Christ
Page 31
When they drew near to the village to which they were going, he made as if to go on; but they pressed him to stay with them saying, “It is nearly evening, and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. Now while he was with them at table, he took the bread and said the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; but he had vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?” (REB; Luke 24:13–32)
The Jesus who appears to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus may fairly be compared to the angel Gabriel appearing to the sage Daniel. What the angel performs for Daniel is not a miracle but an exegesis, and exegesis is also what Jesus offers the two disciples on the road. And just as Daniel will do for others as Gabriel has done for him, so also will the two disciples do for others as Jesus has done for them. Philip will do for the Ethiopian eunuch what Jesus does for these downcast disciples. They had been hoping for someone “to set Israel free” and had wanted to believe that Jesus would be the one. What he shows them is that God has not disappointed them (or himself) after all but has devised a new way to set Israel free. Jesus was the one, and is the one, if they can but understand their own scriptures aright. Creative exegesis was nothing new in Judaism. Christianity began—and is seen beginning at this moment—as just another school of Jewish exegesis, reading the received texts in a new direction but with a familiar intensity. When he breaks the bread, beginning the commemorative ritual that is itself an exercise in exegesis, they recognize him, and he immediately vanishes: The completion of the ritual is theirs to accomplish.
The two of them immediately head back to Jerusalem and, arriving presumably after dark, find the eleven apostles and their companions assembled and with a piece of exciting news: The Lord has appeared to Peter. They proceed to tell their own story, and just as they finish it, Jesus appears and greets the group with the words “Peace be with you.”
And after saying this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy at seeing the Lord, and he said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so am I sending you.” After saying this he breathed on them and said:
Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive anyone’s sins,
they are forgiven;
if you retain anyone’s sins,
they are retained.
Thomas, called the Twin, who was one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord,” but he answered, “Unless I can see the holes that the nails made in his hands and can put my finger into the holes they made, and unless I can put my hand into his side, I refuse to believe.” Eight days later the disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them. The doors were closed, but Jesus came in and stood among them. “Peace be with you,” he said. Then he spoke to Thomas, “Put your finger here; look, here are my hands. Give me your hand; put it into my side. Do not be unbelieving any more but believe.” Thomas replied, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him:
You believe because you can see me.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.
(NJB; John 20:20–29)
Jesus has kept the promise he made at the Last Supper. He has returned to breathe his own spirit, the Paraclete, into his apostles. Henceforth, when they speak, it will be his breath that issues from their lips. When they act, it will be he who acts through them. In all they do, they will do as he has done and be as he has been. The apostles who receive his spirit have been born again from skepticism to belief, as fully as the dry bones in Ezekiel’s valley. Though they have all been calling him “Lord,” Thomas brings the Gospel of John to a culminating pitch of awestruck recognition by addressing him as “My Lord and my God!”
Jesus remains among them for forty days more. Then, at the last possible instant, there comes a jolt of something approaching levity: “Now it happened that they had come together, and they asked him, ‘Lord, will you now restore sovereignty to Israel?’ ” (Acts 1:6). Who is it, one wonders, who at this late hour asks the Lord whether he is about to restore sovereignty to Israel? Is it perhaps Jude, who asked him at the Last Supper, “Lord, what has happened that you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?” (John 14:22). Jude, who would be honored centuries later as the patron saint of lost causes and impossible cases, stopped just short on that earlier occasion of beginning his question “Lord, what has gone wrong that you …?”
Many a teacher has had the experience, perhaps on the very last day of class before the examination, perhaps while conducting a routine review of the material covered, of hearing a student ask a question so dumbfoundingly elementary, so heartbreakingly basic, that the teacher concludes that nothing, truly nothing, has been effectively conveyed. Of all the writers in the New Testament, Luke (the author of the Acts of the Apostles) is the one who just conceivably might have timed the placement of a final note of incomprehension to produce a rueful smile in the reader. But experienced teachers also know that the student who asks the stupid question often miraculously focuses many months of learning for the entire class and forces the teacher himself to come at last to the point. The question “Will you now restore sovereignty to Israel?” is the defining question of the Gospels, as it was the besetting question for Israel under a Roman occupation that had led, around the time Jesus was born, to an uprising put down only after two thousand crucifixions. The answer to the question is “No”—if not no in principle, then at least no in practice; if not no forever, then at least no for the duration of an indefinitely long postponement. But, as we have seen, rather than simply answer the old question, the Lord—for good reason, though at supreme cost to himself—has preferred to change it.
When the old question is posed one last time, Jesus, with nothing further to gain or lose, replies gently:
“It is not for you to know times or dates that the Father has determined by his own authority, but you are going to receive power as the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the farthest ends of the earth. | Go then and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of time.” | As he said this, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. They were still staring into the sky when suddenly two men in white were standing beside them, who said: “Why do you Galileans stand here looking into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken from you up into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him go up.” (Acts 1:7–8, Matt. 28:19–20, Acts 1:9–11)
Jesus is floating up to heaven, and they still don’t get it.
But then they do. They return to the Temple and, against every expectation aroused by their conduct after Jesus’ arrest, they begin preaching and arguing his cause just as boldly as he did while with them. The disciples—through their spiritual offspring, of whom the most notable will be Paul of Tarsus—do become his witnesses to the farthest ends of the earth. Jesus does not return, but the time of his return begins to be counted among those times and dates that “it is not for you to know.”
If such is the continuation of their story, many of them eventually dying as martyrs, the continuation of his story is in heaven. The Book of Revelation, by the visionary John of Patmos, follows the Lamb of God to heaven. Early in his vision, as John weeps in fear of what may lie ahead for the church on earth, a heavenly elder tells him: “Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, and he will open the scroll [of the future] and its seven seals” (Rev. 5:5). The Lion of Judah (Gen. 49:9) turns out to be the Lamb of God, but the scroll of the future, terrifying as its contents prove to be, belongs to this Lamb. John is to take heart: Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the
Lamb has conquered the world.
Before the Lamb opens the seals of the scroll and a horrendous vision unrolls of the time between now and the second coming of Christ, a rite of cosmic triumph is performed in language for which the “Hallelujah Chorus” of Handel’s Messiah has become the unofficial score. As the Lamb comes forward to open the scroll,
I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands;
Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.
And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. (KJV; Rev. 5:11–13)
Irony is the last word that the “Hallelujah Chorus” brings to mind, and yet the enthronement of the Lamb is a supremely ironic outcome. This is not how God’s work in the world was supposed to culminate, and yet, ironically, this is just what was predicted. This is not the glorious victory that the Lord promised to Judah, and yet, ironically, it meets every criterion for that victory. The Bible is a divine comedy in both the high and the low sense of the word comedy. The enthronement of the Lamb is truly both sublime and ridiculous. Yield to it in just the right way, with just the right music playing, and you will be swept away. Catch it at a slightly crooked angle, with the sound system off, and you will laugh out loud.
The scene as “every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea” gathers round to applaud the enthroned Lamb invites the skills of the Walt Disney studio, if taken as low comedy; but if taken as the highest of high comedy, then the scene is the fulfillment of the Lord’s celebrated promise through Isaiah:
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall feed;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.…
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
(RSV; Isa. 11:6–7, 9)
“The lion shall eat straw like the ox”—Disney could have a little fun with that one too. But this joke is more than a joke, or deeper than a joke. If there is about all religious faith an element of going along with the gag, these passages provide the religious gag with klieg lights and a Dolby system.
And the enthronement of the Lamb comes at the beginning of Revelation. By its conclusion, the sublime and the ridiculous have collided with an even louder crash as, first, the Word of God, appearing this time as the archetypal man-on-a-white-horse, rides off to the war that truly ends all wars.
And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS. (KJV; Rev. 19:11–16)
At the end of the ensuing battle, Satan is chained in the abyss for a thousand years, after which, it is revealed, he will be released to wreak havoc again but only for “a little season” (KJV; 20:3) before being “cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (KJV; 20:10).
Christian militarism has fed on the imagery of these passages for two millennia, but how much serious militarism or military seriousness is to be realized from the story of a war that is won by a lamb? The Book of Revelation surely does express the honest horror of early Christianity at the consequences of unarmed resistance to the armed might of Rome. Its Sturm und Drang is an elaborate expansion of the dismay buried in John the Baptist’s question to Jesus from his own Roman captivity: “Are you the one?” But the book, for all its excesses, effectively conveys a confidence that the Lamb of God has indeed won and, whatever the historical moment may suggest, won definitively.
And so it happens that the comic epic of Christianity ends, as so many comedies do, with a gala wedding. The Lamb Triumphant arrives at long last at his wedding day, taking to himself his eternal intended, the human race itself:
I heard what seemed to be the voices of a mighty throng, like the surging of the sea or the rumble of thunder, answering:
Hallelujah!
For the Lord God Omnipotent reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
And give glory to God,
For now comes the wedding day of the Lamb.
His bride has made ready.
She has dressed herself in fine linen,
Dazzling white because made of the good deeds of the saints.
(Rev. 19:6–8)
The beasts, we presume, are all invited to the reception—the flying, the hopping, the swimming, and the burrowing. As for the invitation, it will be engraved—in gold, of course—with a text from the prophet Hosea:
I will make for you a covenant on that day
with the beasts of the field,
with the birds of the air,
and with the creepers on the ground.
The bow, the sword, and war I will banish from the land.
I will make them lie down in safety.
And I will marry you forever,
I will marry you in righteousness and justice,
I will marry you in faithfulness,
and you shall know the Lord.
(Hos. 2:18–20)
It is all too much, but then is mystical experience ever temperate? Is it ever just enough?
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The old heaven and the old earth had passed away, and the ocean no longer existed. I saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, arrayed as a bride adorned for her husband. Then I heard a loud voice calling from the throne, “Behold, God now lives among human beings. He shall make his home among them. They shall be his people, and he shall be their God, their God-with-them. He shall wipe the last tear from their eyes. There shall be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone.” (Rev. 21:1–4)
No more death, no more mourning, no more sadness or pain. The world of the past left behind. The last tear wiped away. The ultimate epiphany of bliss.
The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come!”
Let everyone who listens answer, “Come!”
All who thirst, let them come.
All who thirst for the water of life shall drink it
and drink it free. (22:17)
Water and the Spirit.…
At the start of his public ministry as a human being, God submitted to a rite of repentance in the waters of the Jordan and, speaking from heaven, with his Holy Spirit hovering visibly over his human brow, he declared himself well pleased with what he had done and who he had become. He had become a lamb, and he was pleased as he had not been since the last day of creation.
Repentance in the Greek of the Gospels is metanoia, a changing of the mind. The changing of the mind of God is the great subject, the epic argument, of the Christian Bible. Having blighted his own work and cur
sed his own image with misery and mortality, God faced an immense challenge. He had to restore his masterpiece. He had to redeem those whom he himself had exiled from paradise. For his own sake and not just for theirs, he had to recover the lost crown of his creation. But instead of becoming again the calm and sure creator he had been at the start, he became, for long centuries, an angry and anxious warrior. He won his first battle in Egypt, and effortlessly at that: What weapon avails against an opponent armed with nature itself? A few centuries later he seemed to suffer defeat at the hands of Assyria and Babylonia, but he assured his people Israel that, in truth, he was only losing so as to inflict pain and punishment on them. Soon, he said, he would wreak against their new enemies the same spectacular havoc that he had wreaked in Egypt, ravaging the landscape, laying waste to the flora and the fauna, decimating the human population, and so forth. They would be victorious, and grateful, and—a matter obsessively on his mind—the world would know beyond any doubt that he was Lord.
He was going to do all that again; but somehow, mysteriously, when the time came, he couldn’t go through with it. His mind had changed. In the end, what would such a victory accomplish? After it, the deeper consequences of his own inaugural violence—a catastrophe for mankind far more devastating than any mere military defeat, more devastating even than slavery—would remain as unending punishment for them and a silent indictment of him.
So he broke his promise. He allowed himself and his people to suffer a still more catastrophic defeat; but before that doom descended, he joined them, suffering in advance all that they would suffer, and creating out of his agony a way for them to rise from the dead with him and return to paradise, bringing all nations with them.
Adam and Eve did not speak of themselves as God’s children, and God did not speak of himself as their father. That came later, for God had to learn how to be a father. He had to learn how to be a spouse as well: the Lord God as the bridegroom of the universe and husband of the human race. Most of all, he had to learn how to win by losing. It took a long time, and Satan has not yet been entirely vanquished, but the Lamb of God has won the only victory that really matters. The Good News of the Gospel is the news of how he did it.