Christ
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THE LAST TESTAMENT OF THE LORD
Several of the greatest figures of the Old Testament—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David—deliver long speeches just before their deaths. These “last testaments” mingle visionary prediction with pondered, if sometimes mysterious, advice. The last and greatest of these last testaments is that of the Lord himself, which takes the form of a dialogue (more accurately described, perhaps, as an interrupted monologue in the Johannine manner). Twice during this dialogue, Jesus resorts to the theatrical gesture of a ritual action.
1. He washes his disciples’ feet
Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God and that he was returning to God. And so he got up from the table, removed his outer garment, and, taking a towel, wrapped it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel he was wearing.…
When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garment again, he went back to the table. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he said. “You call me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for such I am. But if I, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, then you must wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example so that you may imitate what I have done for you.… Now that you know this, blessed are you if you behave accordingly.” (John 13:3–5, 12–15, 17)
To a proud people, few of the consequences of foreign occupation are so humiliating as being required to feed and wash the foreigners. But it is this of all manifestations of oppression—a service performed in his day by the lowliest of slaves—that Jesus chooses to mime. He presents himself to his disciples not in the guise of a kind friend but in the guise—that is, in the working attire—of an outright slave.
To the Romans, the Jews are a subject people who, should they resist their subjugation, may be reduced at any moment to outright slavery. By miming that subjugation and then telling his followers to accept it in imitation of him, the Lord delivers a milder form of the same message that he delivers when he allows the Romans to execute him. He will not spare them what he does not spare himself.
Yet the aptness of the scene as a metaphor for political oppression meekly accepted rather than violently resisted is its burden rather than its strength. Its strength is the touching beauty of the action itself. As traditionally defined, God is no one’s servant but, rather, everyone’s lord. Servitude, to put it mildly, does not become him. But in this scene he finds a way to make the unbecoming becoming and, indeed, irresistibly attractive. He achieves a profound revision of his own identity by what seems the simplest, most spontaneous of gestures. The frame that he places around the whole is not at first glance the frame of adjustment to defeat but that of love taught by example. As he has loved them and taught them to love, so they will love and teach love to others:
No one has greater love
than he who would lay down his life for his friends.
You are my friends
if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you servants,
because a servant does not know what his master is about.
I call you friends,
because I have revealed to you
everything I have heard from my Father.
You did not choose me.
No, I chose you, and I have charged you
To go forth and bear fruit,
fruit that will last,
So that my Father will give you
whatever that you ask him in my name.
(15:13–16)
In the Old Testament, the word friend is poignantly rare in connection with God. In the Book of Exodus, the Lord is said to have spoken face-to-face with Moses, “as a man speaks to his friend” (33:11). Once, speaking through Isaiah, the Lord refers to Abraham as his friend (41:8). Otherwise, the Lord is—certainly to any modern sensibility—strangely and painfully friendless. He may demand perfect sincerity—the sincerity of the “circumcised heart” (Deut. 10:16). He may promise perfect constancy in return. But he neither asks nor ever offers simple friendship. God Incarnate, offering and asking friendship, shows God to have become, to be sure, someone whom one might have imagined him becoming, but much of the best that can be imagined never comes to pass. It is a stunning surprise to find the Lord of All the Earth washing anyone’s feet.
2. He foresees betrayal but preaches love
Having said this, Jesus was deeply troubled and declared, “Truly I tell you, one of you is going to betray me.”
The disciples looked at one another, wondering whom he meant. The disciple whom Jesus loved was reclining next to him. Simon Peter motioned to him to ask who it was he meant, and so, leaning back against Jesus’ chest, he said, “Lord, who is it?”
Jesus replied, “It is he to whom I will give this piece of bread after I dip it in the dish.” And when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas, son of Simon Iscariot. As soon as Judas had taken the bread, Satan entered him. Jesus then said, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” None of the others at the table understood why he said this.… When he had gone, Jesus said: …
Little children, I shall not be with you much longer.
You will look for me, but as I told the Jews,
where I am going, you cannot come.
I have given you a new commandment:
Love one another.
You must love one another
just as I have loved you.
It is by your love for one another
that all will know that you are my disciples.
Simon Peter said, “Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus answered, “Where I am going you cannot follow me, but later you will.”
Peter said to him, “Why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.”
“Lay down your life for me?” answered Jesus. “I tell you truly that three times before the cock crows you will have denied knowing me.” (John 13:21–28, 31, 33–38)
At the several points earlier in the Gospels where Jesus deals with demonic possession, the demons who possess human beings as Satan now possesses Judas do not afflict them at the command of God. Although God is far from powerless against these demons, they are less than fully under his control. So it is here. Jesus does not employ Satan as his passive tool but rather outsmarts Satan so as to make the seduction of Judas produce a good effect that Satan cannot foresee. But to say that Jesus’ strategy is in place and working as intended does not mean that its implementation is not costly. Judas and Peter are a part of the price. Jesus’ preaching is a picture incomplete without its frame of betrayal and abandonment, for he is commanding his disciples to love one another even when they find themselves betrayed and abandoned by one another. If they remember Judas and Peter when they remember his new commandment, they will better understand what he demands of them.
Later, while Jesus is in custody in the palace of the high priest, his prediction about Peter comes true:
Simon Peter and another disciple followed after Jesus. This disciple, who was known to the high priest, went with Jesus into the high priest’s courtyard, but Peter stayed outside the gate. So the other disciple, the one known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the gatekeeper, and brought Peter in. The girl on duty at the door said to Peter, “Aren’t you another of that man’s disciples?” [The first disciple evidently has admitted this about himself.]
He answered, “I am not.” Now it was chilly, and the servants and guards had started a charcoal fire and were standing around it, warming themselves. Peter stood there too, warming himself like the others.…
As he stood there warming himself, someone said to him, “Are you not another of his disciples?”
He denied it, saying, “I am not.”
One of the high priest’s servants … said, “But didn’t I see you in the garden with him?”
Again Peter denied it, and at once a cock crowed. (18:15–18, 25–27)
What m
atters most about Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s denial is that he makes it and then stops. He does not condemn or expel Peter. He does not treat Peter as Peter will treat him. The evangelist’s account of the denial is explicit and circumstantially detailed. He makes the fact of the denial unmistakable, but then he too falls silent. The kind of belief that Jesus has sought in his disciples has been personal commitment, attachment to him as a model and a friend rather than concurrence with some discrete set of teachings. Peter’s denial of acquaintance with Jesus reverses just that kind of commitment. He does not deny the teachings but the teacher. He detaches himself from the friend to whom he has just professed himself so attached.
Jesus, in a real struggle with Satan, needs and wants disciples. If he seemed detached toward his disciples at the start, he is ardently attached to them at the finish. Speaking through Isaiah, the Lord had said mournfully, centuries earlier:
The ox knows its owner,
and the ass its master’s crib;
But Israel does not know,
my people does not understand.
(RSV; Isa. 1:3)
But of the apostles, his tiny, hand-chosen flock, he had said, “I am the good shepherd. / I know mine and mine know me” (John 10:14). Yet the bond between these sheep and their fond shepherd turns out to be painfully fragile. At the end of the meal, when they all leave for the Mount of Olives, he will say to them: “You will all desert me tonight, for as the scripture says, ‘I shall strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered’ ” (Matt. 26:31, quoting Zech. 13:7).
Yet Jesus’ use of this image is not bitter but, even at this moment, bathed in compassion and forgiveness. In Isaiah’s day, when Israel denied God as Peter has denied Jesus, God was prepared to inflict severe punishment. Jesus, in sharp contrast, is prepared to let Peter’s cowardly offense, his act of wounding disaffiliation, go uncondemned and unpunished. The betrayals of Judas and Peter are to the betrayals of Adam by Eve, Abel by Cain, Abraham by Laban, Esau by Jacob, and so forth as the incarnation of God in the New Testament is to the anthropomorphism of God in the Old. The betrayal of God Incarnate by his closest friends brings the biblical betrayal story, the archetypal story-type of the entire Bible, to its final pitch of intensity. As the leader of the twelve apostles, Peter stands collectively for the twelve tribes of Israel and is a perfect symbol for all the faithless kings of Israel and Judah who of old did “what was displeasing in the sight of the Lord,” deserting him and leading the people to desert him. It was their infidelity that prompted the Lord to send Babylonia swooping down from the north to lay waste to Jerusalem. But though Peter is as faithless as they, Jesus allows him to retain his position of leadership. On this night of role reversals, it is the Lord, not the vassal, who must be punished.
3. The supper of the Lamb
As they were eating he took bread, and when he had said the blessing, he broke it and gave it to them. “Take it,” he said, “this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. He said to them, “This is my blood, of the new covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. | I am going now to prepare a place for you; and when I have done so, I will return to take you with me.… I will not leave you orphans but will come to you. In a short while, the world will no longer see me, but you will see that I live, and you will live as well. On that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” (Mark 14:22–25 | John 14:2–3, 18–20)
Jesus enacts a Passover meal that begins, for him, in this world but ends only in the next. After symbolically offering his own body and blood, he proclaims his faith in his coming resurrection. When “that day” comes, he says, the world will see him as dead and gone, but his followers will see, with the eyes of faith, that he is alive and that his triumph over death is the promise of their own triumph. And one day, perhaps soon, he will return to take them to himself. Then and only then will he drink with them again.
It is exceptional for Paul to quote Jesus verbatim, but Paul’s report of this moment in the life of the Lord is one of the exceptions. His version of “the Lord’s Supper,” from one of the two or three oldest documents of Christianity, is striking for its closing reference to the Lord’s return:
For I have received from the Lord what I now pass on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread and, when he had given thanks, broke it, and said: “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And the cup as well, in the same way, after supper, saying, “This is the new covenant in my blood. As often as you drink this, do it in my memory.”
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Cor. 11:23–26), italics added)
Paul’s closing comment reminds his congregation that when they perform the ritual of remembrance, they look not just back to the ceremony that the Lord conducted on the night before he died but also forward to his second coming, when their participation in his resurrection will be realized.
By transforming himself symbolically into a lamb slain and eaten on the occasion of this new Passover, the Lord makes his human death a saving death. Eating the body of the Passover lamb was a part of the existing Passover ritual, but drinking or otherwise consuming the blood was not, for God had forbidden Israel to eat “flesh with life, that is to say blood, in it” (Gen. 9:4). The Israelites in Egypt did not consume the blood of the paschal lamb (the adjective paschal comes from pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover) but splashed it on their lintels. It was only in that way, as a signal to God’s angel, that it saved them. The blood of the new paschal lamb saves in a new way. At the second Passover, the blood of the Lamb of God must be drunk for the same reason that, ordinarily, blood must not be drunk—that is, precisely because it has life in it. Yes, life belongs to God, but God Incarnate has chosen by this extraordinarily vivid symbol, the symbolic drinking of his own blood, to show that he intends to share his eternal life with his people. His is the life-giving, life-carrying blood that will henceforth be the sign of his covenant with humankind, and after this ultimate sacrifice none other need ever be conducted.
The covenant ritual will consist not of repeated sacrifices but of the repeated commemoration of this single, inherently unrepeatable and unsurpassable sacrifice. At one level, the rite will be utterly simple, civil, and quiet—just the sharing of a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. At another, it will be the revival and perpetuation of the visceral power of the basins of ox blood that Moses flung over the heads of the assembled Israelites in the Book of Exodus. And because the blood, in this case, will symbolically be human blood, the rite will be even darker and wilder than the Exodus covenant-ratification rite, for it will evoke the earlier covenant drama in which God asked Abraham to spill the blood of his son, Isaac, as a proof of devotion (Gen. 22). Because this time the sacrifice will not have been aborted, the rite that will commemorate it will capture the buried, prerational hunger for human sacrifice. Yet the rite will tame what it captures. The commemoration will require no further bloodshed. The cup of the new covenant will never be filled with real blood, animal, human, or divine, but only with wine and memory. Nothing will be lost. Everything will be carried forward. And yet everything will be transformed.
Were anyone but God himself to create such a rite, it would be not just obscenely close to human sacrifice and cannibalism, but also sacrilegiously free with God’s own person. But desperate needs beget desperate measures. The impossible challenge facing God is somehow to revoke the expectations aroused in his people by the Exodus from Egypt—expectations that he knows he will never again meet—without altogether destroying his relationship with them. He must save himself as well as them, and his means to this end is a new event intended to transcend the Exodus on every level: a grander promise, a more poignant and heart-stopping story, a more vi
vid and unforgettable liturgy of commemoration, and finally a new means of corporate identity for them and self-incorporation for himself.
When the Hebrew scriptures are read in the Jewish order, few comparisons seem so instructive as that between the second and the thirty-fourth of the thirty-nine canonical books. In Exodus, the second book, a hostile king, Pharaoh of Egypt, threatens Israel with genocide. In their peril, the Israelites cry to the Lord, who rescues them with a spectacular display of his power over nature. In Esther, the thirty-fourth book, a hostile king—this time it is the king of Persia—again threatens Israel with genocide. But this time, in their peril, the Jews do not cry to the Lord; God is not even mentioned in the Hebrew text of Esther. Rather, by a combination of virtue and valor, they rescue themselves from their oppressor. In Esther, in other words, Israel plays collectively the same role that the Lord plays in Exodus. It is very much as if Israel has become a corporate version of the Lord—loyal to him, to be sure, certainly never denying him, but doing for itself what he once did.
At the Last Supper, Jesus mediates a similar transfer of functions. Earlier, he has preached (to the scandal of many):
My flesh is truly food,
and my blood is truly drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
lives in me and I in him.
(John 6:55–56)
By the life that he will live in them, he will acquire their earthly or temporal lives and their human capacities. When the human lifetime of Jesus ends, his earthly work will continue through them. His absence will be bearable because of their corporate presence to one another. Like the Jews of the Book of Esther, they will provide one another what he once provided them. Of the various names by which the sacrament established at the Last Supper will later be called, one will be Holy Communion, because those who are brought into union with the Lord by eating his flesh and drinking his blood—“Of his fullness we have all received,” John promised in his prologue (1:16)—will understand themselves to be brought into communion with one another by the same means. Down to the present, the image of the lamb is commonly stamped on the communion wafer. Finally, because the same link that joins them together in their mortality also binds them to him in his immortality, the rite that symbolizes unity also symbolizes victory in the only battle that finally matters: the battle with death.