In a hurried passage, Jesus walks by Levi the tax collector and says, “Follow me.” That is all there is to that. He calms the storm on the lake from his skiff. He heals the centurion’s servant at a distance from his house; he raises a widow’s young son from his funeral bier. He drives demons into the Gadarene swine and over the cliff. He performs all with his marble calm, by his fiery power which seems to derive from his very otherness, his emptiness as a channel to God. He moves among men who, being fishermen, could not have been panicky, but who nevertheless seem so in contrast to him: “Master, master, we perish!” Jesus is tranquil in his dealings with maniacs, rich young men, synagogue leaders, Roman soldiers, weeping women, Pilate, Herod, and Satan himself in the desert. Resurrected (apparently as a matter of course), he is distant, enlarged, and calm, even subdued; he explicates Scripture, walks from town to town, and puts up with the marveling disciples. These things are in Luke, which of all the Gospels most stresses and vivifies Christ’s common humanity.
Long before any rumor of resurrection, the narrative is wild. Jesus dines with a Pharisee. A woman—a sinner—from the town walks in; she has heard that Jesus is in that house for dinner. In she walks with no comment at all, just as later a man with dropsy appears before Jesus at another house where he is eating. The woman stands behind him in tears; the men apparently ignore her. Her tears, which must have been copious, wet Jesus’s feet. She bends over and wipes the wetness away with her hair. She kisses his feet and anoints them with perfume from an alabaster flask.
After some time and conversation with the Pharisee, Jesus says, “Seest thou this woman?…Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet…. Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.” To the woman he says, “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” (This is in Luke alone.)
The light is raking; the action is relentless. Once in a crushing crowd, Jesus is trying to make his way to Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter, who is dying. In the crowd, a woman with an unstoppable issue of blood touches the border of his robe. Jesus says, “Who touched me?” Peter and the other disciples point out, with exasperated sarcasm, that “the multitude throng thee and press thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?” Jesus persists, “Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.” The woman confesses, and declares she was healed immediately; Jesus blesses her; a message comes from Jairus’s house that the daughter has already died—“Trouble not the Master.”
“Fear not,” says Jesus; he enters the child’s chamber with her parents and Peter, James, and John; says, “Maid, arise.” She arises straightway, and he commands her parents to give her meat. Then he calls the twelve together, gives them authority over devils and power to heal, and sends them out to teach and heal. When they come back he preaches to multitudes whom he feeds. He prays, teaches the disciples, heals, preaches to throngs, and holds forth in synagogues. And so on without surcease, event crowded on event. Even as he progresses to his own crucifixion, his saving work continues: in the garden where soldiers seize him, he heals with a touch the high priest’s servant’s ear, which a disciple impetuously lopped off; hanging on his cross, he blesses the penitent thief, promising him a place in paradise “this very day.”
Historians of every school agree—with varying enthusiasm—that this certain Jewish man lived, wandered in Galilee and Judaea, and preached a radically spiritual doctrine of prayer, poverty, forgiveness, and mercy for all under the fathership of God; he attracted a following and was crucified by soldiers of the occupying Roman army. There is no reason to hate him, unless the idea of a God who knows, hears, and acts—which idea he proclaimed—is itself offensive.
In Luke, Jesus makes no claims to be the only Son of God. Luke is a monotheist: Jesus is the Son of Man, and the Messiah, but Jesus is not God’s only-begotten Son, of one substance with the Father, who came down from heaven. Luke never suggests that Christ was begotten before all worlds, that he was very God of very God, that eternity interrupted time with his coming, or that faith in his divinity is the sole path to salvation. The substance of his teaching is his way; he taught God, not Christ. The people in Luke are a rogues’ gallery of tax collectors, innkeepers, fallen women, shrewd bourgeois owners, thieves, Pharisees, and assorted unclean Gentiles. He saves them willy-nilly; they need not, and do not, utter creeds first.
Salvation in Luke, for the followers of Christ, consists in a life of prayer, repentance, and mercy; it is a life in the world with God. Faith in Christ’s divinity has nothing to do with it. The cross as God’s own sacrifice has nothing to do with it; the cross is Jesus’ own sacrifice, freely and reluctantly chosen, and of supreme moment on that head. That Jesus was resurrected in flesh and blood means in Luke, I think, that he was indeed the Messiah whom God had promised to lead the people—now all people—by his teaching and example, back to prayerful and spiritual obedience to God their father and creator.
Still, his teachings are as surprising as his life. Their requirements are harsh. Do not ask your goods back from anyone who has taken them from you. Sell all that thou hast, and give it to the poor. Do not stop to perform a son’s great duty, to bury a father. Divorce and remarriage is adultery. Forgive an enemy seven times in one day, without limit. Faith is not a gift but a plain duty. Take no thought for your life. Pray without ceasing. Unto everyone which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away.
The teachings that are not harsh are even more radical, and harder to swallow.
Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?…
Your Father knoweth that you have need of these things.
But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Fear not, little flock…
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
“Fear not, little flock”: this seems apt for those pious watercolor people so long ago, those blameless and endearing shepherds and fishermen, in colorful native garb, whose lives seem pure, because they are not our lives. They were rustics, silent and sunlit, outdoors, whom we sentimentalize and ignore. They are not in our world. They had some nascent sort of money, but not the kind to take seriously. They got their miracles, perhaps, but they died anyway, long ago, and so did their children. Salvation is obviously for them, and so is God, for they are, like the very young and the very old in our world, peripheral. Religion is for outcasts and victims; Jesus made that clear. Religion suits primitives. They have time to work up their touching faith in unverifiable promises, and they might as well, having bugger-all else.
Our lives are complex. There are many things we must consider before we go considering any lilies. There are many things we must fear. We are in charge; we are running things in a world we made; we are nobody’s little flock.
In Luke, Christ’s ministry enlarges in awfulness—from the sunny Galilean days of eating and drinking, preaching on lakesides, saying lovely things, choosing disciples, healing the sick, making the blind see, casting out demons, and raising the dead—enlarges in awfulness from this exuberant world, where all is possible and God displays his power and love, to the dark messianic journey which begins when Peter acknowledges him (“Who do you think I am?”) as the Christ, and culminates in the eerie night-long waiting at the lip of the vortex as Pilate and Herod pass Jesus back and forth and he defends himself not.
Jesus creates his role and succumbs to it. He understands his destiny only gradually, through much prayer; he decides on it, foretells it, and sets his face to meet it
. On the long journey to Jerusalem, which occupies many chapters of Luke, he understands more and more. The narrative builds a long sober sense of crushing demand on Jesus the man, and the long sober sense of his gradually strengthening himself to see it, to cause it, and to endure it. (The account of his ministry’s closure parallels the account of its beginning three years previously; Jesus very gradually, and through prayer, chooses, creates, and assumes his tremendous and transcendent role. He chooses his life, and he chooses his death.)
In that final long journey to Jerusalem, the austerity of Jesus deepens; his mystery and separateness magnify. The party is over. Pressure rises from crowds, pressure rises from the Jewish authorities.
His utterances become vatic and Greekish. Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, he tells his disciples. If anyone wishes to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross day after day, and so follow me. For the Son of Man is coming into his glory. What awaits him is uncertain, unspecified, even unto the cross and upon it; but in the speeches of his last days, in this village and that, his awareness becomes stonily clearer. Privately, often, and urgently, he addresses his disciples in dire terms: When they call you before the magistrates, do not trouble yourself about what you are to say. I have a baptism to undergo. The days will come when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and ye shall not see it. “And they understood none of these things.”
On the way to Jerusalem he addresses the Pharisees, who bring him a message from Herod (“that fox”): “I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.” He adds an apostrophe: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered they children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!”
And he does walk, that day, and the next day, and the day following, soberly, wittingly, and freely, going up to Jerusalem for the Passover in which he will not be passed over. There is little mingling with crowds, and only four healings, two of them provokingly on the Sabbath. His words are often harsh and angry. “Thou fool,” he has God saying to a rich man. “Ye hypocrites,” he calls his disciples. In one of his stories an outraged master says, “Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity.” I am come to send fire on the earth. But those mine enemies…bring hither, and slay them before me.
He enters the city on a “colt” and is at once discovered driving the money changers out of the Temple. “Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” As for the temple in which they stand, “there shall not be left one stone upon another…. These be the days of vengeance.”
The crowds around Jesus are so great in Jerusalem that the Roman authorities must take him at night, as he quits the garden. There he has prayed in an agony, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” Then he has prayed more earnestly, and his sweat fell down to the ground. Betrayed to the soldiers, he shuttles back and forth between Pilate and Herod all night; the cock crows; Peter denies him; and in the morning Pilate takes him—him supremely silent, magnificent, and vulnerable—before the chief priests and Jewish rulers, and before an unspecified crowd. They cry, “Release unto us Barabbas.” And their voices and those of the chief priests prevail. As Roman soldiers lead Jesus away, “there followed him a great company of people.” Where were they a minute ago, that they could not outshout the claque for Barabbas?
In Luke alone, after Jesus on the cross commends his spirit to the hands of God and dies, a Roman soldier is moved to say, “Certainly this was a righteous man.” Luke alone recounts the incident on the road to Emmaus. Two disciples walking to Emmaus are talking about Jesus’ crucifixion, which has occurred three days previously, when a stranger joins them and asks what they are talking about; the disciples, surprised, explain. The stranger interprets messianic prophecies in Scripture for them, beginning with Moses, which seems to surprise them not at all. In the village, they invite the stranger in. When at table he takes the loaf, gives thanks, and breaks it, then their eyes are opened, they recognize him, and he vanishes.
Amazed, they walk that night all the way back to Jerusalem—another seven miles—and tell the others. And while they are speaking, Jesus appears yet again. They are “terrified,” but Jesus says, “Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” He shows them his wounded hands and feet, and they are full of joy and wondering, and very far from recognizing that, among other things, ordinary hospitality is called for—so Jesus has to ask, “Have ye here any meat?” (They give him broiled fish and a piece of honeycomb.) Then the resurrected Jesus explains scriptural prophecies concerning the Messiah’s death and his resurrection on the third day; charges them to preach to all nations; leads them out as far as Bethany (two miles east); blesses them; and is carried up to heaven.
When I was a child, the adult members of Pittsburgh society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They did not recognize the lively danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a dose of its virulent opposition to their world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.
In Sunday school at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, the handsome father of rascal Jack from dancing school, himself a vice-president of Jones & Laughlin Steel, whose wife was famous at the country club for her tan, held a birch pointer in his long fingers and shyly tapped the hanging paper map—shyly because he could see we were not listening. Who would listen to this? Why on earth were we here? There in blue and yellow and green were Galilee, Samaria itself, and Judaea, he said (and I pretended to pay attention as a courtesy), the Sea of Galilee, the River Jordan, and the Dead Sea. I saw on the hanging map the coasts of Judaea by the far side of Jordan, on whose unimaginable shores the pastel Christ had maybe uttered such cruel, stiff, thrilling words: “Sell all that thou hast….”
The Gospel of Luke ends immediately and abruptly after the Ascension outside Bethany, on that Easter Sunday when the disciples had walked so much and kept receiving visitations from the risen Christ. The skies have scarcely closed around Christ’s heels when the story concludes on the disciples: “And [they] were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God. Amen.”
What a pity, that so hard on the heels of Christ come the Christians. There is no breather. The disciples turn into the early Christians between one rushed verse and another. What a dismaying pity, that here come the Christians already, flawed to the core, full of wild ideas and hurried self-importance. They are already blocking, with linked arms, the howling gap in the weft of things that their man’s coming and going tore.
For who can believe in the Christians? They are, we know by hindsight, suddenly not at all peripheral. They set out immediately to take over the world, and they pretty much did it. They converted emperors, raised armies, lined their pockets with real money, and did evil things large and small, in century after century, including this one. They are smug and busy, just like us, and who could believe in them? They are not innocent, they are not shepherds and fishermen in rustic period costume, they are men and women just like us, in polyester. Who could believe salvation is for these rogues? That God is for these rogues? For they are just like us, and salvation’s time is past.
Unless, of course—
Unless Christ’s washing the disciples’ feet, their dirty toes, means what it could, possibly, mean: that it is all right to be human. That God knows we are human, and full of evil, all of us, and we are his people anyway, and the sheep of his pasture.
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Unless those colorful scamps and scalawags who populate Jesus’ parables were just as evil as we are, and evil in the same lazy, cowardly, and scheming ways. Unless those pure disciples themselves and those watercolor women—who so disconcertingly turned into The Christians overnight—were complex and selfish humans also, who lived in the material world, and whose errors and evils were not pretty but ugly, and had real consequences. If they were just like us, then Christ’s words to them are addressed to us, in full and merciful knowledge—and we are lost. There is no place to hide.
1989
From
PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.
—HERACLITUS
I USED TO HAVE A cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.
It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze; my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover. We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…. “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”