Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (16 page)

Jesus, who referred to himself by the (at least retrospectively) ironic title “the
Son of Man,” has been proved to be also “the Son of God” by virtue of his resurrection. But how do we—all the rest of the sons and daughters of Man—get to tag along in his train as the Sons and Daughters of God? How does Jesus, born of woman, redeem us (that is, buy us back from
slavery), so that we can “receive adoption” as God’s children? To work this out, we have to take humanity and human flesh as seriously as Paul (and all the Jews) did. The human race—“all flesh,” as it is called repeatedly in the sacred scriptures of the Jews—is a unity. Just as all Adam’s descendants were subject to the blight of his disobedience, the advent of a perfectly obedient man—
“obedient unto death, to death upon a cross”—raised “all flesh” with him.
Adam—the name means “earthman,” thus signaling that he is symbolic of mankind—could not content himself with human status but wished to be “a god,” and so brought on himself and all his descendants the fall from grace and “the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Jesus, by accepting his creatureliness and all the severest limitations of fallen human status, including
suffering and death, has reversed that fall. “As it was because of one man that death [and all the lesser forms of disaster, decay, and disharmony] came,” wrote Paul to his Corinthians, “so because of one man has come the
resurrection of the dead. Just as all die in Adam, so in Christ shall all be revived.”

Like all the
early believers in Jesus, Paul knew better than to imagine that Jesus’s resurrection had brought about the end of suffering. They were living at the
beginning
of the end-time that Jesus’s victory had initiated, but of the actual end they “knew not the day nor the hour.” Though they would certainly be surprised to be informed that two thousand years would pass without a sign of Jesus’s return, they were not crackpot millenarians who thought they could calculate exactly what would happen next and when it would happen. The majority of early converts came from the same stratum of society that Jesus had come from: they were working-class artisans and had neither the leisure nor the inclination to imagine themselves exempt from any of the ills “that flesh is heir to.” They would be “in the world but not of it”: they would continue to occupy whatever position was their lot, cheerfully accepting its sufferings, but they would not allow themselves to be infected by the cynical, self-serving values of the world they found themselves inhabiting.

They would live in this world and share its sufferings, as Jesus had done. These sufferings, however, were not merely to
be endured but welcomed as if they were each individual’s share in the sufferings of Jesus, in whose sufferings, because he is the new Adam, we all have a share. “All of us,” writes Paul in his final epistolary instruction, “when we were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death.” In baptism, in our immersion, we descend, as Jesus did, to the depths of human misery. But our trajectory, like his, is opposite to the movement of classical tragedy. For we, like Christ, arise from the depths of our baptism to new life: “Thus, by our baptism into his death we were buried with him, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too should begin to live a new life. For if we have been joined to him by dying a death like his, we shall surely be joined to him in his resurrection; realizing that our old self was crucified with him, so that the self that belonged to sin might be destroyed and we should be freed from the slavery of sin.… If we died with Christ, then it is our belief that we shall live with him, too. We know that Christ has been raised from the dead and will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For by dying, he is dead to sin once and for all, and now the life that he lives is Life-with-God. In the same way, you must see yourselves as being dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Baptism, as presented by Paul, has none of the magic power of automatic salvation that it would come to have for medieval and many modern Christians. It does not
effect
the inner transformation that only God’s grace and individual human response can effect. Baptism is an outward symbolic ritual that dramatizes the inner transformation—the conversion or turnabout that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, the
metanoia
or opening of the heart that Jesus asked for. For each human being, this “death” comes in a different guise. The sin
that I must die to if I am to live God’s life will be quite different from the sin that you must die to.

It is interesting to consider how, even in my truncated quotation about baptism’s symbolic death (taken from Paul’s letter to the Jesus community in Rome, a community he did not found), Paul circles around his own thought, repeating himself with variations, straining to get his meaning across. This is because he is trying to get his audience to go deeper. He is elaborating on the primitive
kerygma
—the simple sentences that constituted the creed of the early
Jesus Movement—and he is unsure exactly how to go about it, unsure how his words will be received and whether his intended audience, whom at this point he has never even met, will comprehend or misconstrue them. He is, in short, saying something
new
, albeit based on declarations that all Messianists would have understood; and when a writer has something new to say, he must always be anxious about its reception. Here, as in so much of Paul, we are watching original theology in the making.

The “death to sin” that Paul speaks of is basically a relinquishing of power; it is to live a life that is the opposite of the lives of the Alexanders and the Caesars and all the “gods.” Now, you may say, most of his hearers had little chance of imitating such exalted and august models. But Paul makes clear that the power plays of the Great Ones are imitated over and over again in the lives of little ones—through acts of petty cruelty. But those who have “died with Christ,” who have allowed themselves—at least vicariously—to experience all the depth of human suffering, can never stoop to gaining advantage over another, even if the other is clearly in the wrong. “Sisters and brothers,” Paul admonishes the
Galatians, “even if someone is caught red-handed, you who have received the Spirit should
restore such a one with all gentleness—and watch out that you don’t end up in the same position yourself! Carry one another’s burdens: this is the way to fulfill the ‘Law’ of Christ.”

Just a little before this he had told the Galatians not to go “snapping at one another and tearing one another to pieces” (which some of them must have been doing). Even though “you were called to be free, do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but be servants to one another in love, since the whole Law [of Moses] is summed up in a single commandment:
Love your neighbor as yourself.”
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus, questioned by a Pharisee who wants to expose him, is asked: “Rabbi, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?” Jesus answers:
“ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it:
‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
Paul appears to be alluding to this probably well-known Jesus anecdote in his admonition to the Galatians.
⁶
But he omits love of God! So, within a few decades, love of neighbor, now tagged as the “ ‘Law’ of Christ,” became—within Pauline circles and no doubt far beyond—the ultimate and only guide for a believer’s conduct.

Paul’s repeated
emphasis on freedom—that
we who are freed by Jesus’s cross-and-resurrection are no longer slaves but sons—gets him into repeated trouble. He receives grim reports of his converts among the
Galatians, a Celtic tribe settled in Asia Minor between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and who like all Celts were extremists—and hardly experts in subtle distinctions. So Paul finds he must advise them that their new freedom doesn’t really include attending “orgies and such things,” which are only occasions for relinquishing one’s newfound freedom and putting oneself under the power of heedless passions. Under the heading of “such things” Paul includes a laundry list of favorite Galatian pastimes, “whoring … idolatry and witchcraft … faction-fighting and malice, drunkenness.” Sounds like the Celts, all right.

But if the Galatians sometimes get things skewed, the
Corinthians never seem to get things right. Corinth, vindictively destroyed by the Romans in the second century
B.C
.
but reestablished by
Julius Caesar as an exile for undesirables, had become a boomtown, full of retired army grunts, resettled freedmen, and assorted misfits and refugees from more conventional lifestyles, a place where anything might happen. To his Corinthian converts, who were always giving him hives, Paul sent his most eloquent exposition of the life of a true believer, hoping that with such a detailed description they would finally get things straight. This is Paul’s “Hymn to Love,” a Himalayan peak of world literature:

Could the
Corinthians miss the point of this large and humble essay, in which Paul, admitting what he does not know, sets out so clearly that the life of the believer is to be—at least ideally—a series of acts of generosity toward others without regard to self-indulgence or self-seeking? Well, the Corinthians were a difficult bunch. They required additional visits and several letters
(not all of which have come down to us). Even in this letter you can read between the lines Paul’s anguish at how many things they have bollixed up.

They have allowed themselves to be split into factions, one of which encouraged a more “spiritual” form of belief in Jesus, a belief that did not take serious account of his humanity and suffering—a point of view that Paul, always the Jew, always aware of the physical dimension, cannot stomach. These “spirit” people think themselves superior to the others and possessors of special wisdom. They may be forerunners of the
Gnostics who in the second century will deny that Jesus was ever anything so base as a human being; he was rather a spiritual apparition who
seemed
to die. To the smug superiority of the “spirit” people and their rarefied “wisdom,” Paul opposes the “folly” of the bloody cross:

These
proto-Gnostics, whose influence on the impressionable
Corinthians Paul is trying to quash, had dreamed up any number of kooky variants on his teaching. Since they had entered the time of fulfillment—since they were now perfect—they could look down their noses at the imperfect: those without
gnosis
, or secret knowledge, those who could not speak “in tongues,” those trapped in marriage (of all things). Since they were now by their baptism free, they could do as they liked. While exalting the single life, they seem to have had no problem with incest and other sexual irregularities—on the supposition that the perfect do perfectly and the free do freely. (E. P. Sanders, one of America’s most cherished biblical scholars, once characterized the Corinthian attitude as: “Christ has come—whoopie, bend over!”) Nor were they adverse to taking one another to court, not exactly the best way to build community. “Your self-satisfaction,” writes Paul with considerable understatement, “is ill-founded.”

As he tries to sort out each of the Corinthians’ bizarre innovations by turn, nothing sends Paul further up the wall than their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the reenactment of Jesus’s last night with his disciples before his crucifixion, during which he asked them to memorialize him in future by consuming bread and wine as his body and blood. Paul, writing to the Corinthians from
Ephesus, has had word of their liturgical variations from “the house of
Chloe,” probably a reference
to visitors to
Corinth from an Ephesian house-church under Chloe’s direction.
⁹
It seems that Chloe and her people attended a
Eucharist led by a flamboyant male transvestite and a strange woman who sported a butch haircut (never worn by women in the ancient world, except for humiliated prisoners of war). Chloe and her people were not edified. To come from
Ephesus to Corinth in those days would have been a little like coming from Victorian Boston to Dodge City, where you would certainly see any number of things you had never seen before. Paul, himself the straightest of straight arrows, tries not to be too exasperated, but his impatience seeps through his instruction. Look, he writes, “I congratulate you for remembering me so consistently and for maintaining the traditions exactly as I handed them on to you”—that is, for living in freedom—but, God help us, a man should dress like a man and a woman like a woman. He is actually only reminding them of the conventions of the time (and that anything too boldly theatrical can give unnecessary scandal to more conventional palates), but he ends with the true democrat’s ultimate stance: “The decision is yours. Does it really seem right to you that a woman should pray to God with her hair exposed
[something never seen in any temple or shrine of the ancient world]? Doesn’t nature itself teach you that a man with the elaborate hairdo of a woman is impossible to take seriously, whereas a woman with long hair is a glorious instance [of God’s
Creation]? Wasn’t it God himself who gave her this covering [for her nakedness, as Eve in Paradise]? But if anyone wants to get into an argument over all this, then I say that we don’t—nor do any of God’s churches—have such a thing as ‘
custom.’ ”