Christ
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None of these behaviors is retaliation, but none, either, is simple capitulation. What Jesus has discovered, and the discovery is to have a long and explosive history in the West, is the power of the victim against the victimizer. Yet if it is possible to imagine, as he does, scenes in which, while doing no harm, striking no blow, delivering no outright insult, the victim wins, it is equally possible to imagine counterscenes in which the victim loses because there is no flicker of grace in the soul of the victimizer. If it had been Jesus rather than John who condemned Herod, perhaps he would have found a more arresting, more droll, or simply more politic formulation than John’s blunt and artless “It is against the law for you to have your brother’s wife” (Mark 6:18). Still, it takes little to rile a petty tyrant. There may have been no way for John to say what he had to say cleverly enough to escape with his life.
Yet the story of John’s beheading, considered in this light, suggests another way in which the victim can win. If instead of looking for victory only in the victim’s personal gains or losses we broaden the context, then one who loses for himself may win for others. John’s truth-telling cost him his head, but then what happened? Did Herod move on without a backward glance? No; he remained troubled by the thought that John might rise from the dead. He was persuaded that Jesus, a new censor whose fame was reaching his court, might be John come back to life. In short, Herod, after John’s death, was changing. A man without a conscience was being led, however haltingly and nervously, to develop one—to the potential gain of all Galilee.
If the Romans shocked the Jews by making death a form of entertainment, the Jews who founded Christianity were about to shock the Romans by taking hold of the idea of martyrdom and making death an unprecedented form of protest from one end of the Roman empire to the other. The death of John the Baptist, a prophet slain for speaking truth to power, is a moment in the genesis of Jewish martyrdom. Historically, this genesis was a complex process whose earliest fully conscious biblical antecedent may be found nearly two centuries earlier, in the martyrdoms of 2 Maccabees 7. In that chapter, seven brothers, one following another, accept death after hideous torture rather than desert their ancestral religion. The Hellenistic tyrant who is overseeing their execution wavers in his bloody resolve after the sixth dies and tries to cajole the seventh and youngest into compliance. He urges the boy’s mother, who has witnessed the entire gory spectacle, to persuade him to save his own life. She feigns cooperation but then, speaking to the boy in Hebrew or Aramaic, which the tyrant does not understand, exhorts him to die bravely. The passage ends as follows:
“I too [the seventh brother says], like my brothers, offer up my body and life for the laws of my forefathers, imploring God quickly to take pity on our nation, and by trials and afflictions to bring you to confess that he alone is God, so that through my brothers and myself the Almighty may bring to an end the wrath that he has rightly loosed on our whole nation.”
The king fell into a rage and treated this one more cruelly than he had the others, for he was stung by the young man’s scorn. Thus, the last brother met his end unsullied and with perfect faith in the Lord. The mother was the last to die, after her sons. (2 Macc. 7:37–41)
Two of the elements of the victim strategy as Jesus has taught it are in evidence here. First, torture is accepted not simply to demonstrate courage but to change the mind of the torturer, and the tactic is not without effect: The tyrant is “stung by the young man’s scorn.” Second, vindication beyond the grave is assumed. When the second brother accepts death rather than eat pork, his dying words make this particularly clear: “You accursed wretch, you may discharge us from this present life, but the King of the World will raise us up to live forever, since it is for his laws that we die” (2 Macc. 7:9).
On two other points, however, there is a difference. First, the seventh son assumes that the Greek tyrant’s presence in the land is temporary. He is no more than a part of God’s punishment of Israel, which will end in due course. Despite the fact that the tyrant is subjectively iniquitous, the oppression he visits upon Israel is objectively “the wrath that [the Almighty] has rightly loosed on our whole nation.” This is the sort of thing that Jesus never says, and the omission could not be more striking than it is. Second, the Maccabees are a Hellenized Jewish warrior clan that, by making an alliance with Rome, will succeed in defeating the Hellenistic tyrant and establishing an independent Jewish kingdom that will last a full century—essentially, until Rome is strong enough to move in and take over. Accordingly, the martyrs of 2 Maccabees 7 do not renounce violence but eagerly anticipate military vindication by their own victory on the battlefield. The fifth brother’s dying words are “Do not think that God has deserted our race. Just wait, and you will see in good time how his mighty power will torment you and your descendants” (7:16–17). In the Books of Maccabees, moral resistance does not preclude military resistance but only pursues it by other means, like propaganda or “psyop” (psychological operations) in modern warfare. In the Gospels, moral resistance entirely replaces military resistance.
In some form, then, the notion of martyrdom is known to the audience that Jesus addresses, yet he redefines the role of martyr even as he redefines the role of messiah. Martyrdom, as he envisions it, is not battlefield heroism in another form but demonstrative suffering of a kind that even a prostitute can manage. Any victim, however humble, who manages to make his pain a form of speech can turn himself from a simple victim into a martyr, or so Jesus suggests. In our own culture, where this form of speech is deeply rooted and instinctively understood, the powerful are constantly on guard against having the pain they inflict create martyrs whose voices can be heard speaking against them. In Jesus’ day, though all of Hellenistic culture honored valor and though influential currents of moral philosophy such as Stoicism honored suicide as well, martyrdom understood as Jesus understood it was a novelty that would become a cultural weapon only after his death.
Even within the Gospels themselves, martyrdom is not treated as a well-understood or generally accepted idea. On the contrary, though all four Gospels include early allusions to it, their pervasive assumption is that this idea shocks even Jesus’ closest disciples. Jesus treats his own future martyrdom as a disturbing and fearful secret—in effect, a scandal, to be disclosed only to a few and only with the greatest caution. John in Herod’s prison and the whore in Simon’s house are moments in that gradual disclosure. Jesus’ praise for her exceeds any that he has spoken for anyone except John, and in fact the two eulogies have a deep link and raise the same pressing question.
For if the strategy of shame requires, at the extreme, that the victim shame his opponent by surrendering his very life, and if this strategy is now the principal strategy of the divine warrior, then what lies ahead for Israel? John acclaimed Jesus as the Lamb of God, but now it is John himself who has been butchered. Are the disciples to see in John’s fate an illustration of Jesus’ new tactics? Does Jesus want to produce a nation of lambs? Does he really expect to redeem Israel from oppression merely by shaming her oppressor? It was not by such means that the Lord God of Hosts ever promised to save Israel!
HE FEEDS A MULTITUDE
The identity of Jesus is, of course, the question whose answer changes everything. The angels, at his birth, referred to him as “Christ the Lord,” using a title that, as noted earlier, is reserved in the Old Testament for God. The demon whom Jesus expelled from a madman in the Capernaum synagogue addressed him as “the Holy One,” using a similarly reserved title. But has any mere human being entertained the thought that Jesus might be God Incarnate?
The odd fact is that Jesus has often seemed determined to conceal rather than reveal his identity. His caution only grows more pronounced after the death of John. From that point on, his parables in Galilee take on a significantly darker, more guarded, more coded character—more like the language he used at the start in Judea:
As a large crowd gathered and people from every town found their way to him, h
e told this parable:
“A sower went out to sow his seed. Now as he sowed, some fell on the edge of the road and was trampled underfoot; and the birds of the air ate it up. Some seed fell on rock; and when it sprouted, it withered for lack of moisture. Some seed fell amid thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. And some seed fell into good soil, where it grew and produced a hundredfold.” Saying this, he cried: “If you have ears to listen, then listen.”
His disciples asked him what this parable could mean, and he said, “To you it has been given to understand the secrets of the kingdom of God. For the others, it remains in parables, so that [quoting Isaiah]
they may look but not see,
listen but not understand.
Here, then, is what the parable means: The seed is the word of God.” (Luke 8:4–11)
Jesus explains the parable, but only to a chosen few; and the explanation matters less than the fact that, as God Incarnate, Jesus is concealing his own message just as God did at Isaiah 6:9, the passage that he quotes. He is speaking and yet seeing to it that he is not understood until the events that he is arranging, the events that will say more than any words, have come to pass. By quoting Isaiah, he reminds his disciples that this is how God sometimes proceeds, but his conduct remains paradoxical, for he reminds them of God at a highly paradoxical moment in God’s past.
What Jesus conceals for the moment but must soon reveal is, above all, his own divinity. Actions of his that might suggest blasphemous presumption in a mere human being—actions like casting out demons and forgiving sins—have certainly been wondered at, but the enormity of divinity as their true explanation has been psychologically out of reach. As Jesus approaches the moment when he will perform his most spectacularly godlike miracles, perhaps the one man still alive who has an inkling of the full truth is Nicodemus. The eminent Jerusalem leader, dumbstruck at first, may later have understood that Jesus, with his talk of “water and the Spirit,” was laying claim to nothing less than God’s own power to create worlds and destroy them. Jesus has not otherwise attempted to bring anyone so far into his confidence. But this is about to change.
Shortly before the execution of John, Jesus, taking charge of his mission in a new and more organized way, sends his disciples out, two by two, to cast out demons in his name, heal the sick, and preach repentance. The mission goes well, but the grim news of John’s death reaches him just as the disciples return, and Jesus calls for a tactical retreat.
He said to them, “Come away by yourselves to some isolated spot and rest for a while.” There had been so many people coming and going that they had had no time even to eat. So they headed offshore toward an isolated spot where they could be by themselves. But people had seen them leaving, and many recognized them. And so from every town they all hurried to the same spot on foot and reached it before they did. The result was that when Jesus came ashore, he found a large crowd waiting. But his heart went out to them because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he set about teaching them many things.
When it grew late, his disciples came up to him and said, “This place is remote, and it is getting late. Send them away now so that they can go to the farms and villages in the area to buy themselves something to eat.”
He answered, “Give them something to eat yourselves.”
They said, “Are we to go and spend several months’ wages buying bread for them?”
He asked, “How many loaves have you? Go check.”
When they did, they said, “Five, and two fish as well.”
Then he ordered them to settle everyone in groups on the grass, and they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. Then he took the five loaves and the two fish, raised his eyes heavenward while saying the blessing, then broke the loaves and began handing them to his disciples to distribute among the people. He also divided up the two fish among them all.
They all ate their fill, and twelve baskets of bread scraps and fish pieces were collected afterward. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men. Right away he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side near Bethsaida, while he himself dismissed the crowd. |
Seeing the sign that he had done, the people said, “This must surely be the prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, when he realized they were coming to take him by force and make him king, fled alone into the hills. (Mark 6:31–46 | John 6:14–15)
While this is obviously the most spectacular and the most public miracle Jesus has yet performed, it is the interpretation he places upon the miracle that makes it a further revelation of his identity. Central to his interpretation is that he sees the crowd who have come seeking him as “sheep without a shepherd.” The murder of John has robbed Israel of a leader sent by God. Rome is the real murderer, and what has happened to John will happen again with steadily increasing frequency until it culminates in the genocidal slaughters of 70 C.E. and 135 C.E. Then, indeed—and God Incarnate foresees this—the Jews will be sheep without a shepherd.
The phrase “sheep without a shepherd” has further, highly suggestive associations, however, for someone who bears the name Joshua (as Jesus does in his own Aramaic language)—and who knows well what the name Joshua means. Moses, just before his death, said to the Lord: “Let the Lord … appoint a leader for this community to be at their head in all that they do, a man who will lead them out and bring them in, lest the Lord’s community be sheep without a shepherd” (Num. 27:16–17, italics added). God honors this request, instructing Moses to appoint Joshua as leader; and Joshua goes on to become the greatest warrior in Israelite history, even greater, perhaps, than David. It was Joshua who defeated the Canaanites and conquered, with the Lord’s help, the land that the Lord had promised. Joshua was the Lord’s chosen shepherd.
The name Joshua—alternately yehoshua‘ or yeshua‘ in Hebrew—is Iēsous in the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the same Greek name that, when it occurs in the Gospels, is conventionally translated “Jesus,” though it could just as easily be translated “Joshua.” In other words, Jesus’ real name effectively is Joshua. Though the name yeshua‘ has acquired a certain currency in recent popular books about Jesus and though that name accurately reproduces the form of this name that he most likely used, yeshua‘ effectively muffles all the associations that Jesus’ contemporaries heard in either the Greek or the Hebrew form of that name, all of the warlike, heroic, and salvific associations that modern Bible readers hear in “Joshua.”
The duties of a shepherd in ancient Israel, through the time of Jesus, were not confined to placidly herding and feeding the sheep. In those days, the habitat of the Asiatic lion included the Jordan Valley, and wolves roamed the hills of Galilee and Judea. Armed only with hand weapons, a shepherd had to defend his flock against these predators as well as against human thieves. A “good shepherd” needed the skills of a warrior, and military historians have long noted that these skills, combined with an animal butcher’s knowledge of anatomy, would again and again make pastoral peoples formidable in combat.
When the Lord sees his people as “sheep without a shepherd,” therefore, he is seeing them not just as lost or needy but as defenseless before ravenous predators. When he spoke to King Ahab through the prophet Micaiah of a coming great defeat, Micaiah’s vision was of “all Israel scattered on the mountains, as sheep without a shepherd” (2 Chron. 18:16)—scattered sheep as an image of military defeat. In the coming great defeat by Rome, Israel will be scattered like shepherdless sheep throughout the Roman empire; the wanton murder of John the Baptist, fresh in Jesus’ mind, is a bitter foretaste of that horror and a reminder to God Incarnate of what he will not do on that day of darkness.
To say all this is not to deny the element of simple, immediate compassion in Jesus’ reaction to the hungry crowd or, for that matter, the connection of this reaction to the further associations of the phrase “Shepherd of Israel” (Ps. 80:1). The tender, emotive side of God’s covenant with Israel as a pe
ople is endlessly evoked through this metaphor, and even the individual Israelite may say with perfect confidence, “The Lord is my shepherd” (Ps. 23:1). When the early, culturally Jewish church represented Christ as a young shepherd bearing a lamb on his shoulders, it was consciously portraying God as well: Such had been God’s relationship to Israel; Jesus as God Incarnate merely enlarged the flock.
This may seem a great deal to load onto a turn of phrase that could be read much more simply, but the occasion, after all, is one on which Jesus demonstrates divine power by performing a miracle that goes far beyond any faith healing. If in this of all moments his followers seem to him like sheep, then he must seem to himself in the same moment like their shepherd, with all the associations that this relationship summons up.
When God spoke through Isaiah, in the same passage that Luke quotes in telling the story of Jesus’ baptism, he promised that he would soon come to the rescue of his people as a warrior shepherd:
Go up on a high mountain,
O messenger to Zion!
Lift up your voice,
O messenger to Jerusalem!
Shout it boldly,
saying to the towns of Judah,
“Behold your God!”
Behold the Lord Adonai coming with power,
He rules by his mighty arm,
his reward he brings with him,
his prize precedes him.
Like a shepherd, he feeds his flock,
gathering the lambs in his arms,
Holding them against his breast
and gently leading the mother ewes.