I would like to take a brief diversion from the Book of Job and look at another subject which I have previously touched on: the person of Christ. I've had the opportunity to prepare for a presentation on this subject recently, and would like to expand on some of my thoughts here. It's a common refrain to hear: "I believe that Jesus was a good man who taught a lot of good things, but I don't think he was God." Now, Jesus of Nazareth is an endlessly fascinating man- and the more you learn about the context in which he lived, the more interesting he becomes- but I don't think he left us that option.¹ In short, good men don't say the kinds of things Christ said about himself. I would like to start off by considering four things he said, one from each Gospel, in increasing order of outrageousness; the first two will be from Mark and Matthew.

A word on methodology: I'm going to treat each text as though it's the closest thing to what Jesus actually said (translated as it is from Greek, which would itself have been a rendering of his original Aramaic). There may be readers who object to this; after all, aren't these spurious documents, composed by scheming cabals of religious elites, patched together by clumsy redactors and accepted uncritically by the blind, faithful masses? Have a little patience; I will get to that (though it will not be in this post, and probably not the next).

Holier than thou

Let's start off with what Mark's Gospel has to offer. Consider the passage below:

1 - And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home.
2 - And many were gathered together, so that there was no more room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them.
3 - And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men.
4 - And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay.
5 - And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
6 - Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts,
7 - “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
8 - And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts?
9 - Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?
10 - But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” — he said to the paralytic —
11 - “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.”
12 - And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”
Mark 2:1-12

You could write a book's worth on this passage alone; I'm sure people have. I will try and be brief. Jesus claims that he, the "Son of Man" (there's quite the rabbit trail) has authority on earth to forgive sins. To put it perfectly inadequately, this is a little unusual. If you were to cheat me somehow- if I entrusted you with ten pounds, for example, and found later on that you had gone and spent it- I would be well within my rights to forgive you. After all, the injustice has been committed against me directly. However, if you were to cheat somebody else out of ten pounds, I would have no business forgiving you whatsoever; if it did not indicate lunacy, then it would at least indicate an abnormally large ego.

Some people try to avoid the implications of this by saying "well, perhaps he's just a man who's been given authority; after all, priests in the Temple could forgive people's sins." Interesting hypothesis. I have to point out the glaring problem that Jesus isn't a kohen (a temple priest; see resources below); he isn't even from the Tribe of Levi. I also have to note that there's no reference to God in either pronouncement. A mere prophet would surely have called upon Adonai to work a miracle; here there is no such thing. Jesus tells the man in the plainest and most prosaic terms that his sins are forgiven, and then to pick up his stuff and go home. In working this miracle, Jesus makes no reference to anyone but Jesus.

And then we have the scribes' reaction: "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Evidently Jesus knew that they were thinking this. Now, if I were in a similar position (not being God, but having been given some divine leeway to work miracles in the name of God), the very first thing I would do would be to clarify "well, hang on a minute, I'm not actually claiming Godhood. I'm just using some of my delegated authority. Don't get your tzitzit in a twist." But Jesus does virtually the exact opposite; he deliberately confounds the situation by saying he can both heal the man and forgive his sins, while leaving the scribes' actual concern- that he was doing something only God can do- entirely unaddressed. For a man (and nothing but a man) who had the power to read hearts and minds, he was a terrible communicator- if he was merely a man.

On the hypothesis that Jesus was simply a good person who taught about morals and did some light exposition of the Torah from time to time, this is hard to explain. He's claiming a level of authority that transcends anything allotted to us mere mortals. He has no priestly authority; not in the conventional sense, at least. When challenged with an apparent misunderstanding- that he is exercising a privilege reserved only for the God of Israel- not only does he do nothing to rectify the situation, but he actively makes it worse. I am inclined to agree with old Clive (see below); if this man is not God in the flesh, he is either history's most audacious liar, or a man who has completely lost his mind. Merely good men do not say such things.

A mother hen's lament

And then we have Matthew's Gospel. Jesus has come to Jerusalem in triumph, and, as one might expect, has decided to go into the Temple and pronounce seven woes to the scribes and Pharisees. At the end of his diatribe, he comes out with something very strange:

37 - “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
38 - See, your house is left to you desolate.
39 - For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
Matthew 23:37-39

Setting aside the maternal language which Jesus uses (which is very interesting and something I want to look at in the future, likely when I cover Julian of Norwich) this is a bizarre thing to say. "How often would I have gathered your children together"? What's this man talking about? He's a thirty-something carpenter from Galilee. He's not exactly the High Priest (and I think that even Caiaphas himself would have hesitated to say anything so bold). One would have thought that Jesus of Nazareth- lowly craftsman and humble wandering rabbi- would be among those gathered, not the one doing the gathering. In fact, to gather the people of Israel would seem (funnily enough) to be the sole prerogative of the Most High:

The LORD builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel.
Psalm 147:2

And consider that Jesus's lament comes directly on the heels of something equally outrageous:

Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town...
Matthew 23:34

Bear in mind where Jesus is when he says all this. He's standing in the grounds of the Jerusalem Temple, the holiest site in the land, the joining-place of Heaven and Earth. For any pious Jew, this should be a place of the utmost reverence and reserve. There is no holier ground upon which to stand. By all rights Jesus should be going meekly about his business, buying doves for an offering, perhaps asking the resident scribes for a point of clarification on some confusing matter of Torah. Instead, he's shouting curses at them, denouncing their murder of prophets past and future, and claiming to be the One who sent those prophets to them.

The more I dwell on this scene, the more I find myself wondering how absurd it must have looked. Here is a man otherwise plain and unassuming, standing in the Temple courts, making thunderous proclamations of doom against the Pharisees, lamenting the violence they had done to the prophets- prophets, by the way, which he personally had sent to them. It must have been truly bewildering to see it happen. The bystanders must surely have asked- who is he? What on Earth gives him the right to say such things? And what does he mean by "your house is left to you desolate"? What does he think he's going to do to the Temple?

We return here to the infamous trilemma. The placid moral teacher of popular imagination is nowhere in sight. When we come into the Temple, we find a terrifying figure, hard-eyed and dusty from the road, calling down wrath from the heavens upon the great city and her rulers. Every slight they have ever committed- every drop of prophets' blood shed- he counts as a slight against himself. In this case, I find both the "liar" and "lunatic" options almost as unsatisfactory. The man stands to gain nothing by confusing his own person with that of God; he would have done just as well to denounce the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and stop.

Similarly, his denunciation is too cogent and artful to be the work of an impaired mind. The twenty-third chapter of Matthew is a rhetorical masterpiece. The Pharisees tithe the most insubstantial of herbs, and ignore the weight of the true law; they are like tombs, painted pure white on the outside yet full of death on the inside; they strain out gnats and swallow camels. These things were not crafted by a man out of his mind. On the contrary, when I read this chapter, what jumps out at me is the brightness and the clarity of thought behind it. The man who uttered these words was one who saw much further and more clearly than his contemporaries; indeed, more so than most alive today. And yet there are those strange inconveniences interspersed; with all that force and all that insight, he still seems to think that he is God. What do we make of that?

Fording the river

The two passages I have considered here give us two perspectives on the character of this strange and remarkable figure. In the first, we have the tender healing hand, the eyes lit up with love and mercy, the verdict of forgiveness passed on a sinful man; in the second, that same hand is outstretched in a gesture of wrath against the edifice of the Temple, and those same eyes have turned dark as they look upon filth and corruption, and the verdict passed is one of doom. And in each case there is an unsettling undercurrent running through them. He confronts sin and injustice as though they are personal affronts. He forgives that which he has no earthly right to forgive; he claims a power which no earthly authority could claim. He is the one who forgives sin, the one who sends out the prophets, the one who watches over Jerusalem, and the one who will render a dreadful account for all wrong done.

I think it is safe to say that very little of this has infiltrated our typical perception of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jesus we tend to encounter is at best a vague notion, something about morality and "turn the other cheek" and "do unto others". Asking ten people on the street, you would get the general impression that he was just a teacher, concerned that people abide by the correct moral precepts and not cause trouble. He might have had some good ideas, but the man himself, though balanced, was bland and unobtrusive and without weight. Even in church we often find him depicted, in C. S. Lewis's words, "with the face of a consumptive girl".²

I contend that all this runs utterly contrary to the real Jesus, the one we meet in the Gospels, who seems a mixture of wild contradictions. If he is balanced, it is not because of any absence of gravity, but because he holds in tension a set of impossible weights. One gets the impression of a mind as vast and deep as the ocean, turning in unfathomable rhythms and currents. When it is brought to bear upon the world, it manifests with an overwhelming intensity that cannot be looked at directly, but what it leaves in its wake demands a thousand years' contemplation.

We will look at two more examples in the next post, one from Luke's Gospel and one from John's Gospel. For now I think we should reflect on the sheer disjunct between Jesus as popularly imagined and Jesus as the Gospels present him. We may react to him with confusion, with love, with indignance, with shock; the one thing we may not do is take him lightly.

For further consideration

The Temple priesthood:
Wikipedia | Kohen
My Jewish Learning | What Are Kohanim, or Jewish ‘Priests’?
Chabad | Priesthood: Kohen (כֹּהֵן)

If you were confused by the reference to "old Clive" (he also went by "Jack"):
Wikipedia | C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis Institute

Herod's Temple:
Wikipedia | Second Temple
Encyclopedia Britannica | Temple of Jerusalem

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