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  An Ethiopian had been on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He was a eunuch, an officer at the court of the kandake, or queen, of Ethiopia, her chief treasurer. On his way home, he sat in his chariot reading the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit said to Philip, “Catch up with that chariot.” When Philip ran up, he heard him reading Isaiah the prophet aloud and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, with no one to explain it to me?” But he urged Philip to get in and take the seat next to him. Now the passage of scripture he was reading was this:

  Like a lamb led to the slaughterhouse,

  Like a sheep dumb before its shearers,

  He never opens his mouth.

  In his humiliation fair judgment is denied him,

  His descendants—who will ever speak of them,

  Since his life on earth has been cut short?

  The eunuch turned to Philip and said, “Tell me, is the prophet referring to himself or someone else?” Starting, therefore, with this text of scripture, Philip proceeded to explain the good news of Jesus to him.

  Farther down the road they came to a body of water, and the eunuch said, “Look, here is some water; is there anything to prevent my being baptized?” He ordered the chariot to stop; then Philip and the eunuch both went down into the water, and he baptized him. (Acts 8:27–38; passage in italics from Isa. 53:7–8)

  The atrocity of castration burns behind the lines that the eunuch is reading. Was he shorn of his testicles when he was just a lamb? Did he open his mouth before the shearers? In his humiliation was fair judgment denied him? And who will ever speak of his descendants? When he asks (in what tone of voice?) “Is the prophet referring to himself or someone else?” whom does he have in mind?

  We do not know, but how can we refrain from guessing? It was a subtle but powerful literary move on Luke’s part to make Christianity’s first convert outside Palestine a black eunuch and to give him just these verses to read. The enslaved eunuch is, if you will, just the kind of convert Nietzsche would have predicted, believing as he did that Christianity is a religion for slaves and other emasculate losers, a cult of resentment deriving all its malignant energy from their bad luck. And yet, so far as we can tell, Philip says nothing to the eunuch about the eunuch’s own suffering, only directing his attention to the sufferings of the prophesied Lamb of God. What this kindles in the man, however, is a desire to undergo the death-and-resurrection rite of baptism, uniting his humiliation with God’s own and trusting that it will lead to exaltation in just the way that so appalled Nietzsche.

  Castration is an atrocity within an atrocity. Perhaps someone in Ethiopia could have been hunted down and punished for castrating Philip’s convert, but who can be punished for perpetrating the human condition itself? To use the language of the myth, who is to be blamed for our expulsion from Eden? It is the Lord himself who cursed what he created. “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return,” he swore (Gen. 3:19), bringing death into a world that, until that moment, had known only life. That was the curse, but can we make him bear it? Our offense was so mild, his punishment so ferocious. Can we avenge ourselves upon him?

  No, we cannot; we cannot make him “bear the awful curse” that he has inflicted on his creatures. But he can make himself bear it. And when he does, all lesser offenses can be caught up in one primal offense, his own, for which, though not without a wrenching change in his character, he can wreak the ultimate vengeance upon himself and deliver the ultimate gift—eternal life—as atonement. In the words of Paul (2 Cor. 5:19), he can “reconcile the world to himself” and himself to the world. As God, the Lord cannot cease to exist; but as Christ, he can taste death. Betrayed and abandoned, he can breathe his last breath in pain. The myth that he once did so has within it, as the greatest literature always does, the power to still that rage against the universe which any individual history can engender.

  It doesn’t take castration, after all, to raise the question. It doesn’t take genocide. Far, far smaller misfortunes easily suffice. Cesare Pavese, a brilliant poet dead by his own hand at the age of forty-two, wrote, famously: “No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.” He did not mean to trivialize the act, only to suggest that we refrain from it, more than we realize, by selective inattention to sorrows that, dwelt upon, would undercut our will to live. The myth and, especially, the ritual of the crucified God are ways to bring those sorrows, those horrors, to mind without succumbing to them. What they take away is not guilt, divine or human, but anger, not the sin of the past but the still uncommitted sin of the future.

  In Louis Begley’s novel Mistler’s Exit, a wealthy American advertising executive impulsively flies to Venice to see again some of his favorite Titians. A young woman whom he meets in his hotel accompanies him on his visit to the great painter’s Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, but he surprises her—and perhaps himself—with his sarcasm about it. “I haven’t noticed,” he says,

  that it’s a part of religious iconography to have the Father or the Son attend torture sessions of the martyrs. In fact, right now I can’t think of any painting of the crucifixion or the deposition where the Father or the Holy Ghost looks on.… One wonders why. Celestial squeamishness? Or is it respect for the logic of the faithful? Fear that belief might be strained beyond the breaking point if the Father actually observed such things being done to the Son and did nothing to stop them?

  Mistler is not the connoisseur he thinks he is. Medieval and Renaissance art frequently portrayed the Father, garbed as a priest, holding the transverse beam of the cross in his own hands, as if displaying the suffering Son to the viewer, while the Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovers near. All these paintings illustrate the perfect identity of the Father and the Son at the climax of the Son’s agony. A celebrated example is Masaccio’s The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and Saint John, in which the Father elevates the body of the Son above an altar just as, in the Mass, the priest elevates the consecrated bread, the sacramental body of Christ, above an altar. “This is my body” is, in effect, the silent caption of the painting, but the words are the Father’s, not the Son’s, for it is he, not the Son, who looks outward at the viewer. The suffering of the Son and the suffering of the Father are one as the Father and the Son are one with the Spirit in—recalling the title of the painting—the Trinity.

  In Begley’s novel, Mistler’s young companion does not know that he is dying of cancer. The martyred saint and the crucified savior are psychological surrogates. The death Mistler wants God to notice is his own, and his deepest grievance, to quote the psychologist Allen Wheelis, is his “awareness that, before we die, nothing is going to happen. That big vague thing, that redemptive fulfillment, is an illusion, a beckoning bribe to keep us loyal. A symphony has a climax, a poem builds to a burst of meaning, but we are unfinished business. No coming together of strands. The game is called because of darkness.” Mistler does not believe in God, but his rage that the big vague thing is not going to happen is so huge and so personally felt that he craves the vindication of repudiating the God in whom he does not believe. Moreover, were it only possible, he would willingly take a step beyond repudiation and punish God.

  But what if he were looking at a painting in which, if he chose to see it so, he could see God being punished for Mistler’s death? What sort of difference would that make? Subliminally, paintings by artists like Masaccio, El Greco, and Titian have stilled the rage in many Mistlers, but what finds its way to the painters’ canvases can be found as well in an artistically alert reading of the scriptures that inspired them. Such is the reading—a reading of the New Testament as a work of imaginative literature—that this book will attempt.

  Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The English language may never surpass John Milton’s four-word summary of the Bible. But there is another way to “justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton aspired to do, than by granting God blanket immunity and then bowdlerizing his testimony lest he incriminate himself. An interpretation of the Bible in which God is allowed
to be more hero than saint and in which it is taken for granted that no hero is without his flaw, not even the hero of a divine comedy, is the kind that, if a new Milton ever arose, could yield a new biblical epic.

  Diós escribe derecho con líneas torcidas: God writes straight with crooked lines. The first, spoken pathos of the crucifix as an icon—that the crucified is both innocent and divine—yields to a second, unspoken pathos: that he is both divine and guilty. He is guilty less of sin than of ignorance. At the start, he was ignorant of his own power: He had to discover it by using it and by misusing it. Later, he was blind to his own weakness: That, too, he had to discover by succumbing to it. At length, he chose to undergo a human death in order both to prove to himself and to reveal to the world the full, mixed truth about himself, the truth that the horrified Nietzsche could only denounce.

  Jesus bore, ironically, the name of the greatest warrior of his people. That we call him Jesus is an accident of Latin translation. Iēsous in the original Greek of the Gospels translates Hebrew yehoshua‘ or yeshua‘, alternate forms of the name Joshua, a name compounded of Hebrew words meaning “The Lord is salvation.” But how can this Joshua save others if he cannot save himself?

  As the time for his execution draws near, God gives his answer to that question in a poem that includes the lines

  Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,

  it remains but a single grain.

  Yet if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.

  (John 12:24)

  The grain that must fall into the earth and die is the divine identity itself, which must be violently revised: “This is the very reason why I have come to this hour.” As he hangs in agony, they say of him, “He saved others, himself he cannot save” (Mark 15:31). The irony is not in their mouths. They speak, as they imagine, the simple truth. The irony is in our ears, and in his.

  The world is a great crime, and someone must be made to pay for it. Mythologically read, the New Testament is the story of how someone, the right someone, does pay for it. The ultimately responsible party accepts his responsibility. And once he has paid the price, who else need be blamed, who else need be punished? The same act that exposes all authority as provisional renders all revenge superfluous. And because the death of God does this, it functions within the myth as not just another death but a redemptive death, one that saves us from the violence that we might otherwise feel justified in inflicting on one another. God must die, yes, but he will rise, and at his empty tomb, where none is king, all may be forgiven and may submit to one another. Thus does his kingdom come. Thus does the Lamb of God take away the sin of the world.

  A Note to the Reader

  In what follows, the text of the New Testament will be considered rather as if it were a stained-glass window. That is, it will be looked at and appreciated as a work of art, rather than seen through in an attempt to discern the historical events that lie behind it. Most recent books about the New Testament have had historical reconstruction rather than literary art as their animating concern, and most, accordingly, have sought to see through the text. Readers particularly interested in the difference between those books and this one—the difference between seeing through and looking at—may wish to skip to the epilogue, “On Writing the Lives of God,” or to the second appendix, “The Bible as Rose Window.” Readers more interested in the story as a story than in ancient history or in critical methodology may proceed directly to Part One and to the opening words of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.”

  PART ONE

  The Messiah, Ironically

  In the beginning was the Word,

  And the Word was with God,

  And the Word was God.

  —John 1:1

  Before God spoke his first words, “Let there be light,” the words that began the making of the world, what was he thinking? What was he thinking during the eternity of silence when “the earth was formless and void, darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God’s Spirit breathed over the waters” (Gen. 1:1)? In its opening words, the Gospel According to John consciously echoes the opening words of the Book of Genesis—“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth”—but establishes its own beginning at a time before that famous beginning. Back then, it says, is when this story really began.

  HIS LIFE BEFORE HE WAS BORN

  What was God thinking? The thought that he entertained in silence before he thought or spoke any other reality into existence, John says in his oracular way, was the all-encompassing thought of himself. This is the Word that was with God and was God at the beginning before the beginning. All God’s subsequent self-revelations, everything that he has said or done, made happen or allowed to happen, the whole of history and reality since then—all of these later words, John suggests, derive from the great Word of primeval divine self-consciousness. And as all of them in their different ways have enlightened mankind about what God is like, all have been life that gave light:

  Through him all things were made,

  And without him nothing was made that has been made.

  What came to be through him was life,

  And the life was the light of mankind.

  (John 1:3–4)*

  Now comes the premise of the Gospel itself. At a certain point in time, this unspoken divine self-consciousness itself came to expression. The all-encompassing Word itself “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). God spoke himself aloud in the form of a human being who lived a human life among other human beings.

  Why did God do this? Because the human race, to whom God had given dominion over the world, was estranged from him: “The world did not know him” (John 1:10). God had chosen a special people to be his own, but even many of them rejected him: “His own received him not” (John 1:11). At length, in a final effort to achieve reconciliation with them and with the human race as a whole (collectively, his own self-image and therefore intimately connected with his own identity), God became one of them. This time, too, he was rejected, yet through that very rejection he accomplished something glorious. He began his own life anew; and because he did, his human creatures are now able to begin their lives anew as well, living them not as human beings ordinarily do but rather with a portion of the all-encompassing “fullness” (John 1:16) that was his before the beginning and will remain his after the end. The Gospel is the story of how this new, all-transforming relationship was inaugurated, and John gives his own credentials by confessing, in a tone of awe, “And we have seen his glory”:

  For the Word became flesh

  And dwelt among us.

  And we have seen his glory,

  Glory as of the Father with his only Son,

  Full of gracious truth.

  (1:14)

  The prologue to the Gospel According to John says not a word about crucifixion or resurrection, and never so much as mentions the name of Jesus. In the way of all such mythic proems or “prologues in heaven,” it delivers, in poetry, the quintessence of a story that it assumes we all know. It sets the tone and, above all, makes the true identity of the protagonist known to the reader in a way that it will not be known to most of those to whom the protagonist will say what he has to say through the action that now begins.

  “THE WINNOWING-FORK IS IN HIS HAND”

  The act of divine self-expression by which the Word became flesh might not seem to require either birth or death. If God neither begins nor ends, then these two definitive features of human existence might seem exactly wrong for any divine self-revelation. Far more in character for God, at least for God as a reader of the Old Testament may recall him, would be an appearance, without warning, in the form of a grown man. In the Book of Joshua, for example, the Lord appears just before the battle of Jericho in the form of a warrior with sword drawn:

  Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him, grasping a naked sword. Joshua walked up to him and said, “Are you with us or with our enemies
?” He replied, “Neither one. I am here as the commander of the Lord’s host.” Joshua fell flat on the ground, worshipping him and saying, “What does my Lord command his servant?” The commander of the Lord’s host answered Joshua, “Take the sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy.” And Joshua did so. (Josh. 5:13–15)

  Joshua’s reaction makes it clear that this “commander of the Lord’s host” is the Lord himself, the divine warrior in person. The Lord confirms this impression by giving Joshua the same order that he gave Moses when he appeared to him as a burning bush: “Take the sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy.” It is no more beyond God to appear in the form of a man than it is beyond him to appear in the form of a bush. To be sure, it is one thing for God to make an isolated appearance in the form of a bush and another for him to plant a seed, water it, cultivate it, and have it grow up to be God-made-bush. And it is yet another thing for him to conceive a human being with a fully human (and, not incidentally, Jewish) genealogy, gestation, birth, and childhood, and have it grow up to be God-made-man. But this last step, incomprehensible as it first seems, is a step in a known direction.