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THE ATTENTIVE READER OF THE FOUR GOSPELS MAY NOTICE that they all contain—not too far into the story—a special scene in which Jesus inaugurates his teaching ministry. Those first formal sermons of Jesus—different in each of the Gospels—are preceded by other accounts of his activity, particularly of his miracles. Each inaugural sermon, moreover, introduces themes important to the Evangelists. In addition, as the narrative sequence shifts from Jesus’ other activity to the beginning of his teaching ministry, the relevant scene is introduced with a certain degree of solemnity, depending on the style favored by the Evangelist.
In Mark’s gospel, for instance, after three chapters describing Jesus’ other activities, the Evangelist slows the narrative pace in order to introduce the first sermon in dramatic detail. Mark writes,
And again he began to teach by the sea. And a great multitude was gathered to him, so that he climbed into a boat and sat on the sea; and the whole multitude was on the land facing the sea. Then he taught them many things by parables. (Mark 4:1–2)
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Thus, the parables of the kingdom do not commence until the writer has determined the location, the crowd has been assembled, and Jesus has settled himself in the boat. Only then does Jesus begin to speak: “Behold, a sower went out to sow his seed.”
In Matthew, Jesus preaches the first sermon, not at the lakeside, but on a mountain. Nonetheless, between these two very different sermons, the dramatic correspondence is perfect. After four chapters describing Jesus’ other activities, Matthew suddenly adjusts the pace of the narrative to establish the mis-en-scène for the Sermon on the Mount:
Great multitudes followed him—from Galilee, and Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan. And seeing the multitudes, he went up on a mountain, and when he was seated his disciples came to him. Then he opened his mouth and taught them. (Matthew 4:25–5:2)
Again, the writer determines the location, the crowd is assembled, and Jesus seats himself. Only then does he begin, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Although these are different sermons, each serves an identical function in its respective gospel. As the parables of the kingdom are programmatic for Mark, so is the Sermon on the Mount for Matthew. In addition, the similarity of scenic detail is striking: In each setting the crowd gathers around Jesus, who sits down—the posture of a rabbi—to teach them. Each Evangelist takes his time and deliberately adds details that solemnize the event.
In John’s gospel the inaugural discourse, which follows two chapters describing Jesus’ other activities, is developed differently from Mark and Matthew: The setting is private, the crowds being replaced by a single listener. The episode takes place at night, so we spontaneously picture a candle enlightening a small area in a shadowy room. In this scene Jesus’ ministry as a teacher is established, not by the narrator but by Nicodemus, the only other person in the story: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him” (John 3:2).
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Then there follows the “God So Loved the World” discourse, which begins, “Amen, I say to you, unless man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” This discourse serves in John’s gospel the same sort of thematic role as the two sermons in Mark and Matthew.
THE SYNAGOGUE AT NAZARETH
In the gospel of Luke, finally, the setting of Jesus’ inaugural sermon, placed after more than three chapters of earlier material, is even more detailed and elaborate than in the other gospels. Luke begins by informing us that Jesus had already been teaching:
Then Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and news of him went out through all the surrounding region. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all. (Luke 4:14–15)
Luke does not relate the substance of that earlier teaching, however, so that he may portray the sermon at Nazareth as a true inauguration. This he accomplishes in stunning solemnity:
First, Jesus
went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, according to his custom, and stood up to read, and he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
Next,
when he had unrolled the scroll, he found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, / Because he has anointed me / To preach the gospel to the poor; / He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, / To proclaim liberty to the captives / And recovery of sight to the blind, / To set at liberty those who are oppressed; / To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Finally,
He rolled up the scroll, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16–21)
The people’s response to Jesus further enhances the drama of the scene. Those in attendance in the synagogue at Nazareth that day thought they knew who he was: “Is this not Joseph’s son?” (Luke 4:22).
This was the same Jesus they had known since he was virtually an infant. Older citizens were familiar with his mother, who grew up here. Some remembered that she was pregnant, years ago, when she and her new husband, Joseph, went to Bethlehem (where Joseph’s family came from), to be registered for some Roman census. Others recalled when they came back, the child with them, and rumor had it they had spent some time in Egypt.
On that day, however, it was obvious to everybody that this was not the same Jesus, or at least he seemed very different, when he read and interpreted Isaiah to them on this Sabbath day. Something had happened to him, so they inquired, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”
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The present book was inspired, in certain respects, by the bewilderment of the Nazarenes. In the pages that follow, I want to inquire: Who is this Jesus, what happened to him to make him appear so different to the citizens of Nazareth, and what other things came of it?
The scene in the Nazareth synagogue is a good place to introduce our inquiry into Jesus’ life because it hints at two very different phases in it: First, there were the first thirty years of his life, when he was “in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52). During that time he served as a boy apprentice to a craftsman father and later was a craftsman on his own. His was a quiet life then, at least in the sense that Holy Scripture says little about it.
Second, when we meet Jesus in this synagogue scene, certain dramatic events have recently altered the course of his life. It is clear that something profoundly transforming has happened to Jesus. From this point on, his is no longer a quiet life. He gathers disciples around him, and they all become so dreadfully busy “that they could not so much as eat bread” (Mark 3:20). What has occasioned this dramatic change in our Galilean craftsman? How is this change related to his prior life? What does it mean, and where does it lead?
The first four chapters of the present book will reflect on Jesus’ life before the episode at Nazareth. The synagogue scene we will examine in detail in chapter 5. The later chapters will reflect on later aspects of Jesus’ life, ending with his death and resurrection.
ACKNOWLEDGED DEBTS
Given the nature of its inquiry, the reader will observe that a proportionately larger part of this book is devoted to Jesus’ formative years than is the case in the Gospels themselves. This is a fact, but let me qualify it with two considerations.
First, the “silent years” of Jesus’ life were roughly thirty, whereas the years devoted to his public ministry—as we shall see—were probably just a bit over two. That is to say, the corresponding proportions in the present book are not really unwarranted by the actual division within Jesus’ lifetime.
Second, in this book, the special attention given to Jesus’ formative years rests on the author’s persuasion that the foundations of a person’s character are chiefly laid in his youth.
In this respect, I suppose, my presentation of the biblical material does reflect an interest that is admittedly modern. It is a quality of modern biographies that they tend to look for early influences in the lives they narrate. This has been true even of autobiographies for the past couple of centuries. For example, a full half of Rousseau’s Confessions covers the first twenty-one years of his life.
Although the present book is in no sense a biography of Jesus (for the nature of the biblical material does not allow it), it is written from a modern perspective, by someone on whom the social and behavioral sciences have inevitably left their mark.
Even though this is a new book, I truly hope to say nothing new! At least, I hope to say nothing embarrassing to those generations of Christians from whom I have inherited the faith once delivered to the saints. If I pose certain “new” questions to the Sacred Text, I pray God they are not arrogant or pretentious questions. They may be, for all that, questions that Christians of earlier times, perhaps, did not think to ask. If this is the case, it behooves me to be, at least, devout and modest in the asking.
Nor is this a polemical work. At some points, it is true, certain recent theories will be challenged—especially in soteriology—but these challenges will be few.
Above all, this work will not present a revisionist Christology. I believe Jesus to be God’s eternal Son, “of one being with the Father”—and all the other articles of the Creed. The reflections in this book are shaped under the beloved and gratefully acknowledged tutelage of the ancient councils of the Christian church. Those venerable authorities provide the interpretive lens through which the life of Jesus appears—in the expression of Gregory Palamas—as a theandrikè politeía, a “God-manly way of life.”1
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I confess a particular debt to the councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451. In accordance with the first of these, I recognize in Jesus of Nazareth a “single subject”—one person, not two—who is God’s eternal Son, of “one being (homoousios) with the Father.” That is to say, in the scenes of the gospel we are not presented with two subjects, a “mixed” Jesus, as it were, part God and part man. He was (and is!) completely both. In the expression of Cyril of Alexandria, the most important thinker at Ephesus, Jesus is “a single reality” (mia physis).2
From the Council of Chalcedon I learn that this Jesus Christ is also “of one being (homoousios) with us.” That is to say, the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, as presented in the scenes of the gospel, is in no way diminished by his divine nature. He shares every single human trait as the rest of us, sin excepted. Nor, Chalcedon declared, are these two natures of Jesus confused, changed, divided, or separated. Both natures adhere to a single subject, described by Leo of Rome as “one person, divine and human” (una persona, divina et humana).
At the same time, I recognize that the purpose of those traditional dogmatic formulations was not to elucidate the Christian faith—for no light is brighter than the gospel itself—but to put a custodial hedge around it, a defining barrier to protect the Christian people from misunderstanding Jesus and the gospel. Otherwise, each generation of Christians—not to say every individual believer—might make of Jesus whatever folks thought best at the time.
Nonetheless, those who composed the dogmatic formulations of the Creed intended only to safeguard the truth of the gospel, not to replace it. It is the living gospel—the narrative!—that transmits the faith.
For this reason, my attention in this book is always directed to the divinely inspired writings of the apostles, that small collection of works we call the New Testament.
Unlike the later dogmatic formulas of the church councils, the apostolic writings tend—generally speaking—to speak of Jesus in narrative and existential terms; they are descriptive, most often, of the actual experience of believers when they gaze at the living Jesus.
Now, just what do we believers behold when we gaze at Jesus?
Well, let us limit ourselves to a single scene: We gaze at a man worn out from long hours of travel and labor, slumped asleep on the stern sheets of a fishing boat, which is being violently tossed all over the place by a fierce and dangerous storm. We behold this man’s sailing companions, desperately struggling to keep the vessel afloat. They yell to the sleeper over the roar of the wind, to wake up, please, and do something about the situation. We see the sleeper wake up, glance around him, and then, addressing the wind and the waves, robustly tell them, in plain Aramaic, “Hey, knock it off!” The storm stops abruptly. Finally, the others in the boat look at one another and—understandably—inquire, “Who can this be?”
Fair question! Who, indeed? That is to say, even to those who knew him best and watched him do what he did, Jesus was a sustained source of mystification, and it is to our advantage that we ever bear in mind it is from them—those questioners—and them alone that we know anything at all about Jesus. Every single thing we know, we know on apostolic testimony. We must forswear any attempt to understand Jesus better than the apostles did.
This scene from Matthew 8:23–27—the story of Jesus asleep in the storm—also illustrates what I meant in saying that the dogmatic terms of the Creed were intended to safeguard the truth of the gospel, not to replace it. The Creed declares that Jesus was tired that day because he was human. The Creed asserts that Jesus was able to control the elements of nature that day because he was divine. Indeed, those who wrote the Creed were fond of expressing this double truth in ironic terms: God slept in the boat, and a man stilled the storm! The God and the man were the same person, a single subject.
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IN THE FLESH
All true, of course, but those who wrote the Creed did not intend that its recitation should—or could—replace the experience of sailing in that boat with Jesus, receiving the multiplied loaves from the hands of his apostles, listening to his parables, beholding him transfigured on the mountain, washing his feet with our tears, and reaching out to touch the place of the nails. The purpose of this book is simply to help readers return, in lively faith, to
. . . those holy fields
Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d
For our advantage on the bitter cross.3
This “return” is to the biblical narrative itself, as we read it in faith.4
Let me mention, in this respect, a foundational premise of the present book; namely, that the event of the Incarnation—the Word’s enfleshing—was not static. To be a living human being, any human being, is not a stationary thing.
One of the most important Christian theologians of the fourth century expressed it best, I believe: The being of all created things is a becoming. Motion (kinesis) is a defining quality of everything God made. This is also true of human beings. Accordingly, the human race takes its rise and continues its course, not from a fixed “being” (einai), but from a dynamic “becoming” (genesthai). Human nature is not locked into a defining set of rigid conditions. On the contrary, it always bears within itself the “becoming” that marked its origin in Creation. Man has an essentially changeable nature; he is a stream, not a lake. His existence is a process, not a state.5
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This process of humanization is what the Word assumed when he was made flesh and dwelt among us. The doctrine of the Incarnation does not imply an unchangeable human state—on the contrary, God’s Son came to change it!—but a full human life. Irenaeus of Lyons, in the second century, gave voice to this truth about Jesus: Gloria Dei est vivens homo—“The glory of God is a living man.”6 The Word did not assume our humanity in abstract and philosophical terms. Rather, the Word became a specific human being, Jesus Christ, a man and the sole Mediator between God and man.
That is to say, God’s eternal Word took unto himself not only certain human qualities but the concrete, historical circumstances of an individual human life. He made himself a subjective participant in human history, someone whose existence and experience were circumscribed by the limiting conditions of time and space and organic particularity.
An adequate Christology, then, should affirm that the Word’s becoming flesh refers to more than the single instant of his becoming present in the Virgin’s womb. He continued becoming flesh and dwelling among us, in the sense that his assumed body and soul developed and grew through the complex experiences of a particular human life, including the transition from preconscious to conscious.
During the entire period the epistle to the Hebrews calls “the days of his flesh,” he continued to become flesh and dwell among us. In fact, we must go further and say that through the experience of his passion and death he “learned obedience by the things that he suffered.” At every moment, even as he passed into the realm of the dead and rose again, he was becoming flesh and dwelling among us.
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As a concrete human being, moreover, Jesus cannot be studied apart from the many human relationships that defined his history. Jesus was part of a specific society. He was a village Jew and saw reality through the eyes of a village Jew. His neighbors were the people at hand. He knew and loved them, and they him.
We have already reflected that we Christians have absolutely no historical access to Jesus except through specific human beings—his friends and followers—who wrote the New Testament.
They were part of a larger group who formed the actual world of Jesus of Nazareth. In the New Testament, Jesus does not appear like the garish sun, diminishing the other stars as it rises in the sky. Jesus is, rather, the sun that illumines those other stars and makes them visible. Several of these people—family, disciples, beneficiaries of his blessings—will also be found in the pages that follow. They pertained to the organic particularity of Jesus’ concrete life.
Living a human life—we Christians are convinced—Jesus sanctified every human life in all its aspects, soothing every sorrow, redeeming all hopes. Perhaps no one has better expressed this truth than Gregory Nazianzen, called “the Theologian,” who declared about Jesus, back in the fourth century:
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Therefore now also, when he had finished these sayings he departed from Galilee and came into the coasts of Judea beyond Jordan; he dwells well in Galilee, in order that the people which sat in darkness may see great Light [Isaiah 9:2]. He removes to Judea in order that he may persuade people to rise up from the Letter and to follow the Spirit. He teaches, now on a mountain; now he discourses on a plain; now he passes over into a boat; now he rebukes the waves. And perhaps he goes to sleep, in order that he may bless sleep also; perhaps he is tired that he may sanctify weariness, as well; perhaps he weeps that he may make tears blessed. He removes from place to place, the One is not contained in any place; the timeless, the bodiless, the unbounded, the same Who was and is; Who was both above time, and came under time, and was invisible and is seen. He was in the beginning and was with God, and was God.7