Read Jesus Online

Authors: James Martin

Jesus (2 page)

BOOK: Jesus
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“Fully human and fully divine” means that Jesus of Nazareth wasn't just a great guy, an inspiring teacher, and a holy man. Moreover, the charismatic carpenter wasn't merely a clever storyteller, a compassionate healer, or a courageous prophet.

In response to Jesus's question “Who do you say that I am?” Peter finally answers, “You are the Messiah.” But Jesus is divine—far more than Peter could comprehend even while identifying him as the Messiah.

Jesus performed astonishing deeds, which the Gospel writers call either “works of power” or “signs.” Today we call them miracles—healing the sick, calming storms, raising people from the dead. Time and again the Gospels report that Jesus's followers, no matter how long they have been with him, are “amazed” and “astonished” by what he does. “We have never seen anything like this!” says the crowd after Jesus heals a paralyzed man in Mark's Gospel.
5
After he stills a storm on the Sea of Galilee, Matthew writes, “They were amazed, saying, ‘What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?'”
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Even his
detractors
take note of his miracles, as when they castigate him for healing a man on the Sabbath.
7
The miracles are an essential part of the story of Jesus, as are other signs of his divinity. So is the Resurrection.

If Jesus's humanity is a stumbling block for many, his divinity is even more so. For a rational, modern mind, talk of the supernatural can be disturbing—an embarrassment. Many contemporary men and women admire Jesus, but stop short of believing him to be divine. Despite the proportion of the Gospels that focuses on his “works of power,” many want to confine his identity to that of a wise teacher.

Thomas Jefferson went so far as to create his own Gospel by focusing on Jesus's ethical teachings and (literally) scissoring out the miracles and other indications of his divinity. Jefferson preferred his own version of Jesus, not the one he found in the Gospels. Like many of us, he felt uncomfortable with certain parts of the man's life. He wanted a Jesus who didn't threaten or discomfort, a Jesus he could tame. After studying Jefferson's edited version of the New Testament, the New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders concluded that the Sage of Monticello created a Jesus who was, in the end, “very much like Jefferson.”
8

But humanity and divinity are both part of Jesus's story. Omit one or the other, scissor out the uncomfortable parts, and it's not Jesus we're talking about any longer. It's our own creation.

T
HE TRADITIONAL BELIEF ABOUT
Jesus's simultaneous humanity and divinity may raise as many questions as it answers. “Fully human and fully divine” is, to use a loaded word, a mystery. Something not to be solved, but to be pondered.

This book will explore that question, but it will not set forth any new theological propositions. For one thing, I believe in the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus Christ. For another, I'm not a theology professor. If you want a lengthy theological discussion, for example, about how the Son is “consubstantial” or “one in being” with God the Father or how to begin to understand the Trinity, there are many books that can handle those topics much better than I can. I'll point you to some of them as we progress through these chapters.

Neither is this book a Bible commentary, a scholarly work providing a detailed analysis of each verse of the Bible, in this case the Gospels. Bible commentaries concentrate on the historical, political, and sociological context behind the books of the Bible, including authorship, date, and place; the way that the texts were edited; the meaning of the original Hebrew or Greek words; the likely implications of the texts to the readers of the time; the religious underpinnings of the texts; parallels between the verse in question and other parts of the Bible; and the theological interpretations of the text throughout history. Throughout this book, I'll draw on commentaries written by the best scholars. But this is not a reference manual.

So what
is
this book?

It is a look at Jesus, as he appears in the Gospels, through the lens of my education, experience, prayer, and most recently a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And through the lens of faith.

Much of my understanding of Jesus comes from studies, both formal and informal. Like any Catholic priest, I studied theology for several years in graduate school. During that period, my classmates and I spent a great deal of time poring over the New Testament. Through careful study of the narrative, often a line-by-line and word-for-word analysis of the texts, we tried to plumb the meaning of Jesus's words and deeds.

But even before theology studies, I studied the New Testament. A few years earlier, during my philosophy studies as a Jesuit, I even learned some Greek in order to read the Gospel texts in their original language. In fact, learning New Testament Greek was the most satisfying educational experience of my life. One spring afternoon, the professor called on me to translate the first lines of John's Gospel, and when I read aloud, “In . . . the . . . beginning . . . was . . . the Word,” I thought my heart would burst with elation.

Knowing a little Greek helps you notice things that even the best translations miss. It's one thing to read an English translation of the Gospels that says that when Jesus saw a sick person he was “moved with compassion.” It's another to read the Greek
splagchnizomai
, which means that Jesus was moved in his inmost parts—literally, in his bowels. In other words, Jesus felt compassion
in his guts.
I'll use some Greek whenever it can help us better understand what the Gospel writers may have meant by a particular word or phrase.

Besides academic courses, I've also done a good deal of informal study about Jesus. Since entering the Jesuits I've become an admirer of books on what is called the “historical Jesus.” In historical Jesus studies, scholars try to explain as much as we can know about the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. Books and articles about the historical Jesus focus on topics like religious customs in first-century Jewish culture in Palestine, the socioeconomic realities of living under Roman rule, and the ways that a carpenter would sustain his family in a small village in Galilee.

Such research helps us better understand Jesus within the context of his time. One quick example: In one of his parables Jesus spins the compelling tale of a steward who is given care of his master's “talents.”
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If you know that a “talent” was a huge sum of money, equivalent to fifteen years of wages for a day laborer, you'll have a better understanding of Jesus's reason for using that term in his story. You'll understand the parable—and therefore Jesus—better.

Historical Jesus scholars use every tool available—our understanding of first-century cultures, our knowledge of the local languages, even archaeological finds in the region—to understand his life and times. Such studies are closely aligned with what is called a “Christology from below,” an attempt to understand Jesus by beginning with his humanity. The starting point is Jesus as a human being, the “Jesus of history.”

But I've read just as many books and articles about Jesus that focus less on the details of his time on earth and more about his place in the Christian faith. These writings consider topics such as the Resurrection, how Christ “saves” us, and the nature of his relationship to the Father and the Holy Spirit. They focus on the “Christ of faith” and begin with the divinity of Jesus Christ. This is called a “Christology from above.” Here the starting point is Jesus as the Son of God.

The difference between these two approaches can be shown with a brief example, which we will revisit in more detail later: the dramatic story of the raising of Lazarus. Midway through the Gospel of John, the brother of Jesus's friends Mary and Martha dies in the town of Bethany, just outside Jerusalem. Jesus hears the news, waits two days, meets with the two sisters, and finally visits the man's grave. Jesus asks for the stone to be rolled away and calls out, “Lazarus, come out!” And the dead man emerges from the tomb.
10

The historical Jesus scholar, doing theology “from below,” might ask questions like: What were Jewish burial practices at the time? Is there a religious significance to the two-day period? Did any customs prevent Jesus from going immediately to the tomb? What was the role of women in Jewish burial rites? Did any Jewish traditions of the time incorporate the idea of resurrection? Answers to these questions help us to understand the story more fully, and they shed light on what Jesus said and did in Bethany on that day.

Someone starting from the vantage point of the Christ of faith, and doing a theology “from above,” might pose slightly different questions: What does the raising of Lazarus tell us about how divine power is at work in Jesus? How do Jesus's actions at the tomb underline his words? How does the idea of Jesus as “life” show itself in this story? In what ways does the raising of Lazarus foreshadow Jesus's own resurrection? And what does the story of Lazarus say about our response to God's voice in our lives today?

Both sets of questions are important, and if we lose sight of either perspective, we risk turning Jesus into either God pretending to be a man or a man pretending to be God. The two approaches are complementary, not contradictory. To fully meet Jesus Christ, believers need both to understand the Jesus of history, the man who walked the earth,
and
to encounter the Christ of faith, the one who rose from the dead. Both approaches seek to answer the question that the disciples grappled with on their way to Caesarea Philippi: Who is Jesus? Both approaches are essential, and both will be used in this book, though the emphasis may shift depending on the story.

Moreover, Jesus is always fully human and fully divine. That is, Jesus is not human during one event and divine in another, no matter how it might seem in any particular episode of his life. He is divine when he is sawing a plank of wood, and he is human when he is raising Lazarus from the dead. In our reading of various Gospel passages we may feel we are seeing his humanity more in some, his divinity more in others. And in this book, some chapters highlight parts of Jesus's life that readers may associate with his human nature (for example, his work as a carpenter); others focus on events some may associate with his divine nature (his healing a paralyzed man). But even speaking in those terms is misleading, for Jesus is always human and divine, whether he is building a table or healing the sick. His two natures are inseparable, united in one person at all times.

There are also questions about the fully human, fully divine person that we cannot answer. What went on inside Jesus's mind? How does his humanity “cooperate” (to use a dull word) with his divinity and vice versa? To what extent was the human person conscious of his divinity? These questions, like so much about Jesus, must remain a mystery.

But although Jesus's identity as the fully human Son of God remains a mystery, it is a beautiful mystery, the most beautiful one I know, and well worth pondering.

B
EYOND ACADEMIC STUDIES
, I have come to know Jesus in three other ways: prayer, experience, and pilgrimage.

Twenty-five years ago, I entered the Society of Jesus, the Roman Catholic religious order better known as the Jesuits. Shortly after I entered the Jesuit novitiate (the first stage of training), I was introduced to a marvelous way of praying popularized by St. Ignatius Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuits. This method of prayer goes by many names: Ignatian contemplation, imaginative prayer, and composition of place.

Ignatian contemplation encourages you to place yourself imaginatively in a scene from the Bible. For example, if you're praying about Jesus and his disciples caught in a boat during a storm on the Sea of Galilee, you would try to imagine yourself on board with the disciples, and ask yourself several questions as a way of trying to place yourself in the scene.

You might ask:
What do you see?
How many disciples are in the boat? What is the expression on their faces? How rough is the sea?
What do you hear?
The howling wind? The fishing tackle shifting about in the boat?
What do you smell?
You're in a fishing boat, so you might smell residues from the day's catch.
What do you feel?
Homespun clothes were probably heavy when soaked by storm-driven water.
And what do you taste?
Maybe the spray on your lips. With such imaginative techniques you let the Gospel passage play out in your mind's eye, and then you notice your reactions.

Ignatian contemplation doesn't require any special spiritual talents. Nor does it require you to believe that every single detail of the narrative is accurate. (As we will see, some Gospel accounts of the same events disagree.) It merely asks you to enter into Bible stories imaginatively and to accept that God can work through your imagination to help you see things in fresh ways. Jesus himself asked people to use their imaginations when he offered them his parables. When someone asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded not with a definition, but with the story of the Good Samaritan, in effect saying to his listeners, “Imagine something like this happening.”

Some parts of Jesus's life easily lend themselves to Ignatian contemplation—the vivid stories of his healing the sick almost cry out for this kind of prayer. Another example is the period of Jesus's life in Nazareth between the ages of twelve and thirty. Because only a single line is written about that long stretch of time, those years are called his “Hidden Life.”
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It's important to ponder what his daily life might have been like, and here the results of historical Jesus scholarship can fill in some of the gaps and help us to imagine his life in first-century Nazareth.

Parts of this book, then, came from my prayer; and in preparation for writing I reread my spiritual journals. But here's an important point: When discussing the life of Jesus, I'll be clear about what comes from the Gospels, the Christian tradition, and historical research—and what comes from scholarly speculation and my own personal prayer. I'll be clear about what is speculative and what is not.

BOOK: Jesus
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