Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (22 page)

If Mark begins with his apocalyptic sense of “the Time” that has come, and Matthew with his overwhelming Jewish sense of the obligations of Justice incumbent on all those who would live in God’s blessedness, Luke sees Jesus himself as the theme, Jesus the bearer of glad tidings to the poor (who are so seldom the recipients of good news), Jesus the healer, Jesus the liberator, Jesus who enlightens, Jesus who frees. We come to the truth by watching Jesus intently (“all eyes … fixed on him”), for his every movement (his standing up, his unrolling of the scroll, his choice of text, his rolling of the scroll, his returning it to the synagogue official, his sitting among us) is redolent with meaning. In Luke, the elegant writer from whose polished pen the Greek flows effortlessly, Jesus moves through his life with unhurried dignity—in almost stately progression—toward his appointed end. This is not to say that Luke is inventing, just that he is capable of setting a scene to dramatic effect with a facility unavailable to the earlier evangelists, who were probably translating in their heads from Aramaic to Greek and just trying to keep their tenses straight.

But there are ways in which Luke not only dramatizes but softens the material he has taken from Mark so as not to trouble
or unduly offend gentile sensibility. In Luke, though
Nazareth rejects Jesus (in prophetic foreshadowing of his rejection by the Jewish nation), Jesus’s family never has any doubts. Jesus never chastises Peter (as he does explicitly in Mark and Matthew); and the stupidity of the disciples, who are always misunderstanding Jesus in the earlier evangelists, is lessened and excused. By the 80s, the family of Jesus and his principal disciples, almost all of whom were now deceased, had assumed heroic reputations in Christian circles; and Luke sees no reason to emphasize their failings. But these alterations go beyond tact. In Luke, we are looking at Jesus’s story through a gentile lens, which viewed the biographies of great men as exemplars for others to emulate. So the great men and women of the Christian tradition must not be shown as muddled, contentious, or craven; and the central figure, Jesus, must be allowed as much dignity and distance from criticism as possible. Thus, in Luke’s treatment of the call of Matthew Levi, the
Pharisees and their scribes direct their ire at Jesus’s disciples, not at Jesus himself (as they do in Mark), for eating and drinking with “tax collectors and prostitutes.”

The Jews, in their emphasis on justice and its lack, were familiar with guilt. They had no trouble portraying their greatest king,
David, as a murderer beset by lust, a man who must come to feel the sharp, inner pangs of guilt for his abysmally unjust actions. Greco-Roman literary and imaginative traditions enshrined no such scenes. For the Greeks and Romans, sin—
hamartia
—was not personal, the result of an evil choice, made against the Law of God written in their hearts. Rather, it was an unavoidable flaw, such as Oedipus’s
hamartia
, his tragic mistake in murdering his father and marrying his mother, while believing he had done everything to
avoid these very actions. For gentiles, what we may think of as a more “Oriental” orientation prevailed: rather than guilt, they were much more likely to feel shame, a far less socially constructive emotion.
²
The great figures of the Christian tradition must not, therefore, be shown by their admiring biographer in shameful, slovenly, or compromising situations.

Luke’s alterations are occasional; and it is tempting to make more of them than is warranted by his text. In the controversy over Jesus’s notorious dinner companions, for instance, Luke gives us the same answer as Mark, when Jesus, addressing the objections of the
Pharisees and their scribes, says: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. I have not come to call the upright but sinners”—Luke adding only
eis metanoian
(“to a change of heart”), which hardly constitutes a change of meaning. We discover in Luke’s Gospel a subtle development of the
kerygma
for presentation to a gentile audience, but a development without substantial discontinuity.

If the pagan emphasis on outward show—the
bella figura
that still ices Italian social life—leads Luke to minor revisions of the Marcan tradition, other elements of gentile sensibility may have impelled the third evangelist to search for stories beyond those that Mark and Matthew had collected, stories that would enable his particular audience to connect with Jesus; and we find in Luke a series of encounters and anecdotes recounted nowhere else in the books of the
New Testament. For example, in Luke’s redaction of the dialogue in which Jesus articulates the two commandments
that summarize the whole
Law of Moses (love of God and neighbor), Jesus’s interlocutor—a lawyer with a lawyerly turn of mind—poses a further question: “And just who is my neighbor?” Jesus replies:

It is fair to say that there is no teaching of Jesus with wider currency than this story of the
Good Samaritan, who
makes his only appearance in Luke’s Gospel. There is no cause to think that Luke made the story up and put it in Jesus’s mouth. Its accurate Palestinian setting—the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, which was indeed perilous—all but forbids such a conclusion. More than this, the parable of the Good Samaritan is of a piece with the most basic substrate of Jesus’s teachings: the obligation of kindness to everyone and anyone who falls across my path, especially someone in trouble.

But we may posit a reason why Mark and Matthew, evangelists closely associated with Jewish communities in Palestine and the diaspora, failed to include this story. The Jews despised the sectarian
Samaritans, who possessed the
Torah but not the Prophets and who worshiped not in the Jerusalem Temple but on
Mount Gerizim to the north. There is no hatred so intense as
odium theologicum
—hatred for those nearby who are religiously similar to oneself but nonetheless different. Through the ages, Christians, for instance, have been far more hateful to Jews, to Muslims, and to one another than they have ever been to Buddhists and Hindus. The Samaritans were the neighboring
heretics; and for them the Jews reserved a contempt they did not display even toward gentiles. Is it not possible that Mark and Matthew felt they could overlook this one example of Jesus’s teaching on universal kindness (after all, they already had so many others), since a Samaritan as the model of Christ-like behavior would rub so many Jewish Christians the wrong way?

But Luke’s gentile Christians needed to be reassured that there was more than one way to be Christ-like, more than one path that could be taken if you would follow in the footsteps of the Master. You needn’t be a born Jew, raised in the traditions
of the ancestors. There was no background that was unthinkable: it was even possible to be something as freaky as a Samaritan. As we stand now at the entrance to the third millennium since Jesus, we can look back over the horrors of Christian history, never doubting for an instant that if Christians had put kindness ahead of devotion to good order, theological correctness, and our own justifications—if we had followed in the humble footsteps of a heretical Samaritan who was willing to wash someone else’s wounds, rather than in the self-regarding steps of the priest and the immaculate steps of the levite—the world we inhabit would be a very different one.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is followed immediately by a scene from Jesus’s life that only Luke recounts. Jesus enters a village where friends of his, Martha and Mary, have a home. While Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he had to say,” Martha “was distracted by her many household tasks.” At length, Martha, feeling sharply the inequity of the situation, upbraids Jesus: “Sir, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work myself? Tell her to help me!” Jesus’s reply, though affectionate, is not what Martha was looking for: “Martha, Martha, you fret and fuss over many things. But only one is necessary. Mary has made the right choice, and it will not be taken from her.”

This encounter might seem intolerable if it concerned anyone other than Jesus. If we imagine Mary as the household member who after dinner is far too absorbed in her guests’ fascinating conversation to bother about clearing the table but leaves all that sort of thing to her drudge of a sister, we may find ourselves solidly on Martha’s side of the argument. Rather, we should read this anecdote in the context of Jesus’s
(and presumably Mary’s) understanding that his time is short, that his entire life is lived against the horizon of apocalypse. Mary is one of the wedding guests who rejoice while the bridegroom is among them, refusing to deprive themselves of the joy of his presence for the sake of some lesser goal. Whatever Martha is huffing and puffing about can be put off till Jesus moves on.

For Luke, Jesus has become the central reality, the yardstick against which all actions are to be measured. It is no coincidence that the story of Martha and Mary follows immediately on the parable of the Good Samaritan, whose actions are Christ-like. Only if we put Christ before all practical considerations—only if we clear a place for him in our hearts (rather than clear the table)—will we be able to behave as the Samaritan does. For us who (like Luke and his gentile readers) live in the time after Jesus, without the comfort of his physical presence, clearing a place for Jesus means praying. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus, despite the constant outpouring of his energy in preaching and healing, always finds time to “withdraw to some lonely place to pray.” So, immediately after the story of Martha and Mary, Jesus teaches his disciples to pray:

R
OMAN
P
ALESTINE
IN
THE
T
IME
OF
J
ESUS

For the sake of effective administrative control, the Romans divided the ancient territory of the Jews in different ways at different times. At the time of Jesus’s death, Judea-Samaria-Idumea was subject to Pontius Pilate, and Galilee to the north and Perea on the west bank of the Jordan were subject to Herod Antipas. The populations of these territories were quite mixed, Judea-Samaria-Idumea containing, as the names imply, Jews, Samaritans, and Idumeans, as well as Greeks, Romans, and other Eurasians. Rural Galilee was home to Samaritans as well as Jews. The Decapolis was largely composed of Roman settlers.

Luke is not later than Mark and Matthew in every respect. Here he has recorded what is almost certainly the original form of the New Testament’s most famous
prayer. (Matthew’s alterations and psalm-like parallelisms do little more than elaborate what is implicit in the original: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not put us to the test, but deliver us from the Evil One.”)
⁴

Luke is building up a purposeful sequence, which begins by answering the question “Who is my neighbor?” and goes on to remind the reader that unfailing kindness (even to strangers) is possible only if we keep Jesus in mind—that is, if we pattern our lives on his—and that such a resolve can be accomplished only if we pray as Jesus did, asking Jesus’s loving Father (who is also our Father) to watch over us. What we say to the Father is not so important; and despite the fact that Jesus’s sample prayer has become an unvarying
Christian incantation, he meant only to sketch one possibility, not to lock us into a formula.

In the last story of this Lucan sequence, Jesus gives us a
midrash on his own prayer: