made them with His hands, and for the first time by means of these
things manufactured by Him, entered into communion with the daily life
of men, with the most intimate and sacred life, home life. He made the
table around which it is so sweet to sit in the evening with one’s
friends, even if one of them is a traitor; the bed whereon man draws his
first and last breath; the chest where the country wife keeps her poor
clothes, her aprons, her handkerchiefs for festivals, and the starched
white shirts for great days. He made the kneading trough where the flour
is put, and the leaven raises it until it is ready for the oven; and the
arm-chair where the old men sit around the fire of an evening to talk of
never-returning youth.
Often while the thin, light shavings curled up under the steel of His
plane and the sawdust rained down on the ground, Jesus must have thought
of the promises of the Father, of the prophecies of old time, of what He
was to create, not with boards and rules, but with spirit and truth.
His trade taught Him that to live means to transform dead and useless
things into living and useful things: that the meanest material
fashioned and shaped can become precious, friendly, useful to men: that
the only way to bring salvation is to transform; and that just as a
child’s crib or a wife’s bed can be made out of a log of olive wood,
gnarled, knotty and earthy, so the filthy money-changer and the wretched
prostitute can be transformed into true citizens of the Kingdom of
Heaven.
FATHERHOOD
In nature where the sun shines on the good and on the bad, where wheat
ripens and grows golden to give bread to Jew and heathen, where the
stars shine on the shepherd’s cabin and the murderer’s prison; where
grape clusters turn purple and swell to give wine to the wedding banquet
and to the orgies of assassins; where the birds of the air freely
singing find their food without fatigue, where thieving foxes also have
their refuge and the lilies of the field are clad in more splendor than
kings, Jesus found the earthly confirmation of His eternal certainty
that God is not a Master who punishes one day of enjoyment by a thousand
years of reproach, nor a fierce war-like Jehovah who commands the
extermination of enemies, nor a kind of grand sultan who delights in
being served by satraps of high lineage and keeps close watch that his
servants execute to the last detail the rigorous ritualistic etiquette
of that Regia Curia, which is the Temple.
As a Son, Christ knew that God is Father: Father of all mankind and not
only of the people of Abraham. The love of a husband is strong but
carnal and jealous. The love of a brother is often poisoned with envy;
that of a son stained with rebellion; that of a friend spotted with
deceit; that of a master swollen with condescending pride; only the love
of a father towards his children is perfect love, pure, disinterested
love. The father does for his son what he would do for no one else. His
son is his creation, flesh of his flesh and of his bone, grown up by his
side day by day, a completion and a complement of his own being. The old
man lives again in the young man. The past sees itself in the future. He
who has lived sacrifices himself for him who is to live. The father
lives in the son, and feels himself exalted. This child was born to him
in a moment of passion in the arms of the woman chosen from among all
other women, born through the divine anguish of this woman, cared for
and preserved by his own tears and sweat. He has seen him grow up at his
feet, he has warmed his cold little hands between his own, he has heard
his first words, eternal miracle ever new! He has seen his first
wavering footsteps on the floor of his house. Little by little, he has
seen a soul shine out in that body created by him, a new human soul,
unique treasure beyond price! Little by little on that face he has seen
his own features and those of the child’s mother, of that woman with
whom only in this common fruit is he corporeally identified. A human
couple who long to become one body through love, attain this unity only
in a child. In the presence of this new being, his creation, he feels
himself a creator, beneficent, powerful, happy. Because the son looks to
his father for everything, and in his childhood has faith only in his
father, feels safe only near his father, his father knows that he must
live for him, suffer for him, work for him. A father is a God on earth
for a son, and a son is almost a God for the father.
In the love of a father there is no trace of a brother’s perfunctory
sense of duty, no trace of a friend’s self-interest and rivalry, of a
lover’s lustful desire, a servant’s pretense of faithfulness.
The love of a father is pure love, the only true love, the only love
rightly to be called love. Purged of any elements foreign to its
essence, it is the happiness of sacrificing oneself for the happiness of
others.
This idea of God as Father, which is one of the great new ideas of the
gospel of Christ, this profoundly renovating idea that God is Father and
loves us as a father loves his children, not as a king loves his slaves;
and gives daily bread to all his children and has a loving welcome even
for those who sin if only they return to lean their heads upon his
breast: this idea which closes the epoch of the old covenant and marks
the beginning of the new covenant, Jesus found in nature. As Son of God
and one with the Father, He had always been conscious of this paternity
scarcely glimpsed by the most luminous of the prophets. But now sharing
all human experience He saw it reflected and as it were revealed in the
universe and He was to use the most beautiful images of the natural
world to transmit to men the first of His joyful messages.
THE COUNTRY
Jesus, like all great souls, loved the country. The sinner craving
purification, the saint moved to prayer, the poet eager to create, take
refuge on the mountains in green shadows, by the sound of the water, in
the midst of fields which perfume heaven, or on steep desert hills
parched by the sun. Jesus took His language from the country: He hardly
ever uses learned words, abstract conceptions, drab and generalizing
terms. His talk blossoms with colors, is perfumed by odors of field and
of orchard, is peopled by the figures of familiar animals. He saw in His
Galilee the figs swelling and ripening under the great, dark leaves: He
saw the dry tendrils of the vine greened over with leaves, and from the
trellises the white and purple clusters hanging down for the joy of the
vintage; He saw from the invisible seed, the mustard raise itself up
with its rich light branches, He heard in the night the mournful rustle
of the reeds shaken by the wind along the ditches: He saw the seed of
grain buried in the earth and its resurrection in the form of a full
ear; when the air first began to be warm, He saw the beautiful red,
yellow and purple lilies in the midst of the tender green of the wheat:
He saw the fresh tufts of grass, luxuriant to-day and to-morrow dried
and cast into the oven; He saw the peaceful animals and the harmful
animals, the dove a little vain of its brilliant neck, cooing of love on
the roof, the eagle swooping down with widespread wings upon its prey;
the swallows of the air which like kings cannot fall if it is not God’s
wish: the crows tearing flesh from carrion with their beaks; the loving
mother-hen calling the chickens under her wings when the sky darkens and
thunders; the treacherous fox, after its kill, slinking back into its
dark lair; and the dogs under the table of their masters begging for
scraps that fall to the ground. He saw the serpent writhing through the
grass and the dark viper hiding among the scattered stones of the tombs.
Born among the shepherds, He who was to become shepherd of men knew and
loved the flocks; the ewes searching for the lost lamb, the lambs
bleating weakly, and sucking, almost hidden under their mother’s woolly
bodies, the flocks sweltering on the thin hot pastures of their hills;
He loved with equal love the tiny seed which you can scarcely see on the
palm of your hand and the ancient fig tree, casting its shade over the
poor man’s house; the birds of the air which sow not neither do they
reap; the fish silvering the meshes of the nets to feed His faithful;
and raising His eyes in the sultry evenings of gathering storm, He saw
the lightning flashing out of the east and shattering the darkness of
the night, even into the west.
But Jesus did not read only in the open many-colored book of the world.
He knew that God spoke to men through angels, patriarchs and prophets.
His words, His laws, His victories are written in the Book. Jesus knew
the magic black signs by which the dead pass on to those not yet born,
the thoughts and memories of olden times. Jesus read only the books
where His ancestors had set down the story of His people, the will of
the Lord, the vision of the Prophets, but He knew them in the letter and
spirit better than the scribes and the doctors: and that knowledge gave
Him the right to leave off being scholar and to become teacher.
THE OLD COVENANT
Among all peoples the Jew was the most happy and the most unhappy. His
story is a mystery which begins with the idyl in the Garden of Eden and
ends with the tragedy of the hill of Golgotha. His first parents were
molded by the luminous hands of God, were made masters of Paradise, the
country of eternal, fertile summer, set in the midst of rivers, where
the rich Oriental fruits hung down ready to their hand, heavy with pulp
in the shade of the new young leaves. The new-created sky, not yet
sullied by clouds, not yet riven by lightning, or harassed by winds,
watched over the first two with all its stars.
The first couple had as their duty to love God and to love each other.
This was the First Covenant. Weariness unknown, grief unknown, unknown
death and its terror! The first disobedience brought the first exile;
the man was condemned to work, the woman to bring forth her young in
pain. Work is painful, but it brings the reward of harvests; to give
birth means suffering, but it brings the consolation of children. And
yet even these inferior and imperfect felicities passed away like leaves
devoured by worms. For the first time brother killed brother: human
blood fallen on the earth became corrupt, gave forth an exhalation of
sin: the daughters of men united themselves with demons and from them
were born giants, fierce hunters and slayers of men, who turned the
world into a bloody hell.
Then God sent His second punishment: to purify the world in an
exterminating baptism He drowned in the waters of the flood all men and
their crimes. One only, a righteous man, was saved and with him God
signed the Second Covenant.
With Noah there began the happy days of antiquity, the epoch of the
patriarchs, nomad shepherds, centenarians who wandered between Chaldea
and Egypt searching for grazing lands, for wells, and for peace. They
had no fixed country, no houses, no cities. They brought along in
caravans, numerous as armies, their fruitful wives, their loving sons,
their docile daughters-in-law, their innumerable descendants, obedient
man-servants and maid-servants, goring, bellowing bulls, cows with
hanging udders, playful calves, rams and strong smelling he-goats, mild
sheep laden with wool, great earth-colored camels, mares with round
cruppers, she-goats holding their heads high and stamping impatiently;
and hidden in the saddle-bags, vases of gold and silver, domestic idols
of stone and metal.
Arrived at their destination, they spread their tents near a cistern,
and the patriarch sat out under the shade of the oaks and sycamores
contemplating the great camp from which rose up the smoke of the fires,
the sound of the bustling steps of the women and herdsmen, the mooings,
the brayings, the bleating of the animals. And the patriarch’s heart was
filled with content to see all this progeny issued from his seed, all
these, his herds, the human increase and the animal increase multiplying
year by year.
In the evening, he raised his eyes to greet the first punctual star
which shone like white fire on the summit of the hill; and sometimes his
curled white beard shone in the white light of the moon, which for more
than a century he was wont to see in the sky at night.
Sometimes an angel of the Lord came to visit him, and before giving the
message with which he was charged, ate at his table. Or, in the heat of
the day, the Lord Himself, in the garb of a pilgrim, came and sat down
with the old man in the shadow of the tent where they talked with each
other, face to face, like two old friends who come together to discuss
their affairs. The head of the tribe, master of the servants, became a
servant in his turn, listened to the commands and counsels and promises
and prophecies of his divine master. And between Jehovah and Abraham was
signed the Third Covenant, more solemn than the other two.
The son of a patriarch, sold by his brothers as a slave, rises to power
in Egypt, and calls his race to him. The Jews think that they have found
a fatherland and grow great in numbers and riches. But they allow
themselves to be seduced by the gods of Egypt, and Jehovah prepares the
third punishment. The envious Egyptians reduce them to abject slavery.
That the punishment may be longer, Jehovah hardens the heart of Pharaoh,
but finally raises up the second Saviour, who leads them forth from
their sufferings and from the mud of Egypt.
Their trials are not yet finished: for forty years they wander in the
desert. A pillar of cloud guides them by day and a pillar of fire by
night. God has assured them a Land of Promise, with rich grazing lands,
well-watered, shaded by grape-vines and olives. But in the meantime they
have neither water to drink nor bread to eat, and they yearn for the
flesh-pots of Egypt. God brings water gushing from a rock; and manna and
quails fall from heaven; but tired and uneasy, the Jews betray their
God, make a calf of gold and worship it. Moses, saddened like all
prophets, misunderstood like all saviours, followed unwillingly like all
discoverers of new lands, falls back of the restive and rebellious crowd
and begs God to let him lie down forever. But at any cost, Jehovah
desires to sign the Fourth Covenant with His people. Moses goes down
from the smoke-capped thundering mountain, with the two tables of stone
whereon the very finger of God has written the Ten Commandments.
Moses is not to see the Promised Land, the new Paradise to be
reconquered in place of the lost Paradise. But the divine pledge is
kept: Joshua and the other heroes cross the Jordan, enter into the land
of Canaan, and conquer the people; the cities fall at the breath of
their trumpets; Deborah can sing her song of triumph. The people carry
with them the God of battles, hidden behind the tents, on a cart drawn
by oxen. But the enemies are numerous and have no mind to give way to
the newcomers. The Jews wander here and there, shepherds and brigands,
victorious when they maintain the covenants of the Law, defeated when
they forget them.
A giant with unshorn hair kills, single-handed, thousands of Philistines
and Amalekites, but a woman betrays him; enemies blind him and set him
to turn a mill. Heroes alone are not enough. Kings are needed. A young
man of the tribe of Benjamin, tall and well-grown, while looking for his
father’s strayed asses, is met by a Prophet who anoints him with the
sacred oil, and makes him king of all the people. Saul becomes a
powerful warrior, overcomes the Ammonites and Amalekites and founds a
military kingdom, dreaded by neighboring tribes. But the same prophet
who made him king, now aroused against him, raises up a rival. David,
the boy shepherd, kills the king’s giant foe, tempers with his harp the
black rages of the king, is loved by the king’s oldest son, marries the
daughter of the king, is among the king’s captains. But Saul, suspicious
and unbalanced, wishes to kill him. David hides himself in the caves of
the mountains, becomes a robber chief. He goes into the service of the
Philistines, and when they conquer and kill Saul on the hills of Gilboa,
he becomes in his turn king of all Israel. The bold sheep-tender, great
as poet and as king, yet cruel and lustful, founds his house in
Jerusalem, and with the aid of his gibborim, or body-guard, overcomes
and subjugates the surrounding kingdoms. For the first time, the Jew is
feared: for centuries after this he was to long for the return of David,
and to hope for a descendant of David to save him from his abject
subjugation.
David is the King of the sword and of song. Solomon is the King of gold
and of wisdom. Gold is brought to him as a tribute: he decks with gold
the first sumptuous house of Jehovah. He sends ships to faraway Ophir in
search of gold; the Queen of Sheba lays down sacks of gold at his feet.
But all the splendor of gold and the wisdom of Solomon are not enough to
save the king from impurity and his kingdom from ruin. He takes strange
women to wife and worships strange gods. The Lord pardons his old age,
in memory of his youth, but at his death the kingdom is divided and the
dark and shameful centuries of the decadence begin. Plots in the palace,
murders of kings, revolts of chiefs, wretched civil wars, periods of
idol-worship followed by passing reforms, fill the period of the
separation. Prophets appear and admonish, but the kings turn a deaf ear
or drive them away. The enemies of Israel grow more powerful. The
Phœnicians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, one after
another, invade the two kingdoms, extort tribute and finally, about 600
years before the birth of Jesus, Jerusalem is destroyed, the temple of
Jehovah is demolished and the Jews are led as slaves to the rivers of
Babylon. The cup of their infidelity and of their sins runs over and the
same God who liberated them from the slavery of the Egyptians gives them
over as slaves to the Babylonians. This is the fourth punishment and the
most terrible of all because it is to have no end. From that time on,
the Jews were always to be dispersed among strangers and subject to
foreigners. Some of them were to return to reconstruct Jerusalem and its
temple, but the country, invaded by the Scythians, tributary to the
Persians, conquered by the Greeks, was after the last attempt of the
Maccabeans finally given over to the hands of a dynasty of Arab
barbarians, subject to the Romans.
This race, which for so many years lived rich and free in the desert,
and for a day was master of kingdoms and believed itself, under the
protection of its God, the first people of the earth, was now reduced in
numbers, spurned and commanded by foreigners, was the laughing-stock of
the nations, the Job among peoples. After the death of Jesus, its fate
was to be harder yet: Jerusalem destroyed for the second time: in the
devastated province only Greeks and Romans holding sway, and the last
fragments of Israel scattered over the earth like dust of the street
driven before the sirocco.
Never were people so loved nor so dreadfully chastised by their God.
Chosen to be the first, they were the servants of the last. Aspiring to
have a victorious country of their own, they were exiles and slaves in
other men’s lands.
Although more pastoral than warlike, they never were at peace either
with themselves or with others. They fought with their neighbors, with
their guests, with their leaders. They fought with their prophets and
with their God Himself.
Breeding-ground of corruption, governed by men guilty of homicide,
treachery, adultery, incest, robbery, simony and idolatry, yet their
women gave birth to the most perfect saints of the Orient, upright,
admonishing, solitary prophets; and finally from this race was born the
Father of the new saints, He who had been awaited by all the Prophets.
This people which created no metaphysics nor science, nor music, nor
sculpture, nor art, nor architecture of its own, wrote the grandest
poetry of antiquity, glowing with sublimity in the Psalms and in the
Prophets, inimitably tender in the stories of Joseph and Ruth, burning
with voluptuous passion in the Song of Songs.
Grown up in the midst of the cults of local rustic gods, they conceived
the love of God, the one universal Father. Rich in gold and lands, they
could boast in their prophets of the first defenders of the poor, and
they conceived of the negation of riches. The same people who had cut
the throat of human victims on their altars, and massacred whole cities
of guiltless people, gave disciples to Him who preached love for our
enemies. This people, jealous of their jealous God, always betrayed Him
to run after other gods. Of their temple, three times built and three
times destroyed, nothing remains but a piece of a wall, barely enough so
that a line of mourners may lean their heads against it to hide their
tears.
But this perplexing and contradictory people, superhuman and wretched,
the first and the last of all, the happiest and the most unhappy of all,
although it serves other nations, still dominates other nations with its
money and with its Bible. Although without a country of its own for
centuries, it is among the owners of all countries. Although it
crucified its greatest Son with His blood, it divided the history of the
world into two parts: and the progeny of those god-killers has become
the most infamous but the most sacred of all the peoples.
THE PROPHETS
Never was a people so warned as were the Jews, from the beginning of the
temporal kingdom to its dismemberment: in the great days of the
victorious Kings, in the sorrowful days of exile, in the evil days of
slavery, in the tragic days of the dispersion.
India has its ascetics, who hide themselves in the wilderness to conquer
the body and drown the soul in the infinite. China had its familiar
sages, peaceful grandfathers who taught civic morality to working people
and emperors. Greece had her philosophers, who in their shady porticos
contrived harmonious systems and dialectic pitfalls. Rome had its
lawgivers who recorded on bronze for the peoples and the centuries the
rules of the highest justice attainable to those who command and
possess. The Middle Ages had their preachers, who wore themselves out in
the effort to arouse drowsy Christianity to a remembrance of the Passion
and the terror of Hell. The Jewish people had the Prophets.
The Prophets did not give forth their prophecies in caves, spitting out
saliva and words together from their tripods. They spoke of the future,
but not merely of the future. They foretold things not yet happened, but
they also brought to mind the past. They possessed time in its three
phases; deciphering the past, illuminating the present and threatening
the future.
The Jewish Prophet is a voice speaking, or a hand writing, a voice
speaking in the palace of the King or in the caves of the mountains, on
the steps of the Temple and in the precincts of the capitol. He is a
voice that prays, a prayer that threatens, a threat that breaks out into
divine hope. His heart is afflicted, his mouth is full of bitterness,
his arm is raised, pointing out punishment to come; he suffers for his
people; because he loves his people, he vituperates them: he punishes
them that they may be purified; and after massacres and flames, he
teaches the resurrection and the life, triumph and blessedness, the
reign of the new David and the Covenant not to be broken.
The Prophet leads the idolater back to the true God, reminds the
perjurer of his oath, recalls charity to the oppressor, purity to the
corrupt, mercy to the fierce, justice to kings, obedience to rebels,
punishment to sinners, humbleness to the proud. He goes before the king
and reproaches him, he goes down among the dregs of the people and
scourges them: he greets priests with blame; presents himself to the
rich and brings them to confusion. He announces consolation to the poor,
recompense to the afflicted, health to the sick, liberation to enslaved
peoples, the coming of the conqueror to the humiliated nation.
He is not a king, nor a prince, nor a priest, nor a scribe: he is only a
man, a poor, unarmed man, without investitures and without followers. He
is a solitary voice, a lamenting voice grieving, a puissant voice
howling and calling down shame, a voice which calls to repentance and
promises eternity.
The Prophet is not a philosopher; it matters little to him whether the
world be made of water or of fire, if water and fire cannot purify men’s
souls.
He is a poet, but without will or consciousness that he is, when the
fullness of his indignation and the splendor of his vision create
powerful images which rhetoricians never could invent. He is not a
priest, for he has never been anointed in the temple by the mercenary
guardians of the Book; he is not a King, for he does not command armed
men, and as sword has only the Word which comes from on high; he is not
a soldier, but he is ready to die for his God and his people.