Bright Evening Star

by Madeleine L'engle

  In the letter to the people of Ephesus it is written: “Before the world was made you chose us to be yours in Christ….In love you destined us for adoption, as your children through Christ Jesus: such was your pleasure and your purpose.” God’s children. God’s sons and daughters, affirmed by the love of Christ.

  Christ Jesus. Wholly human. Wholly God. The two natures are bound together in love.

  He was special even to those who failed to understand him and were frightened by him. We know from his words and actions that he was no weakling. He shocked his own family with his unconventional behavior. His sense of mission was passionate and he tried to elucidate it by telling stories, and even when he explained the stories to his friends and disciples they still didn’t understand, and he wanted and expected them to understand. Sometimes it seems that the more he explained the less they understood.

  He had a robust sense of humor. Many of his parables are jokes, told to put over a point. How many times can we hear a joke and still think it’s funny? What’s black and white and red all over? An embarrassed zebra. A newspaper. The responses are stale with repetition.

  They no longer amuse or shock. We’ve heard Jesus’ jokes too often. When he first told that story of the man with the plank of wood in his eye, wasn’t it supposed to be hilarious as well as pointed? The more openly we read the Gospels, trying to listen to them freshly, the more we understand Jesus, and the more we understand how easily he was misunderstood. And the more we understand why he was feared.

  What did Jesus fear? His very fearlessness antagonized the authorities. If you can make someone afraid, you have power over that person. Jesus’ references to power were to the power of the Father, the Creator, something very different from human power which seeks to grasp, dominate, humiliate.

  Is Jesus still feared today? Are we still trying to tame him? It doesn’t work, then, or now.

  Even when his immediate family criticized and misunderstood him, his disciples wanted to follow him wherever he went because they were utterly drawn to the brilliance of his love. But whenever they were tested they drew back in fear; it was too much. They were amazed at the unconventional people who were his dinner companions—lepers, and Romans, the occupying enemy, and tax collectors, who were even worse than enemies because they collected taxes for the enemy, keeping some for themselves. He even chose one of them as a disciple, one of the Twelve.

  He chose the wrong friends, people who failed to understand him and who would abandon him in the end. He did his best to reach out to the people he grew up with; were they so familiar with him that they were unable to hear him? Scripture has given us hints that some of his friends and relatives thought he was crazy and so did not believe in his miracles, or in him. But Jesus continued his loving healing, his strange way of regarding people as though everybody matters. He enjoyed his friends, but they were strange friends, not the ones his family would have chosen for him.

  Luke in his Gospel was very clear about what Jesus expected (and expects):

  What you want people to do to you, do also to them. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them….Love your enemies, do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be children of God. For he is kind to the unthankful and evil. (from The New Zealand Prayer Book)

  What did his listeners think of that? Did they like it? Do we? Luke continues,

  Therefore be merciful just as your Father also is merciful. Judge not and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.

  I need to hear and heed that over and over again.

  * * *

  —

  In four short Gospels we have dynamite!

  6

  WHO KNEW HIM?

  Jesus came to his cousin John for baptism. Not surprisingly, John demurred. But Jesus insisted. His refusal to set himself apart from other human beings was something his disciples never understood. (“Yes, I have come to you as a human being, I am the Son of Man. I am the One Who Was to Come. If you knew me, you would know the Father. If you knew the Father you would know me.”) No wonder his disciples did not understand. No wonder we don’t, either. But aren’t we told that faith is for the things we don’t understand?

  There’s much that I don’t understand that enriches my life. I have faith that every time I light the candles on the dining table and we hold hands and sing, we are joining the angels. I have faith that when I read night prayers with someone I love, this is a sacrament. I have faith that my baptism matters.

  I have faith that the baptism of Jesus was of the utmost importance, and so were the temptations—not only for Jesus, but for all of us, too.

  I’ve written about the temptations over and over again, but there’s something new each time. We all know the scene, Satan urging Jesus to turn stones into bread, to jump off the highest pinnacle of the temple, to worship Satan with all his worldly power. On the surface it seems that Satan was tempting Jesus with power. But Satan was far subtler than that. God, who had given up all power to come to us as Jesus, would have found power easy to resist. What Satan was doing was tempting Jesus to retrieve power, to emphasize his divinity above his humanness, to reverse the Incarnation.

  “Turn the stones into bread. Jump off the highest pinnacle of the temple. Show them that you aren’t an ordinary human being like them. You are God! Aren’t you forgetting that? You can play at being human, if you like, but you’re really God. Show them.”

  Jesus was hungry. He had not eaten for forty days. He was exhausted and vulnerable. What seems ever more clear was that Satan was urging Jesus to deny the very reason he had been born of an ordinary human woman as an ordinary human baby.

  How can we begin to understand? Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Maker of all the galaxies, gave up all power so that this power might instead be human, mortal, finite, and that we might understand that this very humanness, mortality, finiteness, if we would only accept it, would be made divine, immortal, and infinite by God in the fullness of time.

  We are again caught in an enormous paradox. If Jesus would turn the stones into bread, he would be divine, not human, and he would wow the populace. If he jumped from the highest pinnacle of the temple and the angels held him up, he would again be divine, not human, and everybody would worship him.

  But Jesus held true to the promise of the Incarnation. Christ came to us as Jesus, a mortal, in order to show us how to be human, and he never gave in to the temptation to take the easy way out—no stones into bread. The relationship of Jesus to Christ, of Jesus to God, the balance of divinity and humanity, has been confusing and confused for two thousand years. Jesus came not to be confusing, but to be a light to the world. His first disciples were fishermen, ordinary people, uneducated, yet willing to change their lives entirely to follow this extraordinary man. He didn’t promise them earthly power; he spent a great deal of time chastising them for their eagerness for power, and this was something they never seemed to understand. Even at their last meal together the disciples were still quarreling over who would be the most powerful in heaven. Didn’t they hear? (Don’t we?)

  Not then, not now.

  * * *

  —

  Over the years my agent and I have negotiated with Hollywood regarding contracts for movies of my books, particularly A Wrinkle in Time. Not long ago I received a screenplay for Wrinkle. The first page was a normal title page. The second page simply had three words: Love is power.

  I shook my head sadly. “He doesn’t get the book. He simply doesn’t get it.”

  Love is not power. Love is giving power away. Power in the sense of control. When our babies are little infants we have to use loving power to see that they are properly clothed, fed, have the right immunizations, are given love and cuddling and laughter. As t
hey grow up we try to step aside, hoping we have taught them to make right and loving decisions. If we try to control or manipulate (and there are parents who continue to do this long after the children are grown) then we are not loving; we are using power for our own ends. There’s a very fine line here and it’s very easy to step over it: power as love and power as manipulation. Thinking of Jesus and his calm rejection of power in favor of love is a help. Weren’t the miracles power? Yes, but never just for power’s sake. Never to prove a point. Never for Jesus to show off or to get his own way. And Jesus always attributed the power to God; it belonged to God and not to him.

  When God made creatures with free will, that was a tremendous giving away of controlling power. When Christ came to us as Jesus, that was, again, a huge giving away of power. Whenever I love, I give away power. If I try to control or manipulate, then I am not loving, I am using power for my own good, even if I am convinced it’s for someone else’s good.

  After he had rejected every one of Satan’s temptations, Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and preached in his own home synagogue. He quoted the prophecy of Isaiah, and then told his listeners that that very day the prophecy was being fulfilled. But no one believed him, because they had known this kid all their lives. “Isn’t he the carpenter?” they asked. “The son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

  Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own home.” And Luke, the physician, has him add, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ ”

  What does that mean? What was wrong, that Jesus should say such a thing? Was it a fulfilling of Isaiah’s prophecy about a man of sorrows, not beautiful to look on, but with wounds which were visible to those who saw him? It was of the utmost importance to the Jews that the age-old prophecies be fulfilled.

  We don’t know what the human Jesus looked like, except in negatives. He did not look like a Protestant or Catholic Christian, or an American. His skin was probably dark, as was that of his family and friends who lived under the blazing Middle Eastern sun. He probably had dark hair and dark eyes. But whether he was tall or short, whether his eyes were far apart or close together, whether his teeth in today’s world would have been considered in need of straightening, we have no idea. We know that he had what today would be called charisma, or, more likely, chutzpah. He drew people to him by the joyous force of his personality, and his intimate closeness to the One he called Abba.

  Abba, Daddy, Papa, Father.

  Our mental image of the Father is often influenced by our fathers. I called my own father Father rather than Daddy or Papa, and that may have had its effect on my way of understanding the heavenly Father.

  In many of my writers’ workshops a common theme will begin to emerge. In a recent group the theme was overbearing, stifling fathers, who were particularly hard on girl children. There was a consequent lack of conflict in the stories, a reflection of, “Don’t upset Papa.”

  Too often this repressive father is seen as a metaphor of the heavenly Father. But look at the Gospels! This isn’t how Jesus saw the Father. This harsh Daddy whose power must not be contested is not the loving Father who cared about us so much that Jesus came to live with us, teaching us to love the One who made us. “Fear not, little flock,” he urged. Tender. Compassionate.

  Some of the fathers in the workshop were “men of the cloth,” ordained men who were supposed to represent God, but who used their authority to wield power over their sheep, who had to be obeyed instantly and without question. No wonder the flock was afraid.

  Jesus called us away from fear into love and truth, away from power into joy and compassion. He walked by the Sea of Galilee and he called Andrew and Peter, John and James, to come to be with him.

  Together they went into Capernaum where Jesus healed a man with an unclean spirit, and the unclean spirit recognized him for who he truly was. It’s amazing and awesome that the unclean spirits always recognized Jesus as the Messiah, even when nobody else around him did. Is it that unclean spirits still belonged to the spirit world, even though they were fallen spirits, and so were able to see where human eyes were closed? The spirits recognized the humanity and divinity of the One who banished them from those they tormented, for it is in the nature of evil spirits to torment.

  They have always been around. They are here, now. In the bus driver on Mull. In muggers on our city streets. In irrational acts of shooting and knifing. Do the unclean spirits still recognize Jesus, now, two thousand years later? Do they still recognize and then reject him? They no longer flee into herds of swine. Jesus no longer walks the earth in human form as he did two thousand years ago. The Holy Spirit, the Comforter he promised to send, is here, and the unclean spirits are slashing at the holiness.

  Were those around Jesus ever aware that the unclean spirits recognized the One Who Was to Come when they, themselves, did not? That the unclean spirits, unlike the Pharisees and the other religious leaders and the good, ordinary temple-going people, knew who he was? If so, Jesus’ healing was all the more extraordinary.

  * * *

  —

  But then, everything about him was extraordinary. The Sermon on the Mount was extraordinary, a sermon unlike any other sermon we have ever heard, and which was probably preached over many days. How much at a time can people stand of Jesus’ radical turning things upside down and inside out? Jesus gave them a freedom they had never known before. They laughed with joy. They listened with astonishment. They lived in a land of hierarchy, where power was eagerly sought, and yet he told them to be poor in spirit. Who were the poor in spirit? The beggars, the lepers, the women, the Samaritans, the nobodies, and he told them that it was the poor in spirit who would receive the kingdom of heaven. And that was just the beginning.

  The Beatitudes reverse the normal order of thinking. He told them that they would be hated because of him, and yet they were to rejoice and leap for joy. He told them that they were the light of the world, and that they were to reveal the light, not hide it. And then, having knocked down the law as they understood it, he told them that he had come to fulfill the law, not abolish it. He told them that anybody who relaxed these commandments would be called least in the kingdom of heaven, and that their righteousness had to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees or they would never enter the kingdom.

  He told them that it is all right to grieve, to be meek, to be poor in spirit. Don’t be afraid. Don’t judge. If we judge, we open ourselves to judgment. Don’t show off. Reject earthly treasures and earthly power. Keep the law. Love your enemy.

  It didn’t make sense. It was impossible. It was contradictory. He told them that the old law forbade them to kill, but that thinking evil of each other was murder, too. He told them that it was not just fornication but lustful thought that was sexually evil. He was fierce about the sanctity of marriage, and this was strong evidence of his compassion for women. Marriage was not, at that time, sacred. All a man had to say was, “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you,” and the woman was out. Since her husband kept all her property, she was sometimes out on the streets, because there was often no place else for her to go unless she had a loving family willing to take her in; and many had no one to care for them. Jesus’ compassion for the plight of the discarded woman was profound.

  His friends were ordinary people, fishermen, even a tax collector. He told them to come with him and they would, according to the King James translation, become “fishers of men.”

  When I was in college I read these words and wasn’t sure they were compatible with higher education. But I needed them. My father had finally died and I didn’t understand death. His death. Anybody’s death. The world was dark and I stumbled along, bumping into spiritual and intellectual obstacles. Because being on the dean’s list offered
certain desirable freedoms, I managed to keep my grades up. But I felt lost. I went to church and nobody spoke to me and I felt alien and alone, so I never went back. What the old institution had to offer was no longer valid. There was war across the ocean. Killing. Hating. During the holidays I went to a dinner party where I heard anti-Semitic remarks to the effect that maybe Hitler had the right idea: look what he had done to improve the highways and the educational system.

  Jesus was a Jew.

  He was a good, observant Jew even though many Jews did not understand him and neither did anybody else.

  He was a full human being, in contrast to some of the people around him with their petty snobbisms and downgrading of Samaritans (how many protagonists of Jesus’ stories were Samaritans?), just as that man who thought Hitler might have the right idea was less than human.

  And I, in my bleak depression, was less than human.

  When Jesus made his blatant, radical statements the crowds were shocked, awed, relieved, delighted, excited. He knocked down the old, legalistic ways of thinking with something new which they could barely understand. He warned them about the folly of anxiety, and the evil of harsh judgment.

  They followed him down from the hills and watched while he healed a leper. News of his healing powers spread, and a centurion came to him, asking him to heal his servant, who was gravely ill. A centurion was a Roman officer who was head over a hundred soldiers. He was part of the enemy. But when Jesus told him that he would go to the servant and heal him, the centurion said, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Just say the word, and my servant will be healed.”