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The Words and Deeds of
Christ
(Reprinted from
SOBRAN’S, November 2000,
page 5)
When I
was a much younger man, I almost worshipped Shakespeare. He
seemed to me almost literally “inspired,” the most eloquent
man who ever lived. And he nearly filled the place in my life that
Catholicism had briefly occupied after my teenage conversion.
When I returned to the Catholic
Church in my early thirties, I began to see him differently. As a
professional writer myself, I still admired him immensely, realizing how
impossible it was that I should ever emulate him. But I no longer regarded
him as a god. I had another god — namely, God.
I began to marvel at the words that
were truly the most inspired ever uttered: those of Christ. As a writer I
felt honored when anyone quoted me or remembered anything I’d
written. But Christ is still quoted after 2,000 years. An obscure man, he
wrote nothing; we have only a few of the many words he spoke during his
life, not in the Hebrew or Aramaic he spoke them in, but translated into
Greek and thence into English.
His words have a unique power that
sets them off from all merely human words. Even two removes from their
original language, they still penetrate us and rule our consciences. They
have changed the world profoundly. He didn’t just perform miracles;
he spoke miracles. The words we read from his mouth are
miracles. They have a supernatural effect on anyone who is receptive to
them.
One proof of their power is that we
also resist them. Sometimes they are unbearable. Like some of the early
disciples who fell away, we are tempted to say: “This is hard stuff.
Who can accept it?” It’s the natural reaction of the natural
man, fallen man.
Great as Shakespeare is, I never lose
sleep over anything he said. He leaves my conscience alone. He is a
tremendous virtuoso of language, but much of his beauty is bound to be
lost in translation. (I apologize if this offends our German readers;
Germans believe that Shakespeare in English was really just raw material
for Schiller’s great translations.)
By the same token, nobody ever feels
guilty about anything Plato or Aristotle said. They spoke important and
lasting truths often enough, but never anything that disturbs us inwardly.
We are never afraid to read them. We aren’t tempted to
resist them as we are tempted to resist Christ. The sayings of Confucius
and Mohammed haven’t carried over into alien cultures with
anything like the force of Christ’s words. They may be very wise at
times, or they wouldn’t have endured for many centuries; but still,
they are only human.
But all this raises a question (and
here I apologize for offending our Protestant readers). If the Bible is to be
our sole guide, why didn’t Christ himself write it? Why
didn’t he even expressly tell the Apostles to write it, as far as we
know? Why did he leave so much to chance? Yet he said: “Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” And so
far this certainly appears true, though we know of no measures on his part
to see to it that his words would be preserved. He seems to have trusted
that they would somehow have their effect by their sheer intrinsic power,
just as he trusted that his enduring the humiliation, agony, and death of a
common criminal would confound every human expectation and fulfill his
tremendous mission.
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the
Redemption was an even greater miracle than the Creation. I’ve
often wondered just what he meant by that, and I think I’m starting
to see. The human imagination can readily conceive of God creating the
world. The human race has many creation stories and myths; every culture
seems to have its own. But nobody imagined, no human being could ever
imagine, God becoming a human being and redeeming the human race by
submitting to utter disgrace, unspeakable physical pain, and death, ending
his life in what appeared even to his disciples to be total futility.
![[Breaker quote: How
Christ's words differ from Shakespeare's]](images/words1.gif)
The greatest genius who ever lived could never have foreseen or supposed such
a story. It was absolutely
contrary to human common sense. It came as a total shock even to the
devout and learned Jews who were intimate with the Scriptures and
prayed for the coming of the Messiah. The Apostles who had repeatedly
heard Christ himself predict his Passion, his destiny on the Cross, failed
to comprehend it when it actually came to pass. When his words were
fulfilled to the letter, instead of recognizing what seems to us so obvious,
they fled in terror. (As we would done have in their place.)
The New Testament Epistles were
written by men who had seen Christ after the Resurrection. A skeptic
might dismiss St. Paul’s vision as a hallucination, but Peter, John,
and James had seen Christ’s Passion and afterward met him,
conversed with him, dined with him, touched him. They didn’t deny
their own desertion and loss of faith at the time of his death, just as the
ancient Israelites didn’t play down, in their own scriptures, their
many defections from the true God; it was an essential part of the
story.
Nor did the authors of the Epistles
keep reiterating that the Resurrection was a fact, as if it were in doubt.
They simply treated it as something too well known to their hearers to
need further proof. They were prepared to die as martyrs in imitation of
Christ; Christian suffering, not writing, was to be the chief medium of the
Good News for the rest of the world.
Christ’s words, in their minds,
were inseparable from his deeds. He had founded an organization, which
we call the Church, and he had told and shown the Apostles how to go
about their mission when he was no longer visibly present. It seems to me
fatally anachronistic to suppose that distributing literature, in the form
of what we now call the Bible, was to be a prominent part of this mission;
that was impossible before the printing press, surely a great
technological advance but one that had no role in the life of the Church
before the fifteenth century. The Apostles had — and could have
— no conception of books as we know them, easily mass-produced
and cheaply purchased. Before Gutenberg, every book had to be copied by
hand, carefully preserved, awkwardly used. Reading itself was a special
skill.
The life of the Church, as prescribed
by Christ, was sacramental. He never told the Apostles to write books; he
told them to baptize, to preach the Gospel, to forgive sins, and to
commemorate the climactic moment of his ministry before the Passion,
the Last Supper. He delegated his own authority to them and left much to
their discretion, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That is why
Catholics give so much weight to tradition; we aren’t privy to all
his instructions to the Apostles, but we trust that they knew what they
were doing when they formed the Church in her infancy.
In one respect Catholics are more
fundamentalist than the fundamentalists. We take the words “This
is my body” and “This is my blood” very literally. So did
the first hearers who rejected the “hard saying” that eating
his flesh and drinking his blood was necessary to salvation; he
didn’t correct the impression that he meant exactly what he seemed
to be saying. Even a current writer, the professedly Catholic Garry Wills,
rejects the traditional Catholic doctrine that the priest who consecrates
bread and wine converts them into the very body and blood of Christ.
Christ’s words, as I say, still provoke resistance. And this is why I
believe them.
What greater proof of his divinity
could there be than the fact that he is still resisted, even hated, after
2,000 years? Nobody hates Julius Caesar anymore; it’s pretty hard
even to hate Attila the Hun, who left a lot of hard feelings in his day. But
the world still hates Christ and his Church.
![[Breaker quote:
Exactly as he predicted]](images/words2.gif) The
usual form of this hatred is
interesting in itself. For every outright persecutor, there are countless
people who pretend not to hate Christ, but subtly demote him to the rank
of a “great moral teacher,” or say they have nothing against
Christianity as long as the “separation of church and state” is
observed, or, under the guise of scholarship, affect to winnow out his
“authentic” utterances from those falsely ascribed to him
— as if the Apostles would have dared to put words in his mouth! And
as if such fabricated words would have proved as durable as
“authentic” ones! (Try writing a single sentence that anyone
could mistake for a saying of Christ for even a century.)
Most secular-minded people would
find it distasteful to nail a Christian to a cross, though there have been
exceptions. They prefer to create a certain distance between themselves
(or “society”) and Christ, to insulate worldly life from the
unbearable Good News, so that they feel no obligation to respond to
God’s self-revelation. An especially horrifying concrete application
of this insulation of society from Christianity is the reduction of the act
of killing unborn children to an abstract political “issue,” a
matter about which we can civilly “disagree.”
Pretending to leave the ultimate
questions moot, they actually live in denial of and opposition to the truth
we have been given at so much cost. What was formerly Christendom
— a civilization built around that central revelation of God to man
— has now fallen into a condition of amnesia and indifference.
Even much of the visible Catholic
Church itself has defected from its duty of evangelizing, which begins
with transmitting Catholic teaching to children. Ignorance of Catholic
doctrine in the “American Church” is now both a scandal and a
terrible tragedy.
The Vatican recently offended its
Protestant and Jewish partners in ecumenical “dialogue” by
reiterating the most basic claim of the Catholic Church: that it’s
the One True Church, the only sure way to salvation. Apparently the tacit
precondition of “dialogue” was that the Church stand prepared
to renounce her identity. And we can well understand why some people
might get the mistaken impression, even from certain papal statements
and gestures, that this was a live possibility. But it was a
misunderstanding that had to be unequivocally cleared up before any
honest conversation could occur.
Christ always has been, still is, and
always will be too much for the human race at large to accept or
assimilate. Exactly as he said he would be. The world keeps proving the
truth of his words.
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