King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (50 page)

Jesus turned again to his disciples : “The elders of your synagogue sit in the seat of Moses and dispense the Law. This Law must be obeyed to the letter, and to the very fraction of a letter. Though they lay heavy obligations of ritual cleanliness on you—burdens which are nothing to them, because they are wealthy men with servants and Canaanite slaves and do not earn a living with their hands—do always as they tell you, even where the spirit of the Law has been plainly falsified by them. Far be it from me to weaken their authority. Do as they tell you, however absurd their legal fictions for evading a plain duty to God. Do as they tell you—but not as they do! For, in the words of the proverb : they strain from their broth the unclean gnat, yet swallow the unclean camel.”

The elders, trained from childhood to accept reproof humbly and patiently, kept silence but could hardly contain their rage as Jesus continued : “The Preacher, the Son of Sira, says : ‘Let none declare : “My sin comes from God.” For why should God cause a man to do what he hates? Let him not say either : “God caused me to err.” For what need has God of a sinner?’ And I say : Amen, Amen : the Law, holy and righteous as it is, has been made a stumbling-block to the poor. You are the sinners, rich men, who have caused these poor children to despair of salvation by shunning them as unclean and refusing them admittance to the synagogue. It is your wealth that has led you into sin : for wealth begets leisure, and leisure begets an evil conscience, and an evil conscience begets over-scrupulousness in the Law, and over-scrupulousness in the Law begets presumption, and presumption dries up the fountains of the heart. Therefore when it is written in the Testament of Moses : ‘They shall touch what is unclean’, the meaning is : ‘The idle rich man rides on the neck of the poor man and forces him to eat what is unclean ; and thereby contaminates himself.’ In the Day of Judgement you will be made to answer for your sins and it will go hard with you.”

They asked him : “Do you dishonour the memory of the learned Hillel from whom we learned these ‘absurd legal fictions’, as you call them, these ‘falsifications of the Law’ ?”

“Hillel was a carpenter who never ceased to labour with his hands and remained a poor man to the last. If any man now pleads poverty as an excuse for not studying the Law, it is asked of him : ‘Are you poorer even than Hillel was?’ He interpreted the Law in the spirit of love and laid no burden on the people that he would not himself undertake with joy. It is written that when Moses died all the men of Israel mourned for him ; but at the death of Hillel, as at Aaron’s death, not only men but women and children also mourned. Honouring his memory, I say : Sell your profitable business, merchants, distribute the proceeds to the poor, return to the boats and nets that you foolishly
abandoned, and as you labour on the waters of the Lake remember again your duty towards your neighbour! For is it not written : ‘Six days
shalt
thou labour’? And the learned Shammai, who received from Simeon son of Shetach, said : ‘Love work, and hate lordship.’ And others of the wise have said : ‘A man should hire himself out to a stranger rather than sit idle ; let him flay a carcase in the street to earn his bread rather than say : “I am a priest”, or, “I am a great and learned man”.’ ”

“You are called Jesus the carpenter. Where then are your hammer, saw, chisel and mallet ?”

“From a carpenter I have become a shepherd.” He displayed his pastoral staff and mantle. “Let no man envy me my laborious new trade.”

“And these idle disciples of yours ?”

“Let no man envy them their laborious apprenticeship.”

The elders took their leave of him without another word ; and he received no more invitations to preach in any synagogue of Capernaum.

The reason for the suspicion that he accepted tainted money was that two Jewish sisters who frequented Matthew’s house were financing his tour of preaching. One of them, Joanna, was the wife of Chuza, the estate-steward of Antipas ; the other, Susanna, was married to a colleague of Matthew’s, the collector of road-taxes for Lower Galilee. Jesus gladly accepted their offer of assistance on an assurance that the money was drawn from their own dowries and therefore clean. Susanna also collected money from her women friends, being careful to accept none of doubtful origin. But the sum that they had to find was no small one. Though at this time the disciples seldom needed to buy food in the market, but on the contrary were often embarrassed by the lavish hospitality offered them by admirers of Jesus, none of them was rich and all had families to support, homes to keep up, and taxes to pay.’

They used Peter and Andrew’s boat for travelling together around the Lake, and fished between religious labours ; but carefully as they lived, the sense that they were playing truant from their homes and trades haunted them, and was not dispelled by the sense of virtue that they won in abandoning their former sins. Jesus found that some of them were deriving what he regarded as illegitimate satisfaction from being the chosen disciples of a famous healer and teacher. He quoted Hillel’s judgement to them : “A name made great is a name destroyed.” Thereafter he performed cures rarely and in secret, and ceased to emphasize his preaching with mysterious symbolical acts.

As the novelty of his preaching wore off, this apparent failure of his powers was soon observed and commented upon disparagingly in the market-places : it was said that he had come to the Lake a few months before as a pale ascetic, but had now forfeited his curative powers through gluttony at the tables of his disreputable supporters. And though at first he had been welcomed as a prophet who laid light obligations on his listeners and did not insist on fatiguing ritual or cramping self-denial, critics now complained that this was no fiery John the Baptist, whose words scorched them to the marrow like the hot desert wind. Was this
a time for soft words, a time for eating and drinking and good cheer? True, Jesus preached the coming of the Messiah as John did : but John’s disciples fasted and abstained from earthly pleasures, knowing that the Messiah would come only when the truly penitent separated themselves from the mass of evil-doers and presented themselves as his holy bodyguard. Jesus’s disciples, on the other hand, looked merry and prosperous and seemed oblivious of the sin and oppression which surrounded them.

When publicly challenged on this score, Jesus replied : “Do you not know that the bridegroom’s companions are exempt from the obligation of fasting and even of prayer during the seven days of the wedding feast? Let them fast beforehand, let them fast afterwards, but this is a time to dance, sing and be glad. I preach the mercy of God to those who seek him, not his vengeance on those who oppose him.”

His former friends of the Capernaum synagogue discovered that Judas of Kerioth, as Jesus’s treasurer, went at regular intervals to draw money from the house of Antipas’s estate-steward. They began to regard Jesus as a false prophet and a traitor to his country. Having originally sponsored him, they were now anxious to disavow him for their own credit. It stuck in their minds that he had compared himself to a bridegroom— why a bridegroom? They had a proverb : “The bridegroom is like a king.” Was he hinting that he was a Great One? They sent two other elders to him as a deputation.

These asked : “You say that you are a bridegroom. In what sense do you mean it ?”

He would say no more than that this was a marriage to which the best-bred people in the land had been invited—priests, land-owners, lawyers, elders of the synagogue—but many had made excuses and their seats had therefore been filled with tax-gatherers, prostitutes, beggars and the sick.

The elders then asked him to prove by some clear sign that he was a person of sufficient eminence to be judged superior to scandal.

He replied that he was no magician who caught the attention of the mob by vulgar miracles. To lust after signs and miracles was spiritual adultery. “Even King Solomon, for all the authority that he exercised over demons, gave no sign to the Queen of Sheba when she came to visit him except the moral wisdom which he imparted to her. Therefore you will be given no more than the sign that Jonah gave the people of Nineveh : namely, that he preached repentance to them. If you do not repent, you will be given the sign that they escaped the threatened destruction of their city.” He added : “You propose, I hear, to rebuild the tomb of Nahum in marble and gilt bronze. Pious men, your ancestors killed Nahum. Were he alive now and prophesying against his oppressors as he prophesied against Nineveh, would you kill him yourselves? Or would you avoid the blood-guilt by betraying him to the Tetrarch ?”

This answer decided the synagogue that he had become a public danger. They kept a jealous watch on him, hoping to catch him in some overt breach of the Law. Jesus warned his disciples that they must live
without possibility of reproach, and must keep perpetual guard against sin. They had been charged with greed and unseemly merriment ; let them not resent the charges. He uttered a judgement : “Love your neighbour when he forgives, but your enemy when he condemns ; repay with gratitude those who hate your follies, pray for those who ill-treat you without provocation.”

It was on this same occasion—they were eating broiled fish by the Lake-side—that Simon of Cana muttered a complaint that the salt had no taste to it, and that until the Romans had been driven out of the country it would grow more and more tasteless every year. This was fair comment, for the result of the salt-tax, which was farmed out with the other taxes, was that salt had not only become costly but was adulterated with chalk and earth ; but Jesus reminded Simon that the Romans were permitted to oppress the Israelites only because they had failed in their duty towards God, and that the adulteration of the salt was an apt reminder of this. At Jerusalem no sacrifice was offered without salt : salt was sprinkled even on the incense. “Salt purifies, but when salt loses its saltiness, what else will salt it? Sons, keep your own salt pure, and one day I will take you to Jerusalem to salt the salt that you find there.”

The first of these two sayings has been over-simplified by the Gentile Church. It now runs : “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who ill-treat you”, and becomes either a counsel of impossible perfection, or an incitement to godlessness where (as in Jesus’s own case) a man acknowledges no enemies but the enemies of God. Another judgement of his which has been similarly misrecorded may be noticed here. It originally ran : “Amen, Amen : Whoever is not with me is against me, whoever is not against me is with me.” The two delicately balanced halves of this antithesis have been considered contradictory by dull-witted editors, and a dispute has arisen as to which of them is authentic! Some quote only one half ; some only the other. Yet the sense is plain. Jesus meant that between two active extremes of opinion there is a passive middle region ; but passivity does not mean indifference. In other words : “The time has now come when everyone must decide whether he is on the side of good or evil ; even to say that one is ‘not against’ as opposed to ‘not with’ is a clear indication of choice.”

At last he was caught in what seemed to the Capernaum elders a clear breach of the Law : he healed on a Sabbath day a man with a paralysed arm. Now, the religious rule was perfectly clear. It was forbidden to do work of any sort on a Sabbath, the only exception being work necessary for the saving of life. The man’s arm had been paralysed for many years and his life could not by any hyperbole be regarded as in danger. Why had Jesus not healed it on the Friday or waited until the Sunday? An ordinary physician was bound by these rules, and though danger of death might be generously interpreted in the case of a wound, which might or might not prove fatal if left undressed, he would no sooner set about curing a paralysed arm on the Sabbath, by the accepted treatment
of massage and blistering, than he would hoe cabbages in his garden.

Jesus, when indignantly questioned on this point, asked : “Is it lawful to save human life on the Sabbath day ?”

They answered : “You know as well as we do that it is lawful.”

“Is it even lawful on the Sabbath day to save the life of an ox or an ass that has fallen into a gully or dry well and injured itself ?”

“The door is left open. But what life did you save ?”

“The life of the man’s right arm,” he said, “which was more to him than any ox or ass ; for without his use of it he could not fully perform the duties enjoined on him by the Sabbath ordinances.”

“But the arm, being only a part of the man, has no separate existence, though it is his right arm !”

“You know the proverb, not to let your right hand know what your left hand does. This is to allow them separate souls ; and justly. For the right hand repels, but the left hand beckons ; the left hand holds the chisel, the right wields the hammer ; the right hand guides the pen, the left steadies the parchment. Come now, is it not said by the Sages : ‘A man may profane one Sabbath, that a man may preserve many Sabbaths’? And does not our Father himself undertake cures on his holy day? Have you never known him to heal thorn-scratch or headache between the eve of a Sabbath and its close ?”

Had this shrewd answer been uttered in a Jerusalem academy by a famous Doctor of the Law it would doubtless have been applauded and gratefully added to the Corpus of Comment ; but Capernaum was a small provincial town, far less liberal than Jerusalem. Now the rumour began to fly about that Jesus had begun his ministry shortly after a descent from Mount Tabor where he had been initiated in the rites of the Demon Beelzebub, and that he performed his miracles by invocation of this power. Beelzebub is one of the “names of scorn” in which Jewish sacred literature abounds. By a slight alteration of letters, a title of honour is converted into one of dishonour. Thus the chieftain of Carmel whose widow King David married has had his honourable name Laban “the white man” changed to Nabal “the fool”. And by a similar change the statue of Olympian Zeus set up by Antiochus Epiphanes in the Temple of Jerusalem is called not “The statue of the Lord of Heaven”, but “The Abomination of Desolation”. So also Beelzebub, “The Lord of Bluebottles”, is a name of scorn for Baal Zebul, “The Lord of Zebulon”, or Atabyrius, by whom Ahaziah King of Judah had once sought to be cured of the internal injuries he had sustained in a fall from an upper window.