by Paul Johnson
Moreover, Jesus was always prepared to remind people, even his instructed followers, that children were not to be ignored. In some ways they were models. When his disciples held their unseemly dispute as to which of them was the greatest, an incident recorded in all three synoptics (Mt 18 : 1-4; Mk 9:33-37; Lk 9:46-48), Jesus called to him a child and placed it in their midst, saying, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” It was always Jesus’s teaching, and his profound belief, that the study of children had much to tell. Matthew records the delight he felt when, in his last days on earth, children in the Temple greeted him with hosannas, and the way in which he rebuked the officials who protested against the salutation as unseemly: “Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?” (21:16). It is also remarkable that Jesus reserved his fiercest warnings for those who ill-treated children or led them into wickedness. Matthew quotes him as saying, “Take heed that ye despise not one of my little ones” (18:10), and “[W]hoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned to the depth of the sea” (18:6).
If women and children had special plans in Jesus’s heart and his notions of innocence and virtue, what of the aged? Almost inevitably, many of his healings—only a handful are specifically described—benefited old people. The hopeless cripple who had hung about the pool of Bethesda for nearly forty years was obviously old. So was the woman with “an issue of blood,” who had for many years spent all her money on doctors without finding a cure. Jesus noticed virtuous old people, like the widow who put her two mites into the collection box. But he was careful not to attribute particular merit merely to the aged. Orthodox Judaism already did that, and Jesus was not impressed. The status of “rulers” in the synagogues and at the Temple was based partly on seniority, and age was important at every level of the sacerdotal hierarchy. A specific term, “elder,” paid tribute to age in Judaism. Jesus thought them to be often elders in sin. In an important passage in Matthew, Jesus said that publicans and prostitutes would go to heaven before the elders (21 :31- 32). At the time Jesus was born, saintly old men like Simeon and Zacharias were to be found constantly at the Temple. But by the time Jesus completed his ministry there were no good old men in its precincts. Joseph Caiaphas, the head priest, had been many years in his post and must have been in his late fifties at least. His father-in-law, Annas, formerly the high priest and the power behind the scenes, was even older. Many of the orthodox Jews who listened to Jesus in the hope of catching him out, or to report back any blasphemous sayings, were old; some were technically elders. The establishment against which Jesus so often protested was essentially run by old men. Hence his sayings that to enter God’s Kingdom it was necessary to be “born again” and to become “a new man” were double-edged. Jesus’s use of the child image for the saved and his stress on the blessed being “children of God” were both so frequent and so important in his imagery that there is a distinct impression in the New Testament, taken as a whole, that age had somehow to be annihilated or transformed in the quest for God.
This impression is powerfully reinforced by the Transfiguration, one of the most remarkable events described in the Gospels. A few days before he was transfigured, Jesus had questioned his disciples about what men said of his mission. Peter answered, “Thou art Christ, the son of the living God.” Jesus then made him in effect his deputy and vicar, and pronounced him blessed: “[F]lesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt 16 : 15-20). Six days later he took Peter, with James and John, “up into an high mountain apart, And he was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Mt 17:1-2). Both Mark 9:2-8 and Luke 9:28-36 also record this spectacular irradiation of Jesus’s face and body. All three describe a divine epiphany. Matthew puts it thus: “[A] bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him” (17:5).
The Transfiguration has been variously interpreted. But its meaning seems clear. Jesus was a man, but not only a man. He was also God, Son of the Father. He was living outside time and space, as well as upon earth. His ministry was taking place not only in this world but also in the next. What he said was true for all time, in earthly reckoning but also for eternity. It was being put before men in a small province of the Roman Empire during the early part of the first century AD, but its truth applied to all peoples, at all times, transfiguring history and geography, spreading everywhere and bridging the gulf between the universe God created and the infinite in which he had his being.
Over the next two thousand years, the changes which Jesus first introduced among human beings would slowly revolutionize society, so that his transfiguration on the high mountain was a foretaste of a gradual modification of attitudes and mentalities.
VII
Jesus’s New Ten Commandments
THE AIM OF JESUS was not to change the world. His aim was to fit its inhabitants for the Kingdom of God, which he insisted “is not of this world.” The ancient Hebrews were confused about this life and the next and only gradually, and imperfectly, learned to embrace a concept of the hereafter. In Jesus’s day, many Jews, such as the Sadducees, still refused to accept the concept of an afterlife. So it is not strange that the belief in “the Christ” or Messiah or savior or redeeming King of Israel, which was prevalent in Jesus’s day, was muddled. Virtually all Jews believed in it, in varying degrees of intensity. So did the Samaritans—the woman Jesus met at the well, who had had five husbands and was now living in sin, may not have been squeamish about morals, but she knew all about the Christ and was delighted to recognize Jesus as such. But neither Jews nor Samaritans were sure whether the Messiah was a secular leader or a spiritual leader or a bit of both. The Sadducees saw him as another David who would restore the great Jewish kingdom which had flourished a thousand years before. The Pharisees saw him as a theocratic high priest who would make the Temple the seat of government.
Jesus inherited the doctrine of the Messiah but not the confusions. As the Son of God he never had the smallest doubt that “my Father’s business,” as he put it, was to show all who would listen how to make themselves fit for the next world. He demanded not allegiance as another David, or a secular ruler, or even a theocratic priest-king, but faith as a spiritual leader whose power and Kingdom lay in eternity. He insisted he was not a revolutionary or a Zealot or a rebel against Rome or even against the Jewish authorities. He took no steps to disturb the political status quo. But no one quite believed him, not even his disciples. The apostles themselves were unsure what would be the end of his ministry. They found it hard to accept that he was a sacrificial victim who would die for humanity. And these were devout men in daily contact with Jesus. The further people were from his person, the less they knew about his teaching, the more suspicious they were. The men of the Temple establishment had no doubt that Jesus was a troublemaker who envied their positions and planned to usurp them, a rabble-rouser who would embroil them in a destructive conflict with the Roman power, which terrified them. The idea of a leader-teacher whose concepts and aims were entirely spiritual was something beyond their worldly conception.
Jesus himself always strove to draw absolute distinctions between heaven and earth. He was not concerned with political arrangements or even political philosophy. He was aware that in AD 6 there had been a “tumult” in Palestine and Syria over the great census, which had led to bloodshed when the Roman occupation forces put it down. Census was for tax purposes, “tribute” as it was called. Jesus knew that his ecclesiastical enemies, the “Temple men,” would try to embroil him in political disputes about the tribute. It was so easy to present
him to the Roman authorities as a tax rebel who tried to persuade the people not to pay tribute. That was the specific charge that the Temple men brought against Jesus when they finally got him before Pilate’s judgment seat: “We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King” (Lk 23:2). This was a deliberate lie. Jesus had gone out of his way not to forbid tribute. The Pharisees and the supporters of Herod Antipas had tried to trap him into making such a mistake. They insinuated, in words Matthew records, that he was a fearless critic of existing authority who only spoke the truth: “[N]either carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” But Jesus “perceived their wickedness, and said: Why tempt you me, ye hypocrites?” He demanded they produce a coin, and when they did so, asked, “Whose is this image and superscription?” They said, “Caesar’s.” He told them, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This masterly retort silenced them. “They marvelled, and went their way” (22 : 16-22).
The metaphor of the coin was typical of Jesus’s efforts to show that his teaching drew absolute distinctions between the material and the spiritual, between this world and the next. He came not to liberate the Jews from the Romans but to show all human beings how to liberate themselves from sin. His object was not to found a new regime but to portray a new way of life. The revolution was entirely inward, a revolution against selfishness and greed, cruelty and prejudice, anger and lust: a revolution from self-love into love for all and fellowship with everyone. The reborn person would be totally different, and all would be changed. But outwardly, the world would carry on.
Or would it? The key to the life of Jesus is a huge paradox: the most striking and important paradox in world history. Jesus aimed to show men and women how to prepare themselves for the next world, to make themselves worthy of it. But he did so with such grace and skill, such psychological and emotional brilliance, that he also gave them a pattern to follow which made them better, and therefore happier, human beings in the present world. At the heart of Christianity is the imitation of Christ. The Gospels show how the perfect person behaves and thinks and speaks. By imitating Christ to the best of their limited abilities, those who have followed him over two thousand years have made the world a better place, and they have enabled many of those who dwell in it to lead more fulfilled and happier lives. The quest for the next world has transformed this one. But Jesus’s example, though the most powerful and pervasive, has not been the only force at work. Humanity has a propensity for evil as well as good. And other imposing figures in history have set a bad example and written and spoken words that have misled and perverted many. I write in the early part of the twenty-first century, and as a historian I can survey two millennia of changes in which the example of Jesus has battled for the minds of men and women against what he would have called the forces of darkness. There have been great epochs of transformation among the civilized: the rise of Christendom in Europe, its triumph, and its decay; the Renaissance and Reformation; the first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century; the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; the Industrial Revolution and the advent of sensibility and reform; the colossal intellectual and social changes of the twentieth century, which continue in our own epoch. All these have been a combination of good and evil, of justice and savagery, of tenderness and cruelty, of progress and degeneration. But if we sort out the salutary aspects from the deplorable, if we look at what is decent and valuable in our modern sensibilities—now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century—we see that all the genuine improvements in the way human beings live and behave toward one another spring from following the teaching and, above all, the example of Jesus.
What Jesus provided by his life was in effect a new Ten Commandments. A close study of the Gospels, such as I have tried to reflect in this brief biography, shows us what they are. The first is: each of us must develop a true personality. Jesus taught that each of us is unique, and that each has, in addition to a body, a soul in which our character is preserved. The body is frail and mortal; the soul is indestructible and timeless. This is Jesus’s most important teaching, which is implied in all his remarks. We have a duty to become self-conscious: not in any egotistical sense but by becoming aware of our existence as an act of God’s creation. We may have all kinds of collective existences, as a member of a family, a tribe, a nation, a race, a religious group, or a profession. But our personality, as we shape it and carry it, stands absolutely alone in the face of God. He knows everything about us, and sees and weighs everything we do, say, and think. Our knowledge of this is a key element in our self-consciousness. But linked to our awareness of ourselves is the right to self-determination. Each has a will, and it is by the exercise of this will that we shape the personality which is given to us at birth and belongs to us throughout our lives. However insignificant and impotent any of us may appear to be, we all have a will which is free, and therefore possess a right and an ability to exercise self-determination which is absolute. The personality is, or can be, all-powerful over itself, and it is always unfettered. That is what St. Paul meant when, within a generation of Jesus’s death, he wrote that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor 3:17).
The social and political implications of personality are infinite and become the essence of Christianity. They have been worked out over two thousand years of history, and are still being worked out today. Personality, human uniqueness, is the glory of the human race. But it has implications. First, accountability: we alone are responsible for the personality as we shape it in life. And we will be held accountable for it at death. The last judgment, and its implications for eternity, is the price we pay for self-determination. Second, though each personality is unique it is also incomplete. The soul is given by God and has an ineradicable impulse to return to its Creator. It cannot be at rest until this is accomplished. By free will, this becomes possible. If the personality we are given but which we also help to shape is finally acceptable, we enter what Jesus called “the Kingdom.” If it is not, we are refused. Jesus spoke of this repeatedly, using a variety of metaphors. He made it plain that earning acceptance of the personality we shape is the object of life on earth. Nonacceptance entails punishment: what St. Thomas Aquinas calls “the pain of loss,” using the similes of losing and finding which abound in Jesus’s teaching.
Thus personality is the key to life. Jesus made this clear when he said, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mk 8:35-36).
The second commandment is: accept, and abide by, universality. The consistent, daily, unremitting implication of Jesus’s teaching is to see the human race as a whole. Each soul is unique, but each is part of humanity. Here, as often, Jesus draws an absolute distinction between the material and the spiritual. The difference between one personality and another, one soul and another, may be infinite. The material difference between one body and another, when compared with their essential similarities, is insignificant. We are all neighbors in the eyes of God, and we must all become neighbors in our own eyes. Jesus’s doctrine of the neighbor, most strikingly illustrated in his parable of the Good Samaritan, is overt or implicit in everything he said or did. Politically and socially it is a very powerful doctrine. Jesus never set himself up as a pacifist or a democrat, or a multi-racialist or a humanitarian. Insofar as any of these creeds are valid he belonged to all of them. For him, the love of God implied that you loved your neighbor as yourself, and once you accepted that, the practice of it—the “Great Commandment,” as he called it—embraced all the felicitous arrangements which mankind’s ingenuity has contrived to bring people together in universal harmony. Neighborliness is a wond
erful commandment. It is a principle everyone can understand. It applies to all circumstances. And it is not essentially difficult—albeit harder than we think at times, and with particular neighbors.
The third commandment is: respect the fact that we are all equal in God’s eyes. Striving to be first was something Jesus found distasteful. He knew that human beings tended to form themselves into hierarchies, but he disliked seeing the results. When his disciples, even his apostles, quarreled about priorities among themselves, he was grieved. He shuddered at pushiness. When prominent elders or rulers of the synagogue strove for higher places on the benches he turned away in disgust. He warned against those who took top seats at the table. He never missed an opportunity to disparage the insensitivity of the rich and the kings of the world, or to praise the humble and lowly in spirit. The repeated refrain of his Gospel was “the first shall be last; and the last shall be first” (Mt 19:30). It was not that Jesus despised effort and industry or failed to recognize ability. Much of his teaching, and many of his parables, praised those who tried hard and well. The “good and faithful servant” was a noble figure for him. But so was the poor widow with her two mites. To Jesus the human race was a vast, moving mass trudging its way across time and space, evoking his pity and sympathy not only in its endless sufferings, often self-inflicted, but also in its secret heroism—a mass by virtue of its numbers, but actually composed of countless individuals, each precious to God, meriting equality of treatment according to deserts, and receiving it from his judicious hands, directed by his all-seeing eyes. The best that human beings could do—and this applied particularly to rulers or officials, anyone given power by birth or ability or money or chance—was to try to follow God’s example and give equal consideration to all. Thus equality, as Jesus taught it, was not an abstract doctrine but a living practice.