Things get strange sometimes in the same way when he tells stories. He likes to do this; it’s his favourite way of teaching. And he doesn’t mean to be mysterious, you can tell. He doesn’t mind playing language games when people are trying to trap him into saying something out-and-out arrestable, but the idea is always to be understood. He is a bit sarcastic to his friends when they suggest that he is talking in a secret code, for insiders only. Nothing is hidden except to be revealed, he says. The stories are always about homely, everyday things. They’re about sheep, vineyards, money, weddings, bosses and servants, parents and children. And mostly they’re perfectly easy to follow, like the story of the rude son who says Fuck off Dad and pulls the blanket over his head when his father tries to call him for work, but arrives in the field at mid-morning with a grunt of apology, while his smoothy-smoothy brother is all Yes Dad, No Dad, but never turns up at all. Or the story of the foreigner who helps the guy who’s been mugged. Or the story of the tenants who kill the landlord’s son. But then you’ll get a story which is just baffling; and not because it is making some profound but hard-to-understand statement, or because it is doing the Zen thing of deliberately invoking an impossibility to jump you into an altered state. These are baffling because they seem to have several different layers of meaning going on at once which don’t square up with each other. Wait wait wait, you want to say – so the fellow who wants to be king represents God? But then who is it he’s applying to for the royal powers? and who are the people who accuse him of injustice supposed to be? Sorry, what? It’s as if when Yeshua talks we’re hearing something big and obvious being translated into a form which won’t quite hold it. Or, worse, there are stories that seem quite clear, but where the homely details start to seem odder and odder, less and less familiar, the more you think about them.
Say you have a hundred sheep, says Yeshua. And you lose one. Wouldn’t you drop everything, wouldn’t you leave the remaining ninety-nine, and go in search of the missing one, never resting till it was found? That’s what God is like, in search of us. Oh, I see, you say. Yes. But then, after a minute: Er, hello? Er, mister? No. No; not unless you lock up the ninety-nine other sheep in a sheepfold first, so you don’t lose them too. Because, you know, sheep wander off. And because, you know, you’d want to keep as many of them as possible. That would be your sheep-maximising strategy. That would be, kind of, the point of being a shepherd. You do know, right, that ninety-nine is a bigger number than one? You have actually seen sheep, right? And then the same implicitly weird – weird verging on inhuman – thing happens when he tells a story about a woman who has ten coins, loses one, and finds it again. He doesn’t seem even to notice the nine coins she still has left. The losing and the getting back are all that stand out to him. He doesn’t seem to understand ownership. It’s as if someone is speaking for whom loss, and making good on it, is so urgent, so prominent in the world, that they scarcely have any attention left over for possession. What matters is that what is lost should be found, what is broken should be made whole.
Lost people arouse his particular tenderness. In all their varieties. People whose bodies or minds don’t work properly. People especially mangled by the HPtFtU. People who one way or another fall foul of the purity rules, whether it’s their own doing or not. People who live beyond the usual bounds of sympathy, because they are ugly, or frightening, or boring, or incomprehensible, or dangerous. People who are not people like us, whoever ‘we’ happen to be; people who are not the right kind of people, whatever that is being defined as. In theory he has come to help the lost sheep among the God-fearers, the lost sheep of Israel – that’s what he says – but in practice, over and over again, he gives his whole attention to whoever he meets, including a multitude of foreigners, and members of the occupying army. The lack of limit in what he asks of people, the limitlessness of what he wants for people, washes away the difference between insiders and outsiders. He is never recorded as saying no to anyone. Anyone can claim his time, if they can find a way to him through the crowd, and when someone does, whatever their reason is, he speaks to them as if the dust and the noise and the reaching hands had receded and nothing else were going on in the wide world but he and they talking. All his conversations seem to be personal. Even in argument, even practising neat word-judo on a heckler with an agenda, he appears to be fully focused on the particular individual in front of him. When he offends a rich person by advising them to dump their possessions, he does not say it to push them away; it is his real prescription for what afflicts them, and when they do not take his remedy he is sorry, if unsurprised. He seems to know the names of strangers without asking. He knows things about their histories too. One by one, as they get their moment with him, they are each vividly, substantially present to him. They matter. They matter in themselves. They are not means to an end. He is not like a politician in a democracy, who wants to convert instances of individual liking into a bloc of votes; or a war leader, who wants charisma to win him a devoted army; or a lawgiver, like Moses or Muhammad, who is thinking in terms of the health of the group. It is not a good day for him when he wins lots of new followers, or a bad day for him when he doesn’t. Yeshua’s sense of people is not additive. More is not better. Each person in front of him is, for that moment, the one missing sheep.
And he is never disgusted. He never says that anything – anyone – is too dirty to be touched. That anyone is too lost to be found. Even in situations where there seem to be no grounds for human hope, he will not agree that hope is gone beyond recall. Wreckage may be written into the logic of the world, but he will not agree that it is all there is. He says, more can be mended than you fear. Far more can be mended than you know.
He tells another story. A father has two sons. One is a steady type, content to work away on the farm, but the younger one is all flash and leather trousers, and he persuades his dad to let him have his share of the inheritance up front, so he can have fun fun fun with it. Which he does, away in the big city, draining the bucket of fun deeper and deeper, sleazier and sleazier, down into the sump of fun where the fun is really not that much fun any more, but still kind of compelling, so you keep on doing it, despite many resolutions to stop, because if you do stop you’ll let yourself see what you’re losing; right down to the last few extraordinarily disgusting mouthfuls, during which the younger son does things he can’t bear to even name. Until finally the bucket is empty, and there’s nothing left but the bitter knowledge of waste, and the younger son is alone and penniless and ruined, in the gutter of the big city: and he wants to creep back home, because that’s all that’s left. But he doesn’t know whether home is even there for him now, and he doesn’t really see why it should be; after all, it was home he traded in for the fun fun fun, it was his stake in home he was burning up, it was home he was choosing against all that time. So as he makes the long walk in the ridiculous rags of his party-wear, clothes not made for dusty noon on the road, with his blisters oozing and the sour stink of old vomit lingering, he rehearses the speech he’s going to make when he gets there: Dad, I know I’ve already had all I deserve from you, and then some, and I don’t deserve to be your son, but can I just come back as a farmhand, and sleep in the barn? But when he’s stumbling down the last hill, before he’s even reached the farm gate, he sees a figure on the road running to meet him, and it’s his father, weeping and laughing and waving his arms in the air. Dad, he says, I – but his father ignores the speech; he just kisses him, smelly scarecrow that he is, and hugs him as if he’s never going to let go again. This is my son, he shouts, this is my son who was lost and is found. Heat the bathwater! Start cooking a feast! Invite all the neighbours over!
That’s not the end of the story, though. It doesn’t stop on this moment of pure rejoicing. Because the older brother is there too. He comes in from another day of sober, sensible work to ask what all the commotion is, and when he finds out, he’s cautious, and more than a little bit pissed off, as we would be if we responded to the story
with our everyday self-protection and scepticism in place. Yeah? the older brother’s sour face says – all very touching, but there’s only my half of the farm left, and how do you know, Dad, as you wipe the tears out of your beard, that Mr Party Animal here has actually changed? Maybe he’s just skint. Also, when did I ever get a feast for staying put and doing what I was supposed to, all along? Not fair.
At which point, the set-up of the story stops making sense, just like the lost sheep did; or rather, it drops away, all the homely talk of farms and brothers, because this is about something else, a love that deliberately does not protect itself, a love that is radically unprotected on purpose, and is never going to stop to ask whether the younger son, like many junkies briefly boomeranging back to the nest, will tomorrow steal the silver spoons and the digital camera and be off again to the fun-bucket. A love that does not come naturally in a world of finite farms, and real inheritances, and exhaustible parents; a love which therefore can only be like a father running across the fields to kiss his ruined child. But a love we might need anyway, if we’re to get beyond deserving. Yeshua tells the story with the bad boy’s viewpoint first, and then the brother’s, so that those who hear it must become both of them, so that we can recognise ourselves in both of them. Which we do, if we’re honest in the way Yeshua recommends. In every life, we have times when we play both parts. We ruin, and we build. We’re chaotic, and we’re the anxious maintainers of a little bit of order in the face of chaos. We could only join the older brother in asking for fairness, nothing but fairness, if we didn’t see ourselves at all in the lost boy. Since we find ourselves in him as well, we too will need, at times, something far less cautious than justice. We too will need sometimes to be met on the road by a love that never shudders at the state we’re in, never hesitates to check what it can bear, but only cries: this is my son, who was lost and is found.
How, though? How can an unlimited love be applied in a world of limits? To begin with, as he goes about the province, Yeshua seems to be trying to do it physically. What do you want me to do for you, he asks the people he speaks to, and very often the answer is, heal me; make me better from the diseases that this time and place in human history cannot cure. Leprosy, epilepsy, paralysis, schizophrenia. All the accidents of a biology which palpably is not safe, is not designed, is not secured from harm by the love that backs the universe. And Yeshua does what he is asked to. He licks his fingers and makes a paste of mud and spit, he lays his hands on twitching stick-limbs and the nubs where hands used to be and the sides of heads which are canisters of unbearable noise or skittering electricity; and where he does so, without any fuss or visible fireworks, the patient shining that precedes all particular things is somehow enabled, just this once, just at this particular moment, on a tiny scale, very locally, to seep through from the brightness beyond into the here and now, into what is, and to remake it as love would have it be. Impossibilities occur. Blind eyes suddenly see. Severed nerve cells reconnect. Legs straighten, infections recede, pain fades, horrified minds quieten. Up you get, says Yeshua. Go, get up, live, be in motion, be about your business, be the mended version of yourself. Perhaps this momentary suspension of the laws of the universe can happen because the maker of all things is now no longer outside them, impartially sustaining them, holding everything but touching nothing in particular. Now, instead, the maker is within as well, and he has hands that can reach, he has a local address in space and time from which to act. But now, by the same token, he cannot be everywhere at once. He has only two hands, one voice. He can only touch the people who are within the reach of his hands, as he travels at foot speed or fishing-boat speed around the province. And he himself, existing in the domain of limits, has limits too. Healing people exhausts him; it makes him sway on his feet. Day after day ends with him helplessly asking his friends to get him away, and they carry him off in a boat, or up into the hills, just so he can sleep, leaving behind the vast total of the world’s suffering almost unaltered, only the tiniest inroads made into it, only an infinitesimal fraction of it eased. One man doing miracles in West Asia doesn’t even move the leprosy statistics. The cruelty of the cruel world reproduces itself far faster than his slow hands can move. He brings sight to blind eyes, and all the causes of blindness rage on. He interrupts one stoning, and that very week twenty other stonings proceed without a hitch.
He can’t mend the world’s sorrows this way – weep though he does, berate himself though he does, say yes though he does to every request. The healing of damaged bodies can only be a sign of what he’s truly come to do. His business is with the human heart in the metaphorical sense, not with the clenching muscle in our chests. He’s here to mend the HPtFtU, not to cure diseases. (And yes, he knows the difference. The idea that disease is a sin, or at least a consequence of one, is very popular in the province, and Yeshua takes care to disagree whenever he comes across it.) That’s what he means by the camel skipping through the needle’s eye, by the lost sheep being found, by the ruined boy coming home. His promise is that the grief we ourselves cause can be mended. How, though? Isn’t that even more impossible? Two thousand years later, we can do something about a lot of the diseases that were incurable when Yeshua came, and our knowledge increases year by year, reducing pain far more effectively than isolated miracles could. But how, in a world of consequences, can we possibly be rid of the consequences of our own cruelties and failures – especially when Yeshua is insisting we take ourselves so ferociously seriously? The consequences of the HPtFtU ramify out in time from moments we cannot retrieve. Our past is past, definitively out of reach. The child you neglected grew up into the adult who will always be shaped, in part, by the neglect. The effort you failed to put into your first marriage left your ex-partner with scar tissue that is now part of him. The nervous teenager you talked into trying skunk in Amsterdam in 1997, the one who had the psychotic reaction to it, is still living at home with her parents, still frightened, still unquiet in mind. None of it can be unpicked, revised, done over again. So how can the weight of it, which Yeshua insists we should feel as the first step towards hope, possibly be lifted off us?
The existing religion of the God of everything, in Yeshua’s time, says that the only way to be free of the past is by sacrifice. If you’ve done something that appears in the lawbook’s list of prohibited actions, you go to the one temple in the one city, and you pay the tariff for the action, also listed in the lawbook. You buy a pigeon, or a bullock, or a ram, from the special animal dealers operating in the temple forecourt, and then you take it to the priests, who kill it for you, and because you have penitently given up the cost of the sacrifice, your action dies along with the animal. And thus you stand right again with God. But Yeshua says that the HPtFtU is universal and pervasive, staining our thoughts as well as our actions, far in excess of the lawbook’s listing; and he doesn’t seem to be talking about sacrifice. At least, not a sacrifice that we can make. He doesn’t seem to think that any number of dead doves can remake our relationship with our own history. Instead – to the horror of the pious people he talks to – he thinks that he can. Don’t you know that only God can forgive us? someone is saying to him one day, when, at that moment, a shaft of sunlight suddenly appears in the darkness of the house where he is sitting. It isn’t a sign of divine favour. It’s a hole in the roof. The entrepreneurially-minded relations of a paraplegic have decided to jump the queue to see Yeshua by breaking their way in from above. In a tumble of thatch and dust and plaster particles, down comes a whole mattress, on ropes. Yes, says Yeshua wearily, because taking away guilt would be even harder, wouldn’t it, than taking away this gentleman’s paralysis? But, just to make the point: get up, sir. Walk. And hey, take the bed with you, please.
And now, at last, he turns toward the one city. He and his friends make for the dry yellow town on the desert hill where the empire’s governor keeps the uneasy peace with the authorities of the one temple. It’s where this story was always going. It’s where a christos, a moshia
kh, would have to declare himself. It’s where power is. It’s where the religion of the God of everything has its focus. It is the place where actions stop being provisional, experimental, retrievable, and become definite, final. It’s where this drama, whatever it is, must find its ending.
They arrive at the walls, but it’s too late in the evening for the entrance Yeshua has in mind, so they wait till the next day in the straggly settlement outside the gates. Then in they go, Yeshua and the nucleus of twenty or so men and women who have been following him about. The narrow stone streets are packed with visitors who’ve come in from the province for the biggest festival of the year, a festival of death averted, in which the people of the one God remember how he saved them by smiting the rest; and the visitors see, well, something like a parade, with Yeshua riding on a borrowed donkey, and the friends around him shouting make way, make way. Who’s this? It’s another bloody prophet. It’s that crazy preacher who says we don’t need the law. It’s the rabbi from up north who heals people. What, the river-dipping one? No, he’s dead, this is another one. It’s a king! Rubbish, kings ride on horses, not donkeys. But there are prophecies about donkeys. Maybe he’s the one. Oh come on. This fellow? Where’s his sword? It’s the king, it’s the king! Keep your voice down, idiot. Better get the children indoors, just in case.
Unapologetic Page 11
