Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

  Jesus accepted this understanding of the heart and made it central to his perception of the human condition. In a passage attested by both Matthew and Luke, he said:

  No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. (Luke 6:43–45; Matt. 12:33–35; cf. Matt. 7:16–20)

  As a sage, Jesus made a commonsense observation about nature: one gathers figs and grapes from fig trees and vines, not from thorn or bramble bushes. The application of the observation is obvious and far-reaching: the tree and its fruits are an image for the self (the heart) and its behavior: a good self produces good behavior. The rest of the saying makes explicit the connection to the heart: a heart filled with good treasure produces good, and one filled with evil treasure produces evil. Thus what matters is the kind of tree one is, the kind of heart one has.

  Just as the rabbis spoke of the heart being inclined one of two different ways, so did Jesus. Identifying two comprehensive centers of ultimate loyalty, Jesus spoke of “treasures in heaven” and “treasures on earth,” symbolic of the infinite and finite respectively, and added, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:19–21; cf. Luke 12:33–34). That is, if one’s treasure is in the finite, “where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal,” then one’s heart will be preoccupied with the finite.

  The same two fundamental orientations appear in a passage in which Jesus spoke of the impossibility of serving two masters: “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13). “Wealth” by extension connoted all of the finite. The heart could be centered in God or the finite, the servant (slave) of one or the other. Thus what made a heart pure or impure was its center.

  Apparently, Jesus perceived most of his contemporaries as centered in the finite. In his parables, whose power depends upon the realistic portrayal of typical human behavior, people are concerned to receive what is theirs, undisposed to be generous to others, anxious about losing what they have, and fearful of defilement. In his teaching, he regularly identified four centers as most typically dominant in people’s lives: family, status, possessions, and piety. The last perception is particularly interesting. The heart can center in its own piety, its own holiness or purity, whether one ostentatiously displays it or not, for the fault lies not in displaying the piety but in holding to it as the basis of identity and distinction from others. Such a heart is not pure, as the conclusion of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14) shows: the tax collector, who appealed to the mercy of God and prayed for a pure heart, was praised instead of the Pharisee, who centered on his own purity.

  Thus the problem was the heart: what mattered was a pure heart. Centuries earlier, the author of Psalm 51 identified the problem in the same manner: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (51:10). The hope for a transformed heart was the basis of the new covenant of which Jeremiah spoke:

  But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. (31:33–34)

  Significantly, the passage combines the internalization of the Torah “upon their hearts” with knowing God.

  What was needed was a new heart. But how was the heart to be transformed? Obedience to the Torah was one way; indeed, the purpose of the Torah was to “incline one’s heart toward God.” Immersion in and meticulous observance of Torah in virtually every aspect of daily life reminded one constantly of God and, with the Torah more and more internalized within the psyche, oriented the heart toward God. Moreover, it worked. Judaism produced a number of notable saints through this method.

  However, this way had become normative among the religious, in part because of the particular circumstances facing Judaism in the Roman period and because of the particular intensifications of Torah that had established holiness as the exclusive way of being rightly related to God and as a blueprint for society. But as the normative way, this way cut off large numbers—perhaps most—of the Jewish people from a relationship to God and was responsible for the division within the people of God between the righteous and the outcast. Moreover, in Jesus’s perception, it was possible to posture this way, to follow the requirements of holiness without being transformed: “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me’” (Mark 7:6).

  Jesus spoke of another way of transformation. Most basically, it was the path of death: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).25 In the first century, crucifixion was widely known in Palestine as a form of execution practiced by the Romans—a slow, torturous, agonizing death inflicted upon those suspected of treason against the power that ruled the world. Customarily the condemned were required to carry the horizontal crossbeam to the place of execution; hence, “bearing one’s cross” was a stark symbol for death. The language of “following,” “coming after,” points to the image of a way or path. To follow after Jesus, to follow his way, meant walking the road to death—to deny one’s self and take up the cross.

  Even though some of the early followers of Jesus were literally crucified, the saying was metaphorical, as the earliest commentary on it suggests: “Let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily” (Luke 9:23).26 As a metaphor for an internal spiritual process, the “path of death” involved the death of the heart centered in the finite and the birth of a new heart centered in God. The way of death can be described either as a dying to the world or a dying to the self: the person dies to the world as the center of security and to the self as the center of concern. From this death emerges a new or pure heart centered in God.

  Many of the images and contrasts in the teaching of Jesus expressed this basic pattern. To become as a servant was to cease to have a will of one’s own, for servants/slaves in the ancient world were understood to be agents of their master’s will. Their will had died (Mark 9:33–35; Mark 10:42–44; Matt. 20:25–27; cf. Luke 22:25–26; Matt. 23:11). To become as a child was to become as an infant, a newborn (Matt. 18:2–4; Mark 10:15; Luke 18:17).27

  In words preserved four times in the Gospel tradition, Jesus contrasted humbling and exaltation: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 18:14; see also Luke 14:11; Matt. 23:12; 18:4). Self-exaltation or self-elevation is a natural response of the self to culturally validated accomplishment, for the culture’s standards have been internalized within the self through the process of socialization, and the self that meets those standards thus judges itself “good.” In the Gospel contexts of this saying, these standards are religious and social.28 The self in its own eyes thus “stands out” and becomes the basis for self-affirmation; it and its status have become the center.

  “Self-humbling” is the opposite. In the Hebrew Bible, to be humble was often associated with the objective state of poverty and affliction,29 but by the first century referred primarily to a subjective state, though still carrying connotations of poverty. To be humble was not to claim status, but to be internally without possessions, to be empty.30 Self-humbling was thus self-emptying, and the passage may be paraphrased, “Those who empty themselves will be exalted; those who exalt themselves will be emptied, will come to naught.”

  The closely parallel contrasts of first and last, finding one’s life and losing one’s life made basically the same point. Those who make themselves first will
be last, and those who put themselves last shall be first (Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30; Matt. 20:16); those who seek their lives will lose them, but those who let go of their lives will find them (Matt. 10:39; cf. Mark 8:35 and parallels; Luke 17:33; cf. John 12:25).

  The way as the path of death and rebirth of a new heart was embodied in the life and teaching of the early Christian movement. The apostle Paul, the earliest of the New Testament authors, wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:19–20), and he affirmed that this experience was common to all Christians.31 Such was also the case in the Jesus movement in Palestine, which grew directly out of Jesus’s teaching. The symbolism of baptism, its ritual of initiation, points intrinsically to death and resurrection, to new creation: one was plunged beneath the waters of death and returned to the night before creation, where one was created anew, born anew.

  The Jesus movement in Palestine not only preserved the teaching of Jesus concerning the path of death, but arranged it into comprehensive patterns that emphasized the teaching even more sharply. Mark’s Gospel as a whole can be construed as the Gospel of “the way”32 and the massive central section of Luke’s Gospel (9:51–18:14) as a journey toward death.33

  The way of transformation of which Jesus spoke was akin to his own experience. Intrinsic to the spirituality of a Spirit person is the internal experience of the death of self, sometimes involving a ritual of self-wounding, an ordeal, or participation in a myth of dismemberment that corresponds to inner psychic experience.34 Jesus’s ministry began with a ritual of death and rebirth, baptism; strikingly, the Gospels agree that on this occasion Jesus’s identity as “son” was first disclosed. Moreover, the baptism was followed immediately by the temptation in the wilderness, which can be understood as a Spirit person’s initiatory ordeal and encounter with the Spirit world. Jesus himself had “died to the world,” living without possessions, family, or home. Yet he did not make the details of his way normative, but only the basic pattern itself.

  Put positively, the path of death involved trusting radically in the compassion of God and letting go of the self and the world as the basis of security and focus of concern. This way was simultaneously hard and easy. It was hard especially for those who were quite secure and who measured up to the standards of culture internalized within their psyches, whether the decisive standards were wealth, status, or observance of the Torah. For them to let go of those standards and the self that met them was very difficult. Hence the way was the narrow way: “The gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:14; cf. Luke 13:24).

  Hence also the metaphor of death: dying is very hard and it is difficult to let go of finite centers. Yet it was also the easy way because it was a “letting go,” a cessation of striving. Moreover, it may have been easier for some, namely, the poor and the outcasts. Riches were not a temptation for the poor (except in societies that stress upward mobility); the poor knew that the world offered a scant measure of security. Righteousness was not a temptation for the sinner, social approval not a snare for the outcast. To die to a world in which one was poor, that pronounced one an outcast, was not as difficult as dying to a world in which one was financially secure, socially and religiously esteemed. Hence Jesus could say:

  Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matt. 11:28–30)

  The way of transformation thus involved becoming pure in heart through dying to the finite and living by radical trust in God. The world as the center of existence comes to an end. The form as well as the content of much of the sagely teaching of Jesus seemed designed to jolt his hearers out of their present world, their present way of seeing reality. The aphoristic sayings and parables are crystallized flashes of insight that also compel insight and frequently reverse ordinary understanding by bringing it into judgment. In short, even the form of Jesus’s wisdom teaching mediated and invited end-of-world.35

  Thus Jesus proclaimed a way of transformation that did not depend upon observing the requirements of the Torah as understood by the other renewal movements. Speaking of a divine compassion grounded in his own experience of God, he proclaimed a way of transformation whereby people could increasingly experience and live that awareness. By undergoing that path, they began the process of becoming good trees producing good fruit, of having hearts whose treasure was in heaven. Thus Jesus internalized holiness, just as he internalized the commandments against murder and adultery. Holiness was a matter of the heart, for what mattered was a pure heart. The way to purity of heart was not exclusively or even primarily through obedience to the Torah, but the path of dying to the self and the world.

  Those commentators throughout the centuries who have affirmed that Jesus was centrally concerned with the orientation and transformation of the heart are thus correct. What has not often been noted, however, is that Jesus’s teaching about the heart had a number of immediate socioreligious and historical-political implications in the context of the Jewish homeland in the first century. Affirming that purity was a matter of the heart cut the connection between holiness and separation as understood by the other renewal movements. That is, holiness was to be achieved neither by driving the Romans from the land nor by withdrawal from society nor by separation within society. Intensifying the Torah by applying it to purity of heart also destroyed the basis for dividing society into the righteous and the outcast, for “once the norms had been intensified . . . so that they were quite beyond the possibility of fulfillment,” applying to internal disposition as well as behavior, no group could claim that it alone was the “true Israel,” for “all alike were sinners.”36 Jesus’s teaching thereby provided a ground for overcoming the fragmentation of Jewish society.37

  Moreover, Jesus perceived that the orientation of the heart—its most deeply seated commitments—had historical-political consequences. He saw that the most fundamental commitments of his culture were leading to a collision course with Rome. Finally, the basic quality of a heart centered in God—compassion—had political implications. Compassion was to be the core value of the people of God as a historical community. Thus Jesus’s teaching as sage was not divorced from the conflict situation for which we have argued, but was integral to it.

  * * *

  Originally published in Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus (1984).

  Chapter 6

  Awe, Wonder, and Jesus

  PERHAPS NO ASPECT of the Gospel portrait of Jesus poses so many difficulties for the modern mind as the tradition that he was a “wonder-worker,” a performer of “miracles.” As a culture, we do not take it for granted that there are “miraculous powers” at work in the world, and we are suspicious of events that seem to require an explanation that transcends what we take to be the “natural” laws of cause and effect. Except in cases where a psychosomatic explanation seems possible, miracles violate the modern sense of what is possible.

  Within the church itself there is uncertainty about the miraculous elements in the Gospels. Christians in mainstream churches, those most open to the intellectual spirit and genuine achievements of the modern age, share in our culture’s suspicion and tend to ignore the miracle stories of Jesus or else interpret them in such a way that no violation of the modern understanding of what is possible occurs. More “conservative” and fundamentalist Christians tend to insist that the miracles really happened and suspect that those who are uncertain about their historical actuality do not really believe in the power of God. Some even argue that the miracles “prove” that Jesus was divine, turning them into an element in a tight rational argument. For charismatic Christians, the emphasis is different. Rather than seeing the miracles as unique and thus as “proofs” of who Jesus was, they are convinced that the same “gifts
of the Spirit” are still accessible and operative today. Understandably, they find no difficulty believing that such powers flowed through Jesus.

  Modern biblical scholarship has developed its own characteristic approach.1 Concerned with the meaning of the miracle stories as part of the early church’s story of Jesus, it has not been very much concerned with the historicity (the actual “happenedness”) of the miracles. The concern has been with what the Gospel writers intended to say with the miracle stories as components of a larger narrative or literary unit, the Gospels themselves. Such meanings are disclosed by paying meticulous attention to the relationship of a particular miracle story to the Gospel in which it is found, including its use of recurrent themes or motifs that are important to the author and to its placement within a particular Gospel. Attention is also paid to the relationship between the miracle stories and the larger literary-religious tradition of which they are a part. The early Christians who put the miracle stories of Jesus into their present form did so not only in light of their post-Easter experience of the living Christ, but also as part of a rich literary-religious tradition constituted by the Jewish religion and the Hebrew Bible (which was still their sacred scripture). Not surprisingly, they often alluded to their tradition as they told their stories about Jesus.