Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. (11 page)

Friendship with Nicodemus and Joseph illustrates the range of Jesus’s circle, which included everyone who was drawn to him, irrespective of their social position or lack of it. A good example of his friendliness is the case of the royal official in Herod Antipas’s service who comes to beg for the life of his little son (Jn 4:46-53). At first he beseeches Jesus to come in person, but then accepts that a mere word from Jesus will effect the miracle of healing. Jesus assures him that his faith is sufficient, and so it proves. This touching story is told by John with great tenderness, which reflects Jesus’s own words spoken to the apostle and evangelist, for no one else heard the exchange. At the other end of the scale is the pathetic example of the elderly cripple who had haunted the pool of Bethesda for thirty-eight years (Jn 5 : 1-15). This medicinal pool, with its five flights of steps, or porches, into the waters, had an intermittent mineral spring, and when the waters “moved” (attributed to an angel) a cure was more likely, so there was competition to be the first in the flow after a “movement.” The old man had no servants to drag him there quickly and so had had to watch, year after year, while others were cured and he remained “impotent,” as John puts it. Jesus saw him there and seems to have known all about him, that he was a bit of a rogue, but was nevertheless moved to pity. He said, “Wilt thou be made whole?” The cripple said, “Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down into the pool before me.” Jesus said, “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.” The man was cured “immediately.” Jesus later ran into him in the Temple and recognized him. He said, “Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.” The man talked eagerly about his cure, as well he might, and that aroused the ire of the orthodox, for the miracle had occurred on the Sabbath. Some interpret the passage as a sign of ingratitude: the former cripple betrayed Jesus by talking to the Jewish officials. But that is surely wrong. The man had been unable to get about for nearly forty years, and suddenly he was free and active. Naturally he went everywhere telling his tale to whoever would listen.

There is a similar encounter in John 9 : 1-38 when Jesus meets and cures a young man blind from birth. He was poor and of no importance, and when he tried to tell people that a marvelous thing had occurred, they bullied him. Was it not the Sabbath when he was cured? How did it happen? Who did it? Was not it a Sabbath-breaking sinner? The orthodox said, “Give God the praise: we know that this man [Jesus] is a sinner.” At this point the young man exclaimed in exasperation, “Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.” They argued with him, bringing in Moses and whatnot, until he said, keeping in the forefront the one thing that mattered to him—sight—that restoring the sight of someone born blind had never been done before in the history of the world: “If this man were not of God, he could do nothing.” They shouted at him, “Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us?” then “they cast him out.” When Jesus heard about this, he found the young man and asked about his beliefs. The young man answered, “Lord, I believe.” And John concludes: “he worshipped him.” Here is another touching story of a brief encounter, with sight giving a perfect metaphor for knowledge of the truth.

Jesus’s encounters with women had a particular significance. Women were almost invisible in the ancient Near East. They had little or no status unless they married rulers, and then their place was precarious. They might be discarded—“put away” was the term used in legal documents—at their husbands’ whim. If they were poor and old, they were nothing. But not to Jesus. His keen eyes sought them out amid the multitude of figures who crowded round him. That is how he spotted the old widow putting her two mites into the collection box at the Temple. He commended her as an example of how even the poorest could possess generous hearts. Charity was not the easy prerogative of the rich but was a particular virtue of the needy and humble. We are left to speculate whether the widow, having given her daily coins, would have gone without food until the next morning. She and her mites thus pass into the literature of goodness just as surely as she passed into the Kingdom. Jesus could also sense goodness, even when he could not see it. Thus he became aware of the old woman who touched his garment believing her debilitating complaint would thus be cured. He felt her faith. Her spiritual need pulsed into him, and his power passed out and into her in response. So he identified that woman and praised her, and she knelt down and acknowledged his divinity. She was cured but, even more important, she passed into the spiritual repertoire of the humble believers, those whose faith in goodness towers over their insignificance.

But some of Jesus’s encounters with women are more complicated than these simple instances. One of the most fascinating is his meeting at the well of Sychar, in Samaria, with a local woman who has come to draw water (Jn 4 : 4-42). The well had been dug by the patriarch Jacob and stood outside the town. Jesus and his disciples had to travel through Samaria every time they moved from Galilee to Judaea or vice versa. Jews were commanded to have no dealings with Samaritans, who were held to be accursed: though Hebrews by descent, they had their own shrine and religious customs. But that was exactly the kind of religious dogma Jesus held to be cruel and unreasonable. Being tired, he stopped at the well while his disciples went into the town to buy food. When he saw the woman he looked through her, and into her, as was his habit and his genius. He asked her for a drink of water from the well and got into conversation. She saw he was a Jew and thought it strange he was willing to talk to her. But she was happy to respond and was immediately fascinated by the distinction he drew between the water of the well, which soon left one thirsty again, and the spiritual water of truth, which was everlasting. She said, “Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.” He said, perhaps smiling wryly to himself, for he knew all about her, “Go, call thy husband, and come hither.” She replied, “I have no husband.” This was what Jesus had been waiting for. He told her, “Thou hast well said, I have no husband: For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.” The woman was astounded. But she was not a timid creature—Jesus had sensed this from the start—and had self-possession enough to respond, “Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.” That gave Jesus the chance to explain to her that, however orthodox Jews and Samaritans might differ, they both had nothing in common with what he called “the true worshippers” who “shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” For, he added, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” The question of rival shrines was irrelevant. The woman responded eagerly. She knew the Messiah was coming, she said, and “when he is come he will tell us all things.” Jesus was beginning to explain—“I that speak unto thee am he”—when his disciples, arriving with the food they had bought, interrupted. They were very surprised indeed to find him talking to the woman, but they did not like to say so. Instead, they asked him to eat, but he declined: “I have meat to eat that ye know not of.” He meant, of course, that his encounter with the woman had given him food for thought: how in doing “the will of him that sent me” (as he put it) he would include outsiders like the Samaritans who were eager to learn.

The woman, meanwhile, had left her pot and rushed back into the town, clamoring to all the men (we are told nothing about the women): “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” The men, of course, came and were fascinated by Jesus; they persuaded him to spend two days with them and believed his message. The woman was pushed into the background: “Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves.” Perhaps she was notorious and unpopular among their wives. As with many other passages in the New Testament, we wish we had been told more. What was the explanation for her unusual marital arrangements, or lack of them? What more had Jesus told her about her life to explain her saying he “told me all things that ever I did”? It is strange that we know so much. For she did not talk to the evangelist John. Jesus must have given him the gist of his conversation with the woman, which John reproduces. And perhaps Jesus omitted much. As it is, she recedes into the darkness of history untold, to our regret; but we are left with the hope that she is saved, too, as this fascinating woman surely deserved to be.

The exotic woman we meet in Luke 7 : 31-48 is equally fascinating. Jesus’s convivial nature, his willingness to attend feasts and dinners with a wide variety of worldly people, had attracted comment and censure by the pious. Jesus answered them, the religious establishment whom he termed “the men of this generation,” through a curious metaphor: “They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.” He said that John the Baptist ate neither bread nor wine, but the religious men complained, “He hath a devil.” Jesus told them, “The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” He then added, mysteriously, “But wisdom is justified of all her children.” All the same, a prominent Pharisee called Simon asked him to dinner, and Jesus agreed to come. News of the feast got around. “And behold,” says Luke, “a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment. And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.”

This was an extraordinary scene, for to wash a man’s feet was a gesture of unusual humility in the ancient Near East, highly symbolic of submission and devotion. Jesus was to do it to his disciples shortly before his Crucifixion, provoking acute embarrassment on Peter’s part. There must have been embarrassment on this occasion, too. For to wash a man’s feet with tears, and dry them with your hair, was a supremely difficult feat, even if the tears were copious and the hair very long. Moreover, the woman was beautiful and notorious. The Pharisee Simon was mortified. How had the woman got in? And did Jesus know about her? He “spake within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him.”

Jesus read his thoughts and answered them: “Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee.” Simon replied, “Master, say on.” Whereupon Jesus characteristically asked him a question: If a man had two creditors, one of five hundred pence, one of fifty, and forgave both, which of them would love him more? Simon said, “I suppose that he, to whom he forgave most.” Exactly, said Jesus. Now he administered a rebuke: not angrily but in measured tones and careful words. “Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house. Thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment.”

He then added, with some emphasis, “Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.” To the woman he said, “Thy sins are forgiven.” We do not hear any more about the woman, who—like the much-married Samaritan lady—disappears into unrecorded history, but not without Jesus’s blessing: “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” The lesson was lost on Simon and his friends. All they could say was “Who is this that forgiveth sins also?” But the repentant woman saved by faith, sublime in her humility, remains one of the most touching figures in ancient literature. And, as often in the New Testament, the matter-of-fact account by Luke has the resounding ring of truth.

This episode is an example of the extraordinary effect Jesus had on women. He evoked not only their faith and devotion but also an added dimension of tenderness tinged with poetry of gesture and sometimes of speech. The pagan Canaanite woman described in Matthew 15:22-28, who wanted Jesus to cure her daughter, was treated rather brusquely—she seems to have been persistent and importunate and was no doubt making a great noise. Jesus said his mission in Tyre and Sidon was to recover “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” and told her, “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” Unabashed by this uncompromising reply, she was inspired to say, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the master’s table.” Instantly moved by this brilliant riposte, Jesus gave in: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” The daughter “was made whole from that very hour.”

Jesus was conspicuous for gentleness, patience, and forbearance. He was hugely intuitive. He disliked any kind of legalism or ponderous logic, preferring the flashes of instant perception and poetry which illuminated his speech and turned his sayings into strings of sparkling jewels. These were not masculine characteristics. He relied more on emotions than reason to get across a point, a more feminine trait than what women expected from a preacher of doctrine. But then he was not a preacher: that was one thing women liked about him. He taught: he explained in an interesting, luminous way difficult things by using images from everyday life and work. He was a moralist but a poetical one. And Jesus was glad to make them interested and happy. He loved the two sisters of Lazarus who lived in Bethany, Martha and Mary, and clearly spent many precious hours there on the rare occasions when he rested. He knew well the sterling virtues of Martha and the staunchness of her faith—did she not make a declaration of it in terms which equaled in robustness the splendid confession of St. Peter? (Jn 11 : 27). But he liked Mary to sit at his feet and listen, and would not have her pleasure and instruction interrupted by household drudgery—“Mary hath chosen that good part,” he freely admitted (Lk 10 : 42). “Let her alone,” he said, when Judas Iscariot wanted to take away the alabaster jar of spikenard which she poured over his feet, “and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment” (Jn 12 :2-8).