Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  The flesh of Jesus is the bread of the poor, the sick, the miserable, the dispossessed—their nourishment. “For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow into our lives, so does the encouragement we receive through Christ,” Paul tells the Corinthians. Whatever pain we suffer, he has suffered. However acute our suffering, he too has borne the whips, the thorns, the nails, the lance, the cross. “It makes me happy to be suffering for you now, and in my body to complete all the hardships that still must be undergone by Christ for the sake of his Body, the Church,” Paul tells the Colossians. Because Jesus meant to sympathize with the pain of every man and woman, his sufferings continue in us and ours in him. “To sympathize” means literally “to suffer with.” “Though he possessed divine estate,” goes a primitive Christian hymn, quoted by Paul to the Philippians,

  he was not jealous to retain

  equality with God.

  He cast off his inheritance,

  he took the nature of a slave,

  and walked as man among men.

  He emptied himself to the last

  and was obedient to death,

  to death upon a cross.

  While huddled with others in a London air-raid shelter in 1940, Edith Sitwell listened through the night to the sounds from the sky, both bombs and rain:

  Still falls the Rain—

  Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—

  Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails

  Upon the Cross.…

  Still falls the Rain—

  Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:

  He bears in His Heart all wounds—those of the light that died,

  The last faint spark

  In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark

  The wounds of the baited bear—

  The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat

  On his helpless flesh … the tears of the hunted hare.

  Despite the bombs, the rain, the mercy of Christ, is falling through the universe:

  Still falls the Rain—

  Then—O Ile leap up to my God: who pulles me doune—

  See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:

  It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

  Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart

  That holds the fires of the world—dark-smirched with pain

  As Caesar’s laurel crown.

  Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man

  Was once a child who among beasts has lain—

  “Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.”

  “I have come to believe,” said Martin Luther King not long before he died in a pool of his own blood, “that unmerited suffering is redemptive.” This can only be so if our sufferings are taken up into the redeeming sufferings of Christ. Like King, Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated for his defense of the poor and mistreated. Having pronounced the words of offering over the bread and wine, he was gunned down at the altar by a Salvadoran death squad, his blood spattering over the Bread of Life and mixing with the Wine of Salvation.

  The Church makes a bloody entrance into the world. In John’s Passion account, the Roman soldiers smash the shinbones of the crucified victims to hasten their deaths. When they come to Jesus, he seems already dead, so they do not break the bones of this Paschal Lamb without flaw. Just to be sure, however, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance, and at once blood and water flowed out”—witnessed, writes John, “by the one who saw it,” the Beloved Disciple. This blood and water, the last drops of Jesus’s wracked body, seem to have flowed copiously, if we accept the visual testimony of that strange Fifth Gospel, the Shroud, which may have been a treasure of the church of the Beloved Disciple, the same church that treasured the evolving Fourth Gospel.3 In the early Christian centuries, the blood and water from the side of Jesus were taken as the principal sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism, symbolic of the Church’s birth. The Church is born from the side of Christ as Eve was born from Adam. Humanity is redeemed by humanity—by the human suffering of Jesus issuing forth in even the last effusions of his human body. “The Church’s one foundation,” runs the grand old Methodist hymn,

  Is Jesus Christ her Lord;

  She is his new creation

  By water and the word:

  From heaven he came and sought her

  To be his holy bride;

  With his own blood he bought her,

  And for her life he died.

  Jesus is the bridegroom. We are the bride.

  1 There are several extant (and partially extant) writings, all dating to the second century or later, which are sometimes given the designation “gospel.” These are works that were excluded from the New Testament (when its canon was closed in the fourth century) because they were not believed to have issued from apostolic auspices—and, therefore, were not seen as authentic witnesses to Jesus. These apocryphal “gospels” tend to be collections of sayings (therefore, not true gospels) or fictional fantasies about Jesus, usually influenced by Gnostic imaginings. A few reputable scholars (e.g., John Dominic Crossan, Helmut Koester) take one or another of these—such as the Gospel of Peter or, more defensibly, the Gospel of Thomas—seriously, but find I cannot. John Meier disposes conclusively of their arguments in A Marginal Jew, 1:112ff.

  2 The Medieval legend of Prester (or Presbyter) John derives from this self- description of the author of the three Johannine letters, as well as from the enigmatic statement of Jesus at the end of John’s Gospel that the Beloved Disciple, assumed in the Middle Ages to be John the Apostle, might “remain until I come”—that is, not die but live until the Second Coming of Jesus at the end of the world. Prester John was, therefore, imagined to be an undying king who ruled an ideal realm in deepest Asia (or Africa). As late as the sixteenth century, he figures in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. Pope Alexander III in the twelfth century sent urgent letters to him by a special messenger, who never returned.

  3 The Fourth Gospel presents the Beloved Disciple as running with Peter to the empty tomb to check out Mary Magdalene’s story. The Beloved Disciple, younger and swifter, reaches the tomb first but, out of deference, awaits Peter’s arrival before entering. They both see the “the shroud lying flat” but only the Beloved Disciple, who alone among the male disciples had followed Jesus to the cross, “saw and believed” because of this sight. It is possible that the Beloved Disciple gathered up the Shroud, which was in later centuries associated with the Johannine church, especially its community in the city of Edessa in present-day Turkey.

  VII

  Yesterday, Today, and Forever

  The World after Jesus

  ON CALVARY, in the pause between the lancing of Christ and the arrival of Nicodemus with his hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes, his lengths of linen, and his permission from Pilate to remove the body and place it in the new-hewn garden tomb—in the deepest silence of human grief, on that most terrible of the world’s many terrible hills—John alone has the presence of mind to recall to us the dry-throated prophecy of Zechariah, rendered three centuries earlier: “And I will pour out upon the House of David and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look on me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for [the death of] his firstborn.”1

  But in every age since Jesus’s, the human race has done its best, as did the first Christians, not to look on him whom we have pierced. Not unnaturally, we prefer to this moment of abysmal bitterness the glory of the resurrection—which has surely led to the marked preference of the West for happy endings that come as a delightful surprise, wrested from most unlikely dramatic ingredients. Our most common reference to the horror of the crucifixion is the sanitized cross, which, whether Protesta
nt-pure or festooned and entabled in the manner of the Eastern churches, seems determined to keep our mind off the “worm and no man” (of Psalm 22) who hung there, the “man of sorrows” (of Isaiah), one “acquainted with grief,” in whom “no comeliness” remained “to attract us” and “from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze.” The crucified criminal, open-mouthed with pain and dripping with blood, is exiled to the cellars of Latin excess and the storerooms of masochistic bad taste.

  The poor and the miserable may know better. Whether under a wayside Polish crucifix or a Baroque depiction of the Ultimate Agony in a Mexican cathedral, the bowed people one sees on their knees before this image seldom have the patina of the well-heeled and self-satisfied. Nor is it only down-and-out Christians who find their way to the man of sorrows. Asher Lev, the Hasidic prodigy of Rabbi Chaim Potok’s affecting novels, finds himself in the Duomo of Florence, his eyes riveted on Michelangelo’s final Pietà:

  I stared at the geometry of the stone and felt the stone luminous with strange suffering and power. I was an observant Jew, yet that block of stone moved through me like a cry, like the call of seagulls over morning surf, like—like the echoing blasts of the shofar sounded by the Rebbe. I do not mean to blaspheme. My frames of reference have been formed by the life I have lived. I do not know how a devout Christian reacts to that Pietà. I was only able to relate it to elements in my own lived past. I stared at it. I walked slowly around it. I do not remember how long I was there that first time. When I came back out into the brightness of the crowded square, I was astonished to discover that my eyes were wet.

  Asher Lev remains, according to his own lights, “an observant Jew,” but one who resolves to paint crucifixions, not because he is turning into a Christian but simply because “there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.” This strikes me as just: however we avert our eyes from his reality, the image of the crucified holds us and will not let go. In the end, it has little to do with whether one believes Jesus to have been Messiah or Son of God. One can believe, if one prefers, that he never existed—or, at least, that he never in life occupied the position of social or theological centrality that the gospels assign to him. But the image does not let go. Even if it explains nothing of heaven (or even of earth), it embodies the depths of human pain.

  “Traditions are born,” says Asher Lev, “by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries.” In the case of Christianity, these acts and ideas have often been misidentified. This is because the radical society of friends, of free and equal men and women, that came forth from the side of the crucified was quickly overwhelmed by ancient patriarchy and has been overwhelmed in every era since by the social and political forms of the age. As we look back over the ages of monarchical popes and princely bishops, engaged in war games and power struggles with one another, these players of old shrink in size and begin to resemble figures on a chessboard, retaining little of lasting relevance for us.

  But the “ideas and acts” have been hurled across the centuries; and whenever an individual or gathering has had the courage to confront the Gospel anew, the society of its time has experienced transformation. When the apostles and martyrs were gone and Christianity had compromised itself by becoming part and parcel of the Roman state, some men and women remembered the desert of the Jews and sought it out as the natural place for a meeting with God. These hermits and anchorites became the first Christian monks and nuns, purifying a religion that would otherwise have devolved into mere political appendage and social decoration, not unlike its cultic pagan predecessors. But the desert people rediscovered the earth-shattering encounter with God that had occupied the lives of figures from Abraham to Paul; and they gave the West a consistent tradition of spirituality and mysticism. When the medieval papacy was growing into the most splendid irreligious despotism the world had ever known, a young man whose fun-loving friends called him “Francesco” stripped himself naked in the public square of Assisi in Umbria and dedicated his life to Christ’s poor, definitively separating true religion from pomp of any kind and giving the Western world a conscience it can never quite get rid of. When in the late seventeenth century George Fox and his fellow Quakers began to read the gospels, Acts, and letters of Paul, it seemed to them as if no one had ever read them before, for they rediscovered there the blueprint for Christianity as the radical “society of friends” it had once been and the theological courage to oppose slavery, prisons, capital punishment, war, and even the unholy union of church and state.

  Through the history of the West since the time of Jesus, there has remained just enough of the substance of the original Gospel, a residuum, for it to be passed, as it were, from hand to hand and used, like stock, to strengthen, flavor, and invigorate new movements that have succeeded again and again—if only for a time—in producing alteri Christi, men and women in danger of crucifixion. It has also produced, repeatedly and in the oddest circumstances, the loving-kindness of the first Christians. Malcolm Muggeridge, the supremely secular British curmudgeon, who cast a cold eye over so many contemporary efforts and enterprises, was brought up short while visiting an Indian leprosarium run by the Missionaries of Charity, the sisters founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He had always imagined secular humanism to be the ideal worldview but realized, while strolling through this facility, built with love for those whom no one wanted, that no merely humanist vision can take account of lepers, let alone take care of them. To offer humane treatment to humanity’s outcasts, to overcome their lifetime experience of petty human cruelties, requires more than mere humanity. Humanists, he realized with the force of sudden insight, do not run leprosariums.

  But it is also true that the West could never have realized some of its most cherished values without the process of secularization. The separation of church and state was achieved in the teeth of virulent Christian opposition, as was free speech, universal suffrage, tolerance, and many other values we would not be without. That these values flow from the subterranean river of authentic Christian tradition points up, once more, the paradoxical validity of the distinctions Jesus made between the religious establishment and true religious spirit.

  United Nations headquarters in New York bears on its facade the great antiwar quotation from the prophet Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” But this does not mean that Jews, Christians, and Muslims—these Peoples of the Book to whom the quotation should be most meaningful—are the world’s most committed proponents of peace. The UN’s magnificent milestone, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, grew out of the twentieth century’s European wars, to be sure, but also out of the subterranean river of Western values—to such an extent that much of its language and form are modeled on the American Declaration of Independence. Mankind’s most effective check on the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Universal Declaration could have issued only from Judeo-Christian sources (to which non-Western tyrants everywhere give witness when they take exception to the declaration for espousing values not “indigenous” to their cultures). Though it is only a weapon of words, it is also a never-failing font for raising consciousness worldwide, and it stands as an unassailable intellectual (and even emotional) bulwark against political cruelty in all its many forms. But the fact that it is obviously founded on Gospel values does not mean that we should look to Christian forces to uphold the declaration.

  The Western values of individual destiny, hope for the future, and justice for all began in the world of the Jews, the inventors of the West. These values were then elaborated into an interpersonal tradition, which holds freedom and kindness in tension and continues to evolve as the Spiritual Story of the West. But the West has become the world; and this river of Judeo-Christian values is now accessible to all, and everyone can drink from its life-giving stream. If we
find shining examples of true Christian spirit in the lives of people like George Fox and Mother Teresa, we find equally compelling examples of the opposite in such contemporary “Christians” as the blood-soaked butchers of Rwanda and Serbia. Far more impressive than most Jewish or Christian lives are the examples of a Muslim economist like Mohammed Yunus, who has created the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which pioneered the financing of businesses run by women too poor to offer collateral, or a Buddhist like the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has sacrificed a normal family life and puts her own life on the line daily for the sake of wresting freedom of speech and assembly from the fascist dictatorship of Myanmar. Kindness and care for one’s fellow man, like the actions of the Good Samaritan, cannot be ascribed to one group of people more than another.

  Does this then leave us with a spiritual tradition that has become so universalized that it may be claimed by anyone but can no longer boast any characteristic proponents?

  WITH THE FRIGHTENED WOMEN of Jerusalem, we have stood on Calvary, where so many of the building blocks of our world were hewn—where even opposition to the death penalty began. With the children of Rome, we have wandered over the Janiculum and, in so doing, have reacquainted ourselves with our own ancient history—but in a freer, kinder world than the ancient Romans could ever have known. Let us now descend to the streets of Trastevere and ask once more the question Did the life and death of Jesus make any difference—to the world and to Trastevere?