STRANGE GARDENER

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)

 

WALKING THROUGH WALLS

          

 

Now, after Easter, we are in the Resurrection Time – a limited period between Easter and the Ascension. The time when Yeshua is back, for a specific task: to explain to the disciples and the expanding community what his ministry, passion and resurrection have all been about, so that they will understand it as a coherent whole, an act of the Father’s love for his human children; and to set the community on its future path of realising the New Alliance between God and the expanded Israel that is the whole human race. 

            It is a strange time. One of the things Benedict XVI points out in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week is the fact that when the disciples closest to Yeshua meet him after the Resurrection, they do not recognise him. This is extraordinary. They have lived with him every day for three years ; and yet when they land their boats and see a man grilling fish on the beach who says “Come and have breakfast!” they do not recognise him at first. Likewise the two less close disciples walking to Emmaus, who were clearly among those who had listened to him, seen him, admired him and followed him, and who now spend a couple of hours at his side, listening to him explain the Scriptural basis for the Passion: they only recognise him when, at table in the inn, he breaks the bread with the Baruch atta Adonai prayer – at which point he vanishes. 

            It makes you wonder what his resurrection-body looked like, what it was. Rembrandt painted it, and when you compare it to his paintings of the living Yeshua (probably after one of his Jewish neighbours in Amsterdam), you can in fact see a very uncanny difference. I’m not sure anyone else has imagined it so well. But would he have been unrecognisable? One may also wonder what this resurrection-body in fact was. Was it a temporary one, taken on only for this time between Easter and the Ascension? It did have the stigmata of the Passion, as the story of Thomas shows. Or was it his definitive eternity-body which he still has today, sitting at the right hand of the Father? That’s not something even the boldest theologian can answer.

            Also, this resurrection-body walks through walls. The disciples are together in an upper room; the doors are closed and locked; suddenly there he is among them. Not a ghost: feel my wounds. But suddenly, there. At table in Emmaus: whoosh, he is gone. Now this reminded me of something Benedict does not mention, although I’m sure others have – nothing that can be thought about the Gospels has not been thought and written, usually many times. When Yeshua returns to Nazareth and at first the people are thrilled by him and then turn against him, they want to throw him off a local cliff: “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”(Luke 4:29-30). I have always found that astonishing in its serene calmness. This is an angry mob, the kind that stoned Stephen and would have stoned the woman taken in adultery. Few things are more terrifying and more dangerous. But he passed through the midst of them. 

            In other words, even in his entirely human mortal body there was something uncanny. A touch of the resurrection-body, one might say, was always already there. This was not one of his “miracles”: it was not done for someone else, and no fuss is made about it. He just wasn’t there any more. 

            So now, in this Between-Time, this Resurrection-Time, we might wish that he would still suddenly appear among us and have a bite of fish; but that’s not going to happen. The Ascension is past, and he is now in Eternity-Time. But still patiently waiting for us, as he was on that beach at breakfast. Would we have recognised him? Do we now? He did tell us where to look: in the child holding out a trusting hand; in the lonely old woman whose children never phone or visit; in the retired psychiatrist whose days not longer make sense; and in the entirely unexpected smile of a total stranger. Perhaps, apart from the gestures such incarnations call forth in us, the thing for us to do at this time is to think and learn and discuss as we would have in that inn at Emmaus, and so come to understand the coherence of the life, calling, death and resurrection of this most unlikely Meshiach.

Images: Rembrandt, "Head of Christ" and "The Risen Christ"

. . . WENT HIS WAY

Nazareth Village: the synagogue

Yesterday’s New Testament reading is one of the fascinating ones, especially if one has been to Nazareth, where the Nazareth Village project has reconstructed the synagogue of Jesus’ time, where you can sit on one of the tiered benches and imagine him standing at the front, reading from a scroll. He reads the passage from Isaiah; then, as the congregation waits for the commentary, he says, simply, “Today what’s written here is being accomplished” – in other words, it’s happening now.

The locals’ reaction is depressing but so understandable. This isn’t some exotic preacher come into town from Away: this is Eddie Josephson, the garage owner’s eldest! We’ve known him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper; who does he think he is? The Meshiach or something? If you’re so great, do some healing here, convince us!

He looks at them with a kind of infinite sadness. This is Jesus in his full humanity, completely disillusioned. If we needed proof that God doesn’t – can’t – use his omnipotence to convert everyone, here it is. Uh, huh. Prophets don’t cut it back home. Happened to Elijah; happened to Elisha. No better here, no better today. Sorry, guys.

So they get seriously mad. Go to hell, Eddie! He’s a charlatan; worse, he’s a blasphemer! (For us, it’s easier to imagine this happening in a strict Muslim environment, where blasphemy still merits the sword.) So they rush him, and haul him off to the local escarpment, a kind of provincial Tarpeian Rock that’s useful for executions.

All the commentaries I’ve seen in the last few days more or less stop here, and explain the locals’ reaction. How odd. Is nobody astonished by the story’s ending? Here is a wild crowd, in the grip of mob reaction, enraged, clutching the bad guy and about to throw him off a cliff. And what happens? “But he, passing through the midst of them, went his way.” (Luke 4:30)

This leaves me speechless, and breathless. It’s at least as astonishing as his walking on the water of Tiberias.  How to envisage it? The clutching hands drop; in the heart of the roaring mob there is a sudden focus of intense silence; and suddenly, there on the cliff-edge, they have nobody, and in the distance there is the man himself, striding for the horizon.

It is precisely what the disciples hoped he would do on Good Friday, but then he did not. The contrast should give us furiously to think. But meanwhile, let us at least marvel at this hometown miracle. He, passing through the midst of them, went his way. Just like that.  

CARPENTRY AND DANGEROUS READING

Benedict/Ratzinger cites 'liberal theology' as theorising that Jesus, having hitherto lived a perfectly normal life in Galilee, at his baptism by John underwent a shattering experience that began his ministry. He condemns this as being the attitude of a 'Jesus novel', and claims that Jesus is above our psychologising, that we should read the whole episode theologically.

He is doubtless right in the major sense. But I do not think that it is either irrelevant or reprehensible that we, as humans reacting to the story of a God who took full humanity upon him, should wonder how he came to the point where, ca. 30 years of age, he began his ministry. And if this is a 'Jesus novel', then so be it: a novel conceived, composed, and read in faith.

I have spent a number of years wondering about, and being fascinated by, the 'lost years' of Jesus, between 13 (in the Temple) and 30 (on the bank of the Jordan). The image that suggests itself to me pleases me but is not therefore necessarily wrong. 

It is of a young man much marked by his childhood, much marked by his mother's presence and stories, but otherwise a young carpenter (teenagers worked) of Nazareth; a young Jewish carpenter, i.e. one who not only learnt the trade but learnt to read and spent much of his spare time studying the Scriptures. A little later, say ca. 21 or 22, I suspect he is taking over the shop: he is the eldest son, and Joseph is either retired or already deceased. So he is a young professional craftsman, running a small business -- and reading, reading the scriptures at night, as well as conversing with his mother, who must have been a major presence.

During this time, partly because of the climate of the period, partly because of what Myriam may have told him about his birth, what he reads is especially the passages about the Messiah, and notably those of Deutero-Isaiah, that show a counterintuitive Messiah, a Messiah who is not a conquering king, not a supreme warlord, but a sacrificial lamb, a scapegoat almost, a Messiah who takes upon him, into himself, all the sheer awfulness of crapulous humanity and bears it into the mouth of Hell. And gradually, there must have come upon him as he read these scriptures an awful (in every sense) sense of recognition. My feeling is that the Revelation came upon him gradually, that it stole into his consciousness, that it crept in upon him, until one day, at the age of perhaps 29, he could no longer put it aside or ignore it -- much as he may well have wanted to. The recognition that 'OMG, it's me.' But also the day his regular and devout prayers open, open up a vast space in which at first he is lost, but which then surrounds him like cosmic skin, immeasurably vast and utterly close and intimate at the same time, where he is fully one with the Father he has been praying to and with the Ruach Qadosh who has been doing the praying, through him.

And then, having heard about John the Baptist, he realises that not only must he now go out and live this destiny in the world, but that being baptised by John is the only true and perfect beginning to such a road. He has always been God and man/boy; now he has truly become God and Man. And if Man, then he must, even if he is sinless, join with the sinners who are immersed in the water of the river overhung with trees and skimmed by kingfishers. John, remember, is his cousin; and John too has grown into his destiny. When it is Jesus' turn, he recognises him, both as Cousin Yeshua and as the Meschiach: briefly taken aback, he quickly sees the point. And the heavens open. Were they two the only ones who heard the Voice and saw the dove?

  Of course, this is novelistic, in a way. But it is also the cry of human historical inquiry since Ranke: Wie es eigentlich gewesen: What really happened? We want to know, about human events that occurred in this world, what really happened? We wish we could time-travel; we want to have been there. And it is very hard, if not impossible, for us not to think that the only alternative to 'this really happened' is 'this didn't happen, at least not in this way.' And that if we are told, as in the ancient Catalan beginning of tales, 'Aixa era y no era', 'this was and was not, that we are being told a fiction, something made up.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons so many modern people have turned away from religion: because we have lost the particular scale of reality it demands. A scale where what we are told is true, the form in which it is expressed is true, it is not fiction, yet it did not happen in the way that this morning's subway ride happened. It is this truth that Genmesis expresses; it is this truth that Revelations communicates; it is this truth that the story of Jesus' baptism offers us. 

Perhaps -- to continue the inquiry -- this is one of the reasons, if not the main one, that we are told to become as little children. A child at a certain age does not distinguish between truth and happoening: the stories you tell him make sense, that is all and that is enough. We all experience our children's or our grandchildren's first questioning of Father Christmas as somehow a fall from grace; and this, while inevitable, is also true. The child now begins to believe that there is a difference between truth and fiction, and that truth resides in happening. Only much later, if he is fortunate, does he relearn a sort of unity, when he is taught that fiction can contain important truths; but in that educated-adult universe, its fictionality remains. What Jesus teaches us is that what we need to be close to his, and our, Father is to regain the pre-factual sense of truth.

How to do this? That was Nicodemus's question. How can an adult become a child again? Isn't it against nature? No: it's against culture, not against nature. What we have to do is to allow ourselves to be children again. Nature will let us do this; culture disapproves. Rereading Genesis, we allow ourselves to be thrilled all over again, unquestioningly, by the image of the Spirit of God brooding over the waters. We react with absolute simplicity and enthusiasm to the story of Abraham making lunch for the angels. We see the three Children of Israel in the fiery furnace, and shiver at the fleeting vision of a fourth. And while we do so, the truth is silently building in our minds and hearts an edifice: a synagogue that can allow truth to be transmitted, a temple that can receive Emmanuel.

Benedict/Ratzinger says, and he is right, that the texts tell us nothing about Jesus's years between 13 and 30; he also says, and there I'm not sure he is right for everyone, that that means we should not try to go beyond the texts but read therm as they were intended to be read: as a young Church's attempt to make sense of the life, the death, and the resurrection of the Messiah. Again, I believe that ultimately he is right in this; but proximately I believe that a fragmentary 'Jesus novel', if conceived and received in faith, may have the virtue of helping us be, or become again, the children our daily lives and even our serious religion all too often disallow.

FAMILY VALUES

Frank Mason Good, A carpenter's workshop in Nazareth, 1875

Today is Family Sunday in the Catholic Church, and there is much mention of the Holy Family, with pictures of Mary, Joseph and young Jesus. I’ve long been intrigued by a different view of the Holy Family: Joseph, Mary, and at least seven children, of whom Jesus was the eldest, but which included James, Joseph, Simon, Jude, and at least a couple of sisters. This is an ancient view, which ended up being severely quashed by the Church because it denied Mary’s perpetual virginity. Those of us inhabiting climes well North of the Mediterranean and living some 1500 years later than those theologians find virginity less crucial to holiness, and I for one enjoy the thought of a busy carpenter’s workshop with a number of boys working under their father’s direction and enjoying the curious harmony radiating from their eldest brother.

What happened later? We know that at one point, when someone pointed out to Jesus that his mother and brothers were outside and wanted to see him, he replied ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? These (pointing at those in front of him) are my mother and my brothers.’ (Mt. 12:46-50) Not a kind reply, we’d have thought. And it’s intriguing that there is no mention of any brothers or sisters during the Passion and the Crucifixion – only Mary is mentioned, with John. Later, though, James ‘brother of Jesus’ is mentioned as heading the young Church in Jerusalem.

We don’t know. So here is one narrative that might work. Jesus and his brothers get on well during their youth. When they are in their twenties they go separate ways, as brothers often do, getting together only for family celebrations. Then, when their eldest brother is thirty, he changes, gives up his job, and becomes an itinerant prophet. I can easily imagine his brothers finding this more than peculiar. Moreover, from what thy hear about him, it seems that he is spreading some seriously heretical ideas. Would they have necessarily approved?

Much depends on what their mother would or would not have told them about her eldest. They must in any case have noticed that she approached him differently; but she might not have told them about the Angel  Gabriel and the Holy Spirit – a little strong for young stomachs. So we might imagine them at the very least quizzical, and quite possibly disapproving, with regard to the life their brother had started leading.  And when this led to his being arrested for a combination of heresy (to the Jews) and treason (to the Romans), they may well have been angry, or scared, or both. After all, even out of 11 remaining disciples only one was there on Golgotha: where were the others?

And then, perhaps, after the Resurrection, one can imagine at least James, the next-eldest brother, going through a profound and painful conversion process as the news spread; and ending up in charge of the new faithful in the capital.

            All of this, of course, is rank speculation; but I, for one, find it a much more interesting image of the Holy Family, and at least as instructive and inspiring.