Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. (5 page)

Jesus was adamant that the men he called must put the mission first. In a striking passage in Matthew (10:34-38) he admitted that his work would cause dissension within families: “[A]nd a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” Sons against fathers, mothers against daughters, mothers-in-law against daughters-in-law. Although he called only men for public purposes, the fact that he mentions the womenfolk shows that he also recruited women to sustain the mission in various ways and expected them to serve with equal devotion—as, indeed, they did. In this difficult and hard-edged passage, Jesus stresses the absolutist nature of a vocation to serve him. It involved painful choices. “He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.”

The reference to the cross is significant. Jesus had just narrowly escaped death at the hands of angry bigots, and was never in any doubt about the danger of his mission. His launching of it coincided with—may have been accelerated by—the arrest of the Baptist. Andrew may not have been the only follower of the Baptist among the apostles, and certainly many were soon recruited among the mass of Jesus’s disciples. But Jesus cast his net wide, and though the core of his apostles were fishermen, he deliberately chose men of diverse occupations, including those who were anathema to the orthodox, such as tax collectors, or publicans as they were known. At the north end of the Sea of Galilee was a road from Damascus to Acre on the Mediterranean. At the boundary between the territory of Philip the Tetrarch and Herod Antipas, ruler of the area where Jesus was operating, was a customhouse, where tolls were exacted on goods passing along the road. Jesus passed it, saw Matthew sitting inside counting, and said to him, “Follow me.” As he said the words, the penetrating look in his eyes, as they met Matthew’s, is the subject of one of Caravaggio’s greatest paintings, now on display at the Contarelli Chapel in Rome. Matthew obeyed instantly.

Not all of those whom Jesus called responded. One of the saddest stories in the Gospels occurs in Mark 10 : 17-22. On the Judaean coast, a man came running up to him and knelt at his feet. He asked, “[W]hat shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” Jesus listed the commandments, and the man replied, “[A]ll these have I observed from my youth.” Jesus felt a flash of deep affection for this earnest believer and “beholding him loved him.” So he decided to call him, too, and said, “[S]ell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.” But the man felt it was asking too much: “And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions.”

The twelve apostles were enlisted early in Jesus’s ministry, and all three synoptics give their names (Lk 6:13-16; Mt 10 : 2-4; Mk 3 : 14-19). Luke’s list is Simon Peter and his brother Andrew; James and John, brothers whom Jesus called “the Sons of Thunder” because of their enthusiasm; Philip, the cautious one; Bartholomew (referred to as Nathanael, his other name, in John); Matthew; Thomas (later “Doubting Thomas”); James, the son of Alphaeus; Simon, known as the Zealot; Judas, brother of James; and Judas Iscariot. In the lists given by Matthew and Mark, Simon the Zealot is given as “the Canaanite,” and Thaddaeus is included instead of the first Judas. But Thaddaeus and this Judas may be the same person: in first-century Palestine, many men had more than one name, often a Greek name (like Andrew or Philip) as well as an Aramaic one, and some like Nathanael were called after their father. Bearing this in mind, the close conjunction of the lists is remarkable. It is likely, in my view, that all early Christians knew the names of the apostles, in order, by heart.

The twelve were special. They had particular functions and were given powers to carry them out. Mark says Jesus “ordained” them close to a high place, as was his custom, to begin the Christian priesthood, the “apostolic succession,” as it came to be called, which continues to this day, two thousand years later: “And he goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto him whom he would: and they came unto him . . . that he might send them forth to preach” (3:13-14).

Thus was Jesus’s mission prepared for and organized. What was its object? At whom was it aimed? And what were its methods?

I
N CHOOSING HIS APOSTLES, Jesus astonished them by the way in which he identified them, and by his knowledge of their lives. It led Nathanael, in John’s account, to hail him as “the Son of God . . . the King of Israel” (1 : 49). Jesus replied that he seemed easily impressed: “[T]hou shalt see greater things than these” (1 : 50). But it is important to note that Jesus, conscious as he was of supernatural powers of every kind, was unwilling to use them for display—that was one of the temptations he resisted in the wilderness. He was a reluctant miracle worker.

Three days after he chose his first apostles, as John relates, he attended a wedding at the town of Cana, not far from the shores of the Sea of Galilee, where his fishermen disciples worked. They went with him. It was a family affair. A member of his mother’s numerous clan was getting married. John’s account (2:1-11) of what he calls the “beginning of miracles” is one of the most fascinating episodes in the entire New Testament, proving as it does the authenticity of the account and its detailed accuracy. At the very least, it illuminates the intimacy between Jesus and his mother, her ability to read his mind.

Mary was anxious because Jesus had brought so many of his followers with him. Whether because of the extra uninvited, though welcome, guests, or for reasons not disclosed—mismanagement, as common in the first century AD as it is today—the wine ran out. Mary, concerned about the shame this would bring on her family, expected Jesus to do something about it. She told him, “They have no wine.” Her calm expectation that he would perform a miracle for a purely social purpose shows she was already fully aware of his powers. But her presumption brought a sharp retort: “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” From everything we know about him, it is impossible to see Jesus being rude to his mother—to anyone, indeed, but to her least of all. Certainly, that is not how Mary took his reply. With her instinctive maternal knowledge of his goodness and devotion to her, she interpreted his apparent refusal to help as a sure sign he would do what she wished. So she said calmly to the servants, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.”

Now comes the second detail which speaks truth. Jesus noticed six huge pots of stone, empty now but usually containing “two or three firkins apiece” (a firkin was eight gallons). He told the servants to fill them up with water, and when they had done so, he ordered, “Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast.” And now comes the third detail which conveys verisimilitude. The master of ceremonies (or “governor”), of a type that happily no longer exists—at least in the West—felt it incumbent on his dignity to pronounce on the quality of the wine. He told the bridegroom, “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.” One wonders what this self-important person could have said, in rebuke, if Mary and Jesus had permitted the wine to run out. As it was, Jesus had provided, by my calculations, nearly a thousand bottles of vintage quality. This was talked about among the drinking classes of northeast Galilee, the men terming it “glory.” The details of the new supply we may take to be correct, for where alcohol is concerned men rarely make statistical mistakes.

Cana, as it happens, was not the first miracle. For one had already occurred to enable Jesus to escape being murdered by the pious mob at the hilltop synagogue, and another when Jesus raised the draught of fish when calling Simon Peter and his colleagues. But all three miracles were reluctant, a response by Jesus to a situation rather than a deliberate use of his supernatural powers to impress.

Indeed, though working miracles was regarded as one of the most notable aspects of Jesus’s ministry at the time and ever since, Jesus did not place much importance on it. Twenty years after his death, St. Paul distinguishes between Hebrew and Greek culture: “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom” (1 Cor 1:22). In Jewish theology, God created nature, which itself was a miracle, or an unending series of miracles. And God’s decision to suspend nature on a particular occasion was another kind of miracle that punctuates the Old Testament as a sign of his power. Jesus was always prepared to demonstrate God’s power by miracle, when it was necessary to do so. But he repeatedly rejected the mere role of miracle worker as a human instrument of “signs and wonders.” Luke says he regarded the incessant clamor of the people for “signs” as itself the sign of “an evil generation”: “[T]hey seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it” (11 : 29). And in telling the story of Lazarus the beggar and the wicked rich man (Lk 16 : 19-31) Jesus makes it clear that it is preferable in God’s eyes that men show faith by listening to the holy truth, and by accepting it and following it, rather than by waiting for signs and miracles to convince them. Jesus taught that the truth was reasonable, that goodness made sense, that to follow his teaching and obey God’s commandments was a rational thing to do. Hence he was much closer to the Greek position than to the Jewish one. St. Paul’s work in giving Jesus’s message in terms of Greek culture was thus carrying out the Master’s intention, and St. Thomas Aquinas’s great theological structure in his thirteenth-century
Summa theologica,
showing Christianity as the moral architecture of reason, was the intellectual culmination of a process which Jesus began in Galilee twelve centuries before.

Nevertheless, Jesus performed miracles. I have counted dozens of occasions recorded by the evangelists in which they occurred. Three of them were multiple healings of the sick and exorcisms of those possessed by devils. The others concerned either individuals or incidents when Jesus interrupted the normal course of nature by stilling a tempest or causing a fig tree to wither. The evangelists record the miracles in different ways. Mark, reflecting the memories of St. Peter, who always reacted dramatically to miracles, records eighteen of them: indeed, his brief text is virtually an account of Jesus’s miracle ministry. Matthew’s much longer text records twenty, but he devotes most of his space to what Jesus said: his is essentially the “teaching Gospel.” Luke also notes twenty miracles, but he stresses the secondary place they occupied in Jesus’s work. Also the author of the Acts of the Apostles, he tries to show that mere men, the apostles, could perform healing miracles of exactly the same kind as Jesus himself did—one need not be the Son of God to exercise this derivative or vicarious power. Thus Luke’s account in Acts 9 : 32-42 shows Peter duplicating Jesus’s work in curing the paralytic Aeneas (Lk 5:18-26) and raising Dorcas (Lk 8 : 49-56). John records only nine miracles, though these include the Cana beginning and the most significant miracle of all, the raising of Lazarus from the dead when his body was already decomposing (11 : 1-44), which prefigures his own Resurrection. The only occasion when all evangelists record the same miracle is when Jesus fed the five thousand.

On most occasions when Jesus consented to perform a miracle, his motive was compassion. His heart went out to the sick, the infirm, the stricken, especially if they were old and had suffered the burden of incapacity for many years. When teaching to a synagogue, Jesus noticed an old woman in a pitiable state who “had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou are loosed from thine infirmity. And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God” (Lk 13:11-13). Here was Jesus the perceptive: noticing a dreadful case of debility in a crowded congregation and acting swiftly. More often, in the press of the crowds, it was the friends of the sick, or the sick themselves, who begged him to do something. Near Decapolis, the friends of a deaf and dumb man brought him to Jesus and “beseech[ed] him to put his hand upon him.” Jesus “took him aside” and “put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue.” Jesus then sighed, and said in Aramaic, “Be opened.” The man’s ears were immediately opened, “and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.” This was another case of compassion and, far from making it a “sign,” Jesus “charged them that they should tell no man.” But the more he insisted on silent gratitude, “the more a great deal they published it” (Mk 7:32-36).

Jesus gave little credit to those whose faith was inspired by a miracle he performed. He was more impressed by those who already had faith that he could perform one. Matthew (8: 5-13) and Luke (7:1-10) tell the touching story of a Roman officer, a centurion, who came up to him in Capernaum and beseeched him: “Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.” Jesus’s heart always warmed to those who cared for their underlings as well as their families, and immediately he said he would come and heal the servant. But the officer had complete faith in Jesus’s mere words. He explained, “I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.” He explained that he was not worthy that Jesus “shouldest come under my roof.” All he asked for was a command which he knew would be obeyed: “[S]peak the word only and my servant shall be healed.” This was the true kind of faith Jesus was looking for. He said to the crowd, “Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.” He took the occasion to warn that many who believed themselves chosen deluded themselves, and that the great mass of the saved should be drawn from “east and west”—making it clear that his mission was not just to the Jews but, above all, to the Gentiles, or to humanity as a whole. Matthew and Luke tell this significant story in almost identical words and insist the centurion’s orderly was healed from the hour Jesus spoke.