Unapologetic

by Francis Spufford

  What they want is what the empire by definition will not give them: their separateness, their independence. They want the country their law implies, the kingdom of their own that they used to have, long ago, before the empires. In memory it has grown from a hardscrabble patch of rocks and olive trees into something verging on a different state of being. The kingdom has started to represent righteousness itself, the state (in both senses of the word) in which God’s people live in accord with Him again. It has become the focus of their longing. But a longing that cannot be acted upon. The occupiers are much too strong. Even tucked away in their barracks, the people know they are there, enormous brawny thugs with bare knees, backed up by superb organisation, matchless military technology, the wealth of the whole world.

  So the province simmers. As you would expect, the young men find a particular testosterone-fuelled humiliation in their powerlessness. As you would expect, the burdens of the laws of purity fall with particular weight on the young women. As you would expect, collaborators are hated. As you would expect, so are prostitutes, especially if they have anything to do with the army camps. As you would expect, the high officials of the one God’s one temple perform a difficult balancing act, trying to keep the people happy, trying to keep the occupiers sweet so they don’t take away even more of the province’s limited autonomy. Low-level terrorism flourishes, followed by example-setting public executions. An ever-changing selection of pious groups offer ever-changing prescriptions for getting back God’s approval. Preachers and would-be prophets are everywhere, prominent for a season and then gone. Some people say the rules of purity should be even stricter. Some people say you should abandon everything and go into the clean desert. Some people say you need to be washed in the province’s one river. A lot of people think that the world will end soon; fear it will end soon; hope it will end soon, because then a more than human justice may put things right. All the time, there are whispered rumours of someone, somewhere, claiming the kingship and starting the holy war to get the kingdom back. It never seems to be true, but every fanatic up in the hills knows the role is waiting to be filled. The religion has made a space for this figure, the king-who-is-to-come, the man whom the God of everything will choose to lead the uprising. He is called moshiakh, ‘the anointed one’, after the holy oil that kings wear. In Greek, where oil for hair is chrism, his title translates as christos. But it’s a no-show so far for Mr Royal Oil. In summer the tension gets specially bad; and also at festivals, which are supposed to celebrate things being right, and make it feel much worse that they aren’t. The soldiers are jumpy and resentful too. They don’t like it here. The fleshpots of the exotic East it isn’t. The locals are loons. Any moment, some teenage boy may try to stab you with a kitchen knife, and you can’t tell if the girls are babes because they’re all covered up. It’s a grim little armpit of a posting. Say the wrong thing, eat the wrong thing, touch the wrong thing – any little thing can kick off a riot.

  Into this setting comes Yeshua, with the love song to all that is ringing continually in him, and he says: don’t be careful.

  He certainly isn’t careful himself. He and his friends come wandering into town on the holy Saturday when you’re not supposed to work or to travel, or to do anything much, and they’re chewing and laughing, they’re picnicking in the street as they stroll along. Challenged, he says (with his mouth full) that the rules are for the people, not the people for the rules. When crowds gather, to check out this new source of entertainment or outrage, to see if he’s conducting himself like a teacher or a prophet or just possibly like a guerrillero looking for recruits – when the crowds gather, he sits them down in the sheep pasture, and he says: behave as if you never had to be afraid of consequences. Behave as if nothing you gave away could ever make you poorer, because you can never run out of what you give. Behave as if this one day we’re in now were the whole of time, and you didn’t have to hold anything back, or to plot and scheme about tomorrow. Don’t try to grip your life with tight, anxious hands. Unclench those fingers. Let it go. If someone asks for your help, give them more than they’ve asked for. If someone hits out at you, let them. Don’t retaliate. Be the place the violence ends. Because you’ve got it wrong about virtue. It isn’t something built up from a thousand careful, carefully measured acts. It comes, when it comes, in a rush; it comes from behaving, so far as you can, like God Himself, who makes and makes and loves and loves and is never the less for it. God doesn’t want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity. Try to keep what you have, and you’ll lose even that. Give it away, and you’ll get back more than you bargain for; more than bargaining could ever get you. By the way, you were wanting a king? Look at that flower over there by the wall. More beautiful than any royal robe, don’t you think? Better than silks; and it comes bursting out of the ground all by itself, free and gratis. It won’t last? Nothing lasts; nothing but God.

  He isn’t a relativist, though. Far from it. He doesn’t think you should relax and do what you like, and it won’t really matter what. He believes in good and evil all right, to a drastic degree. He has a vivid, horrified sense of the HPtFtU, in all its elaborate self-deceiving semi-oblivious encrustedness, and he talks as if it overshadowed huge swathes of human activity, including the human activities that humans tend to be proud of. Whenever anyone asks him about the law, he usually ups the ante; he amps the law up towards a perfectionist impossibility, in which anger is forbidden as well as murder, in which desire can be as much of a betrayal as adultery – in which internal states of being that apparently don’t hurt (or even affect) anyone else weigh as heavily with God as external acts. Sometimes he seems to be a kind of radical pessimist about human nature. Who are you calling good? he says, when someone makes the mistake of addressing him with ordinary social politeness as ‘good man’. No one is good but God. He talks as if virtue is almost unachievable, yet still compulsory. Rather than being a menu of demands that all can satisfy, for him it seems to be something that it would take feats of absurd unlikelihood to accomplish, rents or openings or transformations in the order of nature, so that camels can climb through needles’ eyes. He talks a lot about fire sometimes, about burning. He seems to think a change is required in us as complete as the change that comes when chaff is set blazing after the harvest, and the fields billow with flame. We must all be ‘salted with fire’, he says. He can be frightening, indeed he can. He says it would be worth chopping off bits of yourself – eyes, hands – if it would rid you of what separates you from God. Yet he is an optimistic pessimist. Come on, says somebody. How could anybody ever stand right with God, if it were as hard as you say? With God, everything is possible, he says.

  He annoys people when he talks like this. Because the implication of his perfectionism is that everybody is guilty; and if everybody is guilty, nobody gets to congratulate themselves, and murderers and adulterers cannot be shunned. If what he says is right, then those are only people in whom the universal HPtFtU has taken a particular turn, has been indulged in particular ways. They are not outcasts, they do not belong in a category of unclean persons that the clean rest of us can hold at arm’s length. Yeshua insists that being unclean is not a temporary violation of the proper state of things. It is the normal human condition. Yet he seems weirdly unbothered about sex. Except to make it clear that it falls under the umbrella of his perfectionism, he hardly has a thing to say about it. He expresses no opinions whatsoever about homosexuality, abortion, promiscuity, contraception, clerical celibacy, virginity at marriage, modest dress, non-procreative sex, masturbation, gay marriage, or how far you should go on a first date. He appears to be opposed to divorce on the pro-feminist grounds that it cuts women off without economic support. (In his world, men can divorce women but not the other way round.) He does not denounce anything. He does not seem to be disgusted by anybody, anybody at all. It is as if, shockingly, what we do in bed is not specially important to him. As if it just does not constitute for him a particularly prominent and anx
ious category of human behaviour. Whether he has any passions of his own, and what kind, and who for, no one has been interested in telling us, any more than they have bothered to say what he looks like.*

  * For the question of whether, instead, his sex life has been brutally excised from the documents by a body-hating church – again, please wait for the next chapter. Go on, you can hold out. Take a deep breath.

  On the other hand, he has a lot to say about self-righteousness, which he compares, not very tactfully, to a grave that looks neat and well cared for up top but is heaving with ‘corruption’ down below. Maggots, basically. And the point of this repulsive image is not just that the inside and outside of a self-righteous person don’t match, that there’s a hypocritical contradiction between the claim to virtue and the actual content of a human personality: it’s also that, for him, being sure you’re righteous, standing on your dignity as a virtuous person, comes precious close to being dead. If you won’t hear the bad news about yourself, you can’t know yourself. You condemn yourself to the maintenance of an exhausting illusion, a false front to your self which keeps out doubt and with it hope, change, nourishment, breath, life. If you won’t hear the bad news, you can’t begin to hear the good news about yourself either. And you’ll do harm. You’ll be pumped up with the false confidence of virtue, and you’ll think it gives you a licence, and a large share of all the cruelties in the world will follow, for evil done knowingly is rather rare compared to the evil done by people who’re sure that they themselves are good, and that evil is hatefully concentrated in some other person; some other person who makes your flesh creep because they have become exactly as unbearable, as creepy, as disgusting, as you fear the mess would be beneath your own mask of virtue, if you ever dared to look at it.

  He arrives in a town just as a public execution is about to take place. The criminal is a woman ‘taken in adultery’, which could mean that she’s been caught having literal sex with someone other than her husband. But it could also mean that she smiles at soldiers when she serves wine to them, or that she’s been seen chatting at the well with a boy who is neither her brother nor her cousin; or it could mean that she works in the brothel the town is ashamed it possesses, and has been servicing five burghers a night for a decade. One way or another she has concentrated in herself the town’s fear and alarm about desire. And the good people have gathered to punish her. They already have in their hands the rocks the law stipulates, neither too small nor too big, which will crack her bones and mash out of her flesh the disturbance of her desirability. Yeshua intervenes, which is not necessarily a very sensible thing to do, when virtue is breathing fast and looking forward to this kind of treat. He asks what she’s done. They tell him. Oh, he says. Well then, the one of you who’s never wanted anything bad had better throw the first stone. And he raises his eyebrows and waits, and something in the gaze of his ordinary eyes makes the good people shuffle where they stand. There’s a pause. Perhaps it helps that his friends have walked into town with him, equally dusty from the road, and that among the rag-tag of his followers, male and female, who’re hanging back to see what he does, there are some quite large and burly men. But anyway there’s the hollow klok and klok and klok of stones dropping onto the ground, and the executioners slink away, and in a moment or two only the executee is left there with Yeshua and his friends. She is weeping. He helps her to stand up.

  This kind of thing does not make him popular, and nor does his persistent refusal to show any respect for people’s sense of their own spiritual accomplishments, which comes out in his bizarre attitude to the question of where he has dinner each night. The usual custom, when a preacher or a would-be prophet is doing well out on the circuit, is for him to accept an invite from a pious local dignitary: someone upstanding, a pillar of the meeting-house, a bit of a connoisseur of the finer points of the law, who will feed the rising star, and in return get a private performance of whatever the new thing is he’s offering, as after-dinner entertainment. But Yeshua keeps ignoring the invitations and picking the night’s host for himself, from out of the crowd – again and again unerringly settling on some really unrespectable citizen, someone like a wineshop owner the pious would ignore in the street, or on an out-and-out public enemy, like a tax-farmer for the empire. And when, for a change, he does accept a meal from the upright, he has a way of being casually, intimately offensive to his host. So tell me, teacher – says a solid citizen as the remains of the baked eggplant are cleared away – what must I do to be saved? Yeshua’s gaze slides across the tapestries, the silver bowls for washing guests’ feet, the candlestick blessed by the Chief Priest of the temple himself. I’d get rid of this lot for a start, he says.

  People bristle. The news about him gets around. He starts to pick up hecklers, to be drawn into staged conversations designed to get him into trouble or to make him declare himself unambiguously for one of the factions. He arrives in new towns and anti-welcoming committees greet him. Take the crazy talk somewhere else, they say. But it isn’t just strangers who think he’s making a fool of himself. His own family think so too. They are embarrassed by him, and beginning to be frightened for him as well, correctly seeing that if he goes on like this, he is cruising for a bruising. One day when he’s preaching in a house, and the alleyway outside is blocked solid with interested onlookers, his mother and his brothers and sisters turn up in a body to retrieve him. They can’t force their way through the crush, so they send in a message: tell him his family have come to take him home, tell him his mother’s here and very upset, tell him it’s time to stop all this nonsense. But he won’t go. He won’t even come out to talk to them. Instead he weaves their message straight into what he’s saying. Mother? Brother? Sister? What are those? What good does it do if we only love those who love us back? God wants more than kin loving kin. He wants more than the natural bonds. He wants more than biology. He wants our love to do more than run around the tight circle of our self-interest; more, even, than that it should run around the wider circle of our altruism, if altruism means we get some kind of roundabout payback for love in the end. God, he says, wants us to love wildly and without calculation. God wants us to love people we don’t even like; people we hate; people who hate us. He says this, and he looks away from the familiar faces who’re bobbing up and down behind the wall of shoulders in the doorway, calling to him, trying to be heard. He isn’t going with them. His brothers, his sisters, his mother start the long walk home, defeated.

  By the way, he says. The law is not enough, either. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. That book in the place of honour in the meeting-house is a gift from the one God, but it is not His only gift; it is not the whole pattern of what He wants from us; it does not capture, perfect and entire, His whole intentions towards us. God knows that we need justice, without which no human city can stand. There must be rule by rules, or force will tear down every wall. Since blood will be shed no matter what, humans being humans, better that it should be shed to try to protect the weak from the strong, to guard the widow and the orphan and the traveller on the road, to settle quarrels without massacres. Innocence and guilt must be portioned out. Punishments must be assigned. Judgements must be made. Our nature requires it. But God’s nature doesn’t. The law is needful for us, not for Him. God is not in the game of harnessing fear and anger, and trying to turn them into fairness. God does not need to struggle to get from the shouting and the screaming and the sword in the night to the calm room where a judge is doing their best to see what somebody deserves. The law says that everyone should get what they deserve, but God already knows what we deserve with terrible precision, and He wants us to have more than that. He sees that we need to do justice to each other, but he wants to give us mercy. He wants deserving to be overflooded by love. So, if you want to live in accord with Him, you can’t do it just by being law-abiding. You have to try, again, to be like Him, and to do what He does. He doesn’t wait for us to come to Him where He is, out there beyond the need for t
he law; He comes to us, right now, where we live in the grip of our necessities, to bring us the rest of His gift, to complete the work the law began.

  And yet, though Yeshua is telling people to discard the dream of perfect law, he somehow still wants the kingdom anyway. He talks about the kingdom all the time, every day, almost every hour, as much as any of the threadbare bandits in the hills who tell themselves they’ll be sitting on silk cushions in the city when the christos comes. Yes, the kingdom is coming, he says. But in his mouth the great object of the province’s yearning for a century and more turns . . . elusive. When he talks about it, it skips from analogy to analogy, keeping all its power as heart’s desire and humiliation’s remedy, but sliding ever onward, impossible to pin down as a political plan. Yeshua’s kingdom apparently exists in ever-changing resemblances. He does not say what it is, only what it is like. It’s like a tiny seed. It’s like a big tree. Like something inside you. Like a pearl you’d give everything to possess. Like wheat growing among weeds. Like the camel climbing through the needle’s eye. Like the way the world looks to children. Like a servant making good use of the master’s money. Like getting a day’s pay for an hour’s work. Like a crooked magistrate, who has fixed the case in your favour. Like a narrow gate, a difficult road, a lamp on a stand. Like a wedding party. Like a wedding party where all the original guests have been disinvited and replaced by random passers-by. Like yeast in dough. Like a treasure, like a harvest, like a door that opens whenever you knock. Or like a door you have to bang on for hours in the middle of the night until a grumpy neighbour wakes up and lends you a loaf. The kingdom is – whatever all those likenesses have in common. The kingdom, he seems to be saying, is something that can only be glimpsed in comparisons, because the world contains no actual example of it. And yet the world glints and winks and shines everywhere with the possibility of it. Which is not exactly what you’d call a manifesto.