Jesus. They came perhaps from Ecbatana, perhaps from the shores of the
Caspian Sea. Mounted on their camels with their full-stuffed
saddle-bags, they had forded the Tigris and the Euphrates, crossed the
great desert of the nomad tribes, followed along the Dead Sea. They were
guided to Judea by a new star like the comet which appears every so
often in the sky to announce the birth of a prophet or the death of a
Cæsar. They had come to adore a King, and they found a nursing baby,
poorly swaddled, hidden within a stable. Almost a thousand years before
this, a Queen of the East had come on a pilgrimage to Judea, and she,
too, had carried gifts, gold, fragrant perfumes and precious stones; but
she had found on the throne the greatest king who had ever reigned in
Jerusalem and from him had learned what no one else had been able to
teach her.
The wise men found no king. They found a new-born baby, a tiny boy, who
could neither ask nor answer questions, a boy who in His maturity was to
disdain material treasures, and the learning which is based on material
things.
They were not kings, these wise men, but in Media and Persia they were
the masters of kings. The kings ruled over the people, but the wise men
directed the kings. They alone could communicate with Alma Mazda, the
good God. They alone knew the future, and Destiny. They killed with
their own hands the enemies of men and of the harvests, snakes, harmful
insects, birds of prey. They purified souls, they purified the fields.
Except from their hands God accepted no sacrifices. No king began a war
without consulting them. Theirs were the secrets of heaven and earth. In
the name of science and religion they held first rank in the nation. In
the midst of a people sunk in material things they represented the
Spirit. It was fitting that they should come to kneel before Jesus.
After the animals which are Nature, after the Shepherds which are the
common people, this third power which is knowledge knelt at the manger
in Bethlehem. The old priestly caste of the Orient made its act of
submission before the new Lord, who was to send His Gospel to the west.
The learned men knelt before Him who was to set above the learning of
words and numbers the new wisdom of love.
Symbolizing the old theology bowing before the final revelation, the
wise men at Bethlehem knelt before Innocence: Wealth prostrated itself
at the feet of Poverty.
They offered gold to Jesus: gold which He was to tread under foot. They
offered it not because Mary in her poverty might need it for the
journey, but in anticipation of the command, “Sell all that thou hast
and give it to the poor.” They offered Him frankincense, not to drown
the stench of the stable, but as a token that their own ritual was
ended; that their altars would need smoke and perfume no longer. They
offered Him myrrh knowing that this boy would die young, and His mother,
smiling now, would need spices to embalm the dead body.
Kneeling in their pontifical robes upon the bedding of straw, they, the
mighty, the learned, the soothsayers, offered themselves as pledges of
the obedience of the world.
Jesus now had received all His rightful investitures. The wise men had
scarcely gone when persecutions were begun by those who were to hate Him
to the day of His death.
OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS
When Christ appeared upon the earth, criminals ruled the world
unopposed. He was born subject to two sovereigns, the stronger far away
at Rome, the weaker and wickeder close at hand in Judea.
One lucky adventurer after wholesale slaughter had seized the empire,
another had murdered his way to the throne of David and Solomon. Each
rose to high position through trickery, through civil wars, betrayals,
cruelty, massacres. They were born to understand one another, were, as a
matter of fact, friends and accomplices, as far as was possible between
a subordinate rascal and his rascal chief.
Son of the usurer of Velletri, Augustus showed himself cowardly in war
and vindictive in victory, false to his friends, cruel in reprisals. To
a condemned man who begged only for burial he answered, “That is the
business of the vultures.” To the Perugians begging for mercy during the
massacre he cried, “Moriendum esse!” On a mere suspicion he wanted to
tear out the eyes of the Praetor Quintus Gallius before ordering his
throat cut. Possessed of the empire, with his enemies crushed and
scattered, with the power all in his own hands, he put on a mask of
mildness and of his youthful vices kept only his lust. It was told of
him, that in his youth, he had sold his body twice, first to Cæsar, and
again in Spain to Hirtius for 300,000 sestertia. Now he amused himself
with the wives of his friends, with almost public adulteries, and with
posing as the restorer of morality.
This filthy, sickly man was sovereign of the western world when Jesus
was born, nor did he ever know that One had been born who would bring
the dissolution of all that he had founded. The facile philosophy of the
plump little plagiarist Horace was enough for him, “To-day let us enjoy
wine and love: hopeless death awaits us: there is not a day to be lost!”
In vain Virgil, the man of the countryside, friend of woods, of quiet
flocks and golden bees, he who had gone down with Æneas to see the
sufferers in Avernus and poured his restless melancholy into the music
of poetry; in vain Virgil, the loving pious Virgil, had foretold a new
era, a new order and a new race, a kingdom of heaven less spiritual,
less brilliant than that which Jesus was to announce, but infinitely
nobler and purer than the kingdom of Hell which was then making ready.
In vain, because Augustus saw in these words only a pastoral fancy and
perhaps believed that he, the corrupt master of the corrupt, was the
proclaimed Saviour and restorer of the reign of Saturn.
But his vassal of Judea, his great Oriental client, may have had a
presentiment of the birth of Jesus, of the true King, who was coming to
supplant the king of evil.
HEROD THE GREAT
Herod was a monster, one of the most perfidious monsters of the many
which have sprung from the burning deserts of the East. He was not a
Jew, nor a Greek, nor a Roman. He was an Idumean, a barbarian who
prostrated himself before Rome, and aped the Greeks the better to secure
his dominion over the Jews. Son of a traitor, he had usurped the kingdom
of his sovereign from the last unfortunate Hasmonæans. To legalize his
treachery he married their niece, Mariamne. Afterwards, on a baseless
suspicion, he had her killed. It was not his first crime. He had had his
brother-in-law, Aristobulus, treacherously drowned. He had condemned his
other brothers-in-law, Joseph and Hyrcanus the Second (last of the
conquered dynasty). Not content with having killed Mariamne, he put her
mother, Alexandra, to death as well, and finally, the sons of Baba,
merely because they were distant relatives of the Hasmonæans. In the
meantime he amused himself with burning alive Juda of Sarafaus and
Matthew of Margoloth with other heads of the Pharisees. Later, afraid
that the sons he had had by Mariamne would wish to avenge their mother,
he had them strangled. Himself at the point of death he gave the order
to kill a third son, Archelaus. Voluptuous, suspicious, impious, greedy
of gold and of glory, he never knew peace at home, in Judea or in his
own heart. In order that he might bury the recollection of his
assassinations he gave the Roman people a present of three hundred
talents to spend in festivals. He humiliated himself before Augustus to
make him the accomplice of his infamies and, dying, left him ten
thousand drachmas and, in addition, a ship of gold and one of silver for
Livia.
This half-civilized Arab attempted to conciliate the Greeks and the
Jews. He succeeded in bribing the degenerate posterity of Socrates so
that in Athens they put up a statue to him, but the Jews hated him to
the day of his death. It did him no good, in their eyes, to build up
Samaria and restore the temple of Jerusalem. He was always, for them,
the heathen and the usurper.
Apprehensive like all ageing evil-doers, and like all new-made princes,
he shivered at every fluttering leaf, every shifting shadow.
Superstitious like all Orientals, credulous of presages and soothsayers,
he readily believed the three wise men when they said, that led by a
star, they had come from the interior of Chaldea towards the country
which he had fraudulently stolen. Any pretender to the throne, even a
fantastic one, could make him tremble, and when he knew from the wise
men that a King of Judea was born, his uneasy, barbarian’s heart gave a
great leap of fear. Seeing that the astrologers did not come back to
tell him the place where the new nephew of David had appeared, he
ordered that all the boy babies of Bethlehem should be killed.
THE INNOCENTS
Nobody ever knew how many children were sacrificed to the terror of
Herod. It was not the first time in Judea that even nursing children had
been put to the sword. This same Hebrew people had punished in the olden
times cities of their enemies by the massacre of the old men, the wives,
the young men and the boys. They saved only the virgins to make them
slaves and concubines. God Himself, the jealous Jehovah, had often given
the order for the slaughter, and now the Idumean applied to the people
who had accepted him, the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth.
We do not know how many of the Innocents there were, but if we can
believe Macrobius we know that among them was a little son of Herod who
was at nurse in Bethlehem. For the old King, wife-killer and son-killer,
who knows but that this was a form of retribution: who knows but that he
suffered when they brought him news of the mistake? A short time after
this he also was to die, suffering from loathsome disease. His body
began to putrefy while still alive. Worms consumed his organs. Burnt up
with fevers, gasping, he could scarcely draw his tainted breath.
Disgusting to himself, he tried to kill himself with a knife at table,
and finally died, after having given Salome orders to have many young
prisoners killed.
The massacre of the Innocents was the last act of the reeking, bloody
old man. There is a prophetic meaning in this immolation of the
Innocents around the cradle of an Innocent, this holocaust of blood for
a new-born child, a child destined to offer His blood for the pardon of
the guilty, this human sacrifice for One, who in His turn was to be
sacrificed. After His death thousands and thousands were to die for the
sole crime of having believed in His resurrection. He was born to die
for others and as if to expiate His birth, behold, here are thousands
born who die for Him.
There is a tremendous mystery in this blood-offering of the pure, in the
death of so many of His contemporaries. They belonged to the generation
which was to betray and crucify Him. But those who were killed by the
soldiers of Herod that day did not see Him, did not grow up to see their
Lord killed. They saved Him with their death, and saved themselves
forever. They were innocent and they remained innocent for all eternity.
Their fathers and their surviving brothers avenged them later, but they
will be pardoned because “they know not what they do!”
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
A Christian poet, an Italian, sang this lullaby to the new-born Jesus:
Sleep, baby, do not weep,
Sleep, heavenly babe.
Over your head, the tempests shall not dare to rage!
But the son of Mary did not make Himself man in order to sleep, and the
tempests raged, but He was not afraid.
Better than Siddharta, He deserves the name of the Awakened one. How can
He sleep in the stable, where the donkey brays, precursor of all donkeys
who will bray against Him: where the ox lows, waiting until the other
oxen speak at His presence; where the shepherds question Him; where the
wise men give Him their blessing? How can He sleep when the shuffling
steps of Herod’s assassins draw near? How can He ever sleep up to that
last night when He will agonize under the olive trees, amid the sleeping
bodies of the Eleven?
And Mary cannot sleep. In the evening as soon as the houses of Bethlehem
disappear in the darkness and the first lamps are lighted, the mother
steals away like a fugitive. She is snatching a life away from the King,
she is saving a hope for the people as she presses upon her breast her
man-child, her hope, her sorrow.
She goes towards the west, she crosses the old land of Canaan and comes
by easy stages—the days are short—to the Nile, to that country of
Mizraim which had cost so many tears to her ancestors fourteen centuries
before.
Jesus, who carried on the work of Moses and at the same time demolished
the work of Moses, goes back over the route taken by the first redeemer.
When the Jews were under the whip of the Egyptian slaves, oppressed,
mistreated, ill-used, the Shepherd of Median made himself the Shepherd
of Israel, and led his hard-headed people across the desert till they
were in sight of the Jordan and of the miraculous vineyards. The people
of Jesus left Chaldea with Abraham and came with Joseph into Egypt.
Moses led them from Egypt toward Canaan. Now the greatest of the
liberators, in danger of his life, went back to the banks of that river
where the first Saviour had been saved from the water and had saved his
brothers.
Egypt, the rich spawning-bed of all the infamies and all the
magnificences of the first epoch, that African India, where the waves of
history broke and died, where but a few years before, Pompey and Antony
had finished the dream of Empire and of life, this prodigious country,
born of water, burned by the sun, covered with the blood of many
peoples, inhabited by many animal-gods, this country, paradoxical and
supernatural, was by contrast the predestined asylum for the fugitive.
The wealth of Egypt was in mud, in the rich snake-breeding mud which the
Nile rolled out each year upon the desert. Death was the obsession of
Egypt. The soft, prosperous people of Egypt would not accept death,
denied death, thought they could conquer death with graven images, with
embalmings, with sculptured representation of flesh-and-blood bodies.
The rich, portly Egyptian, son of mud, adorer of the sacred bull, and
the dog-headed god, could not resign himself to dying. He manufactured
for his second life immense necropolises full of bandaged and perfumed
mummies, of images of wood and marble, and raised up pyramids over his
corpses, as if stone and mortar might save them from decay.
When Jesus could speak, He was to pronounce the verdict against Egypt:
the Egypt which is not only on the banks of the Nile, the Egypt which
has not yet disappeared from the face of the earth along with its kings,
its sparrow-hawks and its serpents. Christ was to give the final and
eternal answer to the terror of the Egyptians. He was to condemn the
wealth which comes from mud and returns to mud, and all the fetiches of
the pot-bellied river-dwellers of the Nile, and He was to conquer death
without sculptured tombs, without mortuary kingdoms, without statues of
granite and basalt. His victory over death is won by teaching that sin
is greedier than worms and that spiritual purity is the only aromatic
which preserves from decay.
The worshipers of mud and of animals, the servants of riches and of the
Beast, could not save themselves. Their tombs, high as mountains though
they be, decked out like queens’ palaces, white and fair to see as those
of the Pharisees, guard only ashes, dust returning again to dust, even
as the dead bodies of animals. Death cannot be conquered by copying life
in wood and stone. Stone crumbles away and turns to dust, wood rots and
turns to dust, and both of them are mud—eternal mud.
THE LOST FOUND
But the exile in Egypt was short. Jesus was brought back, held in His
mother’s arms, rocked throughout the long journey by the patient step of
the ass, to His father’s house in Nazareth, humble house and shop where
the hammer pounded and the rasp scraped until the setting of the sun.
The canonical gospels say nothing of these years: the Apocrypha give
many details but unworthy of belief. Luke, the wise doctor, is content
to set down that the boy grew and was strong; that is, that he was not
sickly and overworked. He was a boy developed as he should be: healthy,
a bearer of health, as was fitting in one who was to restore health to
others by the mere touch of His hand.
Every year, says Luke, the parents of Jesus went to Jerusalem for the
feast of unleavened bread in memory of the escape from Egypt. They went
with a crowd of neighbors, friends, and acquaintances to keep each other
company on the journey. They were cheerful like people going to a
festival rather than to a service in memory of a solemn crisis: for the
Passover had become at Jerusalem a great feast day, when all the Jews
scattered about the Empire came together.
On the twelfth Passover after the birth of Jesus, as the group from
Nazareth was returning from the holy city, Mary found that her son was
not with them. All day long she sought for Him, asking every
acquaintance, but in vain. The next morning the mother turned back,
retraced her steps over the road and went up and down the streets and
open places of Jerusalem, fixing her dark eyes on every boy she met,
asking the mothers standing in the open doors, begging her countrymen
not yet gone, to help her find her lost son. A mother who has lost her
son does not rest until she has found him; she thinks no more of
herself, she does not feel weariness, effort, hunger. She does not shake
the dust from her clothes nor arrange her hair. She cares not for the
curious glances of the passers-by. Her distracted eyes see nothing but
the image of him, who is no longer beside her.
Finally on the third day she came to the Temple, looked about in the
courts, and saw at last in the shadow of a portico a group of old men
talking. She came up timidly, for those men with long cloaks and long
beards seemed people of importance who would pay no attention to a plain
woman from Galilee, and discovered in the center of the circle the
waving hair, the shining eyes, the tanned face, the fresh lips of her
Jesus. Those old men were talking with her son of the Law and the
Prophets. They were asking Him questions and He was answering; He put
questions to them in His turn and they marveled at Him, astonished that
a boy should know the words of the Lord so well. But He remembered the
books which He had heard read out in the little Synagogue of Nazareth:
and His memory had retained every syllable.
Mary remained for a few moments gazing at Him, hardly believing her
eyes. Her heart, a moment before beating fast with fear, was now beating
fast with astonishment. But she could not restrain herself any more and
suddenly in a loud voice called Him by name. The old men took themselves
off and the mother snatched her son to her breast and silently clasped
Him to her, the tears which she had kept back till then raining down on
His face.
She clutched Him, took Him away, and then, certain that she had Him with
her, that she had not lost Him, the happy mother remembered the
despairing mother, “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy
father and I have sought thee sorrowing.”
“How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my
Father’s business?”
Weighty words, especially when said by a twelve-year-old boy to a mother
who had sought Him for three long days.
And, the Evangelist goes on, “And they understood not the saying which
he spake unto them.” But after so many centuries of Christian experience
we can understand those words, which seemed at first sight to be hard
and proud.
How is it that ye sought me? Do you not know that I can never be lost,
that I can never be lost by any one, even those who will bury me under
the earth? I will be everywhere where any one believes in me, even if
they do not see me with their eyes. I cannot be lost from any man, by
any man, provided that he hold me in his heart. I shall not be lost
alone in the desert nor alone on the waters of the lake, nor alone in
the garden of olives, nor alone in the tomb.
“And who is this father of whom you speak to me? He is the legal father,
the human father, but my real Father is in heaven. He is the Father who
spoke to the patriarchs face to face, who put words into the mouths of
the prophets. I know what He told them of me, His eternal wishes, the
laws He has given to His people, the covenant which He has signed with
all men. If I am to do what He has commanded me, I must be busy about
what is truly His. What is a legal, temporal tie confronted with a
mystic, spiritual and eternal bond?”
THE WOODWORKER
But the hour for really leaving His home had not come for Jesus. The
voice of John had not yet been heard; and with His father and mother He
once more went along the road to Nazareth and returned to Joseph’s shop
to help him in his trade.
Jesus did not go to school to the Scribes nor to the Greeks. But He did
not lack for teachers. Three teachers He had, greater than all the
learned: work, nature and the Book.
It must never be forgotten that Jesus was a working man and the adopted
son of a working man: that He was born poor, among people who worked
with their hands; before He gave out His gospel He earned His daily
bread with the labor of His hands. Those hands which blest the
simple-hearted, which cured the lepers, which gave light to the blind,
which brought the dead to life, those hands which were pierced with
nails upon the cross, were hands which had been bathed with the sweat of
labor, hands which had known the numbness of work, hands which were
callous with work, hands which had held the tools of work, which had
driven nails into wood, the hands of a working man.
Before being a workman of the spirit, Jesus was a man who worked with
material things. He was poor before He summoned the poor to His table,
to the festival of His Kingdom. He was not born into a wealthy family,
into the house of luxury on a bed covered with purple and fine linen.
Descendant of kings, He lived in a woodworker’s shop: Son of God He was
born in a stable. He did not belong to the caste of the great, to the
aristocracy of warriors, to the circles of the rich, to the Sanhedrim of
the priests. He was born into the lowest class of the people, the class
which has below it only the vagabonds, the beggars, the fugitives, the
slaves, the criminals, the prostitutes. When He became no longer a
manual worker, He went down lower yet in the eyes of respectable folk,
and sought His friends in that miserable huddle which is even below the
common people. But until that day when Jesus, before going down into the
Inferno of the dead, went down into the Inferno of the living, His
position was that of a poor working man and nothing more, in the
hierarchy of castes which eternally separates men.
Jesus’ trade is one of the four oldest and most sacred of men’s
occupations. The trades of the peasant, the mason, the smith, and the
carpenter are, among the manual arts, those most impregnated with the
life of man, the most innocent and the most religious. The warrior
degenerates into a bandit, the sailor into a pirate, the merchant into
an adventurer, but the peasant, the mason, the smith, the carpenter do
not betray, cannot betray, do not become corrupt. They handle the most
familiar materials, and their task is to transform them visibly into
visible, solid, concrete creations, useful to all men. The peasant
breaks the clod and takes from it the bread eaten by the saint in his
grotto and the murderer in his prison; the mason squares the stone and
builds up the house of the poor man, the house of the king, the house of
God. The smith heats and fashions the iron to give a sword to the
soldier, a plowshare to the peasant, a hammer to the carpenter. The
carpenter saws and nails the wood to construct the door which protects
the house from the thieves, to make the bed on which thieves and
innocent people die.
These plain things, these common, ordinary, usual things, so usual,
common and ordinary that they pass disregarded under our eyes used to
more complicated marvels, are the simplest creations of man, but more
miraculous and essential than any later inventions.