by Jack Miles
Among these self-characterizations, the most startling comes in a soliloquy derived from the Book of Numbers. Thinking back to his origin in heaven and forward to his human death, Yahweh Incarnate recalls, of all unexpected moments, the time when he sent a plague of poisonous snakes—“fiery serpents”—upon the Israelites. Wandering in the desert, they had complained of hunger and thirst. The snakes were his reaction to their complaint. After many had died of snakebite, the survivors turned to Moses desperate for relief, more than ready to repent of their crime of complaint. Moses then prayed to the Lord, who instructed him to break one of the Sinai commandments and make a graven image of a serpent. “Set it on a pole,” he told Moses, “and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live” (21:4–9). Moses obeyed, the plague was lifted, and the people moved on.
Now, alone in the night, more than a millennium later, having committed a capital offense against the religiopolitical establishment in Jerusalem, Jesus imagines himself “lifted up” on the gallows of his day and compares himself, in that condition, to the serpent that Moses “lifted up” on that pole in the desert. The serpent was lifted up so that the dying Israelites could be cured of fatal snakebite. Yahweh Incarnate will be lifted up “so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” This is the equation, but it is a deeply shocking equation, for what did the Israelites see when they looked at the bronze serpent? Antiquarians may say what they will about sympathetic magic or apotropaic medicine. In the story as we now have it, what the Israelites saw was a reminder that the Lord had been prepared to kill them in large numbers for no greater offense than complaining of hunger and thirst. When they looked at the bronze serpent, even though it cured them, they saw a reminder of why they had so greatly to fear him. The snakes, after all, were not the cause of their dying. The Lord himself was the cause.
What, then, does Jesus suggest that all mankind will see when they look upon him lifted up on the cross or, later, look upon an image of him in that condition? How can we avoid saying that they will look upon the cause as well as the cure of their distress? To the objection that this comparison is far-fetched, I would reply that it is Jesus himself who has fetched the comparison from afar. The bronze serpent is a detail from an obscure episode in Israelite history. The comparison is so arcane, so recherché, that it can only be fully, provocatively intended.
Anyone who sets out to comment on the character of Jesus quickly finds himself in competition with his subject. Jesus is more provocative in characterizing himself than most commentators begin to guess. I include not just learned commentators but naughty screenwriters, satirical novelists, nihilist philosophers, everybody. The latter all intend to blaspheme, and they all succeed (blasphemy is an easy target to hit). Jesus, however, blasphemes with a resourcefulness that exceeds theirs, because he knows so much better than they do whereof he speaks. Was there no other image available to him than that of the killer snake? Could he not have compared himself, for example, to the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that led the Israelites through the desert? Why dredge up this brutal incident and this grotesque symbol? Why, if not because in this incident human crime and divine punishment are so excruciatingly ill-matched? The death penalty for a complaint about bad food? How can divine innocence not be called into question? Why conjure up the memory of the bronze serpent if not to suggest that those who will see Jesus upon the cross will look upon not just the remedy for the human condition but also its cause?
Though Jesus’ gnomic line in the Temple alluded to his destruction, the means of destruction was not then named. Here it is. In this soliloquy, Jesus alludes for the first time to his crucifixion, and the allusion is, of course, highly oblique, audible only by people who already know the rest of the story. And then, at this of all moments, Jesus speaks perhaps the most quoted single line in the New Testament:
For thus has God loved the world:
he has given his only Son
so that everyone who believes in him may not perish
but may have eternal life.
(John 3:16)
Jesus makes the astonishing statement that God is giving his son, his incarnate self, to the world as, through Moses, he gave the serpent to the Israelites—namely, as an icon against and a remedy for his own past ruthlessness. How hauntingly the next lines resound, against the now awakened memory of God’s murderous revenge, as God protests that this time he has not come to judge:
For God sent his Son into the world
not to judge the world,
but so that through him the world might be saved.
(NJB 3:17, italics added)
As the stage goes dark, vast promises and dark confessions hang in the air together, their meaning scarcely decipherable. The world is somehow a lost world, a world that must be saved. Its salvation somehow requires a new creation. This much he has revealed to Nicodemus. But the new creation somehow requires in turn the death of the creator. This is the shocking prospect that the incarnate God has so far dared confide to no one but himself.
INTERLUDE: THE ASEXUALITY OF THE FATHER AND THE SEXUALITY OF THE SON
The celibacy—more exactly, the asexuality—of the Lord God might well seem to make him a refutation in person of the notion that gods are made in the image of men and women. Who, one might ask, modeling a deity on humanity as we know it, could possibly leave sex out? The immortals of both the Greek and the Indian pantheon are sexual, even though they are spared not just ordinary death but also, to a large extent, ordinary birth—birth preceded by laborious pregnancy and ending in painful parturition. If they are thus made in the image, at least the dream-image, of mankind, why could it not be so for the Lord as well?
Faith answers that if the Lord were simply an extrapolation of or a dreamy improvement upon mankind, then he would indeed be a sexual being. The fact that he is not such is a proof of his authenticity, a proof that we know him only because he has revealed himself to us, a proof that we have not created him in our image. There are, however, at least two other ways to take up this question.
The first begins with the fact that, as even a naive and prescientific observation of nature will reveal, everything sexual dies, while contrariwise everything that does not die is not sexual. It might then have been (and may still be) intuitive rather than counterintuitive to imagine that a deity who did not die could not be sexual, and then to associate divine immortality—as ancient Israel clearly did—with things like the wind, which neither mate nor perish. From such an intuition it would follow that sexual experience, however intense, could not be, as often in the history of religion it has seemed to be, a brief, ecstatic participation in divinity. On the contrary, sexuality would be understood to point not upward to divinity but forward to reproduction and then downward to death.
Speculation along these lines may seem to read a modern vision of sexuality back into Israelite antiquity, but this coincidence is interesting in its own right. Twentieth-century molecular biology has taught us to see the individual animal, including whatever counts as the animal’s sexual experience, as just a machine by which one gene makes another gene. Only the simplest animals reproduce by asexual cloning, passing on the whole of their genetic endowment to their descendants. More complex, sexual animals transmit only half of their genetic identity in any one act of reproduction—and later die, even when their genes live on. Evolutionary biology and the new evolutionary psychology have taught us to see experientially enhancing features of human sexuality, such as concealed ovulation and year-round estrus in the female, as just so many means to the end of reproductive maximization—always, of course, in the interest of the gene.
As evolutionary science, with this impersonal and objective view of sexual experience, increasingly becomes the new common sense, the highly personal, intensely subject-centered sexual philosophy of a Sigmund Freud comes to seem the intellectual oddity of a bygone era. A century ago, “personal matters” were preeminently sexual matters, and intensely private. In
our own era, sexual matters are decreasingly private, increasingly impersonal, and decreasingly consequential as a result. When everyone’s sex life is just part of a large, collective, impersonal, well-understood, but ultimately meaningless process, it can seem to matter little whether God—or anyone—has a sex life or not.
There is, however, another, very different way to explain the asexuality of the Lord—namely, by seeing it as the projection of an impulse, as natural and even healthy as sex itself, to repress sex. This impulse may find its starkest mythological expression in a relatively little-noticed episode in the Book of Genesis in which a Semitic version of “the sensuous immortals”—to borrow Pratapaditya Pal’s genial characterization of the gods of India—is stamped out by the direct intervention of the Lord:
When men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife those of them that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. Let his days be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim [demigods] were on the earth in those days, and later as well, after the sons of God had gone in to the daughters of men, who bore them children. These were the supermen of yore, the men of legend. (Gen. 6:1–4)
The “sons of God” in this episode seem, as it opens, to have no female counterparts, no “daughters of God,” with whom they might have sexual relations. They seem to discover sex only when they encounter the daughters of men. In any case, the offspring of these divine-human couplings, unless the Lord steps in, will inherit immortality from their divine fathers and sexuality from their human mothers. By this double inheritance, they will be, then, very like the lucky gods of Greece, Rome, and India. But the Lord refuses to tolerate this new class of sensuous immortals. He seems to assign to them, as already to everyone of purely human descent, a finite, if lengthy, lifespan.
A similar intervention has come a bit earlier, when the Lord God intervenes to ensure that Adam, newly aware of his nudity and newly sentenced to death, does not escape his punishment and become a sensuous immortal:
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. But wait! What if he should put forth his hand and take of the tree of life as well, and should eat and live forever.…” Therefore, the Lord God expelled him from the Garden of Eden to till the ground whence he was taken. He drove the man out; and east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. (3:22–24)
The Lord can countenance sexuality, as from the very beginning in Adam and Eve; he can countenance immortality, as in the sons of God. What he cannot allow is the conjunction of the two, as in the Nephilim, who all die in the great flood that immediately follows.
The appeal of the combination of sexuality and immortality as personified in innumerable sexually active immortals is clearly universal. In the biblical tradition, however, it faces, in God, a repressive counter-force—a second, equally compelling, personified idea that considers the first idea and opposes it. If the sensuous immortals are the apotheosis of sexual indulgence, the Lord is—at least in such episodes as the two just considered—the apotheosis of sexual restraint. And though it is perhaps easier to recognize human projection in sexually active gods than in this strictly celibate god, it is possible to recognize projection—the human personality in a recognizable guise—in him as well.
Does sexual repression result from him, or did it create him in the first place? The answer should be evident. Even if we grant that many have repressed themselves sexually by introjecting a repressive deity who began as someone else’s projection, many others, clearly, have managed repression without this particular aid. What one must concede if one believes that gods are human projections is that there exists a cultural antisex instinct nearly as deep in the human species as the biological sex instinct itself. If the Lord did not exist in his anomalous asexuality as the personification of this counterinstinct, the counterinstinct would find some other mythic way to express itself. In other words, the statement with which this interlude began—that an asexual deity cannot be made in the image of his worshipers—is mistaken. Such a deity may indeed be a projection, but if so, a useful and necessary projection, because in every regard, not just as regards sex, human existence requires both indulgence and repression, and myths are written to make what is required seem both inevitable and wondrous.
The sensuous immortals have their ways of being, if not quite sexually repressive, then at least socially conservative. The Lord has his ways of being, if not quite sexually indulgent, then at least selectively accommodating. As for Jesus, what is most remarkable about his sexuality is that, though he remains celibate for all that the Gospels ever tell us of him, his sexual tolerance is exceptional to the point of being a public scandal to his contemporaries. This being the case, the possibility of pre- or extramarital sexual experience can no more be ruled out of his character, on the ground that it is never spoken of, than can the possibility that, had he lived longer, he might have married.
What is called for is not, in the manner of a modern novelist like Nikos Kazantzakis, to supply Jesus with a love life that the Gospels do not supply. What is called for is only to refrain from explicitly foreclosing possibilities that the Gospels leave implicitly open. The confession about himself that God has become human to make has far more to do with power and weakness than it does with indulgence and repression. For that confession, it matters rather more that the Lord should have become some woman’s helpless baby than that he should have become any woman’s hungry lover. And yet Jesus, speaking to Nicodemus or (more revealingly) to himself, says that it is love that has sent him into the world. And once God has become God Incarnate, he cannot speak the word love and leave out all reference to his own body. His is now an embodied love.
Moreover, when the disciples of John the Baptist express concern about the size of the crowds that Jesus and his disciples are attracting, John characterizes Jesus as a bridegroom in his response to them:
It is the bridegroom who has the bride;
and yet the bridegroom’s friend,
who stands by and listens,
is filled with joy at the bridegroom’s voice.
This is the perfect joy that I feel.
He must increase,
I must decrease.
(John 3:29–30)
If John answers a question about himself, he raises one about Jesus. If Jesus is the bridegroom, who is the bride?
In the Old Testament, the Lord describes his relationship to Israel as that of a man to, variously, an infant daughter, a female foundling, a nubile young woman, a prostitute, a bride, a wife, the mother of his children, an unfaithful wife abandoned to rape and sexual humiliation, and a divorced, elderly wife whom he has remarried and taken back into his home. There is never the shadow of a doubt, however, that these relationships are metaphorical. The Lord has no divine spouse, and he has no sexual relations with any human being. He is celibate because he is the only one of his kind. This being the case, what does John mean to suggest when he calls God Incarnate a bridegroom?
Since there is no ordinary human bride on the scene, John may mean to suggest that Jesus, like God, is a metaphorical bridegroom. “The Father loves the Son,” Jesus says, “and has entrusted everything to his hands” (3:35)—everything, including Israel, his metaphorical bride. Yet because Jesus is a male human being, the use of the word bridegroom cannot fail to direct attention to his sexual potency and to raise the question of whether now might not be the moment when, through Jesus, God’s celibacy might end. God is a species unto himself. God Incarnate belongs as well to the human species. He has undergone an ordinary human birth. Will he now enter an ordinary human marriage?
The celibacy of the Lord God initially had less to do with his relationship to women than with his relationship, as sovereign and sole creator, with time and with history. As not
ed earlier, God asserted his ascendancy over recurring time by creating the sun and moon by which days, months, and years are measured. He asserted his ascendancy over nonrecurring time—one unrepeatable event following another in a sequence of indefinite length—by creating that by which such time is measured: namely, human generation. Both kinds of time are God’s creation of order out of atemporal chaos.
The Old Testament measures nonrecurring, historical time genealogically. The nearest equivalent in classical Hebrew to the modern word history—and it is by no means a close equivalent—is toledot, “generations.” Just as the God who created the sun and the moon is not himself implicated in any solar system, so also the God who created humankind male and female is not himself implicated in any process of sexual generation. Men and women reproduce; God creates.
Having neither progenitors nor offspring, God has, accordingly, no toledot, no generative history, except by vicarious participation in the generative history of his creatures or by metaphorical representation of his real relationship to them. He may be metaphorically their father. He may also be metaphorically their husband (he may even, though very rarely, be their wife). In reality, however, God is his own species, or his own genus, and it is a genus that does not reproduce.
But, to repeat, now that God has become man, now that he himself belongs to the species that he has created, does his relationship to toledot not change? Matthew and Luke go so far as to give his genealogy in detail. Though John provides no genealogy, his revision of God’s relationship to toledot is more radical in another way, for he seems to assume that Jesus, though divine, has received his human nature in the ordinary way from a human father as well as a human mother. If God is now irretrievably involved in the life process of the human species by his human birth, why may he not allow himself the further involvement of a human marriage?