Jesus

by James Martin

  DEDICATION

  For Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, who teaches Jesus in his classes, through his books, and with his life

  MAPS

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  MAPS

  INTRODUCTION

  Who Is Jesus?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Pilgrims

  CHAPTER TWO

  Yes

  “How can this be?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bethlehem

  “She gave birth to her firstborn son.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nazareth

  “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jordan

  “Do you come to me?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rejection

  “Is not this the carpenter?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Galilee

  “And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Immediately

  “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gennesaret

  “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Happy

  “Rejoice and be glad.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Capernaum

  “They removed the roof above him.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Parables

  “He began to teach them many things in parables.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Storms

  “Teacher, do you not care?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gerasa

  “Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tabgha

  “And all ate and were filled.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Bethesda

  “There is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha,

  which has five porticoes.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Jericho

  “He was trying to see who Jesus was.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Bethany

  “Take away the stone.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jerusalem

  “Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Gethsemane

  “He threw himself on the ground and prayed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Golgotha

  “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Risen

  “Jesus said to her, ‘Mariam!’”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Emmaus

  “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Tiberias

  “Do you love me?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Amen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY JAMES MARTIN, SJ

  PRAISE

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  Who Is Jesus?

  JESUS IS WALKING WITH his friends to Caesarea Philippi, a town roughly twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee. The story comes midway through the Gospel of Mark. Out of the blue Jesus asks, “Who do people say that I am?”

  His friends seem caught off guard. Perhaps they are embarrassed, as when someone mentions a taboo topic. Perhaps they have been discussing that very question furtively, wondering who would be forthright enough to ask Jesus about his identity. Maybe Jesus had even overheard them arguing over who he was.

  The disciples offer halting responses: “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah,” they say, “and still others, one of the prophets.” That’s probably a fair summary of popular opinion at the time. Herod, the first-century ruler of Galilee, thought that Jesus might be John the Baptist come back to life. A number of Jews believed that Elijah’s return would herald the reign of God, which some in the region expected to come soon. And the comparison to a prophet like, say, Jeremiah seemed sensible because of similarities between the prophet and Jesus. But the disciples are careful to avoid saying what they believe.

  So Jesus asks them directly, “But who do you say that I am?”1

  Who is he? Why another book on this first-century Jewish man? Why have I spent years studying the life of an itinerant preacher from a backwater town? Why did I spend two weeks traipsing around Israel under the broiling sun to see places where a former carpenter lived and sites that he may (or may not) have visited? Moreover, why have I committed my life to Jesus? The answers turn on the question of who I believe Jesus is, so it’s fair to tell you before we begin our pilgrimage.

  My starting point is a classic theological statement: Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine. This is one of the first things that Christians learn about their faith. But what does it mean?

  To begin with, Jesus of Nazareth, the person who walked the landscape of first-century Palestine, wasn’t God pretending to be human.2 He was a flesh-and-blood, real-life, honest-to-God man who experienced everything that human beings do.

  Jesus was born and lived and died, like any human being. The child called Yeshua entered the world as helpless as any newborn and just as dependent on his parents. He needed to be nursed, held, burped, and changed. As a boy growing up in the minuscule town of Nazareth, Jesus skinned his knees on the rocky ground, bumped his head on doorways, and pricked his fingers on thorns. He watched the sun rise and set over the Galilean countryside, wondered how far away the moon was, and asked why the stars twinkled.

  Jesus had a body like yours and mine, which means that he ate, drank, and slept. He experienced sexual longings and urges. The adult Jesus felt joy and sadness, laughing at things that struck him as funny and weeping during times of loss. As a fully human being with fully human emotions, he felt both frustration and enthusiasm. He grew weary at the end of a long day and fell ill from time to time. He pulled muscles, felt sick to his stomach, and maybe sprained an ankle or two. Like all of us, he sweated and sneezed and scratched.

  Everything proper to the human being—except sin—Jesus experienced.

  Jesus’s humanity is a stumbling block for many people, including a few Christians. Incidents in the Gospels that show Jesus displaying intense and even unattractive human emotions can unsettle those who prefer to focus on his divinity. At one point in the Gospel of Mark, he speaks sharply to a woman who asks him to heal her daughter.3 The woman is not Jewish and, as a result, Jesus seems to dismiss her with a callous comment: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

  That is a stinging rebuke no matter what the context. When the woman responds that even the dogs get crumbs from the table, Jesus softens. And he heals her daughter.

  Why did Jesus speak so sharply? Was it because he was visiting what Mark calls “the region of Tyre,” a non-Jewish area, where he was presumably not expected to perform any miracles? If so, why didn’t he respond to the woman more gently, rather than using a term that was seen in his day as “highly insulting”?4 Was Jesus testing her faith, challenging her to believe? If so, it’s a harsh way of doing so, at odds with the compassionate Jesus whom many of us expect to meet in the Gospels.

  Perhaps, however, Jesus needed to learn something from the woman’s persistence: his ministry extended to everyone, not just Jews. Or maybe he was just tired. A few lines earlier in the Gospel, Mark tells us, “He entered a house and did not want anyone to
know he was there.” Perhaps his curt remark indicates physical weariness. Whatever the case (and we’ll never know for sure) both possibilities—he is learning, he is tired—show Jesus’s humanity on full display.

  But there is another part of the story: a healing. Jesus says to the woman, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” She returns home, says Mark, and finds her child lying on the bed, “the demon gone.”

  “Fully human and fully divine” means that Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t just a great guy, an inspiring teacher, and a holy man. Moreover, the charismatic carpenter wasn’t merely a clever storyteller, a compassionate healer, or a courageous prophet.

  In response to Jesus’s question “Who do you say that I am?” Peter finally answers, “You are the Messiah.” But Jesus is divine—far more than Peter could comprehend even while identifying him as the Messiah.

  Jesus performed astonishing deeds, which the Gospel writers call either “works of power” or “signs.” Today we call them miracles—healing the sick, calming storms, raising people from the dead. Time and again the Gospels report that Jesus’s followers, no matter how long they have been with him, are “amazed” and “astonished” by what he does. “We have never seen anything like this!” says the crowd after Jesus heals a paralyzed man in Mark’s Gospel.5 After he stills a storm on the Sea of Galilee, Matthew writes, “They were amazed, saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?’”6 Even his detractors take note of his miracles, as when they castigate him for healing a man on the Sabbath.7 The miracles are an essential part of the story of Jesus, as are other signs of his divinity. So is the Resurrection.

  If Jesus’s humanity is a stumbling block for many, his divinity is even more so. For a rational, modern mind, talk of the supernatural can be disturbing—an embarrassment. Many contemporary men and women admire Jesus, but stop short of believing him to be divine. Despite the proportion of the Gospels that focuses on his “works of power,” many want to confine his identity to that of a wise teacher.

  Thomas Jefferson went so far as to create his own Gospel by focusing on Jesus’s ethical teachings and (literally) scissoring out the miracles and other indications of his divinity. Jefferson preferred his own version of Jesus, not the one he found in the Gospels. Like many of us, he felt uncomfortable with certain parts of the man’s life. He wanted a Jesus who didn’t threaten or discomfort, a Jesus he could tame. After studying Jefferson’s edited version of the New Testament, the New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders concluded that the Sage of Monticello created a Jesus who was, in the end, “very much like Jefferson.”8

  But humanity and divinity are both part of Jesus’s story. Omit one or the other, scissor out the uncomfortable parts, and it’s not Jesus we’re talking about any longer. It’s our own creation.

  THE TRADITIONAL BELIEF ABOUT Jesus’s simultaneous humanity and divinity may raise as many questions as it answers. “Fully human and fully divine” is, to use a loaded word, a mystery. Something not to be solved, but to be pondered.

  This book will explore that question, but it will not set forth any new theological propositions. For one thing, I believe in the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus Christ. For another, I’m not a theology professor. If you want a lengthy theological discussion, for example, about how the Son is “consubstantial” or “one in being” with God the Father or how to begin to understand the Trinity, there are many books that can handle those topics much better than I can. I’ll point you to some of them as we progress through these chapters.

  Neither is this book a Bible commentary, a scholarly work providing a detailed analysis of each verse of the Bible, in this case the Gospels. Bible commentaries concentrate on the historical, political, and sociological context behind the books of the Bible, including authorship, date, and place; the way that the texts were edited; the meaning of the original Hebrew or Greek words; the likely implications of the texts to the readers of the time; the religious underpinnings of the texts; parallels between the verse in question and other parts of the Bible; and the theological interpretations of the text throughout history. Throughout this book, I’ll draw on commentaries written by the best scholars. But this is not a reference manual.

  So what is this book?

  It is a look at Jesus, as he appears in the Gospels, through the lens of my education, experience, prayer, and most recently a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And through the lens of faith.

  Much of my understanding of Jesus comes from studies, both formal and informal. Like any Catholic priest, I studied theology for several years in graduate school. During that period, my classmates and I spent a great deal of time poring over the New Testament. Through careful study of the narrative, often a line-by-line and word-for-word analysis of the texts, we tried to plumb the meaning of Jesus’s words and deeds.

  But even before theology studies, I studied the New Testament. A few years earlier, during my philosophy studies as a Jesuit, I even learned some Greek in order to read the Gospel texts in their original language. In fact, learning New Testament Greek was the most satisfying educational experience of my life. One spring afternoon, the professor called on me to translate the first lines of John’s Gospel, and when I read aloud, “In . . . the . . . beginning . . . was . . . the Word,” I thought my heart would burst with elation.

  Knowing a little Greek helps you notice things that even the best translations miss. It’s one thing to read an English translation of the Gospels that says that when Jesus saw a sick person he was “moved with compassion.” It’s another to read the Greek splagchnizomai, which means that Jesus was moved in his inmost parts—literally, in his bowels. In other words, Jesus felt compassion in his guts. I’ll use some Greek whenever it can help us better understand what the Gospel writers may have meant by a particular word or phrase.

  Besides academic courses, I’ve also done a good deal of informal study about Jesus. Since entering the Jesuits I’ve become an admirer of books on what is called the “historical Jesus.” In historical Jesus studies, scholars try to explain as much as we can know about the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. Books and articles about the historical Jesus focus on topics like religious customs in first-century Jewish culture in Palestine, the socioeconomic realities of living under Roman rule, and the ways that a carpenter would sustain his family in a small village in Galilee.

  Such research helps us better understand Jesus within the context of his time. One quick example: In one of his parables Jesus spins the compelling tale of a steward who is given care of his master’s “talents.”9 If you know that a “talent” was a huge sum of money, equivalent to fifteen years of wages for a day laborer, you’ll have a better understanding of Jesus’s reason for using that term in his story. You’ll understand the parable—and therefore Jesus—better.

  Historical Jesus scholars use every tool available—our understanding of first-century cultures, our knowledge of the local languages, even archaeological finds in the region—to understand his life and times. Such studies are closely aligned with what is called a “Christology from below,” an attempt to understand Jesus by beginning with his humanity. The starting point is Jesus as a human being, the “Jesus of history.”

  But I’ve read just as many books and articles about Jesus that focus less on the details of his time on earth and more about his place in the Christian faith. These writings consider topics such as the Resurrection, how Christ “saves” us, and the nature of his relationship to the Father and the Holy Spirit. They focus on the “Christ of faith” and begin with the divinity of Jesus Christ. This is called a “Christology from above.” Here the starting point is Jesus as the Son of God.

  The difference between these two approaches can be shown with a brief example, which we will revisit in more detail later: the dramatic story of the raising of Lazarus. Midway through the Gospel of John, the brother of Jesus’s friends Mary and Martha dies in the town of Bethany, just outside Jerusalem. Jesus
hears the news, waits two days, meets with the two sisters, and finally visits the man’s grave. Jesus asks for the stone to be rolled away and calls out, “Lazarus, come out!” And the dead man emerges from the tomb.10

  The historical Jesus scholar, doing theology “from below,” might ask questions like: What were Jewish burial practices at the time? Is there a religious significance to the two-day period? Did any customs prevent Jesus from going immediately to the tomb? What was the role of women in Jewish burial rites? Did any Jewish traditions of the time incorporate the idea of resurrection? Answers to these questions help us to understand the story more fully, and they shed light on what Jesus said and did in Bethany on that day.

  Someone starting from the vantage point of the Christ of faith, and doing a theology “from above,” might pose slightly different questions: What does the raising of Lazarus tell us about how divine power is at work in Jesus? How do Jesus’s actions at the tomb underline his words? How does the idea of Jesus as “life” show itself in this story? In what ways does the raising of Lazarus foreshadow Jesus’s own resurrection? And what does the story of Lazarus say about our response to God’s voice in our lives today?

  Both sets of questions are important, and if we lose sight of either perspective, we risk turning Jesus into either God pretending to be a man or a man pretending to be God. The two approaches are complementary, not contradictory. To fully meet Jesus Christ, believers need both to understand the Jesus of history, the man who walked the earth, and to encounter the Christ of faith, the one who rose from the dead. Both approaches seek to answer the question that the disciples grappled with on their way to Caesarea Philippi: Who is Jesus? Both approaches are essential, and both will be used in this book, though the emphasis may shift depending on the story.

  Moreover, Jesus is always fully human and fully divine. That is, Jesus is not human during one event and divine in another, no matter how it might seem in any particular episode of his life. He is divine when he is sawing a plank of wood, and he is human when he is raising Lazarus from the dead. In our reading of various Gospel passages we may feel we are seeing his humanity more in some, his divinity more in others. And in this book, some chapters highlight parts of Jesus’s life that readers may associate with his human nature (for example, his work as a carpenter); others focus on events some may associate with his divine nature (his healing a paralyzed man). But even speaking in those terms is misleading, for Jesus is always human and divine, whether he is building a table or healing the sick. His two natures are inseparable, united in one person at all times.