Sunday upon Sunday can stack up after a while into something which amounts to not much of a muchness, and one must try to put all that out of one's mind for a moment, lay everything aside and re-read an entire Gospel at a sitting to regain one's sense of interpretive proportion. Usually when I do this I end up shaking my head over the stark contrast a Gospel represents just in its urgent tone of voice compared with the satisfied demeanor evident in the denizens of any given church. Whatever may be said of our religion of forty years ago, let alone twenty centuries, its moral tone was more distinct, its own sense of urgency more palpable. Was it because we were not as rich then? And did not live as long? Or was our connection to the sources of Jesus' inspiration somehow more substantial? Did we actually preach Law and Gospel in those days, instead of about Law and Gospel?
The conviction of the imminence of the end of the world has its basis in Jesus' moral vision of God's coming judgment. A studious peasant on the periphery of society, he brings to bear the powers of a gifted critic whose observations are steeped in the language of the Law and the Prophets but whose experience is that of the outsider looking in. His contemporaries are repeatedly said to be astonished at this mere carpenter's son who suddenly appears on the scene filled with an urgency to tell all who will listen to repent and follow him. Jesus is at pains to urge radical change in attitudes and behavior, to invest life with a moral sense it has come to lack, because he is convinced God is about to intervene decisively and justly in human history, in contrast to contemporaries who were content to acquiesce in the status quo, or who more widely thought we should enjoy it while it lasts because human life simply represented a fleeting point in time. For Jesus "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die" must give place to "take up your cross and follow me" because God surely is coming. Apart from this constellation of presuppositions, the character and force of the teaching of Jesus itself becomes distorted and misunderstood.
The earthly Son of Man of this early tradition, who has no place to lay his head, looks besieged by hangers-on though supremely in command in comparison with the ascended Jesus of the later tradition, who sits at the right hand of God's power in heaven, from where he seems oddly unable to find the kind of competent help he is looking for, even among The Twelve. The latter he had commanded "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not." Suddenly all that is changed, and he at length hits upon a young fanatic, one Saul of Tarsus, to whom he complains from heaven of being persecuted and whom he subsequently directs in his travels, first here and not there, to spread the message beyond the Jewish confines where it had produced what must be considered an anticlimactic result. But after a good beginning even this Paul disappears for upwards of a decade before he reappears and produces the history with which we are now familiar from the New Testament.
Since God's decisive judgment of men had failed to materialize in the conclusion of Jesus' earthly career, it is not surprising that the re-interpretation of it should find new expression in such formulations as "it is appointed unto men once to die, and then comes judgment," which amounts to an attenuation of the original eschatological expectation of Jesus. And unlike Jesus' missionaries of Matthew 10 (The Twelve) who went out provisionless with the promise and expectation that they "shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come," Paul takes no support from anyone but funds his own missionary activity by practicing his trade, going among the Gentiles, planting churches and visiting them, retracing some of his steps multiple times, being closer to the end of all things only by a day, each and every day that passes.
Under the pressures of such developments, it is still somewhat surprising that the memory of the early tradition survived. At this long remove it is easy to fail to imagine the impact that it must have made. Much of it must have seemed as unintelligible as it was offensive.
We are informed that the individuals Jesus called who became The Twelve left everything behind, including co-workers and jobs, wives and family, and, depending on the chronology you accept, wandered around following their teacher for about three years, turning most of them into what today we should call beggars and dead-beat dads, socially irresponsible men of the meanest sort. While it may be argued that some of these had nothing to lose by doing so except long hot days in the boat, at least one may have abandoned a more lucrative skimming operation collecting taxes.
But most were far more reluctant to come along. The command to cut off hands and feet or pluck out eyes if they cause one to sin can't have helped. The rich young ruler sorrowfully declined because he couldn't bear to part with his many possessions, which Jesus told him to liquidate for the benefit of the poor as the final one thing lacking. Others protested their need to bury their dead before they answered the call to follow, for which social obligation Jesus had no patience whatsoever. The man at the plow must keep looking to the future and not look back or he will plow a crooked line and miss the kingdom's sudden appearance ahead of him.
The rich in particular have difficulty inheriting the kingdom of God because wealth's many cares distract them from the impending catastrophe and the narrow way of escape. The foolish rich man is more concerned with building new barns to store his gains than with the prospect of a final reckoning overtaking him as a thief in his nightly leisure. Riches represent a wide load on their backs which makes passage through the narrow doorway to the kingdom impossible. "Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be who find it."
Ostentatious dumping of wealth at the last second to get in won't do either, and would represent as conspicuous a sin as the lifelong propensity to accumulate wealth and ignore the needs of the poor. The improper divestiture of wealth at once exposes the insincerity of the would be follower of Jesus. It is noteworthy how often this is overlooked by our contemporaries both in the church and out of it who want to be recognized for their charitable giving. "Take heed," begins Matthew 6, "that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."
A person who has less to give away more easily escapes detection than one who has much, and faces a task therefore much less onerous. But still he must do it, and God will see it. This is the meaning of Jesus' statement that the widow he saw from the street, who almost escaped notice when she put into the treasury two small coins, "cast more in than all they . . . even her whole life," because it was all that she had, in contrast to the Pharisees who openly and grandly deposited great sums out of their abundance. In what Jesus had observed in the woman, God had observed as one of the truest of followers.
What is remarkable about the Gospels is how they preserve the memory of this world renouncing ethic in the face of the imminent eschaton despite the trend already at work within them, especially in the little apocalypses in Matthew 24 and Mark 13, to re-interpret the urgent expectation of the end in the light of the crucifixion. Consider, for example, Luke's account of the trial of Jesus. There Jesus no longer predicts his imminent coming as the Son of Man with the clouds as in Mark, but only that he will in future sit at the right hand of the power of God (23:69). Yet in 14:33 Luke uniquely preserves in the sternest possible terms the conditions of discipleship: "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." The latter shows against the hyperbolists that Jesus expected all his followers, not just the rich, to turn their backs on everything they owned. To the hardness of which even members of the Twelve had protested their compliance, wondering to what end.
To what end, indeed. Despite the sacred halo painted over the early community in Jerusalem in Luke's Acts of the Apostles, it was Paul who intervened to rescue them from the economic difficulties they got themselves into, and who made of The Way the Weltreligion that it became. It was his expansive missionary ambition which brought Jesus' moral vision of reality in a new form to new soils which did not have the benefit of the Law and the Prophets. Without Paul the civilization of the West is almost unimaginable, the way forward, full of danger. If ours is a post-Christian age, if we no longer know what to make of this inheritance, if we no longer care, perhaps the swine are ready to turn, trample and rend.
