Christ

by Jack Miles

  The multiplication of the loaves, the walking on water, and now these predictions of suffering, death, followed only then somehow by the triumph of the Kingdom of God—all of this is the further explication of Jesus’ paradoxical sermon against violent resistance. God has become man to win a great victory by enacting that sermon, or so it seems. Crucifixion first and then … what? The Son of Man coming down from heaven in glory and surrounded by his angels? Even if he can cure the sick and forgive sins, even if he can feed multitudes and give orders to the wind and the sea, does the son of Joseph have anything remotely approaching the authority to make predictions and demands like these?

  Now about eight days after this, he took with him Peter, John, and James and went up a mountain to pray. And as he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothing became dazzling white. And suddenly two men were there talking to him. They were Moses and Elijah, appearing in glory, and they were speaking of the exodus that he was to accomplish in Jerusalem. Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but now they awoke and saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here, so let us make three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what he was saying. As he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and when they went into the cloud, the disciples were afraid. And a voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen One. Listen to him.” And after the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. The disciples kept silent and, at that time, told no one what they had seen. (Luke 9:28–36)

  The eight-day lapse indicates that Jesus and his disciples have arrived at Caesarea Philippi. This Roman shrine city was built adjacent to an earlier Greek shrine, the Paneion, honoring the god Pan; and the Greek shrine, built where the headwaters of the Jordan River emerge from a natural grotto, paid silent homage to an older, Canaanite tradition according to which Mount Hermon was the abode of the gods, the Mount Olympus of the Canaanite pantheon. In Israelite tradition, Mount Zion, site of the holy city of Jerusalem, was not a place where God had lived from time immemorial but only one where God at a certain point in time had chosen to abide. Until David captured Jerusalem from the native Jebusites and made it his capital, Mount Zion had not been holy to the Lord. Heaven was most often named as the Lord’s home, but several mountains were named as places where he was wont to sojourn or, in one way or another, make his glory manifest. Mount Sinai was the most famous of these; Mount Horeb, evidently another name for Mount Sinai, was another; Mount Seir in the south is a third; and an unnamed “mount of assembly” in the far north, mentioned at Isaiah 14:13 and at Psalm 48:2, was a fourth. This sacred northern mountain is undoubtedly Mount Hermon, Israel having appropriated, as so often in its poetry, an indigenous Canaanite tradition.

  The place to which Jesus brings his three most important apostles is, then, richly suggestive and would be so even if he did no more than speak to them there with appropriate solemnity. What happens, instead, is that he is joined by the spirits of two giants from Israel’s past, to each of whom the Lord appeared on a mountaintop: to Moses, on Mount Sinai; to Elijah, on Mount Horeb. But does the Yahweh Elohim now appear to Jesus as he did to Moses and Elijah? No, it is Jesus himself who appears—his face transfigured and his clothes shining with a preternatural whiteness—to Moses and to Elijah. They speak to him as if they know him, and they clearly know as well of the passing, or exodus (the Greek word used is exodos), that awaits him in Jerusalem. All this happens, and the three apostles awake to find it in progress. They see the glory of the Lord Christ just as Moses saw the glory of the Lord God on Mount Sinai and as Elijah did on Mount Horeb. Then a cloud appears—again, just as it did atop Mount Sinai when the Lord appeared to Moses—and from the cloud a voice speaks: “This is my Son, my Chosen One. Listen to him!” The voice of God? But when they look, they see no one but Jesus.

  On whose authority, to repeat the question that the three disciples brought with them up the mountain, does the son of Joseph presume so drastically to reinterpret the promises of the Lord God to his chosen people? The answer, they now know, is this: He does so on his own authority. The Father has become his own Son. The voice from heaven is his own voice, as it was when it said at his baptism, “You are my Son. This day have I begotten you.” The glory of the Lord made manifest on the sacred mountain of the north is Jesus’ overwhelming reply to Peter’s rebuke. Yet, awestruck as Peter is, stammering out his incoherent wonderment, can he, can any of the three, yet make sense of the coming collision of divine glory and human agony?

  *I use this Hebrew noun, which means simply “catastrophe,” in preference to the more usual holocaust, a word that some find offensive because its original setting is in the Jewish religion itself. Shoah is the noun most commonly used in Israel to refer to the slaughter of the Jews of Europe during World War II.

  *The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  †The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Christ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).

  PART THREE

  The Lord of Blasphemy

  During the few weeks that precede his execution, Jesus spends his time in and near Jerusalem. Once reluctant to perform miracles even when asked, he now performs them even when not asked. Once secretive when talking about either his divinity or his doom, he now talks openly of both, often linking them. Once a preacher and healer in rural villages and “lonely places,” he now works in the precincts of the Temple in the heart of Jerusalem. Once acclaimed as king of Israel only by a lone disciple, he is now about to hear that phrase shouted by a huge crowd: Jews from around the world assembled in Jerusalem for the Passover feast. Yet once disparaged only as “Joseph’s son” and seriously threatened only by a band of Nazareth neighbors, he is now aggressively dismissed as a Samaritan, a Galilean, a madman, or a demoniac and made the object, finally, of an assassination plot conceived at the highest levels.

  The effect is that of a gathering before a shattering, as when a wave hangs poised before it breaks on a rocky shore, yet Jesus never indicates for even a fleeting moment that events are running out of his control. Nothing surprises him. He foresees the worst and embraces it. Others are dismayed or confused. God Incarnate is lordly and serene.

  HE FLAGRANTLY VIOLATES THE LAW OF SABBATH REST

  After this there was a Jewish festival, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem next to the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called Bethesda in Hebrew, which has five porticoes. Under these lay a large number of sick people—the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. One man there had been ill for thirty-eight years; and when Jesus saw him lying there and knew he had been ill for so long, he said, “Do you want to recover?” The sick man replied, “I have no one, sir, to put me into the pool when the water stirs. While I am yet on the way, someone else gets down there before me.” Jesus said, “Arise, pick up your mat, and walk.” At once the man was cured, and he picked up his mat and started walking.

  Now that day happened to be the Sabbath, so the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “This is the Sabbath. You are not allowed to carry a mat.” He answered, “The man who cured me told me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ” They asked him, “Who was this man who told you to pick it up and walk?” The man who had been cured had no idea who it was, since Jesus had slipped into the crowd. Later Jesus met him in the Temple and said, “Now that you are well again, leave off sinning, lest something worse happen to you.” So then the man went back and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had cured him. It was because Jesus did such things on the Sabbath that the Jews started harassing him. His answer to them was, “My father does not stop working, and neither do I.” But that only made the Jews more intent on doing away with him, for not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he also spoke of God as his father in a way that made him equal to God.…

  [Jesus challenged
the crowd,] “Why do you want to kill me?” The crowd replied, “You’re crazy. Who wants to kill you?” He answered, “I do one work, and you are all amazed at it. Moses instructed you to practice circumcision, and you circumcise on the Sabbath. Well, if the law of Moses is not violated when you fix a penis on the Sabbath, why are you upset with me for fixing a whole body on the Sabbath? Don’t go by what looks right. Go by what is right.”

  —John 5:1–18, 7:19–24

  In the episode quoted above, Jesus heals an invalid on the Sabbath, thus violating the traditional practice by which most normal work ceased on the seventh day of the week because on that day the Lord himself had observed a day of rest after creating the world. A physician or healer might break the rule of Sabbath rest to save the life of someone mortally ill, but the invalid at Bethesda—a spot just to the northeast of the Temple—is merely handicapped. He has lived with his affliction, whatever it is, for thirty-eight years. There is no reason, then, why Jesus might not have waited a day to cure him. He has not asked to be cured. Even when Jesus offers to cure him, he does not accept the offer eagerly. He seems scarcely to understand the question. Nor is there any evident reason why Jesus should require the man, simply because he has been cured, to violate the Sabbath by carrying the burden of his sleeping mat. The man could keep the Sabbath for another few hours in the place where, it seems, he has already spent many days and then gather up his belongings and leave.

  The grounds that Jesus gives for first healing the man and then ordering him to pick up his mat and walk are that God, contrary to traditional belief, does not actually rest on every Sabbath, even though he may have rested on that first Sabbath. And if God keeps working on the Sabbath, then Jesus and anyone acting at Jesus’ behest may do so as well. Yet who but God himself can say whether or not God rests on the Sabbath? Once again, Jesus dares to announce a change in God or, as it may be in this case, the previously unknown truth about God.

  In comparing Sabbath healing, which is forbidden, to Sabbath circumcision, which is permitted, Jesus uses the traditional Jewish a fortiori style of legal reasoning against his adversaries, but this is no more than intellectual byplay. His real strategy, as we have seen before, is to shame his opponents. Whatever the technical requirements of Sabbath observance, who would not be ashamed to object when a lifelong invalid is restored to health? Who, hearing such an objection made, would not be inclined to side with the healer against the authorities? Who can believe that God would object, the God who once said:

  Say to the fearful at heart,

  “Be strong, dread not!

  Behold, your God!

  He shall come with vengeance,

  with terrible retribution.

  He shall come and save you.”

  Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened,

  and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

  Then shall the lame leap like a stag,

  and the dumb tongue sing for joy.

  (Isa. 35:4–6)

  Not every observer realizes just how much hostility this kind of provocation can arouse, but Jesus himself does. “You’re crazy,” some bystanders say when he claims to have become the object of a murder plot, but he has been anticipating the hostility that he will arouse. The hostility is, in fact, a part of his plan.

  SCANDAL SPREADS, AN ARREST ATTEMPT FAILS

  At the start of his short career, Jesus was faced repeatedly with people who thought they knew who he was. Even when they held a high opinion of him, his response was typically to suggest that he was either more than or other than what they thought he was. As his career draws near its violent close, the talk about him in Jerusalem makes it clear that he has succeeded quite decisively not just in making his identity a public question but also in making it a public occasion for the raising of other disputed questions:

  At this time some of the people of Jerusalem were saying, “Is this not the man they have been trying to kill? Here he stands, speaking openly, and they say nothing to stop him! Could it be true the authorities have concluded that he is the Messiah? But then, we all know where he comes from, and when the Messiah appears, no one will know where he comes from.” …

  They wanted to arrest him then and there, but no one could lay a hand on him because his hour had not yet come. There were a good many in the crowd, however, who believed in him; and they were saying, “When the Messiah comes, will he give more signs than this man has?” When the Pharisees and chief priests heard that talk about him was taking this turn and spreading among the people, they sent the Temple police to arrest him.

  Then Jesus said:

  For a short time I am with you still,

  but then I return to him who sent me.

  You will look for me

  but you will not find me,

  For where I AM,

  you cannot come.

  So the Jews said to one another, “Where is he going that we shall be unable to find him? Does he intend to go abroad into the diaspora and teach the Greeks?” …

  Some who had been listening said, “He must be the prophet.” Others said, “He is the Messiah.” Still others said, “Would the Messiah come from Galilee? Does not scripture say that the Messiah must be descended from David and come from Bethlehem, the town of David?” So people could not agree about him.

  Some wanted to arrest him, but no one succeeded in laying a hand on him. The police returned to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, “Why haven’t you arrested him?”

  The guards replied, “No one has ever spoken like this man.”

  “Have you too been led astray?” the Pharisees retorted. “Has any one in authority come to believe in him? Any of the Pharisees? This rabble knows nothing about the Law—damn them.”

  One of them, Nicodemus—the same man who had earlier come to Jesus—objected to them, “But does our Law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he is doing?”

  To this they answered, “Are you a Galilean too? Look into the matter, and see for yourself: Prophets do not arise in Galilee.” (John 7:25–27, 30–35, 40–52)

  Jesus is presented here as the center of a tangle of disagreements. There are authorities who want to arrest him and put him to death, but opinion even at the top is divided about him—a fact that does not escape notice below, where opinion, though more favorable, is also divided. Is he the Messiah? The question stirs up conflicting expectations about the Messiah. Some think that when the Messiah comes, no one will know his origin; others think that he must be identifiable not just as a descendant of David but also as a resident of Bethlehem, David’s ancestral village.

  And then there is the matter of signs. Some, who evidently expect the Messiah to prove his claim to that role by working miracles, are impressed by Jesus’ miracles. But others think that if Jesus is a miracle worker, then this proves that he is, in fact, not the Messiah, the Son of David, but rather “the Prophet,” the second Moses whom Moses had promised would someday come. David was not a miracle worker, but Moses was, and his miraculous powers were granted him precisely in order to prove to the Israelites that his was the voice of God and must be heeded:

  “But what if they will not believe me or attend to my words [Moses said to the Lord] and say to me, ‘The Lord has not appeared to you’?”

  The Lord then said, “What is that in your hand?”

  “A staff,” he said.

  “Throw it down on the ground,” the Lord said.

  Moses threw it down on the ground. The staff turned into a snake, and Moses recoiled from it.

  The Lord then said to Moses, “Reach out your hand, and grasp it by the tail.”

  He reached out his hand, grasped it, and it turned back into a staff in his hand.

  “Thus shall they come to believe that the Lord, the God of their forebears, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.” (Exod. 4:1–5)

  If Jesus had offered many signs, then perhaps the proper inference should be: “He mus
t be the Prophet!”

  Jesus’ own comment addresses neither the claims made for him nor the doubts raised about him. Brief as his words are, they allude both to an identity that transcends even the boldest claims made about him and to a destiny that will be accomplished sooner than they guess. The statement “Where I AM, you cannot come” is audibly askew. Logically, it should read “Where I go, you cannot come.” But I AM is the name of God. When Jesus speaks of where he is going (as in “I return to him who sent me”), he is speaking—less blatantly at this point than he will a bit later—of who he is. But with the irony that grows ever more intense as the Gospel of John nears its conclusion, he is also speaking of his own death, which few if any in the crowd realize is only “a short time” away.

  This second meaning, this progressive revelation of an identity, conceals something of a third meaning. Though the ultimate meaning of Jesus’ execution will be inseparable from his identity, the proximate reason for it is the wisdom of his preaching, a wisdom that the world cannot comprehend. In Proverbs 1:24–28, God speaks as Wisdom personified, a feminine voice, the anima to God’s usual male animus:

  Because I have called and you would not listen,

  have stretched out my hand and no one cared,

  Because you have ignored all my advice

  and rejected my correction,

  I will laugh at your calamity

  and mock when panic grips you,

  When panic rakes you like a storm

  and your downfall descends like a whirlwind,

  when distress and anguish come upon you.

  Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer.

  They will look for me, but they will not find me.

  Jesus is not referring only to the fact that, after his death, people will look for him and not find him. He is also referring to the coming destruction of Jerusalem and to the fact that, on that dread occasion too, people will look for God to rescue them and will not find him. Jerusalem will be abandoned in her hour of need just as Jesus will be in his.