Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Just as people were supposed to stay away from lepers, they were also supposed to keep their distance from public sinners. In the Israel of Jesus’ time it was simply not “the thing” to eat with “toll collectors and sinners.” The view of Jesus’ contemporaries in Judaism was that the tax and toll collectors made their money in dishonorable ways. They were looked on as thieves and robbers. One who followed the Torah would never, ever eat with them.

It was customary as well to wash one’s feet before a banquet, but it was certainly not customary for the one called master and lord to wash the feet of his table companions. That was something for servants or slaves to do. Thus, many of Jesus’ little gestures and signs broke through what was customary, even though they were still embedded in the culture of the world of the time.

But above all we must see that, for Jesus, behind the gestures and attitudes that were otherwise well-established in antiquity stood a biblical awareness of the human being. For in all this he was always also making a statement about the bodily nature of the human and thus about a crucial dimension of human existence. The human is dust and earth, but earth into which God has breathed his own breath (Gen 2:7), and therefore Jesus can make a paste of earth and spread it on a blind man’s eyes. This act is more than an instance of natural healing, and it has not the least thing to do with magical practices. It makes it clear that healing and liberation are not something purely spiritual or merely internal. Earth comes to the aid of humanity (Rev 12:16), and the body is to be redeemed just as is the soul.

It seems to me that the fact that Jesus had a deep relationship with physical attitudes, the language of the body, and the world of signs is of great significance, because precisely in this it becomes clear that he lived in an unbroken relationship to human physicality. Jesus is not alien, helpless, or disturbed in his relation to the body; for him, body and bodiliness are indispensable aspects of humanity.

Jesus takes the body and its needs seriously. No one could have said of him what antiquity said of the pagan philosopher Plotinus and what Athanasius reported of the Christian hermit Antony: Plotinus “lived like someone who was ashamed to have been born into a human body,”³

and Antony “blushed” when he ate in the presence of others.⁴

The story of Plotinus reveals the absolutizing of the spiritual that was possible in the world of Greek culture, and in reading the description of Antony’s life we need to be aware that anti-bodily tendencies from late antiquity had penetrated Christianity so that the language of its legends distorted the reality of the saints’ lives. But supposing that Antony really did regard eating as something slightly indecent: what would he have thought if he had seen Jesus at a banquet with toll collectors and sinners that most certainly was not as silent and respectable as depicted in the paintings of the Last Supper in Christian art? And what kind of confusion would have overcome him if he had been involved in what Luke relates in chapter 7 of his gospel?

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. (Luke 7:36-38)

Jesus is not upset in this story. He defends the woman against the criticism that begins immediately to be hurled at her. He interprets her action as a sign of her faith. The uninhibited behavior of the woman and that of Jesus are a match. Jesus understands. He knows what the woman’s signs mean. He has no fear of physical behavior.

The incarnational nature of Jesus’ work is obvious in his deeds of healing but also in all his signs and gestures: God’s salvation must enter into the world and penetrate every facet of its reality. It is not just a matter of changing minds. It is just as much about matter. Nothing can be left out. Redemption is meant for the whole of creation. The history of revelation has not been a progressive dissolution of the worldly but a more and more comprehensive incarnation, a deeper and deeper saturation of the world with the Spirit of God.⁵

God has “moved in on us” to do us good.

A Demonstrative Healing

Surprisingly often Jesus’ behavior concentrates into a formal symbolic act. The meaning of that will be clearer from the following example. I will begin with an incident that is related in Mark 3:1-6: