jesus at barnes & noble

I just now read this passage of scripture aloud to my daughter Charlotte in which Jesus says, first off, that he has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, not to abolish it.  

“I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that passage,” Charlotte interrupted before I got any further.

“Why’s that?”

“I thought it said Jesus says I didn’t come to break the commandments but to fulfill them. That’s what my professor of my C. S. Lewis class said about that place where the stone table breaks when Aslan dies.”

"Well, it goes on to say that whoever breaks even the least commandment and teaches others to do the same ‘will be called least in the kingdom of heaven’ but that those who do the commands ‘will be called great in the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 5:19 NIV).

“Here’s the part I don’t get, though,” I told her. Jesus finishes up by saying, ‘For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:20).What does he mean by that, do you think?”

“I don’t get whether Jesus thinks the Pharisees and teachers of the Law are in the first group of those who don’t follow all of scripture or those who do.”

We tossed that around a bit, getting nowhere. Are there two groups (lawdoers and lawbreakers, of which the former comprise the righteous) or are three groups (lawdoers, lawbreakers, and the righteous)?

Then my husband Kris joined us and the three of us fought about it a bit. We landed, hesitantly, on there being two groups: the lawdoers and the small lawbreakers, both of which will have a place in the kingdom, apparently. None, however, are righteous. In other words, whether or not you do all the law or just part of it will not determine whether or not you will enter the kingdom but merely your place in the kingdom once you’re there.

Of course, we know what does determine entrance into heaven, but Jesus doesn’t explain that quite yet. Or, only obliquely references it. In some very confusing statements about scripture adherence. I wonder if anyone at all got it.

inside my mother's uterus

Every year I attend the biggest professional conference in my field of creative writing, and, on the first day of the conference last Thursday—didn’t manage to post that day or yesterday, sorry—I attended one of the two scheduled sessions (out of some 500 sessions) on writing as it relates to faith. It was about teaching students who want to write about matters of faith, a big interest of mine since I teach a course called “writing from faith” every fall.

As usual with faith-related sessions at this conference, two of the four panelists prefaced their presentations with the announcement that they themselves are atheists and a third claimed agnosticism (although he did say that the best he could do was hang as tightly as he could onto Jesus, which, I would say, is the best any of us can do).

Anyway, the fourth guy, a believer, led the session, God love him, and gave a really wonderful little talk on the difficulties presented by the language of faith: that it’s hard to talk about the supernatural, that the best we can do is talk about it in terms of the natural world. Thus, just about all the language of faith starts out as metaphors. He used the example of breath, the metaphorical source of our word spirit in the ancient languages of scripture. (Arguably, if life and spirit are synonymous for you, then you  might think of the connection between breath and spirit as literal, not metaphorical, but the guy didn’t get into that.)

After a word's genesis as metaphor, though, it usually stops meaning that way—that is, it loses its link to the original natural world word it was derived from—and starts to just be what we call that thing when we talk about matters of faith. So, spirit mostly isn’t thought of as breath or even breathlike. It has lost its referential nature and becomes, in a crucial sense, meaningless, merely a label.

I totally agree with this assessment. I love to go back to the original meanings of the words to refresh my faith language in my writing, and I recommend doing so as a way to avoid “Christianese,” as I call it, to my students.

Along the way in the guy’s presentation, he mentioned how much he liked the story of Nicodemus—which comes early in John’s biography of Jesus and is thus where I am in scripture in my chronological progress through Jesus’ life—because Nicodemus’s response to Jesus’ explanation that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3 NIV) is so insistent on the real words of Jesus’ metaphor.

“How can someone be born again when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” (John 3:4).

I love this passage too, and for pretty much the same reasons. in discussing it with my students, I like to go even further into referentiality, past even the Bible translators’ Christianese.

“When was the last time you used the word womb not in the context of faith?” I ask them.

When no one raises a hand to give an example of talking to a friend or a gynecologist or a parent or a professor about a womb, we go on to talk about the word they’d actually use in any such conversation: uterus.

“How would your understanding of Nicky’s question be changed, honed, if he asked it that word in English—which is precisely the way he asked it in Greek?”

They titter, consider, discuss. For many, even the word uterus makes them uncomfortable when used in the context of faith—which, I tell them, is good.

“Just as it’s good to be uncomfortable when Jesus says he wants you to eat his body. If that statement makes you squirm, it means you’re really taking in those words. Really hearing them. Really thinking about them.”

taste good; be bright

Context is everything, as they say. The next little clump of mixed metaphors in Jesus' mountainside sermon—“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house” (Matthew 5:14-15 NIV)—seems to resay the salt one and is easier to follow. It also has a built in explanation: “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

Good move, Jesus.

So, so far the sermon goes: Seek me, and I will fulfill your longing. I have made you salt—the most essential of flavorings—and light in a dark world. Your job is to go out and show what it’s like to be filled: to go out and taste good and brighten the darkness.

Note to self on plane flight today and for the next few days among strangers: Taste good; be bright.

nackle

After establishing the States of Blessedness in that early mountainside sermon, Jesus next characterizes us blessed, or happy or fortunate, ones who long for God as the “salt of the earth” and make the first of many demands this long sermon makes of believers: not to lose our saltiness because, if we do, how else will we be made salty again?

“You are the salt of the earth," Jesus tells his listeners. "But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot” (Matthew 5:13 NIV).
 

Forgive my blasphemous critique of Jesus’ rhetoric here, but to me this makes little sense. Bear with me.

First off, it doesn’t work as a metaphor. As I often have to explain to my students, metaphors are made of two parts: the tenor (the thing we’re talking about) and the vehicle (the comparison that is supposed to help us see or understand the tenor better). For an effective metaphor, both sides have to work. Here, the tenor is “you” and the vehicle “salt of the earth.” All is good.

However, if the metaphor develops beyond the simplest x = y comparison, both sides need to keep on working. In the next stage of the metaphor, the salt of the earth becomes salt that has lost its saltiness—an impossibility except hypothetically, because, as far as I know from my extensive experience as a cook and as a frugal saver of even the oldest condiments, the only way salt can lose its flavor is if it stops being salt. The entire substance of salt—which means everything that makes its salty taste—is NaCl. (Which is what, by the way, the weirdos in my family refer to it as, pronouncing it "nackle," as in, "Pass the nackle.")

Anyway, as usual, I read around about the verse and found,  also as usual, all sorts of science-defying rationalizations about the salt of Jesus’ time and region, how it could in fact lose its saltiness, and so on. Sorry. I’m not buying it. Salt is salt. And, indeed, the sheer zeal of biblical experts to say it's not evidences, to me, the insolubility (pardon that pun!) at the core of this metaphor, which is, in effect, saying, “You are salt, but if salt stops being salt, then it won’t be salty anymore and is thus worthless.”

Then I got to thinking about salt. About how, as Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, was saying in an interview on NPR the other day that there are “as many as 40 types of salt that are manipulated, created, sort of reformed and shaped in order to maximize the allure—or what they call in the salt world the flavor burst.” Salt’s shape, in other words, can intensify or reduce its saltiness. That helped a bit, giving me the idea of dissolved salt being useless—in which case, however, it’s not really trample-able. So that was a dead end.

“Um,” I would ask if a student had written this passage of Jesus’ sermon, “what happened to your tenor? If I’m salt, what am I in this hypothetical instance of not being salt anymore? What does that even mean? It’s nonsense at best. At worst, a tautology.”

“That’s just it,” I can imagine that student arguing in the metaphor-maker’s defense, surrounded as I am by the once-saved-always-saved. “It’s an argument for the eternal security of the believer! Jesus was telling those people that believers can’t stop being salt.”

“I never would have gotten there without that explanation” would be my answer. And, as obtuse as Jesus often is, I always struggle to believe he was intentionally setting out to buffalo his listeners and me. Certainly he doesn’t seem to be in this sermon, anyway, in which he clearly sets out to teach the fundamentals of faith.

Trusting Jesus to at least mean to make sense, my next attempt to solve the riddle was to look at alternative translations. Most English translations said about the same thing: if salt loses its saltiness or taste or savor…. (Luther’s early German translation says if salt becomes dumm, as in deaf and dumb, but I don’t have time to research whether dumm had some other use back then or was, God forbid, a mixed metaphor to boot.)

There was one translation that, I thought, sought to make the whole thing work, and that was good old Wycliffe’s of 1382.

“Ye be salt of the earth; that if the salt vanish away, wherein shall it be salted?” he wrote (employing what could be understood as unclear pronoun reference implicit in the passive construction “be salted”). “To nothing it is worth over, but that it be cast out, and be defouled of men.”

If the salt vanishes—by dissolving, for example—in other words, how’s anything going be salted? The “it” might, as Wycliffe suggests, refer to whatever’s being salted, and not to the salt itself.

That’s as far as I have the energy to consider this salt business tonight. Maybe I’ll get enlightenment overnight.

 

for theirs is

I sat down this morning with thinking to select the blessing I’d most like to have out of all those Jesus offers in the Beatitudes.

What would I most like to have? I wondered. Heavenly tenure, comfort, inheritance, or justice for wrongs I have suffered? To be filled with righteousness or to be shown mercy for my unrighteousness? Would I rather see God or to hear God to call me Daughter? So hard to choose.

It occurred to me that Jesus’ message is this: Seek me, and I will fulfill your deepest longing. Or longings, I hope. Because, as I say, I can’t choose.

poor in spirit

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus preached from the mountainside, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3 NIV). Who these poor in spirit are—the first and, by that placement, seemingly most important blesseds in Jesus’ poem that opens his mountainside sermon—has always intrigued me.

It’s such a weird turn of phrase, used nowhere else in Jesus’ teaching. And, however central to the overall message of the Beatitudes its initial placement in the poem may make it seem, none of the many writers who rehashed Jesus’ teachings in the letters and accounts that make up the rest of the New Testament ever repeated this expression. What, exactly, does it mean to be poor in spirit?

Not poor in the usual sense, obviously—although that’s how Luke puts what he remembers  Jesus teaching. “Blessed are you who are poor,” he has Jesus starting off an analogous sermon—this one preached on “a level place” (Luke 6:17) rather than a mountainside—“for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). Luke’s rendering notwithstanding, I don’t think it’s the poor in money or poor in housing or poor in opportunity who are at issue here, although such poverties often plague the poor in spirit. Indeed, for many, it is through the related desperations of socioeconomic poverty—through drug or alcohol addiction, through imprisonment, through messed up relationships—that they eventually find themselves in a state of spiritual impoverishment. Poor in spirit. Poor in—to tap the Greek and Hebrew incarnations of the word spirit—breath. Lacking the breath, that source of life that comes to us all from God, the spirit necessary to keep on living.

On some level, I’ve always felt I knew, intuitively, who the poor in spirit were—perhaps because, not to claim holiness where none is merited, I spent a good part of my adult life spiritually deprived. Having lost my faith as a teenager, I spent the next couple of decades on my own, spiritually speaking. I wanted to believe—I wished I could pray and feel heard as I had as a child and was jealous of those I met who seemed confident of God's existence—but I couldn’t seem to get there, couldn’t convince myself that any of what I had known as a child was true, and thus I perceived myself to have been abandoned by the God I no longer believed in rather than the other way around. I was, in those years, indisputably poor in spirit, and I knew it.

If there was one belief in those years I still carried with me from my childhood faith, though, it was this: Faith itself, if it was real, had to come from God.

This was not something I was ever taught. Indeed, the Church’s and the Bible’s and even Jesus’ own messages about the source of faith often seem to say quite the opposite. People are encouraged to have faith throughout the Bible and in every Christian church, and even Jesus himself complains, again and again, about the miniscule faith of even those who follow him. The belief that faith comes from God came to me, I think, entirely experientially. I never believed in God because I chose to—not as a child and not since. Nor did I believe because I was told to. We never really spoke of matters spiritual in my family, though we were taken to church every Sunday. Even at church, even in the catechism classes of my childhood, I was never commanded or persuaded to believe the good news that God had sent Jesus to us. Or, if I was, I have no memory of it.

Instead, faith just seemed to inhabit me, effortlessly—the way that, later, love for my daughters would. The way genuine thanks does on occasion or deepfelt forgiveness or remorse. Believing was never a choice for me. I just believed. And then I didn’t.

Still, I never perceived the ability to believe as a divine gift until it left me.

Losing my faith was like what I am finding the gradual loss of sight to be like as I grow older, but more sudden, less fixable, more devastating. As with eyesight, I was utterly unappreciative of the gift of faith till I lost it. But by then, I secretly grieved, it was too late. God was gone.

The poor in spirit, I think, are those of us who come to a point of longing, of desperation, for God’s restorative, revitalizing breath—whether as the result of losing track of God, as I did, and misperceiving my inattention as abandonment or as the result of other miseries and poverties, other traumas and terrors.

Once, during one of those many unbelieving years ago when I was teaching English in China, my assigned mentor teacher—unbeknownst to me a Christian—offered to make me a calligraphy as a going away present.

“Find a little line of poetry you like and I will translate and paint it,” he told me.

I couldn’t think of a snippet of poetry small or meaningful enough to suit me, so I borrowed a King James Bible from my Mormon neighbors and leafed through it and immediately, having never really read the Bible before, lighted on two that seemed to speak for me: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither” (Job 1:21) and “Bow down thine ear, O Lord, hear me: for I am poor and needy” (Psalms 86:1).

As a foreigner in China in those days, I was regarded by all I met as amazingly wealthy, and I knew this assessment to be true. Unlike many I met and heard of—not least the famous calligrapher father of my mentor teacher, who was taken from his family and made to suffer unspeakable miseries for having been an intellectual and an artist—I had everything I needed in life. Not just food and money and opportunities but the freedom to enjoy them.

And yet, in the most elemental sense, I was poor. Needier than my mentor teacher, certainly. Indeed, utterly bereft, the very breath of me plundered and lost. And, though it would be years before I fully rejected my lot and let God's breath fill me again, somehow—thank God!—I knew it.

blessed are those who never had children, etc.

I was reading around about the Beatitudes and came across this statement that the Greek word that ends up translated as “Blessed” in virtually all translations is actually more accurately Happy.

I sort of liked that idea, so I looked Blessed up in my exhaustive concordance with the goal of seeing how the same Greek word, μακάριος (makários), was translated in other passages, which is how I generally make up my mind in such matters of translation. Here’s the breakdown of what I discovered: of the 50 uses of μακάριος, 44 were translated in the 1984 NIV as blessed, 4 as good, 1 as fortunate, and 1 as happier. So, I concluded, while “Happy are the…” (or“Fortunate are the …” or even the synonymous “Lucky are the …”) might be a useful way of jerking ourselves out of our usual nonthinking about what the Beatitudes are actually saying, it probably wasn't any more correct.

 

That said, in case you want to be jerked out of your usual nonthinking about the passage, here’s how it might sound with a different word than Blessed:

Fortunate are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Fortunate are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Fortunate are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Fortunate are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Fortunate are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Fortunate are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Fortunate are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Fortunate are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Fortunate are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. 
(Matthew 5:3-12 NIV with the word Blessed changed to Fortunate)

While I was researching μακάριος in my concordance, I got sidetracked into perhaps a better way of reseeing the States of Blessedness. Have a look at all the others that Jesus identifies as μακάριος— that is, as blessed or or happy or fortunate—elsewhere in his teaching:

Blessed are the poor (Luke 6:20).
Blessed are the hungry (Luke 6:21).
Blessed are those who are crying (Luke 6:21).
Blessed are those who never had children (Luke 23:26-31).
Blessed are those who never got to see the One God Sent in person but who nevertheless believe in him (John 20:26-29).
Blessed are those who pay attention to what God tells them to do and then do it (Luke 11:28).
Blessed are those who accept from God the power to recognize him as God (Matthew 16:16-17).
Blessed are those who look for the One God Sent and actually see him, who listen to him and actually hear him (Matthew 13:16 and Luke 10:23).
Blessed are those who aren’t offended by or embarrassed about the One God Sent (Matthew 11:6 and Luke 7:23).
Blessed are those who, as he does, lower themselves to serve others (John 13:12-17).
Blessed are those who love the unloveable (Luke 14:12-14).

To find out why Jesus considered such people fortunate—how, in other words, their current situation rewards them—you’ll have to look up the passages yourselves (which is why I went to the trouble of citing the passages I paraphrased). Have fun!

the states of blessedness

Jesus’ mountain sermon begins with a cheery little poem we call “The Beatitudes,” or “The States of Blessedness,” so called because all but the last of its ten lines begins with “Blessed are” (or with “Blessed be,” depending on whether or not the translation wants that verb to be in indicative or subjunctive mode).

I call it a poem because the repetition of Blessed and the stringent parallel structure of the lines—Blessed be…for…”—make it sound poetic. It also seems to be spoken forth as one would a poem. Before delivering “The States of Blessedness” to the crowds surrounding him, Jesus first climbs a mountain, presumably for better acoustics. Then—in the original Greek as in most early and some contemporary translations—Matthew goes out of his way to draw attention to the speaking itself with reference to Jesus’ mouth as well as three verbal communication verbs: “And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying…” (Matthew 5:2 KJV).

The Beatitudes are a formal proclamation of exactly what Jesus, reading from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue, has already said is the reason God sent him to us in the first place: to preach the good news to the poor and miserable. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he told them, and is promising them now, “to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18). These poor sufferers are the very ones surrounding him, who’ve heard of his miraculous healings and come after him with their own griefs.

And into this suffering and longing, Jesus preaches the good news.

I love Matthew's reference to Jesus’ mouth. He didn’t just teach or speak, that day on the mountainside. He opened his mouth and delivered forth blessing upon blessing, word upon word.

people everywhere

Me: Babe, d’you know what the Decapolis was?

Kris: No.

Me (surprised: Kris knows everything there is to know about history, modern or ancient, but, apparently, not this): I looked it up. It means The Ten Cities and refers to these ten cities in what would now be the Jordan area that amounted to the main Greek and Roman cities in that area in the early Common Era. That means the non-Semitic cities.

Kris: What about it?

Me: Well, it says in Matthew’s gospel that, when Jesus started going around healing, people from not only Galilee and Jerusalem and Judea followed him but also people from the Decapolis. That's Greeks and Romans. Right from the beginning. That's, like, people from far away.

(I went and got my Bible and showed him: “Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him” (Matthew 4:25 NIV).

Kris: Yes, we tend to think Jesus healed people to help them, but actually he did it so that  people everywhere would believe.

Me: But he told a lot of the people he healed not to tell anyone, so he couldn’t have healed them to spread the word.

Kris: No, he healed those ones out of compassion.

Me: Ah.

word for word

I’m just about to start studying the Jesus’ mountain sermon recorded at length in Matthew the way Pericles’ speeches are in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, written five or six hundred years earlier.

Something that has always worried me, from a credibility perspective, about both Jesus’ mountain sermons and Pericles’ speeches is their perfectness. That the writers in each case somehow, without any recording equipment besides their brains—and afterwards, perhaps, pen and papyrus—managed to capture what was said so convincingly word for word.

Without being too there-really-is-scientific-proof-of-a-man-swallowed-up-and-vomited-out-live-by-an-enormous-fish about the matter, though, I have to remind myself that, even absent miracles, such a feat of documentation is possible. Back in the early days of my acquaintance with my husband—then this weird farmer guy, a star of our University of Arkansas MFA program who was looking for a wife—I happened to sneak a glance at the notes he took in class one day and discovered what looked like the script of a play: names of people in our workshop followed by direct quotes of what they had said and how others had responded, seemingly word for word as each person had said it, only clearer and more impressive than I remembered. 

I’m saying here I’m married to a Matthew or a Thucydides.

temple tantrums

Okay, so all four of the accounts of the good news that God sent Jesus are arranged seemingly chronologically with respect to Jesus’ earthly life. It’s true they don’t all start in the same place. Matthew and Luke start with his birth, whereas Mark and John start with his baptism by his cousin John. Nevertheless, all four of the gospels use decidedly sequential language to link the episodes from Jesus' life they recount.

For example, “The next day…,” the gospel of John begins after the introduction of John the baptizer (John 1:29 NIV). Then Jesus enters the story, and a few lines later John writes again, “The next day…” (John 1:35). Often the sequential information is quite specific, as in this instance just a few sentences later: “So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon” (John 1:39). Reading the gospels, I generally have a clear sense of when each event happened with respect to what happened before and after.

That said, although each gospel sounds unambiguously chronological, the same stories told in several accounts often come at crazily different times in Jesus’ last years.

Take Jesus’ famous temple tantrum.

(Sorry. Just can’t resist. It’s either that pun or else an analogy to a similar—though admittedly less virtuous—anger episode of my own, which my daughters refer to as my “closet fit” because it took place in their closet. But temple fit just doesn’t sound as good as temple tantrum.)

Anyway, all four gospels recount this event, but whereas John’s telling happens very early on in his account and early on—just after the wine miracle in Cana—in Jesus' three years of preaching and teaching, in the tellings of Matthew, Mark, and Luke the anger episode comes very close to the end of Jesus’ life.

This really bothers me, I’ve got to say. What bothers me more, though, are the efforts of theologians to smooth my irritation over with tidy explanations, such as that Jesus had more than one temple tantrum. Or that the events are rearranged in John for stylistic or theological reasons and that the chronological references are at best rhetorical and at worst meaningless. I don’t want them tidying God’s story. I want it the way it really is. I want to have to deal with it.

And if this sort of thing happened just this once, it wouldn’t vex me too much—or, anyway, not any more than any other seeming glitch of scripture vexes me. I believe in a holy write that's 100% God-authored but also 100% humanly produced—and thus no more contradictory than Jesus himself. And human-authored texts are rife with contradictions. And errors.

But such chronological misalignments and mismatched tellings don't happen just once. They happen over and over and over again. There are three accounts of the woman who dumps perfume on Jesus’ head and rubs it in with her hair, to give just one example, and each one is different. And again, historians and theologians rush to account for the differences with multiple-story theories and rhetorical arguments. But how could it possibly be that more than one woman ever did that to Jesus?

I take  some comfort in one repeated story: the feeding of the hordes. In one account it’s four thousand, in another five thousand. In one there’s a boy’s lunch of bread and fish, in another there's no boy mentioned. In total, there are six separate accounts of the feeding in the gospels. But what fixes things in my mind is that Matthew and Mark each include both a four thousand and a five thousand story, so they’re themselves asserting, in effect, that there were multiple feedings of the multitudes. And these assertions get at, for me, the crux of what might be going on (apart from a millennia-long game of telephone, in which a story gets passed down through so many mouths that it becomes unintelligible).

Here’s what I think: the same things did keep happening over and over again, just as those theologians and Mark and Matthew themselves say. And just as the same things keep happening over and over again in our own lives.

As I was telling my creative writing students this afternoon, people, in real life, repeat themselves. It’s what defines them as individuals—that they always do this or that. That they routinely make these gestures, say these phrases, throw this sort of party, tell this sort of story.

I like to go to funerals, for example—even funerals of people I barely know or don’t know at all. Something about a funeral makes me feel God’s presence especially clearly. I like to pray-worry about the widows and other loved ones left behind. I like to be part of the community supporting them by my own presence. I like the ritual and pomp of it all. And, at every funeral I go to, I run into the same people—other locals who, like me, attend all the funerals and study the corpses and shake hands with the family members and probably sense throughout God’s hovering presence. We repeat ourselves. Repeat one another.

All this to say I’ve come to accept that Jesus probably had more than one temple tantrum. The same irritating stuff kept happening in those days at church. And he kept on getting fed up with it. And every so often he went in and flipped out and flipped their tables over. (Relax: I'm not going to use the word flipping again.) And the more Jesus does the same thing over and over again, the more real he becomes in my mind, the more believable.

Which is to say, accepting multiple temple fits helps me do God’s work, because isn’t that what Jesus said the work of God was: “to believe in the one he sent” (John 6:29)?

 

why he came

I have heard Jesus called a great doctor. (The great “physician,” actually, but I can’t stand puffed up words like that—like attorney in lieu of lawyer, purchase in lieu of buy, in lieu of instead of instead of). And I’ve heard him called a great teacher. But I’ve never heard Jesus referred to as a great preacher.

Which is odd, seeing as how that’s what he came to do. Or anyway, that’s what he tells Simon and his buddies:

          “Jesus replied, ‘Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.’
          So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons. (Mark 2:38 NIV)

Matthew writes that, after John the baptizer was imprisoned for badmouthing Herod, “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matthew 4:17).

I guess you could argue that such preaching was teaching—that preaching and teaching are six of one, half dozen of the other. But Matthew actually goes out of his way to differentiate the two actions: “After Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in the towns of Galilee” (Matthew 11:1).

He taught (διδάσκω, didaskō) and preached (κηρύσσω, kēryssō). (And also “instructed” his disciples, for which Matthew uses a different verb—διατάσσω, diatassō—which means something more along the lines of giving directions or training.)

So why not call Jesus The Great Preacher?

 

Certainly he was successful at it. “Everyone is looking for you!” Simon and his friends tell him (Mark 1:37), and from then on, when people found out he was in town, “They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them” (Mark 2:2).

Maybe we don’t call Jesus The Great Preacher because the word preacher has so much negative baggage. One preacher preaches one thing, another another. And there are false preachers. And scandals involving preachers.

And when we speak of preachers we mean those who tell us about Jesus, whereas what Jesus preached, early on, was largely the message of the whole Bible. Repent. And he preached from the Bible—literally reading forth what was written there and adding little to it besides “Heads up! This prophecy is happening right now” (Mark 4:21, my paraphrase).

Nevertheless, we’re told—although he soon made them so mad they wanted to toss him off a cliff—initially, at least, they were impressed with his preaching: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips” (Mark 4:22). That must have been some sermon!

I think we think that Jesus came to Earth pretty much exclusively to die for us. And maybe, secondarily, to explain some spiritual stuff to us that we’re too stupid to figure out on our own. I think he also came, though, simply to preach the word. To tell us, in person, with his own mouth, the good news of himself.

i'll take my scripture neat

Mark jolted me this morning out of mere dutiful scripture reading—in order to make my daily posting for Lent that I’ve committed myself to—into genuine puzzlement and absorption. A guy with leprosy comes to Jesus, drops to his knees, and begs, “If you are willing, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40 NIV).

Elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus commends as faith such expressions of trust in his power—in which the speaker acknowledges that Jesus’ will is synonymous with his ability to perform miracles. The guy doesn’t say “If you can…,” as another guy does who makes Jesus respond angrily, “If I can?!” (Mark 9:22-23). Instead, the guy with leprosy seems confident that, if Jesus is simply willing to heal him, his leprosy will go away.

In this instance, though, rather than commending the guy’s faith, Jesus responds quite differently:

Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” (Mark 1:31 NIV).

Why in the world was Jesus indignant? I wondered as I read.

I should point out here that, as is typically the case when I come upon such counterintuitive moments in scripture (of which there are many), the verse is a point of contention among translators and biblical scholars and even, apparently, among the ancient scribes who made the manuscripts from which biblical translators work. Most other versions of the passage go with the more sensible and utterly unsurprising of the two antonymous Greek words the ancient scribes here used for Jesus’ response, choosing σπλαγχνισθείς (splancnisqei, to have compassion)

over the weirder ὀργισθείς (ojrgisqei, to become angry or irritated). So, in just about every English translation besides the newest NIV (even the 1984 NIV disagrees with the 2011 NIV), Jesus is either “moved with” or “filled with” compassion or pity at the man’s request, just as he is in two other of Mark’s accounts in which Jesus responds with splancnisqei to a request for healing (6:34 and 8:2).

All this to say, I have no idea which word is more apt to describe Jesus’ response or why, contrary to almost all other English versions of scripture, the latest NIV translators opted for the less predictable one. But I like to go with the more difficult choice, the one that doesn’t need to be smoothed over by some expert or tethered into predictability. I like my scripture neat, not watered down.

Also, I checked to see how Martin Luther had translated the passage back in 1545, and he seems to have gone with the angrier response: Und es jammerte Jesum. If the German verb jammern back then meant what it means today, Jesus griped at the guy right before he healed him.

And I know this: that guy, for all his faith in Jesus’ power to heal him, is annoying.

I mean, you’d think someone who’d just been given miraculous health after a period of suffering would want to comply with the healer’s request, “‘See that you don’t tell this to anyone’” (Mark 1:44).

But no. According to Mark, “Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news” (Mark 1:45). The guy was, in other words, a blabbermouth.

Just like me, I have to confess. (I’m suffering this weekend from one of my frequent bouts of ruing having said things I shouldn’t have said.)

Jesus probably knew the guy was an bigheaded blabbermouth—or sensed it from some flamboyance of gesture or boasting tone in his voice—and was ticked off by him before the guy ever knelt in the dirt and made his request. And yet, Jesus went ahead and healed him anyway.

Just as he healed me.

And keeps on healing me.

Daily.

 

alone with you

In Capernaum on day—having spent the night at the house of brothers Simon and Andrew, who apparently lived together, along with at least Simon’s wife and family, if not Andrew’s— Jesus snuck out “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark . . . and went off to a solitary place” to pray (Mark 1:35 NIV).

The night before, according, “The whole town [had] gathered at the door” (Mark 1:32) for Jesus to heal their sick ones and rebuke their demons. Surely he was all prayed out by the next morning. I know I would have been. That he snuck out before dawn and chose a solitary place indicates to me, though, a different kind of prayer that what I usually think of when I use the word prayer. Not praying for something to happen or not happen. Not praying words that others will hear and possibly judge. Not praying words at all, but just being alone with God.

It’s an odd expression, an oxymoron: to be alone with someone. If you’re alone, that means no one else is there. But we use this expression often to mean sharing pleasurable time with someone.

“I just want to be alone with you,” I might tell my husband or a close friend. Occasionally, I enjoy being alone with one of my daughters—not just away from others (especially the other daughter) but having fun with just her. We are like different people when we're alone together. And, unless something goes awry on one of these dates (as, sadly, often happens), being alone together is magnificently therapeutic. All the ills of those other times we spend together, or apart, seem to get washed away by our being present to each other.

When I just want to be alone with someone, I have no other motivation than to be in that person’s presence. No motive or goal. No memory of some planned thing I want to say. No memory at all. No plan. No duty.

Being alone with God in this way, I must confess, is a new kind of praying for me. The “I just want to be alone with God” prayer. Not wanting anything from him. Not searching my mind for things I should be praying about. Not remembering any particular prayer-need of anyone else or even myself, perhaps. Just being with God, by myself.

That’s, I learned the other day, what meditation is. Or can be. Not emptying my mind of every thought—an impossibility, as it has always seemed to me—but just being present, by myself, with God. Available to him. Having no more holy purpose than to say, “I’m here.”

I’ve been doing this twice a day for coming up on a week, now, as part of a 40-day “defunking” project of my yoga class. We're supposed to meditate for five minutes every morning and every evening.

I was against it, at first. Strangely put off by—afraid of, even—the idea of not thinking, not doing something. Afraid of just being alone.

When I admitted this fear to my yoga class, my teacher said, “It’s not any different than praying. It’s just committing five minutes to being present to God. Available.” She gave me that language and, with it, not only a way to meditate, to get the job done, but a whole new approach to prayer, one of the great conundrums of my spiritual life.

And, while I can’t say anything has happened worth reporting on, this new way of praying has been curiously satisfying.

I make sure that Kris is occupied with some task or taking one of his 20-minute showers. Then I set the oven timer for 5 minutes, plus 10 seconds to get myself settled. (I’m rather pharisaical, as you can see, when it comes to following instructions.) I sit myself cross-legged on the livingroom floor and consciously breathe, the way I’ve been taught, tightly and loudly in through my nose and then shoot it back out, watching the tubular breaths in my mind as they move from outside of me to inside of me and back out.

“I’m here,” I breathe. In. Out.

Soon, I’m no longer seeing breaths or saying mind-words but just being.

Here.

In.

God’s.

Presence.

And then the timer shrills, almost immediately, it seems to me.

“The timer went off!” Kris calls from wherever he is, then rushes into the kitchen to turn it off.

And just like that it’s over and I’m alone again with just me.

speaking of demons

In addition to healing people’s sicknesses, Jesus also gets rid of their demons. We know that, in at least some of the stories, they must actually have been demons and not simply the gospel writers’ way of referring to mental illness because, as a reader of this blog pointed out to me, in some of the stories at least, “the demons talk to Jesus!” Indeed, Luke summarizes many such cases when he writes that “demons came out of many people, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew he was the Messiah (Luke 4: 41 NIV).

My Bible’s notes and the sermons I’ve heard dealing with such stories are quick to explain that Jesus silenced them because he wasn’t yet ready to be revealed as the Messiah. We’re never told, though, why the demons recognized Jesus’ divinity in the first place. Maybe, because they were of the spirit world, they knew Jesus from there.

My question has never been why the demons recognized Jesus as God’s son, the anointed one, or why Jesus always went out of his way to shut them up but why just about every one of them announces Jesus’ identity. Why would Satan’s helpers want to let others in on the truth about Jesus and thus risk their believing? Or, to put it another way, how does publically identifying Jesus achieve their demonic ends?

It occurred to me, in thinking about it this time around, that maybe the demons can’t help themselves. Maybe they, already in some other realm, are proof that, as God promises in Isaiah 45:23 in a passage Paul paraphrases first in Romans 14:11—“‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God’”—and then fleshes out in Philippians 2:9-11:

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

The demons say it because they have to say it. Paradoxically, though it’s not Jesus’ will for the word to get out quite yet, it’s nevertheless God’s will that, in his kingdom, every tongue—even the tongue of a demon—will proclaim the good news of the One God Sent.

more on jesus' healings

I want to take you today to Matthew’s one-sentence summary of Jesus’ initial healings: “and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them” (Matthew 4:24 NIV). He healed, in other words, people suffering from severe pain, demon-possession (arguably mental illness in modern terms), epilepsy, and paralysis.

Interestingly, there’s no mention of the more dramatic healings—for observers, at least—of the blind or deaf. And no bringing of dead people back to life, as we will see later on. Nevertheless, on the basis of these healings, Jesus’ fame quickly spread throughout Syria, we’re told, and he accrued followers from all over: not only Galilee, where he began his healings, but Jerusalem, Judea, Syria, the largely Greek and Roman cities of the current day Jordan area known as “The Ten Cities” (The Decapolis), and even the region beyond Jordan.

Just for fun, let’s go to two of the earliest English translations of this same summary sentence. In Wycliffe’s 1382 translation of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible (itself, I should emphasize, a translation from the original biblical languages into Latin), he writes, “and they brought to him all that were at mal-ease, and that were taken with diverse languors and torments, and them that had fiends, and lunatic men, and men in palsy and he healed them."

I don’t know about you, but the language here evokes the modern condition rather than what I imagine the illnesses of Jesus’ time—or the late 300s CE, when the Latin Vulgate was written or even Wycliffe’s time—to be. Languors, torments, and fiends all suggest, to me, mental rather than physical illness. They’d also be less impressive healings than, say, the sores of leprosy or a withered hand.

Tyndale, writing a century and a half later, translated directly from the original Hebrew and Greek texts, and here’s what he came up with for the same sentence: “And they brought vnto hym all sicke people that were taken with divers diseases and gripinges and them yt were possessed with devils and those which were lunatyke and those that had the palsie: and he healed them.”

Gripinges, devils, and lunatykes—again, people suffering largely from insanity rather than physical ailments that would have been more observable in the healing.

Of course, not only the English language but also medical understanding and terminology have changed in the centuries since any of these translations were made. Still, much, it seems to me, might be understood about the similarities between those times and now. Then, as now, our most compelling grievances were mental rather than physical.

Heal my daughter of her griping and malaise, my son of his debilitating languor and lack of motivation, my wife of her perpetual rage, my husband of his many demons, his porn addiction, his alcoholism, his gambling, I imagine them pray-worrying in those days as they left their homes in pursuit of this purported healer, just as many of us pray-worry to Jesus now. Heal us all of our unhappinesses, our inner struggles, our stress.

And Jesus began what he began by addressing, first of all, these most essential human troubles.

healing stories

I love the stories of Jesus’ healings. The specificity of the ailments. A shriveled hand. A spirit that tosses a boy into the fireplace. People with sores and paralysis and a guy so depressed he tears at himself with rocks.

And Jesus’ interaction with these sick ones is so alarming. When Simon’s mother-in-law (Peter did have a wife!) had a high fever, Jesus “bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her” (Luke 4:39 NIV). He sticks his finger in a deaf guy’s ear. Rubs spit mud in a guy’s eyes. Tells a woman who’s had her period and been secretly unclean for twelve years to explain the nature of her issue to him in front of her neighbors.

“Stand up in front of everyone,” he commands the guy with the withered hand (Mark 3:3). And then “Stretch out your hand” (Mark 3:5).

(Which, reading it now—forgive me—reminds me of Jodi Arias’s defense attorney telling her to hold up her broken finger for the jury to see.)

And the people watching complain and doubt—one whose authority? and what, he’s working on the Day of Rest?!—and Jesus gets enraged. “He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts” (Mark 3:5).

And I’m thinking, what good stories! I want my students to write stories with so much happening! So concrete! So much conflict!

And then the miraculous result:“He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored” (Mark 3:5).

And no, I didn’t make a mistake. One numbered verse, Mark 3:5, contains all that rage and commanding and stretching and restoring.

Best stories in the world. I mean.

syria

Here’s how Matthew sums up what Jesus began: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them” (Matthew 4: 23-24 NIV).

Teaching, preaching the good news, healing.

There are two things to think about that are new for me.

First, the “demon-possessed” are not separated out into their own category and thus seem to be included under the heading of “every disease and sickness among the people.” That makes me a lot more confident in interpreting the demon-possessed as people with epilepsy and mental illness.

Second, news of Jesus spread all over Syria. Syria. I don’t know why this should surprise me. I mean, Jesus spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus. But somehow Syria seems distant from what I generally think of as where people started out believing in Jesus.

shut up

Okay, so Mark, whose account I’ve been neglecting a bit in my current journey through Jesus’ life, explains what Jesus began in Capernaum. (I like how, so often, the question I have reading one gospel is answered in one of the others.) He started teaching.

At Capernaum, Mark says, “Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach” (Mark 1:21 NIV). As always when he went into the synagogue, he amazed everyone present. Even as a boy of twelve “in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46), he amazed “Everyone who heard him”—not least the teachers themselves—with “his understanding and his answers” (Luke 2:47). Now that he’s a man, what amazes them—Mark says the word twice, in this brief account, for emphasis—is not merely his knowledge about matters spiritual but his “authority.”

Mark writes, “The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law” (Mark 1:22). Teachers of the law—that is, the experts in what he was teaching—did not teach with authority. Which makes me wonder why not.

Were they, like me, too speculative? Trying to tease out layered meanings where the answers were simple and clear?

 

The account of Jesus confronting a man “possessed by impure demon” that immediately follows Mark’s authority claim demonstrates—a little comically, to my mind—the difference between the rabbis’ teaching and Jesus’.

The man with the demon (or, arguably, the demon itself; it’s always hard to sort the spirit from the person in these demon possession stories) cries out, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”

“‘Be quiet!’” said Jesus sternly.” (That’s the part I find funny.) “‘Come out of him!’”

And with that, “The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek,” and “The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, ‘What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him’” (Mark 1:24-27).

Jesus’ amazing authority, like the authority of the Centurion with the sick servant whom we encounter much later, amounts to his ability to get others to do what he wants them to do. He tells demons to shut up and come out, and they do. He commands others to drop everything and follow him, and they do. That’s the difference.

 

Something in his voice and person commanded obedience. Commands it still.

when he begane

Today’s discovery is that early on in Jesus’ three years of preaching and healing, he hung out not only with his disciples but also, on occasion, with his mother and brothers, too. After the wedding at Cana, which he attended with his mom and his disciples, Jesus went on what sounds like a family vacation with his disciples in tow: “After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days” (John 2:12 NIV).

Matthew describes Capernaum as “by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali” (Matthew 4:13) and quotes Isaiah as having called it “the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles” (Matthew 4:15). It was here, according to Matthew, that Jesus “began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God has drawn near’” (Matthew 4:17). The NIV translation refers to this p

I wonder what Jesus’ mom and brothers did while he was preaching. Hang out on the beach? Did they have relatives to stay with in Capernaum? And was it there, at Capernaum, that Jesus’ family had first suspicions that Jesus maybe wasn’t really doing God’s will but was crazy, as they would later say he was (Mark 3:20-21)? Was it then, on that family trip, that Jesus’ brothers began to be skeptical of what he was saying, as we find them later to be (John 7:5)? And, during this trip, where was Joseph, who, “it was thought” (Luke 3:23), was his dad? At home working? Dead, hence Mary’s travels with her oldest son? We can only speculate about these matters.

We do know that Jesus’ age at this time. According to Luke, “Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry” (Luke 3:23). That word ministry, though, is an invention of the NIV and several other translations, added, say the NIV translators, for clarity. The NRSV adds the word work. I hate when they do that. I’d rather seek my own clarity with what’s actually in the Greek.

Early translations, felicitously, leave it out. In Wycliffe’s translation of 1382, “Jesus himself was beginning as of thirty years." Tyndale, in the revised version of his 1526 translation, wrote, “And Iesus him silfe was about thirty yere of age when he begane.” Martin Luther’s 1545 German translation reads, “Und Jesus war, da er anfing, ungefähr dreißig Jahre alt” (trot: And Jesus was, when he began, around thirty years old.). The King James Version of 1611 and the Geneva Bible of 1599 on which the KJV was based both say, “And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age."

Jesus “began,” Luke wrote, and a flurry of modern translators, worried we’d not know what he meant, surged in to fill that gap with a churchy word never once mentioned in the Greek accounts of Jesus’ life that we toss back and forth at one another meaninglessly. Later, in Acts and Paul’s letters, the word commonly translated as ministry does surface: the Greek word διακονία (diakonia), which probably meant something more like service, as in servant, than what we mean when we say ministry, if we mean anything at all. From it comes our church word deacon.

But Jesus, at thirty, at the lake in Capernaum with his family, simply began.