Jesus: The Human Face of God (Icons)

Preface

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your soul.  For my yoke is easy and my burden light.
 —Matthew 11:29-30

The soul of man is the lamp of God.
 —Hebrew proverb

This is a biography of Jesus, not a theological tract, though I take seriously the message embodied in the story of Christ that unfolded in real time.  In Jesus: The Human Face of God, I offer a fresh look at him from the viewpoint of someone (a poet, novelist, and teacher of literature) who regards scripture as continuous revelation, embodied not only in the four gospels—still the main source for information about the life of Jesus—but also in extracanonical writing, such as the Gnostic Gospels, as well as in centuries of poetry and literature, where we see that prophecy remains active and ongoing.  I emphasize throughout what I call the gradually realizing kingdom of God—a process of transformation, like that of an undeveloped photograph dipped in chemicals.  The process itself adds detail and depth to the image, which grows more distinct and plausible by the moment.
   Literal-minded readings of the scriptures distort this understanding of the kingdom of God in unfortunate ways. In my view, one is not “saved” by simply checking off the boxes in a code of dogmatic beliefs—this is not what Jesus had in mind.  He asked more of us than that, and offered more as well. And so, in this portrait of Jesus’s life and ideas, I put forward a mythos—a Greek word meaning story or legend—which suggests that the narrative has symbolic contours as well as literal heft, and that one should always read this story with a kind of double vision, keeping in mind the larger meanings contained in the words and deeds that have mattered so much to Christians over two millennia.  Modern theologians have talked about demythologizing Jesus, but I want to remythologize him.  At every turn in this biography, I try to discover what Jesus meant to those who encountered him, and how his teachings and behavior inspired deeply personal transformations with public or social (even political) implications. 
   Jesus was a religious genius, and the Spirit moved in him in unique ways, with unusual grace and force, allowing him access to the highest levels of God-consciousness. His own life provided an example of how to behave in the world, urging us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to turn the other cheek when struck, and to remain fixed on “faith, hope, and love.” “This is my commandment,” Jesus said, putting before us a single ideal, “That you love one another, as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) The simplicity and force of this statement take away the breath.
   In the course of this book, I make an effort to place Jesus and his teachings within the context of desert wisdom. He came into this world at a turning point in history, a devout Jew trained in the laws of Moses and the traditions of Judaism. But he lived on the Silk Road, where he had access to Eastern as well as Western ideas. These currents informed his thoughts, and the Sermon on the Mount—where the core of his teaching lies in compressed form—extended and transformed key Jewish concepts while absorbing the Hindu and Buddhist idea of Karma: the notion that we ultimately reap what we sow. Jesus thought of the human mind in Greek terms, of course: an amalgam of body and soul. Yet his understanding of the human condition drew on every available concept as he set forth at the age of thirty with energy and passion, hoping to reshape the world, speaking not to elites—those who ruled the Roman Empire and administered the Second Temple in Jerusalem—but to the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. Here was, indeed, a revolution.
   He was a ferocious, challenging teacher, hardly the Jesus “meek and mild” of the church hymn.  And he made huge demands on those drawn toward him, as when he says in Mark 8:34: “Whoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” It’s an audacious invitation and one that Christians rarely take with the seriousness intended.  The Way of Jesus, as it might be called, involves self-denial, a sense of losing oneself in order to find oneself, moving through the inevitable pain of life with good cheer, accepting gracefully the burdens that fall on our shoulders and the tasks that lie before us.  This is true discipleship.
   On this subject, I often recall the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and minister who was executed by the Nazis in a concentration camp at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945, only a few weeks before its liberation by the Allies. Bonhoeffer stood up boldly to Hitler, and his anti-Nazi activities led to his arrest by the gestapo. During his imprisonment in Berlin’s Tegel Military Prison for a year and a half, Bonhoeffer offered comfort and inspiration to his fellow prisoners, and even his Nazi jailors admired his courage and compassion, the example he set for others in a dire situation. He imitated Jesus there, making use of his example, allowing it to define his own life and actions.
   Bonhoeffer reflected passionately on the meaning of his life, writing in his diary only a few months before his death: “It all depends on whether or not the fragment of our life reveals the plan and material of the whole. There are fragments which are only good to be thrown away, and others which are important for centuries to come because their fulfillment can only be a divine work. They are fragments of necessity. If our life, however remotely, reflects such a fragment . . . we shall not have to bewail our fragmentary life, but, on the contrary, rejoice in it.”1
   In The Cost of Discipleship, a bracing theological work, Bonhoeffer meditates at book-length on what it means to take up the cross: “Discipleship means adherence to Christ, and, because Christ is the object of that adherence, it must take the form of discipleship. An abstract Christology, a doctrinal system, a general religious knowledge on the subject of grace or on the forgiveness of sins, render discipleship superfluous, and in fact they positively exclude any idea of discipleship whatever, and are essentially inimical to the whole conception of following Christ.”2 So it won’t do simply to follow a doctrinal system, marking off the things one has to believe in order to be “saved.” To follow the Way of Jesus, one has to walk in a certain direction, experiencing the difficulties as well as the illimitable freedom of that choice. “Happy are the simple followers of Jesus Christ who have been overcome by his grace,” writes Bonhoeffer. “Happy are they who, knowing that grace, can live in the world without being of it, who, by following Jesus Christ, are so assured of their heavenly citizenship that they are truly free to live their lives in this world.”3 Bonhoeffer’s statement makes one question the idea of dogma, the notion that one should adhere to strict rules and prescribed statements in order to pursue the Christian way.
   Jesus himself would have been startled to learn that, only a few centuries after his death—with the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century—the Roman Empire itself would officially adopt his teachings and make them the law of the land. He might well have balked at the thought that a world religion would arise in his name, with competing theologians (and armies), all convinced that their understanding of his gospel message is correct, while other views are wrong. Jesus had no intention of founding a church (Greek: ekklesia) in competition with Judaism, although as the parable of the mustard seed suggests, he could imagine large numbers of people flocking to his tree of ideas like birds.
   In the last chapter of this book, I explore the “afterlife” of Jesus, how a church gradually formed, with competing ideas about what his life meant.  I also explore the various attempts to write about his life, which in the modern age began in the eighteenth century, when after the Enlightenment a degree of skepticism arose about the historical status of Jesus and the deeds and words relayed in the gospels.  But that’s later in the story.  The starting point, for me—as suggested above—is the world into which Jesus was born, a pervasively Jewish world in Palestine at one of the major junctures in history, when the message that Jesus offered struck a small chord among a core group of people—most of them Mediterranean peasants who could barely read or write—that would grow louder and more resonant in time. 
   Yet questions loom: Who exactly was this man, Jesus of Nazareth? Was he, as some scholars argue, a wandering rabbi, a magician, a healer and exorcist like many others at this time, including Rabbinic sages such as Honi ha-Ma’agel or Hanina ben Dosa?4 Was he also an apocalyptic visionary who imagined an end to history? As anyone who reads the Gospels soon notices, Jesus quoted easily and often from Hebrew scriptures, with incredible alertness to parallels that foreshadowed his own story. He understood that Jews in Palestine felt profoundly uneasy under Roman rule, and he reflected this political reality in the things he said and did. But it’s important to keep in mind that he was always a good, if unconventional, Jew. The fact that he took himself to be the long-awaited Christ (the Greek word for messiah) would, in fact, hardly have endeared him to Jewish authorities, who never imagined that the Chosen One would come from peasant stock in a remote Galilean village.  That wasn’t what they had in mind, and they looked askance at his purveyance of “signs and wonders”—miracles and astounding deeds that drew crowds wherever he went.5