by Jack Miles
In the immediate aftermath of his sermon, Jesus briefly resumes his activity as an itinerant healer. Then there comes a terse query from the desert prophet who had baptized not only Jesus but all his disciples as well:
John, summoning two of his disciples, sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect someone else?” When the men reached Jesus, they said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come or are we to expect someone else?’ At that very time [Jesus] was healing many people of illnesses and afflictions and of evil spirits, and bestowing sight upon many who were blind. So he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is he who finds me no hindrance to faith.” (Luke 7:18–23)
No hindrance to faith! Jesus evades the question but correctly guesses its motive. Though he tries to make the question answer itself, he concedes that to someone like John, the work of Jesus, interpreted as Jesus himself has lately been interpreting it, could indeed be an obstacle to faith and worse: a crushing disappointment. That is, Jesus’ preaching could arouse doubt that God was coming in power to liberate his suffering people.
John and Jesus understand each other well, though they couch their exchange in the veiled language that might be expected when one man is behind bars and the other might at any time be accused of sedition. Jesus knows to whom John’s oblique (at least to the Romans) “one who is to come” refers. John hears the silence when Jesus omits “and prisoners are set free” from his long list of authenticating signs. Jesus offers his miracles as his authentication, yet the frame he places around them suggests an agonizing reappraisal of just what it is that Israel—and John—should hope for from God.
Knowing that his words will hurt John when they reach him in his cell at Herod’s sumptuous court, Jesus speaks of John to his own disciples admiringly, ruefully, and defensively—but not before John’s disciples have left:
What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed trembling in the breeze? No? Then what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? Look, those who dress in finery and live in luxury are to be found at royal courts. Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. It is of him that it is written: “Behold, I send my messenger in advance to prepare a path before you.” I tell you, of all those born to women, there is none greater than John.… And yet, the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” (7:24–28)
God, even God Incarnate, does not apologize. From the first word of Genesis to the last word of Revelation, his manner bespeaks perfect moral certitude. God never admits doubt about any word he ever says or any action he ever takes. What he does allow himself to express, on rare occasions and in sometimes veiled language, is regret, and this is one of those occasions. In the clutches of Herod, a quisling whom even his Roman paymasters despise, John is an all-too-perfect personification of Israel under Roman rule abetted by Jewish collaboration. Moreover, John’s plight all too precisely reflects the setting of at least half the Psalms: An innocent man in danger turns to God for help, imploring the Lord of the covenant to unleash his fabled powers and avert disaster. Jesus receiving a plea with a Psalm written between its lines from an exceptionally good man in exceptional peril is all too like God hearing Israel’s pleas and failing to answer them.
John is laconic, but his situation speaks for itself, and what it says—to borrow a verse from a typical Psalm—is:
O Lord, be not far off.
O my strength, come quick to my aid.
Save my life from the sword,
my one and only life from the fangs of their dogs.
(Ps. 22:19–20)
John presents in person the devastating cost of Jesus’ revision of the covenant. From prison, the Baptist sends for a clarification, and, to his sorrow, he gets one. In this exchange, he is the representative of Israel, the devout Jew par excellence, hearing from God the painful news that the covenant promises will not be kept, or will be kept only in so different a way that they amount to an entirely new covenant.
God has alluded before to the possibility of a new covenant based on something other than the kind of military victory that began the old covenant and might portend the rescue of a prisoner like John, but alluded is indeed the right word. This possibility has been marginal, almost theoretical, an exception scarcely expected to become a new rule. Speaking through Jeremiah, in measured prose rather than in the excited poetry usual on such occasions, God did once foresee such a state of affairs:
Behold, a time is coming when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and the House of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forebears when I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt (a covenant that they broke, even though I was their Lord). For this will be the covenant that I will make with the House of Israel when the time comes—I will plant my law within them, writing it in their hearts. Then I shall be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they need to teach neighbor or brother, saying, “Heed the Lord.” For they will all heed me, from the least to the greatest, since I shall have forgiven their iniquity and will never again call their sin to mind. (Jer. 31:31–34)
This “new covenant” does not begin, as the old one did, with victory over an oppressor, and no reference is made to punishment, only to forgiveness. Among so many other passages (no less in Jeremiah than in other books of prophecy) that foresee the return of the mighty hand and outstretched arm of Deuteronomy, this passage stands out for its hint—it is no more than a hint—that a covenant between God and Israel might continue to exist even if, for whatever reason, God were to lay down his arms.
Jesus’ message to John need not be cause for absolute despair, then, and yet it cannot fail to be a bitter disappointment. What Jesus is telling John is that he who so eloquently preached the Lord’s return in power may well die at the hands of his captors. And this is exactly what happens next:
[Herod had had John] chained up in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife [and his own niece], whom he had married. For John had told Herod, “It is against the law for you to have your brother’s wife.” As for Herodias, she was furious with [John] and wanted to kill him, but she was not able to do so because Herod was in awe of John, knowing him to be a good and upright man, and he gave him his protection. When he heard him speak, he was greatly troubled, yet he liked listening to him.
Herodias got her chance on Herod’s birthday, when he gave a banquet for the nobles of his court, for his army officers, and for the leading figures in Galilee. When the daughter of the same Herodias came in and danced, she delighted Herod and his guests; so the king said to the girl, “Ask me anything you like and I will give it you.” And he swore an oath to her: “I will give you anything you ask, even half my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother, “What shall I ask for?” And she replied, “The head of John the Baptist.” The girl at once rushed back to the king and made her request: “I want you to give me John the Baptist’s head, immediately, on a platter.” The king was deeply distressed, but, thinking of the oath he had sworn and in front of his guests, he was reluctant to go back on his word to her. Next thing, the king sent one of the bodyguards with orders to bring John’s head. The man went off and beheaded John in the prison; then he brought the head on a platter and gave it to the girl, and the girl gave it to her mother. When John’s disciples heard about this, they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb. (Mark 6:17–29)
The story of the murder of John the Baptist is as sparing in detail and restrained in tone as the story of the binding of Isaac. When a detail is included, such as the platter that the girl asks for, it attracts attention by its very isolation. In Richard Strauss’s expressionist opera Salome, the young dancer actually cradles the bleeding head in her arms as she sings to it of decadence and desire. In
Mark, more realistically, she asks that it be brought on a platter. She cannot have been eager to handle it before delivering it to her monstrous mother—or so we are left to guess. (How did the guests react? the reader wonders. Mark, in his biblical way, holds his tongue.)
Style aside, the murder of John is as much a gloss on Jesus’ “Love your enemies” as the story of the Amalekites is a gloss on Moses’ ”Love your neighbor.” It matters that John not only loses his life but loses it in a hideous way to contemptible people. Herodias is worse than a Lady Macbeth. Herod Antipas is worse than, or less than, a Macbeth. He is a man of idle curiosity whose simpering good intentions crumble under pressure like a sugar sculpture. Herod’s willingness to turn murder into entertainment would strike a Jewish audience as quintessentially and revoltingly Roman. So too, perhaps, might his effete susceptibility to his wife’s manipulation: “Give not your strength to women,” the Book of Proverbs says, “your ways to those who ruin kings” (31:3). As for Herodias, her cynicism in making her own child an accomplice to assassination is the worst possible indictment of the debauched, deracinated subculture to which she belongs.
Yet the deepest, most traumatic transaction in this episode is the one that takes place silently between John and Jesus: John, who appears only as a severed head carried in on a platter, and Jesus, the price of whose teaching is here on display even as his own death is foreshadowed. When the guards seized John in his cell, did he resist them? Did he bare his neck voluntarily to the executioner’s sword, or did he struggle? Jesus, who said, “If someone takes your outer garment from you, let him have your undergarment as well” (Luke 6:29), had stopped short of saying, “And when they come to behead you, bare your neck,” because he could not yet continue such a statement by saying, “… for your Father in heaven, when they came to kill him …” The moment for that blasphemous suggestion is not far in the future as John’s blood drains from his jugular; but until it comes, John’s passing stands as a grim prophetic pantomime of Jesus’ own end and the price of his new revelation.
A WHORE DEMONSTRATES HIS STRATEGY OF SHAME
Jesus’ pacifist vision might seem to entail that he himself should have an obliging, complaisant, generally uncontentious and pacific personality, but he does not. The Jesus of the Gospels, especially of the Gospel of John, is more often peremptory than solicitous, and this with his supporters no less than with his opponents. When he is asked for material help, his first instinct is not to be obliging but to be irritated and dismissive. He never backs away from a dispute, nor does he ever allow disagreement to be papered over with a soothing cliché like the Samaritan woman’s “I know that Messiah is coming; and when he comes, he will explain everything.” In all these unamiable ways, Jesus is in considerable characterological continuity with his own past. The thesis, then, that God’s character has changed requires a mental asterisk. He has indeed changed, but some of his old traits live on. There is reason, in particular, to suspect that his break with violence does not entail the renunciation of all forms of resistance. This is a point that may be taken away from, of all things, his public celebration of the unrecognized virtue of a fallen woman.
One should know, to appreciate the scene that follows, that in first-century Palestine guests at a formal meal typically dined reclining on couches with their heads pointing inward around a U-shaped table. Servants came and went bringing food and drink through the open end of the U. An uninvited guest in this story waits until the invited guests have settled onto the couches around the U. Then she approaches one of them at the foot of his couch.
One of the Pharisees had invited [Jesus] to a meal; and when he arrived at the Pharisee’s house, he reclined in his place at the table. A woman of the town, who had a bad name, had heard he was dining with the Pharisee. Having brought with her an alabaster flask of perfumed oil, she waited behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. She covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the fragrant oil.
When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman it is who is touching him and what a sinner she is.” Then Jesus took this up and said, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” He replied, “Say it, Teacher.” “There was once a creditor who had two men in his debt. One owed him five hundred days’ wages, the other fifty. Neither could pay, so he let both off. Which of the two will love him more?” Simon answered, “The one who was let off more, I suppose.” Jesus said, “Right you are.”
Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you provided no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears, dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but she has been covering my feet with kisses ever since I came in. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with perfumed oil. That she shows so much love proves that her sins, many as they are, have been forgiven. It is one who is forgiven little who shows little love.” Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” Those who were with him at table began to ask among themselves, “Who is this man, that he even forgives sins?” But he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.” (Luke 7:36–50)
Why is this woman weeping? Is she weeping tears of joy that her sins have been forgiven? Is she weeping tears of sorrow for those sins? Do the tears count with the flask of perfumed oil as an expression of her love for Jesus? Has he then already met with her, heard her confession, and forgiven her, so that his closing words to her in Simon’s house merely ratify or reveal to the dinner guests what he and she already know? Or is she for some reason grieving over him, consoling him for something that he is suffering and that perhaps only she knows about?
A woman weeping for an unknown reason attracts all eyes to herself. If, while she weeps, she begins to undress (the meaning, in this culture, of letting down her hair), her behavior becomes obscene, an obscene demonstration. But of what? Jesus interprets her action, quite apart from what it may say about her relationship to him, as a statement about Simon. She is engaging in shameful behavior so as to shame. She is humbling herself so as to humiliate another. The object of her action is not just to honor and comfort Jesus but also to shame and discomfit Simon.
Did she really intend this? How can we know? She never speaks. For that matter, we know only through Jesus’ interpretation that she is showing love toward him because much has been forgiven her and not for some more mundane reason. Simon, whose reaction recalls that of Jesus’ disciples in Samaria, is surprised to see Jesus so at ease as he receives physical attention of an intimate sort in a public place from a woman of ill repute. Does Jesus’ calm as he receives this attention suggest that he has received it before? His serenity, like her tears, might have any of several explanations and, by remaining unexplained, raises the emotional temperature of the episode. One thing, however, is clear—namely, that he approves of her shaming behavior. He has no desire to lower the temperature or spare Simon further embarrassment. On the contrary, he wants to keep the heat on and intensify the embarrassment. If the story of John’s beheading is a gloss on “Turn the other cheek,” so is the story of the whore in Simon’s house. The two are complementary. John exhibits the madness in Jesus’ method; the whore exhibits the method in his madness.
What Jesus said, to quote the shocking line again and this time in Matthew’s more revealing formulation, is “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well” (Matt. 5:39, italics added). Supposing a right-handed attacker, the blow should fall on the left cheek. That it falls on the right means that it is a backhanded slap, the kind delivered by a master to a slave or a ruler to a subject. If the victim then turns his left cheek toward his attacker, he places the features of his face where his right cheek had been when the first slap landed. He dares his master, his ruler, or whoever it is who has insulted him to insult him further by landing a second blow squarely on h
is nose and mouth. Thus does the victim shame the victimizer, forcing insolence into consciousness of itself and then, perhaps, into repentance.
In a second illustration, using, significantly, the Latin word for mile, the word that the occupying Romans would use, Jesus says, again in Matthew’s version: “If a man presses you into service to go one mile, go with him two” (5:41). What is being alluded to is not just any importunate acquaintance but an arrogant soldier of the occupying Roman army forcing a Jew to carry his pack. But soldiers can be shamed too. They may be, more than appears, pained to be causing pain. If one of them abuses his strength, force him into a worse abuse, and you may shame him into mercy.
Finally, most obviously because most ludicrously, Jesus says, “If anyone wants to sue you for your undergarment, let him have your outer garment too” (5:40). It was the costlier outer garment that might be taken as security from a poor person rather as, in our day, a student might leave a credit card as security when renting a bicycle. (The use of clothing as security is alluded to at Exodus 22:26 and at Deuteronomy 24:12, where the humane provision is added that a pledged cloak would have to be returned at nightfall lest the poor person have nothing to sleep in. In the era before the mass manufacture of clothing, a substantial outer garment was an object of no slight value.) But the undergarment? No one would take that in pledge. The idea is more than slightly indecent. Luke’s version (6:29) of Jesus’ comparison reverses the position of the two garments: “If someone takes your outer garment from you, let him have your undergarment as well.” In Luke as in Matthew, the victim shames the victimizer by standing naked before him. But in Matthew the victimizer is both more “respectable,” because he goes to court to get what he wants, and more contemptible, because what he wants is a man’s underwear. In any event, supposing that such a lawsuit were to take place, a defendant who chose to hand over his outer garment as well as his undergarment would show up the shameful—and indecently petty—conduct of the plaintiff. Like the whore in Simon’s house, he would strip away his opponent’s dignity by stripping away his own.