Christ

by Jack Miles

  4. “Take heart, I have conquered the world”

  I have told you these things while still with you,

  but the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit,

  whom the Father will send in my name—

  he will teach you everything and remind you of all I have told you.

  Peace I leave with you,

  my own peace I give to you.

  A peace that the world cannot give.

  This is my gift to you.…

  If the world hates you,

  know that it hated me before it hated you.…

  Remember what I told you:

  A servant is not greater than his master.

  If they persecuted me,

  they will persecute you too.…

  His disciples said, “Now you are speaking plainly and not in figures of speech. We realize now that you anticipate everything and do not need the questions first; because of this, we believe that you have come from God.”

  Jesus answered them:

  You believe for the moment.

  But wait: a time will come—indeed it has come already—

  when you will be scattered, each going his own way

  and leaving me alone.…

  In the world you will face persecution,

  but take heart,

  I have conquered the world.

  After saying this, Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said:

  Father, the hour has come!

  Glorify your Son that your Son may glorify you!

  You have given him power over all mankind

  so that he may win eternal life for all those you have entrusted to him. |

  I will not speak with you much longer

  because the Prince of This World approaches.

  He has no power over me,

  but the world must recognize that I love the Father

  and that I do just as the Father has commanded.

  Come now, let us be on our way.

  (John 14:25–27; 15:18, 20; 16:29–17:2 |

  14:30–31; italics added)

  When the children of Israel, oppressed in Egypt, cried out to the Lord to rescue them, the Lord did not reply: “A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too.” The Lord could not give such a reply. Who had ever persecuted him? Nor could he say: “Take heart, I have conquered the world.” When had the world not been his? Unless and until opposed, as in Egypt he was opposed for the first time, the Lord had nothing to conquer and therefore no call to become a warrior. From this night on, however, the Lord will always be able to decline when his people cry to him for warlike assistance. This is the context that must be recalled to give full meaning to what Jesus said on his last appearance in the Temple:

  Now my soul is troubled.

  What shall I say:

  “Father, save me from this hour”?

  No, for this is the very reason why I have come to this hour.

  Father, glorify your name!

  (John 12:27–28)

  God has “come to this hour,” placing himself in this condition, despite its enormous cost to him, so that he may be able to answer the prayers of the persecuted in the future as he has not been able to answer them in the past—namely, by saying, “If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you.”

  To a very considerable extent, this is how prayer has come to be understood in the West. It has remained possible, of course, to offer prayer for the success of one’s nation on the battlefield. Such prayers were offered with great public solemnity in the West at least as late as World War I. But private and even public prayer has become, far more frequently, prayer for something like the secret assistance of a Paraclete, prayer that the Lord, if he cannot eliminate the persecution or other affliction, may through his Spirit provide the strength to bear it. This spiritualization of hope in the Lord would have been rejected as purely and simply an impoverishment of hope unless the Lord had been able somehow to provide a rationale for it and unless he had been able to endow himself with a new moral authority in proposing it. The new rationale is victory over Satan, leading in the end to the possession of eternal life. The new moral authority is his own persecution, suffering, and death: If hope must now give way to courage, God has first demanded this courage of himself.

  As we recalled when considering the murder of John the Baptist, the Book of Psalms, the prayerbook of Israel, presents persecution—typically the Psalmist’s private experience of prejudice and injustice—as that to which the Lord, if he is the God the Psalmist believes him to be, must respond. In a few of the greatest Psalms, private sorrow is replaced by national tragedy, and the Lord is approached in a mood of hope deeply scarred by grief. How can the Lord fail to respond when the cause is so just?

  This is precisely—but precisely—the question that must be answered. How indeed can the Lord fail? The Lord needs a way to fail—without ceasing altogether to be the Lord. The way he settles on—his new Passover, to which the whole world is invited—is the passion, death, and resurrection of his incarnate self. Henceforth, no unrighted wrong, no un-vindicated innocence, will be so great that this sacred drama cannot accommodate it. Human hope and divine honor will have been redeemed together at a single transcendent stroke.

  HE IS ARRESTED, TRIED, SCOURGED, AND SENTENCED

  In a posthumously published lecture, Jorge Luis Borges says that the world’s greatest stories—for him, these are The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Gospel—invite endless retelling. Yet, “in the case of the Gospel,” he says, “there is a difference: The story of Jesus Christ, I think, cannot be told better.” Borges does not imply that the Gospel story should not be retold. He knows that it has been retold as endlessly as The Iliad and The Odyssey, and he expects that it will continue to be retold. But he is surely right that the Gospel, for anyone who feels invited to retell it, does seem quickly to retract its own invitation, to defy or defeat what it first provoked. The writer who attempts the retelling immediately senses this.

  In no part of the Gospel is this sense of mysterious finality more palpable than in the narration that begins with Jesus’ arrest and ends with his death, and in none of the accounts more so than in the last. Through the length of the Gospel of John before the arrest, a brief narration is typically followed by long, rhetorically flamboyant interpretation. John’s account of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, for example, is ten verses long, while his account of the “bread of life” discourse that follows the miracle is forty-four verses long. But from the arrest on, Jesus says very little and then only in the shortest of sentences. Jesus has just said, “I will not speak with you much longer” (John 14:30), and he keeps his word.

  He has by this point explained so much to his disciples that he has little to add. As for his opponents, he has no further desire for the verbal jousts with them that have loomed so large earlier in the Gospel. When Judas Iscariot left the supper chamber to betray him, Jesus said, “What you are about to do, do quickly” (13:27). A certain deliberate speed marks the narration of John 18–19. What Jesus says may be bold, but it is always terse as well. He does nothing to slow his own progress toward the end, and at three key moments seems to accelerate it. The Last Supper ends with Jesus’ lengthy prayer to his Father for his disciples, and the mood thereafter is such that the action seems not a climax but only a denouement, as if Jesus himself is psychologically in the company of his Father rather than of the human beings whom he is required to address. That the Son and the Father are identical gives Jesus’ prayers a peculiarly contemporary cast inasmuch as he is praying to himself or bringing himself to a focused presence to himself. Can God pray? To whom would God address a prayer? The Gospel answer to that question is: God prays as a son would pray, addressing a father whom he knows to be himself. In the Gospel of John, Jesus seems to place himself in this state just before his arrest and, in effect, never leaves it again. This mood makes those moments, from that point on, when others address him or he is required to
address them seem like interruptions or self-interruptions.

  The first of the moments when Jesus seems to hasten the action comes in the garden, when an arrest party including Temple guards and a Roman cohort arrives “all with lanterns and torches and weapons” (18:3). Jesus does not wait to be singled out but comes forward and asks whom they seek. When they say, “Jesus of Nazareth,” he answers, “I AM,” speaking aloud the sacred name of the Lord, and they tumble backward, falling to the ground (18:4–6). Then Jesus says, less portentously, “I am the one you are looking for; let these others go” (18:8), and they apparently do so.

  Jesus is then bound and taken to the palace of a former high priest, Annas, who attempts to engage him in conversation about his disciples and his teaching, but Jesus declines to be engaged: “I have always taught in synagogues or in the Temple, where all the Jews gather. I have said nothing in secret. Why ask me? Ask my hearers about my teaching. They know what I said” (18:20–21). A guard slaps Jesus for so affronting a senior priest, but the interview is over. Jesus is taken, still bound, to the palace of Annas’s son-in-law, the incumbent high priest Caiaphas, who had earlier called for his death, and then is led, after daybreak, to the Praetorium, the law court of the Roman governor. No charge has yet been brought against him.

  When Pilate asks what the charge is, Jesus’ Jewish captors respond, “If he were not a criminal, we would not have turned him over to you,” to which Pilate replies, “Take charge of him yourselves, and try him in accordance with your own law” (18:30–31). But they object that Rome has forbidden them to impose capital punishment. Pilate then has Jesus taken into Roman custody, inside the Praetorium, and brought before him for interrogation. “Are you the King of the Jews?” he asks. Jesus, guessing (or knowing) that this is the charge that has been privately brought against him, asks, more like a lawyer than like the accused, “Do you ask that question of your own accord, or have others suggested it to you about me?” Pilate, irritated, retorts: “Am I a Jew? It is your own nation and the chief priests who have turned you over to me. What have you done?” (18:33–35).

  The question of what God will do about Roman oppression of the Jews has been the unspoken background subject of the entire Gospel. As the Gospel of John comes to its climax, that subject moves dramatically to the foreground. The most momentous question in the history of Israel is called with maximum starkness. This is truly “the hour” of which Jesus has spoken. The divine warrior of the Exodus must now either deploy or renounce his fabled powers. Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate at this second Passover is the equivalent of a face-to-face confrontation between Yahweh and Pharaoh at the first Passover. This time, of course, it is Yahweh who is in bondage, but will he break his bonds?

  If he does break them, on whose behalf will he act? The question arises because at this Passover the Lord’s enemy is not just foreign but also Israelite. Jesus is in peril not just from Romans but also from Jewish collaborators with Rome. The charge on which the Jews have had Jesus arrested is treason against Rome, but for a Jew to bring such a charge against another Jew, any Jew, is to collaborate with Rome. Such Jewish collaborators are the Jews whom John, at times, seems most pointedly to have in mind when he speaks of “the” Jews. Officially pious, “the Jews” in this sense are manipulators of the Roman system, insiders with well-tended Roman connections, the kind of Jew, in sum, whom pious Jewry conventionally loathed. The conversation continues: “Jesus replied, ‘My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my followers would be fighting to prevent my being turned over to the Jews. As it is, my kingdom is elsewhere.’ Pilate said, ‘So, then, you are a king.’ Jesus replied, ‘It is you who say that I am a king’ ” (18:36–37). Jesus dissociates God from the overthrow of Rome on the one hand, and from corrupt Jewish accommodation to Rome on the other. Later, at the time of the Jewish rebellions against Rome, there will be those who maintain that a Jew who is not a “zealot,” that is, a rebel, is a collaborator. And it will not be immediately clear—God himself has left it unclear for centuries—that any middle ground exists. But Jesus intends to open such a middle ground for the Jews and for their God alike. His confrontation with Pilate marks the birth of the Western tradition of nonviolent resistance. By winning for God the right to fail at war, Jesus wins for him simultaneously the right to succeed at peace. In other words, he creates a nonmilitary profile of political success.

  That Jesus’ otherworldly definition of kingship makes a mockery of the Lord’s usual kingship claims is a charge built into the story. As the day of his death wears on, while Jesus is condemned before Pilate by “the Jews” for claiming to be the Son of God, he is mocked in private by the Roman soldiers for claiming to be some sort of king. Pilate has had Jesus scourged, normally a prelude to crucifixion. After the scourging, the soldiers—the same, presumably, who have been guarding him all day and so have overheard his conversation with Pilate—twist thorns into a crown, put the crown on his head, dress him in a purple robe, and cry, “Hail, King of the Jews!” as they slap him around (19:1–3).

  Jesus’ new notion of kingship does make a mockery of the old notion. Unless this potentially grotesque aspect of his revision is grasped, its full cost cannot be appreciated. The execution of John the Baptist was turned into a hideous Roman entertainment, and now something similar is happening to Jesus. When violent resistance to evil is renounced, there is no guarantee that dignity or decorum will be retained. Mockery is a particularly pointed inclusion in this account because the linkage between laughter and vindication is so frequent in the Old Testament. Psalm 37:12–13 is one of a very large number of passages that could be cited in this connection:

  The wicked plots against the righteous,

  and grinds his teeth at him;

  but the Lord laughs at the wicked,

  for he sees that his day will come.

  When (as often enough happens) the wicked laugh at the righteous, the righteous complain to the Lord, confident that he will put the laughter back in the right mouth. This complaint is the most conventional of poetic tropes. But now God himself is being laughed at, and God’s people, as he has told them just a few hours earlier, should expect to endure no less than he is enduring. Henceforth, when they find themselves laughed at, they can no longer call on God to save them from the cruelty of ridicule. If God has not spared himself ridicule, his people cannot expect that he will spare them. The psalmbook has to be read in a new way. The servant, as he has reminded them, is not greater than the master.

  “Where are you from?” Pilate asks when the bloodied Jesus is again brought before him. The question could not be more open-ended or multilevel. If Jesus had wished to delay his own demise, he would not, even in this condition, have been at a loss for rhetorically expansive responses. However, at this second of the moments when he hastens rather than slows the action, Jesus declines to respond, as he earlier declined to respond to Annas.

  Pilate then said to him, “Do you decline to speak to me? Do you not realize that I have the power to release you or to crucify you?”

  Jesus replied, “You would have no power over me at all if it had not been given you from above. That is why the one who turned me over to you has committed the greater sin.” (19:10–11)

  Pilate does not rule by the power of God, whatever the phrase “from above” might seem to suggest, but by the power of Satan, the Prince of This World. Pilate would not have Jesus in his custody were it not for Judas’s surrender to Satan. Pilate’s words recall Satan’s words in the desert about the power that “has been handed over to me, for me to give to whom I choose” (Luke 4:6). Jesus’ reply to Satan on that occasion, quoting Moses, was “You must worship the Lord your God; him alone must you serve” (Luke 4:8). Power does come ultimately from the Lord, but Jesus did not then deny that Satan had for the time being the power he claimed to have, any more than he denies now that Pilate has the power that he claims to have. Yet Pilate is disturbed:

  From that moment Pilate sought to rele
ase him, but the Jews shouted, “If you release him, you are no friend of Caesar’s. Anyone who claims to be a king is Caesar’s enemy.”

  Hearing these words, Pilate brought Jesus out and seated him on the chair of judgment at a place called the Pavement (in Hebrew, Gabbatha). It was about noon on the Day of Preparation. “Here is your king,” said Pilate to the Jews.

  But they shouted, “Away with him, away with him! Crucify him!”

  Pilate said, “Shall I crucify your king?”

  The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.”

  At that Pilate handed him over to be crucified. (John 19:12–16)

  If the Israelites had said to the Lord on the eve of the first Passover, “We have no king but Pharaoh,” would the Lord have freed them from bondage anyway? Jesus’ kingdom “not of this world” may be a sorry joke for his detractors, but they turn themselves into a grotesque caricature of political sagacity when their defense of the nation—recall that it was for the good of the nation that, according to Caiaphas, Jesus had to be put to death—requires them to declare, “We have no king but Caesar.”

  The “Day of Preparation” that John mentions in an aside is the day of preparation for Passover. According to tradition, it was at the sixth hour on that day, or about noon, that the slaughter of the lambs to be consumed on the following day began. Jesus, the Lamb of God, is handed over to be crucified at the same hour of the day when the Passover lambs are being handed over to the butchers.