Even to the Poor

One of the staple elements of Christian preaching in our age is the invitation for a person to read the Gospels and be struck by how Jesus transformed the lives and outlooks of his hearers.  I say "Christian preaching" because this approach to appraising the ministry of Jesus is inseparable from the ministrations of clergy and interpreters, who have an interest in their own hearers being predisposed to receive the Gospels in a cloud of attendant church-supplied suggestions.  It does not seem at all prevalent for Christian proselytizers to simply hand people this or that gospel, and to hope that this "transformation of Jesus' hearers" element will appear to the reader unbidden.

There is a reason for this.  The bulk of the Gospel testimony is barren of this supposed "transformation" business.  The easiest of the examples of this lack is the Gospel of Mark, though it be noted that the other synoptics (to use the term with unavoidable irony) supply additional viewpoints.  However, the evidence against a "transformation" theme in the Gospels writ large is found quite strikingly also in John, in which Jesus begins and ends his ministry in doubt about whether he has gotten through to his hearers.  And I will not hesitate to assert that Mark is meant to be complete and sufficient as a gospel--though its apparent (and possibly quite superfluous) appended ending is of no small frustration to the orthodox.

Jesus at the start of Mark certainly transforms the lives of his first disciples, inviting them to leave fishing to become "fishers of men," but transformation of mode of living is not the same as internal transformation, and John's Gospel gives the game away, depicting a vigorous interest in the advent of the Messiah in Jesus' first hearers.  Jesus went fishing where he knew there was a catch to be found.

The remainder of Mark shows people transformed by miraculous healings and transformed by miraculous blessings.  And just as tenaciously Mark shows such blessed people fickle in their attentions, ungrateful enough to immediately ignore Jesus' post-miracle instructions, focused only on the comforts and convenience provided by miracles, and dogged in their vigor to bend the ministry of Jesus into presaging of their pre-existing hopes for the Messiah.  It is not too much to say that Jesus' hearers show an amazing resistance to having themselves transformed in any meaningful way.

Here, of course, if one wishes to follow it, is a beckoning avenue for charting out the tactics of preachers.  In contexts tucked safely away from the transformative-effect-of-the-greatest-preacher-ever prating about Jesus' ministry, theologians will gladly describe the thick-headedness of Jesus' hearers in some particular situation.  This business is all about who controls the flow of the modern discussion.  What is important to remember is the interest of the churches in establishing a logical continuity between the Gospels (or, rather, some digestion of the Gospels as a whole) and the Church proper, that is, that awkward and shambling organization that can scarcely bear the weight of its obvious internal machinations in Acts and afterward.  Never has the Church been able to afford an honest or straightforward examination of its relationship to the Gospels.

Simultaneously, however, one must guard against giving the Church too much credit in having concocted (or transmuted) the Gospels to its own purposes.  That the gospels have prefaces and epilogues tacked on is scarcely questionable (the supposed ending of Mark being merely the most obvious.)  Also, there are plain interpolations as well as wincingly clumsy insertions of Old Testament quotations and mis-quotations.  If, however, the Gospels are understood as having been possessed and shepherded chiefly by the churches, then merely the addition and insertion of ostensibly-qualifying "Messiah legitimization" elements--genealogies and tortured applications of prophecies--would have sufficed.  There would have been no direct need to inject the elements of (chiefly Pauline) theology, such supply having been the reasoning and the livelihood of preachers.

And in such examination is to be found the chief argument against the notion that the theology of Paul (or of anyone else) was derived from some disembodied atoning-crucifixion-taking-place-in-the-heavenly-realm ideology that was transmuted artificially by someone into on ostensible historical event.  A person serving the interests of a pre-existing atonement theory by inventing an earthly ministry of Jesus would have surely drawn up this characterization around the elements of that soteriology.  This, obviously, was not done.  If the "Gospel" is about how Jesus died to redeem sinful humanity, then Mark cannot qualify as a gospel at all--by the standard definitions, someone forgot to put any "Gospel" into the Gospel of Mark.

In Mark, Jesus tells the disciples of his own impending execution and then excoriates Peter for having attempted to rebuke him.  Peter, however (though impertinent and impetuous, as the preachers love to describe him), was not doing anything remarkable.  Jesus himself is recorded elsewhere as asking a man whether or not he wants to be healed.  Though Jesus' impending death and described "rising" is a far more impressive miracle than any he had yet performed, nonetheless it need not have been seen by Peter as anything but yet another in an ages-long theology of miraculous interventions into the life of the people--an intervention that Peter found horrible to contemplate.  That Jesus describes Peter as thinking not as God thinks, but as humanity thinks, is not theologically-specific to Christianity.  Judaism (and many other faiths) have held to the importance of self-sacrifice--as indeed Jesus asks, in practical effect, from everyone.  And if Jesus' self-resurrection was to be understood by Peter as a miracle in the rarefied quality in which Christianity sees it, and as the lynch-pin of Christian theology, then the writer of the Gospel of Mark forgets to include that in the book.

I will not attempt to defend the thesis that dying-to-redeem-sinful-humanity cannot be extracted by some exertions from each of the Gospels.  This is not a theology entirely foreign, of course, to the Scriptures (considered most generally).  Unfortunately, the mechanism of sacrifice being so common to humanity (and here of course we invite the God-shaped-hole-in-each-of-us blather), it is virtually impossible to look at any element of religion (or of any contemplations of the ultimate) without being able, if willing, to find the fingerprints of atonement theology on it.  Preachers will declare Adam and Eve to be saved because blood was shed to clothe them and they passed between cherubim pre-typifying the temple rituals, and so on and so on.  (And would you like to hear about Egyptian hieroglyphics?)  Unavoidably, however, as far as religiously-specific discussion is concerned, there is no practical distinction between finding something always and everywhere, and finding it nowhere.

Yet there is an another element of miracle in the Gospels, that is, entirely and sufficiently in the Gospels, that needs to be examined if any true understanding of Jesus' ministry is to be obtained.  After Jesus' ministry is well begun, in Luke 7, disciples of John the Baptist travel to Jesus and ask, in John's name, whether Jesus is the one for whom they have been waiting.

Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.  And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

This is one of the strangest parts--to us--of the Gospels.  John had gotten his first information about Jesus from divine sources of which Jesus' disciples could scarcely dream.  And now John hesitates to understand Jesus as the Messiah?  No one has been able really to explain this, and the critics have had a field-day.   However, an even greater puzzle lies within Jesus' response.  It makes some sort of sense--a rather sad sense about an inexplicable misunderstanding--that John's attention must be drawn to the miracles of Jesus that have been noised about so widely.  But, "to the poor the gospel is preached"?  What is that all about?

The disseminated elements of any religion, and the digestion of those elements of common discourse, are almost by necessity perpetuated by any age's equivalent of the middle-class.  Many are the religions that can claim the humble-brag of being the religions of the poor and the outcast, but the case is not always so simple.  No observer of humanity can escape the realization that each and every such religion will have adherents who identify with the plights of the poor, and still other adherents who identify the poor as emblematic--if not actual responsible causes--of depravity as defined by the faith.  Even more probably will the poor be beset by self-doubt--at least, that is the logic behind Jesus' outreach to them.

In our day--and, again, typically among those in our day who disseminate the elements of Christianity--there is a tendency to project backwardly the middle-class experiences of modern culture.  Today there are people who have some means, however modest (or at least as much as to allow modest living), and then there are those without.  A typical notion might be a middle-class neighborhood with a shopping center in which appears intermittently some person who is tolerated more or less as a holder of a sign indicating some disability or need.  Such is our notion of poverty, and poverty is to be kept in its place.

It would be fatuous to imagine that such conditions applied in Jesus' day.  Poverty and disease lurked at almost everyone's door, and haunted the daily prospects of nearly everyone.  Only our cinema-tinged imaginations can support notions of well-fed "Bible days" villagers tolerating occasional beggars into whose cups coins might be dropped (or more likely tossed.)  Moreover, to be poor in Jesus' day was to be deprived, to a greater or lesser extent, of the means to satisfy the ritual requirements of the authorities whom Jesus decried.  This is what we need to consider.  The "poor" of Jesus' day were not afflicted merely with a daily life-or-death struggle against adverse circumstances.  The "poor" to whom Jesus says that the gospel was preached were people who knew the moment-by-moment experience of being rendered inhuman.

The Jewish authorities thought the poor were ignorant and damned.  Jesus' disciples, confronted with his declaration that wealth was a positive hindrance to salvation, countered with amazement, "Who then can be saved?"  When Jesus says, "to the poor the gospel is preached," he is reiterating what enlightened believers of every age have known--that existence is a miracle, that the existence of humanity is a miracle, and that such miracles are meaningless if it be held that our unclean hands and minds can dare to pull apart the elements of Creation.  Indeed, the fabric of the tapestry of Jesus' teaching is the presumption that everything is a miracle.  The Gospels teach that Jesus is one with the miracle of Creation's beginning, and in that understood context "miracles" as distinct elements become--if one might presume to say--laughable.

We can say that every person is valuable, and that our faith tells us so, and that we must propagate our faith, and that we must make hard choices about the necessities of propagating our faith, and that we must allocate resources prudently in supporting that faith, and that we must safeguard the persons and the energies of those who will lead the charge of the faith, and that we must support the governments that do the safeguarding, and that we must allow the free exchange of goods and services that to tend to the wealth of our polities and our communities, and that we must be frugal in the apportionment of the means by which we support the poor, and that we must be careful to not remove from the poor their incentive to try to better themselves.  And usually we leave the poor feeling they are lacking something in their very selves, or at least that we view them so.

It would seem strange that one or more of the Gospels was written so that the only miracles performed were those performed in the instance by Jesus.  In the parlance of the day, those were "signs," and everyone knew that many persons of many descriptions performed "signs."  It would be stranger still to contend that the one great miracle of Christianity--the Resurrection and its salvation as described in as many different ways by as many different sects as exist, and as more-or-less delineated by the New Testament and as many different Fathers as the different sects will tolerate--is what is described in the Gospels.  Look for it.  It is not there, at least not so consistently as to define what we could call a "gospel."

The gospel, the good news proclaimed most notably to the poor, is the declaration of the miraculous quality of whatever exists--things all the more especially to be viewed as miraculous when we would rather not look at them.  That the gospels, individually and collectively, are centered on an enigmatic person who spoke and acted and proclaimed as God, is the uniting factor that makes them gospels, and those the sayings and actions and proclamations are those of a perfect God is the contention of his proper adherents, not ridiculous and tiresome contentions that this or that wilted fragment of a copy of a pagan's quote of another pagan about Jesus is some sort of "evidence" of a Resurrection that cannot be proven, that was never meant to be "proven."

A Jew of modest means in first-century Judea who bent down into a gutter to lend aid to a beggar was not lifting the beggar merely from the muck, but from a state of sub-humanity, of damnation while yet alive.  This, as ever and everywhere (and as possibly involving anyone), is the foundation of the miracle-conception of the gospels.  Herein resides the origin of the great through-line of the gospels, of the teachings of Jesus.  If the creating and sustaining and empathetic nature of Jesus is not understood to inhabit the lowest parts of our experienced existence, nay, even unto the bowels of the earth, then the nature of Jesus will never be recognized as our eyes and minds travel up to the Cross.