Christ

by Jack Miles

  But I, when I shall have been lifted up from the earth,

  Will draw all people to myself.…

  Having said this, Jesus left them and went into hiding. (12:20–32, 36)

  The Greeks do not speak to Jesus. All the Greeks will, in due course, be part of the “rich harvest,” but first the grain of wheat, Jesus himself, must fall into the earth and die. The sword spoken of in Zechariah is not to be wielded against them or against the Romans but against God himself. The blood of his covenant is his own blood, which is about to be shed. And the voice from heaven that spoke at his baptism speaks again in ratification.

  Jesus does not need to hear this voice, for it is his own, but his disciples do, for what he has just said is deeply disturbing. He who has so recently demonstrated his power over life and death is choosing death over life for himself. But by his doing so, “the Prince of This World,” the Devil, will be driven out and paradise will be regained. Thus does the public ministry of Jesus, the ministry that began with his public repentance, come to an end. The Prince of This World, who retreated after skirmishing with him in the desert, is on the march. The battle has been joined. There remains only to win it.

  PART FOUR

  The Lamb of God

  The spectacle of the Lord of All the Earth dying in agony on a Roman cross is a huge and horrifying surprise. That this happens at all is a shock, given his powers. That he endures it without protest is a second shock, because his temperament is the temperament of a warrior. It has been the thesis of this book that so problematic a turn in the life of God, problematic despite the fact that his execution is followed by a resurrection, can only be explained by supposing a prior problem for which this enormity may seem the resolution. Before turning to the climax of the Gospel, then, we turn again to that prior problem. The title given to a late anthology of writings by Samuel Beckett was I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. Something like that might be the title as well of this last chapter in the life of God.

  THE CHANGING OF THE MIND OF GOD

  God came into being as an amalgam of several of the Semitic gods and goddesses whom Israel had encountered in its originally nomadic history. As monotheism progressively supplanted polytheism in Israel, the powers, responsibilities, and related personality traits of these deities, rather than being simply suppressed, tended to accrue by reattribution to Yahweh Elohim, Israel’s god. The literary precipitate of this process—God as we encounter him on the pages of the Old Testament—is a character of great complexity and inner tension. God is like an actor who has been called on to replace an entire cast. The virtuosity of his performance is both compelling and disturbing, and the memory of it deeply marks even the many parts of the Old Testament from which he is absent.

  Semitic polytheism had divided the roles of creator and destroyer. Israelite monotheism required its god to play both those roles. As creator, he is the god of order; as destroyer, the god of chaos. Semitic polytheism had divided the responsibilities of national defense and international order: Every nation went to war led by its own god, but above them all there was a lordly judge and lawgiver whom no nation could easily claim. The god of Israel is both: on the one hand, Israel’s national god and its captain in time of war; on the other, the international arbiter and impartial lawgiver to whom all mankind owes honor. Semitic polytheism had assigned the task of personal protection or advocacy to a flexible category of personal gods or guardian spirits whose limited powers and responsibilities did not extend to the national level, much less to the international or the cosmic. The god of Israel, despite his larger national, international, and cosmic duties, is understood in the Old Testament to hear the most private prayer of any and every Israelite. Finally, none of the Semitic gods was celibate, and the goddesses of the Semitic pantheon equaled the gods in their variety and importance. The god of Israel, though he may have had a consort at some stage in the evolution of Israelite monotheism, eventually absorbed her functions as fully as he had those of the other deities whom he supplanted; and though he remains male, and celibate in his uniqueness, he has, particularly in discharging certain functions, a distinctly female aspect.

  Conflict among these several functions and their matching personality profiles defines some of the most memorable moments in the Old Testament. Thus, the Lord as creator breathes life into the first man in Genesis 2, then as destroyer curses him with death in Genesis 3. Thus, again, he tells the first couple to be fertile and “fill the earth” in Genesis I, then blights their labor and sexual desire and at Genesis 7 covers the earth with a great flood to drown the results of their fertility. It is, however, the tension between the roles of cosmic creator and national protector that proves most consequential in the long run.

  After retreating from indiscriminate support of human fertility, God lends his support preferentially to Abraham, with the result that the Israelites, Abraham’s offspring, once they move to Egypt, threaten to outnumber the Egyptians themselves. When Egypt turns against them, enslaving them and killing their firstborn males, God comes to their rescue as their national god, but he captains an army whose soldiers are forces of nature. It is only after he has turned the Nile River to blood and covered the Egyptian countryside with vermin that the Lord sends an armed lieutenant, his Angel of Death, to slaughter the firstborn sons of all Egypt. Similarly, the Lord who saves the fleeing Israelites from the pursuing Egyptian army does so not by fielding his own army against Egypt’s but by unleashing the Red Sea against his opponent.

  The mood thereafter in the Old Testament is one of pervasive and often exhilarating confidence that Israel’s god is far more than just a national god. The god of Israel, unlike the limited or (later) truly nonexistent gods of other nations, is the almighty creator and lord of the cosmos; and his supremacy lends both him and his chosen people an air of triumphant invincibility. Israel is the one nation in the world whose god is God! Let the lesser deities squabble among themselves like courtiers in the corridors of his palace. The Lord of Heaven and Earth is irresistible. His enemies—be they as powerful as Egypt, the mightiest empire known—are as nothing before him. Why, the “divine” Pharaoh’s very thoughts are under the Lord’s control! When the Lord goes into battle alongside David, Goliath is doomed. When David’s heirs must surrender the kingdom to Assyria and Babylonia, the proud conquerors are, all unknowing, mere tools in the Lord’s hand. He can repeal what they have done whenever he wishes, he assures his prophets, and he promises that he will do so soon: The days of the conquerors are numbered.

  Yet, as the victories of Assyria and Babylonia go unreversed for centuries, the inference drawn so confidently from the Lord’s epoch-making inaugural victory over Egypt becomes difficult to sustain. The same combination of traits and functions that has been a source of confidence becomes increasingly a source of consternation. For some, the hope remains alive—as in the prophet Habakkuk’s vision of the divine warrior rampant—that God will once again turn his power over nature to military use and once again demonstrate his invincibility, flexing his “mighty hand and outstretched arm” as he did so memorably in Egypt. But little by little, as centuries pass and vindication does not come, pressure becomes detectable for revision, and this in more directions than one.

  One form of creeping revision is a qualified and gradual retreat from monotheism. As the power of Satan is slowly admitted to be a real one—not equal to God’s own power, to be sure, but by no means negligible—an explanation emerges for the postponement of the victory God promised. Though it remains a scandal that God has not kept his promise and restored Israel to its Davidic glory, the scandal acquires a mitigating factor: God is facing, as may be seen in the Book of Daniel, some formidable opposition after all: enemy angels playing in dead earnest the hostile role once played by the gods of Canaan. Though still powerful, God comes to be seen as far less in control than he was when he brought Israel out of Egypt. Whether or not he has changed in any more intrinsic way, he is no longer unopposed.

  A second hint of futu
re revision is a slight but significant change in the relationship between God’s roles as king of Israel, on the one hand, and as ruler of the world, on the other. In principle, yes, God’s immense powers as ruler of the world may one day be deployed again in military service to his covenant partner, Israel; but in practice, a new way of conceiving the ancient covenant begins to be faintly discernible. Rather than immediately making the nations of the world his messiah’s footstool (Ps. 110:1), God may be content for a long while to define Israel as his light unto the Gentiles (Isa. 49:6). Israel’s victories have always had a secondary, demonstrative effect: Besides doing good for Israel, they have always manifested the greatness of God to the world at large. But if this secondary effect should become primary, then a corollary question will emerge: Can a comparable demonstrative effect not be achieved by other means than war? If so, then the painful postponement of God’s promised military intervention may become less painful as God finds other means to his (adjusted) end. In the Book of Daniel, for all the coded talk of divine intervention on the field of battle, the reader cannot suppress the suspicion that what most engages the writer is his vision of Jews arousing universal admiration at an imperial court for their piety, their compassion, their courage, and above all their wisdom. In their wisdom and the admiration it inspires, there is the suggestion, still undeveloped, of a new way to preserve the dignity of God without resorting to war. The god of war is poised to become a god of wisdom.

  And as if to suggest that with wisdom comes a measure of detachment, the notion begins to emerge that the Lord himself is more an international observer than Israel’s furiously engaged commander in chief. In Psalm 33, for example, we read:

  The Lord looks down from heaven;

  he sees all humankind.

  From where he sits enthroned he watches

  all the inhabitants of the earth—

  he who fashions the hearts of them all,

  and observes all their deeds.

  A king is not saved by his great army;

  a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.

  The war horse is a vain hope for victory,

  and by its great might it cannot save.

  Truly the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him,

  on those who hope in his steadfast love,

  to deliver their soul from death,

  and to keep them alive in famine.

  Our soul waits for the Lord;

  he is our help and shield.

  Our heart is glad in him,

  because we trust in his holy name.

  Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,

  even as we hope in you.

  (33:13–22)

  The Psalmist hopes for immortality and economic security (salvation from famine) but not for military victory. And what the Lord sees as he “looks down from heaven” and “sees all humankind” is not glorious victory for his friends and abject defeat for his foes but something quite different and unprecedented: the folly of trust in armed strength. He sees this because he “fashions the hearts of them all.” Psalm 33 repudiates nothing, at least directly, but its emphases are new and portend a way for God’s military inaction to be conceived as something other than simple failure.

  The third form of revision flows from the second. If God, for whatever reason, is not going to demonstrate his power and his relationship with Israel by making Israel victorious in battle, then the purely personal and more or less private dimension of his covenant relationship with his people comes to the fore almost by default. By the cultivation of that relationship through personal piety on the part of each Jewish family individually rather than by all Israel on the field of battle, Israel may win a new kind of victory and demonstrate the greatness of the Lord in a new way. Jewish piety endlessly replicated will become the wonder and the edification of the whole world, as Daniel is the wonder and the edification of the Babylonian court. This heroism of virtue rather than of valor may even, it is hinted, be a heroism of study. In Daniel 9, the practice of Bible reading—that is, of the private study of scripture—makes its groundbreaking first (and only) appearance in the Tanakh as the great sage is found reading the Book of Jeremiah, the very prophet to whom the Lord spoke of “planting my Law within them, writing it on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33). In this scene, the harbinger of a huge history to come, Torah is to be understood not just as obedience to the Lord but also as intimacy with him. Combining reading with prayer and fasting, Daniel is the very picture of study as a form of worship; and he is rewarded with a visit from an angel. This angel, however, giving another kind of clue to the future than the one he intends to give, is an exegete whose function might easily be discharged by an inspired human being like Daniel himself. It is as if, with the whole world to edify, the Lord must employ a holy faculty of rabbinic angels and angelic rabbis. He himself, “the Ancient of Days,” may seem increasingly remote, but they will implant his Law in the hearts of their students; and as their students learn, the world will slowly be led to wisdom. If God is no longer so alone as once, it is not just because he has acquired an enemy worthy of the name but also because the voice of the Lord, once heard in solo visitations, is now heard in choral exegesis.

  The second and the third of these pressures derive, to a considerable extent, from the refinement and rationalization of monotheism itself. To an extent, life is simpler for Israel when its God is not quite the only god but merely (though by far) the strongest and most important god. At Judges 11:24, an Israelite leader, speaking to his counterpart from Ammon, on the far side of the Jordan, says: “Do you not own what Chemosh your god has given as yours? So we will own all that the Lord our God has given as ours.” The working peace that this diplomatic polytheism allows between territorial neighbors can have its convenient analogue even when neighbors are more theological than territorial. Life is simpler when they have their gods over there, and Israel its God over here. Life is simpler, in other words, when Israel is spared from thinking much either about them or about their gods. Unfortunately, that kind of simplicity and the simplicity of strict monotheism are mutually exclusive. If there truly is only one god and if that one god is the God of Israel, then everybody has Israel’s God whether Israel likes it or not, and Israel as a result has to deal somehow with everybody. The second and third pressures for revision in the understanding of God are accommodations to the increasingly inescapable task of dealing conceptually with everybody.

  The most natural way to reconcile the tension between monotheism and national election—that is, the “chosenness” of Israel—was to envision Israel at the pinnacle of a sacred empire encompassing the whole world. Rather than simply a way to make Israel’s enemies her footstool, this was a vision of all nations entering a covenant with God. In Isaiah 2:3, the nations of the world are imagined to say:

  Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

  to the house of the God of Jacob;

  that he may teach us his ways

  and that we may walk in his paths. (RSV)

  The conjunction of world empire and national election is very ancient and, by this late date, it may seem almost inevitable that when a nation grows wondrously in power, it should attribute its growth to divine election. Older editions of the Anglican hymnal contain the so-called “National Hymn,” with music composed by George William Warren in 1892 for lyrics written by Alexander Pope in 1712:

  Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise!

  Exalt thy towering head and lift thine eyes!

  See heav’n its sparkling portals wide display,

  And break upon thee in a flood of day.…

  See barbarous nations at thy gates attend,

  Walk in thy light, and in thy temple bend:

  See thy bright altars thronged with prostrate kings,

  While every land its joyous tribute brings.…

  But even very ancient ideas have a beginning. The idea of empire arose with the rise of Assyria—effectively, the world’s first multinat
ional empire —in the ninth century B.C.E. As for divine election, if that idea was not unique to Israel, it was Israel’s form of the idea that was to have the longest reach in human history. When the eighteenth-century English poet speaks of “imperial Salem,” Salem being a synonym for Jerusalem, he speaks of imperial England in terms borrowed from the Jewish scriptures. For the first-century inhabitants of Jerusalem itself, however, the abstract appeal of sacred empire as an idea was badly battered by half a millennium during most of which Israel had not been an empire embracing all nations but merely one of many nations embraced by others’ empires.

  The fourth and final revision is an enlargement of the field of battle from the land of Israel to the cosmos and from time to eternity. On this new battlefield, there is a new way for God to win. As we read in the Book of Wisdom:

  The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

  and no torment can touch them.

  To the foolish, they seemed to die,

  their passing was thought a catastrophe,

  but they are at peace.

  If to us they seemed to suffer punishment,

  their hope is rich with immortality.

  Small was their correction,

  great will be their blessing.

  God was putting them to the test,

  and he has found them worthy to be with him.

  (3:1–5)

  Immortality is not necessarily the negation of history. There is still room and still reason for God to restore the temporal fortunes of Israel if and when the right moment arrives. Nonetheless, a certain pressure is undeniably eased by the opening of this alternative form of redress. For all those Jews for whom restoration by force of arms will arrive too late, here is blessed vindication of another sort. The brutality of foreign oppression—the terror crucifixions by which Titus sought to panic the defenders of Jerusalem during the Roman siege, the evisceration of Jewish refugees by Roman mercenaries in search of swallowed gold, the whole ghastly catalog of atrocities—may be seen in retrospect to have been just a test. God will gather the pious of Israel to himself and keep them forever “beyond torment.” And if this proves in the end to be the last and only victory that he wins, will it not be enough? God may not humble his earthly enemies as once he humbled Pharaoh, but what will it matter if his people are secure in a heavenly refuge that no earthly power can storm?