Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (26 page)

T
HE PARTICULARS OF
RESURRECTION
, however one may interpret them, make for fascinating reading; and the encounters of the disciples with the risen Jesus, as the evangelists retell them, form a unique collection in the annals of the world. Their uniqueness lies not only in their singular subject but in the details inserted by the evangelists into the narratives, details which were, surely in some cases, divulged by the original participants. As I read the recountings of these explosively joyful experiences, I am always aware of the smells of spring breaking through the clotted earth and linen fresh from the laundry—the sweetness of life overcoming the molderings of death.

In Mark’s narrative, as we have already seen, Mary Magdalene and two other women make their way to the tomb “very early on the first day of the week … as the sun was rising,” this last, modestly inserted detail indicating that they will just miss the resurrection itself. Stunned to find the tomb open and, inside, a strange and talkative young man dressed in white, they drop their spices for the dead and run headlong from the tomb, frightened out of their wits, but on their way (according to Matthew) to “tell his [male] disciples,” who are cowering elsewhere. The bright April sun must have made vivid the flowing robes and veils of the women, now wild and in full flight, and warmed their arms and faces till they could begin to suspect that something wonderful had happened.

In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene is the first to behold the
risen Jesus. She is in a spring garden close by the tomb. Through copious tears, she sees a man coming toward her, whom she takes to be the gardener. “Woman,” he asks her, “why are you weeping? Who do you want?”

“Sir,” wails Mary, “if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.”

“Mary,” says the “gardener”—and with that one word Mary knows who it is.

“Rabbuni!” she cries out, using the most august Aramaic for “rabbi,” and clutches him to her.

Luke presents us with two dejected disciples leaving Jerusalem as the shadows are lengthening along the road in the sunny afternoon of this most unusual day. They are joined along the way to Emmaus by a third man, who listens politely to their talk of their rabbi, one “Jesus of Nazareth, who showed himself a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and the whole people.” But he was “handed over” to be crucified with the complicity of “our chief priests and leaders.” “Our own hope,” admit the two travelers to the newcomer, “had been that he would be the one to set Israel free. And this is not all: it is three days [by Jewish reckoning, that is, from Friday to Sunday] since this happened; and some women from our group have astounded us: they went to the tomb early this morning, and when they could not find the body, they came back to tell us that they had had an angelic vision declaring him alive.”

The third man, well versed in scripture, explains to them that “it was necessary that the
Messiah should suffer before entering into his glory.” Then, Luke tells us, “starting with
Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures” that concerned the Messiah. “As they drew near the village … he made as if to go
on, but they pressed him to stay with them saying, ‘It is almost evening, and the day is nearly done.’

“So he went into the village to stay with them. Now while he was with them at table, he took the bread and said the blessing, then broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened,” reports Luke, “and they recognized
him;
but he had vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?’ ”

The motifs of light and heat emphasize important themes. Time is precious; and just as the “day” of the prophets of Israel had to come to an end, the “day” of Jesus is “nearly done,” to be succeeded by the
Age of the Spirit that is about to break upon the disciples. The light of day—the limpid, physical presence of the Son of God in their midst, talking with them, breaking bread—will be transmuted into the fire in their hearts, the
invisible presence of the Spirit to which they must respond from now on, even if their journey lies in darkness.

From now on. The Age of the Spirit is also the
Age of the
Church; and if such a phrase makes us shudder a little, bringing on historical memories of Grand Inquisitors and human bonfires, this was hardly the case for the disciples, whose insignificant “Church” was, to begin with, a collection of no more than a hundred-odd marginal men and women. They banded together, at first in fear that Jesus’s fate might prove to be their own. But gradually they took courage, and finally they went public. The transition period—between the morning of resurrection and the first fearless, out-loud announcement that “he is risen”—took nearly seven weeks, stretching from the Sunday after the beginning of
Passover to
Shavuot, the
Feast of Weeks, which Greek-speaking Jews called
Pentecost.

At the beginning of this period, at least some disciples (and we don’t know how many) were the recipients of appearances of Jesus, such as the appearances to Magdalene and the two travelers on the road to Emmaus. The huddled Twelve (now eleven since the betrayal and departure of
Judas) became aware of Jesus in their midst on more than one occasion. These “appearances” were not like the appearance of an incorporeal ghost. Magdalene seems to have clung to a very material Jesus; he invited Thomas, the skeptical disciple who had been missing during an earlier appearance, to “feel” the wounds in his hands and side (where a soldier’s lance had pierced him while he hung dead on the cross); and he even ate food.

It is impossible to say, after two thousand years and in a world whose categories and measurements are so different from those of the first century, what the nature of these appearances might have been. To set them down as a hoax would do a significant disservice to the teaching that surrounds them. As in the case of Jesus’s miracles, we would have to imagine that the most sublime moral sentiments ever expressed had somehow been drafted in the service of a cheap fraud. To hypothesize that the disciples were the victims of mass hysteria would be almost as problematic: Jesus appeared to groups, certainly, but first of all to individuals (who cannot be accused of
mass
hysteria); and the disciples of Jesus, simple though many of them certainly were, were not notable so much for their fanciful imaginations as for their plodding literalness—hardly the ideal ground for hysteria of any sort. It seems wisest to say that the disciples
believed
that they had encountered the risen Jesus, that he was looking much better than when they had seen him last (to the extent that some of them didn’t even recognize
him at first), and that, despite the ease with which he appeared and disappeared, he was tangible.

How long this sequence of experiences lasted we cannot say. The evangelists seem to swing between asserting that everything happened in one day, after which Jesus withdrew from them permanently, and assuming a longer period of some forty days, after which Jesus took formal leave of his faithful disciples and ascended into the
heavens. Either there was something about these experiences that left the minds of the recipients clouded as to time and circumstance or the experiences themselves were of such a timeless nature that it seemed afterward impossible to insert them into a normal, consecutive chronology.

The courage that the disciples would eventually display came to them, they believed, from “the Spirit,” their
reception of which was, like that of Jesus’s resurrection, an experience unlike any other. In John’s Gospel, the risen Jesus breathes on them and says: “Receive the
holy Spirit.” In Luke, he merely tells them in his final instruction to “remain in the city till you are clothed with power from on high.” Then, in the
Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke to extend the story of his gospel into that of the early Church, the Spirit is
described as descending on the disciples ten days after Jesus’s
ascension, in a dramatic theophany replete with Old Testament wind and fire. “When the
Day of Pentecost came,” the Twelve, their number again complete by the appointment of
Matthias to replace the lost
Judas, were gathered together with Jesus’s family and some unnamed male and female disciples (possibly one hundred twenty in all, probably fewer), in a house in Jerusalem,

They tumbled out into the street, where an immense crowd of foreign pilgrims had collected, drawn by the strange noises emanating from the house. According to Luke, the disciples, speaking in different
languages, were able to make themselves understood to the bystanders “each in his own tongue.” But not everyone was impressed. The disciples, windblown, seized by the Spirit, and no doubt traumatized once more, presented an excited and disheveled spectacle to the nosy pilgrims. Some scoffed: “They’ve been slurping up the May wine, that’s all!”

Peter, he of the large shoulders and lungs, needed no megaphone but stepped forward and addressed the pilgrims in his deep voice:

Peter goes on to give a sermon latticed with very Jewish reasoning, declaring that Jesus, risen—“to which we are all witnesses”—and now “raised to the heights by God’s right hand, has received from the Father the holy Spirit, who was promised, and what you see and hear is the outpouring of that Spirit.”

Where did Peter, the cowering, semiliterate fisherman, get up the nerve to address this cosmopolitan crowd in such a confident fashion? Luke would have us understand that it is the outpouring of the Spirit on Peter that has made all the difference. Repeatedly in the text of Acts, the Spirit surges through assemblies and individuals, giving them the courage to do things that would ordinarily be impossible for them. Jesus, risen, has returned to his Father, as he told his disciples he must, but he has not left them orphans. He has sent them the Father’s Spirit, which is also his Spirit. “Indeed,” cries Peter, “the whole House of Israel can be certain that the Lord [of the Universe] and Messiah [promised through the prophets] whom God has made is this Jesus whom you crucified.” Jesus, the obedient
Adam (and, therefore, perfect human being), has been raised to “God’s right hand,” which means that God has given him permanent Lordship over the cosmos. In this way, mortal Time has been able to intersect with
Eternity—so the
Age of the Spirit, prophesied by Joel, is now under way.

It has always been a bit difficult to get a grasp on who or what this Spirit is. The Greek
New Testament’s word for spirit,
pneuma
, has precisely the same root meaning as the Hebrew
word,
ruach:
breath or wind. In the prophecy of
Joel, as throughout the Hebrew Bible,
the
Spirit is God’s Spirit, which, like a mother’s breath on her newborn, “broods over the waters” at the Creation and, like wind, which cannot be controlled and is invisible except in its effects, “blows where it will.” But the
Feast of Weeks, which was called in this period the
Feast of the Assembly because it called the diaspora Jews back to Jerusalem, was a celebration of the Covenant between God and the Jews; and Jesus’s Twelve now confront the
Twelve Tribes of Israel, symbolically assembled in the street, to announce the fulfillment of the Covenant in the very event of Jesus’s exaltation and sending of
his
Spirit upon the new Assembly, the Church.

What are the effects of this Spirit? What did the disciples, imbued with new courage, actually succeed in doing?

According to Luke, their lively and convincing preaching of the risen Jesus brought many into their ranks. By the end of the day on which Peter preached his maiden sermon, “three thousand were added to their number.” As with Jesus, it is not so much the words as the deeds of the disciples that draw fresh adherents. Peter and John, on their way into the Temple for evening sacrifice, pass a man in his forties, “crippled from birth,” who has been begging at the gate for many years. The scene, as described by Luke, starts off with all the elements of the typical nonencounter between beggars and their prospective donors. The cripple puts out his hand in the usual automatic gesture, expecting Peter and John either to pass him by or, with carefully averted gaze, to drop a small coin into his hand. They do neither, but stop completely and insist that the man “look at” them, which he does, amazed and now hoping for a considerable gift.