Jesus

by James Martin

  There are also questions about the fully human, fully divine person that we cannot answer. What went on inside Jesus’s mind? How does his humanity “cooperate” (to use a dull word) with his divinity and vice versa? To what extent was the human person conscious of his divinity? These questions, like so much about Jesus, must remain a mystery.

  But although Jesus’s identity as the fully human Son of God remains a mystery, it is a beautiful mystery, the most beautiful one I know, and well worth pondering.

  BEYOND ACADEMIC STUDIES, I have come to know Jesus in three other ways: prayer, experience, and pilgrimage.

  Twenty-five years ago, I entered the Society of Jesus, the Roman Catholic religious order better known as the Jesuits. Shortly after I entered the Jesuit novitiate (the first stage of training), I was introduced to a marvelous way of praying popularized by St. Ignatius Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuits. This method of prayer goes by many names: Ignatian contemplation, imaginative prayer, and composition of place.

  Ignatian contemplation encourages you to place yourself imaginatively in a scene from the Bible. For example, if you’re praying about Jesus and his disciples caught in a boat during a storm on the Sea of Galilee, you would try to imagine yourself on board with the disciples, and ask yourself several questions as a way of trying to place yourself in the scene.

  You might ask: What do you see? How many disciples are in the boat? What is the expression on their faces? How rough is the sea? What do you hear? The howling wind? The fishing tackle shifting about in the boat? What do you smell? You’re in a fishing boat, so you might smell residues from the day’s catch. What do you feel? Homespun clothes were probably heavy when soaked by storm-driven water. And what do you taste? Maybe the spray on your lips. With such imaginative techniques you let the Gospel passage play out in your mind’s eye, and then you notice your reactions.

  Ignatian contemplation doesn’t require any special spiritual talents. Nor does it require you to believe that every single detail of the narrative is accurate. (As we will see, some Gospel accounts of the same events disagree.) It merely asks you to enter into Bible stories imaginatively and to accept that God can work through your imagination to help you see things in fresh ways. Jesus himself asked people to use their imaginations when he offered them his parables. When someone asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded not with a definition, but with the story of the Good Samaritan, in effect saying to his listeners, “Imagine something like this happening.”

  Some parts of Jesus’s life easily lend themselves to Ignatian contemplation—the vivid stories of his healing the sick almost cry out for this kind of prayer. Another example is the period of Jesus’s life in Nazareth between the ages of twelve and thirty. Because only a single line is written about that long stretch of time, those years are called his “Hidden Life.”11 It’s important to ponder what his daily life might have been like, and here the results of historical Jesus scholarship can fill in some of the gaps and help us to imagine his life in first-century Nazareth.

  Parts of this book, then, came from my prayer; and in preparation for writing I reread my spiritual journals. But here’s an important point: When discussing the life of Jesus, I’ll be clear about what comes from the Gospels, the Christian tradition, and historical research—and what comes from scholarly speculation and my own personal prayer. I’ll be clear about what is speculative and what is not.

  My insights into Jesus’s life also come from experiences. Christ lives, truly risen, not only at the “right hand of the Father,” as the Nicene Creed has it, but in the lives of people around us. One beautiful image, from St. Paul, is that the community of believers is the “body of Christ” on earth. So in the ministries in which I have worked, I’ve met Christ. In Kingston, Jamaica, alongside Mother Teresa’s sisters. In Nairobi, Kenya, with East African refugees. In Chicago with street-gang members. In Boston, with incarcerated men and women. And in a parish in an affluent neighborhood in New York City.

  Mother Teresa often spoke of encountering Christ “in distressing disguise” when working among the poor. And often I have found Christ among the poor. But you can find Christ in anyone. As the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

  for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

  Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

  To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

  Put less poetically, we can encounter Christ in the people around us. Every person’s life can tell us something about God. So I will share stories of encountering God in and through others.

  Many New Testament passages have also taken on greater meaning thanks to particular events in my life. When you encounter Scripture at a critical moment it often feels as if you’ve never seen that passage before. You notice something new, and the passage takes on an unmistakable urgency. Reading about Jesus’s stilling a storm at sea is one thing when your life is calm, but when things are stormy, it is quite another. In connecting some of these biblical passages to my own experiences, I hope to help you connect them to your own.

  Finally, much of the book will be informed by, and structured around, the idea of pilgrimage. Two years ago, I traveled with a Jesuit friend to the place that Christians call the Holy Land, the region in and around Israel where many events of the Old and New Testaments took place.

  MY PILGRIMAGE TO THE Holy Land was overwhelming. It was almost unbelievable to visit the places where Jesus had lived. When I first caught sight of the Sea of Galilee, its shimmering blue-green waters surrounded by pinkish sandy hills under a blazing sun, it was like a dream. A few days earlier, during our time in Jerusalem, my friend George and I stumbled upon the Pool of Bethesda, which the Gospel of John names as the place where Jesus healed a paralyzed man.12 John describes it as a pool with “five porticoes.” For centuries, some scholars doubted that the pool ever existed. But archaeological excavations in the nineteenth century uncovered almost the entire complex—including the five porticoes, just as John had described. Seeing not only the site at which Jesus had performed a miracle, but also one confirmation of the Gospels’ accuracy was deeply moving. There were the five porticoes: one, two, three, four, five. There they were. And here he had been.

  Over two weeks, George and I visited almost every spot Jesus had visited: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, of course, but also the locales traditionally connected to his ministry around the Sea of Galilee: the Mount of Beatitudes, where he preached the Sermon on the Mount; the rocky beach where he called the first disciples; the bay from which he preached the parables while sitting in a disciple’s boat. Seeing what Jesus saw and standing where he stood (or at least near there) deepened my appreciation of the Gospels, and deepened my faith.

  The pilgrimage also taught me things that I had not learned from books. For one thing, how close the places were in which many of the miracles occurred around the Sea of Galilee. In just a few hours, you can walk along the coastline and visit the sites of many of what the Gospels call dynameis, dynamic “works of power.” For another, how far apart some of the towns were. It’s one thing to read that Jesus and his disciples walked from Jerusalem to Jericho; it’s another to traverse that distance by car (about an hour) and picture how punishing the trip must have been on foot in first-century Palestine.

  Small details leapt up at every moment. One hot day, standing in the place where Jesus most likely preached the parables, on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, I looked around and noticed that the surrounding landscape included rocky ground, fertile ground, and thorny plants. Immediately I thought of Jesus’s parable of the sower, in which a farmer spreads his seed on just those kinds of terrains.13 For the first time I realized that when Jesus was preaching, he may not have been describing abstract plots of land (as in “Try to imagine rocky ground”), but what his listeners were standing on. I could envision him pointing and saying, “Look at that ground over there.”

  That experience reminded me of something a friend told me
before I left. Traveling through the Holy Land is like visiting the family home of a good friend. No matter how well you know the person, you’ll understand your friend better afterward. Overall, the pilgrimage made the Gospels more vivid, deepened my understanding of specific stories, and afforded me an enormous amount of fascinating information about the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. This is why the Holy Land is often called the Fifth Gospel.

  All of this will be brought to bear on the life of Jesus: study, prayer, experience, pilgrimage—and faith. All of this will be brought to bear on the question first posed to the disciples on the way to Caesarea Philippi: Who is Jesus?

  AS FOR THE BOOK’S structure, I will present the life of Jesus sequentially—starting from the announcement of his birth, moving through his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, continuing through his baptism by John, concentrating especially on his public ministry, and ending with his last days, his death, and his resurrection. The four Gospels don’t always agree on the sequence of events (often they don’t include the same events), but they progress in a more or less logical order. So it is possible to use all four in tandem. My guide will be the various “Gospel parallel” books that match passages from Matthew, Mark, and Luke according to chronology. John is somewhat harder to match up, but not impossible; it too follows the progress of Jesus’s life.

  As we arrive at significant “places” in Jesus’s life, I’ll share stories of what I saw at those sites during my pilgrimage. In this way I hope to bring you into that trip as I experienced it. Also, I’ll offer reflections on what particular episodes in Jesus’s life might have to say to us today.

  Each chapter, then, will include some travel narrative, some study of the text, and some spiritual reflection. At the end of the chapters I will include the corresponding Gospel passages, to encourage you to experience these parts of the Bible for yourself.

  Needless to say, I won’t cover every event in Jesus’s life as recorded in the Gospels. As I said, this is not a Bible commentary. Nor does anyone care to read a four-thousand-page book. Instead, I’ll focus on the specific events in Jesus’s life that have held the most meaning for me and about which I think I might have something new to say. Nor will I treat each passage with the same level of detail. Some stories require more analysis, and there’s no need to stretch things out. For example, I won’t discuss passages about Mary and Joseph in as much detail as I will those in which the adult Jesus appears. Finally, I won’t tell you about every place George and I visited. You can do without my description of buying toothpaste in a drug store in Jerusalem or soap in Tiberias.

  This book is designed to be accessible to anyone—from those just starting to think about Jesus to those who feel that they may know the topic well. It is designed for people of deep faith or no faith who want to know about Jesus. But my own approach is that of a Christian. So I won’t be shy about talking about my faith. Finally, I won’t assume too much previous knowledge about the Gospels, or about the life and times of Jesus, but I will assume that you can quickly come up to speed and, as Jesus said, follow me.

  WHENEVER I TOLD FRIENDS that I was writing a book about Jesus, they inevitably laughed. The scale of the project seemed impossible. But after I explained that the book would focus only on specific Gospel passages, one friend asked sensibly, “What can you say that hasn’t been said?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll write about the Jesus whom I’ve met in my life. This is a Jesus who hasn’t been written about before.” It may be similar to hearing a friend tell you something unexpected about a mutual friend. “I never knew that about him,” you might say wonderingly. Seeing a friend through another pair of eyes can help you appreciate a person more. You may end up understanding your friend in an entirely new way.

  So I would like to invite you to meet the Jesus you already may know, but in a new way. Or, if you don’t know much about Jesus, I would like to introduce him to you. Overall, I would like to introduce you to the Jesus I know, and love, the person at the center of my life.

  Getting to know Jesus, like getting to know anyone, has been a pilgrimage. Part of that pilgrimage was a trip to Israel, one that changed my life.

  CHAPTER 1

  Pilgrims

  “YOU SHOULD GO TO the Holy Land,” said the editor in chief of America. We were sitting in my boss’s office in the magazine’s headquarters in New York City. “If you’re planning to write a book about Jesus, it will be of great help.”

  While I appreciated his advice, I was doubtful. Thanks to years of experience in the field of Jewish-Christian relations and multiple trips to Israel, Drew, a Jesuit priest like me, had a natural affinity for the loose geographic region known as the Holy Land. So I thought he was speaking more out of personal interest, much as a baseball fan might say, “You’ve got to visit the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown!”

  As Drew prodded, my objections came to mind. For one thing, I had read the Gospels every day since entering the Jesuit novitiate. And I had pored over dozens of books about Jesus and prayed hundreds—maybe thousands—of times over the Gospel stories. What more could a trip teach me?

  Another friend voiced similar sentiments. We had read (and heard) these stories so often, and had prayed about them so frequently, that we had formed our own mental images of the places mentioned in the Gospels. I already “knew” what Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and the Sea of Galilee looked like, because I had imagined those locales so often. We feared that laying eyes on locales overrun with tourists would sully our pristine mental pictures. Would seeing the ornate Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, one of history’s original tourist destinations, supplant my own image of Jesus’s tomb in first-century Palestine? “I like my own Gospel,” said my friend. Me too.

  “No,” I responded to Drew’s encouragement. “I don’t think so.”

  But gradually, I started to doubt my doubts.

  “Are you crazy?” said a friend who had visited the Holy Land several times. “How could you pass up a chance like that?” Then he added, “Don’t you usually do your annual retreat in August? Why not go then, and think of the pilgrimage as a retreat?” Finally, he said, to clinch the argument, “You’ll love it!”

  My objections began to seem insignificant compared to the opportunity to see the land in which Jesus lived.

  Little by little, a plan took shape. The end of August would be a convenient time to go (though, as Drew pointed out, the weather would be “brutally hot”). Phone calls and e-mails to knowledgeable friends helped me map out a tentative agenda.

  My enthusiasm grew as I listed places to visit: the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Bethany. Just thinking about seeing these places, which I had long prayed about, filled me with joy. Of course I wanted to go! When I first entered the Jesuits, I told an older priest that the first thing that I would ask God when (or if) I made it to heaven would be to show me exactly what Jesus’s life was like. Please show me what the landscape looked like. Please show me what Jesus saw. Now I had an opportunity to realize something of that dream, on this side of heaven.

  Then a friend reminded me that the Jesuits run a house in Jerusalem. The Pontifical Biblical Institute was founded in 1927 to house Jesuit biblical scholars studying in Jerusalem and archaeologists working on digs. Today the institute hosts Jesuits from around the world, students of all stripes who study at various universities in Jerusalem, and many pilgrims. And by happenstance (or Providence) a Jesuit who had overseen the “PBI” for many years was spending a few weeks in my Jesuit community in New York.

  “The PBI would be perfect!” he said, pointing out that it was located only a few blocks from the “Old City.” I had no clue what the Old City was, but it sounded reasonably important. He put me in touch with David, a Jesuit living there. A few e-mails later, I had a place to stay in Jerusalem.

  Another friend, a Jesuit studying in Rome who had visited the Holy Land several times, helped me with another dilemma: Should I sign up with a tour grou
p? As a first-time traveler I was worried about missing certain sites, not finding others, and overlooking the significance of some. I could imagine returning home and someone expostulating about a particular locale, “You missed that? How could you overlook the most moving site in Galilee?”

  You’ll do fine without a tour company, my Roman friend wrote in an e-mail. All you need is a reliable guidebook. Plus, you’ll be able to spend as much time as you would like in each place. You can pray as long as you would like, which you might not be able to do as easily with a group.

  He had another piece of advice: rent a car for your excursion to Galilee.

  Galilee? Wasn’t that just outside Jerusalem?

  “No,” Drew explained patiently, “it’s several hours away.” A quick glance at a map proved that, despite my love of the Gospels, I knew almost nothing about the topography of the region. Another Jesuit had a more specific recommendation for a sojourn in Galilee: a retreat house run by some Franciscan sisters right on the Mount of Beatitudes. “It’s a perfect spot,” he said, wistfully recalling a retreat he made there decades ago. From Jerusalem, David sent me an e-mail address for the sisters.

  I rolled my eyes (at least inwardly); I doubted that I would be able to make reservations from the States. I imagined a sleepy Franciscan monastery that owned a single ancient computer stored in a dusty anteroom, which was checked once a week by an elderly nun with poor eyesight and worse computer skills. Reluctantly I e-mailed. To make things easier I wrote in both French and English, politely asking for a room.