Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (29 page)

When the church at
Corinth grew beyond such confines, it had to move to
Titus Justus’s larger house (beside the synagogue), which probably boasted the cool inner court and frescoed dining room of the upscale urbanite. When Paul explained to Prisca and Aquila, however, that he needed their continuing help, the couple shut up shop at Corinth and went on to Ephesus to open a house-church there. For tradespeople like Prisca and Aquila, starting over for a second time cannot have been easy. But their trade, unlike most, did allow for such a possibility—and there was no part of the Near East that attracted more tourists than Ephesus of the Great Mother. Paul almost always mentions Prisca first, most unusual in a civilization where women, whether in the forum or in literature, invariably walk a step behind their husbands. It was Prisca who was the essential friend, probably more practical, almost certainly more devoted, than Aquila, however dear he may have been. We next spot the two tentmakers in
Rome, after Claudius’s death in 54, establishing yet a third house-church and continuing to give Paul their unfailing support, for, as he tells the Romans, “they risked their own necks to save my life.” We glimpse these permanent pilgrims for the last time back at Ephesus, greeted by Paul in
Second Timothy not long before his execution.

The pages of Acts and the
Pauline letters overflow with such “fools for Christ,” as Paul calls all those who persevere in the Way. They are engaging, affectionate, informal people, ready to roll up their sleeves and pitch in. They romp through this literature like clowns through a circus: the apostle Philip, cheerfully jumping into the chariot of an impatient Ethiopian eunuch in order to instruct him in how to read Isaiah; Dorcas, “who never tired of doing good and giving to those in need,” weaving tunics for all the poor of Jaffa;
Barnabas and Paul, abashed to be mistaken for Zeus and Hermes by the ecstatic Lycaonians; Agabus, the prophetic mime;
Mark, pooping out at Pamphylia and angering Paul for his “desertion”; Paul’s dream of the Macedonian—so like the Irishman who will appear four centuries later in Patrick’s dream—who invites Paul to “come across [the sea] to Macedonia and help us,” thus setting off the evangelization of Europe, as Patrick’s Irishman will set off its re-evangelization. Here are Paul and his companions refusing to escape from prison after the doors have miraculously shot open and the prisoners’ chains have come unlocked, so that their jailer, who blamed himself for the miracle, would not commit suicide (“Don’t hurt yourself: we’re all still here!”); Paul the Indefatigable preaching for five hours a day—right through the hallowed Mediterranean siesta—for two years in the lecture hall of Tyrannus at Ephesus; Paul preaching into the night in the upper room of a claustrophobic little house-church at Troas, till a boy named Eutychus, sitting in the window, nods off to sleep and falls out the window into the street below—a story that, after much commotion, ends happily.

If there is much commotion, solidarity, and camaraderie, there are also many kisses from afar, many last embraces, and many tears of farewell. “
Timothy has returned from you and
has given us good news of your faith and your love, telling us that you always remember us with pleasure and long to see us, just as we long to see you,” writes Paul to the Thessalonians. To Timothy, “dear son of mine” and Paul’s most loyal missionary companion, the apostle writes in his last letter, “I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. I remember your tears and long to see you again, so that I may be filled with joy.” When he says his final farewell to the Ephesian elders, “they were all in tears,” according to Acts. “They put their arms around Paul’s neck and kissed him. What saddened them most was his saying that they would never see his face again.”

These people, generous with their time, talents, and resources to the point of improvidence, actually liked one another. They make it possible to believe, as Paul encouraged the
Corinthians to believe, that “Jesus Christ was never Yes-and-No; his nature is all Yes.” They make it possible to hope, as Paul urged the Macedonians to hope, that human beings needn’t “live in the dark, for we belong to the day.” The people of the Way were not ideologues but believers. They did not organize protest marches or write op-ed pieces; and if they had, they would have been eliminated. They lived in a dangerous time under many strictures and disabilities—legal, social, economic, political—none of their own making. But it is hard to escape the impression that in their day they lived buoyantly.

Jesus, returned to the Father, had sent the Spirit. Was Jesus, therefore, finished with them? Did his ascent into the inaccessible
heavens and the sending of the Spirit as his “replacement”
mean that their contact with him was forever a thing of the past? Was he to be only a ghostly model to conjure in the mind but never to hold again in human arms? No; and this is not simply because Paul had taught them that Jesus was Lord of the Cosmos and they were his mystical Body. Such constructs are, in the last analysis, too cerebral to make a lasting difference in the ordinary lives of ordinary people like Prisca and Aquila.

The appearances that followed on the discovery of the empty tomb had given them a taste of Jesus risen and exalted. The disciples had, in effect, just caught him midway through his ascension from the realms of the dead—on his way to the Father’s right hand. From time to time, long after Jesus’s ascension, unusual individuals, like Paul on the road to Damascus, would be privileged recipients of such “out of time” appearances, as they may be even to our day.

But what of you and me, the less-than-privileged? What of folks like Prisca and Aquila, or tunic-making Dorcas and sleepy Eutychus, whom nobody would mistake for visionaries? Are we to be left only with faith?

The answer lies in Matthew’s Gospel, which shows the public life of Jesus as getting under way with the
Sermon on the Mount (and the articulation of the
Beatitudes) and closes the narration of this trajectory with a scene no less memorable, Jesus’s final sermon before his passion:

To this heart-stopping lesson, Matthew adds the frightening comment: “Jesus had now finished all he wanted to say.”

The Son of Man has become the Ward of all Mankind. Incarnated as the human Jesus of Nazareth, he is after his
resurrection the principle of Jewish Justice itself, incarnated in the person of anyone and everyone who needs our help. It is ironic that some Christians make such a fuss about the elements of the
Eucharist—bowing before them, kneeling in adoration, because Christ is present in them—but have never bothered to heed these solemn words about the presence of Christ in every individual who is in need. Jesus told us only once (at the
Last Supper) that he would be present in the Bread and Wine, but he tells us repeatedly in the gospels that he is always present in the Poor and Afflicted—to whom we should all bow and kneel. It is perverse that some Christians make such a fuss about the bound text of God’s Word, carrying it processionally, holding it with reverence, never allowing it to touch the ground, but have never considered seriously this text of Matthew 25, in the light of which we would always catch God’s Needy before they hit the ground. It sometimes seems that it is to churchpeople in particular—to Christian Pharisees—that these words of Jesus are directed.

But the first-century churchpeople, the people of the Way, took this lesson with all solemnity. It gave them their constant focus—on the poor and needy. Though this focus will be abandoned soon enough as Christian interest turns in the second century to theological hatred, in the third century to institutional triumphalism, and in the fourth to the deadly game
of power politics, it has remained the focus of a few in every age. “Often, often often, goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise” is the repeated refrain of a medieval Irish poem, “The Rune of Hospitality”; and the figure of Christ in the guise of clowns, beggars, and fools roams the literatures of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and even Asia, from the earliest stories and plays of the Christian West to the novels of Shusaku Endo and the films of Federico Fellini. In every age, brothers and sisters of Jesus have come forward to heed the lesson, not least
Dorothy Day, the twentieth-century saint of New York and founder of the
Catholic Worker movement, who spent her life in service to the hungry and homeless, the displaced and dispossessed, who truly loved every Dostoyevskian idiot who crossed her path, and who once wrote:

We have reached a stage in our reflection where ordinary prose breaks down and only the words of scripture or of saints and poets will do. None of us will be lost in the abyss of nothingness and nonexistence; we will all be called forth at the
Last Judgment. As Emily Dickinson wrote: