Jesus

by James Martin

  Nor were the emotional ones. As a fully human person, Jesus felt the full range of human emotions. He could be, for example, joyful. That little children wanted to be near him shows a sunny personality.41 (Generally speaking, children are not drawn to the morose.) He had a sense of humor, as evidenced by the playful exaggeration and clever figures in his parables and stories (the man who builds a house on sand, for example, or the parent who would give a child a stone instead of bread, elements that would have drawn some laughter in his day).42 Jesus might even have been playful: after all, he seems to bestow nicknames on some of the disciples.43

  Jesus feels the more “difficult” emotions too. He can grow agitated, even tetchy at times. “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you?” he says to the disciples at one point.44 He speaks sharply to the Syrophoenician woman who asks for healing for her daughter. He weeps over the death of his friend Lazarus. He feels anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane. And these are just the incidents recorded in the Gospels.

  Even from what little we know about life in Nazareth in Jesus’s day, we can reasonably posit other emotions: he loved Mary and Joseph; he treasured the members of his extended family; he enjoyed friendships as a child, adolescent, and young adult. As a tektōn he probably worked alongside fellow Nazarenes, helping stonemasons build a house, traveling over the hillsides with fellow carpenters to chop down trees, or walking back to his village from a job and seeing some of his neighbors at their daily tasks, and then spending a few minutes enjoying some lighthearted conversation. In Nazareth Jesus surely knew friendship. He led a fully human emotional life.

  To that end, a third point: Jesus understood family life. Now, it is almost certain that Jesus was celibate. How do we know this? For one thing, the Gospels talk about Jesus’s mother and “brothers and sisters,” so if he had a wife it would be odd not to mention her.45 Meier also suggests that being unmarried was seen as undesirable for most rabbis of the time, and even though Jesus was not technically a rabbi, it would have been strange for the Gospel writers to concoct a story that he was celibate if he was in fact married.46 The Gospels’ silence about a wife and children likely means that Jesus had neither.47

  What are some possible reasons for Jesus’s remaining unmarried? He may have intuited that once he started his ministry, it would be short or even meet a disastrous end. As a Jew, he knew the fate of other prophets. Jesus may have foreseen the difficulty of caring for a family while being an itinerant preacher. Or perhaps his celibacy was another manifestation of his single-hearted commitment to God. After sifting through the facts, Meier lands on the last reason: “The position that Jesus remained celibate on religious grounds [is] the more probable hypothesis.”48

  But that does not mean that he did not understand married life—he lived with Mary and Joseph and knew married friends in Nazareth (by the time Jesus was thirty most of his male friends would have married)—or family life—he lived with his four “brothers” (James, Joses, Jude, and Simon) and his (at least two but perhaps more) “sisters.” He and his cousins (or siblings) probably lived in the same small stone house in Nazareth among a tight grouping of houses filled with other relatives. His “brothers” and “sisters” played together, fought together as any family members do, and wept together when Joseph died.

  Thus when Jesus told stories about, say, a wayward son being welcomed home by his father, these insights may have been colored by his own experiences. And when he entered a family home in Galilee for a meal with friends, when he visited the house of Peter and his wife in Capernaum, when he dined with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus at Martha’s house in Bethany, he understood their world. Families and extended families were a central part of the culture of Jesus’s time, and so he understood them.

  Jesus understood the emotional life of intimate friendships too. We can assume that he—as a fully human person—experienced the normal sexual urges as he matured, most likely experienced the typical adolescent crushes, and perhaps fell in love. At some point Jesus would have had to undergo a serious discernment about what it meant to be a good friend and share intimacy while remaining celibate. All of this flows from love, and we can see traces of Jesus’s deep loving friendships in not only his patient affection for the disciples, but also his encounters with people like Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus, who is described at one point to Jesus as “he whom you love.”49 He must have been a loving and kind friend to both men and women, capable of great intimacy and affection.

  Finally, Jesus understood work. This cannot be emphasized enough because it is so often forgotten.

  Jesus does not simply stride onto the world stage at his baptism, having spent the last thirty years praying, wandering dreamily through the countryside, or idly examining a piece of olive wood when the mood struck him. Besides the daily chores of helping his family run a house, he would have probably spent many years (upward of, say, fifteen years) working as a tektōn with Joseph. And if Joseph died early, as it seems he did, Jesus himself might have taken over the family business. Did Jesus run Joseph’s business with the men in his extended family? If so, could that kind of working together have influenced his ministry? Could that have helped him understand what it meant to make plans, to motivate a group of adults, to calculate the cost of a venture? Or did he work alone, and learn how to make difficult decisions on his own?

  Jesus was a worker, and that work must have influenced his outlook on life. As I mentioned, Meier notes that Justin Martyr, a second-century theologian, gives voice to the tradition that calls him a maker of yokes. In Jesus’s day only the most talented tektōn would have been able to fashion a good yoke for oxen (perfectly made to fit the team of oxen, so that it caused no chafing or discomfort). When Jesus said, “[M]y yoke is easy and my burden is light,” did people of his day, who knew what an easy yoke was, smile to themselves and say, “Yes, he did make good yokes”?50 Was he subtly playing on their knowledge of his background?

  Think of the values that a carpenter needs. You need persistence to carry out physically taxing labors. Imagine Jesus not simply delicately sanding a small table, but cutting down trees, carrying the heavy logs back to his house, and fashioning planks for lintels and doors, all the while lugging tools all over Galilee. You need patience for slowly waiting for the wood to dry. You need a sense of fairness, for charging your customers a fair price. And if you are working alongside other laborers—builders, stone carvers, roofers, masons, and so on—who would also be constructing houses, you need an ability to cooperate and even to lead. All these traits would serve him well later in his ministry. They were useful tools.

  Many of Jesus’s parables are about work and workers: the man who is paid more than what others consider his fair share; the farmers in the vineyard; the person who calculates the cost of a venture, and so on. These parables came from someone who knew the notion of a fair day’s work. He understood the kind of work that women did as well, having watched his mother, women in his family, and other women in the village at their labors. The brief parable of the woman cleaning her house to find one lost coin may have come from watching his mother at her daily chores.51

  Though they are not many, there are tantalizing signs of Jesus’s tektōn background in some of his sayings. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus compares those who act on his words to a house builder who has “dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock.” When a flood comes, the house stands firm, “because it had been well built.” By contrast, the foolish person, who does not put into action Jesus’s words, is like the person who builds a house on sandy ground. When storms come, the house washes away.52 Was Jesus drawing on his knowledge of building—more specifically, of helping to build houses in and around Nazareth? Would his hearers have known him as a reputable builder?

  When Jesus tells his listeners, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” is he referring to something that the tektōn would
have made—a plow?53 Are these echoes of his work in this familiar line of Scripture?

  Finally, in each of the Synoptic Gospels, during his last days in Jerusalem, Jesus refers to those who would reject him by saying, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?”54 It is a powerful image, but there are multiple images of rejection in the Old Testament upon which Jesus could have drawn. Why did he choose this one? Perhaps its relation to the art of building held special appeal to the tektōn.

  In the messy and beautiful physical realities of the human person, in the craziness and sublimity of family life, and in the toil and satisfaction of the working life, Jesus knew the world.

  Soon the world would know him.

  NOW FOR SOME SPECULATION—ON Jesus’s consciousness, or, we might say, self-consciousness. Here we are entering into more of an imaginative exercise, because while we can study the archaeology of first-century Galilee, we cannot gain access to the mind of Jesus, other than through what is revealed to us through the Gospels. Still, it’s worth thinking about as we seek to understand him. So let’s look at how the Gospels portray the knowledge of Jesus.

  First, did Jesus learn? This question is fraught with theological difficulties. The main dilemma is: Since he is divine, doesn’t he know all things? Some passages in the Gospels show Jesus having a knowledge surpassing human understanding. When he is faced with a dead girl, he proclaims, “The girl is not dead but sleeping.” And in the Gospel of John he says, “The Father and I are one,” which clearly implies divine knowledge. However, Luke notes that as a young man Jesus “increased in wisdom,” which just as clearly implies a growth in human understanding and knowledge. The Greek word is proekopten: Jesus “progressed” in wisdom.55 Why would he have to progress in wisdom if he knew everything?

  In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus indicates at least one thing that he doesn’t know: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” The passage seems to imply limited knowledge on the part of Jesus.56

  Any answers to “What did Jesus know?” depend on whether we focus on his divinity or his humanity: God’s knowledge is limitless, and human knowledge is limited. But since we’re looking at Jesus’s ordinary life in Nazareth at this point, let’s consider his human consciousness. As a youth, Jesus was probably curious. What child isn’t bursting with questions about everything? We can imagine him asking questions of Mary and Joseph: “What’s that?” As an adolescent, he would have sought answers to larger questions: “Why do people die?” As an adult he would have been interested in the lives of those around him: “Why must we give so much to Herod?” His teachers in Nazareth would have instructed him in his Jewish faith, including how to read Hebrew. And Joseph would have trained him in the art of being a tektōn.

  But not everything about Jesus’s learning is wholly speculative. At least one passage in the Gospels shows Jesus as open to learning. After the Syrophoenician woman asks to have her daughter healed, he says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But when she responds, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” Jesus seems to change his mind. “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”57 He seems to learn something from the woman. Perhaps he is moved by the love she evinces for her daughter—so great is it that she risks another harsh comment. So it seems that even after beginning his public ministry Jesus is open to learning from others.

  Jesus also may have “progressed,” to use Luke’s word, in understanding his vocation. Once again, we face a dilemma. Did the Son of God always fully comprehend his unique purpose? Did he understand it from the day of his birth, or at least from the time he gained self-awareness?

  One possible approach, based on several passages in the New Testament, is that Jesus may have grown in his understanding of his mission, step by step, until finally grasping it completely. After all, his first miracle, the Wedding Feast at Cana, seems a reluctant one. When the wine runs out, his mother encourages him to come to the aid of the hosts. But he says to her, rather sharply, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”58

  In response, his mother calmly says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Mary seems to grasp his call before he does, perhaps because she’s had more time to meditate on it. I’ve often wondered how much Mary and Jesus discussed his future and shared their thoughts about his unique vocation. In his book To Know Christ Jesus, F. J. Sheed wonders why we so often think of them as “tight-lipped and inarticulate, each pretending not to know that the other knew.”59 Perhaps this was the moment when Mary invited him to embrace the path that God had set out for him.60

  After his mother’s encouragement, Jesus grasps what is required of him. More confident now, he tells the steward to fill the earthen jars with water. But it is not water that comes out; it is wine: his first miracle.

  Later, Jesus is bursting with confidence in his vocation. “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean,” says a leper. “I do choose!” says Jesus. “Be made clean!”61

  Near the end of his earthly life, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus must confront for the final time what God intends. “If it is possible,” he prays, “let this cup pass from me.”62 But through intense prayer, he realizes that his impending suffering is what God the Father is asking of him. Here, it seems to me, he fully understands his vocation. To me, several Gospel passages seem to show a growth in his understanding of his identity, which reaches its ultimate point in his surrender to God on the cross, and ultimately is brought to fulfillment in the Resurrection.

  As Elizabeth Johnson writes, perhaps even Jesus himself was surprised on Easter Sunday, when “his ultimate identity burst upon him with all clarity.”63

  PERHAPS IT STILL MAY be hard to see Jesus’s life as like your own. Likewise, the culture of first-century Nazareth may seem almost incomprehensible. In his book Jesus of Nazareth, the Scripture scholar Gerhard Lohfink reminds us how strange Jesus would appear to us today:

  He would—probably to our profound horror—look quite different from the way that we had imagined him. He would be neither the sovereign Christ of the Byzantine apses nor the fettered man of sorrows of Gothic art nor the Apollonian hero of the Renaissance. His Aramaic language would be comprehensible to only a few specialists. A lot of his gestures and postures would seem strange to us. We would sense he lived in a different civilization and a different culture.64

  Nonetheless, because of what we know of the human person and what we can know about the Hidden Life, we can begin to identify intersections with our own lives.

  Many of us protest that we are just too ordinary to be holy. Our lives feel far from the extraordinary life of Jesus of Nazareth. And so we sadly speak of our “just” lives. I’m just a student. I’m just a mom. I’m just a businessman. But for most of his life, Jesus was just a carpenter in a little nowhere town. Meier calls him “insufferably ordinary.” This is why his townspeople and family and friends were so shocked when he began his public ministry: “Is not this the carpenter?”

  Jesus shows us the inestimable value of ordinary time. As the Jesuit theologian John Haughey comments, during Jesus’s time in Nazareth God fashioned him into “the instrument God needed for the salvation of the world.”65 In Nazareth Jesus speaks to the meaning and worth of our ordinary lives.

  Soon the tektōn who had been hidden in the small town would begin his public ministry, step onto the world stage, and decisively change human history.

  But before that, he had one more place to visit.

  * * *

  THE HIDDEN LIFE

  Luke 2:51–52

  * * *

  Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart.<
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  And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  Jordan

  “Do you come to me?”

  ALL FOUR GOSPELS TELL us that before Jesus launched his public career, he first went to visit his cousin John, who was baptizing on the Jordan River.

  But where, exactly? The Jordan River runs from the northernmost part of current-day Israel southward through the Sea of Galilee and finally empties into the Dead Sea, a course of 156 miles. As with many sites in the Holy Land, there are multiple candidates for the location, each hotly vying for authenticity—and tourism.

  The Gospels aren’t much help on this particular question. Both Mark and Matthew say that John was baptizing “in the river Jordan” at a place accessible to people from Jerusalem and Judea. Luke says, even more vaguely, that John went into “all the region around the Jordan.” John’s Gospel is more specific, locating the spot at “Bethany across the Jordan,” a site otherwise unmentioned in the rest of the New Testament.1 Recent excavations, however, on the eastern bank of the Jordan River have uncovered twenty churches, as well as caves and baptismal pools from the Roman and Byzantine periods, and this Jordanian site now claims to be “Bethany beyond the Jordan.”

  Before traveling to the Holy Land, I hadn’t a clue where John did his baptizing. Unlike my fascination with the Hidden Life, I’m not as curious about the precise details surrounding the Baptism of Jesus. At one point during our drive from Jerusalem to Galilee, I remarked to George, as I examined our map, “Oh, I see, in this area the Jordan River marks the boundary between Israel and . . . Jordan.”