That Wretched Real Man

Each of the Synoptic Gospels describes early on the wilderness temptation of Jesus by the devil.  Mark’s perfunctory description is unproblematic, but Matthew and Luke describe three temptation events individually and disagree on the order.  A standard explanation of the disagreement seems to be presented in the book Hard Sayings of the Bible (Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., et al., 1996 edition used):

“Each orders the testings of Jesus and mentions details to bring out their picture.  Both pictures are true, but neither is complete in itself.  If we lacked either picture we would be poorer.  This is why it is important to read each Gospel for itself and to get the distinctive message each author is proclaiming, to see the picture each author is painting.  If we try to merge them together to get a homogenized harmony we lose these distinctive contributions, moving from books Christians believe God inspired to an interest in mere history.”

Of course, it can be amusing to note the authors’ contention that working out a “homogenized harmony” of accounts of the Savior’s universe-shaking lone battle with the Tempter would betray “an interest in mere history.”  What is more important to note in rationalizations such as that above (and others like it) is the way the authors grant themselves the edge in every nuance.  They write of the differing accounts of the temptations in Matthew and Luke, “Both pictures are true, but neither is complete in itself.”  Of course, they are complete in themselves—that is why commentators (like those above) must contend that the Gospel accounts differ because of the themes the Gospel writers want to bring out in their respective stories.  Writing a gospel that conflicts with another on a statement of fact does not “complete” the other, nor does it lend to the two conflicting gospels being more “complete” together—all that is “complete’’ in such an instance is the body of Scripture that the commentator has to work with (with all its attendant difficulties.)

Of course, the “conflict” (such as between Matthew and Luke on the temptations) must be shown to be direct—a gospel that leaves out (or appears to leave out) a detail presented in another gospel does not conflict necessarily with the latter.  A prime example of this is the gospels’ descriptions of the two condemned with Jesus—John and Mark describe their presence matter-of-factly (though some manuscripts of Mark include an Old Testament allusion), while Luke includes most notably the Good Thief upbraiding his fellow for the latter’s insults of Jesus, and in Luke the Good Thief receives the hopeful promise of salvation from Jesus.

Then there is Matthew, which has both insulting Jesus (at first?):

“Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, He saved others; himself he cannot save.  If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him.  He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God.  The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth.”

Of course, if the Bible were held to be (as, unfortunately, it is held often to be) a seamless and unproblematic book of books, then the literary lurch between the Matthew thief (casting “the same” in Jesus’ “teeth”) and the Luke thief (“remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom”) would be neither more nor less than an embarrassment.  One can contend that one of the “thieves” changed his mind.

It is at this point that I must emphasize this blog’s focus on moments.  Moments are experienced, and each episode of attention-commanding experience is a moment.  And to each moment we are roused, readied, and reaped.

And if we are to understand Jesus’ teachings, we must understand Jesus’ emphasis on moments.  In the teachings of Jesus time and place are rendered infinitely malleable.  It is ridiculous to try to work out details of time and place in contemplating Jesus’ teachings, since his abiding and all-encompassing command is to submerge such particulars (which otherwise we collect and frame as our “lives”) into the experiential realm of the kingdom of God.

It is in terms of experiences that we must view the accounts of the gospels and of the scriptures to which Jesus draws our attention.  Most critical of all this is our understanding of (or attempts to understand) the experiences of Jesus.  “The experiences of Jesus” is one of the most problematic aspects of organized Christianity, since the topic of Jesus’ experiences is one of the religious topics subjected most fiercely to ideological abuse.  One wonders if Jesus’ physical and psychological abuse in the course of the Crucifixion is dwarfed by the horrific presumptions upon his experiences committed by theologians.  One would think that Jesus’ sacrificial torments would be reckoned the great theological holy ground untrammeled by divines, yet in their frantic need to extract supportable “salvation economies” upon which to base their denominations, theologians expound endlessly upon the height and depth and breadth and duration of Jesus’ agonies.

A person can spend a pious lifetime expounding on how the sins of all mankind were piling on top of the cross that Jesus bore.  Then again, there was the contribution of Simon of Cyrene.  A person can attempt to formulate an equation by which Jesus suffered the equivalent of eternities of suffering of all mankind (or, if you prefer, of all of the elect), although infinities and eternities do not fit well into our equations.  And then again, there is the surprise on the part of experienced agony-producers at how short a time Jesus lasted on the Cross (though the onset of the festival was going to cut short the agonies of Jesus and his condemned fellows at any rate.)  This type of conjecture is not merely ridiculous, but ultimately impious.

We cannot even begin to conjecture on the sufferings of Jesus.  When we try to do so, we do so in ways that betray our self-centered emphases.  When we want to construct a salvation economy, no pains will be spared in conjecturing about the aspects of Jesus’ suffering.  When we want to construct an argument for our version of Scripture, we will contort ourselves appallingly rather than abide the notion of a disjointed and cumbersome body of literature about Jesus.  The business of manipulating the extant scriptures is especially problematic in how this business discounts the experiential aspect of Jesus’ ministry.  We see this phenomenon in both of the examples (different in other respects) described above—the Order of the Temptations and the Behavior of the Crucified Criminals.

Arguments about the Temptations as presented in the gospels rely generally on considering certain related aspects of the narratives as being understandable in terms of writers’ viewpoints.  This or that order of the temptations related by this or that Greek phraseology representing this or that Hebrew (or Aramaic) utterance between Jesus and Satan are batted around endlessly.  Did Jesus and Satan even speak a post-Babel language to each other?  (Can we ever stop revisiting the notion that Hebrew was the “original language,” based on sophomoric word-play in Genesis?)  Did Jesus and Satan speak any language at all to each other?  Were the temptations limited to those described in the texts?  The (presumably and apparently) original description in Mark sure sounds like forty days of torment.  Who are we to imagine otherwise?  When the emphasis on the Temptations is “scriptural” rather than “experiential,” the Temptations come across as little more than high-school debating exercises.  Indeed, high school students would seem to suffer more exasperating temptations.

Jesus’ punishments were beyond imagining.  Jesus’ temptations were beyond imagining.  Either these things are true, or Jesus’ stature as the Son of God does not mean what we claim it means.  Only our experiential participation in the life that Jesus offers to us can direct us toward any understanding, and that very “directing” is intrinsically related to an understanding that we can never comprehend the divine.

We cannot forget the other example presented above, the Behavior of the Crucified Criminals.  The reason it does not matter whether they both derided Jesus until he died, or whether one of them repented and sought Jesus’ favor, is because Jesus knew the full experience of both scenarios—just as he knew the full life-story of everyone in the crowd ridiculing him.  Just as he knew the exhaustive details not merely of the lives of all the onlookers, but of how their lives—and presumably their attitudes toward him—would have or could have been affected by any experience they had faced, or would face.

There is an even more pointed example of how we will do well to focus on experiential aspects of Jesus’ ministry, rather than upon trying to construct a narrative.  This example is Jesus’ betrayal by Judas.  Judas has been raised in our communal lore as the most despicable of evil-doers, and little else might be expected of a “scriptural” heritage that considers him greedy, self-righteous, hypocritical, cowardly, and impious—to say nothing of devil-possessed.  It is this last point, however (devil-possession) that can help us throw Judas into proper light.

The Judas of John was a thief who became possessed by the devil.  The great crime of this Judas was thievery—unless we consider ourselves qualified to opine on devil-possession (and are prepared to deliver the pronouncement that Judas, and not Satan, bore the guilt of it.)

The Judas of Luke was simply devil-possessed and went to arrange (apparently) for money in return for the betrayal—the money presumably being more important to this Judas than to the devil who possessed him.

And, of course, since it seems that Jesus considered Peter little better than Satan if Peter were to hinder Jesus from his fate, it seems indeed strange than Satan would positively thrust Jesus toward that same fate.  Such, to say the least, is the sort of conundrum we enter when we start puzzling out demon-possession.  We have no more grounds to say that we can understand the devil-possessed Judas of John or of Luke than to say that we can understand the fallen angels.  It is beyond us.

Then there is the Judas of Mark, who does not even seem to have predicated his betrayal on monetary payment (or at least the translators seem unable to work the language that way.)  The Judas of Mark hands Jesus over to the authorities and bids them to keep Jesus well-guarded (or is it safely guarded?)  The Judas of Mark did what he did because the Judas of Mark did what he did.  The rest is beyond us.

And then finally there is the Judas of Matthew.  The book of Matthew is filled with alternating criticisms by Jesus of the people, and then of their leadership, and then of the people, and then of their leadership, and so on.  This is the gospel in which Jesus tells the people that they are to do what the scribes and Pharisees tell them to do.  This is the gospel in which Jesus says of the Pharisees “leave them,” or “let them alone.”  It would not be rash to assume that Jesus would get into trouble with the law, but for what, and with what gravity?

And so Judas goes to the authorities (whose internal deliberations would be hidden from him) and asks, “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?”  They offer him thirty pieces of silver—enough to pay the temple tax for sixty men.  He is expected to betray Jesus, who likes to tells parables about millions of dollars in gold—for enough to pay the temple tax for sixty men.  Judas is expected—the Judas who the expositors like to imagine in league with immensely powerful men scheming to hold power under the mighty Roman Empire—this same Judas is expected to expose himself in something like a scene of darkness and torches and swords and potential panic, for enough to pay the temple tax for sixty men?

Judas, who has no reason to assume that Jesus will get more than the flogging that Pilate offers (and the type of punishment that the Apostles discover will be handed out by Levantine leaders almost as an afterthought) asks, “What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?”  The pittance he is promised might easily be translated by him into a statement—perhaps an assurance—that Jesus would be punished with a misdemeanor, and hopefully dissuaded in future.  We can think worse of Judas if we like, but he is at least a human being, and (unlike the demonic Judases of Luke and John and the sketch figure of Mark) the Judas of Matthew is a human being who we can try to understand.

And so Matthew continues:

“Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.”

What foul contagion of the most brutish ages of history would prompt two thousand years of Christianity to throw their eyes over this verse of Judas’ anguish and assign to him the role of devil incarnate?  The reduction of Judas to a soulless caricature would be bad enough, but there is a still greater evil here.  Judas’ prospective Savior has since the world’s beginning shouldered every burden and felt every pain of Creation—no follower of Jesus could possibly imagine otherwise.  And no follower of Jesus, in good conscience and confronted by the matter, would ever exempt from consideration any cause to contemplate a source of Jesus’ pain.

The only analyzable story of Judas in the gospels is found in Matthew.  It is a story of a man aghast at what he has gotten himself into, and what he has joined others in doing.  It must have been agony to him, and the suffering of Judas must have been agony to Jesus.  There is really no mystery here, no “How could anyone have shared earthly fellowship with Jesus and then have turned away?”  They all turned away—Judas, the fleeing disciples, the crowds, “all the people.”  And they all have been joined by the rest of us throughout history—our history—when too often we have recalled with remorse what we have gotten ourselves into, and what we have joined others in doing.

There is only one abiding lesson of the Temptations, the accounts of which are bound to be jumbled in the transmitting and the translation: Jesus was there, and he felt it.  There is only one abiding lesson of the thieves on Jesus’ left and right, whose agonies were mingled for Jesus with his own: Jesus was there, and he felt it.  There is only one abiding lesson of Judas’ act of betrayal, which involved real, not cartoonish, behaviors on the part of that wretched real man: Jesus was there, and he felt it.