The form of Judaism that Luke embraced involved, by the time he embraced it, a willingness to suffer and even die for this faith. The genuine perils he had experienced in his travels with Paul had paled before the insane cruelty of the rampant Beast, state persecution by Nero and his successors. Little wonder that Luke devalued material goods, which could so easily be expropriated by the state, and took every opportunity to remind his readers of how necessary it was to imitate Jesus in prayer if they were to resist not only the powers of this world but the gnawing fear in their own hearts. And little wonder that Luke comforted himself with the belief that his celibacy, like the exceptional celibacy of Jesus and (at least in his missionary years) Paul, was for the sake of the Kingdom.
Another indication of Luke’s supposed “Stoicism” is how little emotion he allows Jesus to show. Once again, a comparison with other gospels, especially the primitive Mark, on which both Matthew and Luke depend for about one-third of their material, proves illuminating. Though Luke takes over many of Mark’s episodes more or less whole, he consistently omits Mark’s mention of Jesus “moved to pity” (Mark 1:41), Jesus “indignant” (10:14), Jesus “cursing” (11:21), Jesus in the dark about the future (13:32), Jesus overwhelmed by “terror and anguish” and “sorrowful unto death” (14:33–34), Jesus despairing and “forsaken” by God (15:34).
For Luke, Jesus remains the Jewish prophet and Messiah acknowledged by the first disciples. But to see Jesus only from this perspective would be to limit him to the Jewish religious context. Falling in step with his companion Paul, also Greek-educated if no gentile, Luke sees Jesus as a cosmic phenomenon, the cosmic phenomenon, the ultimate meaning not only of Judaism but of the universe. This, for both Paul and Luke, is to put Jesus in his proper philosophical-theological-global context. And to put Jesus in his proper social-political context, he is, as John the Visionary saw him, the very “Son of God” and “Savior” that the emperors have claimed (but failed miserably) to be. He must, therefore, be shown with a sublimely tranquil dignity even greater than the public portrayals of the imperial presence in statuary and literature.
The Jews, because of the commandment against graven images, had virtually no art, certainly nothing characteristic of them. If they had, it would not have looked much like the work of Phidias or Praxiteles, whose object was to exhibit to the world the supreme placidity and perfect balance of their gods and heroes—the ideal. The Jews had no such ideal. In Judaism, ideas were expressed in their most extreme form, and emotions ran from warm to hot, whether in great men and women or in God himself, who was, unlike human beings, “slow to anger but quick to forgive.” We needn’t go so far as to claim Luke for the Stoics in order to say that he ultimately sees Jesus not from a Jewish but from a gentile perspective.
If these small omissions of emotion, which represent a tiny fraction of Luke’s Gospel, tell us more about Luke than about Jesus, it is still true that Luke, the painstaking researcher and skillful writer, is able to complete his portrait of Jesus with daring brushstrokes of brilliant color, impossible to his fellow evangelists. The scenes, unique to his gospel, that he (or, perhaps more accurately, Jesus) paints for us of penitence and forgiveness are as gripping as anything in world literature.
There is, for instance, the parable of the prodigal son, who insists on having his inheritance from his living father and goes off “to a distant country where he squandered his wealth in wild living.” Famine comes upon the land and the prodigal is reduced to feeding pigs for a local farmer, who feeds his pigs better than his farmhands. This reminds the hungry man how well his father cared even for hired hands, and he resolves to return to his father and beg to be hired as a farmhand. “ ‘While he was still a long way off,’ ” recounts Jesus,
“his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. The son said to him, ’Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.’ But the father said to the servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him; give him a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet. Bring forth the fatted calf and kill it; let’s have a feast and make merry, because this son of mine was dead and has come back to life, was lost and is found.’ ”
The prodigal’s elder brother is puzzled when, returning from his toil in the fields, he hears—of all things—“music and dancing.” This self-righteous son, in typical elder sibling fashion, seethes with anger when he learns what is going on. “ ‘Look here,’ ” he shouts at his father,
“ ‘all these years I’ve been slaving for you and have never disregarded a single command. You never gave me so much as a goat to make merry with my friends. Now that son of yours has come back, the one who devoured your estate with prostitutes, and you have killed for him the fatted calf!’
“But the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me. All that I have is yours. But we had to make merry and celebrate. For your brother was dead and has come back to life, was lost and is found.’ ”
Luke does not always play down emotion. The pitiful, repeated refrain of the father (“was dead and has come back to life, was lost and is found”) is so rich in human feeling that it can take a moment to realize that the father is God the Father and I the prodigal child, always welcome back whatever I may have done—as are all those whom I (in the role of elder sibling) may have felt safe to despise. Luke actually abounds in stories that are full of sentiment: a penitent tax collector whose sins God forgives; a “poor widow” who gives her “mite,” the smallest coin of all, but everything she has; a Samaritan leper, one of ten lepers but the only one who remembers to return to thank Jesus for his cure.
Luke the celibate is in a league with Henry James when it comes to portraying real women, like Martha and Mary. His most daring female character may be the prostitute who crashes the party at Simon the Pharisee’s house, where Jesus is one of the guests. She has come only to encounter Jesus, which she goes about in a manner befitting her profession: falling to the floor at his feet, weeping over them and drying them with her lustrous long hair, then covering his feet with kisses, and at last massaging them with a precious ointment she has brought with her in an alabaster jar. The pious host, beside himself at the spectacle taking place in his home, thinks: “If this man were really a prophet, he would know who this woman is and what sort of creature is now touching him and just how bad a name she has [and he would, therefore, not suffer her attentions].”
Jesus, reading his thoughts, says:
“Simon … I came into your house, and you poured no water over my feet, but she has cleaned my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but she has been covering my feet with kisses ever since she came in. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. For this reason I tell you that her sins, however many they may be, have been forgiven her, because she has been so loving.”
One can imagine the huffy reaction of Simon and his fellow Pharisees, in whose eyes the touch of a woman—any woman not one’s wife—entailed ritual pollution. Jesus is playing dangerously on the word love, for a prostitute’s “love” should mean paid erotic service. But this prostitute’s excessive loving—her service to Jesus—has been the real thing. Though the weeping prostitute with the uncovered curls is often assumed to be Mary Magdalene (whence the words magdalene for “prostitute” and maudlin for “excessively weepy”), this is probably not so. Mary Magdalene is mentioned by Luke just after this scene in a list of women who “went with” Jesus on his preaching expeditions. Medieval interpretation further conflated the weeping prostitute, Mary Magdalene, and Martha’s sister Mary into one person, whereas it appears to modern scholars that they were in actuality three different women. In this episode from Luke, however, is born la traviata, the fallen woman with the heart of gold, one of the most enduring archetypes in all of Western drama, fiction, opera, and painting.
The lesson that Jesus articulates t
o Simon—to us a fairly obvious one—would have cut through the proto-puritanical pieties of the Pharisees with all the shock of a sharp blade, encouraging renewed opposition to this renegade rabbi. But the unlikely encounter between a preacher and a prostitute may prompt the modern reader to a deeper consideration: why did the woman wish to approach Jesus in the first place? It is hard to believe that she could have expected to hear that her sins were forgiven and had engineered the encounter to this end. She appears, in Luke’s telling, as a spontaneously expressive person, one who wears her heart on her sleeve. Filled with remorse, inexpressible in words if not in tears, she is drawn instinctively to Jesus because she knows he will not reject her.
The reason the scene is finally so shocking—whether in its original context or in ours—is that it is so difficult to imagine such an excessive woman, cheaply painted, her vulgar apparel chosen for the sake of a teasing display of her physical endowments, bawling her head off and crawling on her knees to the naked feet of a bishop or rabbi or imam—or whatever religious figure you might choose to imagine—while he not only allows her to proceed in full view of a dignified dinner party but shows himself to be entirely unembarrassed and even completely comfortable (not the sort of thing one can fake) with her prolonged and inordinate display. It takes quite some time, after all, to wash the dusty feet of a grown man with one’s tears and then dry them adequately with one’s hair. It may make the scene slightly easier to imagine if we bear in mind that Jesus was not in any sense an official religious figure (a priest or levite) but a layman—an anticlerical layman, given the scathing references in the parable of the Good Samaritan—whose disciples had bestowed on him the honorific title “Teacher.”6
In Greek psychological theory, emotion was deemed a daimon, a spirit or demon that came to possess one. One goes from tranquility to emotion as the sea goes from undisturbed calm to roiling chaos when it is “possessed” by a storm. Thus one is “possessed” by eros or anger or pity or fear—all of them “gods” in some sense. This is probably the underlying reason that Luke has erased from his portrait of Jesus the catalogue of emotions attributed to him by Mark. Jesus, in Luke’s view, cannot have been “moved to pity” or compassion. These minor gods cannot overcome his inner tranquility as they do ours. But this is not because Jesus is some sort of unfeeling Martian. He does not merely feel compassion, an emotion that can come and go and is dependent on outside forces; he is Compassion. Luke presents the prostitute as knowing this, thus crediting her with an instinctive understanding that a more conventional person might repress.
Despite the backdrop of Greek psychology, Luke found that he could not omit all reference to Jesus’s emotions, especially as he shows the man approaching his last days on earth. “As the time drew near for him to be taken up [by crucifixion, resurrection, and enthronement in heaven at the Father’s right hand], he resolutely turned his face toward Jerusalem,” the Holy City of his terrible destiny; and “as Jerusalem came into view, he wept at the sight of it.” Earlier he had lamented, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem … how often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it.” Now, in tears, he predicts the destruction of the city.
Similar predictions occur in Mark and Matthew. The prediction in Mark, almost certainly written before A.D. 70, that is, before the city was actually leveled by the Romans, is vague. (After all, it hadn’t happened yet.) The prediction as recounted by Matthew in the 70s or 80s, has an apocalyptic tinge that makes it seem more a prediction of the end of the world than of the city. The prediction in Luke, also written in the 80s, seems a reconstruction of the actual siege of Jerusalem, as it might have been reported to Luke by an eyewitness. Luke may wish to remind his readers that Jesus was capable of genuine prophecy, but, given his overall bias against depicting Jesus as “moved,” even more important to his purpose here is his conviction that gentile Christians should in no way find the fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecy a reason for rejoicing. Just as Jesus wept over the coming destruction, they must join their Jewish brothers in loving solidarity and mourning for the lost city.
Luke’s version of the Last Supper, twice the length of Mark’s and Matthew’s, comes close to being a Jewish symposion, a convivial meal of ardent friendship, shared by Jesus and his disciples. “I cannot tell you how much I have longed to eat this Seder with you before I suffer,” says Jesus to his friends. Only Luke gives voice to this passionate wish of Jesus, but it is likely to be an accurate remembrance of what Jesus said, since Luke appears here to be hewing as close to Semitic expression as he can. The painstakingly awkward Greek reads literally, “With desire have I so much desired this Passover to eat with you.…”
As Jesus is crucified, only Luke records him as praying, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” While hanging in agony from his cross, a “criminal” crucified on either side of him, Jesus enters into a brief and final earthly dialogue. Besides enduring the horrible pain of crucifixion, the dying men are beset by the taunts of spectators and soldiers; and one of the criminals takes up the taunts of the crowd, screaming at Jesus: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Then save yourself—and us, too!”
But, according to Luke, the other criminal rebukes him: “Have you no fear of God? We all got the same sentence, but you and I deserved it. We are paying for our crimes. But this man has done no wrong. Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”
And Jesus responds: “I tell you solemnly: today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Could this dialogue, reported only by Luke, have taken place? Though it certainly accords with everything we know of the personality of Jesus, it seems almost too good to be true. But do we find it incredible because it is a relatively rational, sequential dialogue between two men dying hideously—or because the forgiveness offered seems too good to be true? It is certainly of a piece with the forgiveness offered elsewhere in this gospel, the forgiveness of the father to his prodigal son, the forgiveness of Jesus to the theatrical prostitute. The dialogue contains at least one additional clue to its possible authenticity: the crucified criminal calls Jesus by his first name alone, the single instance in any gospel where Jesus is not addressed by an honorific such as “Rabbi,” “Master,” or “Lord”—none of which a rough-hewn convict in his dying agony would have been likely to employ. Like the saying of Jesus about the Passover Seder, was Luke given this crucifixion dialogue on a trip with Paul to Jerusalem from someone who might actually have overheard it, perhaps one of the women who stood near the cross of Jesus or a Roman soldier converted by his exemplary death?
However that may be, Luke is preeminently the evangelist of God’s mercy to sinners; and his gospel is the one that dramatizes most believably Paul’s insistence to the Romans that “God’s love for us is shown in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Like the father of a prodigal child and like Jesus forgiving the executioners who drove the nails into his hands and feet, God does not wait for our repentance; he loves us anyway.
Luke is, in Dante’s words, “il scriba della gentilezza di Cristo,” “the scribe of the kindness of Christ.” Luke’s portrait of Jesus is the one that has had the most effect on the West; it is, in fact, Luke’s Christ that has made an indelible impression on the world’s imagination. From “Jesu dulcis,” the “sweet Jesus” of Bernard of Clairvaux, to the “fairest Lord Jesus” of popular hymnody, from the merciful motets of Bach to the solemnly compassionate face sketched over and over by Rembrandt, the face that Jesus turns toward us is the face that Luke, with reverent devotion and superior craft, was able to show us, a face of mildness and love, a Jesus who almost seems to observe our follies with an affectionate twinkle in his eye.
It is this face that millions, even billions, of dying men and women have hoped to see at the last, as they have hoped to hear spoken to them the words recorded only by this “beloved physician” of souls: “I tell you solemnly: today you shall be with me in Paradise.”
A Miracle for Me
We have already seen that, during the course of the history of New Testament interpretation, Mary Magdalene’s identity was confused with both that of Mary the sister of Martha and that of the prostitute who wept over Jesus’s feet. We know little of the historical Mary Magdalene, save that she hailed from the Judean town of Magdala, that she was one of Jesus’s closest disciples and probably an “apostle,” that (with other women) she followed Jesus to his cross, and that she was among the first to view the empty tomb. She may also have been the first recipient of an apparition of Jesus following his resurrection and the first to spread the news that “he is risen.” This favor gave her in ancient Christian tradition the unique title of Apostola Apostolorum, “the Apostles’ Apostle.” She seems to have been a woman of substance and unconventional, for Luke tells us that she was one of “many women” who traveled with Jesus and his male disciples in an age and place where the mixing of the sexes was unheard of and that these unusual women “provided for [everyone] out of their own means”—that is, bankrolled the operation. Luke also provides us the baffling factoids that the women “had been cured of evil spirits and diseases” and that Mary, in particular, was one “from whom seven demons had been expelled,” presumably thanks to an exorcism performed by Jesus.