Christ

by Jack Miles

  Classical Hebrew and Aramaic, the Semitic languages in which the Old Testament is written, are relatively poor in adjectives and often express by a noun phrase what an Indo-European language would express by a noun with an adjective. Thus, Jesus refers to two of his disciples as “sons of storm,” meaning that they are stormy men. A “son of man,” then, is in the first instance simply a human being, and it is striking that while others in the Gospels sometimes refer to Jesus as “Son of God,” he himself often stresses his humanity—especially when defining his own identity or mission—by referring to himself as “Son of Man.” As it happens, however, “Son of Man” had begun to function at the turn of the Common Era as a mysterious title. If we hear it as a title rather than merely as an idiom, then the scene that echoes in Jesus’ words to Nathanael is Daniel 7:13–14:

  In a dream I saw the clouds of heaven,

  and there he was, one like a son of man,

  And he came to the Ancient of Days,

  and was presented before him.

  To him was given dominion and glory and sovereignty,

  that all races, nations, and languages should serve him.

  His is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away,

  and his kingdom shall not be destroyed.

  Here, as often in the Gospels, Jesus is provoked to use the title “Son of Man” by someone else’s applying to him a title like the one Nathanael has just used: “King of Israel.” But when he declines some such accolade, Jesus invariably implies not simply “I am less than what you think I am” but “I am both less and more.”

  To awestruck fellow human beings like Nathanael, Jesus may be most naturally acclaimed as “the Son of God”: It is his holiness that is most remarkable about him. To God himself, however, what is remarkable about God Incarnate is that he is God Incarnate. Households transformed by the arrival of a newborn typically speak of “the baby” as if there were only one baby in the world. In the life of God, God Incarnate is, in a similar sense, “the man.” What Jesus says to Nathanael, playing on the ambiguity of the phrase, is, equivalently: “You call me a divine being merely because I know your mind and can read your past. I tell you, I am a human being, but you will see the sky split open and the angels throng about the head of this ‘human being.’ ”

  So, then, if Jesus is not the King of Israel, it is because he is more: He is the Emperor of All Peoples. Yet his first followers were drawn to him because the Baptist had identified him as “the Lamb of God.” How can an emperor be a lamb, or a lamb an emperor?

  HE PERFORMS HIS FIRST MIRACLE, BUT RELUCTANTLY

  Were Jesus’ first disciples troubled by his cool reception of them? If we imagine that they were, the episode that now follows may seem like the completion of their recruitment, though Jesus’ manner remains abrupt and unaccommodating throughout. Back home in Galilee, he attends a wedding in the village of Cana.

  The mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited. And they ran out of wine, since the wine provided for the feast had all been used, and the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” Jesus replied, “Woman, what is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” There were six stone water jars standing there, meant for the ablutions that are customary among the Jews; each could hold twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water,” and they filled them to the brim. Then he said to them, “Draw some out now and take it to the head waiter.” They did this; the head waiter tasted the water, and it had turned into wine. Having no idea where it came from—though the servants who had drawn the water knew—the head waiter called the bridegroom and said, “Everyone serves good wine first and the poorer wine when the guests are half drunk; but you have kept the best wine till now.”

  This was the first of Jesus’ signs.… He revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him. After this, he went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples, but they stayed there only a few days. (NJB; John 2:1–12 with modifications)

  The Devil asked Jesus to turn stones into bread. Jesus’ mother stops just short of asking him to perform a nearly duplicate miracle and turn water into wine. True, she merely notes the fact that the wine has run out, but he rightly hears a challenge. Though we need hear no disrespect in his addressing his mother as “Woman,” his words “what is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come” seem clearly to resist her. In the Gospel of John, whenever Jesus refers to “my hour,” he is referring to his death, and he speaks as if expecting her to understand the reference. In the end, he relents, but what has his death to do with wine at the wedding? What point is he making to her?

  When she declines to reply to him and addresses herself instead to the attendants, she suggests—as the Devil does in his confrontation with Jesus—that she knows something about him that others do not but has, at the same time, a question about him. What would that question be?

  The answer may lie in the point of the miracle, which seems to involve Jesus’ disciples more than it does the embarrassed wedding hosts. The episode concludes, “He revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him,” recalling words from the prologue (1:14) “And we have seen his glory.” If she has prevailed upon him to reveal his glory to them before he intended to do so, she may be attempting to bind them to him for his own good; and he may be cooperating with her by changing the water not just into a fresh supply of the existing wine but into new and better wine. All Jesus’ miracles are, for John, “signs,” and no detail in them is without meaning.

  Just a few days later, when Jesus goes to Jerusalem, his disciples go with him, but his brothers notably do not. His mother may have known that they would not, and have wanted him not to be alone when, at the Jerusalem Temple, he performed a reckless and violent act that would have one meaning, as she half-guessed, for those who had already glimpsed his “glory” and quite another meaning for those who had not.

  HE STAGES AN ATTACK ON THE TEMPLE, THEN RETREATS

  Since the time of the Jewish Passover was approaching, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the Temple compound, he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and the money changers sitting there. Making a whip out of cords, he drove them all out of the Temple, sheep and cattle as well. He scattered the money changers’ coins, knocked their tables over, and said to the dove sellers, “Get these things out of here, and stop turning my Father’s house into a market.” Then his disciples remembered the words of scripture, “I am eaten up with zeal for your house.” The Jews spoke up saying, “By what right do you do these things? Show us a sign.” Jesus answered, “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this Temple! Are you going to raise it up again in three days?” But he spoke of the temple of his body. When Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples remembered what he had said, and they believed in the scripture and the words that he had spoken. (John 2:14–22)

  Jesus’ violent attack on the Temple is the first public action of his career, and it is a career-defining action. Herod’s Temple was not just the central shrine of the Jewish religious establishment; it was also the seat of such political power as the nation retained. How do his disciples react to his audacity?

  When they recall “I am eaten up with zeal for your house,” a line from Psalm 69, they seek to define him as a zealous and righteous prophet, like so many before him, including John the Baptist. But he is rather more than that: No prophet went so far as to attack the Temple physically. Jesus’ fierce conduct evokes, if anything, a cleansing visitation of the Lord himself as imagined by the prophet Malachi:

  The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.…

  But who can endure the day of his coming,

  and who can stand when he appears?

  For he is like a refiner’s fire,

  or like the cleaner’s lye.

  (Mal. 3:1–2
)

  Jesus assumes the authority predicated of him by the Baptist’s words “the winnowing-fork is in his hand.” But authority like this cannot be assumed with impunity. Jesus’ provocation of the Jerusalem authorities is potentially a capital offense. In the Synoptic Gospels, it is in fact the most prominent of the charges brought against him at his later trial. But the boldness of his conduct is exceeded by the boldness of his language in explaining it. When “the Jews” demand a “sign,” some proof that Jesus has the right to usurp the Temple authorities as he has done, the destruction of the Temple is the very last thing on their minds. Why is it the first thing on his mind in his audacious answer to them?

  The destruction of the Temple weighs on the mind of God Incarnate for at least three reasons: first, because it was God himself who destroyed the First Temple, the first “House”; second, because he knows that a new destruction is coming; and, third, because he knows that he will not stop it.

  The destruction of the First Temple, God made abundantly clear at the time, was not Babylonia’s doing but his. Speaking through Jeremiah shortly before Nebuchadnezzar arrived from the north, he said:

  I have forsaken my House.

  I have abandoned my inheritance.

  I have given my soul’s beloved

  into the hands of her foes.…

  She has raised her voice against me;

  therefore I hate her.

  (Jer. 12:7–8)

  Though it is a convention of classical Hebrew poetry to present victory and defeat as the jubilation or lamentation of women, it is also true that, then as now, military defeat has a special and horrible meaning for women. In a later passage never read in church, the Lord gave more details about just what he had in mind for her whom he had come to hate:

  Do you ask yourself,

  “Why is all this happening to me?”

  It is because your guilt is great,

  that your skirts have been pulled up

  and you have been raped.…

  Because you have forgotten me,

  and put your trust in falsehood,

  I have pulled your skirts up over your face

  to let your shame be seen.

  Ugh! Your adulteries, your squeals of pleasure,

  your vile prostitution!

  On the hills, in the dales,

  I have seen your depravity.

  Jerusalem, woe is coming upon you!

  (13:22, 25–27)

  “I have pulled your skirts up over your face.…” We may assume that when disaster came for Jerusalem in the sixth century B.C.E., such scenes were actually enacted. Has war not always been so? But now the Lord revisits the scene of the rape, and his mood is defensive and arrogant. His words “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up” are like those of an arsonist who visits, unrecognized, a church that he once torched. “Burn this place down,” he says, apropos of nothing, “and I can rebuild it for you in nothing flat.”

  The reference to reconstruction in three days echoes at least as loudly as the reference to destruction. In three days he will raise it up? Five hundred years have gone by and he has not raised it up. The Second Temple, as we have seen, was an embarrassment. The very name of Zerubbabel, the kinglet who built it, was ludicrous, meaning “Born-in-Babylon”—a name perhaps sarcastically substituted for his real one after he was discredited and deposed by the Persians, who were the real power in “restored” Israel. As for the Temple that Jesus now visits, though Jewish taxes have paid for it, is it the Lord’s Temple or Herod’s? Observing its commercialization, Jesus feels anger as a Jew but, as the Lord Incarnate, he also feels shame. If the chosen people have to conduct their very worship as junior partners in a foreign-owned enterprise, the blame is not theirs. He had promised it would not be so, and he has not kept his promise.

  The worst, however, is that the Lord, now incarnate as Jesus, knows that this Temple, too, will soon be destroyed, with consequences worse than anything he prophesied through Jeremiah, and that he will not intervene to stop it. He knows that when that time comes, the Romans will need so many crosses to crucify Jews after putting down their desperate rebellion that the hills around Jerusalem will literally be deforested (a ghastly detail mentioned by the first-century historian Josephus). Because the subject is so much on the Lord’s mind, it is provocatively close to his lips.

  But then what? Much of the uncanniness of the character of Jesus derives from the way he makes familiar objects and images strange by combination. The expiatory lamb is familiar; a human lamb is strange. The Temple is equally familiar; a human temple (“He spoke of the temple of his body”) is strange again. A human temple marked for destruction, a temple that will be sacrificed like a lamb, is strangeness squared. And note well that Jesus does not say, “If you destroy this Temple.…” What he says is, defiantly, “Destroy this Temple.” He dares the authorities to kill him. A lamb who taunts the butcher? His followers do not hear the defiance. “The Jews” do not hear it either. No one yet makes the bizarre double or triple equation that Jesus makes. But all have seen the defiance in his destructive action, which speaks more clearly and no less loudly than these words; and all know that unless he either quits Jerusalem or provides something unprecedented by way of an explanatory, legitimizing “sign,” he has put himself in mortal danger.

  In the end, Jesus chooses to leave Jerusalem when the Passover feast is over, strongly suggesting that, whatever his full intentions are, they do not center on reforming Temple practice, much less on seizing power. He has come to his Temple suddenly, as the prophet Malachi predicted, only to announce a profound change in his relationship to it. His attack, the one and only violent action reported of him, is a mere staged attack, a demonstration, and the demonstration is the whole of the agenda. His equation of the Temple and his own body goes beyond Louis XIV’s “L’état c’est moi.” No “real” messiah could ignore the seat of Jewish political power and commercial life. But Jesus is an ironic, “unreal” messiah, a yes-and-no messiah who has no such agenda. The horrendous attacks that the Lord unleashed against the Temple in the past are definitively in the past. When such attacks occur in the future, and they will not be long in coming, he will not claim that they are his attacks, nor will he defend against them. The Lord of Hosts, the hero of Jewish song and story, will be a noncombatant.

  The Gospels report recurring questionings of Jesus’ sanity, and one can easily see why. It would have been easy for the Temple authorities to contain his little raid, intellectually, in the capacious category of crazy visitors to the great national shrine. If he had been serious, then he would have had to go on from this raid to others; he would have had to exhort his followers to conduct their own raids. But he does nothing of the sort. He leaves Jerusalem because, now that he has substituted himself for the Temple, he has nothing to do there but die and rise, and the hour of his death and resurrection has not yet come.

  INTERLUDE: THE BURDEN OF HIS OMNISCIENCE

  While he was in Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he performed. Jesus, however, knew all people and did not entrust himself to them, for he never needed evidence about anyone: He could tell what they had within. (John 2:23–25)

  God Incarnate’s ability to “tell what they had within” is a power that God did not have at the start of his creative activity but acquired only gradually, even as his physical power seemed to ebb away. Just after creating the world, when his strength was at its apex, the Lord still had to ask Adam and Eve, “Who told you that you were naked?” (Gen. 3:11). By the end of his career, he is physically quiescent, but his mental powers have grown apace. The Book of Daniel features both divine clairvoyance and divine prescience—that is, both the ability to “tell what someone had in him” and the ability to read the future. But then thousands of years lie between the moment when the Lord creates the first man in Genesis and the moment when he appears, in Daniel, as “the Ancient of Days,” a white-haired sage seated
on a throne, burdened with his own knowledge and emotionally detached.

  Jesus too seems burdened with his own knowledge and emotionally detached as a result. Though he is only about thirty (Luke 3:23), he seems much older, knowing in the way of an older man, weary in the same way. But if Jesus seems to have been born old, it is only because he was born old. As the son of Joseph, he may have only three decades behind him, but as God Incarnate he has a curriculum vitae three millennia long. Recalling this, we need not be surprised that he rarely displays conventional curiosity about or interest in other people. He asks his interlocutors many questions for their sake but never one for his own sake. Jesus never needs to ask: He knows.

  Related to this is the fact that Jesus’ schedule seems to have only one appointment on it. His “hour,” the time predestined for his execution in Jerusalem, is fixed and obligatory. Everything else seems random and optional. He seems to choose as his disciples the first men who come along. He works his miracles for those sufferers who happen to cross his path. It is as if, because his intentions comprehend all mankind, he may begin anywhere, with anybody. There is never anyone whom Jesus simply must meet. No human encounter is forbidden. None is required.

  The private life of Jesus differs from the private life of the Lord God inasmuch as Jesus does seem to have a private life, while the Lord God does not. True, God does talk to himself during the creation and again just before the great flood. From the call of Abraham onward, however, every word he says is specifically addressed. He never muses, never thinks aloud, never says anything as an aside to himself. Unless he has something to say to someone, he has nothing to say.