It was forty days. It had to be. The “intervals” are always forty days. Forty days in the wilderness, from the baptism to the beginning of ministry’s work. For a long time, I’ve been looking at – and looking for – the shaping of Yeshua’s mind during the “lost years”, the years not mentioned in the Gospels, for him between the ages of 12 and 30. In spite of warnings from my beloved Joe Rat (Benedict XVI to you) and other Church spokespersons that we should not indulge our imaginations where the Bible is silent, nor compose in our minds a “Jesus novel”, I find myself unable to still my historian’s curiosity and my Christian desire to recapture – with my imagination since there is no other tool – wie es eigentlich gewesen, what really happened, what it was really like.
I tried to follow him through his young manhood, to see him in the Nazareth workshop with Ya’akov his brother, saying the blessings at Shabbat dinner with Mother Myriam, four brothers and two sisters, and then going off to join the baptism crowd around Cousin Yochanan the Dipper. I tried to follow him into the desert (Sinai?) and then to renting (or even buying) a small house in Capharnaum, near the Synagogue, from which he went out to be what he had known the Meshiach would be: an itinerant rabbi, walking around Galilee (a distant place, Israel’s Maine or Yorkshire), teaching, healing, and preaching the surprising idea that the basileia to theou, the Reign of God, had in fact come, and was right here and now.
It is not impossible so to follow him, and we know where one ends up, so doing. One ends up on Golgotha, first, in the noise and heat and obscene unrolling of an execution; and then, after a day of stunned silence, on Easter morning with Myriam from Magdala, talking to a gardener. And from there on it becomes exponentially harder. Dare we try anyway?
That gardener, then. Notice that, on a number of occasions during the forty days that follow, even those who had been closest to him do not recognise him: not Myriam, not the disciples in the fishing-boat coming to shore in the dawn, not the followers walking to Emmaus. So one thing we know is that his face was not the same. His body, though, was: he invites Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds. So how, in what details, was his face different? It could be, say, the difference between bearded and beardless; it could be that the unimaginable interval between death and resurrection had marked his features in some indelible but disguising way, like the sudden greying of hair or the carving of lines in the face.
What is sure is that he was recognised when he spoke: his remarkable voice – remember he had addressed a large crowd from an offshore boat, without a microphone – had remained untouched.
Now let us go further. If we could imagine his thoughts and feelings while making scroll-cases and furniture for clients of the family business, can we imagine them in this strange between-time?
First of all, why did he come back? He could have gone straight home to his Father, into whose hands he had commended his spirit. Instead, he comes back to spend forty days – very much off and on – with his friends and students. Why?
Well, we know the answer. It was, in a sense, the whole point of everything. St Paul, in one of his vigorous letters, put it best: “If the Anointed One did not rise from the dead, everything we proclaim is nonsense.” Humans – his humans first, then all the others – had to know that he had conquered Death, and that Death, thenceforth, had no dominion other than an apparent one. And so he had to be there: not a ghost, not a spectre, but a human resurrected, a man who had tangible scars, a man who could make a fire and eat grilled fish.
What did it feel like, for him? How human was he still, in this time? Did he feel twinges of nostalgia for the old days of exchanging repartee with a foreign Samarian woman at a well, or of calming his fearful friends in a storm-tossed boat on Kinneret? Did he feel he was performing a duty, establishing the Resurrection in the minds of a core group who would then go out and proclaim it to the world? I think he felt a great wave of affection for this little group of friends who were so obviously suffering from their loss. Was he always meant to stay forty days, that Biblical interval, or did he persuade his Father to prolong it from a shorter original? He may have eaten fish, but he also walked through walls and disappeared at the dinner table. That must have felt peculiar, but doubtless in an odd way natural – a between-state in a between-time.
I do think, though, that when Ascension Day arrived it was not a surprise to him. Interestingly, it seems to have been so for the disciples: clearly, they were not counting in forties, though they might have done. But he, I am sure, did know, if only by counting the days. We may assume that during this time, whenever he was not with them, he was in that Other Place, with the Father; and that when the moment came to go Home definitively part of him must have been deeply relieved. As he was whisked out of our dimension (they read it as “up”) he could honestly say that he had done all his duty, that he had accomplished the task the Father had set him. And the homecoming must have been joyful to a degree, and in ways, truly beyond our imagination.
Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, "Mary Magdalene and Christ as gardener" (1638)
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