by Jack Miles
(Isa. 40:9–11, italics added)
Speaking through Jeremiah, he reacted with the same mix of anger and tenderness to the fact that his flock was without a shepherd:
This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says about the shepherds who shepherd my people: “You have scattered my sheep; you have driven them away and have not cared for them. So then I will punish you for your misdeeds—the word of the Lord! But the remnant of my flock I myself will gather from all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their pasture. (Jer. 23:2–3)
When God Incarnate sees a crowd of Jews as “sheep without a shepherd,” his reaction is inevitably a comment not just on them but also on their leaders, their negligent shepherds. But his motive in replacing those shepherds with himself is not just that the sheep should enjoy safety and plenty but also that they should recognize him as their shepherd—that is, as their God. After making, through Ezekiel, the same promise to replace Israel’s greedy and careless shepherds with himself, he concluded: “And they shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord God. And you are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, and I am your God, says the Lord God” (RSV Ezek. 34:30–31 with modifications).
When Jesus himself was hungry, after fasting in the desert, and the Devil challenged him to turn a stone into a loaf, he declined. That is, he declined to perform a food miracle in the desert for himself as he had once done for the Israelites under Moses. Had he provided himself manna in the desert at the Devil’s instigation, he would have performed his miracle for one witness alone. Now, keeping to his own schedule, he performs such a miracle for five thousand witnesses, demonstrating that, to paraphrase Ezekiel, they are his sheep, the sheep of his pasture, and he is their God.
The story of the feeding of the multitude well illustrates the mixed literary style of biblical narration, a style the Gospels do not invent but merely continue. The miracle proper could be at home in a fairy tale or, if the frame of reference were made large enough, a myth, but here the setting is a real place, the crowd is an ordinary crowd experiencing ordinary hunger, and the scraps are collected afterward as after any large human repast. Most strikingly, perhaps, the miracle worker himself, when the crowd seeks to make him king against his wishes, does not cast a spell upon them or turn himself into a swan and fly away. He simply flees from them into the nearby hills as any ordinary man might do.
To say this, however, is not to suggest that the mixed style of the Gospels is an adequate explanation for Jesus’ behavior. If Jesus is a new Joshua, if this is what he reveals by so spectacularly exhibiting his power, then why is he running away? Does the good shepherd, the brave shepherd, flee the flock?
HE STILLS A STORM
Jesus’ disciples attempt to cross the Sea of Galilee to Bethsaida, as he has instructed them, but the wind is against them. From his hiding place in the hills, Jesus watches them struggle.
During the night, when the boat was well out from the shore and he was alone on the land, he could see that they were struggling to stay on course, for the wind was against them. Sometime between three and six in the morning, he came toward them, walking on the sea. He would have passed them by; but when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out. They all saw him and were terrified. But at once he spoke to them. “Take heart, I AM,” he said, | and he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Silence! Be still!” The wind dropped, there followed a great calm, | and immediately they were at the place on the shore they had been heading toward. |
He said to them, “Why are you so frightened? Have you still no faith?” They were overcome with awe and said to one another, “Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him.” … The reason they were dumbfounded was that they had not grasped the import of the miracle of the loaves. Their minds were closed. (Mark 6:47–50 | Mark 4:39 | John 6:21 | Mark 4:40–41, 6:51–52)
The list of questions about Jesus that already contains
Who is this that casts out demons?
and
Who is this that forgives sins?
as well as
Who is this son of Joseph to declare himself the fulfillment of prophecy?
acquires here another entry:
Who is this that the wind and the sea obey him?
Power over the sea is the signature power of God. This is the power he deployed when he created the world, as we recalled when discussing Jesus’ words to Nicodemus about “water and the Spirit.” This is also the power that he used to part the Red Sea and the Jordan River before the advancing Israelites. In the Psalms, storms at sea stand poetically for all the tribulations that face Israel as a nation and the individual Israelite turning to God in prayer. God’s power to still the storm is, par excellence, his power to rescue the oppressed. Thus:
They cried out to the Lord in their affliction,
and he delivered them from their distress.
The tempest he made to be still,
and the waves to be silent.
They were glad then because of the quiet,
and he brought them to the haven they sought.
(Ps. 107:28–30)
Had the disciples recognized that when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes he was demonstrating divine power, they would not have been surprised at this further demonstration of his divinity. But they did not recognize it then, and so he has now given them a more awe-inspiring, truly godlike demonstration of what he can do.
Yet a disturbing shadow lies across this scene. Jesus lets the storm rage for some time before coming to his disciples’ rescue. More disturbing still, when he comes to them walking on the raging waves, he makes as if to walk past them. When he finally comes close enough for them to see that it is he and not a ghost, the words he says are the mysterious name I AM that God gave himself when speaking to Moses from the burning bush. He will do the same at several later moments of high drama. But what dread meaning is to be conveyed by the fact that the incarnate I AM allows his disciples to entertain the thought, for a terrifying moment, that his divine powers will not be exercised to save them, that he may, in fact, allow them to drown in the Sea of Galilee? They receive an answer to that question not long after they disembark, shaken to the core by their narrow escape from shipwreck, but the answer they receive merely deepens their confusion.
HE SPEAKS OF DRINKING BLOOD, AND MANY DESERT HIM
The next day, not finding Jesus and having seen his disciples leave for Capernaum in their boat, some of the crowd follow in boats of their own.
When they found him on the other side, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered:
Truly I tell you,
you are looking for me
not because you saw the signs
but because you had all the bread you wanted to eat.
Do not work for food that spoils,
but work for food that keeps unto eternal life.…
I am the bread of life.
Your forefathers ate manna in the desert
and they [eventually] died …
I am the bread of life which has come down from heaven.
Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.
But the bread that I shall give
is my flesh, for the life of the world.
Then the Jews started arguing among themselves: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus replied to them:
Truly I tell you,
if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood,
you will have no life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him up on the last day.
For my flesh is true food
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
lives in me
and I in him.…
After
hearing this, many of his followers said, “This is intolerable talk. How can anyone accept it?” Jesus was aware that his followers were complaining about it, and he said: “Does this upset you? What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” … Thereafter, many of his erstwhile disciples went away and accompanied him no more. (John 6:25–27, 48–56, 60–62, 66)
What kind of man gives you his flesh to eat and his blood to drink? Whatever else this shocking speech refers to, it must refer somehow to Jesus’ death. It also serves notice to those who have flocked to him because he fed them that it is not his vocation simply to be a cornucopia. Yes, he fed a crowd on that one occasion, but crowd-feeding is not what he is about. In just the same way, he saved his followers from drowning, but rescue—whether from the real waves of the Sea of Galilee or from the metaphorical waves of unspecified tribulation—is not his mission either. Somehow, his mission is to be discharged by his own death—a violent death, he suggests; a death like John’s. And this alone, this even if his “bread of life” speech were not as physically and spiritually repellent as it is, would be enough to drive people from him. If he cannot save himself, what hope is there that he can save or otherwise serve them?
Beyond that motive for disaffiliation, however, there should be no doubt whatsoever that Jesus’ speech is viscerally repugnant to his hearers’ Jewish sensibilities. John writes their reaction into his account of the speech, but one could guess it had he not written it. What Jesus speaks of seems to be, to give it a plain name, cannibalism, a practice that is repugnant in most cultures. Even granting that many or most of his hearers realize that he must be speaking of a symbolic action of some sort, the symbolism is only somewhat less repugnant than the real thing—and most especially so to Jews.
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were vegetarians. Though they were free to eat of the fruit of every tree but one, they were given no comparable freedom to eat the flesh of every, or any, animal. This came only after the great flood, when God made a new covenant with Noah and his descendants:
Every living thing that moves will be yours to eat, no less than the foliage of the plants. I allow you everything, with one exception: You must not eat flesh with life—that is to say blood—still in it. And I shall demand an account of your lifeblood as well. I shall demand it of every animal, and of man. Of man as regards his fellow man, I shall demand an account for human life:
Shed no man’s blood,
Or by man will your blood be shed,
For in the image of God
Is man made.
(Gen. 9:3–6, italics added)
Homicide is an offense against the God whose image mankind bears—except when God himself commands it. As for the meat of animals, it may be eaten only after the blood has drained from it into the earth, for blood, like breath, has life in it, and life belongs to God alone. It is from this verse that the practice of kosher butchery descends. Meat is kosher—that is, fit for consumption in accordance with God’s law—only when the blood has been drained from it. How shocking, then, that Jesus should propose miming the consumption of a human corpse. And how unutterably, unspeakably shocking that the corpse should be that of the Messiah.
Israel knew about cannibalism. The Lord had promised to drive Israel’s enemies to just this extreme. “They will be as drunk on their own blood as on new wine,” he had exulted (Isa. 49:26). He had sworn that if his own people disobeyed him, the enemy he would send against them would do even worse to them:
During the siege and in the distress to which your enemy will reduce you, you will eat the fruit of your own bodies, the flesh of the sons and daughters given to you by the Lord your God. The gentlest and most refined of your men will begrudge his brother, and the wife whom he embraces, and his surviving children, any share of the flesh of the child he is eating. (Deut. 28:53–55)
But these were horrors recognized as such and rhetorically employed as such. The notion that God Incarnate should propose even the symbolic drinking of his own blood is so obscene as to seem almost deranged—a charge that has been made against Jesus already and will be made again. But Jesus knows quite well what he is doing.
Why did he perform the two spectacular miracles he has just performed if he did not intend to perform others like them? His motive in thus demonstrating his power was to make it clear that the shocking things he is now beginning to say are truly being said by God. With many, perhaps most, of his hearers, he does not succeed. With a few, he does: “Then Jesus said to the twelve, ‘What about you, do you want to go away as well?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe—and have come to know—that you are the Holy One of God.’ ” (John 6:67–69). Peter’s loyalty is clear, but does he know what he is saying? Certainly as regards Jesus’ scandalous speech, Peter gives no sign of prescience or exceptional penetration. He does not declare himself, for example, prepared to eat his master’s flesh and drink his blood. All the same, he does acclaim him with the title “the Holy One of God,” a phrase hitherto applied to Jesus only by a demon in the synagogue of Capernaum. No human being has yet dared so far. Jesus, perhaps recalling that agitated but knowing devil, reacts to Peter’s declaration by saying: “ ‘Did I not choose the twelve of you? Yet one of you is a devil.’ He meant Judas, son of Simon Iscariot, since he was the man, one of the twelve, who would betray him” (John 6:70–71).
HE APPEARS IN SUDDEN GLORY ON A MOUNTAINTOP
Blocked, after John’s death, in his first attempt to withdraw to a remote location, Jesus succeeds on his second try. With a group of his disciples, he sets out for Caesarea Philippi, several days’ journey to the north, at the foot of snowcapped Mount Hermon. By far the most impressive mountain in the entire region, Mount Hermon lies well outside Galilee and therefore outside the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas. Jesus is prepared to die, but he does not intend to die at the hands of the puppet king who slew John.
During the course of a grueling, twenty-five-mile uphill walk, out of earshot of the authorities and strung out along the road as hikers always are on a long trek, Jesus and his disciples talk.
He put this question to his disciples, “Who do people say I am?” And they told him, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the prophets.” “But you,” he asked them, “who do you say I am?” Peter spoke up and said to him, “You are the Messiah.” And he gave them strict orders not to tell anyone about him.
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man was destined to suffer greatly, and to be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and to be put to death, and after three days to rise again. He said all this quite openly. Peter, taking him aside, then tried to rebuke him. But, turning and looking toward his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying to him, “Out of my sight, Satan! You are thinking as men think, not as God thinks.” (Mark 8:27–33)
Is Jesus speaking to Peter, merely calling him “Satan,” or is he speaking, in fact, to Satan himself, aggressively rejecting a temptation seductively offered through Jesus’ leading disciple? The conduct that Peter urges, if not quite as self-serving as what Satan urged earlier, is, at the very least, not much different from what the crowd so recently had in mind when it sought to anoint Jesus king of Israel. Loyal and pious as he is, Peter believes that he knows from scripture what Jesus must do if he is to be the Messiah. Peter is mistaken, but his is not an ignorant mistake. Though the concept of messiah was fluid in some regards, the future that Jesus sketches for himself clearly violates it. The Messiah was not to be rejected, much less slain, by the people he would come to save. On the contrary, he would rally them, just as Joshua and David did, against enemies holding the promised land against God’s will. Peter has solid traditional grounds on which to object, but Jesus will not be rebuked. He halts the caravan, allows the disciples to gather, and says to them and to anyone else within earshot, in plainer language than any yet used, what he requires of them.
He called the
crowd and his disciples to him and said, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it. What good is it to win the whole world and forfeit life itself? What indeed can be offered in exchange for one’s life? If anyone in this sinful and adulterous generation is ashamed of me and of my words, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he went on to say: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God coming in power.” (Mark 8:34–9:1)
Jesus preemptively rebukes any disciple who, like Peter, would rebuke him for proceeding as he intends to proceed. In so doing, he evokes both larger losses and larger, more personal gains than they have yet heard him evoke: on the one hand, death on the cross, the Romans’ hideous instrument of torture and death; on the other, a mysterious victory that will come so soon that some of them will never die at all.
More now than ever before hangs on the identity of Jesus. When he preached the renunciation of violence and yet insisted, in answer to the doomed John’s inquiry, that he was indeed “he who is to come,” he was shattering hopes that had been entertained on the highest authority for hundreds of years. Who was he to go so far? And had he anything to offer but surrender? Shocking as it would be for God to revoke his earlier promises, it would be blasphemous for any human being to do so. Any prophet claiming that this was his prophetic message would be a false prophet. Is God’s word not irrevocable? But in this speech, I AM Incarnate seems to be saying, first, that the kind of victory he used to promise, up to and including the winning of the whole world, is worthless in comparison with “life” and, second, that “life” can only be saved by losing it.