to Christ on behalf of his friend and for his friend’s sake desiring to be heard by Christ, directs his attention with love and longing to Christ: then it sometimes happens that quickly and imperceptibly the one love passes over into the other and coming as it were into contact with the sweetness of Christ himself, the friend begins to taste his sweetness and to experience his charm . . . Thus ascending from that holy love with which he embraces a friend to that with which he embraces Christ, he will joyfully partake in abundance of the spiritual fruit of friendship, awaiting the fullness of all things in the life to come. Then with the dispelling of all anxiety by reason of which we now fear and are solicitous for one another, with the removal of all anxiety which it now behooves us to bear for one another, and above all, with the destruction of the sting of death together with death itself, whose pangs now often trouble us and force us to grieve for one another, with salvation secured, we shall rejoice in the eternal possession of Supreme Goodness; and this friendship, to which here we admit but few, will be outpoured upon all and by all outpoured upon God, and God shall be all in all.17
‘Eternal life’–life free of all constraints–becomes humanly accessible in this great incarnational vision of God.
As with any human relationship, friendship with Jesus proceeds by stages. One of the first things we do when a relationship begins to deepen is to remember the history of the friendship from the moment of first meeting. It becomes one of the irreplaceable stories within the story of our life. It is inconceivable that we could be friends with someone without wanting and needing to know the basic facts about their life and origins. Their past in some way needs to be appropriated into the shared story the friendship is creating. This is why it is natural to want to know what Jesus of Nazareth was like, what influences formed him, what he really taught and did. A lot of time has passed and his contemporaries had different ideas about biography from ours. There is a lot we will never know about him but the gospels give all we need to know.
What Are the Gospels?
Early one glorious evening when the sun seemed determined not to set I stopped in at my cousin’s house and found his two young boys glued to the television. It was rare to find them indoors when the weather was so good unless it was to watch Ireland play football. I wondered what programme had proved stronger than their irrepressible instinct to have real adventures outdoors. They were watching Baywatch, a series set on the beaches of southern California with huge ratings and a low budget for the cast’s wardrobe. How these Bere Island boys would compare the fantasy world of southern California with the cold pebbly beaches of West Cork where any bathers attracted admiration more for their physical courage in undressing than for their defined physiques, I discussed later with my cousin. He looked pensive.
In the old days, he said, before twenty-four hour TV, people entertained each other with the recital of their family histories. Every evening, even in the worst weather, they would do the tour of each other’s houses to sit by the peat fire with a glass of the real stuff in reach and recount again the epic stories of each household. The same stories would be repeated continuously, often re-interpreting familiar facts. There would be frequent updates with news about those who had gone to America or Australia or England. Personalities, deaths and births, feuds and reconciliations. Powerful feelings tempered by time or the instincts of justice. Storytelling was a liturgy of the island community. It was also a way of entertainment, a characteristic Irish delight in the use of imagination and words for their own sake. But it was serious too: a way of making meaning of the close-knit world of Bere Island and its now dwindling population.
Privacy and the low whisper were important values among this community that constantly communicated itself to itself. People lived so closely to each other that mistakes were hard to undo. What was said in anger or bitterness today might take years to stop hurting. But nothing went unnoticed or uncared for. Privacy did not mean isolation. And in the perspective of history all events belonged to the community not only to the individual or the family. After the invasion of television people no longer braved the winter cold, the devil that prowled abroad to chase late-night card-players on their way home or the spirits that were older even than the church’s angels and devils. People no longer did the rounds of their neighbours to talk their own stories into the larger stories of the island. Now they stay indoors and watch soaps made in Hollywood for a global market. The ancient stories were dying for lack of telling, as friendships or plants die when they are not given the time needed to tend them. To forget is the unforgiveable sin.
The gospels were written only after they had long been talked. Even today their stories need to be spoken aloud and can only be properly read within the oral as well as a bookish tradition. Word of mouth is still their essential means of transmission. And the old wisdom of the islanders applies to this story-telling as well: to tell a story you have got to believe it, to put yourself and all that is important to you, into it.
To read the gospels through is to see that, to understand who Jesus is, we must start by seeing him at the least as a teacher. Everyone agrees that Jesus is a teacher.
His way of teaching was both private and public: to an inner group of disciples and to the crowds. But it was not esoteric in a secretive sense. He told his judges at his trial that he had taught openly and not in secret.1 He did not have a schoolhouse or Academy in the style of Greek philosophers. Instead he walked the roads of Palestine. He spoke in the open air, by the side of lakes, hillsides, in fields and also in synagogues, at meals in private homes and in the courts of the Temple in Jerusalem. He taught by parable and aphorism. His language was simple and graphic showing a preference for natural symbolism and the kind of stories which a people in touch with the life of nature and of a local community would have enjoyed. It avoided intellectual analysis and legalistic hair-splitting. He drew on well-known stories and daily images familiar to his listeners.
We know his teaching almost entirely from the four gospels. In a sense the gospels are the notes taken by others of the living words of a teacher who, like Socrates and the Buddha, did not himself write books. Only once is he shown writing when he bends to write unknown words in the dust.2 He communicated his message orally, in the interactive process of teaching people who sat listening to his words, some spellbound, some thinking of dinner, everyone watching his facial expressions and gestures. It is a living teaching of ‘one who taught with authority’ waiting for us in these inspired notebooks. That is why it is so important to consider how we should read them.
First of all, there are four gospels not one. Like all notebooks they remind us that everyone takes different notes of the same talk and in the later oral report further elaborations are made. An industry of scholarship today explores the theories of how the gospels were written, by whom, for whom and how they influenced each other. There will probably never be universal agreement. The major goal however is not to explain how they were written but how to read them well. To try merely to reduce the four perspectives to one ‘historical’ reality behind them is to seriously misread them.
We make the same misreading when we dissect the gospels in search of the ‘real historical Jesus’. The problem, to paraphrase Pontius Pilate, is to know ‘What is real?’ We have become so conditioned to the prose of science and sociology as the language of reality that we have lost an ear for the other tones in which human experience expresses itself and what is beyond itself. We dismiss them as ‘unhistorical’ or ‘mythical’ and try to translate them reductively back into the language of ‘factual truth’. This attempt betrays the text. It fails to see how other methods can communicate truths that the scientific method will never grasp. To deny the many-layered texture of reality that calls
