Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. (12 page)

One reason Mary listened so intently was that the religion he outlined was quite different from Mosaic Judaism. Women were put right at the center of it alongside men, sharing equally in its duties and consolations. His mother, Mary, was an indispensable part of his Incarnation—his mission would have been impossible without her. The Holy Family to which he and she and his foster father Joseph belonged was, to him, the ideal image of the unit of society. To protect the family, he changed Mosaic law in one important particular: he placed marriage on an altogether higher plane of sanctity and made it indissoluble (Mt 19 : 5-6). A married couple were “one flesh”: “What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder.” Jesus’s object in this unqualified condemnation of divorce was not merely to strengthen marriage but to protect women. Their inferior legal position in the ancient Near East was enhanced immeasurably by the ease with which men—but men only—could get a divorce. This applied everywhere in varying degrees. The penal code of Babylon laid down: “If a husband say unto his wife, Thou art not my wife, he shall pay half a mina and be free. But if a woman repudiate her husband, she shall be drowned in the river.” Judaic law was less oppressive, but the school of Hillel declared it a sufficient ground for divorce if the wife had spoiled her husband’s dinner. Other systems in Greece, Persia, and Rome, for instance, were not essentially different in treating the woman as inferior and a species of property. Even today, easy divorce bears harder on the wife than on the husband, and in upholding marriage, Jesus was the first teacher in world history to show his anxiety to put women on an equal footing with men.

It is true that Jesus selected only men for his apostolate. That was inevitable in the social conditions of the time, for his apostles were expected to go on independent missions, often alone, and to direct the disciples as part of the organization Jesus set up to spread his Gospel. Moreover, Jesus needed men to protect him from the hysteria of crowds and the physical threats of his enemies—not that they proved effective when it came to the end. It is one of the lessons of the life of Jesus that women often show more physical courage than men. He also expected his apostles to devote themselves full-time to his service. As Luke says, “they forsook all and followed him” (5:11). Peter states emphatically, “Lo, we have left all and have followed thee” (Mk 10:28). Virtually all women were not in a position to do this, at least formally, though it is clear some women contrived to manage it in practice. Jesus did not make a particular virtue of celibacy, though there is a passage in Matthew in which, contrary to traditional Jewish teaching, he showed it was lawful (19:10-12). He indicated it was a special calling: “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” What Jesus did stress, time and again, was that devotion to God came before any family tie—father, mother, brother, sister. This applied equally to men and women. The notion of celibate monks or nuns living in communities is not incompatible with anything Jesus says in the Gospel. Nor is an all-male priesthood. But, equally, there is nothing in Jesus’s teaching which rules out women priests.

What Jesus taught, essentially, is that friendship with God meant participation in a heavenly family which superseded all human ties, while not necessarily excluding them. Luke records a woman shouting out to Jesus from the crowd, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.” Jesus agreed with her, but pointed to the higher value: “Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (11 : 27-29). There is an important passage in Matthew in which Jesus indicated that for the purpose of his mission on earth he was creating an apostolic family which necessarily had first place in his attention and affection. While he was teaching, his entourage told him that his mother and other members of his family, probably cousins, were waiting to speak to him. He answered, characteristically, with a question: “Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?” He answered it himself by a gesture toward his disciples: “Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother” (12:46-50). The most common word Jesus applies to God is “Father” and to himself is “Son.” Human beings were first, and primarily, “children of God.” That was the eternal relationship, outside time. Marriage, progeny, and human love within the family were all-important in worldly terms. Still, they were of this world: it was membership in God’s family which mattered in the end.

In Jesus’s family on earth, which he carefully composed and instructed, women were as numerous, though not perhaps as prominent, as men. His mother and other female members of her family were often present, and she was with him at the end, by the cross. Luke refers to a group of fallen women, whom Jesus had cured of their “devils”—that is, their licentiousness—and recruited for his entourage (8:2). The most important of them was Mary Magdalene, and Luke emphasizes the sinfulness of her former life by saying “out of whom went seven devils.” Then there were Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. But Luke also mentions a group of well-to-do women, which included Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’s steward Chuza, and Susanna. These are the only two he names, but he says there were “many others.” They “ministered unto him of their substance” (8 : 3). Jesus’s traveling mission needed financial support as well as servicing, and this was primarily supplied by women. The first echelon, the apostles, were all men. But the second group, responsible for housing and meals and traveling expenses, were women, usually of ample means. Jesus had the ability, partly because of his character, partly through the appeal of his teaching, to attract intelligent, educated, cultured, and sensitive women, who found in his words a kind of religion infinitely more moving and satisfying than anything they could get in the synagogue or Temple. This appeal to affluent women was not confined to Jewish or Samaritan circles. The wife of Pilate, the governor of Judaea, was also fascinated with Jesus. She could not join his entourage, of course, but she had dreams about him and tried to persuade her husband to save him: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him” (Mt 27 : 19). The other affluent ladies were also prevented by their situation from going on missionary work, but they provided the means to sustain it and came to help when Jesus and his disciples were within range of their homes. The widows could work with him full-time. These women foreshadowed the Roman ladies who, in the early days of Christianity, flocked to the catacombs and the first churches and were, in great part, responsible for its spread and success. Jesus’s teaching was such that a woman could identify herself with it absolutely, and the higher her rank and the more independent minded she was, the stronger the bonds with the Master. Prostitutes, whose profession itself was a form of emancipation, were also violently attracted the moment they forsook their degrading way of life.

That Jesus loved the society of women, felt at home with them, and knew how to talk to and respond to them is clear from the Gospel. But he also loved children. It was one of his most marked and powerful characteristics. He saw in children uncorrupted innocence before the material attractions of the sinful world distorted the instinct of purity and love. He liked children of all ages. Young mothers sensed his love of babies and handed their own to him to caress. There is a striking passage in Mark which illustrates Jesus’s ability to be comfortable with the very young, which makes him unique (so far as I know) in the literature of the ancient world: “[T]hey brought young children to him, that he should touch them.” The disciples, more typical of their times, did not like this and rebuked the mothers. “But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” He often compared children with the sinless and now, inspired by this attempt to deny him their company, summed up his feelings: “Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” To emphasize his point, he “took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them” (10:13-16). Matthew 19 : 13-14 recounts the same incident, adding, “[O]f such is the kingdom of heaven.”

The theme that a certain childish innocence was required even of grown men and women to fit souls for salvation was one which recurred frequently in Jesus’s teaching. It was linked to his image of being “born again” and to his love of humility. But Jesus loved the child not just as an image but as a reality. He was fascinated by every aspect of the way in which a baby comes into the world and then grows and becomes a delightful child. He brought them into his teaching constantly. He was very observant. He noted how the delight of a mother in her baby obliterated the pains of childbirth (Jn 16:21), how the father cuddled his child in bed (Lk 11 : 7), and how parents listened to what children said and granted their requests, but only when unharmful (Mt 7 : 9; Lk 11 : 11-13). The impulses of children at play interested him (Mt 11 : 16) and so did their sorrows (Mt 18:25). He regarded as the supreme test of loyalty the willingness of a disciple to leave his children for his, and God’s, sake (Lk 14:26, 18:29; Mt 19:29). For Jesus, the love of husband and wife for each other and their shared love of their children are inextricably intermingled, and part of the intimate way in which human love can imitate and foreshadow the love which is the sustaining principle of God’s Kingdom.

Unwilling as Jesus was to perform miracles for show, he invariably acted when begged by a parent to heal a sick child. It is notable how large a proportion of his cures benefited children. The little child of the nobleman at Capernaum (Jn 4 : 49); the distressed boy (Mt 17 : 18), “the only child of his father,” whom Jesus healed while descending from the mountain; Jairus’s “little daughter” (Mk 5:23), whom Jesus raised from death; the “daughter” of the Canaanite woman (Mk 7 : 30); and the only son of the widow of Nain (Lk 7:11-18) are only some of the cases where Jesus hastened to the aid of a sorrowing parent. Life was cheap in first-century Palestine. Children died all around him of neglect and poverty as well as disease. But when a particular case of a suffering child was placed before him, he always acted. He preached not only “Feed my sheep” but also, markedly, “Feed my lambs.”

Moreover, Jesus was always prepared to remind people, even his instructed followers, that children were not to be ignored. In some ways they were models. When his disciples held their unseemly dispute as to which of them was the greatest, an incident recorded in all three synoptics (Mt 18 : 1-4; Mk 9:33-37; Lk 9:46-48), Jesus called to him a child and placed it in their midst, saying, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” It was always Jesus’s teaching, and his profound belief, that the study of children had much to tell. Matthew records the delight he felt when, in his last days on earth, children in the Temple greeted him with hosannas, and the way in which he rebuked the officials who protested against the salutation as unseemly: “Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?” (21:16). It is also remarkable that Jesus reserved his fiercest warnings for those who ill-treated children or led them into wickedness. Matthew quotes him as saying, “Take heed that ye despise not one of my little ones” (18:10), and “[W]hoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned to the depth of the sea” (18:6).

If women and children had special plans in Jesus’s heart and his notions of innocence and virtue, what of the aged? Almost inevitably, many of his healings—only a handful are specifically described—benefited old people. The hopeless cripple who had hung about the pool of Bethesda for nearly forty years was obviously old. So was the woman with “an issue of blood,” who had for many years spent all her money on doctors without finding a cure. Jesus noticed virtuous old people, like the widow who put her two mites into the collection box. But he was careful not to attribute particular merit merely to the aged. Orthodox Judaism already did that, and Jesus was not impressed. The status of “rulers” in the synagogues and at the Temple was based partly on seniority, and age was important at every level of the sacerdotal hierarchy. A specific term, “elder,” paid tribute to age in Judaism. Jesus thought them to be often elders in sin. In an important passage in Matthew, Jesus said that publicans and prostitutes would go to heaven before the elders (21 :31- 32). At the time Jesus was born, saintly old men like Simeon and Zacharias were to be found constantly at the Temple. But by the time Jesus completed his ministry there were no good old men in its precincts. Joseph Caiaphas, the head priest, had been many years in his post and must have been in his late fifties at least. His father-in-law, Annas, formerly the high priest and the power behind the scenes, was even older. Many of the orthodox Jews who listened to Jesus in the hope of catching him out, or to report back any blasphemous sayings, were old; some were technically elders. The establishment against which Jesus so often protested was essentially run by old men. Hence his sayings that to enter God’s Kingdom it was necessary to be “born again” and to become “a new man” were double-edged. Jesus’s use of the child image for the saved and his stress on the blessed being “children of God” were both so frequent and so important in his imagery that there is a distinct impression in the New Testament, taken as a whole, that age had somehow to be annihilated or transformed in the quest for God.

This impression is powerfully reinforced by the Transfiguration, one of the most remarkable events described in the Gospels. A few days before he was transfigured, Jesus had questioned his disciples about what men said of his mission. Peter answered, “Thou art Christ, the son of the living God.” Jesus then made him in effect his deputy and vicar, and pronounced him blessed: “[F]lesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt 16 : 15-20). Six days later he took Peter, with James and John, “up into an high mountain apart, And he was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Mt 17:1-2). Both Mark 9:2-8 and Luke 9:28-36 also record this spectacular irradiation of Jesus’s face and body. All three describe a divine epiphany. Matthew puts it thus: “[A] bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him” (17:5).