Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (20 page)

After the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem, the
early Christian church tried desperately to distance Jesus from the zealous nationalism
that had led to that awful war. As a result, statements such as “love your enemies”
and “turn the other cheek” were deliberately cleansed of their Jewish context and
transformed into abstract ethical principles that all peoples could abide regardless
of their ethnic, cultural, or religious persuasions.

Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose
sight of this fundamental fact:
Jesus of Nazareth was first and finally a Jew
. As a Jew, Jesus was concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews. Israel
was all that mattered to Jesus. He insisted that his mission was “solely to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24) and commanded his disciples to share
the good news with none but their fellow Jews: “Go nowhere near the gentiles and do
not enter the city of the Samaritans” (Matthew 10:5–6). Whenever he himself encountered
gentiles, he always kept them at a distance and often healed them reluctantly. As
he explained to the Syrophoenician woman who came to him seeking help for her daughter,
“Let the children [by which Jesus means Israel] be fed first, for it is not right
to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs [by which he means gentiles
like her]” (Mark 7:27).

When it came to the heart and soul of the Jewish faith—the Law of Moses—Jesus was
adamant that his mission was not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17).
That law made a clear distinction between relations
among
Jews and relations
between
Jews and foreigners. The oft-repeated commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself”
was originally given strictly in the context of internal relations within Israel.
The verse in question reads: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge
against any of your people
, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). To the Israelites,
as well as to Jesus’s community in first-century Palestine, “neighbor” meant one’s
fellow Jews. With regard to the treatment of foreigners and outsiders, oppressors
and occupiers, however, the Torah could not be clearer: “You shall drive
them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods.
They shall not live in your land
” (Exodus 23:31–33).

For those who view Jesus as the literally begotten son of God, Jesus’s Jewishness
is immaterial. If Christ is divine, then he stands above any particular law or custom.
But for those seeking the simple Jewish peasant and charismatic preacher who lived
in Palestine two thousand years ago, there is nothing more important than this one
undeniable truth: the same God whom the Bible calls “a man of war” (Exodus 15:3),
the God who repeatedly commands the wholesale slaughter of every foreign man, woman,
and child who occupies the land of the Jews, the “blood-spattered God” of Abraham,
and Moses, and Jacob, and Joshua (Isaiah 63:3), the God who “shatters the heads of
his enemies,” bids his warriors to bathe their feet in their blood and leave their
corpses to be eaten by dogs (Psalms 68:21–23)—that is the
only
God that Jesus knew and the
sole
God he worshipped.

There is no reason to consider Jesus’s conception of his neighbors and enemies to
have been any more or less expansive than that of any other Jew of his time. His commands
to “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” must be read as being directed exclusively
at his fellow Jews and meant as a model of peaceful relations exclusively within the
Jewish community. The commands have nothing to do with how to treat foreigners and
outsiders, especially those savage “plunderers of the world” who occupied God’s land
in direct violation of the Law of Moses, which Jesus viewed himself as fulfilling.
They shall not live in your land
.

In any case, neither the commandment to love one’s enemies nor the plea to turn the
other cheek is equivalent to a call for nonviolence or nonresistance. Jesus was not
a fool. He understood what every other claimant to the mantle of the messiah understood:
God’s sovereignty could not be established except through force. “From the days of
John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of God has been coming violently, and the violent
ones try to snatch it away” (Matthew 11:12 | Luke 16:16).

It was precisely to prepare for the unavoidable consequences of establishing the Kingdom
of God on earth that Jesus handpicked his twelve apostles. The Jews of Jesus’s time
believed that a day would come when the twelve tribes of Israel would be reconstituted
to once again form a single, united nation. The prophets had predicted it: “I shall
restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah, says the Lord, and I shall bring
them back to the land that I gave their ancestors and they shall take possession of
it” (Jeremiah 30:3). By designating the Twelve and promising that they would “sit
on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28 | Luke 22:28–30),
Jesus was signaling that the day they had been waiting for, when the Lord of Hosts
would “break the yoke from off the neck” of the Jews and “burst their bonds” (Jeremiah
30:8), had arrived. The restoration and renewal of the
true
nation of Israel, which John the Baptist had preached, was finally at hand. The Kingdom
of God was here.

This was a daring and provocative message. For as the prophet Isaiah warned, God would
“gather the scattered people of Israel and the dispersed people of Judah” for a single
purpose:
war
. The new, reconstituted Israel will, in the words of the prophet, “raise a signal-banner
to the nations,” it will “swoop down on the backs of the Philistines in the west”
and “plunder the people of the east.” It will repossess the land God gave the Jews
and wipe from it forever the foul stench of foreign occupation (Isaiah 11:11–16).

The designation of the Twelve is, if not a call to war, an admission of its inevitability,
which is why Jesus expressly warned them of what was to come: “If anyone wishes to
follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
This is not the statement of self-denial it has so often been interpreted as being.
The cross is the punishment for sedition, not a symbol of self-abnegation. Jesus was
warning the Twelve that their status as the embodiment of the twelve tribes that will
reconstitute the nation of Israel and throw off the yoke of occupation would rightly
be understood by Rome as treason and thus inevitably lead to
crucifixion. It was an admission that Jesus frequently made for himself. Over and
over again, Jesus reminded his disciples of what lay ahead for him: rejection, arrest,
torture, and execution (Matthew 16:21, 17:22–23, 20:18–19; Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33;
Luke 9:22, 44, 18:32–33). It could be argued that the evangelists, who were writing
decades after the events they described, knew that Jesus’s story would end on a cross
in Golgotha, and so they put these predictions into Jesus’s mouth to prove his prowess
as a prophet. But the sheer volume of Jesus’s statements about his inevitable capture
and crucifixion indicates that his frequent self-prophecies may be historical. Then
again, it does not take a prophet to predict what happens to someone who challenges
either the priestly control of the Temple or the Roman occupation of Palestine. The
road ahead for Jesus and the Twelve had been made manifest by the many messianic aspirants
who came before him. The destination was clear.

That explains why Jesus went to such lengths to hide the truth about the Kingdom of
God from all but his disciples. Jesus recognized that the new world order he envisioned
was so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response
to it would be to arrest and execute them all for sedition. He therefore consciously
chose to veil the Kingdom of God in abstruse and enigmatic parables that are nearly
impossible to understand. “The secret of the Kingdom of God has been given to you
to know,” Jesus tells his disciples. “But to outsiders, everything is said in parables
so that they may see and not perceive, they may hear and not understand” (Mark 4:11–12).

What, then, is the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings? It is at once the joyous wedding
feast within the king’s royal hall, and the blood-soaked streets outside its walls.
It is a treasure hidden in a field; sell all you have and buy that field (Matthew
13:44). It is a pearl tucked inside a shell; sacrifice everything to seek out that
shell (Matthew 13:45). It is a mustard seed—the smallest of seeds—buried in soil.
One day soon it will bloom into a majestic tree, and
birds shall nest in its branches (Matthew 13:31–32). It is a net drawn from the sea,
bursting with fish both good and bad; the good shall be kept, the bad discarded (Matthew
13:47). It is a meadow choking with both weeds and wheat. When the reaper comes, he
will harvest the wheat. But the weeds he will bundle together and toss into the fire
(Matthew 13:24–30). And the reaper is nearly here. God’s will is about to be done
on earth, just as it is in heaven. So then, take your hand off the plow and do not
look back, let the dead bury the dead, leave behind your husband and your wife, your
brothers and sisters and children, and prepare yourself to receive the Kingdom of
God. “Already, the ax is laid at the root of the tree.”

Of course, none of Jesus’s obfuscations about the meaning and implications of the
Kingdom of God would keep him from being seized and crucified. Jesus’s assertion that
the present order was about to be reversed, that the rich and the powerful were going
to be made poor and weak, that the twelve tribes of Israel would soon be reconstituted
into a single nation and God made once again the sole ruler in Jerusalem—none of these
provocative statements would have been well received in the Temple, where the high
priest reigned, or the Antonia Fortress, where Rome governed. After all, if the Kingdom
of God, as Jesus presented it, was in fact a real, physical kingdom, then did it not
require a real, physical king? Was not Jesus claiming for himself that royal title?
He promised a throne for each of his twelve apostles. Did he not have in mind a throne
for himself?

Granted, Jesus provided no specifics about the new world order he envisioned (though
neither did any other royal claimant of his time). There are no practical programs,
no detailed agendas, no specific political or economic recommendations in Jesus’s
teachings about the Kingdom of God. He seems to have had no interest at all in laying
out how God’s reign on earth would actually function. That was for God alone to determine.
But there is no question that Jesus had a clear vision for his own role in the Kingdom
of God: “If by the finger of God I cast out demons, then surely the Kingdom of God
has come upon you.”

The presence of the Kingdom of God had empowered Jesus to heal the sick and the demon-possessed.
But at the same time, it was Jesus’s healings and exorcisms that were bringing the
Kingdom of God to fruition. It was, in other words, a symbiotic relationship. As God’s
agent on earth—the one who wielded God’s finger—Jesus himself was ushering in the
Kingdom of God and establishing God’s dominion through his miraculous actions. He
was, in effect, the Kingdom of God personified. Who else should sit on God’s throne?

No wonder, then, that at the end of his life, when he stood beaten and bruised before
Pontius Pilate to answer the charges made against him, Jesus was asked but a single
question. It was the only question that mattered, the only question he would have
been brought before the Roman governor to answer before being sent off to the cross
to receive the standard punishment for all rebels and insurrectionists.

“Are you the King of the Jews?”

Who Do You Say I Am?

Two years have passed, more or less, since Jesus of Nazareth first met John the Baptist
at the lip of the Jordan River and followed him into the Judean desert. In that time,
Jesus has not only carried on his master’s message about the Kingdom of God; he has
expanded it into a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed—a
movement founded upon the promise that God would soon intervene on behalf of the meek
and the poor, that he would smite the imperial Roman power just as he smote Pharaoh’s
army so long ago and free his Temple from the hands of the hypocrites who controlled
it. Jesus’s movement has drawn to him a corps of zealous disciples, twelve of whom
have been given the authority to preach his message on their own. In every town and
city they enter, in the villages and the countryside, great crowds gather to hear
Jesus and his disciples preach, and to take part in the free healings and exorcisms
they offer to those who seek their help.

Despite their relative success, however, Jesus and his disciples have for the most
part restricted their activities to the northern provinces of Galilee, Phoenicia,
and Gaulanitis, wisely keeping a safe distance from Judea and the seat of the Roman
occupation in Jerusalem. They have cut a circuitous route through the Galilean
countryside, altogether bypassing the royal cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias, lest
they confront the tetrarch’s forces. Although they’ve approached the prosperous ports
of Tyre and Sidon, they have refrained from actually entering either. They have rambled
along the edge of the Decapolis, yet strictly avoided the Greek cities themselves
and the heathen populations therein. In place of the region’s wealthy cosmopoleis,
Jesus has focused his attention on poorer villages such as Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethsaida,
and Nain, where his promise of a new world order has been eagerly received, as well
as on the coastal towns that rim the Sea of Galilee, save for Tiberias, of course,
where Herod Antipas stews on his throne.