Jesus of Nazareth

by Gerhard Lohfink

  A Paradox

  Thus in his parables Jesus can say that the reign of God comes as a pure miracle “of itself” (recall the parable of the seed growing secretly), but he can also say that it must be seized with ultimate decision if it is to come. Is that a contradiction? Not necessarily, but it is a paradox. Apparently both things need to be said if one wants to speak accurately about the reign of God. The paradox must not be resolved, any more than the tension between the present and future natures of the reign of God may be relaxed.

  Jesus was a master of brief, striking sayings and skilled at telling stories in images and parables. Obviously, he did not invent the parable form, which had long existed both in the ancient world and in Israel. But Jesus took old, existing forms to a new level. The number of parables we have from him is also outside the norm. If we exclude the similitudes and images in the Gospel of John, which have an entirely different character, we come to a total of about forty parables in the Synoptic Gospels. That is unique in antiquity.

  But it is not simply a matter of quantity. Jesus’ parables and images have never been equaled in quality either. With them he leads his listeners into a world with which they are already familiar or at least one they have heard about, a world he describes with accurate realism. But at the same time he makes that world alien and thus blows up the well-worn paths of customary pious thinking. Jesus wants to show that the reign of God has its own logic. It does not fit in the usual molds of religious talk about God. Jesus’ saying also applies to his own language: “no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins” (Mark 2:22).

  Chapter 8

  Jesus and the World of Signs

  Jesus didn’t just talk. He didn’t just announce the reign of God. He acted not only through words but just as intensively through gestures, symbols, and signs. Obviously, language itself is a system of signs, but this chapter is about Jesus’ physical conduct, which surprisingly often was concentrated in formal “symbolic acts.”

  The Bodily Sphere

  Jesus embraced children when they were brought to him, laid his hands on them and blessed them (Mark 10:16). He embraced1 the rich man who asked him about eternal life (Mark 10:21). He sat at table with toll collectors and sinners (Mark 2:15). He washed his disciples’ feet and dried them (John 13:3-5). He healed sick people, not through mere words, but usually by touching them as well. He laid his hands on them (Mark 6:5). He took Peter’s mother-in-law by the hand and lifted her up (Mark 1:31), just as he did the daughter of Jairus, the head of the synagogue (Mark 5:41). He touched a leper to heal him (Mark 1:41). He put his fingers into the ears of a deaf man with a speech impediment and touched his tongue with his saliva (Mark 7:33). He spat2 in a blind man’s eyes and laid hands on him (Mark 8:23). For another blind person he made a paste of dirt and saliva, spread it on his eyes, and ordered him to wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:6-7).

  Of course many of these physical actions were simply part of ancient culture: before a formal meal one had to wash one’s feet; people embraced each other in greeting; laying on of hands was part of healing, and saliva was used therapeutically on the eyes. All that may be quite usual and a matter of course.

  And yet there is more here, as is clear in the healing of the leper as told in Mark 1:40-45. Jesus touches the leper, and that was not common. It was, in fact, forbidden and shunned. According to Leviticus 13:45-46 lepers had to wear torn clothing and leave their hair unkempt, men had to cover their beards, and they must call attention to themselves by shouting “unclean! unclean!” No one was to come near them. Jesus’ touching of the leper was a gesture that overcame a deep social rift in antiquity. It is a helping, healing, community-creating deed.

  Just as people were supposed to stay away from lepers, they were also supposed to keep their distance from public sinners. In the Israel of Jesus’ time it was simply not “the thing” to eat with “toll collectors and sinners.” The view of Jesus’ contemporaries in Judaism was that the tax and toll collectors made their money in dishonorable ways. They were looked on as thieves and robbers. One who followed the Torah would never, ever eat with them.

  It was customary as well to wash one’s feet before a banquet, but it was certainly not customary for the one called master and lord to wash the feet of his table companions. That was something for servants or slaves to do. Thus, many of Jesus’ little gestures and signs broke through what was customary, even though they were still embedded in the culture of the world of the time.

  But above all we must see that, for Jesus, behind the gestures and attitudes that were otherwise well-established in antiquity stood a biblical awareness of the human being. For in all this he was always also making a statement about the bodily nature of the human and thus about a crucial dimension of human existence. The human is dust and earth, but earth into which God has breathed his own breath (Gen 2:7), and therefore Jesus can make a paste of earth and spread it on a blind man’s eyes. This act is more than an instance of natural healing, and it has not the least thing to do with magical practices. It makes it clear that healing and liberation are not something purely spiritual or merely internal. Earth comes to the aid of humanity (Rev 12:16), and the body is to be redeemed just as is the soul.

  It seems to me that the fact that Jesus had a deep relationship with physical attitudes, the language of the body, and the world of signs is of great significance, because precisely in this it becomes clear that he lived in an unbroken relationship to human physicality. Jesus is not alien, helpless, or disturbed in his relation to the body; for him, body and bodiliness are indispensable aspects of humanity.

  Jesus takes the body and its needs seriously. No one could have said of him what antiquity said of the pagan philosopher Plotinus and what Athanasius reported of the Christian hermit Antony: Plotinus “lived like someone who was ashamed to have been born into a human body,”3 and Antony “blushed” when he ate in the presence of others.4

  The story of Plotinus reveals the absolutizing of the spiritual that was possible in the world of Greek culture, and in reading the description of Antony’s life we need to be aware that anti-bodily tendencies from late antiquity had penetrated Christianity so that the language of its legends distorted the reality of the saints’ lives. But supposing that Antony really did regard eating as something slightly indecent: what would he have thought if he had seen Jesus at a banquet with toll collectors and sinners that most certainly was not as silent and respectable as depicted in the paintings of the Last Supper in Christian art? And what kind of confusion would have overcome him if he had been involved in what Luke relates in chapter 7 of his gospel?

  One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. (Luke 7:36-38)

  Jesus is not upset in this story. He defends the woman against the criticism that begins immediately to be hurled at her. He interprets her action as a sign of her faith. The uninhibited behavior of the woman and that of Jesus are a match. Jesus understands. He knows what the woman’s signs mean. He has no fear of physical behavior.

  The incarnational nature of Jesus’ work is obvious in his deeds of healing but also in all his signs and gestures: God’s salvation must enter into the world and penetrate every facet of its reality. It is not just a matter of changing minds. It is just as much about matter. Nothing can be left out. Redemption is meant for the whole of creation. The history of revelation has not been a progressive dissolution of the worldly but a more and more comprehensive incarnation, a deeper and deeper saturation of the world with the Spirit of God.5 God has “moved in on us”
to do us good.

  A Demonstrative Healing

  Surprisingly often Jesus’ behavior concentrates into a formal symbolic act. The meaning of that will be clearer from the following example. I will begin with an incident that is related in Mark 3:1-6:

  Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

  No question: it is not only a person’s illness that is being healed here. This is more: the healing becomes a demonstration, provoked by Jesus’ opponents who are watching his every move, even lurking about in the hope that they can put the law on him. That very attitude forces Jesus to react quite clearly. He calls the crippled man forward. This healing is meant to be a provocation. It is to show that the Torah is to be interpreted in light of what God really wants: in this case, to save life or give back life that has been lost or diminished, whatever the circumstances.

  The healing becomes a symbolic act that says something fundamental about Jesus’ attitude toward the Torah. What really should happen privately and quietly, namely, the healing of a person, becomes in the face of the hardening of his opponents a public, provocative sign that extends far beyond the pure act of healing.

  New Family

  Mark 3:20-35 brings us a step further. We could title this part of the text “The Founding of a New Family.”6 The three-part story first presents us with the kind of enmity Jesus encounters when he begins to gather Israel for the reign of God. The resistance comes from two quarters: Jesus’ own relatives, who simply call him “crazy” (3:21), and the Jerusalem authorities, who have sent scribes to Galilee to observe Jesus. They, in turn, demonize Jesus by saying he is possessed by an evil spirit and does his miracles with the aid of the supreme evil spirit (3:22). Jesus warns the scribes with a saying about sin against the Holy Spirit, but he dismisses his relatives, who have come to put him under house arrest, with the curt question, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” (3:33).

  But the narrative intends more than simply to illustrate the resistance to Jesus. It only gets to its real point when Jesus constitutes a “new family,” the family of those who do the will of God: “And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’” (3:34-35).

  In Israel, “doing the will of God” in and of itself meant following the Torah. But that cannot be what is intended in this situation, because Jesus’ family and relatives certainly kept the Torah. The common formula has acquired a new meaning. Here “doing the will of God” can only mean learning from Jesus what the living will of God is for “today,” the today that has broken upon Israel with Jesus’ appearing, and then responding obediently to this “today.” Whoever does that becomes Jesus’ brother, sister, and mother, and so belongs to Jesus’ new family.

  As important as it is to rightly understand what “the will of God” has to mean in this passage, it is equally important to take the form of the saying seriously. Jesus is formulating his words here not merely in high rhetorical style, but even in juridical terms.7 Looking at the people seated around him, he speaks a declaratory formula analogous to one that was used at marriages in Israel (and also in divorces):8 “This is my mother, and these are my brothers!” The whole scene—like the healing of the man with the withered hand—is a kind of demonstration or illustration. We could also say that it is a definitive statement of intent. And yet such terminology is not adequate to what is happening here. Jesus wants to do more than merely declare or illustrate, just as the symbolic actions of the Old Testament prophets were more than illustrations or demonstrative declarations of intent. There is something creative in a symbolic action; it establishes a new reality. In our case it even has a formal-juridical dimension: Jesus releases himself from his physical relations and establishes a “new family.”

  So what is related in Mark 3:20-35 is not a mere incident, and what he says about those who now follow the will of God is not simply rhetoric. Anyone who knows what clan and family mean in the Middle East can only see in Jesus’ distancing himself from his own family an event that cuts deeply into social relationships, something that is anything but innocuous.

  The Installation of the Twelve

  Finally, the installation of the Twelve in Mark 3:13-19 has a juridical-institutional dimension. I have already mentioned these texts in chapter 4, but only in regard to the fact that it is one of the clearest pieces of evidence for the “gathering of Israel” Jesus intended. Here my concern is with the institutional dimension of the event.

  Both the carefully preserved list of the Twelve, with Simon Peter as the first, and the verb epoiēsen (= “he created” or “he installed,” from Greek poiein) show that this is a symbolic action that creates a new reality within Israel and also has institutional character, for there is no other comparable complete list of names in the early church, except for the Seven in Acts 6:5. In the Old Testament, “create” can be used for installation in office, for example, of judges or priests,9 and such a public-official action is likewise intended here. Both the list and the verb indicate that this is something special, deeply embedded in memory.

  When Jesus called the Twelve out of a larger group of disciples and set them before the others as a precisely defined group, it was in the first place a vivid illustration, a demonstration of his will to gather all Israel. But here again we would underestimate the depth dimension of the symbolic action if we saw it only as that. It is also an initiation of the future, of something that is already proleptically realized in a prophetic sign. In the beginning of realization the future is already projected in advance.

  Jesus’ symbolic actions open up a new reality, institute meaning, put in place a reality into which one can enter. To that extent they have a basic sacramental structure and are the preliminary stages of the church’s later sacraments. With the establishment of the Twelve and their preaching of the reign of God the existence of eschatological Israel has already begun.

  “He created the Twelve”—anyone familiar with the Bible hears the fixed formula “God created” from the creation account in Genesis 1:1–2:4 in the background here. But there is also an echo of Deutero-Isaiah, who says again and again that God “has created” his people (e.g., Isa 43:1, 21) and “will create” new things for his people (Isa 43:19). With Jesus’ institution of the Twelve, the promises from the book of Isaiah begin to be fulfilled definitively. The new creation of Israel is beginning.

  If Jesus did anything in the way of creating institutions, it was primarily in the creation of the Twelve. This symbolic action has a juridical dimension. However, it was not for the sake of a church about to be newly founded that would take Israel’s place in the history of salvation; it was for the sake of the eschatological Israel that was to be gathered. It was out of that eschatological Israel that Jesus instituted and founded that the church came into being after Easter.10

  The Constitution of a New Reality

  The first section of this chapter spoke of Jesus’ gestures and attitudes, the next three about a demonstrative healing (Mark 3:1-6), the institution of a new family (Mark 3:34-35), and the installation of the Twelve (Mark 3:13-19). The number of symbolic actions that accompanied Jesus’ appearance was certainly much, much greater. We must also say something about Jesus’ solemn entry into the city of Jerusalem (Mark 11:1-11), the subsequent action in the Temple (Mark 11:15-19), and Jesus’ gesture with the bread and wine at the Last Supper (Mark 14:22-25). But those three symbolic action
s are closely related to one another: they begin Jesus’ passion. Therefore they need to be treated in this book at a later time, namely, in chapter 15 (“Decision in Jerusalem”).

  But by now it should already be clear that Jesus did not only act through his words. He also acted in gestures and signs that often concentrated themselves into symbolic actions. In this way much of his life acquired a symbolic dimension: for example, his celibacy, which we will also need to discuss (chaps. 13 and 14). But none of it is symbolic in the pale, watered-down sense in which people today, surrounded as they are by traffic signs, pictograms, and computer symbols, think of signs and symbols. The symbols and signs in the life of Jesus create meaning. They constitute new reality. In everything he did—and above all in his symbolic actions—Jesus was creating the beginning of the eschatological Israel.

  Chapter 9

  Jesus’ Miracles

  Human words have enormous power. They can tear down or build up. They can gather and scatter. Words can thrust the world into deep distress, and they can give rise to an unending sequence of events. Once the concept of human rights was put into words it could no longer be banished from history. Since the Sermon on the Mount was composed, it has not ceased to incite silent revolutions. Nevertheless, it would be a fundamental mistake to think that the world is governed only by words and that only words set history in motion.

  For Jesus the word did indeed play a major role: he instructed and taught, he corrected and warned, he interpreted events prophetically, he preached the Gospel of the reign of God, and more than that: he proclaimed it publicly. And yet Jesus did not just talk. He not only announced the reign of God. His work was not merely a “word event.” His whole public activity from beginning to end was shot through with action the evangelists call “deeds of power” (dynameis) and “signs” (sēmeia).1 For centuries the church has called these “miracles.” Anyone who wants to say anything about Jesus cannot avoid engaging with his miracles. This chapter will have to show what that word can mean.