Jesus (17 page)

All of our lives are important, even the parts of our past that we have ignored, downplayed, or forgotten. If we open the door to our past, we will discover God there, accompanying us in both happy and sad moments.

Jesus of Nazareth is not simply the man who preaches and performs miracles. Jesus is not a person who, after his baptism, forgets his old life to start anew. Like all of us, he is more than that. He is the boy who played with his friends in Nazareth, and maybe even made human pyramids with them, laughing all the while. He is the adolescent who asked questions and wondered where his life would lead. He is the adult who worked as a
tektōn
for many years in his hometown.

We usually think of Jesus as the preacher and healer. But that is only part of his life. Before his visit to the Jordan River, he was a person with a graced history, whose details may always remain sketchy to us, but that nonetheless remain a part of him.

By contrast, the people of Nazareth saw Jesus only as the boy, the adolescent, the
tektōn.
They were unwilling to see him in any other way. We will soon see how misguided that was.

T
HE
B
APTISM OF
J
ESUS

Matthew 3:13–17

(See also Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–22; John 1:29–34)

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

C
HAPTER
6

Rejection

“Is not this the carpenter?”

“L
ISTEN TO THIS
,” I said to George as we were driving to Nazareth. I had just read a surprising comment in Murphy-O'Connor's by now indispensable guide to the Holy Land: “Slender evidence suggests that a Judaeo-Christian community survived in Nazareth during the C2 and C3
AD
.” And a fourth-century pilgrim reported few visitors. That seemed bizarre. One would expect Jesus's hometown to have been the scene of a
flourishing
Christian community in the second and third centuries, given the town's significance.

That may explain the modest archaeological site we found a few feet away from the Basilica of the Annunciation. The excavation's main features were a few traces of the foundations of houses dating from the first century. Perhaps no one in the second and third centuries bothered to preserve evidence of the village from Jesus's day, and few in the fourth century considered those remains important enough to warrant a visit. Or perhaps the small site reflects the size of the village or, more simply, the impermanence of the poorly constructed buildings.

Among the ruins in Nazareth may be the remnants of a first-century synagogue, the site of one of the most important events in Jesus's life and one of my favorite Gospel passages. After Jesus's time in the desert, Luke reports that he returned to Nazareth and preached in the town's synagogue. What he says was so offensive to the people that they expelled him from his hometown, but not before some of them tried to kill him.

But if any traces of the synagogue remain from that time, they have not been uncovered. The earliest evidence for a synagogue dates from later, around the second or third century. Or perhaps the remains lie underneath today's Synagogue Church in Nazareth, built on a spot venerated since the sixth century, near the Basilica of the Annunciation.

While it's not surprising that the ruins have not been located, I was surprised to read this conclusion in
Excavating Jesus
by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed:

Unlikely? How could a Jewish town, even a small one, not have a synagogue?

After some inconclusive research, I decided to call Professor Reed himself in his California office. The expert in first-century archaeology was friendly and helpful, and his answer made sense. “A Jewish village of that size at that time,” he told me, “would not have had a synagogue building.” Reed's conclusions were based on excavations of towns of similar size in the region. “The very few synagogue buildings at the time were located in towns five or ten times larger than Nazareth.”

Then where would people in Nazareth have gathered? “Outdoors!” he said immediately. “Perhaps they congregated in an open space in the village, or in a courtyard owned by someone in the village who was wealthy enough to build a house with a courtyard.” Reed envisions this Gospel narrative along the lines of the Sermon on the Mount, with Jesus preaching in the open air.

Wherever the location, Luke reports that Jesus was ejected from Nazareth, his hometown for roughly thirty years, for what he said.

I
T
'
S EASY TO THINK
of Jesus as being admired—at least up to his Passion, when he is rejected by almost everyone. And overall this was true. Jesus was sought after, popular, as in the original Latin
popularis
—belonging to, or accepted by, the people. When considering Jesus's enormous appeal, we might recall the disciples who immediately abandoned their old lives to follow him, the grateful men and women he had cured of illnesses, the delighted parents of healed children, the forgiven sinners turned into followers, and the great crowds who followed him from town to town, who hung on his every word—and on his person too. Frequently people simply wanted to
touch
Jesus.

Consequently, Jesus, frequently beset by crowds, often sought to “withdraw.” “He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there,” says Mark's Gospel. Matthew also mentions his frequent desire to escape from the crowds, and even the disciples, in order to pray. Following the death of John the Baptist, he “withdrew . . . to a deserted place by himself.” After the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, Matthew tells us that Jesus suspected the crowds wanted to make him king, so he “went up the mountain by himself to pray.” The Gospel of John says after that same miracle, “he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” Luke's Gospel frequently emphasizes Jesus's desire to pray. At one point, beset by “many crowds” seeking to hear him and be healed, Luke tells us, “But he would withdraw to deserted places and pray.”
²
This must have happened time after time. Although these passages are often deployed by preachers and spiritual writers to illustrate Jesus's love of prayer, they also reveal his popularity.

During our pilgrimage, this facet of Jesus's public life was made clearer after seeing the close confines in which he worked. His base of ministry was the small town of Capernaum, on the northern end of the Sea of Galilee. In and around Capernaum, Jesus performed many miracles, among them the exorcism of a possessed man in the synagogue and the feeding of the multitudes. Just outside the town today, on a sidewalk along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, sits the
Petra Haemorroissae
, the “Hemorrhage Stone,” a waist-high granite monument that commemorates Jesus's healing of a woman with a hemorrhage, a story that appears in all three Synoptic Gospels.
³
On his way to a synagogue official's house, Jesus is stopped by a woman “who had been suffering from hemorrhages.” All she wants is to touch “the fringe of his cloak.” She does so, and she is healed instantly.

This story is often taken as a representation of the variety of individuals healed by Jesus (the daughter of a synagogue official and a desperate woman) and of Jesus's great power (the woman needs only to touch his clothing). But the story also shows his astonishing magnetism. He is on his way to one healing when someone clamors for
another
one. It reminds me of the scene in the film
Jesus Christ Superstar
where crowds of people desperately stretch out their hands and sing, “Touch me, touch me, Jesus!”

Near Capernaum, in the rocky hills overlooking the sea, is the Eremos Cave (after the Greek word for “hermit”). In a rough opening in the hillside, where there is barely enough room for a person to stretch out, tradition says that Jesus took refuge from his popularity.

But Jesus wasn't always popular. Immediately after his time in the desert, he returns to Nazareth. And this story of unpopularity speaks to me in a special way.

W
ITH DECEPTIVE CALM
, L
UKE
begins the story of Jesus's return to Nazareth. After his stay in the desert he goes back to Galilee “filled with the power of the Spirit.” News of him (
phēmē
, “fame”) spreads throughout the surrounding territory, and he begins teaching in the synagogues in Galilee, where he was praised by everyone. (For our purposes, let's assume that there was some sort of gathering space—either indoors or outdoors—which I'll call a synagogue. The word means, after all, “an assembly.”)

Then he returns to Nazareth, “where he had been brought up.” One day he goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, “as was his custom.” Luke portrays Jesus as an observant Jew, a pious believer who frequents the synagogue. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

His presence in the gathering would have been quite ordinary. By age thirty Jesus must have been well known in the small town as not only a pious man, but also a reliable tradesman, perhaps like his father Joseph. When they saw Jesus stand up in the gathering on the Sabbath, some of those in attendance in Nazareth may have thought,
There is my friend Jesus. I wonder what he'll say. He always has something interesting to say about Scripture.
Or,
I wonder where Jesus has been for the last few weeks. Someone said something about the desert. He's probably thinking about joining the Baptist—he's always been devout.
Or,
There is Mary and Joseph's son. I remember him when he was a little boy, and even before, when there was all that trouble over his birth.
Or perhaps,
There's my carpenter. I haven't seen him for a few weeks. I wonder when he's going to start that job!
(Remember that in the Gospels people in the area refer to Jesus more frequently as “the carpenter” than they do “the rabbi.”)

The carpenter follows the standard practice of the day for Jewish men: he stands up to read a passage from Scripture and then sits to comment on it. At that time the Sabbath services included a reading from the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and then from the Prophets. The
chazzan
, or attendant, in the synagogue would have passed Jesus the scroll. Then again, Crossan and Reed in
Excavating Jesus
wonder if Nazareth would have been wealthy enough to afford scrolls. Perhaps, then, we can assume that Jesus read from a piece of text before him or recited it from memory. But again, nothing out of the ordinary.

Jesus reads aloud a passage from the Book of Isaiah that might have been well known to the people in his hometown as a prophecy of the coming Messiah, though this was a somewhat ambiguous term in Jesus's day. (In general, the Messiah was the one sent by God to usher in a new era of God's powerful rule.) Talk of the Messiah was in the air. Jesus reads these words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”
⁴

Then Jesus rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant, and sits down. “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him,” says Luke. Why? Were they simply waiting for him to comment on this passage or anticipating something especially inspiring? Perhaps they had heard of Jesus's reputation as a kind of holy man. Their later reaction, however, shows that they weren't expecting what he would say at all.

What he says is extraordinary: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, “I am the fulfillment of the Scripture you just heard.” “Today” is an important word for Luke. The breaking into human history of the reign of God is not happening in some far-off time, or in some distant land, but right now, and as Jesus is saying, not in some distant land, but before your very eyes. Today and here.

Not all first-century Jews believed in the coming of the “messianic age,” when God would usher in an era of peace. But this belief and hope were in the air. Among those who did believe, there was general agreement that the age would arrive through an individual: the Messiah (
Mashiach
in Hebrew, “the anointed one”; in Greek, the
Christos
). And the selection that Jesus read, describing God's promises to his people—the nations will cease warring, the sick will be healed, captives will be freed—was, as Amy-Jill Levine notes, associated with the messianic age.
⁵

All this is associated with the “kingdom of God” or the “reign of God,” to which most New Testament scholars point as the crux of Jesus's teaching.
⁶
This sometimes surprises people who assume that his central message was loving your enemies or offering forgiveness or helping the poor. But though all of those are central to his message, they are not
the
central message: the reign of God was.

I
RONICALLY, TWO THOUSAND YEARS
after Jesus introduced this message, scholars are still unclear about precisely what he meant. For one thing, the phrase more or less originated with Jesus. It appears in very few places in the Old Testament. For another, Jesus seems to have described the reign of God in some places as a future event, in others as already present.
⁷