Christ

by Jack Miles

  God Incarnate, in sharpest contrast, seems to have a private life that has swallowed his public life whole. The Gospel of John reads at times like a book-length soliloquy with occasional digressions into conversation. Jesus’ interlocutors often seem to be mere occasions for thought, like the students of a meditative teacher given to speaking his meditations aloud. Yet the difference is not so great as it seems. Even when Jesus talks over the heads of his auditors or keeps on talking when a given interlocutor has departed or fallen wholly silent, the meaning of his speech always requires completion by the identity of the hearer. The difference is that, unlike God, Jesus invariably seems to understand his interlocutors’ desires better than they do themselves.

  Jesus, like God, never engages in small talk. Small talk serves the needs of people who need time to get to know one another. Jesus needs no such time. He already knows all that he needs to know. And his speeches are carried in a narrative that reflects his own stringent priorities. The New Testament, like the Old Testament, is morally serious to the virtual exclusion of charm and, often enough, even of information. It is not that there is no humor in the Bible, but its humor, like everything else in it, is always a means to a moral end. Nothing in the Bible is ever said merely to inform or amuse; neither knowledge nor beauty nor any other human good is ever pursued for its own sake. As a result, the Bible provides only some of the aesthetic pleasure that we have learned to expect of imaginative writing, while the distinct aesthetic effect that it does produce is one of concentrated and commanding moral urgency. The speeches of Jesus, like the speeches of God, have that about them which says, in effect, “This is neither a school exercise, reader, nor an idle entertainment, nor even a beautiful work of art. This is reality. This is serious. Pay attention!”

  The rule of thumb for the interpretation of texts written to this ascetic recipe might be stated as follows: Since everything insignificant has been left out, assume that everything kept in is significant. Reading a text in this way might also, more loosely, be described as reading it as if it were written by God. The kind of close scrutiny, the magnification of detail, that such interpretation entails is exhausting to undertake and, at first, bewildering even to behold. But the Bible did receive such attention, for centuries, and the habits of biblical exegesis, as they have been crystallized and secularized, have led in the West to a relative scripturalization of all imaginative literature—indeed all imaginative production. Poems, plays, and novels would not now be subjected to such close and earnest examination, in other words, nor would their authors be revered as the source of otherwise unavailable truth, if biblical exegesis had not first set the pattern: a text understood to contain more than first meets the eye and a central character—understood to be the ultimate author of the text—who never, for even the most fleeting instant, consents to be taken casually. In the oracular gravity of a filmmaker (architect, novelist, mezzo soprano) who clearly believes that what has been brought forth is no mere movie (building, novel, aria), we may see the secularized continuation of the biblical antigenre of pure moral consequence. The interviewing journalist who would withhold homage before this gravity is like a prophet who would decline the word of the Lord. At issue is something far deeper or altogether other than mere pomposity. With consummate art, the Bible insists that it is not art at all, and by that very insistence it has had its deepest impact on the Western artistic ideal.

  HE SPEAKS OF A NEW CREATION, BUT PRIVATELY

  The classic biblical combination of intense moral seriousness and extreme narrative economy appears at full strength in an episode that begins not long after Jesus’ raid on the Temple, when

  one of the Pharisees called Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews … came to Jesus by night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher. No one could perform the signs that you do unless God was with him.” Jesus answered:

  Truly I tell you,

  no one can see the Kingdom of God

  without being born anew.

  (John 3:1–3)

  Where is Jesus lodging when Nicodemus comes to see him? What do his quarters look like? As the two of them speak, are they seated, standing, or pacing about? What are they wearing? Is Nicodemus an elder statesman among the Pharisees or a young searcher of the same age as the man he has come to visit? As usual in the Bible, none of this information is provided; and as usual in the Bible, its absence forces the attention of the reader to the information that the writer does provide.

  Thus, in the three verses just quoted, it matters that Nicodemus is a Pharisee and therefore a believer in resurrection; it matters that he is coming to Jesus not on his own account but as “a leader of the Jews”; it matters that, by the same token, Nicodemus and his circle have been favorably impressed by Jesus’ public “signs,” of which the only one so far mentioned is his violent action in the Temple; and finally it matters that Nicodemus arrives under cover of darkness.

  It matters as well, of course, that Jesus can read minds.

  Jesus chooses to decline Nicodemus’ conventional homage (“Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher”), saying, in effect, that a man like Nicodemus cannot (or, at least, does not yet) know enough to tell whether Jesus comes from God or not. To acquire that ability, he will have to be “born anew.” But in raising this strange topic, Jesus responds not to what Nicodemus has said but to what Jesus knows he is thinking. It is unlikely, after all, that Nicodemus has come by night merely to compliment a visitor from Galilee. Jesus continues:

  Truly I tell you,

  no one can enter the kingdom of God

  without being born of water and Spirit.

  What is born of human nature is human;

  what is born of the Spirit is spirit.

  Do not be surprised when I say:

  You must be born anew.

  The breath of the wind blows where it pleases.

  You can hear its sound,

  but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes.

  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

  (3:5–8)

  When Nicodemus asks, mildly, “How is that possible?” Jesus rebukes him again:

  You are a teacher of Israel, yet you do not understand this? Truly I tell you, we speak only of what we know and testify only to what we have seen, yet you people reject our testimony. If you do not believe me when I speak to you of the things of earth, how will you believe me when I speak to you of the things of heaven? (3:9–12)

  If the Gospel of John were printed as drama, there would be a stage direction at around this point: “Exit Nicodemus,” or perhaps “Exit Nicodemus, muttering,” or “Exit Nicodemus, agitated.” Nicodemus never speaks again in this scene. “How is that possible?” are his last words. If Jesus’ goal was to confound this inquirer, he would seem to have succeeded. Yet Nicodemus happens to be the man who will bury Jesus after his crucifixion, so somehow Jesus did reach him. What is there about Jesus’ speech that a “teacher of Israel”—someone who knows the tradition out of which Jesus is speaking—might use to turn himself into a disciple?

  With reference to “being born of water and Spirit,” Nicodemus might think of Genesis 1:1 and the time when “darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God’s Spirit breathed over the face of the waters.” It is an undernoticed fact that in Genesis God does not create darkness but only contains it. After creating light, “God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day” (Gen. 1:4–5, italics added). Day, which God has created, is a space cleared within darkness, which he did not create. Time begins when light begins, occupying the same cleared space in the primeval darkness, which itself is timeless. “And God said: ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years’ ” (RSV; Gen. 1:14, italics added). As light is a space cleared within darkness, so time
is a space cleared within eternity by God’s chronometers, the sun, the moon, and the stars. As for the waters, once again God does not create them but only contains or restrains them, opening the dry land as an ordered space within the chaos of the waters: “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear” (1:9). Night and ocean as mankind knows them are the remains of the uncreated chaos of darkness and water that God dammed up to make the world.

  When Nicodemus, who comes to God Incarnate out of the night, is told that he must be “born anew,” as I have translated the phrase, following the Revised Standard Version, he is being pushed to guess that the new birth being spoken of will occur as part of, or in anticipation of, a descent into chaos, followed by a new creation of the cosmos itself from darkness, water, and Spirit—in brief, a new birthday for the whole world.

  Only God can perform such a cosmic feat, but will he? Will he start over? Jesus seems to hint at nothing less, but how strange that such a vast possibility should be spoken of at night, in private if not in secret, with just one interlocutor. And if a new creation is called for, does it not follow that there is some crippling defect, some mistake or disgrace, in the old creation? Nicodemus’ question “How is that possible?” leads inevitably to the question And why is it necessary? And Jesus’ answer is: “The breath of the wind blows where it pleases.” In brief, God has his reasons.

  Greek, like Hebrew, uses a single word for breath, wind, and spirit, and the three have a powerful experiential linkage. The experience of even the smallest child includes two kinds of blowing: the blowing of the wind and the blowing of the child’s own breath. Since breathing stops at death, it is an easy step to associate breath with life and then to make the further inference that the wind, which seems to breathe, must also be alive. Ancient Israel went yet one more step and asserted that the living spirit that blows sometimes fiercely in the storm and sometimes sweetly from the mouth of a babe is the breath of the living God. In the Bible, the breath/wind/spirit that moves in each man, woman, or child moved first as God’s own breath/wind/Spirit. He breathed it into the first man, and thereafter all human life and breath belongs to him. He can breathe a corpse to life as surely as he did a mud statue in Genesis 2. His Spirit—in the wind, in the lungs, and in the mind—is this vivifying power in person.

  In the Old Testament, the most frequently cited encounter of water and Spirit—more frequently cited than the Genesis encounter—is the encounter in Exodus of a wind from God with the waters of the Red Sea. God’s breath, blown from his nostrils, dried up the sea so that the Israelites might flee to safety from the pursuing Egyptian army, which drowned when the wind stopped and the waters rushed back. On the far shore, the Israelites sang a song of victory over their drowned enemy:

  A blast from your nostrils and the waters piled high;

  the waves stood firm as a dyke;

  the bed of the sea became firm ground.…

  [Then] you exhaled, and the sea closed over them;

  they sank like lead beneath the mighty waters.

  (NJB Exod. 15:8, 10 with modifications)

  The Jordan River, where the Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism, would part at another blast from God’s nostrils when the Israelites crossed from the desert into Canaan.

  The most vivid, memorable, and explicit of all biblical equations of breath, wind, and life-giving Spirit comes, however, in Ezekiel:

  [The Lord God] said, “Prophesy over these bones. Say, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. The Lord God says this to these bones: I am now going to make breath enter you, and you will live. I will put sinews on you, I will make flesh grow on you, I will cover you with skin and give you breath, and you will live; and you will know that I am the Lord.’ ” I prophesied as I had been ordered. While I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound; it was the bones coming together. And as I looked, they were covered with sinews; flesh was growing on them and skin was covering them, yet there was no breath in them. He said to me, “Prophesy to the Spirit; prophesy, son of man. Say to the Spirit, ‘The Lord God says this: Come from the four winds, Spirit; blow on these dead, so that they come to life!’ ” I prophesied as he had ordered me, and the wind entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet, a great, a mighty host. Then he said, “Son of man, these bones are the whole House of Israel. They keep saying, ‘Our bones are dry, our hope has gone; we are doomed.’ So prophesy and say to them, ‘The Lord God says this: I am now going to open your graves; I will raise you up from your graves, my people, and lead you back to the soil of Israel. And you will know that I am the Lord.’ ” (37:4–14)

  Does Jesus intend Nicodemus to remember Ezekiel? The passage is so well known and so striking that it is difficult to imagine Nicodemus’ not making the association, particularly after being challenged to ask himself what he should be expected to recall as a “teacher of Israel.” It matters, as noted earlier, that Nicodemus is a Pharisee, practicing a form of Judaism one of whose innovations was a belief in the resurrection of the dead.

  In the intellectual tradition that began in ancient Israel, revolutions did not come by deletion or replacement but by transformative expansion or, in the broader sense of the word, by midrash. Transformative expansion is what occurs when the “son of man” of Daniel 7 is made to refer not just to the period following Alexander the Great but also to an actual human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who was born during that period. Transformative expansion is what occurs when Ezekiel’s vision (in which “son of man” does mean simply “man”) is made to refer not just to national rebirth but also, simultaneously, to personal resurrection. And, as we shall see later, transformative, midrashic expansion is what happens most dramatically when the lamb whose blood saved the Israelites from God’s Angel of Death at the first Passover becomes the divine lamb or Lamb of God whose blood at the second Passover saves all mankind from God’s ancient curse. In sum, instead of “Exit Nicodemus, agitated,” perhaps we may understand, after all, “Exit Nicodemus, inspired.”

  HE TALKS, BUT TO HIMSELF, OF GOD AS ILLNESS AND AS REMEDY

  Chastened or inspired, the Jewish leader makes his way back into the night. Left alone, God Incarnate, like Hamlet in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, ponders the scarcely comprehensible death that awaits him. Having put his human life in mortal peril by his action in the Temple, he now says shocking things of and to himself that he is not yet ready to say to Nicodemus—or to anyone:

  No one has gone up to heaven

  except the one who came down from heaven,

  the Son of Man.

  As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert,

  so must the Son of Man be lifted up

  so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

  (John 3:13–15)

  In the Old Testament, the Lord is oblivious of himself. In the New, the Lord Incarnate is obsessed with himself. The Lord says so little about himself in the Old Testament that who he is must be inferred from what he does. In Exodus (JPS; 3:13–17), when pushed by Moses, the Lord actually makes this very point about himself, if somewhat gropingly. Moses asks, “When I come to the Israelites and say to them ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?,’ what shall I say to them?” God’s answer comes in four stages, and he seems to be making it up as he goes along. First, he says, “I am who I am” or perhaps “I am what I do,” which is an answer but not a name. It is an explanation for why he has no name and needs none. Second, shortening his first answer into a kind of makeshift name, the Lord says, “Tell them, ‘I AM sent me to you.’ ” I AM is his raw or naked name, a name that is not just conventionally but inherently unspeakable. How can you speak it—how, at least, can you speak it routinely—without encountering all kinds of syntactic confusion? Third, conceding a bit more to Moses’ need for credentials, he says, “Thus shall you speak to the Israelites: ‘Yahweh [a name with an audible link to “I am what I do” but in
the third person], the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ ” Fourth and last, with unexpected solemnity, he ratifies what he has just done, saying:

  Let this be my name forever.

  Thus will I be called for all eternity.

  To repeat, the impression conveyed is that the Lord is naming himself on the spot, discovering the need for a name and coining the name in the same moment. And why should we be surprised? Until asked to provide a name for himself by a human being, why would the Lord need one? He lives among no other gods. It matters not how he is addressed, because no one addresses him. He is the only one of his kind. No one exists with whom he might be confused. And at this point in his story, he has not yet required human beings to address him in prayer. When he thinks of himself, what else can he think but “I am”?

  How very different it is for Jesus. Though he is God, he is also a man. There is the whole male population with whom he might be confused. Knowing this, he resorts to extreme language to distinguish himself from them. But the Incarnation, which occasions this need, is itself a radical response to a still deeper need: The Lord, at long last, has become a question to himself. Very simple identities do not happen into crisis; complex identities do. The Lord’s behavior from the beginning was certainly contradictory enough to have been problematic for him no less than for his creatures, but his absolute confidence and blissful oblivion of self long kept him from regarding himself as a problem. Now, as God Incarnate, while very far from shedding the manner of unquestioning invincibility, he says things that are so strange and so utterly unprecedented that, whatever his manner, they betray radical conflict.