable sin that we most typically think of as sin—the kind that the Baptist speaks of: exploitation, extortion, intimidation. Sins of this sort can be made good only by repentance and, where harm has been done, by commensurate atonement. Thus, in a deservedly famous passage:
When men fight and one of them hurts a pregnant woman and she suffers a miscarriage but no further harm results, the man responsible will pay compensation as determined by the woman’s husband, paying as much as the judges allow. If further harm is done, however, you will demand life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stroke for stroke. (Exod. 21:22–25)
Though this passage is no exhortation to mercy, neither is it a license for revenge. It is a warning that atonement should be no more than commensurate: an eye for an eye, not an eye for a tooth nor a life for an eye. More to the point, when the sin is of this nature, the sinner is not readmitted to the community merely by offering a lamb to the Lord.
Can the Lamb of God that will “take away the sin of the world” take away this kind of sin as well—true sin and not just the curse of the human condition—and do so, indeed, for the whole world? If the world has sinned, should the world not make reparation? Conversely, if someone else is making reparation, then is that someone else not the guilty party and the world innocent?
Even as these questions are rushing in, John baptizes this Lamb of God and exclaims immediately afterward: “I saw the Spirit descend upon him from heaven like a dove and rest on him. I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water had said to me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit descend and rest is the one who is to baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen it, and I bear witness: He is God’s Chosen One” (John 1:32–34). And then there comes a voice from heaven saying: “You are my Son; this day have I begotten you” (Luke 3:22).
The voice from heaven quotes an Old Testament text (see italicized words below) in which God is heard speaking to the King of Israel:
He said to me:
“You are my Son;
this day have I begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
and smash them to bits like a potter’s pot.”
(Ps. 2:7–9)
The improbable and appalling conjunction of expiatory lamb and messianic warlord receives its first statement here, and the disturbing power of Jesus as a character has everything to do with such combinations. No set of foreign ideas could surpass, in its ability either to attract or to offend a Jewish audience, these native Jewish ideas made daring and new by unforeseen combination.
The notion that a human being could ever be sacrificed in expiation—treated, that is, as an animal rather than as a human being—was repugnant in a Jewish culture that had rationalized animal sacrifice quite explicitly as a substitute for human sacrifice. That the hoped-for son of David should play the role of sacrificial animal is an even more repugnant notion. That the “Son of God,” who, as John pointedly says, “existed before me,” though the two are of the same age, should play this role begins to seem not just outrageous but blasphemous.
Please note that at this moment Jesus himself has yet to speak his first word. We are at the very beginning, and no one yet has any idea what these hints will add up to. Baptism with water—ritual immersion as a symbol of repentance, a cleansing before reform—has a kind of natural logic to it. But what are John’s listeners to understand by baptism “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16)? Is baptism by fire to be understood as judgment by a stern Jesus with “the winnowing-fork in his hand,” determined to gather the grain and burn the chaff? Perhaps, but if the avenger is simultaneously the “Lamb of God,” how stern an avenger can he be?
And whatever may be guessed about the baptism that Jesus will administer, there remains the still more remarkable fact that God Incarnate has begun his redemptive work with an act of public repentance. Everything that will follow, the entire public life of God-made-man, will be performed under the sign of this repentance. The fact bears repeating: God has repented! But of what? What has he done wrong? As these disturbing questions swirl in the air, God’s great enemy, the Devil, suddenly takes notice.
THE DEVIL TRIES TO TAKE HIS MEASURE
Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus turned back from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert, where for forty days he was put to the test by the Devil. During that time he ate nothing, and by the end of it he was hungry. Then the Devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf.” But Jesus replied, “Scripture says, ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ ”
Then, leading him to a height, the Devil showed him in a moment of time all the kingdoms of the world and said to him, “To you will I give all this power and their glory, for it has been handed over to me, for me to give to whom I choose. Worship me, and it shall all be yours.” But Jesus answered him, “Scripture says, ‘You must worship the Lord your God; him alone must you serve.’ ”
Then he led him to Jerusalem and set him on the highest parapet of the Temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said to him, “cast yourself down from here, for scripture says, ‘He has commanded his angels to guard you,’ and again, ‘They will bear you in their arms lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ”
But Jesus answered him, “Scripture says, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”
Having run through every way of tempting him, the Devil left him, until the opportune moment. (Luke 4:1–13)
In this episode, which gave rise to the proverb “Even the Devil can quote scripture,” Jesus and the Devil confront each other as dueling Jewish intellectuals. Jesus wins the verbal duel, but the Devil exercises an ominous physical control over his opponent, and physical control is far from beside the point. It bears on the question that the Devil wants answered, namely: How much power does Jesus really have at his disposal? The arena in which this question is posed is not the Judean desert but the entire sweep of Israelite history.
When the Devil suggests that Jesus turn a stone into a loaf of bread, he is talking about more than mere hunger. Behind that suggestion stands the memory of an earlier moment in the desert when the Lord fed all Israel with miraculous food. Of this experience, Moses would say, forty years later: “[The Lord your God] humbled you and starved you, then fed you with manna, which you had not known, nor had your fathers known it, that he might teach you that man does not live by bread alone, but by all that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). What the Devil is really saying to Jesus is “Are you God, the god who, back then, performed a food miracle in the desert? If so, prove it by performing another.” Jesus proves that he hears the allusion in the question by including the same allusion in his answer, but the answer evades the real question. Jesus could lack the divine power at issue and still give the same clever answer. The Devil has learned nothing.
A question with higher stakes lies buried in the second exchange. The Devil says, “To you will I give all this power … for it has been handed over to me.” Handed over to him by
whom? By whom, if not by the Lord himself? The Devil alludes provocatively to the Lord’s disturbing earlier decision to deliver the world into Babylonian hands.
On the eve of Babylonia’s victory, the Lord told Jeremiah to make yokes, symbols of servitude, and deliver them to the Jerusalem representatives of Israel’s immediate neighbors, Moab, Edom, Ammon, Tyre, and Sidon. The cover letter with this “gift” was the following (note the italicized phrase):
You must tell your masters this: I by my great power and outstretched arm made the earth and the people and animals that are on the earth, and I give them to whom I please. Now I have handed all these countries over to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, my servant; I have even put the animals of the wild at his service.… Any nation or kingdom that will not serve Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and will not bow its neck to the yoke of the king of Babylon, I will punish with sword, famine, and plague.… The nation, however, that will submit its neck to the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will leave in peace on its own land … to farm it and live on it. (Jer. 27:4–6, 8, 11)
As for Israel’s neighbors, so also for Israel. True, Babylonia’s ascendancy proved brief, but its fall was followed by the rise of another foreign power. Would it not then be reasonable to infer that the Lord has transferred his power successively to the empires that have succeeded the Babylonian: the Persian, the Greek, and now the hated Roman? And if scripture itself, in the Book of Daniel, equates the gods of those empires with devils in the service of the great Devil, then may the commanding Devil not challenge Jesus in the name of the God who has “handed over” such power to him?
The myth that God had handed Israel over to Babylonia when the Israelites sinned evolved, historically, into the more comprehensive myth that God had handed the world over to the Devil when Adam and Eve sinned. In a parallel way, the promised victory over Babylonia that would restore Israel’s glory evolved into the promise of a more comprehensive victory that would reverse the “fallen” human condition itself. After the rise of Christianity, the developed form of this myth became a capacious and durable framework within which false gods and evil kings of all sorts could be “demonized”—that is, identified as demons or tools of the Devil—while the just awaited God’s definitive intervention. It is in this sense that everything which is “of this world” or “worldly” is presumptively sinful: Until God’s final victory, it is all to some extent under the Devil’s control.
This vision of a world under provisional but real demonic control frames even a work as late as John Milton’s Paradise Regained. In that poem, the demonic legions, anxious at the appearance in the world of a man who may be God Incarnate, turn to their commander,
To him their great dictator, whose attempt
At first against mankind so well had thrived
In Adam’s overthrow, and led their march
From Hell’s deep-vaulted den to dwell in light,
Regents and potentates and kings, yea gods
Of many a pleasant realm and province wide.
(First Book, lines 115–118)
The demons are afraid that Jesus will drive them back into “Hell’s deep-vaulted den” from the pleasant realms and wide provinces where since “Adam’s overthrow” they have held sway as regents, potentates, kings, and even gods. In the Gospel, Milton’s source, the Devil, still uncertain about Jesus and trying to take his measure, tempts him to reclaim the handed-over power immediately.
In his reply, Jesus does not reclaim the power, but he hints that he could. He reminds his opponent that ultimate power remains with the Lord. “You must worship the Lord your God; him alone must you serve,” he says, quoting Moses for the second time. But he does not deny the claim per se. He leaves hanging the question of whether and when the Lord will reclaim the power that is ultimately his. Jesus neither confirms nor denies that—for now—the Devil has the power that he claims has been handed over to him.
In the third temptation, the Devil does not just allude to scripture but quotes it brazenly and with a hint of menace. Taking insolent liberties, he transports Jesus bodily to a parapet of the Temple in Jerusalem. There, while taunting Jesus to throw himself over the parapet and be rescued by his angels, the Devil implicitly threatens that he himself will throw his captive over the parapet so as to observe with his own eyes whether any angels arrive to break his fall.
The Devil does not deny that ultimate power rests with the Lord, yet he hints: “What good will that do you if he will not use his power on your behalf?” This is, of course, just the question that Israel has been asking for half a millennium. The Devil quotes a Psalm that includes, just before the verses he quotes, an expression of confidence in the Lord’s military power:
A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it [death] will not come near you.
You need only open your eyes
to see the recompense of the wicked.…
No disaster can overtake you,
no plague come near your tent.
He has commanded his angels
to guard you wherever you go.
They will bear you in their arms
lest you strike your foot against a stone.
(Ps. 91:7–12)
What Jew could read this Psalm without flinching? “It will not come near you,” the Psalm says. Oh, won’t it? Have the Romans, one of the empires that the Devil claims to control, not been “near” Israel for decades? Have they not been “recompensed for their wickedness” all too handsomely? If the Lord did not rescue Israel from the gods of Rome, will he rescue Jesus from their commander? And granting that this is the Lord himself who is being taunted, will he protect even himself? Why is he so restrained?
Herod’s Temple is built on a gigantic scale, towering on its eastern side over a deep gorge. We must imagine Jesus gazing into that gorge as the Devil’s taunts ring in his ears. How much confidence does Jesus have in himself? We cannot know how fully he accepts his own identity as proclaimed by the prophet John or at what point he first fully understands it. He speaks not a single word to the Devil in his own name or on his own authority but foils him only by quoting Moses against him. The three quotations are all to the point, and yet they completely fail to humble the diabolical opponent. Is Jesus holding himself grandly above the fray? Or is his caution the caution of the kidnapped?
Even as God Incarnate fully conscious of his identity, Jesus might well be ultra-circumspect in this encounter, recalling that the Devil has bested him not just once but twice before. The first time came in the Garden of Eden when by manipulating Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, the Devil trapped the Lord into wrecking his own creation. In Paradise Regained, the Devil pauses, before leaving for his encounter in the desert with the admittedly mysterious and potentially menacing Jesus, to look back on that early victory and draw encouragement from it. Speaking to his minions, he says:
I, when no other durst, sole undertook
The dismal expedition to find out
And ruin Adam, and the exploit performed
Successfully; a calmer voyage now
Will waft me; and the way found prosperous once
Induces best to hope of like success.
(First Book, lines 100–104)
But the strategy the Devil actually follows in his desert encounter with Jesus recalls the one he followed on the second occasion when he bested the Lord. This second victory came when, appealing to the Lord’s sense of his own greatness, Satan lured him into torturing the innocent Job.
On both those occasions, the Lord recovered and then set about repairing the damage that he had done respectively to Adam and Eve and to Job, thereby sharply limiting the extent of Satan’s victories. And yet, on both occasions the Lord was clearly wounded. No less important, Satan was far from vanquished. On this third occasion, recognizing the approach of the endgame, the Devil chooses to retreat rather than attack, but the retreat is merely tactical: He leaves only “until
the opportune moment.” When that moment arrives, he will ignore Jesus’ mind and go straight for his body.
DISCIPLES, UNSOUGHT, FOLLOW AFTER HIM
Returning to the Jordan River, Jesus is again acclaimed by John:
As John stood there again with two of his disciples, Jesus walked by, and John looked toward him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” And the two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following him and said, “What do you want?” They said, “Rabbi [which means “teacher”], where do you live?” He replied, “Come and see,” so they went and saw where he lived. It was about the tenth hour [late afternoon]. (John 1:35–39)
Jesus’ first followers, Galileans like himself, leave John to follow the one whom John has acclaimed. Jesus does not recruit them. He merely accepts them.
“The next day,” the passage continues:
after Jesus had decided to leave for Galilee, he met Philip [another Galilean] and said, “Follow me.” … Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found the one that Moses, in the Law, and the prophets as well, wrote about, Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can any good come from Nazareth?” Philip replied, “Come and see.” When Jesus saw Nathanael coming, he said to him, “Now here, surely, is an Israelite without guile.” Nathanael asked, “How do you know me?” Jesus replied, “Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.” Nathanael answered, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel.” Jesus replied, “You believe this just because I said: ‘I saw you under the fig tree.’ You are going to see greater things than that.” And then he added, “Truly I tell you, you will see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending over the Son of Man.” (John 1:43, 45–51)
Jesus commands assent as effortlessly as God does in Genesis when he commands Abram to leave his kinfolk in Haran and go to Canaan, and the resemblance is fully intended. Indeed, Jesus is more peremptory with Philip than the Lord is with Abram, for in Genesis 12, the Lord offers material incentives to Abram (“I will make you a great nation”), while Jesus offers none to Philip or Nathanael or the others. Is Jesus grateful for their acclamation and allegiance? To judge from his arch manner with Nathanael, it does not seem so.