Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

A saying that recurs in all three of the Synoptics is Jesus’ quotation and interpretation of Psalm 110. In verse 4 this psalm invokes Melchizedek, the mysterious pagan priest who appears in Genesis to bless Abraham and receive a tithe from him. The text in Genesis gives Melchizedek no paternity and no age at death, departures that are taken to set him outside the mortal run of things, to make him, as the psalm says, “a priest forever.” Jesus draws attention to the first words of the psalm, “The Lord says to my lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool,’” and asks, “If David thus calls him Lord, how is he his son?” In Matthew, this is his response to the reply of the Pharisees, whom he has asked, “What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?” If Jesus’ meaning is that the Christ is greater than and other than even the great kings of Israel, it is notable that he makes this argument by rejecting the concept of messianic sonship, despite the attenuated claim made through Joseph in the two genealogies, and for Jesus, though only as he, like Abraham and David, has a place in the sacred history of Israel, or as he is a son of Adam.

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Jesus’ origin as son of God, shared, as Luke says, by Adam, makes ancestry moot and opens the way to universalism, the movement of the knowledge of God beyond the ethnic, cultural, and historical boundaries of its first revelation, to all those other children of Adam, to humankind. This movement was already taking place through the efforts of Paul and others before the Gospels were written. If this expansion into the world, epitomized in an astounding event at Pentecost and by the conversion and mission of Paul, seemed to the Evangelists to be a realization of Jesus’ purpose and an expression of his nature, then it would follow that the teachings of Jesus in which it was anticipated would receive special emphasis in their recounting. The Gospels were written in light of the emergence of what came to be called Christianity, and subsequent to the events recounted in the Acts of the Apostles. If their writers took the spread of the faith to be the presence and work of the resurrected Christ—“Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I also”—then of course every foreshadowing of it during his lifetime would seem essential to an understanding of him. Any account made of him before they had witness of his impact on the larger world would have been entirely premature.

There are those who worry because the Gospels were probably written decades after the death of Jesus, as if his mortal life were all that was relevant to questions of his nature and his meaning, which the passage of time could only obscure. But for his early followers, a flood of new meaning would have become apparent in the aftermath of his death. They would have other bases for interpreting what he did and said, and what his resurrection meant, which would, very reasonably, shape their telling of it. The Incarnation is, by itself, the great fact that gives every act and saying of Jesus the character of revelation. With the Resurrection, it is the grand and unique statement of the bond between history and cosmos. The disciples, the Temple authorities, and the general population can have had no notion of what was transpiring among them, unprecedented as it was. The Gospel writers and readers would know much more. They might know, for example, that people in distant cities were moved and changed by the vision expressed in the hymn in Philippians, and might take it to be true that the Holy Spirit is at work in the emergence of the faith, and in its forming character. In light of such knowledge it would seem appropriate to assume, as they did, that the words and actions attributed to Jesus have a meaning unlike and in excess of virtue or wisdom or morality, chastisement or consolation, all of which would be the marks of teacher and prophet, all of which are temporal and will pass away.

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We can assume, at a minimum, that there was indeed a historical Jesus of Nazareth, as there were a Thales of Miletus and a Pythagoras of Samos. Ancient teachers whose disciples attested to their teachings are numerous. We are in the habit of assuming the fragments that survive give us these philosophers, to the extent the accidents of transmission and loss will allow, granting that this extent cannot be reckoned. We have four accounts of the teachings and the life and death of Jesus, three of them largely consistent with one another. Their differences should surely be taken as evidence that they were the work of very human witnesses, receivers of the tradition and interpreters of it. God honors us with important work. And where they are similar, this might be taken as evidence of a particular emphasis and centrality in the teaching, whether explicit or implicit. If Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been put in separate rooms and told to write from memory a fifty-page summary of the Gospels, their two versions would be alike in important respects and different in important respects. And both would be sound and valuable.

Many have questioned the reliability of the biblical narrative as history, therefore its credibility as the basis of belief. Like the genealogies in Matthew and Luke which dismiss genealogy, the Gospels might be said to testify against themselves in the fact of their unreconciled differences, at least when they are judged by the standards of the literary forms to which they are presumably compared. This kind of comparison itself raises questions, of course. The accounts of the life and death of the Persian Cyrus the Great vary markedly, and the tales of his abandonment in infancy and adoption by a herdsman certainly have the character of myth or folklore. Yet no one questions that there was indeed a Cyrus. He left a wake of consequence the mighty do leave, and records, and relics. Jesus, of course, had little status while he lived. Obscure as he was, it is notable, perhaps miraculous, that his life is attested at all. If we knew Cyrus only by ancient accounts of his life, there would be as good grounds for doubting his historical reality as for questioning the historicity of Jesus. The mythic elements in the tale of Cyrus’ infancy are conventions that mark him out as no ordinary man, reflecting his historical importance. If the circumstances said to surround Jesus’ birth are in fact retrojections of the same kind, they cannot reasonably be taken as casting doubt on his existence, though they very often are.

There are great differences between the accounts of origins of the Persian conqueror and the Jewish carpenter, one being that Jesus’ birth and the circumstances of his life were of his own choosing. As Chrysostom says, “He took to himself a mother of low estate”—ironically, a prerogative no mere emperor could dream of. He fulfilled an exalted purpose in living and dying an obscure figure in a minor province. His birth was indeed humble, consecrated by the sacrifice of two pigeons. As a boy he impressed the elders in the Temple, but this did not bring him to a more elevated condition, as youthful kingliness is said to have done for Cyrus. He did not, like Oedipus, find his way to a destined role at odds with his apparent origins. If Jesus had become king of the Jews in the ordinary sense, his narrative would indeed follow this ancient paradigm very closely. Instead, in his truest nature, human and divine, he really was to be found among those who hungered and thirsted and were sick and in prison. If all the tales and myths and histories of greatness obscured and greatness revealed hover behind the Gospels, they are there to be overturned, with all the assumptions that give them currency in the human imagination. It is not alien to the divine nature to be aware of the stories we tell ourselves and to be articulate in their terms. After all, we live by stories, as God knows, and the books of Moses tell us. If we say Jesus explicitly and purposefully rejected the expectations, that is, the anticipated narrative, that had grown up around the promised Messiah, then against the background of these expectations his life takes on particular meaning. His self-characterization as a, as well as the, Son of Man, speaks precisely to this point.