The truth is that no one is permanently on top of the social heap. All of us from time to time find ourselves in misery, pain, and (at least) spiritual poverty. But, Jesus insists, the ultimate answer is a simple one:
Come to me, all you who labor and are weighed down with 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.
The care that Jesus takes in approaching others and making them comfortable is phenomenal; there is nothing like his modus operandi in any other literature of the ancient world. Almost his first miracle in Mark’s Gospel is a homely, unspectacular one, the cure of Simon’s mother-in-law, whom Jesus finds sick with fever on his arrival in Capernaum. This is healing that does not mean to advertise itself but takes place in a little house12 at the bedside of an otherwise unknown woman, whom Jesus happens to encounter—healing for the sake of healing. Another cure, the raising of Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter—whom everyone thought dead but who Jesus insists is alive—ends with Jesus enjoining her open-mouthed relatives to silence about his success and reminding them that a twelve-year-old who has just been through such an ordeal needs not their astonishment but “something to eat.”
Food will play an important role throughout Jesus’s life. He feeds a vast throng by miraculously multiplying a few loaves of bread and some fish that his disciples happen to have with them. These ever-increasing mobs that followed him about would become a real headache for his regular disciples, especially for the ones Jesus counted on to play a strategic role in the more practical aspects of his ministry, such as crowd control. Sometimes Jesus and his disciples would just have made it to “some lonely place all by [themselves] in order to rest for a while,” get a bite to eat, and have a little conversation, when the groupies would descend “from every town.” But Jesus would “take pity on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd”; and he would “set himself to teach them at some length.” When at last the irritated disciples would urge Jesus to send the mob on its way, we learn that his pity extends not only to the spiritual but to the physical nourishment of these “sheep”—and this is what prompts the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, a miracle that Jesus may have performed more than once.
But these extraordinary moments aside, Jesus was known as someone who hugely enjoyed a good dinner with friends; in fact, his reputation in this regard was manipulated by less successful rabbis to suggest that Jesus was nothing but a sot. Jesus finds their green-eyed characterizations ludicrous: “When John [the Baptizer] came, neither eating nor drinking, these same people said, ‘He is possessed!’ [I arrive], eating and drinking, and they say, ‘See, he’s nothing but a glutton and a drunkard, an intimate of tax collectors and an habitué of whores!’ ” Hostile rabbis continued their attack: why did his disciples eat without washing their hands first? didn’t they even pluck corn on the Sabbath? Jesus throws their objections back at them: “You set aside the Commandment of God to observe man-made traditions [about hand-washing]”; and “The Sabbath [the weekly day of rest enjoined by the Fourth Commandment] was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
At the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus, as almost his last act on earth, cooks an aromatic lakeside meal of grilled fish for his friends. And the singular Seder, or Passover meal, which Jesus celebrated with his closest associates on the night before his crucifixion, has been reenacted almost every day for the last two thousand years.
Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for another. His disciples, raised to a new level of perception by their contact with him, begin to take themselves quite seriously, so that Jesus must constantly remind them of simple truths. When they begin to imagine that their operation is far too important to be interrupted by children, Jesus is forced to reprimand them: “Let the little children come to me—and don’t ever stop them—for it is to just such little ones that the Kingdom of God belongs.” He thanks God for revealing the secrets of the Kingdom only to people who are able to retain the forthright outlook of children: “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to little children.”
Sometimes the stolid dimness of his most intimate friends necessitates that he speak to them with unadorned bluntness. While other teachers warn his audiences to obey rabbinical proscriptions and not eat with unwashed hands, Jesus counters by telling the crowds that “nothing that originates outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it’s what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’ ” Later, in private, his closest disciples admit that they don’t quite get that bit. “What don’t you get?” wonders the exasperated Jesus. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean,’ since it doesn’t go into his heart but into his bowels and then passes out into the shithole?13 What comes out of a man’s mouth is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For it is from within—from the human heart—that evil intentions flow.”
Jesus was a first-century Jew, a rural rabbi from Galilee, the Bumblefuck of its day. As Cajun Country is to New Orleans and Kerry is to Dublin, the Galilean hills were the ultimate Boonies, the archetypal setting for all of arch Jerusalem’s hayseed jokes. In a time of many Judaisms, originating in a contentious urban atmosphere, Jesus is not easily placeable in any of them. Like other rabbis, he read the scriptures aloud in the synagogue14 and gave a commentary on the reading. Even though rabbis, or teachers of the scripture (unlike the prophets, priests, and kings, who had a long lineage through Israelite history), were a fairly new grouping among the Jews, commentary, or midrash, had a most ancient pedigree. The words of the prophets were commentary on the Torah, for they interpreted the Books of the Law for new generations and new situations. Even within the Torah itself there was midrash. The second half of the Book of Exodus, for instance, was largely commentary on the first half, especially on the Ten Commandments; and the rabbinical interpretations of the “laws” of the Jews were midrash on midrash. Jesus’s midrash on the Commandments and other “laws,” as presented in Matthew’s Gospel, fits squarely within this tradition.
But in another way Jesus could have been closer to the Sadducees and the Temple priesthood, who seem to have favored a freer interpretation of Jewish law than did the rabbis. Jesus, however, was hardly a member of the establishment and clearly believed in life after death—which set him far from the priests and Sadducees of his day. That he shared with John the Baptizer and the Essenes an anticipation of Apocalypse is undeniable, but just as undeniable is his uniquely gentle sense of expectation. His many references to peace and the implicit antiviolence of so much of his teaching would make it hard to place him among the Zealots, though his family, as we shall see, may have had a little Zealotry in it.
Almost all these ancient movements died within a few years of Jesus’s time. Only Pharisaism, which would gradually turn into normative rabbinic Judaism, has lasted to our day. In effect, ancient Judaism, which in the first century of our era was represented by a broad spectrum of emerging “Judaisms,” had two children that survived: rabbinic Judaism and the Judaism we have come to call “Christianity.” To appreciate the atmosphere of first-century Judea we must understand that the “religion” that Jesus preached was, in its time, one of many alternative Judaisms. The word Christianity, which appears nowhere in the New Testament, is a term that would not be invented till a hundred years after Jesus’s time (and then by Roman enemies of the Jewish followers of Jesus). “We Jews must … recognize,” Shaye Cohen, Ungerleider Professor of Jewish Studies at Brown, has remarked, “that Christianity, too, is (or at least once was) a form of Judaism.” Far more urgently must Christians come to the same understanding, if they are to know who they are.
In his most engagin
g book, A Rabbi Talks to Jesus, Jacob Neusner claims to show that Jesus was not really a good Jew because he took exception to the Torah. Certainly, he would take exception to Rabbi Neusner’s neo-Orthodox interpretation of the Torah. But Jesus’s critique is no more radical than that of many Conservative and virtually all Reform Jews, who make up the considerable majority of American Jewry: the heart of Torah is not obedience to regulations about such things as diet—what one may eat, whom one may eat with, how one must prepare oneself beforehand—but to tzedakka, justice like God’s Justice, justice toward the downtrodden. The majority of the world’s Jews15 could hardly find fault with Jesus’s midrash in Matthew’s Gospel according to the norms that they themselves would use to articulate a contemporary interpretation of God’s Word. If anything, they might, like the rest of us, find him just too zealous, pushing us to a level of “observance” far more onerous than food and Sabbath regulations. Must we really “love our enemies”? How is it possible to live in this world while lending to anyone who asks, always walking the extra mile, always turning the other cheek? Isn’t the observance of the Law on a literal level of interpretation a considerably more possible and practical “Way” to follow than this unrealism?
It is exactly this extremism that confirms Jesus’s credentials as a prophet. He was, in the minds of his followers and in his own view, “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” the last of the prophets, the direct inheritor of the mantle of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, and the whole long train of terrible figures who had demanded the impossible—all of whom were shown to have been, in hindsight, far more realistic than their supposedly saner, more balanced contemporaries.
But why is Jesus “the last”? Because this is “the last age of the world,” the Time of the drawing near of the Kingdom of God16 at the end of which we will surely witness the transformation of reality, the end of all things as we have known them. If Jesus’s Apocalypse is a gentle one, it is still Apocalypse. When the Pharisees and the disciples of the Baptizer were keeping a fast, some pious souls approached Jesus to inquire why he and his disciples were not keeping the same fast, a fast that was meant to bring Apocalypse nearer. Jesus replied:
How can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? They cannot, as long as he is in their midst. But the Time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast.
Jesus is the bridegroom, but who is the bride? Present happiness is to be followed by suffering: Jesus will be taken from them. This saying does not properly address apocalyptic expectations, in which suffering is to be followed by happiness. The sequence is off. Jesus, the last of the prophets, sounds more and more like his prophetic predecessors, obscurely predicting unavoidable calamity. One thing is clear: something horrible is going to happen.
His Mother’s Son
Everybody has a mother. As Phyllis McGinley put it:
A mother’s hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.
Love of one’s mother is so often accompanied by a wish that she would be blown away to an outer galaxy. This is especially true if one’s mother is of the relentlessly understanding type who wants only the best for her child. But mothers, of whatever variety, tend to have an influence on their children that exceeds that of father, siblings, town, and school—that, in fact, exceeds everything but (perhaps) genetic makeup or the mother’s own early death. No wonder that she should be “hardest to forgive.”
What was Jesus’s mother like? It is often said that her appearances in the gospels are so infrequent and fragmentary that we can know nothing substantive of her from these sources and that the mythical Virgin Mother of medieval piety has so overshadowed the real woman that there is now no way of reaching any solid conclusions about the historical Mary. Despite these formidable caveats, I tend to the idea that a real woman is concealed in the partial, pointillist portraits of the gospels and that we can find her there if we are willing to connect the dots.
Two of the gospels—Matthew’s and Luke’s—open with what scholars have come to call “infancy narratives,” stories that begin not long before Jesus’s birth and take us through his first days and years. Matthew’s Gospel, which grew out of intensely Jewish concerns about patriarchal transmission, gives Joseph, Mary’s betrothed, the central role in the story of Jesus’s birth: he is “of the house and family of David” from which the Messiah must come; and he is the one who “in a dream” is let in on the real identity of Jesus—Immanuel, born of the virgin foreseen by Isaiah. In Matthew, Mary has nothing to say for herself.
Luke is an evangelist of a different color, whose gospel as a whole we shall consider later. But his infancy narrative is so intriguing that I would like to borrow from it here. In Luke, who is more painterly and lush than Matthew, an angel arrives named Gabriel—
sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph, of the House of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings to the Graceful One! The Lord himself is with you.” She was decidedly put off by these words and asked herself what kind of hello this was supposed to be. But the angel had more to say: “Fear not, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Look, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, whom you are to name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High God. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father [or ancestor] David, and he will reign over the House of Jacob forever; and his Kingdom shall have no end.”
Mary said to the angel, “This doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t had sex yet.”
The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the child to be born will be the Holy One and will be called the Son of God. One thing more: your cousin Elizabeth has conceived a son [who will grow up to be John the Baptizer] despite her age, and she is in her sixth month, the very one people called sterile, for nothing is impossible with God.”
Mary said, “Here I am, the Lord’s servant. Let’s get on with it.” And the angel was gone.
In traditional sermons, Mary is presented as a shy child-bride, espoused but not yet living with her husband, mystified and trembling before the unheard-of responsibility she is being asked to take on. But I read her reactions, especially her words of challenge to the angel (however one translates them), to be down-to-earth and peasant-sensible, almost an exasperated “Get serious.” She was indeed a girl—no more than fourteen or so—but she was a smart Jewish girl. Like Abraham, Moses, and so many of the great figures of Jewish tradition, she argues with God (here represented by his messenger), objecting to God’s unfortunate lack of realism, but in the end she responds as they did: Here I am. She doesn’t see this unexpected turn of events as unalloyed good fortune but rather seems to have some premonition of what it will cost her. At the same time, she doesn’t tremble, even once. Like Job, who uttered the famous words “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Blessed be the Name of the Lord,” she is more resigned than anything else.
Her mood seems to shift somewhat by the time she comes to visit her pregnant cousin Elizabeth in the Judean hills, for it is to Elizabeth that Mary speaks her Magnificat, the most muscular poem of celebration in all of ancient literature:
My soul extols the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
because he has acknowledged his servant’s humiliation.
Look: from now on will all ages call me happy
because the Almighty One (holy his Name) has done great things for me!
His mercy falls on every generation that fears him.
With his powerful arm he has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled the princes from their thrones and exalted the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
r /> He has come to help his servant Israel, remembering his mercy,
in accordance with the promise he made to our fathers—
to Abraham and his seed forever.
Mary’s “humility” in this poem is hardly the humility of the meek and unassuming. This is a larger-than-life song of triumph, thanking God for righting all wrongs by making a definitive choice in favor of the powerless over the powerful. No one knows it yet, but the poor, the hungry, and the humiliated have won!—and this unknown fourteen-year-old is their unexpected representative.
If it is unlikely that Mary was a poet, it is even more unlikely that she wrote this poem, full of literary allusions to Samuel, Isaiah, Habakkuk, Genesis, Job, and the Psalms. The Magnificat is either Luke’s own composition or, more likely, a song in circulation among first-century Christians. It sounds very like the songs of the Anawim (or the Poor in Spirit), yet another Jewish movement of this time that emphasized that the poor and dispossessed were God’s real friends, rather than those who paraded around in the trappings of wealth and power. To emphasize their point, the Anawim dressed shabbily (though they came from education and affluence), befriended the actual poor, and lived among them. But there is no reason to think that Luke has given Mary lines that are at odds with what her own sentiments were known to be. Rather, a common practice among ancient biographers was to put on the lips of a historical character an expression of the sort of sentiments he or she was known to harbor—even if they had no record of the character’s actual words at a particularly crucial moment. (Thus did Tacitus give speech to his Celtic commentator.) One needn’t be a Freudian to spot the aggression implicit in Mary’s words: my Son will triumph, reversing all our previous humiliations; our whole People will be exalted in him—and I will be seen as the source of it all.