Jesus (21 page)

But the call isn't the province simply of priests or members of religious orders. All sorts of people feel powerfully drawn to vocations of all kinds: education, medicine, art, and business, for example.

God calls us in another way: to be the people we were meant to be. God creates us as unique individuals with our own gifts. And so we are already the people God made us to be. At the same time, God continually invites us to greater and greater freedom, asking us to drop the nets that entangle us in our old ways of doing things, ways that no longer are healthy for us, ways that keep us from being more loving.

In such times we can hear the voice of God. Perhaps we are stuck in a relationship characterized by mutual recrimination and hatred. It has ensnared us. Or we are tangled up in the uncharitable way we treat others, trapped in the net of unkind words and selfish motives that we have woven. Or maybe we're just lazy, and our nets are the familiar ties that keep us living the same way we always have. Or we feel that we can never undo the wrong things that need to be undone, like a fisherman cursing over his tangled net.

Then we experience something that seems to promise something new. For me it was, of all things, a television documentary. For Dave, my friend in the financial-services industry, it was the experience of working in an orphanage. For someone else it might be something heard in a conversation, something read in a book, something seen in a movie. This is just as much of a call as the one Jesus issued at the Sea of Galilee. But, as I mentioned earlier, Jesus's invitation to the fishermen was open-ended. It's usually unclear what the future will bring. All that is clear is the call.

We need to listen carefully for those calls and not grow so entangled in our daily lives that we miss them. An open and attentive stance will help us hear better and make it less likely that we block out God's voice. What if Peter and Andrew and James and John had been closed-minded or too busy to listen to Jesus?

At the beginning of the book I pointed out the two main ways of looking at Jesus—the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It's important to know all that we can about the historical person who called Peter, Andrew, James, and John. But it's also important to be open to the ways Jesus calls us today. It is not enough simply to know what Jesus said by the Sea of Galilee. We must also be ready to hear his voice in our own lives.

We must be receptive to the ways that God calls us—today, tomorrow, or ten years from now—so when we hear God say, “Follow me,” we will be ready to drop our nets. And follow.

T
HE
C
ALL OF THE
F
IRST
D
ISCIPLES

Mark 1:16–20

(See also Matthew 4:18–22)

As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

C
HAPTER
8

Immediately

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

T
HE MORNING AFTER WE
arrived in Galilee, I rose early to pray in the garden of the Mount of Beatitudes. On a simple wooden bench I leaned against a tall eucalyptus tree and imagined Jesus walking on these very grounds. I had a sore back, but the grooves in the eucalyptus tree fit my back as if it had been placed there by some divine massage therapist. After breakfast, George and I decided that first we would visit Capernaum, which was within sight of our Franciscan hostel.

During our pilgrimage we visited Capernaum twice.
¹
But I could have spent days there. (My journal for our first day there uses the word “amazing” three times on one page.) Excavations in Capernaum have revealed the foundations of houses from the time of Jesus, and one site has been venerated as the home of St. Peter from as early as the fourth century. In
The Holy Land
Murphy-O'Connor suggests that the town had little to recommend it to Jesus other than it was Peter's home. (Capernaum is only a few feet from the shore, not a bad place for fishermen and their families to settle.) At the time, the little town stretched for about three hundred meters along the sea. When we visited it was an oppressively hot day, and the sea sparkled under the bright sun.
²

Bargil Pixner, a Benedictine monk, scholar, and longtime resident of Israel, estimates that Capernaum had roughly one thousand to fifteen hundred inhabitants when Jesus ministered there. It was a “frontier town” guarded by a large Roman garrison under the direction of a centurion. The garrison also provided support for the tax collectors whose job it was to collect tariffs from those who caught fish in the lake. The custom house of Matthew, the tax collector, was probably in the area. Murphy-O'Connor notes that since Luke records the synagogue as having been built by the Roman centurion, the townspeople may have been too poor to afford to construct a synagogue.
³

Today in Capernaum you can visit a newer synagogue, probably from Byzantine times, which is said to have been built over the first-century synagogue in which Jesus preached. You can stand on that site, look out at the Sea of Galilee, and wonder about the story that happened there two thousand years ago.

For me, Capernaum was like a dream. Here was the view of the sea that Jesus must have seen every day. Here was the sky under which he lived. Here were the birdsongs he must have heard. I was filled with a sense of the
reality
of Jesus.

It also raised a multitude of questions. Why did he move from Nazareth to Capernaum? Or, more broadly, why to the Sea of Galilee? After being booted out of Nazareth, why not move, say, to Jericho, Jerusalem, or Bethlehem? The most convincing answer came from Father Doan, over dinner one night at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. The Sea of Galilee was a trading crossroads, with people coming and going from all over the region, crisscrossing the lake, buying and selling fish, a place of great traffic. Here, perhaps Jesus thought, he could reach many different kinds of people. And perhaps as a crossroads the area might be more open to new ideas.

Or perhaps he just found the sea, as I did, beautiful. Both George and I spent a lot of time in prayer, looking out at the sea. I could have stayed in Capernaum forever.

D
URING MY
J
ESUIT PHILOSOPHY
studies at Loyola University Chicago, I studied Greek. My first course was Introduction to Ancient Greek, taught by an energetic young Greek professor and archaeologist named Paul Rehak; the second was a one-on-one tutorial focused on the Gospels, taught by Wendy Cotter, CSJ, a Catholic sister and New Testament scholar. Gradually, I learned the brand of Greek called
koinē
, or common Greek, used in the New Testament.

One of the first passages I translated with Wendy was from the Gospel of Mark: the electrifying story of Jesus healing a man in the synagogue at Capernaum. (In Luke, the story takes place immediately after the Rejection in Nazareth.) Buried within that story was an unusual phrase that has stayed with me, almost twenty-five years after first encountering it.

Jesus and his disciples enter Capernaum, after having left Nazareth. The small town will now be his base. (Matthew calls it
tēn idian polin
, “his own town.”
⁴
)

On the Sabbath, Jesus goes to the synagogue
euthus
, immediately.
⁵
He has decided to begin his ministry in the place of teaching and instruction. Once again Mark's use of
euthus
gives Jesus's life a breathless, urgent quality. The impression is of a man who felt he had a great deal to do, and perhaps not a great deal of time in which to do it.

Immediately before this, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has just called on Peter, Andrew, James, and John by the Sea of Galilee. It's easy to imagine the scene: the erstwhile fishermen, still unused to the role of disciples, trying to keep pace with Jesus; the curious onlookers in the synagogue wondering what their new neighbor will say; and others trying assiduously not to pay undue attention to this upstart. At the time, anyone with sufficient learning could be invited to teach in the synagogue; one needn't have had any sort of formal ordination or official credentials.
⁶

So the fact that Jesus spoke in the synagogue indebted no one to show him any special honor. But ignoring Jesus will prove impossible. As in Nazareth, those in the synagogue in Capernaum are “astounded” at his teaching. (The Greek word
exeplēssonto
is variously translated as “struck with panic,” “amazed,” “astounded,” or “overwhelmed with astonishment.”) Such a dramatic response is another characteristic of Mark's portrait of Jesus. Surprise, wonder, fear, awe, astonishment, amazement, or similar reactions from the crowds and the disciples occur again and again in his Gospel. Donahue and Harrington note that this establishes a rapport with the reader, who would also be amazed by what he or she was reading.
⁷

What it felt like to be in the presence of Jesus is difficult for the Gospels to convey. But Mark tries. People are amazed not simply by his miracles, but by what he says. Such descriptions and the frequent use of words like “astounded” give us a glimpse into his incredible charisma.

Then,
euthus
again, something dramatic happens. A man with an “unclean spirit” enters the synagogue or makes himself known to the crowd. In the Jewish tradition, “unclean” is one way of speaking about the demonic. It means something out of place in a spiritual sense, not in order, and in this case something opposed to the holy.
⁸
Mark will also use the word “demon,” the Greek way of speaking about the same reality.

The possessed man sees Jesus and cries out,
Ti hēmin kai soi, Iēsou Nazarēne?

It's a mysterious mix of words about which translators differ. A strictly literal translation would be: “What to us and to you?” It is sometimes rendered as “What have you to do with us?” Another translation has, “What is there between us and you?”
⁹
Or, “What have we to do with you?”
¹⁰
Or perhaps, “Who are you to us?” The use of the plural “us” is also a frightening tipoff to readers, indicating that the man is possessed by many demons, like the Gerasene demoniac in a later chapter, who shouts at Jesus, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”

When I first read this passage with Wendy Cotter, I was immediately taken by the force of that hard-to-translate question, as if the jumble of words reflected the man's incoherent rantings. This striking phrase reminded me of times when I was so angry I could hardly speak, could barely get the words out. The possessed man virtually spits his words at Jesus. Even his use of “Nazarene,” which some translate as “you Nazarene” captures some of his contempt. “Who the hell are you to us?” could be a modern translation.

Then, strangely, the possessed man says, or shouts, something sensible. “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Here, in the first chapter of Mark, someone speaks the identity of Jesus. “Have you come to destroy us?” The demons who inhabit the man intuit something essential about Jesus.

The onlookers must have been baffled. They must have asked themselves, “Yes, who
is
this?”

On a retreat years ago I wondered if perhaps the demon was trying to tempt Jesus through pride—that is, “I know who you are: the Holy One of God. Tell everyone else who you are.” If this is so, Jesus, as in the desert, rejects this temptation.

Jesus confidently rebukes the spirit and orders him to leave the poor man. “Be silent,” he says (literally, “muzzle yourself”), “and come out of him!” The spirit throws the man on the ground and with a great cry comes out of him.

The people are again “amazed” and give voice to what they were probably wondering all along: “What is this?” They marvel at the exorcism and Jesus's teaching, which, the crowd says, comes “with authority.”

The teaching and the healing are inextricably connected. Jesus's deeds lend authority to his words, and authenticate them: someone who can drive out demons is surely someone to listen to, and what he says must be true. And his words help to explain his deeds; since his preaching is about the reign of God, his healings must somehow be a manifestation of the coming of that reign. As Raymond Brown writes, “Teaching and an exercise of divine power in healing and driving out demons are united in the proclamation of the kingdom, implying that the coming of God's rule is complex.”
¹¹

The crowd also must have marveled at the
way
the exorcism was accomplished: without any of the complicated incantations or rituals that other wonder-workers used—without even a touch. This man did this with just his words. Jesus's speech is more powerful than the demonic power. And his words effect what he says.

No wonder they were amazed.

H
ERE IS A CRITICAL
question to ask about the Gospels: How is an intelligent, rational, modern-day person to understand tales about possessions? For healings and exorcisms are an important part of Jesus's ministry. As Meier says in
A Marginal Jew: