unconsciously in the very men who begin life with a second birth of
repentance. In the story of Jesus no sign of a different way of life
before conversion ever shows itself in any allusion or in any implicit
meaning, is not recognizable in the smallest of His acts, in the most
obscure of His words. His love for sinners has nothing of the feverish
obstinacy of the proselytizing penitent. It is a natural love, not a
dutiful love. It is brotherly love without any implications of reproach,
spontaneous friendly fraternity needing to make no effort to overcome
repugnance. It is the attraction towards the impure of the pure who has
no fear of being soiled and knows that He can cleanse—disinterested
love—love felt by the saints in the supreme moments of their
holiness—love beside which all other love seems vulgar—such love as no
man saw before Jesus! Love which is rarely found again, and only in
memory and in imitation of His love—love which will always be called
Christian, and by any other name—never! Divine love—Christ’s love! Love!
Jesus came among the sinners, but He was no sinner. He came to bathe in
the water running before John, but He had no inner stain. The soul of
Jesus was that of a child, so childlike as to outdo sages in wisdom and
saints in sanctity.
He was no rigorous Puritan. He never felt the terror of the morally
shipwrecked man barely saved from destruction. He was no overscrupulous
Pharisee. He knew what was sin and what was right and He did not lose
the spirit in the labyrinth of the letter. He knew life; He did not
refuse life which though not a good in itself is a prerequisite
condition of all good things. Eating and drinking are not wrong, nor
looking at people, nor sending a friendly look to the thief lurking in
the shade, nor to the woman who has colored her lips to hide the traces
of unasked kisses.
THE BAPTISM
And yet Jesus came in the midst of a crowd of sinners to immerse Himself
in the Jordan. The problem is not mysterious for him who sees something
beyond the most familiar meaning in the rite reinstituted by John. The
case of Jesus is unique. The baptism of Jesus is like others
superficially, but is justified in other ways. Baptism is not only a
washing of the flesh as a symbol of the will to cleanse the soul, a
remnant of the primitive analogy of water which washed away material
stains and can wash away spiritual stains. This physical metaphor is
useful to the symbolism of the crowd, is a necessary ceremony for the
carnal eye of the many who need a material help to believe in the
immaterial. But it was not made for Jesus.
He went to John that the prophecy of the precursor might be fulfilled.
His kneeling down before the prophet of fire was a recognition of John’s
quality of true announcer, of his worth as a loyal ambassador who has
done his duty who can say now that his work is finished. Jesus
submitting Himself to this symbolical investiture really invests John
with the legitimate title of precursor.
Jesus, about to begin a new epoch of His life, His true life, bore
witness by His immersion in water to His willingness to die, but at the
same time to His certainty that He would rise again. He did not go down
to the Jordan to cleanse Himself, but to show that His second life was
beginning and that He will not die, but only seem to die, just as He
only seemed to be purified by the waters of the Jordan.
THE DESERT
As soon as Jesus emerged from the water He went into the desert. From
the multitude to solitude! Until then He had lived among the waters and
the fields of Galilee and in the green meadows along the Jordan. Now He
went up on the rocky mountains whence no springs arise, where no seed
sprouts, where the only living creatures are snakes. Until then He had
lived among the working men of Nazareth, among John’s penitents; now He
goes up on the solitary mountains where no human face is seen, where no
human voice is heard. The New Man puts the desert between himself and
humanity.
The person who says, “woe to the solitary!” only gives the measure of
his own cowardice. Society is a sacrifice, meritorious in proportion to
its hardness. For those rich in soul, solitude is a prize and not an
expiation, a period of sure value, a time when inner beauty is created,
a reconciliation with the absent. Only in solitude do we live with our
peers, with those solitary souls who think the great-hearted thoughts
which console us in the absence of other consolations.
The people who cannot endure solitude are the mediocre and the mean.
They have nothing to offer, they are afraid of themselves, of their own
emptiness. They are condemned to the eternal solitude of their own
minds, a desolate inner desert where the poisonous plants of waste lands
are the only things to grow. They are restless, unquiet, dejected when
they cannot forget themselves in others, deafen themselves with the
words of others. They delude themselves with the factitious life of
others who are in their turn deluded by it. They cannot live without
mingling, a passive atom, in the streams which overflow every morning
from the sewers of the cities.
Jesus lived among men and He was to return among men because He loved
them. But in the years to come He often hid Himself, to be alone, far
even from His disciples. To love men, you need from time to time to
depart from them: far from them, we draw near to them. The small soul
remembers only the evil they have done him. His night is restless with
bitterness and his mouth poisoned with anger. The great soul remembers
benefits alone, and thankful for a few good deeds, forgets the great
evils he has endured. Even those which were not pardoned at the moment
are blotted out from his heart, and having renewed his original love for
his brothers, he goes back to men.
For Jesus these forty days of solitude are the last of His preparation.
For forty years the Jewish people (prophetic symbol of Christ) wandered
in the desert before entering into the kingdom promised by God. For
forty days Moses remained close to God to hear His laws; for forty days
Elijah wandered in the desert fleeing the vengeance of the wicked queen.
So also the time allotted to the new liberator before announcing the
promised kingdom was forty days of close communion with God to receive
the supreme inspiration. But even in the desert He was not to be
entirely alone: about Him throughout the vigil will be animals and
angels; beings inferior to man and beings superior; those who pull man
down and those who lift him up; beings all matter, beings all spirit.
Born an animal, man struggles to become an angel. He is matter changing
by slow transmutation into spirit. If the animal gets the upper hand,
man descends below the level of the beasts because he puts the remnants
of his intelligence at the service of bestiality: if the angel conquers,
man becomes the equal of angels, and instead of being a mere soldier in
the army of God, partakes of divinity itself. But the fallen angel
condemned to wear the form of a beast is the astute and tenacious enemy
of all men who wish to climb that height from which he was cast down.
Jesus is the enemy of the material world, of the bestial life of the
many. He was born into the world in order that beasts should become men,
and men become angels. He was born to change the world and to conquer
it, to fight with the king of the world, that enemy of God and of men,
the malign, the suborner, the seducer. He was born to drive Satan from
the earth as His father drove him from Heaven.
Therefore at the end of the forty days, Satan came into the desert to
tempt his enemy.
THE ADVERSARY
Our slavery to matter is branded on our lives by the daily need of our
bodies for food, and Jesus wished to conquer our slavery to matter.
Whenever He shared human lives, He consented to eat and drink, because
His friends did, because it is right to give to the flesh that which
belongs to the flesh, and finally as a visible protest against the
hypocritical fasts of the Pharisees. The last act of His earthly mission
was a supper, but the first after His baptism was a fast. Alone where
His abstinence could not shame His simple-hearted companions, where it
could not be confused with ostentatious piety, He forgot to eat.
But after forty days He was hungry. Satan, tenacious and invisible, was
waiting for this moment of material need, and seized on it. The
Adversary spoke: “If thou be the Son of God command this stone that it
be made bread.”
The reproof was prompt: “It is written that man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word of God.”
Satan did not admit a defeat, and from the top of a mountain showed Him
all the kingdoms of the earth: “All this power will I give thee, and the
glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I
give it. If thou therefore wilt adore me, all shall be thine.”
And Jesus answered, “Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”
Then Satan took Him to Jerusalem and set Him on the pinnacle of the
Temple, “If thou be the Son of God cast thyself down from hence.”
But Jesus answered quickly: “It is written; thou shalt not tempt the
Lord thy God.”
“And when the Devil had completed every temptation,” Luke goes on, “he
departed from him for a season.” We shall see his return and his last
effort.
This dialogue seems at first sight only a bandying about of Scriptural
texts. Satan and Jesus do not use their own words, but compete by means
of quotations from the Scriptures. We seem to be listening to a
theological dispute; but as a matter of fact it is the first Parable of
the Gospels acted out and not put into words.
It is not surprising that Satan should have come with the absurd hope of
causing Jesus to fall. It is not surprising that Jesus since He was a
man should have undergone temptation. Satan only tempts the great and
pure. To the others he does not need even to murmur a word of
invitation. They are already his, from their childhood on. He need give
himself no trouble to win their allegiance, they are in his arms before
he summons them. And yet many of them do not know that he exists. He
never has presented himself to them because they obey him from a
distance. Thus, not having known him, they are ready to deny him. The
devil’s cohorts do not believe in the devil. It was said of old that the
devil’s shrewdest ruse was to spread abroad the rumor of his death. He
takes all forms, so beautiful sometimes that no one recognizes him. The
Greeks, for instance, marvels of intelligence and elegance, had no place
for Satan in their mythology, because all their Gods, when closely
examined, show the horns of Satan under their crowns of laurel and grape
leaves. Satanical is tyrannical and lustful Jove, adulterous Venus,
Apollo the flayer, murderous Mars, drunken Dionysius. They were so
astute, the gods of Greece, that they gave the people love-potions and
distilled perfumes to keep them from detecting the stench of the evil
that consumes the world.
But if many do not know him and laugh at him as at a specter invented in
church for the needs of penitents, there are some who cry out upon those
who know him but do not follow him. He seduced the innocence of the
first two created beings, he suborned David the strong, corrupted
Solomon the wise, accused Job the righteous before the throne of God.
Satan tempts and always will tempt all the saints who hide themselves in
the desert, all those who love God. The more we go away from him the
closer he is; the higher we are, the more he rages to bring us low; he
can soil only that which is clean and he gives no care to the filth
which spontaneously ferments under the hot breath of animality. To be
tempted by Satan is a proof of purity, a sign of greatness, and shows a
man that he is on the upward path. He who has known Satan and has seen
him face to face, may well have hope for himself. More than any other,
Jesus merited this consecration. Satan challenged Him twice and tempted
Him once. He asked Him to transform dead matter into matter that gives
life and to cast Himself down from a height so that God by saving Him
should proclaim Him as His true son. He offered Him the possession and
the glory of earthly kingdoms on condition that instead of serving God
Jesus should promise to serve the Demon. He asks material bread and a
material miracle of Him and promises Him material power. Jesus does not
take up the challenge and refuses what is offered.
He is not the fleshly, temporal Messiah, desired by the Jewish crowd,
the material Messiah such as the Tempter in his baseness imagines Him.
He did not come to bring food to bodies but food to souls,—truth, that
living food. When His brothers, far from home, lack bread enough for
their hunger, He will break the few loaves which His disciples bring and
all will have enough and they will fill baskets with the remnants. But
except in cases of necessity He will not be the distributor of that
bread which comes from the earth and returns to earth. If He should
change the stones of the street into bread, every one would follow Him
through love of his own body and would pretend to believe everything He
said. Even the dogs would come to His banquet. But this He does not
wish. Those who follow Him must believe in His word in spite of hunger,
grief and poverty. Thus those who wish to follow Him must leave behind
them fertile fields, they must leave behind them money which can be
changed into bread. They must go with Him without knapsack or payment,
with one garment, and live like the birds of the air, husking ears of
grain in the fields, or begging alms at house doors. One can live
without terrestrial bread: a fig left on the tree among the leaves, a
fish drawn from the lake can take the place of bread. But no man can
live without heavenly bread, if he wishes to escape eternal death, which
is the portion of those who have never tasted it. Man does not live by
bread alone, but by love, fervor, and truth. Jesus is ready to transform
the Kingdom of Earth into the Kingdom of Heaven, furious bestiality into
happy sanctity, but He does not deign to transform stones into bread,
matter into other matter.
For similar reasons Jesus refused the other challenge. Men love the
wonderful, the visibly wonderful, the prodigy, the physical
impossibility made possible before their eyes. They hunger and thirst
after portents. They are ready to prostrate themselves before the
wonder-worker even if he is an evil man or a charlatan. From Jesus they
all asked for a Sign, meaning by that, a gigantic juggling feat; but He
always refused. He did not wish to persuade by means of the miraculous.
He consented to cure the sick—especially those sick in spirit and
sinners—but He often avoided the occasion even for these miracles, and
He begged those cured not to speak the name of their healer. And He
never used this power for His own safety, not even at Gethsemane when
Satan tempted Him to put away the cup of death from His lips, nor when
He was nailed to the cross and Satan repeated his challenge by the mouth
of the Jews. “If thou art the Son of God, come down from the cross and
save thyself.” In the night of His vigil and in the high noon of His
death, He resisted Satan and had recourse to no miracle to save Himself.
Men must believe Him in spite of all contrary evidence, believe in His
divinity even when confronted with what seems His common humanity. It is
no fit deed for Jesus needlessly to throw Himself down from the Temple;
to bring an end to the pain of another with the sole purpose of
conquering men, and fascinating them with wonder and terror; to put God
to a test, to force Him as it were, to accomplish a rash and superfluous
miracle, only in order that Satan may not win the infamous wager founded
on sarcasm and on arrogance. Loving, it is to human hearts He wishes to
speak; sublime in character, He wishes to bring sublimity into human
lives; a pure spirit, He wishes to purify other spirits; deep-hearted,
to light the flame of love in others; a great spirit, to bring greatness
to little, mean, neglected souls. Instead of throwing Himself like a
vulgar magician from the precipice which is below the Temple, He will go
up from the Temple upon the Mount to give out from on high the
beatitudes of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The offer of the Kingdoms of the Earth must have been horrible to Him,
and still more the price that Satan asked. Satan has the right to offer
what is his. The Kingdoms of the Earth are founded on force and
maintained with deceit. They are Satan’s own country, they are his
Paradise regained. Satan sleeps every night on the pillows of the
powerful. They pay material tribute to him, and give him daily offerings
in thought and deed. But Jesus could have taken away their Kingdoms from
the Kings without bending knee to the Adversary. He had only to offer
men bread without work. If like a juggling mountebank He had opened a
public theater of popular miracles, the multitude would have acclaimed
Him. Had He wished to seem the Messiah for whom the Jews had been
longing during their dreary slavery, He could have corrupted them with
plenty and with marvels, He could have made of every land a country of
grace and enchantment and He could have occupied at once every seat of
the procurators of Satan.
But Jesus does not wish to be the restorer of the fallen kingdom, the
conqueror of hostile empires. Authority is of little importance to Him
and glory still less. The Kingdom which He announces and prepares has
nothing in common with the Kingdoms of the Earth. His Kingdom is
destined rather to bring to naught the Kingdoms of the Earth. The
Kingdom of Heaven is in us. Any day when a soul has turned to
righteousness the Kingdom of Heaven is enlarged because it has acquired
a new citizen, snatched from the Kingdom of Earth. When every one is
good and righteous, when all love their brothers as fathers love their
sons, when even enemies love one another (if there still are enemies),
when no one thinks of amassing treasure, and instead of taking away from
others, every one gives bread to the hungry and clothing to those who
are cold,—where on that day will be the Kingdom of the Earth? Where will
be the need for soldiers when no one wishes to enlarge his own land by
stealing that of his neighbor? What need will there be for Kings when
every one has his law in his conscience and when there are no armies to
command nor judges to select? What need will there be for money and for
tribute when every one is sure of his living and satisfied with it, and
there are no wages to be paid to soldiers and servants? When every one’s
soul is transformed, those so-called foundations of life which are named
Society, Country and Justice will vanish like the hallucinations of a
long night. The word of Christ needs neither money nor armies. And if it
really becomes the universal life of the conscience, everything that
binds and blinds men, necessary unjust power, the criminal glory of
battles, will fall like morning mists before sunlight and wind. The
Kingdom of Heaven within is One and it will take the place of the
Kingdoms of Earth, which are many. The liberated spirit will scarcely
remember despotic matter. Men will no longer be divided into Kings and
subjects, masters and slaves, rich and poor, the arrogantly virtuous,
the humble sinners, free and prisoners. The sun of God will shine on
all, the citizens of the Kingdom will be one family of fathers and
brothers and the gates of Paradise will be open again to the sons of
Adam become as gods.
Jesus conquered Satan in Himself and now came out of the desert to
conquer him among men.
THE RETURN
As soon as Jesus came again among men, He learned that the Tetrarch
(second husband of Herodias) had imprisoned John in the fortress of
Machaerus. The voice crying in the wilderness was stilled and pilgrims
to the Jordan saw no more the long shadow of the wild Baptizer fall
across the water.
He had done his work and was now to give way to a more powerful voice.
John waited in the blackness of the prison until his bloody head was
carried on a golden platter to the banquet—almost the last dish served
to that evil woman, betrayer of men.
Now Jesus understands that His day is at hand, and crossing Samaria He
returns into Galilee to announce at once the coming of the Kingdom. He
does not go to Jerusalem, the city of the great king, the capital. Jesus
comes to destroy that Jerusalem of stone and arrogance, proud on its
three hills, hard of heart like the stones. The men whom Jesus comes to
combat are precisely those who glory in great cities, in the capitals,
in the Jerusalems of the world.
At Jerusalem live the powerful of the world, the Romans, masters of the
world and of Judea, with their soldiers in arms. Jerusalem is ruled by
the representatives of the Cæsars; of Tiberius, the drunken assassin,
the perfidious heir of Augustus, the hypocritical voluptuary, and of
Julius the adulterous spendthrift. At Jerusalem live the High Priests,
the old custodians of the Temple, the Pharisees, Sadducees, Scribes, the
Levites and their guards, the descendants of those who pursued and
killed the prophets, the petrifiers of the Law, the bigots of the
letter, the haughty depositories of arid fanaticism. At Jerusalem are
the treasurers of God, the treasurers of Cæsar, the guardians of the
treasure, the lovers of wealth; the Publicans with their excisemen and
parasites, the rich with their servants and their concubines, the
merchants with their crowded shops; money bags clinking with shekels in
the warmth of the bosom above the heart.
Jesus comes to combat all these. He comes to conquer the masters of the
earth—the earth which belongs to all; to confound the masters of the
word—the word which should be spoken freely wherever God wishes; to
condemn the masters of gold, base, perishable and fatal element. He
comes to overthrow the kingdom of the soldiers of Rome who oppress
bodies; the kingdom of the priests of the Temple who oppress souls; the
kingdom of the heapers-up of money who oppress the poor. He comes to
save bodies, souls, the poor; He teaches liberty, in opposition to Rome;
setting at naught the doctrines of the Temple, He teaches love; He
teaches poverty against all the ideals of the rich.
He does not wish to begin His message in Jerusalem where His enemies,
gathered together, are the strongest. He wishes to surround the city,
take it from the outside, arrive there later with a following behind
Him, when already the Kingdom of Heaven has begun slowly to lay siege to
it. The Conquest of Jerusalem will be the last test, the supreme trial,
the great battle, the tremendous battle between the greater than the
Prophets and Jerusalem, slayer of Prophets. If He should go to Jerusalem
now (where He will enter presently as a king and whence He will be
buried as a criminal) He would be taken prisoner at once and would not
be able to sow His word on less ungrateful, less stony soil.
Jerusalem like all capitals—great sewers to which flow the refuse, the
outcasts, the rubbish of the nations—is inhabited by a mob of frivolous,
elegant, idle, skeptical and indifferent people, by a ceremonious
patrician class who have kept only the tradition of ritual and the
sterile rancor of their decadence; by an aristocracy of property owners
and speculators who belong to the herd of Mammon, and by a rebellious,
restless, ignorant crowd, controlled only by the superstition of the
Temple and the fear of the foreigner’s sword. Jerusalem was not fit soil
for the sowing of Jesus.
A man from the provinces,—therefore healthy and solitary—He goes back to
His province. He wishes to carry the tidings of good news to those who
were to be the first to receive Him, to the poor and the humble because
the tidings are specially for them, because they have long been waiting
for them, and because more than any others, they will rejoice. Jesus’
coming into the world is for the poor. Therefore leaving Jerusalem, He
arrives in Galilee, enters into the Synagogue and begins to teach.
THE REIGN OF GOD
The first words of Jesus are few and simple, very much like those of
John, “The time is accomplished; the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent
and believe the Gospel.”