Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (10 page)

Jesus, attracting crowds to himself by his authoritative explications of the scriptures and his unusual power to heal those who suffer, sees a large multitude headed his way. He trudges up a mountainside and addresses the crowded valley (which must have had very good acoustics) thus:

Well, with one or two possible exceptions, this doesn’t seem a happy lot. What’s happy about the poor (“in spirit” or otherwise), the afflicted, and the persecuted? Empty stomachs that hunger and dry throats that thirst don’t sound so happy; peacemakers usually get their comeuppance; and is anyone more persecuted than “the pure in heart”? “Happy the unhappy,” we might say in summary. But these are the
Beatitudes, as central to Jesus’s teaching as the Lord’s Prayer will be and—for Matthew, at least—Jesus’s basic program.

Once again, we see the apocalyptic imagination at work, concentrating on a future of rewards beyond earthly time, but—as is becoming part of Jesus’s signature approach—not
bothering to mention the destruction of the wicked persecutors or to emphasize some coming conflagration. Some of the “happy” ones are clearly miserable for the moment—the afflicted (or, in another translation, “those in mourning”), the undemanding (“the meek” being the usual translation), the pure, and the persecuted—all of whom are persecuted in one way or another and appear to have had their way of life thrust upon them. Others—the poor in spirit, the champions of
justice for the downtrodden, the merciful, the peacemakers—seem to have chosen their way. The division points to Jesus’s two audiences: the powerless, who need to be reminded that God loves them and will see to their ultimate triumph, and the powerful, who need to be goaded by the example of those who have abandoned their comfort for the sake of others. The
purpose of the Gospel is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

There courses through the
Beatitudes the strong current of Jewish ethics, that countercultural tendency so opposed to the majority societies of the ancient world. Like the prophets before him, Jesus wants justice. Even if he does not harangue as they did, there can be no doubt of his profound commitment to their ideals. As
Amos had warned the people of Israel, they were all about to be destroyed because they ignored the poor; as
Micah told
Judah, the only things necessary to avoid the coming catastrophe were to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” Jesus does not speak of destruction or enslavement. Instead of lashing out with threats, he holds up an ideal—or rather ideals, which are all humbly concrete: become one with the poor, defend their undefended interests, be sympathetic and forgiving toward others, make peace wherever you can. If you do these things, you will be happy. Indeed,
these are the only ways to happiness. Power is an illusion and its exercise an excuse for cruelty. It is the misuse of power that is responsible for poverty, oppression, injustice, war, and torture. Not exactly inspiration for Alexander, Augustus, or their admiring biographers.

Jesus does not mention Alexander or Augustus. His references to oppression, war, torture, and the poverty created by military conquest are indirect. But within a world that worshiped the emperor and his sword (not to speak of his armies of soldiers and bureaucrats), this bold challenge to the existing mindset was unmistakable and arresting. People stopped and listened. Matthew tells us that news of this new preacher spread all over the province of
Syria, and, besides the small band of companions he had already attracted, “large crowds followed him, coming from
Galilee, the Decapolis,
Jerusalem,
Judea, and
Transjordan.”

The discourse at the beginning of which Matthew sets the
Beatitudes is always called the “
Sermon on the Mount,” but we know that the author (or, better, the final editor) of this gospel is not recounting here a single event but has arranged much of the material he found in Q into a digest of Jesus’s essential message. Having enunciated his basic program, Jesus is now depicted by Matthew as going on to provide a commentary on the
Torah, the Law (or, better,
Way of Life) of the Jewish people as outlined for them in their most sacred texts, the
Five Books of Moses. This commentary is so important within Matthew’s framework that it is worth quoting in its entirety:

It is one thing to tell people that they may not murder one another without losing their own lives; but it is quite another to say that we may not even dress someone down or make fun of him or exclude him from our midst—or hellfire may be the consequence! What would happen if men could not
divorce their wives? (Among the Jews, a man could obtain a
get
, or “writ of dismissal,” for as trivial a reason as bad cooking. But there were no grounds under which a woman could obtain a
get
against her husband—and it is the sexual injustice of such procedures that Jesus is principally objecting to.) And don’t
look on a woman with lust? Earth to Jesus: Hel
lo!
(Of course, what Jesus is objecting to here is not spontaneous arousal but sexual oppression—the ease with which any man of the ancient world, especially a well-connected one, could arrange to satisfy himself on any woman he wished, her wishes in the matter being beside the point.) In a world where Alexander the Great was the supreme icon, ideas like “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies” must have struck many as positively hilarious. Certainly, in the atmosphere of first-century Judea, where the brutal examples of the Seleucids, the Caesars, and the Hasmoneans held the cultural spotlight, this advice would have sounded even more unrealistic than it does to us.

There is no question that Jesus is using metaphor and exaggeration to make his points. Judgment by the Sanhedrin, being thrown into jail, exile to Gehenna are metaphors. He is not really urging that you should slice off your testicles to stop unwanted erections (though in the third century, poor, humorless
Origen, taking this passage literally, will do great damage to himself). I do not mean to make Jesus the first stand-up Jewish comedian; but to get the tone here, one must hear the irony (and something close to self-mockery) in Jesus’s voice—he knows perfectly well that he’s asking the impossible—and one must see the great crowd, buzzing with confusion, and observe the light dawning in some faces as they come to realize what he is
really
talking about.

It is precisely the entitlement of the powerful and the disfranchisement of the powerless that make life so unlivable. And whether this enshrined and permanent injustice, taken for granted by all, issues in war, torture, and all the grand oppressions to which the
Beatitudes allude or just in the petty tortures that we visit on one another—the casual oppression of
women by men, the interior wounds caused by quotidian mean-spiritedness, exclusiveness, and theatrical mendacity—spirit is crushed and ordinary life is made a torment.

Whereas Mark’s Jesus speaks in blunt staccato phrases (“The Time has come”)—not unlike a certain inspired fisherman—Matthew’s subtle, balanced Jesus exhibits mastery of intellectual discourse, an attention to detail that verges on the legalistic, and a profound reverence for the godliness of Jewish tradition, all of which are likely to have been heightened by the mind and memories of Matthew, the well-schooled Jewish tax collector and Roman employee. However that may be, each portrait of Jesus has been given its peculiar style by the hand, personality, and life experiences of the artist who stands behind the portrait. And yet, both portraits are patently of the same Jesus, who preaches prophetic justice—that unique, inflexible ethic of Jewish religious tradition which insists that the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized be taken care of—but graciously encloses his words in a gentleness that was hardly the hallmark of the old Hebrew prophets. This is Jewish justice, all right, but justice tempered by an affectionate mercy.

J
ESUS
KEEPS
TWO
AUDIENCES
clearly in view: the poor and miserable; and those who, because they are neither poor nor miserable, have a religious obligation to stand in solidarity with those at the bottom of the sociopsychological heap. For those at the bottom, their only “obligation” (if that is not too strong a word) is to trust in God’s mercy. But the obligation of those on top is to exhibit God’s mercy toward those who have nothing. Mark, Matthew, and Luke all recount the
story of the young man who runs up and kneels before Jesus, pleading:

The young man rejects this loving invitation, not to the Kingdom which Jesus has already promised him on account of his good life, but to something more—the high honor of service to the poor and companionship with Jesus. “His face fell,” Mark tells us, “and he went away sad, because he was very rich.” This exchange alerts us to the fact that Jesus is not so much issuing “commandments” as offering invitations. And however uninviting some of these invitations may appear, Jesus insists that, if only we would look at the world through his eyes, we would see that even the harshest life can be full of comfort and the mercy of God.