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)

 

THE NAMELESS, THEN AND NOW

 

Reading, and listening to, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches’ exhortations to the faithful in recent years, I have been struck by an anomaly, if not a contradiction. On the one hand one sees, around one in ‘live’ church or on one’s screen in a service attended online or on television, fairly large crowds of faithful parishioners. They are mostly middle-aged or older, but in many churches there are also families with parents in their thirties and forties, and children from babyhood to pre-adolescence. They look interested, fairly reverent, and quite awake: it is rare nowadays to see someone nodding off during a sermon, perhaps because sermons are now very short. They are people with busy lives who have taken the time to attend Mass or Evensong, and who clearly find there they spiritual food they need to resume life’s daily challenges. 

On the other hand there are in many cases (not all) the clergy, who appear not only to be addressing quite a different audience but to have quite a diffferent goal in mind. To read or hear them, one could easily imagine the pews filled with plump, self-satisfied burghers, Philistines to a man or woman, and thinking only of the Sunday lunch or dinner awaiting them after the blessing. And what are they hearing, these ghostly rentiers? To what are they being called? To wake up to constant challenge, to be aware that they must at all costs leave their comfort-zone, to go out and evangelise the world around them, to realise that their baptism has made them priests (but without powers or authority), kings (but without a realm) and prophets: in other words, to be disciples, all of them. 

Curiously, few or none of the people I know appear to sense the discrepancy here. The folks in the pews hear the message respectfully, and then go out and fight their daily battles; the clergy go back to their overburdened weekday lives; and no one seems to be bothered by the anomaly.

And yet, the question that sits like an invisible elephant in the room is: what is the ordinary Christian believer supposed to be and to do? What if we are not all meant to be disciples? After all, the Meshiach only had twelve (and one of them was a black sheep), and He sent out seventy. What about the others? The faces that haunt me in the pages of the Gospels are, first, those of the people He healed. The formerly blind man; the formerly lame man; the woman with the issue of blood; the father of the demon-haunted epileptic boy. Then, the faces of those who had been part of the crowd listening to His teaching. Those – not very many – who had been near and overheard Him addressing His disciples in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. Those – many more – who had heard His teaching in the synagogues around the Sea of Galilee. Those – vastly more – who had been fed by the disciples after hearing Him teach at the end of the day near the Jordan. 

Of the people He had healed, most were told to keep quiet about it. (Some theologians think that this was so that it would not be misunderstood.) Only the man from whom the demons had come out (Luke 8:35), and who had begged Jesus to let him stay with him (presumablly as a disciple) was told instead to go home ‘and tell people what great things God has done for you.’ (Rieu 140) One assumes that the others, in spite of His injunction, also told friends and neighbours; but that, in their new and healed form, they went on with their lives. 

Those who had heard Him teach, whether around the disciples on the Mount or in the Galilean synagogues, would have tried to apply what they had learned in their lives – lives that were certainly changed, whether minutely or hugely. And those who were fed in the large crowd (one does suspect that 4,000 or 5,000 was an exaggeration, especially without a microphone) would remember not only His teaching of that day but the miraculous meal or snack. And then? They might have gone home with the teachings still in their heads, and trying to apply those; or they might have mainly remembered the bread and the fish and been impressed by the miracle-worker.

The point I am trying to make is that most people who come to church have at some point been touched by His teaching and (thus, or also) by His presence. They come because there they feel healed and restored, because there they receive waybread for life’s journey, which will allow them to go home and try to apply the teachings to their daily battles. They are thus like all those nameless people in the Gospels: they believe, but pray to the Lord to help their unbelief. And if the corners of their difficult days hold some small comfort-zones, who is to blame them?

To enjoin every member of a city our country congregation to become a disciple, I contend, is unfair and unkind. As a Catholic Bible scholar recently explained, there are indeed those who are called to be disciples: to give up everything and follow Him. But the many other believers, good people with doubts but who love God and their church, should be spared the guilt that such a demand, which they cannot meet, lays upon them. As an old Dutch lady said to Noel Coward, ‘One should never ask more of people than they are able to give.’ God may sometimes ask, and enable, us to perform miracles far beyond what we thought was our ability; but I dare to think that old Mrs Hubrecht’s rule is, on the whole, His also.   

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE?

7. All mine enemies whisper together against me : even against me do they imagine this evil.

8. Let the sentence of guiltiness proceed against him : and now that he lieth, let him rise up no more.

9. Yea, even mine own familiar friend, whom I trusted : who did also eat of my bread, hath laid great wait for me. (Ps. 41)

12. For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour : for then I could have borne it.

13. Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me : for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.

14. But it was even thou, my companion : my guide, and mine own familiar friend.

15. We took sweet counsel together : and walked in the house of God as friends. (Ps. 55)

Given the peculiar and oniric relation of the Gospels to the Psalms, I am moved to wonder whether we might not find in these passages the beginnings of an explanation for the strange conduct of Yehuda of Kerioth. 

I have always found the explanation in John 12:6, that Yehuda (Judas) was the group’s thievish treasurer, scarcely believable; and the whole story of the actual ‘betrayal’, the kiss in the park, too theatrical to make sense. As Yeshua himself said, he was not exactly hiding himself: he taught and preached in public practically every day, and the Temple guards could have taken him whenever they wanted. He did not need to be identified.

Once again, I am transgressing Benedict XVI’s injunction against writing a ‘Jesus novel’: first, I believe that if His actual, historical existence as a man in Galilee is of such crucial importance, then whatever we can find out or reasonably deduce about that existence is worth while; secondly, a combination of a historian’s and a reporter’s mind makes me bridle at improbabilities and search for what might actually have happened. 

And in the case of Yehuda of Kerioth, there is a possible narrative. That it comes to us from the Psalms would normally invalidate it at least in part: the Psalms are poetry, and from a time much earlier than the Gospels. Yet the relation between the two is so strange and close at times as to be unnerving. Most of us discover it first in Psalm 22, parts of which read like a description of the Crucifixion even unto the foolish details of the soldiers dicing for the robe; and we meet it again in Psalm 69:22: ‘They gave me gall to eat : and when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink.’

Does this mean that Yeshua modelled his life upon the Psalms? That the Evangelists took Psalm passages to fill in details of the Crucifixion? Or that there was a deeply strange but real coincidence between the two? My narrative concerning Yehuda, I suppose, postulates the third of these possibilities. Here it is.

Imagine that from the beginning of the Disciples’ life as a group it was Yehuda who was the ‘disciple that Jesus loved’. That it was he who was the ‘familiar friend’, especially close to the Master; that it was with him that the Meshiach took sweet counsel in the Temple and who had the favoured place beside him at meals. 

And then, gradually, over the two or three years that we know of, Yochanan the ‘Son of Thunder’ began to make inroads upon that relationship. He it was, young and charming, who wormed his way into Yeshua’s confidence; he it was who became the new favourite. One can then easily imagine Yehuda’s feelings. Disquiet growing slowly but surely and morphing into a green-eyed monster. At first, dislike turning to hatred for the young co-disciple; and little by little a turning of that hatred to the Master himself. The verses from Psalm 55 might then equally well have issued from the mouth of Yehuda of Kerioth himself. 

That the end result was a pointless but deliberate and vengeful giving-up of Yeshua to the Temple authorities makes, in this case, perfect sense. Hell hath no fury like a loving friend and disciple scorned. And it makes all the more likely and understandable, also, his instant and total remorse once the inevitable consequences of his action began to unroll, and his swift dramatic suicide.

There are holes in this narrative, sure; but it seems to me a great deal more likely than the grubby suggestion that he had been stealing shekels. Poor Yehuda. It would indeed have been better for him had he never been born. And yet, if this story is true, may there not, at the end of time, be mercy even for him?

 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

For those who, despite the coming of the Paraclete, feel obscurely bereft after the Lord’s Ascension because He is no longer with us in the flesh:

Perhaps He has left it up to us to be Him in the flesh.

In compassion for the widow whose only son died;

In the forgiveness of the woman about to be stoned;

In the thought that produced those memorable images we call the Parables;

In the constant, unceasing prayer to the Father;

In the patience with the well-intentioned who act like idiots;

In the occasional flash of real anger at those who blaspheme the sacred;

and in the readiness to go the whole way if the world insists and it cannot be avoided;

Perhaps He has left it up to us to be Him, here, in the flesh.

OMG.

FISH AGAIN

“And while they were still talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said, “Shalom!” They shrank back in terror for they thought they were seeing a ghost. “Why are you so scared?” said Jesus, “and why so confused? Look at my hands and feet—it is really I!  Touch me and see; ghosts don’t have flesh or bones as you can see that I have.” But while they still could not believe it through sheer joy and were utterly bewildered, Jesus said to them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of grilled fish and part of a honeycomb which he took and ate before their eyes.” (Luke 24:36ff.)

I love these Resurrection stories. They are so unlike what one would expect from a God in a Holy Scripture. Here is the Risen One, walking along a country road with a couple of his former followers who don’t recognize him, explaining the scriptures to them and pointing out that Deutero-Isaiah had it right about the Messiah; letting himself be persuaded to come into the inn with them and have a meal; disappearing as he said the Baruch Atta Adonai blessing over the bread and leaving them with “burning hearts”. Here he is again as they are telling that story to the others in Jerusalem: just standing among them and saying “Hello!” Staggered they are, as we would be. We know about ghosts: this has to be one. He shows them his hands and his feet – with ragged holes in them and traces of blood. OK, an apparition would have the right visual detailing. But no: he goes on and asks if they’ve any food. And lo and behold, there’s that grilled fish again, this time with a bit of honeycomb. I’ve never tried fish with honeycomb, though I like both; but that is obviously not the point here. The point is that he sits down and eats them, then looks at them with a grin and says “So -- do ghosts eat?”

The sheer beauty of this, of Jesus, is that combination of the absolute majesty that rises out of the tomb in huge silence on the one hand, and the down-to-earthness that comforts a woman delivered from stoning, that talks Zacchaeus down from his tree, that discusses Heaven in terms of vineyards and mustard-seeds, that goes to dinner with a collaborationist (un collabo, as the French called it, ‘someone who was wrong in the war’ as my parents used to say), and eats grilled fish on the beach or in a city apartment.

The other point, though, is that both here and on the road to Emmaus what he came to do was explain the Scriptures, i.e. the Old Testament. And as Benedict XVI points out in Jesus of Nazareth, what is it that he teaches them? Not that they should be good charitable progressive citizens: “No one would crucify a teacher who told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality,” wrote C.W.F. Smith. Not that the Kingdom of Heaven will arrive like the eschaton, the End of Time, with a cosmic bang in the next few weeks or even years. No, what he teaches is that with him the Kingdom has come: that he is the regnum, the reign of God, literally incarnate. Not only does he explain the Word of God in terms of a mustard-seed, he himself is also the mustard-seed, which must die in the earth to rise and become the tree that shelters and gives fruit.

That thought is so stupendous that we tend to avoid it instinctively, either by not thinking about it or by accepting it easily in words and then, and thus, avoiding it. It makes us understand the force of “where two or three are together in my name, I will be there with them”; it makes us understand the power of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. There may or may not be pie in the sky when we die – it may, in fact, be grilled fish, get used to it --, but the Kingdom of God is right here whenever we seriously link, with heart and mind and soul, to the one who said, and says, “Shalom!”

                    Image: "Christ appears to the Apostles at Table" by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319). 
Note the bread, the fish, and the honeycomb in pots!

TIBERIAS

The sails are slack against the morning sun,

Whispering wavelets part to let us through.

The night was long and hard, the dawn shines blue

And gold, the nets are full, the work is done.

We yawn and stretch, and cap each brimming tun

For transport to the town, nailing it true;

Set tillers for the beach. The day is new

But we are old and tired and sere and dun.

Then on the air a smell of charcoal fire

And frying fish caresses us from land:

Who is that waving in the curls of smoke?

The bow grounds on the sand; we pull it higher,

And recognize, and run, as the raised hand

Becomes the Risen, calling laden folk.

SOMETHING FISHY

Extraordinary. In the three readings of the last few days, the three first occasions where Jesus appears outside the burial garden, the common denominator is food. Fish, to be precise. Grilled fish. OK, most of the inner circle seem to have been fishermen, and it’s all happening in Galilee, that Israeli Lake District where unsophisticated people talk funny and go night-fishing on the Sea of Galilee, alias Lake Tiberias, alias Lake Kinneret. But it still strikes me as unexpected in the story of a resurrected Man-God, mysteriously risen from the tomb during the night. Almost bathos, really. Look at the stories:

     1. The two blokes walking to Warm Springs. We don’t know what they were served at the inn when they got there with their new friend, but fish is not out of the question. In any case, it’s a meal, and it’s at the (very workaday) blessing over the bread that they recognize Him.

   2.Then, when they tell all that to the gang in Jerusalem, suddenly there He is again, among them in an ordinary way. Stupefaction all round. “Oh, come on,” He says, “It’s just me – not a ghost, the real me. Look at my hands and feet: touch them!” The hands and feet are both thoroughly solid and not a pretty sight, after those nails. And then, when they go on havering, he says, “Got anything to eat?” And guess what? Yup, grilled fish again. Oh, and honeycomb. An interesting combination, but it seems that that was what they were having for lunch. (Luke 24:33-47).

  3. Next appearance, up North. (Remember, he told the women that he would meet everyone up in Galilee?)  Simon and the boys have been night fishing and have had a rotten night. Zip. They weren’t biting. At dawn they get to the shore, tired and irritable, and there’s someone standing there who says “Hey! Try one more time, over to starboard, I bet they’ll bite there.” So, with a sigh, they chuck the net over one more time, and bingo! There’s a whole school in there, they can hardly land it. John, always quick on the uptake, says to Peter, “It’s Him!” And Peter, never one to dawdle, jumps overboard and swims to shore with a mighty splashing. And what does he find, and the others when they get there? A little fire of thornbushes and branches, and Jesus, peacefully grilling fish and saying “Come and have some breakfast!”

That image of the little beach-fire at dawn and the smell of grilling fish has stayed in my mind since the first time I heard it. So this is the Mighty Resurrection! Ayup. It could be a story from Vermont or Maine. It’s not grand, it’s not “divine”, it’s not especially moralizing, it’s not Spiritual. It’s food. It’s real.

Nothing is realer than grilled fish and bread, with maybe a bit of honeycomb for dessert. And I think that is probably the point. (The Gospels are rarely pointless.) The Risen Meshiach, Who has just changed history forever, is not a ghost. He is not a pure spirit. There is something very, very slightly strange about Him, as Rembrandt sensed (see below); He is not totally the man He had been; but man He is, real He is, flesh and blood He is. And He eats fish. Bon appétit!