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.

wine

Today I reread John’s account—the only account—of what he says is Jesus’ first miracle: changing water into wine. His mom, having noticed that the wine has run out, talks him into doing something about it, even though, as Jesus points out, his “hour has not yet come” (John 2:4 NIV). Mary’s motive is presumably to save the wedding hosts embarrassment, although John doesn’t specifically say this.

That wouldn’t have been my motive. I’d have been interested in there being more wine.

And this story’s all about wine. We don’t know whether the wine Jesus vinted was white or red, sweet or dry, but we do know it was quality wine. After Jesus makes it, he sends some to the “master of the banquet”—who would have been something like a caterer and butler and sommelier rolled into one job. Even though the guests are already drunk, as the master of the banquet marvels, this newly arrived wine is not the cheaper wine one would have expected to be served at that late hour, toward the end of the celebration, but “choice wine.” He tells the bridegroom, “you have saved the best till now" (John 2:10).

And Jesus doesn't just make really good wine. He makes a lot of it. A whole lot of it. Specifically, “six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons” (John 2:6), and Jesus has servants fill them “to the brim” (John 2:7).

That’s, um, somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of wine. Translated into the 750 milliliter bottles of today, that’d be between 606 and 909 bottles of wine. Really good wine. Even if it was a really really big wedding and those already drunk guests got very very drunk, the bride and her husband were still enjoying that wine for years to come, I’m guessing. A happy ending that John neglects to report.

Except that, without being bottled and corked and without the sulfites vintners add to wine nowadays to preserve it, whatever didn’t get drunk up that night would have turned to vinegar soon afterward. I know this because, when I lived in Berlin—where people drink beer, not wine, so wine is expensive—the only wine cheap enough for me to buy for a dinner party was this Portuguese red wine that came in those five liter bottles with basketry on the outside. It was a tasty, sour, peasant wine, thin-bodied and without any sulfites. Whatever was leftover after my drunken guests left to zigzag their way to the U-Bahn turned to vinegar within a week.) A sad ending that John also doesn’t report.

what was it, if not miracles

John opens his account of Jesus’ life with those big scary philosophical statements—In the beginning was the word, etc.—and then tells about Jesus’ being baptized by his cousin John and then recounts certain of Jesus’ disciples being called to drop what they’re doing and follow him.

With that introduction, we arrive at what John identifies as Jesus’ first miracle: his changing of water into wine at somebody’s wedding, having been talked into it by his mom. John writes, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11 NRSV).

I can understand why, having witnessed this miracle, Jesus’ disciples “believed in him.” What I can’t figure out, though, is what it was—if not miracles—that caused the disciples to drop everything and follow Jesus in the first place.

I mean, he was just some guy from around where they lived. Not rich or well-connected, without even, if Isaiah’s prophecy was correct, “beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2 NIV).

I’m guessing the rest of Isaiah’s prophecy—that the Messiah would be “despised and rejected…and…held…in low esteem”—evidences Jesus’ later treatment by those around him, his torture and execution, not the attitude of those he encountered. He seems to have had, in any case, some sort of attraction for those who left home and family to follow him. Some charisma—a Greek word that originally meant favor or divine gift—that not only drew others to him but convinced them, right from the start, without any miracles, that, as Philip tells his friend Nathanael, they had “found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (John 1:45 NIV).

That said, John himself records, and thereby discounts, a pretty amazing miracle that predated the wedding at Cana. Nathanael—having dismissed his friend’s discovery with the words, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46 NIV)—subsequently meets Jesus and comes to believe in him himself after Jesus tells him, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you” (John 1:48 NIV).

If seeing what happened without being present to see it is not a miracle, I don’t know what is. Nathanael’s response, in any case, suggests that he thought Jesus’ divine gifts as a seer miraculous: “Then Nathanael declared, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel’” (John 1:49 NIV).

And Jesus’ own account of Nathanael’s instantaneous conversion also references that miracle—“You believe,” he tells him, “because I told you I saw you under the fig tree” (John 1:49)—and he promises even “greater things than that” (John 1:50 NIV). Not just magic tricks like fortunetelling or changing water into wine or walking on the surface of a lake but the very miracles people wish for: miraculous healings of their loved ones and bringing dead people back to life.

Very truly I tell you,” Jesus tells Nathanael, tells us—just like Jacob at Beersheba, we’ll see “‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man” (John 1:51 NIV).

but they were unaware of it

Backing up slightly in Jesus’ life to his early adolescence, I was thinking last night about Luke’s account of how, at twelve, when he traveled with his family to Jerusalem—almost seventy miles away—for the Passover Feast. Walking let’s say three miles an hour for eight hours each day, that’d be a three day walk.

Luke reports, “After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it" (Luke 2:43 NIV). In other words, Jesus, surely aware that his parents were leaving, um, didn’t bother to tell them he had other plans than going on home with them that day or even trouble himself to say goodbye.

I woke at three this morning, as I often do to pray-worry about my daughters, and it occurred to me that probably Mary had done the same thing—probably many times—even though, unlike Charlotte and Lulu, her son was sinless. Thoughtless, maybe, in his dealings with his earthly parents in this instance and maybe, probably, others—he was, after all, not only 100% God but 100% teenager—but he was surely never mean-spirited or self-centered or unwilling to forgive a slight. And, since times were somewhat different back then and he didn’t go off to college as far as we know, Mary and Joseph wouldn’t have had to worry things like beer pong or designer drugs or the weird sexual culture of today (so horrifyingly in evidence in the Jodi Arias trial).

Nevertheless, many years later, when Jesus is a grown man in his thirties roaming around Galilee, Samaria, and Judea with his buddies and surrounded by crowds so thick “that he and his disciples were not even able to eat,” we find Mary worrying still. Mary enlists her other sons’ help to go “take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’ (Mark 3:21-22). Jesus’ response? “‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’” he quips to the crowd. “Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother’” (Mark 3: 33-34).

Yes, I see what he was getting at. And certainly, having been visited by an angel and impregnated while a virgin, she failed her son, failed God, in not trusting what he was doing. But I just want to look at the parenting issues here.

Evidently, being a parent to even the perfect son was tough going—not just when he was a teenager but long after he was grown and out on his own. This doesn’t augur well for us parents of not so perfect kids. Even so, in some perverse way, these stories give the night-worrier in me hope. Or, at least, the comfort that comes with knowing I’m surely not the only one awake at three.

lenten challenge

I’m  nowhere near the torture and death of Jesus in my current talking-about-scripture project of progressing chronologically through the accounts of his life. However, it being the first day of Lent and the purpose of this blog being to get myself (and maybe a few others) to take to heart the command to talk about scripture when we get up and lie down and walk down the road and sit at the computer and so forth, I would like to issue a challenge: Talk about a specific passage of scripture with at least one person every day for the next forty days.

Here’s how the idea came about, in case you’re interested. I have been thinking for weeks about all the possible things I might give up for Lent this year. My nightly glass of wine. Meat (a reenactment of the Lents of my childhood in honor of my dad, who died this year). The Jodi Arias murder trial (which I’ve discovered I can access on my computer). Google. (My workstudy: “But don’t you need Google?” Me: “Sort of, but I need that glass of wine more.”)

 

None of these givings up seemed likely to succeed to me, and, if there’s one thing I was sure I wanted to give up this Lent, it was failing—as I always do—at giving something up.

So, at breakfast this morning, the first morning of Lent, I was thinking about this dilemma, and my husband, a CPA, started telling me about a conversation he had with one of his clients yesterday about the barn parable, where the guy stores up all this grain in his barn and then finds out he’s going to die the next day.

“What I don’t get is what’s wrong with that, storing up stuff for the future,” Kris's client said.

And so they struggled through it, landing on not the storing as the bad thing, per se, but thinking of oneself, not God, as the source of one’s security.

I so liked the idea of my husband—generally pretty private about matters spiritual—discussing scripture with some guy who came to him about his taxes and then afterward telling me about the discussion—in each case spreading scripture around to those he encountered—that I decided to do the same, at least once daily for the next forty days, as my Lenten discipline.

 

I’m determined to succeed this year. Join me!

at once

The calling is more dramatic in Matthew’s account: “As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.’ At once they left their nets and followed him” (Matthew 4:18-20 NIV).

At once.

So, continuing on my speculations of yesterday, I’m wondering about that net, surely an expensive thing. And the other fishermen with Peter and Andrew, since casting a net and heaving it back in would likely require more than just two pair of hands. What did their fisherbuddies think? What would I think if one of my colleagues abandoned her or his job to join some guy talking weird about fishing people and going around saying “Follow me” to all the able-bodied guys around?

It gets even more dramatic: “Going on from there, [Jesus] saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him” (Matthew 4:21-22).

Immediately. They're preparing nets—so, not yet out on the water. They just step out into the shallow water and take off.

And their father's like, “Boys! Sons! Get back here and help me!” No fish that day—or, probably, for many days after that. No fish. No money. No work. Wife yelling at him. Little ones hungry.

But mostly, the worry about those boys—good boys, Zebedee’s helpers, their parents’ hope, their pension in their old age—going off after a guy who does magic tricks at wedding parties. It all happened so fast—immediately, at once—they hardly knew how to process it, how to talk about it to each other, much less to their friends and neighbors, the people they went to church with.

When Zebedee and his wife encounter James and John in town, or maybe at church—since, weirdly, they still showed up there on occasion—the boys told them, “But he’s for real. It really happened. We saw the water in those jars, drank the wine!”

Clearly it was already too late to talk them out of this silliness. As John himself tells us and probably told them, “What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11).

follow me

I never can get over the fact that Jesus’ disciples just abandoned everything important to them when he said, “Follow me.” Wives. Children. Extended family. Homes. Land. Jobs, apparently.

I just can’t imagine doing this, so I always try to explain it away by telling myself that the details of their reluctance are just left out. That they dithered and hesitated and asked him, “But who will take care of…?” And, indeed, who did take care of? Someone had to. Jewish Law is very clear about that, with its insistence on providing for widows and orphans and all its rules about marriage and patrimony, which governed how one’s children would be provided for after they left home. Jesus himself, as he was dying, transferred his responsibility for his mom as firstborn to his best friend John.

I always have wondered why his younger brothers—James, Joseph, Judas, or Simon (Mark 6:3)—didn’t look after Mary after Jesus’ death. While they are decidedly skeptical of Jesus’ divinity and purpose early on (John 7:5), that doesn’t mean they were necessarily scumbags, and at least one of them, James, later became a leader in the early church. Why didn’t they assume care for their own mom?

The closer I look at it, the more familiar it all looks to me. Siblings unequally invested in the care of their aging parents. Perhaps fighting about it, as many families do. “Don’t you see I have my own family to take care of?” I can imagine Simon or Joseph railing. Or Judas or James saying to Jesus, “It’s all very well for you to talk about Mom’s needs. You don’t have anyone else who needs you. You don’t even have a job!”

And those men who followed Jesus. In their twenties or thirties, probably, as he was. Surely married by then and fathers. Employed. Landowners perhaps.

But, as Peter points out, “We have left everything to follow you!” (Mark 10: 28). Everything they had. Everything they cared about until that moment, when a wifeless, childrenless, fieldless, homeless man beckoned. How did they convince themselves to do that? And how did they feel about it after they did?

 

And what happened to the families they left behind to follow Jesus? There’s virtually no mention in the gospels of the wives and children and fields and aging parents that Jesus commends his disciples for leaving behind (Mark 10:29).

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about as I read about Jesus gathering up his followers from around where he lived. What that would have meant.