by Jack Miles
Asked to offer grounds for divorce, Jesus instead, quoting Genesis in the words italicized above, offers the deep and original ground for marriage and challenges his questioners to respect it. He faults them for the hard-heartedness—and such it surely was in that era—that would turn a respectable married woman into a social outcast with no means of support but prostitution or servitude. The Old Testament, significantly, often calls for kindness to the widow but never once for kindness to the divorcée. Whatever the divorcée suffered, so the implicit message ran, she deserved it. Jesus, whatever social critique may be implied, unmistakably claims the right not merely to interpret but to revise the Law of Moses and to do so by invoking the revised intentions of the Creator as if he were the Creator himself. By invoking the Garden of Eden against Mount Sinai, Jesus alludes, as in his conversation with Nicodemus, to the coming of a new creation: a return to Eden or, indeed, an improved Eden. The curse of sexuality as we know it is to be lifted no less than the curse of mortality. Outside the Garden, the provision Mosaic law makes for divorce may be reasonable, but God is not going to bar mankind from the Garden forever.
Jesus has now spoken on his own authority, as God Incarnate, for mercy and against cruelty; but then he goes on to do something even more astonishing. Having rescued a fallen woman from sure death, he speaks, astonishingly but revealingly, as if he himself has become a defendant and is seeking witnesses in his defense. The Lord God is indeed a defendant, and he knows of what he can be accused, but his way of asking for mercy is to extend mercy.
When Jesus spoke to the people again, he said:
… You judge by human standards;
I judge no one.
Yet if I do judge, my judgment will be true.
For I am not alone:
He who sent me is with me.
In your law it is written
that the testimony of two witnesses is reliable.
I testify on my own behalf,
but the Father who sent me testifies on my behalf as well.
They asked him, “Where is your Father, then?”
Jesus answered:
You know neither me nor my Father.
If you knew me,
you would know my Father as well.
He spoke these words while teaching near the Temple treasury. No one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come. (John 8:12, 15–20)
John adds the comment “No one arrested him” because once again Jesus is claiming equality with God, and it is just this that has previously led to arrest attempts. In one sentence, Jesus says that his Father and he are two witnesses. In the next, he says that to know him is to know his Father. Coming after the sparing of the adulteress, these words have the effect of underscoring the fact that it is God himself who has spared her and therefore God himself whose attitudes on this and related matters must be changing. The meaning of his line “I judge no one” is “I condemn no one,” a meaning that may become clearer if we recall the famous line (Matt. 7:1) “Judge not, that you be not judged.” The God of Israel made his reputation as a judge who would by no means ever say, “I condemn no one,” but God is changing before our eyes. Having turned the tables on the husband in two instances of marital casuistry, God the Husband now turns the tables on himself. In his relationship with Israel, not all the wrong, not all the excess, has necessarily been on her side. Even if God’s sins are largely of omission, even if they consist in a failure to rescue his abused wife, and even if the worst omissions lie in the future, they are sufficient in the aggregate to direct attention, his own attention, away from her to himself. In a word, confronting his sinful but suffering people, God may be not just merciful but also penitent.
“IS HE GOING TO KILL HIMSELF?”
If God neither condemns evil nor resists it, it would seem to follow that he can neither rescue others nor protect himself. The lordly equanimity alluded to earlier has about it a quality that in a Greek tragedy would be called fatalistic. But fate is not an actor in this tragedy; or if that role exists at all, then God himself is playing it. Though the God of Israel cannot be said to have had everything under his control at every moment, it certainly cannot be said that any other power has exerted a control more pervasive or complete than his. Satan, despite the extent to which his influence has grown, cannot be said to have overtaken God. More important, there is no impersonal force to which both God and Satan are both subject—no karma, no ineluctable destiny. If Jesus seems doomed, it can only be because God has doomed himself.
But what word do we use of someone who dooms himself? In the Gospel of John, some of Jesus’ contemporaries ask aloud if he intends to kill himself. The word suicide has not yet been coined, but in the language of our day this is indeed what they ask about. And as so often with popular interpretations of Jesus in that Gospel, they are both wrong and right to ask.
Again he said to them:
I am going away; you will look for me,
but you will die in your sin.
Where I am going, you cannot come.
At this the Jews said among themselves, “Is he going to kill himself, that he says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?” (John 8:21–22)
The brief answer Jesus gives on the spot becomes a more searching explanation a bit later when he says:
I am the good shepherd.
The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.
A hired hand, when he sees a wolf coming,
abandons the sheep,
since he is not the shepherd
and the sheep are not his.
He runs away,
and the wolf attacks and scatters the sheep.
He runs away because he is only a hired hand
and does not care about the sheep.
I am the good shepherd.
I know mine and mine know me,
just as the Father knows me
and I know the Father.
I lay down my life for my sheep.
And I have other sheep
that are not of this fold,
and I must lead them too.
They too must hear my voice,
and there will be one flock, one shepherd.
The Father loves me
because I lay down my life
in order to take it up again.
No one is taking it from me.
I lay it down of my own accord.
I have the power to lay it down,
and I have the power to take it up again.
This is the commission that I have received from the Father.
These words caused renewed division among the Jews. Many said, “He is possessed! He is out of his mind! Why do you listen to him?” Others said, “This is not the voice of demonic possession. Could a devil open the eyes of the blind?” (John 10:11–21)
So, then, those listening to Jesus are correct to a point in their suspicion that he intends to kill himself, but he understands his death to be, somehow, for their sake. He may not die by his own hand, but his own death will nonetheless be of his own doing:
No one is taking [my life] from me.
I lay it down of my own accord.
True, when God Incarnate does such a thing, there is a difference. Though any man might choose to lose his life, only God can “take up again” a life once lost. Only he can employ death, his own death, to make a point and survive to see the point made. But even if a resurrection is to follow, why should God inflict human dying upon himself in the first place?
As we noted when discussing the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the shepherd in Israelite tradition was a figure of heroism and valor. The king of a nation was like the shepherd of a flock not in nurture alone but also, and perhaps most important, in physical courage. It was his task to fight off hostile foreigners as a shepherd fought off wolves. In the Twenty-third Psalm, which opens “The Lord is my shepherd,” the most important verse is the fifth (italics added): “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.” The wolves are out
there, but the divine shepherd has the strength to keep them at bay. The claim that Michelangelo’s muscular David portrays the Israelite hero as a Greek god, though true enough at the level of art history, does not make the work untrue to the Bible once one recalls that Israel’s God was a shepherd understood to have muscle enough to kill when the occasion required. The earliest Christian image of Christ, that of a youthful, beardless shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders, is emotionally akin to the image of an infantryman holding a lost child in time of war. But that image, as inherited equally from Israel, was also an image of God himself. This is what God at his best was like: young, fearless, tender, and heroic.
Recalling this, we should expect God Incarnate, when speaking of the good shepherd, to say not what he says in the passage quoted above but, rather, something like this:
A hired hand, when he sees a wolf coming,
Abandons the sheep and runs away.
I am the good shepherd.
When I see a wolf coming to attack my sheep,
I kill the wolf.
How are sheep served by a dead shepherd? Such a consideration, naive and literal-minded as it may seem, might well prompt those listening to Jesus to suppose that, suicidal or not, the man is deranged. The thought that would make sense of Jesus’ words—the only thought that can make sense of them—is that of divine self-martyrdom, but this is a thought too shocking to consider.
The Greek word martys, from which the word martyr is derived, means “witness.” The martyr who suffers and dies for his faith witnesses before his fellow men to the depth of his devotion to God. But when God suffers and dies, to whom does he testify? And can he thus demonstrate his devotion to his human creatures? Why not do so by rescuing them instead of punishing himself? A martyr proves, after all, not just his devotion but also his trust that the divine power for which he dies will ultimately prevail. What is to be made of a martyrdom in which divinity seems to demonstrate only its weakness?
Jesus forces this very question by first defining himself as shepherd and then announcing that, rather than protect his sheep from the Roman wolf, he will let the wolf kill him, their shepherd. As a demonstration for the benefit of Israel and of the “other sheep / That are not of this fold,” this martyrdom cannot fail to suggest with the utmost vividness that God will not save his people even from annihilation at the hands of the Roman oppressor.
Notably, however, even when speaking of his own impending defeat, Jesus does not speak of the Romans. He speaks instead, at the most crucial moments, of Satan; in so doing, he identifies his enemy not as Rome or some other earthly power, least of all Israel, but as death itself. This shift could not be more important than it is for the revision of God’s identity. When Jesus dies, death wins, and the Devil wins for the moment; but when Jesus rises from the dead, life wins, and the Devil loses for all time. By rising from the dead, God Incarnate will surely not defeat Rome, but he just as surely will defeat death. He will win a victory of a new sort, over a newly identified enemy, and in the process he will redefine the traditional covenant terms of victory and defeat. Victory under the traditional covenant was victory over the likes of the pharaoh of Egypt. Were God to win such a victory in Jesus’ time, it would be a victory over the Caesar of Rome. But what did victory over Egypt matter in the end when the victors—those Israelites who looked on while the pursuing Egyptian army drowned—eventually died anyway? By the same token, what would victory over Rome matter, supposing that God could win such a victory? Well, then, if victory over any given nation does not matter, then neither does defeat by any given nation. The battle moves to a new battlefield where God, by rising from the dead, will lay claim to a new kind of invincibility:
No one is taking [my life] from me.
I lay it down of my own accord.
I have the power to lay it down,
and I have the power to take it up again.
This is his new boast, replacing “I am the god who brought you out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm.”
That this is how God resolves the crisis in his own life will not become fully evident in the New Testament until after Jesus has risen from the dead—more accurately, until after his disciples have realized what his resurrection means for them. His crossing from death to life will function henceforth as the crossing of the Red Sea did when he was still a god out to win conventional battlefield victories. His own resurrection will be the miracle that establishes his credibility and defines his identity. But this revision of God’s identity entails, scandalously, that before his victory God should first suffer a physical horror equivalent to the horror that impends for his chosen people. He must allow Roman soldiers to do to him what Roman soldiers will soon do to his covenant partner. So it is that in speaking of himself as a shepherd, Jesus inverts the traditional biblical image in a way that allows him to reveal the shocking truth only to those few who may be ready to hear it while concealing it from those who are not ready. When God quits the battlefield, God’s people are left defenseless. If this is not to be seen simply as abandonment and betrayal, he must show, first, that he himself is willing to pay the price this change will exact of them and, second, that this defeat presages another kind of victory.
Martyrdom, as we saw in discussing that of the seven Maccabee brothers (pp. 128–29), had begun to be celebrated in Israel during the last pre-Christian centuries, but it was never God who was martyred. A demonstration of self-annihilating courage that could be edifying in God’s saints would be unthinkable in God himself. Accordingly, the more nearly godlike the claims Jesus makes for himself, the more unacceptable, a priori, becomes the suggestion that he is about to die by self-martyrdom. The rhetorical question “Will he kill himself?”—to which the effective answer is yes—belongs, for those who ask it, with the opinions “He is possessed, he is raving.” Suicide, madness, demonic possession—all these are forms of dismissal. If any of these charges is true, then Jesus’ larger claims are false. Those who make these charges do so as if to excuse themselves from listening further, but their own dismissals do not quite work, for “Could a devil open the eyes of the blind?”
INTERLUDE: THE SUICIDE OF GOD INCARNATE IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
The interpretation of the New Testament offered in this book is literary rather than historical or theological. It is literary, however, without indifference to history or prejudice against theology. And in that connection, it is worth recalling that the concept of the suicide of God has a history stretching back to the very first Christian theologians. Its presence in the Gospel of John, the Letter to the Philippians, and the Letter to the Hebrews might in itself be sufficient to establish its antiquity, but these canonical works are, in fact, just the beginning. In a Greco-Roman world whose habitual ideas about suicide were so far from our own, the suicide of Christ was, in effect, more nearly a boast than a scandal.
Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat makes this point in the opening paragraph of Le Suicide du Christ, his intellectually probing historical survey of the use of the idea in Christian thought:
The theme of these pages is born of a double astonishment: that the notion of a Christ who would commit suicide should have been born so early, as early in fact as the Gospel of John; and that this notion should owe virtually nothing to the anti-Christian polemic of the first centuries. The idea of the suicide of Christ will have been, before all else, a Christian if not indeed a Christological idea.
Early Christianity knew a quasi-anatomical, virtually suicidal interpretation, Dauzat reports, of the Gospel verse in which Jesus “said ‘It is fulfilled’ and, bowing his head, gave up his spirit” (John 19:30):
Christ first bows his head, then dies, when ordinarily it is the opposite order that should obtain. The bowing of the head is normally a consequence of death. Up to the moment of death, Jesus remains the subject of an active verb: “Bowing his head” (Greek, klinas ten kephalen), he gives up his spirit. Otherwise put, Jesus voluntarily gives up his spirit because, as Origen [185–254
C.E.] would later say, it was inconceivable that God should be at the mercy of the flesh as any ordinary mortal would be.
Origen’s contemporary Tertullian spoke in a similar vein, stressing the fact that Jesus died on the cross with such abnormal rapidity that he could only be understood to have died as and when he chose.
Of even greater importance, perhaps, than the voices of these early Christian witnesses is the silence of Celsus, a scathing second-century critic who missed no opportunity to mock Christianity. (“A religion for worms,” he called it, inasmuch as its adherents claimed to draw eternal life from a corpse.) Celsus evidently saw nothing to be gained in disparaging Jesus as a suicide: The associations of suicide in his day were so positive that such disparagement could all too easily seem praise. Anti-Christian polemicists like Celsus were far more likely to mock Jesus for fearing death than for embracing it with suspect eagerness. Jesus’ bloody sweat on the eve of his execution and his prayer “Abba, Father! For you everything is possible. Take this cup away from me” (Mark 14:36) were, in pagan eyes, grotesquely unbecoming a hero, much less a god. Cowardice was a disgrace. Suicide could be a proof of courage.
Suicide could also be an expression of sheer devotion, as can be seen in a remarkable passage in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians:
Life to me, you see, is Christ, but in that case death would be a positive gain. But on the other hand, if to be alive in the body gives me an opportunity for fruitful work, I do not know which I should choose. I am caught in this dilemma: I want to be off with Christ, and this is by far the stronger desire—and yet for your sake to stay alive in this body is a more urgent need. (NJB; Phil. 1:21–24 with modifications, italics added)
Like Socrates, Paul believed that a heedless or irresponsible suicide was wrong, but that a moral, fully pondered suicide was conceivable. One could not take one’s life in disregard of God’s wishes, but God might well acquiesce in or even actively approve of such an action, just as he might acquiesce in or actively approve of martyrdom. The theoretical similarities, during this period, among Platonism, Judaism, and Christianity are greater than their differences, though there was wider divergence in practice.