Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. (8 page)

When Jesus was asked “[W]ho is my neighbour?” (Lk 10:29), his answer was: everyone. He turned compassion, which all of us feel from time to time for a particular person, into a huge, overarching gospel of love. He taught the love of mankind as a whole. The Greek word for this is
philanthrōpia,
“philanthropy,” which has since become threadbare with use and stained by misuse. It did not exist in Jesus’s day as a concept. The idea of loving all humanity did not occur to anyone, Greek or barbarian, Jew or Gentile. Everyone’s compassion—love—was selective. The Greeks were taught to hate the barbarians, just as Jews were taught to hate Gentiles and Samaritans. The Romans despised the peoples they conquered. All free men and women hated and feared slaves. Aristotle, perhaps the most sophisticated and enlightened man of his age, dismissed slaves as mere “animated machines.” The intellectual, social, and racial climate of Jesus’s day was implacably hostile to his message in this respect. The society he entered was one in which pious Jews taught and were taught that Gentiles without the law were accursed. What he tried to show was that compassion had, quite literally, no limits. Otherwise it was false. Benevolence was meaningless if it failed to be universal. Here was a new commandment as important as any in the Decalogue, or all of them together. God was the model. He loved
all
human beings. And anyone who drew distinctions and made exceptions on grounds of nationality or race or religious beliefs or opinions or age or sex or profession or past record of sinfulness was not heading for the Kingdom of God. On the contrary, he would find its gates shut.

One principal reason Christianity later spread all over the world was that Jesus himself was a universalist. “I . . . will draw all men unto me,” he said in John 12:32. He insisted, “God so loved the world . . . that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” God had sent him to earth not to condemn the world, or any part of it, “but that the world through him might be saved” (Jn 3 : 16-17). There are no restrictions or qualifications in this universal mission. When he gave his apostles their final instructions about their missionary tasks ahead, he set no geographical, social, national, or racial limits. They were to “go . . . into all the world” and “teach all nations” (Mk 16:15; Mt 28:19).

This universalism of Jesus stretched from his Incarnation to the Crucifixion. His mother was Jewish by birth but his Father was God, soaring above all personal distinctions. He had no home, no country, no race, no characteristics tying him to a tribe or a nation or a locality. He belonged to the Kingdom, outside time and space. But he was united to all men by love. He was philanthropy—the love of man—incarnate, and his sacrifice on the cross was the supreme philanthropic act in his life on earth and for all time: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). But by friends he meant all without exception. There was nothing exclusive about Jesus and his teaching. His message was the most inclusive of all such communications. No one before had, and no one since has, so confidently and warmly and indeed naturally opened his arms to the entire human race.

T
HE APPEAL OF JESUS’ S teaching is clear enough. For wherever he went, for the best part of three years, he attracted large crowds. It was not that This message was popular, though much of it was. But some of it made hard demands and set a high standard of virtue and self-sacrifice. Yet his teaching was mesmeric. All could hear it, though he often spoke to multitudes in the open. So his voice was distinct, and resonant. It pleased them all: there was no weariness. The truth is, Jesus was not so much a rhetorician, or a preacher, as a poet. He thought and reasoned and spoke as a poet does—in images, flashes of insight and metaphors from the world of nature. All the time he taught he was creating little pictures in the minds of the men and women who listened to him. He was the poet of virtue, the bard of righteousness, the minstrel of divine love. His talk was a rhapsody and when he exhorted, his words formed palinodes and lyrics.

It is fitting that his birth should have been cast amid the three poems Luke reproduces in his Gospel. They are the Magnificat, or song of worship, spontaneously produced by his mother (1:46- 55); the Benedictus, or blessing song of her cousin Elizabeth (1:68-79); and the Nunc Dimittis, or spiritual farewell of Simeon, an old Temple servant (2 : 29-32). All have been set to music many times and are spoken in civilized tongues. Jesus’s poetry was the poetry of speech rather than rhyme. Sometimes, indeed, it was rhythmic. Thus the Beatitudes as given in Matthew 5:3-12 are marked by what students of verse call synthetic parallelism, in which the second line of each verse completes the meaning of the first line. And in Matthew 11 : 28-30 there are strong rhythms in Jesus’s beautiful hymn to labor, which I have taken the liberty of setting in verse:

Jesus’s words sometimes straddle the border between prose and poetry, as in this passage (Mt 8:20):

In John 21:18 there is a passage about the old:

Even when rhythm is lacking and the form is prosaic, Jesus’s words are never far from the poetic, for they are rich in metaphor and simile, in vivid comparisons with the world of nature. There are not half a dozen lines of his teaching without an image, and often an unforgettable one, which has entered into the repertoire of writers all over the world. Inanimate objects spring to life, animals are anthropomorphized, nature teems with purposeful moral activity, and human beings often assume a dignity, a profundity, or a pathos, thanks to the brilliant glitter of Jesus’s imagery. We hear of “living water” (Jn 4 : 10) and “the blind lead[ing] the blind” (Lk 6 : 39). Jesus wishes to gather the children of Jerusalem together “as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings” (Lk 13 : 34). There is a wonderful image of the simple farmer who should sow “night and day” and “the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how” (Mk 4:27). Jesus loves single trees, standing in isolation, the olive, the fig, the vine, and uses them tenderly. He speaks of the late summer and the whitening harvests. He loves roots, branches, and leaves, and sees images of people in all of them. When he uses words to conjure up a picture, it is striking how often the phrases he creates have become part of the furniture of literature: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth” (Jn 3 : 8). And in Matthew 11 : 7 he asks, “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” When Jesus says, “[L]et the dead bury their dead” (Mt 8:22), he brings us up short, startled. “I came not to send peace, but a sword,” he says in Matthew 10:34, and startles us again. He is fond of fire images: “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” (Lk 12:49). “Every sacrifice,” he says in Mark 9 : 49, “shall be salted with fire.” Salt images are another favorite: “Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?” (Lk 14 : 34). He tells his disciples, “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Mt 5 : 13). And we hear of salt cast on the dunghill. Time and again he tells us of the beauties of nature, of God “cloth[ing] the grass of the field” (Mt 6 : 30), of lilies so dressed by the deity that “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Mt 6:29; Lk 12:27). There is a fascinating passage in Luke in which a gardener shows pity for his fig tree and begs the owner not to cut it down when it bears no fruit for three years: “Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down” (13:7-9).

Jesus loves the figure or metaphor of the cup which God handed him, and which he must drink: he uses it three times (Mt 20:22; Lk 22:20, 42; Jn 18:11). As I have already noted, he speaks of sheep and shepherds constantly—more often than any other rustic image—the safe folding of the sheep, the guarding of the sheep from wolves, the differences between the true shepherd and the hireling, the fact that the shepherd knows his sheep and that they recognize him and his voice, the way in which sheep become scattered and some lost, and the fidelity of the shepherd who leaves his flock to seek the stray and rejoices mightily when he finds it. “I am the good shepherd,” says Jesus, “and know my sheep, and am known of mine” (Jn 10:14; Mt 18:12, 9:36, 26:31; Lk 15:4). He also says, “I am the light of the world” (Jn 9 : 5). Light and its contrast with darkness is Jesus’s favorite image of all, which he uses with great power and passion. He comes, he says, to “work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: for the night cometh, when no man can work” (Jn 9 : 4). The whole of John, from the Gospel’s stunning first paragraphs, is an epic prose poem to light. In these paragraphs, the word “light” is compared to the knowledge of God’s truth, “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (1:9). Throughout the ministry of Jesus there are striking contrasts between the light of truth and the darkness of ignorance, Satan, and evil. Jesus was always eager to make the blind see because such an act illustrated and epitomized his mission—“seeing” was “knowing,” recognizing truth and following it.

The Gospel of John also makes clear that in Jesus’s teaching there is a continuum between the word, the light, and the life. Jesus came into the world to speak the word: “He that heareth my word . . . is passed from death into life” (5:24). Jesus always emphasized that the physical death of which we speak is only “falling asleep.” The true death is sin. By contrast, “life” is the future Kingdom, outside time and everlasting. In the prologue of John, a vast metaphor of light is the key phrase: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (1 : 4). This is a poetic image, but it is also a philosophical one. It is Jesus’s position, as a moralist, that human beings, despite sin and all their frailties, have a natural inclination to truth. It is revealed by the word, the Logos; that is, Jesus: This word of truth attracts God’s children to the light as a magnet attracts metals while mere stones are unmoved. To love the light is to love the truth. It is a profoundly philosophical point but one, curiously enough, which simple, uneducated people grasp instinctively because it is also a poetic one.

Light and darkness: the Gospels are the verbal stages upon which Jesus’s message is enacted in the strongest chiaroscuro, gradual dawnings breaking into floods of intense light, gathering clouds piling up thunderously, lit by lightning flashes and then dispersed—a darkness truly satanic which finally yields to a light so intense and all-penetrating as to be truly heavenly. Darkness and light are constantly stressed in Jesus’s mission, and then, in real, tragic life, culminate in the twilight Last Supper, the dusk in the Garden Agony of Gethsemane, the darkness of the Crucifixion, and finally the dawn of the third day revealing the blinding light of the Resurrection. Seen thus in the living metaphor, the life of Jesus is the incarnation of light, its growth, spread, and reception, its extinction, and its miraculous rekindling into an everlasting incandescence.

 

That is the poetry of Jesus’s teaching. But he was also a story-teller, and the particular form of storytelling he favored was the parable. Parables are so important in the New Testament and he is so closely associated with this art form that he is often credited with inventing it. In fact, parables occur in other texts of the ancient Near East, and there are several in the Old Testament. The rabbis who came before and after Jesus used them. But their object was to explain difficult texts: they were a device of that dreary and eternal science called “commentary.” The essence of a Jesus parable is to stimulate thought, to encourage people to think for themselves, to puzzle out religious mysteries—a mystery is a secret revealed by God that would not have been known had he not revealed it. A parable helps to alleviate the problem of expressing supernatural things in natural language. Jesus sometimes indicated why he used parables. Mark suggests that Jesus drew a distinction between his spiritually educated disciples and his general congregation (4:11ff.): “But without a parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples.” When addressing his elect, he said, “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables.” This episode, in which knowledge is treated as a possession, contains the difficult verse 25: “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.” This seems unreasonable, as well as unjust, if seen in terms of material goods. But Jesus speaks of understanding. Those who develop skills in grasping will get more, but those without understanding have to be deprived of their false knowledge in order to start again.