Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  If there is much commotion, solidarity, and camaraderie, there are also many kisses from afar, many last embraces, and many tears of farewell. “Timothy has returned from you and has given us good news of your faith and your love, telling us that you always remember us with pleasure and long to see us, just as we long to see you,” writes Paul to the Thessalonians. To Timothy, “dear son of mine” and Paul’s most loyal missionary companion, the apostle writes in his last letter, “I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. I remember your tears and long to see you again, so that I may be filled with joy.” When he says his final farewell to the Ephesian elders, “they were all in tears,” according to Acts. “They put their arms around Paul’s neck and kissed him. What saddened them most was his saying that they would never see his face again.”

  These people, generous with their time, talents, and resources to the point of improvidence, actually liked one another. They make it possible to believe, as Paul encouraged the Corinthians to believe, that “Jesus Christ was never Yes-and-No; his nature is all Yes.” They make it possible to hope, as Paul urged the Macedonians to hope, that human beings needn’t “live in the dark, for we belong to the day.” The people of the Way were not ideologues but believers. They did not organize protest marches or write op-ed pieces; and if they had, they would have been eliminated. They lived in a dangerous time under many strictures and disabilities—legal, social, economic, political—none of their own making. But it is hard to escape the impression that in their day they lived buoyantly.

  Where Is Jesus?

  Jesus, returned to the Father, had sent the Spirit. Was Jesus, therefore, finished with them? Did his ascent into the inaccessible heavens and the sending of the Spirit as his “replacement” mean that their contact with him was forever a thing of the past? Was he to be only a ghostly model to conjure in the mind but never to hold again in human arms? No; and this is not simply because Paul had taught them that Jesus was Lord of the Cosmos and they were his mystical Body. Such constructs are, in the last analysis, too cerebral to make a lasting difference in the ordinary lives of ordinary people like Prisca and Aquila.

  The appearances that followed on the discovery of the empty tomb had given them a taste of Jesus risen and exalted. The disciples had, in effect, just caught him midway through his ascension from the realms of the dead—on his way to the Father’s right hand. From time to time, long after Jesus’s ascension, unusual individuals, like Paul on the road to Damascus, would be privileged recipients of such “out of time” appearances, as they may be even to our day.

  But what of you and me, the less-than-privileged? What of folks like Prisca and Aquila, or tunic-making Dorcas and sleepy Eutychus, whom nobody would mistake for visionaries? Are we to be left only with faith?

  The answer lies in Matthew’s Gospel, which shows the public life of Jesus as getting under way with the Sermon on the Mount (and the articulation of the Beatitudes) and closes the narration of this trajectory with a scene no less memorable, Jesus’s final sermon before his passion:

  “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will be seated on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left.

  “Then will the King say to those on his right, ‘Come, you blessed of my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, naked and you clothed me, sick and you took care of me, imprisoned and you visited me.’

  “Then will the just reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you to eat, or thirsty and give you to drink? When did we see you a stranger and take you in, naked and clothe you? When did we find you sick or imprisoned and go to visit you?’

  “Then will the King answer, ‘I tell you the truth: whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

  “Then will he say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, with your own curse upon your heads, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and you did not take me in, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and imprisoned and you took no care of me.’

  “They will also reply, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or imprisoned, and did not help you?’

  “He will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

  “Then will they go away to eternal punishment, but the just to eternal life.”

  To this heart-stopping lesson, Matthew adds the frightening comment: “Jesus had now finished all he wanted to say.”

  The Son of Man has become the Ward of all Mankind. Incarnated as the human Jesus of Nazareth, he is after his resurrection the principle of Jewish Justice itself, incarnated in the person of anyone and everyone who needs our help. It is ironic that some Christians make such a fuss about the elements of the Eucharist—bowing before them, kneeling in adoration, because Christ is present in them—but have never bothered to heed these solemn words about the presence of Christ in every individual who is in need. Jesus told us only once (at the Last Supper) that he would be present in the Bread and Wine, but he tells us repeatedly in the gospels that he is always present in the Poor and Afflicted—to whom we should all bow and kneel. It is perverse that some Christians make such a fuss about the bound text of God’s Word, carrying it processionally, holding it with reverence, never allowing it to touch the ground, but have never considered seriously this text of Matthew 25, in the light of which we would always catch God’s Needy before they hit the ground. It sometimes seems that it is to churchpeople in particular—to Christian Pharisees—that these words of Jesus are directed.

  But the first-century churchpeople, the people of the Way, took this lesson with all solemnity. It gave them their constant focus—on the poor and needy. Though this focus will be abandoned soon enough as Christian interest turns in the second century to theological hatred, in the third century to institutional triumphalism, and in the fourth to the deadly game of power politics, it has remained the focus of a few in every age. “Often, often often, goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise” is the repeated refrain of a medieval Irish poem, “The Rune of Hospitality”; and the figure of Christ in the guise of clowns, beggars, and fools roams the literatures of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and even Asia, from the earliest stories and plays of the Christian West to the novels of Shusaku Endo and the films of Federico Fellini. In every age, brothers and sisters of Jesus have come forward to heed the lesson, not least Dorothy Day, the twentieth-century saint of New York and founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who spent her life in service to the hungry and homeless, the displaced and dispossessed, who truly loved every Dostoyevskian idiot who crossed her path, and who once wrote:

  It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.

  But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that He speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that He gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that He gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that He walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that He longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ.…

  If we hadn’t got Christ’s own words for it, it would seem raving lunacy to believe that if I offer a bed and food and hospitality to some man or woman or child, I am replaying the part of … Martha or Mary, and that my guest is Christ. The
re is nothing to show it, perhaps. There are no halos already glowing round their heads—at least none that human eyes can see. It is not likely that I shall be vouchsafed the vision of Elizabeth of Hungary [thirteenth-century princess, later landgravine of Thuringia], who put the leper in her bed and later, going to tend him, saw no longer the leper’s stricken face, but the face of Christ. The part of a Peter Claver [seventeenth-century Jesuit who nursed Africans caught in the slave trade], who gave a stricken Negro his bed and slept on the floor at his side, is more likely to be ours. For Peter Claver never saw anything with his bodily eyes except the exhausted black faces …; he had only faith in Christ’s own words that these people were Christ. And when on one occasion [those] he had induced to help him ran from the room, panic-stricken before the disgusting sight of some sickness, he was astonished. “You mustn’t go,” he said, and you can still hear his surprise that anyone could forget such a truth: “You mustn’t leave him—it is Christ.” …

  To see how far one realizes this, it is a good thing to ask honestly what you would do, or have done, when a beggar asked at your house for food. Would you—or did you—give it on an old cracked plate, thinking that was good enough? Do you think that Martha and Mary thought that the old and chipped dish was good enough for their guest? …

  For a total Christian, the goad of duty is not needed—always prodding one to perform this or that good deed. It is not a duty to help Christ, it is a privilege. Is it likely that Martha and Mary sat back and considered that they had done all that was expected of them—is it likely that Peter’s mother-in-law grudgingly served the chicken she had meant to keep till Sunday because she thought it was her “duty”? She did it gladly; she would have served ten chickens if she had had them.

  If that is the way they gave hospitality to Christ, it is certain that that is the way it should still be given. Not for the sake of humanity. Not because it might be Christ who stays with us, comes to see us, takes up our time. Not because these people remind us of Christ … but because they are Christ.

  We have reached a stage in our reflection where ordinary prose breaks down and only the words of scripture or of saints and poets will do. None of us will be lost in the abyss of nothingness and nonexistence; we will all be called forth at the Last Judgment. As Emily Dickinson wrote:

  They dropped like Flakes—

  They dropped like Stars—

  Like Petals from a Rose—

  When suddenly across the June

  A Wind with fingers—goes—

  They perished in the Seamless Grass—

  No eye could find the place—

  But God can summon every face

  On his Repealless—List.

  But when we are called forth from the dust of death, the Just Judge will ask us if we lived by the Cosmic Code, the underlying principle that animates the universe, the code of justice and mercy, the code of caring for the neighbor who is in need. The Good Samaritans of this world, except in extraordinary cases, see only the man fallen among thieves, the person who needs help. They do not see Christ; they may never even have heard of him. But he is there, warming human encounters, softening the harshness of existence, lighting the darkness of faith, as 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.

  1 The passage from Colossians accords well enough with another, First Corinthians 14:34–36, concerning the subordination of women “in the assembly”—though this is widely thought to be a later interpolation since it goes against an earlier passage in the same letter (11:5), which takes it as a given that women are free to “pray and prophesy” publicly.

  2 Hoi hagioi (“the saints” or “the holy ones”) was a common first-century term for one’s fellow Christians, exactly parallel to the Hebrew ha-hasidim (regarding which, see note).

  VI

  The Word Made Flesh

  The Jesus the Beloved Disciple Knew

  WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?” asked Jesus of Peter. Peter’s answer—that Jesus was “Messiah” and “Son of God”—pleased Jesus; and since he did not deny these titles, we may assume that he was not simply flattered: he thought Peter had got it right. But though “Messiah” can be rightly used of only one man (since the Jews do not seem to have been expecting more than one), “Son of God” is an oft-used phrase in earlier biblical literature: it is used both of angels and of prophets, indeed of anyone who could be considered God’s mouthpiece. And we know that, like “Savior,” it was in currency within the Roman world as a description of Caesar—whichever Caesar happened to be occupying the imperial throne. The Christian use of such phrases was meant to convey that Caesar was no messiah, just another inevitable disappointment; Jesus was the one Messiah. Thus, Christians found themselves relying on a Greek acronym to affirm their most basic belief:

  This acronym, ICHTHUS in Roman letters, is also the Greek word for “fish” but it stands for

  in Roman letters Iesous Christos Uios Soter , meaning “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” The outline of a fish , which we find scratched into the walls of catacombs among the earliest examples of Christian iconography, masqueraded as a seemingly harmless ornament, the radical political message of which would be overlooked by the uninitiated.

  Did the first Christians mean by this that Jesus was “God’s Only-Begotten Son” and humanity’s only “Savior”? Apparently not. He was Christos, certainly (that is, God’s Anointed, his Messiah); and, therefore, of necessity he was “God’s Son” (that is, one who spoke God’s message) and he surely came to “save” Israel or, as the disciples on the road to Emmaus put it, “to set Israel free.” The Greek word soter means not only “savior” but “preserver” and “deliverer”—that is, the one who saves the polity from chaos, as Oedipus had saved Thebes from the terrorizing Sphinx. But to assert that Jesus was uniquely God’s Son and mankind’s savior seems to push beyond the articulations of the first Christians.

  The earliest Christian preaching, like Peter’s at Pentecost, emphasized that God’s raising of Jesus from the dead was the ultimate confirmation of his life and message. He had been “anointed” to bring “the Good News to the poor,” the afflicted, the lonely, the handicapped, the rejected—that is, to Israel—though, soon enough, the apostles come to believe that Christ’s message is for all without distinction. But thanks to Paul’s preaching, Christianity begins to deepen its understanding of Jesus’s role as “savior”; and this is done through Paul’s prayerful meditation on Christ’s sufferings and cross. He is not only God’s anointed healer and teacher. “Christ died for our sins,” Paul tells the Corinthians, and thus set us free. This is how he has saved us; and this is the underlying “message of the Gospel.”

  But even for Paul, Jesus’s “sonship” did not make him, in the words of the later creeds, “of the same substance as the Father.” He was a human son of God, made in God’s image like all human beings, but the perfect image of God because he was the only child of Adam and Eve to act in perfect obedience to God—“even to death on a cross.” None of the believers that we have encountered so far—neither Mark nor Matthew, neither Paul nor Luke, none of the apostles and none of the disciples who gathered around Jesus and then formed the early Church—considered Jesus to be God. This would have seemed blasphemy to them. Their belief in Christ was, after all, a form of Judaism; and Judaism was the world’s only monotheism. God had raised the man Jesus and made him Lord. Even though his is now the Name by which we are saved, he did not raise himself—such an idea would have been unthinkable.

  By the end of the first century, however, the Fourth Gospel, the one attributed to John, had reached its final form; and here we find, for the first time, Jesus acclaimed as God. This Gospel opens with a rewriting of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, which begins with the words “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” and goes on to describe how he went abo
ut it. John the Evangelist (whose relatively facile Greek precludes his identification with John the Visionary, author of Revelation) means to bring out the hidden meaning of God’s original Creation, as described at the outset of Genesis, that Book of the Beginning of All Things. He begins:

  In the beginning was the Word;

  the Word was in God’s presence,

  and the Word was God.

  He was present with God in the beginning.

  Through him all things came into being,

  and apart from him nothing came to be.

  What has come into being in him is life,

  life that is the light of human beings.

  The light shines on in darkness,

  for the darkness could not overpower it.…

  He was in the world

  that had come into being through him,

  and the world did not recognize him.

  To his own he came;

  yet his own did not accept him.

  But to the ones who did accept him

  he gave power to become God’s children.…

  And the Word became flesh

  and pitched his tent among us.

  And we have seen his glory,

  the glory as of a father’s only son,

  filled with enduring love.…

  And of his fullness

  we have all had a share—

  love answering to love.

  These are carved words; they have little in common with Mark’s roughness or Luke’s cheerfulness. Before them, Matthew’s occasional attempts at an elevated style seem downright informal. They are intended to be chanted in clouds of incense or incised in stone. Like a solemn organ prelude, they sound notes that let us know that we are no longer seated in a comfortable circle chatting with Paul and Peter, Martha and Mary. We are meant to bow our heads.