by Paul Johnson
We must bear in mind that the land where Jesus preached was a place of contrasts, often savage ones. The long and economically successful reign of Herod the Great had produced prosperity for many, and great wealth for a few. The end of piracy, the expansion of trade, and the stability of the new Roman Empire had made it possible for traders to make rapid fortunes and careful farmers to do well year after year. But as Jesus said, “The poor always ye have with you” (Jn 12:8), and prosperity had attracted countless immigrants from the north and east who formed pockets of poverty everywhere. The Jews looked after their own poor—they were more conscientious in this respect than any other people—but beggars, cripples, lepers, the demented, and the confused were ubiquitous. Moreover, charity itself was a source of pride. Jesus always stressed not the action, however virtuous in appearance, but the feeling behind it. He saw that the successful man turned philanthropist could be a monster of arrogance, just as poverty bred meanness, violence, and cruelty. What he looked for was the “poor in spirit,” a new term he added to the human language, meaning someone whose thoughts were above material things and whose mind simply did not calculate in terms of possessions.
Hence “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” is the first of the Beatitudes Jesus lists in the fifth chapter of Matthew. Those who sorrow will be comforted, the meek will inherit the earth, those who hunger and thirst after justice will be filled, the merciful will be shown pity, the pure in heart will see the beatific vision, the peacemakers will be treated as God’s children, and those who are persecuted because they do right will go straight to God. Luke repeats the gist of this teaching but adds a series of warnings aimed at those who are ambitious to do well in the world (6:24-26). Many of them will prosper, but only in this world, not the next. “[W]oe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.” Jesus said they should be particularly worried “when all men shall speak well of you!” It meant there was something fundamentally false about what they were doing, or saying, or thinking.
This was tough teaching, hard to follow, and entirely new. It had no equivalent in the Old Testament or any of the pious wisdom literature of the ancient Near East. And Jesus, according to Luke, followed it with still more difficult maxims (6:27-29): “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also.” Above all, he told them, hesitate to criticize other people: “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned; forgive, and ye shall be forgiven” (6:37).
In all this teaching, Jesus was stressing that it was not so much the outer actions but the inner sentiments which mattered. In an important passage in Matthew (5 : 21-48; 6 : 1-34), Jesus stressed that evil feelings allowed to develop unrestrained led to major sins. It had always been obvious that killing was wrong, he argued. “But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause” was sinful, too. It was wrong to abuse or swear at another man, and “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” So compose quarrels, “be reconciled to thy brother,” and “[a]gree with thine adversary quickly, whilst thou art in the way with him.” Of course, adultery was wrong—everyone knew that—“But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Swearing was wrong, and he gave examples to avoid. Speech should be simple and direct: “[L]et your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” The old saying “Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy” was wrong: “I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” He begged his listeners to do these things “[t]hat ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” He continued, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” Alms should be given secretly, not publicly: “[L]et not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” Do not make a parade of praying in the street, but “enter into thy closet, and when thou has shut the door pray to thy Father.” When fasting, don’t go about with a woeful face but carry on normally—make sacrifices, like prayers, secret.
The transience and pointlessness of the world, when contrasted with the solidity and the permanence of heaven, was a theme to which he turned repeatedly. “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven. . . . For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Don’t fuss about food or drink or clothes: “Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” The Father knows what you need, and he will provide. “[S]eek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow. . . . Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Many of Jesus’s sayings, thus recorded in Matthew and Luke, have become maxims familiar to us from childhood. But they were startlingly new in his day. They provoked thought, astonishment, often anger, fear, and doubt—and excitement. When Jesus preached in the fields, he set men and women arguing and thinking. Mark tells us that when Jesus was asked what was the Great Commandment, he cited the book of Deuteronomy: “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” He added an injunction from Leviticus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It was Jesus who first drew these two Old Testament commands together, making them the center of the good life—“There is none other commandment greater than these.” The scribe who had asked him the question noticed the innovation and commented in admiration that Jesus’s answer “is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” To which Jesus replied, “Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God” (12 : 28-34). For not all scribes were blind and foolish, and Jesus could always recognize the decent ones.
When Jesus was asked “[W]ho is my neighbour?” (Lk 10:29), his answer was: everyone. He turned compassion, which all of us feel from time to time for a particular person, into a huge, overarching gospel of love. He taught the love of mankind as a whole. The Greek word for this is philanthrōpia, “philanthropy,” which has since become threadbare with use and stained by misuse. It did not exist in Jesus’s day as a concept. The idea of loving all humanity did not occur to anyone, Greek or barbarian, Jew or Gentile. Everyone’s compassion—love—was selective. The Greeks were taught to hate the barbarians, just as Jews were taught to hate Gentiles and Samaritans. The Romans despised the peoples they conquered. All free men and women hated and feared slaves. Aristotle, perhaps the most sophisticated and enlightened man of his age, dismissed slaves as mere “animated machines.” The intellectual, social, and racial climate of Jesus’s day was implacably hostile to his message in this respect. The society he entered was one in which pious Jews taught and were taught that Gentiles without the law were accursed. What he tried to show was that compassion had, quite literally, no limits. Otherwise it was false. Benevolence was meaningless if it failed to be universal. Here was a new commandment as important as any in the Decalogue, or all of them together. God was the model. He loved all human beings. And anyone who drew distinctions and made exceptions on grounds of nationality or race or religious beliefs or opinions or age or sex or profession or past record of sinfulness was not heading for the Kingdom of God. On the contrary, he would find its gates shut.
One principal reason Christianity later spread all over the world was that Jesus himself was a universalist. “I . . . will draw all men unto me,” he said in John 12:3
2. He insisted, “God so loved the world . . . that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” God had sent him to earth not to condemn the world, or any part of it, “but that the world through him might be saved” (Jn 3 : 16-17). There are no restrictions or qualifications in this universal mission. When he gave his apostles their final instructions about their missionary tasks ahead, he set no geographical, social, national, or racial limits. They were to “go . . . into all the world” and “teach all nations” (Mk 16:15; Mt 28:19).
This universalism of Jesus stretched from his Incarnation to the Crucifixion. His mother was Jewish by birth but his Father was God, soaring above all personal distinctions. He had no home, no country, no race, no characteristics tying him to a tribe or a nation or a locality. He belonged to the Kingdom, outside time and space. But he was united to all men by love. He was philanthropy—the love of man—incarnate, and his sacrifice on the cross was the supreme philanthropic act in his life on earth and for all time: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). But by friends he meant all without exception. There was nothing exclusive about Jesus and his teaching. His message was the most inclusive of all such communications. No one before had, and no one since has, so confidently and warmly and indeed naturally opened his arms to the entire human race.
V
Poetry and Parables, Questions and Silence
THE APPEAL OF JESUS’ S teaching is clear enough. For wherever he went, for the best part of three years, he attracted large crowds. It was not that This message was popular, though much of it was. But some of it made hard demands and set a high standard of virtue and self-sacrifice. Yet his teaching was mesmeric. All could hear it, though he often spoke to multitudes in the open. So his voice was distinct, and resonant. It pleased them all: there was no weariness. The truth is, Jesus was not so much a rhetorician, or a preacher, as a poet. He thought and reasoned and spoke as a poet does—in images, flashes of insight and metaphors from the world of nature. All the time he taught he was creating little pictures in the minds of the men and women who listened to him. He was the poet of virtue, the bard of righteousness, the minstrel of divine love. His talk was a rhapsody and when he exhorted, his words formed palinodes and lyrics.
It is fitting that his birth should have been cast amid the three poems Luke reproduces in his Gospel. They are the Magnificat, or song of worship, spontaneously produced by his mother (1:46- 55); the Benedictus, or blessing song of her cousin Elizabeth (1:68-79); and the Nunc Dimittis, or spiritual farewell of Simeon, an old Temple servant (2 : 29-32). All have been set to music many times and are spoken in civilized tongues. Jesus’s poetry was the poetry of speech rather than rhyme. Sometimes, indeed, it was rhythmic. Thus the Beatitudes as given in Matthew 5:3-12 are marked by what students of verse call synthetic parallelism, in which the second line of each verse completes the meaning of the first line. And in Matthew 11 : 28-30 there are strong rhythms in Jesus’s beautiful hymn to labor, which I have taken the liberty of setting in verse: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart:
and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy,
and my burden is light.
Jesus’s words sometimes straddle the border between prose and poetry, as in this passage (Mt 8:20):The foxes have holes,
and the birds of the air have nests;
but the Son of man hath not where
to lay his head.
In John 21:18 there is a passage about the old:When thou wast young,
thou girdedst thyself,
and walkedst whither thou wouldest:
but when thou shalt be old,
thou shalt stretch forth thy hands,
and another shall gird thee,
and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.
Even when rhythm is lacking and the form is prosaic, Jesus’s words are never far from the poetic, for they are rich in metaphor and simile, in vivid comparisons with the world of nature. There are not half a dozen lines of his teaching without an image, and often an unforgettable one, which has entered into the repertoire of writers all over the world. Inanimate objects spring to life, animals are anthropomorphized, nature teems with purposeful moral activity, and human beings often assume a dignity, a profundity, or a pathos, thanks to the brilliant glitter of Jesus’s imagery. We hear of “living water” (Jn 4 : 10) and “the blind lead[ing] the blind” (Lk 6 : 39). Jesus wishes to gather the children of Jerusalem together “as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings” (Lk 13 : 34). There is a wonderful image of the simple farmer who should sow “night and day” and “the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how” (Mk 4:27). Jesus loves single trees, standing in isolation, the olive, the fig, the vine, and uses them tenderly. He speaks of the late summer and the whitening harvests. He loves roots, branches, and leaves, and sees images of people in all of them. When he uses words to conjure up a picture, it is striking how often the phrases he creates have become part of the furniture of literature: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth” (Jn 3 : 8). And in Matthew 11 : 7 he asks, “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” When Jesus says, “[L]et the dead bury their dead” (Mt 8:22), he brings us up short, startled. “I came not to send peace, but a sword,” he says in Matthew 10:34, and startles us again. He is fond of fire images: “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” (Lk 12:49). “Every sacrifice,” he says in Mark 9 : 49, “shall be salted with fire.” Salt images are another favorite: “Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?” (Lk 14 : 34). He tells his disciples, “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Mt 5 : 13). And we hear of salt cast on the dunghill. Time and again he tells us of the beauties of nature, of God “cloth[ing] the grass of the field” (Mt 6 : 30), of lilies so dressed by the deity that “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Mt 6:29; Lk 12:27). There is a fascinating passage in Luke in which a gardener shows pity for his fig tree and begs the owner not to cut it down when it bears no fruit for three years: “Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down” (13:7-9).
Jesus loves the figure or metaphor of the cup which God handed him, and which he must drink: he uses it three times (Mt 20:22; Lk 22:20, 42; Jn 18:11). As I have already noted, he speaks of sheep and shepherds constantly—more often than any other rustic image—the safe folding of the sheep, the guarding of the sheep from wolves, the differences between the true shepherd and the hireling, the fact that the shepherd knows his sheep and that they recognize him and his voice, the way in which sheep become scattered and some lost, and the fidelity of the shepherd who leaves his flock to seek the stray and rejoices mightily when he finds it. “I am the good shepherd,” says Jesus, “and know my sheep, and am known of mine” (Jn 10:14; Mt 18:12, 9:36, 26:31; Lk 15:4). He also says, “I am the light of the world” (Jn 9 : 5). Light and its contrast with darkness is Jesus’s favorite image of all, which he uses with great power and passion. He comes, he says, to “work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: for the night cometh, when no man can work” (Jn 9 : 4). The whole of John, from the Gospel’s stunning first paragraphs, is an epic prose poem to light. In these paragraphs, the word “light” is compared to the knowledge of God’s truth, “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (1:9). Throughout the ministry of Jesus there are striking contrasts between the light of truth and the darkness of ignorance, Satan, and evil. Jesus was always eager to make the blind see because such an act illustrated and epitomized his mission—“seeing” was “knowing,” recognizing tr
uth and following it.
The Gospel of John also makes clear that in Jesus’s teaching there is a continuum between the word, the light, and the life. Jesus came into the world to speak the word: “He that heareth my word . . . is passed from death into life” (5:24). Jesus always emphasized that the physical death of which we speak is only “falling asleep.” The true death is sin. By contrast, “life” is the future Kingdom, outside time and everlasting. In the prologue of John, a vast metaphor of light is the key phrase: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (1 : 4). This is a poetic image, but it is also a philosophical one. It is Jesus’s position, as a moralist, that human beings, despite sin and all their frailties, have a natural inclination to truth. It is revealed by the word, the Logos; that is, Jesus: This word of truth attracts God’s children to the light as a magnet attracts metals while mere stones are unmoved. To love the light is to love the truth. It is a profoundly philosophical point but one, curiously enough, which simple, uneducated people grasp instinctively because it is also a poetic one.
Light and darkness: the Gospels are the verbal stages upon which Jesus’s message is enacted in the strongest chiaroscuro, gradual dawnings breaking into floods of intense light, gathering clouds piling up thunderously, lit by lightning flashes and then dispersed—a darkness truly satanic which finally yields to a light so intense and all-penetrating as to be truly heavenly. Darkness and light are constantly stressed in Jesus’s mission, and then, in real, tragic life, culminate in the twilight Last Supper, the dusk in the Garden Agony of Gethsemane, the darkness of the Crucifixion, and finally the dawn of the third day revealing the blinding light of the Resurrection. Seen thus in the living metaphor, the life of Jesus is the incarnation of light, its growth, spread, and reception, its extinction, and its miraculous rekindling into an everlasting incandescence.
