Jesus of Nazareth Read online

  And yet: everything we would see would be important, exciting, even disturbing. We would know, in the end, many details that biblical scholars have been working to discover for a very long time. But would we, with all that, know what actually happened back then? Would we know more than what the gospels already tell us? Would we now really know with certainty that Jesus drove out demons “by the finger of God” and that his healings were signs of the reign of God now coming to pass (Luke 11:20)? Would we know, because now we could see the external events, that here, in this person, the Logos of God had become present entirely and forever? Let me emphasize: we would know nothing of what really matters about Jesus, his mission, his task, the mystery of his person.

  To really experience anything of that we would have to be able to see the whole public activity of Jesus, be able to survey everything he did, not only on the first day. Above all, we would have to be aware of the claim that underlay his preaching and healing. We would have to be informed about the reactions of his audience, especially those he made his mortal enemies. Here already, then, the filmed documentation of only the first day of Jesus’ public activity would fall short. We would need a documentation of the whole period of his public work.

  Fine; let’s make that part of our scenario. We document on film everything that happened from the time Jesus left his parents’ house until he was laid in his tomb—not only what happened to Jesus himself, but also among his friends and foes. That would mean that a lot of films would have to be running on a lot of screens alongside one another—and for about a year and a half. It would be an enormous burden of work just to watch it! We would not be able to hold out.

  But suppose we did. Then the question would still remain: did this mega-documentation really help us? Could we, for example, even remotely grasp Jesus’ claim without knowing the Old Testament? Can Jesus be understood without the Torah and the prophets, without Israel’s experiences and hopes? Can Israel’s hopes be understood outside the history of the faith of that people? And can Jesus be understood if we look at his life without having as our perspective the fact that here the history that has taken place between God and Israel has reached its last and decisive phase? But how can this dimension of the event be made visible by merely piling up facts, by a simple summary of external events? Here every medium that only shows us a series of external facts will fail us.

  Documentary Films

  Let us remain for a moment with the case of film, because we can learn a great deal from it. Every documentary filmmaker who understands her or his art would make a radical and decisive selection from the enormous quantity of filmed material we would have produced in our scenario and bring that selection into a carefully constructed composition—and so interpret it already. Perhaps she would interrupt the chronological sequence with flashbacks. Perhaps he would even build in visual allusions to the Old Testament to clarify events. In any case we can be sure that she would constantly introduce pieces of film that create connections by means of “quotations.” In addition, he would hint at things in the background and give symbolic dimensions to individual events.

  In other words: every good filmmaker would choose only a little from the overflowing mass of material available, bring that little into a coherent context, and create a great many semantic relationships between the individual parts of the film, and would do exactly the same with the available sound material. And in this way the filmmaker would interpret the whole event, perhaps without inserting a single word of commentary from anyone off screen or providing a single interpretive title. In any case, if no interpretation is given to an external event it cannot tell us anything.

  And now comes the crucial question: did the authors of the gospels do anything different? Did they not cut, recombine, quote, allude, comment, interpret? Of course they did! And they did so using all the tools of a true narrative craft, because they knew that without interpretation there can be no understanding. Even the most accurate and strictly factual depiction of history cannot do without constant interpretation.

  On 25 February 2004 a highly honored film on Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his attempt to assassinate Hitler was shown on German television.5 A commentator in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote of this film:

  This is the most accurate film about Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt that has yet been produced, and it is the least complete. Those who view it this evening on television can rely on the correctness of the scenery, the uniforms, and the chronology. The director, Jo Baier, not only reproduced exactly the events of 20 July already researched by the Gestapo and found in their detailed files. He has precisely reconstructed Hitler’s barrack and the whole of the Führer’s headquarters in the East Prussian swamps, down to the mosquitoes. We cannot say in the strict sense that Baier has forgotten anything.… Anyone who wants to know what a German officer named Stauffenberg did throughout the day of 20 July 1944 will be well served here.

  But anyone who wants to know what the last day in the life of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg meant will feel lost. This has to do with the fact that this film is remarkably lacking in any kind of larger meaning. We could even say that it is a narrative without a context, a historical film with no history in it—and one that de-dramatizes history in the same remarkable way that dramas nowadays are de-historicized. We learn nothing of who Stauffenberg was or even who he might have been.

  6

  This is the problem in a nutshell. To use another image: bare “facts” swirl chaotically through the universe in their billions. If no one organizes or interprets them they remain garbage, pure informational garbage. This informational trash has nothing to do with “history,” not in the least. The so-called fact is a prior level, a partial element, but it is not yet history. Thousands of facts, in and of themselves, are not history. History is interpreted event. Historical knowledge organizes and interprets the infinite chaos of facts.

  The Interpretive Community

  But who does this work of interpretation—interpreting the chaotic factual material that pours out at us every day and every year? Of course it seems obvious to say that this is the work of individual historians, specialists in history, who search the archives, seek out contemporary witnesses, gather material, and then one day produce a book in which they have placed the gathered facts in a larger context, shed light on them from various sides, and so narrated a piece of history.

  Oh, if only it were so simple! In reality, individual historians do not work alone. Alone, they are nearly helpless. They presuppose the work of many others; they examine a great number of prior works that have already been produced by others. They have to depend on the statements and interpretations of earlier historians. All by themselves they could never get an overview of the incalculable quantity of factual material, let alone organize it or interpret it. Besides, the documents the historian finds in the archives are for the most part already interpretations from the view and to the purpose of the witnesses of the time.

  Thus, as with all serious research, there is something like a research community of historians. We need only think of the many dictionaries and reference works every historian has in her or his library. To put it more bluntly: there is something like an interpretive community of historians. Obviously, in this interpretive community as in all the scholarly professions, outsiders, contrary thinkers, oddballs, and blockheads try to make themselves heard. They too are necessary.

  And of course there are struggles between groups, extreme positions, battles over positions, and quotation cartels, that is, groups of scholars who quote each other but persistently keep silence about the results of other groups’ research. But above all, there is endless combat. That is inevitable in every serious field of research.

  But despite the never-ending battle among historians, they form something like an interpretive community that, up to a point, even creates consensus. Otherwise the mainstream of historical research and the great scholarly standard works that are
used throughout the world would be completely unthinkable.

  So what is being called “interpretation” in this chapter does not fall from heaven and cannot be accomplished by lone individuals. “Interpretation” presupposes a community of interpretation. “Interpretation” presumes communication between people. “Interpretation,” finally, in sociological terms, assumes a group that wants to secure its historical identity. And above all, “interpretation” presumes a “cultural memory” within that larger group.7

  The People of God as Interpretive Community

  Everything said so far about historical scholarship is, of course, true also of theology. Here the larger group that makes historical interpretation possible is the people of God. They were a narrative community from the very beginning. They told how God acted among them in ever new ways. And as a narrative community the people of God became a community of interpretation, a community that again and again renewed and purified its memory.

  All that, incidentally, is true not only of the past. The church is still an interpretive community today. It is vital for it to look back at its own past, to examine it critically, and to try to understand the present on the basis of this critical retrospect. Only in that way can it take the next step into the future. At present the church, after causing infinite suffering to the Jews over centuries with its theology of Israel, has finally come to the point of revising its relationship with Judaism. This revision will profoundly change the church’s life.

  So what has been said in sketchy fashion about every kind of secular historical interpretation is true above all of interpretation in faith: faithful interpretation of history presumes the people of God as the interpretive community. It is not only about perceiving the church’s own guilt but also about recognizing the deeds of God performed in his people and for the world through his people. Such perception and narration is impossible without an interpretive grasp grounded in faith. It is only possible when believers come together in believing communities, in the church.

  But is there not widespread unease at this point, at least? Should not objections be heard? Interpretive understanding, interpretive recognition, interpretive perception, interpretation and more interpretation—is it not a fact that interpretation can also go horribly wrong? Is interpretation not something vague, subjective, irrational, arbitrary, more conjecture than knowledge? The objection is plausible, but it does not do justice to the phenomenon of interpretation because the interpretation of world and history is a fundamental process without which human beings cannot grasp reality at all.

  There can be no perception of reality without an interpretive model. More than that: when people open their mouths and do not just put out animalistic sounds such as groaning and growling but use concepts, they are already interpreting their reality. Every language presumes an overarching interpretation of the world and is itself such an interpretation. Those who assign interpretation to the realm of the arbitrary call into question every field of scholarship, including the natural sciences. Still more, they question the value of every human discourse, because whenever we speak and construct sentences we are interpreting the reality that surrounds us.

  The same is true of Jesus of Nazareth, and of him above all. He is unthinkable without Israel, the people of God, in whose tradition he lived, and he can therefore be adequately understood only in faith and out of the believing memory of the people of God. An understanding of Jesus demands the foundation that is Israel, that is the church. If we do not hold to the church’s interpretive tradition and seek its genuine realm of experience again and again, then sooner or later the image of Jesus will disintegrate before us. Interpretation of him will become a matter of taste or at least be determined by the momentary horizon of the interpreter. We see this clearly in the many images of Jesus produced in the last several decades, each according to a shifting fashion. They show very little of the Jesus of the gospels but a great deal of the spirit of those who produce them.

  So we see Jesus as an opium for the soul and as a political revolutionary. Here he is as the archetype of the unconscious, there a pop star. He appears as the first feminist and as the faithful advocate of bourgeois morality. Jesus is used by those who want to see nothing change in the church, and he is used as a weapon against the church. He is instrumentalized over and over again to confirm people’s own desires and dreams. At present he must above all stand for the legitimation of universal tolerance, which is no longer interested in truth and therefore threatens to slide off into arbitrariness. For example:

  The Parable of the Ten Young Women

  For many centuries the interpretation of the parable of the ten young women in Matthew 25:1-13 was obvious to Christians: these virgins are supposed to go out to meet the bridegroom and adorn the marriage feast with their lamps. The wise among them had equipped themselves with surplus oil for their lamps, and in their prudence they had acted quite reasonably. One should imitate them. The foolish, on the other hand, fell short of what they were supposed to do. They had not prepared themselves in advance. They had not understood what was at stake. Therefore, they were still looking for oil when the feast was already beginning. In the end they were left standing outside the door.

  Today the earlier church’s view of the parable has been utterly reversed by many interpreters and preachers: the foolish young women for whom the door of the house remained closed embody people who are stigmatized, suffering, and humiliated. All sympathy belongs to them. We identify with them. The wise, on the other hand, have become offensive. Why didn’t they share their oil?

  In one interpretation of the parable that came to my hands some time ago8 the “I do not know you” spoken by the bridegroom to the foolish virgins is seen as a “wounding reaction” and a “Darwinist mechanism of selection.” And the wise young women in the parable, who could not give away their oil because otherwise the messianic feast of the reign of God would lose its brilliance, are demeaned as unjust, lacking in solidarity, and egoistic about their own salvation. Still more, the concern of the wise for the festival of the reign of God is declared to be “concealed violence” against those who did not prepare themselves for the feast. In other words, those who went out to meet the bridegroom acted inappropriately toward those who were unprepared.

  That shears the point off of Jesus’ parable and perverts the whole thing. In the parable of the ten young women the issue is not one of solidarity, readiness to help, or tolerance, but something quite different: the neglected kairos, the hour not seized.

  Church history shows how often Christians have failed to recognize their hour. Then a door closed and did not open again so quickly. Jesus had exactly the same experience: the majority of the people of God in his time did not recognize the crucial hour of God’s action. The consequences were horrible. Zealots and fanatics shaped the program for the next decades in Jewish history. Jerusalem was destroyed. It was a historical moment not grasped, one that would have demanded wisdom and the highest degree of readiness from the people of God of that time!

  Should Jesus not have spoken of such a danger of failing in his own objective? Should he not have warned against it? The fact that aid and tolerance are important does not exclude the reality that there is a judgment, one that we create for ourselves. Those who are called to follow Jesus cannot remain behind for the sake of others who do not want to go with them. They must go out—precisely so that the new ingathering under the reign of God may come to pass in the world.

  There are numerous texts in the gospels that signal a parting of the ways. They have been off-putting to a whole generation of churchgoers and reveal the degree to which many theologians have forgotten the church—or else they unlock what is crucially Christian and call people to discipleship anew. One such text is this parable about the foolish and wise young women. It is like a sharp sword. No one can understand this parable unless she or he thinks of sin in terms of the history of the people of God, its crises, dangers, and decisions.

  Romano Guardini once
asked, in one of his university sermons: What does that mean, exactly—looking at Jesus? How can I see him? How can I encounter him? And Guardini continues: oddly enough, here we find repeated in almost the same way what was true of the religions’ search for the hidden God: just as there have been many images of God, so also there are many images of Jesus. And as people have sought to take control of God, so also they try to take control of Jesus.9

  Therefore, says Guardini, today especially the question becomes as urgent as it can possibly be: who can protect Jesus from us? Who will keep him free of the cunning and violence of our own ego, which does everything to avoid really following Jesus? His answer: the encounter with Jesus must not be left to subjective religious experience; “rather, there is a place assigned for it that is built correctly, in which he can be seen rightly and listened to, and that is the church.”

  This is the crucial point. We need only to add that the “place” that is the church that protects Jesus from our own interests is not something that has been prepared for him after the fact; it surrounds him from the outset. It is around him as the space belonging to the people of God, into which Jesus was born and in which he grew up, in which one day he followed the Baptizer to the Jordan to be baptized. Jesus comes out of Israel, and without the traditions of Israel he is unthinkable and cannot be understood.

  But the place of the people of God, namely, the newly gathered, eschatological people of God, also surrounds what Christians have said about Jesus since Easter and Pentecost. The very first words of Jesus that were handed on, and the first accounts and stories that told what Jesus had done, were shaped within the “space” of the church. The Jesus tradition is grounded in the interpretive community that is “church.”

  It could not be otherwise, for we have seen that there is no such thing as a pure fact. Every fact that is told is already interpretation. Without interpretation, no event in our world can be understood. And when we are talking about the history between God and the world—still more, when the subject is the culminating point of that history, the fidelity of Jesus to his mission even to death, which set in motion a history of freedom that overturns everything—how could such an event be grasped and told without interpretation? We could also say: how could it be grasped and understood without faith?