Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. (15 page)

Jesus was, by his nature, the most successful religious teacher in antiquity. His appearance, his voice, his words, his unique combination of authority and gentleness, made him attractive to people of all ages, classes, and races. And he cured the sick, though usually privately and at their entreaty. He never used a cure for demonstrative ends. Still, his powers were there, and were known to be there. So almost from the first day of his ministry, he attracted the attention of the authorities, especially the religious ones. They feared him. They saw him as a threat to their positions and even their lives. The high priest Caiaphas, a devious and artful operator who hugely valued and enjoyed his power as spiritual leader of the orthodox Jewish community, got on very well with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, and Herod Antipas, the leading secular Jewish petty king of the area, and he wanted to keep relations as they were. A Jewish popular preacher whom he did not control was a threat to his authority, and if his teaching turned out to be revolutionary, there could be a tumult, for which he would be blamed. As Jesus’s fame spread, and the number of people he could attract increased, so the threat appeared to grow. News that he had persuaded more than five thousand people to ascend a mountain and hear him preach there, and then by a “miracle” fed them heartily with fishes and loaves, filled the ruling priests with terror. What if he did this in a city? Could he not then take it over by force? What if he did it in Jerusalem itself? Then he could occupy it, proclaim himself another King David, and become priest-king. The Romans would then pull out, except from the Antonia fortress, return with reinforcements from Syria in massive strength, take the city, massacre all its Jewish inhabitants, including and especially the priests, and raze it to the ground. They were quite capable of doing so; indeed, they had done so to other rebellious cities in their empire. The priests trembled for their lives as well as their jobs and property. And in a sense they were right to fear, for such a catastrophe actually occurred a generation later, about AD 70, and Jerusalem was taken; indeed, about 132, after a further tumult, it was literally destroyed, leaving not a stone standing erect. Yet they never made a serious effort to discover exactly what Jesus was teaching and quite how he saw his ministry reaching its climax. They periodically sent spies or agents provocateurs to get him to provide damaging verbal evidence to be used later to put him to death. But they never accepted his assurances that the Kingdom he spoke of was a spiritual one, not of this world. It was alien to their nature to recognize a holy man without worldly ambitions. They were corrupt and materialistic, unable to recognize spiritual goodness when they saw it. They did not exactly deny Jesus’s power, but they claimed it was the work of the devil, just as the spiritual potentates of contemporary Iran call their opponents Satan.

Jesus certainly had no wish to challenge the high priesthood. For three years he made every effort to avoid a direct confrontation. He went to the populous centers of Judaea, and especially Jerusalem, only rarely, and then without display. He concealed or used only under pressing entreaty his powers. He begged those he healed not to boast about what had happened. He often taught in private houses or in the open countryside or by the shore of the Sea of Galilee, so as to provoke authority as little as possible. He never spoke against Roman rule—quite the contrary—and if he criticized Jewish leadership it was on spiritual grounds alone. Externally there was nothing revolutionary about him, a friendly, kindly figure telling people to be meek, praising humility, loving the poor, and asking all to turn the other cheek. What harm could he possibly do?

But in one sense he was a revolutionary. He asked for a revolution in the hearts of men and women—a turning from worldliness to spiritual life. And that was enough to cause a popular effervescence which in turn detonated the crisis. Moreover, though Jesus was always careful to avoid antagonizing the priests deliberately, he knew that his destiny was to be a sacrifice, and that his life would be lost by speaking the truth. He always did speak the truth—“I am the way, the truth, and the life” was his rule, his slogan, his motto, his manifesto—and he tended to speak it more clearly and vehemently as his ministry progressed. The religious leaders constantly planned to seize him and have him put to death. They would have done so on half a dozen occasions, but either Jesus slipped away before they could seize him or the crowds surrounding him were too enthusiastic and large to make it possible without a pitched battle, which they might have lost. The priests had an armed force of Temple guards, but it was a matter of argument whether they had the power, either secular or spiritual, to pronounce let alone carry out a death sentence. In John the Baptist’s case they had been spared the trouble by the machinations of Herodias and the sinuous skills of her daughter Salome. Against Jesus they hoped to stir up an angry Jewish mob to stone him to death. But there was never much chance of that. He was too popular. It is true that the priests could, given sufficient warning, assemble a crowd of household servants, up to a thousand, who could carry out a public demonstration. In the end that is exactly what they did do. As they controlled the limited access to the forecourt of the governor’s palace, the demonstration appeared effective. Modern experience teaches us how easily these official protests can be staged by the authorities.

Two events finally decided the priests to act, and made their action possible. Shortly before the Passover feast in the spring, Jesus raised from the dead his friend Lazarus, brother of Martha and Mary and a man well known and much loved among the community both in Bethany, where his home lay, and in Jerusalem. The texts suggest a certain reluctance on Jesus’s part, though they do not actually say he deliberately delayed. As it turned out, Lazarus had been dead four days before Jesus arrived at his sealed tomb and shouted to him to come out. There could be no question that Lazarus’s resurrection was a miraculous event. There were many witnesses both to his death and to his reappearance. There could have been no trickery and no other explanation than that a miraculous event had taken place. It was the talk of Jerusalem, and the priests were alarmed. Indeed, they finally made up their minds to take action against the man who could (in their view) summon Satan to his aid. They also planned to kill Lazarus before he could publicize what had happened to him.

The second event was Jesus’s own decision that the time to make his sacrifice, for which he had been put on earth, had come, and to make a public entry into Jerusalem. There is a hint of this, earlier, in Luke: “And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem” (9 : 51). It was always especially dangerous for him to set foot in the city, and particularly so after the Lazarus affair. In St. John’s account, which is the most specific about the chronology, he began Passion Week on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, by having supper at Lazarus’s house with Martha, Mary, and other friends. Mary took “a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.” This deliberate reenactment of the charitable act of the sinful woman at the house of Simon the Pharisee aroused the anger of Judas Iscariot, the keeper of the funds used by the disciples. But when he said (being a thief, as John writes), “Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” Jesus said, “Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always” (Jn 12 : 3-8).

This hint of his approaching death was ignored, and the next day he and his party set off publicly to enter the big city. Everyone knew. The crowds were immense. Jesus sat on “a young ass,” and the people “[t]ook branches of palm trees and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord!” (Jn 12:13-14). Jesus, knowing his time had come, made no attempt to stop this acclamation, which would later be celebrated in Christian churches as Palm Sunday. Jesus let the excitement die down, and instead of working miracles, as the priests had expected, he spent the next three days, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, largely in prayer on the Mount of Olives outside the city. Meanwhile, Judas Iscariot, tempted by Satan, went to the priests and asked, “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him” (Mt 26 : 15-16). The best occasion, he decided, was on the Thursday, after supper, when Jesus went to the mount to pray. It would be dark, with no one about, and he would (he said) indicate which was Jesus by kissing him in greeting. The priests, who feared a Jesus mob in the daytime, agreed, and said they would be there with their Temple guards.

The Passover, or feast of unleavened bread in the Jewish calendar, was spread over several days. Thursday was a feast day, followed by a fast (Friday), then the Passover (Saturday). The disciples asked Jesus on Tuesday where he wished to have the feast. He told two of his disciples: “Go ye into the city, and there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water: follow him. And wheresoever he shall go in, say ye to the goodman of the house, The Master saith, Where is the guestchamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he will shew you a large upper room furnished and prepared: there make ready for us” (Mk 14:13-15). They obeyed. It was as he said, and on the Thursday evening the Twelve sat down together.

Judas Iscariot was among them, for he needed to identify Jesus to the Temple guards when they came to make the arrest, as arranged, later in the evening. John, who identifies himself in his narrative—“Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved” (13 : 23)—quotes Jesus as saying he was “troubled in spirit” and that “one of you shall betray me.” Then “the disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom he spake.” Peter beckoned to John

We find it curious that Jesus’s warnings against betrayal did not alarm the eleven apostles more: for their lives, too, were at risk. Nor did they take much notice of Jesus’s repeated indications that his supreme sacrifice was at hand. It might have been different if women had been present at the Last Supper. They were more sensitive to these hints: to signs and dreams, to sighs and evidence of worry on Jesus’s part. But his mother, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, and Martha and Mary of Bethany, and Joanna and Susanna (whose means probably paid the bill for the feast) were not invited. This was an all-male occasion, as often with Passover meals. Jesus wished it so. According to Luke, he began the meal by saying: “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (22 : 15). He also, according to John, wished to perform a last ceremony of humility by washing his apostles’ feet (13:4-12). He “laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.” Peter protested.

According to the three synoptics (Mt 26:26-30; Mk 14: 22-26; Lk 22:14-20), Jesus used the supper to institute a symbolic ceremony linking the eating of bread and drinking of wine with the coming sacrifice of his body and the shedding of his blood. The words are important and they are almost identical in the three accounts, and parts are repeated in the Acts of the Apostles (2:42-46, 20:7) and Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (1:10:16, 11:24-25). Jesus said that the supper was the last meal he would eat before his sacrifice, and the last wine he would drink, “until the kingdom of God shall come” (Lk 22:18). Then Luke describes what followed: “And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body, which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul stresses Jesus’s command, given by Luke: “This do in remembrance of me.”

It is curious that John, who was present, does not record these words by which Jesus instituted the sacrament of Holy Communion, which was placed at the center of the ceremony performed whenever Christians gathered together within two decades of Jesus’s death, and has remained such ever since. But John had already recorded Jesus using similar words, calling himself “the bread of life” at the feeding of the five thousand: “I am the living bread . . . the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (6 : 51). Moreover, John gives instead a long eschatological address, dealing with death, judgment, hell, and heaven, which Jesus intended as his last serious message to his disciples, and which included some of his most memorable sayings: “Abide in me, and I in you.” “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.” “In my father’s house are many mansions. . . . I go to prepare a place for you.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” “A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me: and, Because I go to the Father?” (15:4, 5; 14:1, 2, 6, 27; 15:13; 16:17).