2. The Activity of Jesus

          Even though his biography is so brief, we can still determine some definite characteristics his activity. In those barely two years:

a) Jesus communicated and announced (more than taught) what the approaching Kingdom of God meant. The amazement which his teaching aroused was due to this (Mk 1,22). 

b) He shared table, interests and feelings with the excluded of that society (cf. Mk 2,15ff; Lk 15,1; Mt 11,25ff).

d) He called a few simple people to follow him in the style of life that he had adopted (8). It seems certain that he sent them to announce the Kingdom and he tried to build with them a type of "alternative community" that would not abide by the criteria of the civil society of that time, that Jesus summed up like this: "those that govern tyrannize and in addition wish to be called "benefactors" (Lk 22,25ff: this should not be so among you").

f) He got into conflict with the temple leaders and the official cult, permitting himself even an action of certain harshness when he upturned the whole set-up of sales that made the cult possible, and declaring that that temple was destined to disappear and be substituted by another "not made by human hands".

h) When he saw the end coming, he remained hopeful to such a point that he decided to celebrate a dinner with his own (9). At this dinner he made a symbolic gesture that the Christian communities still repeat: he shared bread (symbol of human need) and passed around a cup of wine (symbol of communicated joy), giving to understand that in this gesture of shared need and communicated joy, his life was summed up and he would be present among his own.

          Let us close this overview by pointing out that of all the titles modern investigation has given to Jesus (which do not attempt to be titles of believers but "flashes" of his personal charism and insight), the two most satisfactory ones are those that describe him as "a marginal Jew" and as an "eschatological prophet", that is, prophet of the end of time (that is not a title of a believer, given that no pronouncement is made about the veracity of this prophet). These snapshots are preferable to other titles (a wise man, a saint, a revolutionary, and an itinerant...).

          Perhaps, to these two titles chosen, we could add that of (Son of) Man. It seems very probable that it is in this way that Jesus styled himself, and it implies a certain ambiguity that is very much to the liking of Jesus. Though it could allude to "any common man" (cf. Phil 2), it alludes too to the utopian fulfilment of a human person. 

          What constitutes a human being is one's human conscience. But we have no immediate access to this conscience. We can only draw close to the human being through her/his words, acts and style, especially when these are habitual.

          But given the fact that the ancient notion of historiography is not exactly ours, the criterion to gain access to the the real person cannot be isolated texts (although a few do offer very serious guarantees) but should be the confluence of texts that trace a trait, even though some could possibly be of doubtful historicity. Here, we will access an important facet of the "real Jesus" through the following themes.

1. "ABBA" and Kingdom

          There are two words that were repeated by Jesus with notable frequency: the invocation to God as Abba (Father) and the near advent of the reign of this God. Jesus invited his disciples to call God Abba. But to understand correctly what is signified by "Abba" expressing a relationship of loving fatherhood, we can only do so by considering what Jesus himself understood by the reign of God. These are some of the ways of access to this "Kingdom" that reveals God.

1.1 Surrounding Testimonies

          In the first place the description given in Psalm 145. The psalm enumerates a human situation of freedom, justice, the overcoming of sickness and need, goodness and the welcoming in of the weak. When this occurs "God reigns". In addition, there are two useful texts in the apocryphal gospels:

• "The Kingdom of the Father is extended over the earth but men do not see it" (Gospel of Thomas 113); and 
• "He who knows God will find the Kingdom because knowing him you will know yourselves and you will understand that you are children of the Father. And at the same time you will know that you are citizens of heaven. You are the city of God" (Pap Oxyr. 654)(10)

          The above two texts are very rich in meaning and the words marked in a coloured fonts give us pause for thought.

          I choose these quotations not because they guarantee greater historical accuracy (given their sources, it is not possible to affirm this) but because they are an excellent summary of the teaching of the gospels concerning the Kingdom. We can add two other quotations of Paul: 

• "The Kingdom of God is not food or drink but justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit" (Rom 14,17), that is to say, equality among persons, reconciliation with oneself and all this given freely. 
• "The Kingdom of God does not come through words but through its own strength" (1Cor 4,20), in the line of the Gospel of Thomas, quoted above.

          Secondly, Jesus himself appears to have interpreted his healing task as the arrival of the Kingdom of God and not as a demonstration of supernatural power that guarantees his divinity. Although the "demonstration" interpretation appears more traditional, it is more a product of our recent culture which tries to prove things scientifically, logically, or through cause and effect. The Pharisees tried to explain these healings by attributing them to magical arts or to the devil. And that gave occasion to Jesus to explain how he understood them (see Lk 11,20).

1.3 His Parables

    Finally, let us highlight two characteristics of the parables:

1. The Kingdom of God is like a hidden treasure. He who discovers it will have so much joy that he will gladly give all that he has for it (Mt 13,44ff). It is also like a seed that, looked after well, keeps growing by itself, although the farmer sleeps (Mk 4, 26ff). 
2. And nevertheless a controversial point makes its appearance once again: in this Kingdom it is not the "moral" people (the Pharisees and Scribes) who enter but those excluded for their immorality ("publicans and prostitutes"). Because the morality of the established (dis)order is morality without solidarity that by its excluding action forces many people to these immoral conducts.

          In real fact the justifications could be valid. The possibility of a good business deal is a reasonable excuse not to attend a banquet, then and today. To have just married was a reasonable excuse since in the world of Jesus, banquets were not for women but only for men. And he who is in the middle of a honeymoon, it is understandable that he cannot renounce it...

          In this parable (as in many others (11)) Jesus denounces the occurrence of many morally plausible conducts that usually end up justifying or concealing a lack of solidarity with the weak and excluded while those who do not adopt those conducts are more open to heeding the call for solidarity.

          We begin to find here how the announcement of the Kingdom is at one and the same time, overcoming and subversive. The announcement of Jesus with respect to the Kingdom of God can be re-phrased today as: "the revolution of God is here. Believe this good news and change your mentality" (Mk 1,15). The God that this announcement reveals has the same overcoming and subversive character. The paternity of God is no joke: not only because it is about a paternity of adult men but also because it is a paternity of all (12).

2. A Strange Freedom

          The society in which Jesus moved was a notably closed society. In the matter of customs, it had, over the centuries, not moved an inch. Jesus did not appear to have had any contact with the Judaism of the diaspora which would explain his critical stance since the Jewish people of the diaspora were influenced by Greek culture. Jesus was not.

          It is surprising for this reason that from the beginning, without renouncing his practices as a practising Jew, he went about acting with a disconcerting freedom in matters so serious as:

-- keeping the Sabbath, 
-- the social ways of dealing with women,
-- the norms of purity 
-- his contact with pagans and Samaritans.

2.1 Freedom That Gives Authority

          The gospels describe this freedom of Jesus with the word exousía. It is a word that means both authority (or power) and freedom. And it appears with both meanings in the New Testament. It is for this that I have translated it before as "the power of his freedom". It is the only power that Jesus claimed to have. And this is how we are to understand the surprised and often repeated comments of the people regarding his words: "From where does this authority come since he has not studied with a teacher?... A characteristic that also appears to confirm the fourth gospel: "nobody has ever spoken like this man" (Jn 7,48).

2.2 Freedom in Favour of the Needy

          Regarding all this freedom, there is place here only for one example. We will choose that of the Sabbath, on account of its importance in the Jewish world, and the abundance of testimonies regarding this in the gospels. Jesus on several occasions broke the Sabbath, especially when it was a question of healing someone on that day, disobeying the prudent counsel of waiting another day of the week and alleging that to do good on the Sabbath could in no way be banned since the sacred day was made for human beings and not the other way round.

          Curiously enough, we can guess today that this transgressing practice has given back to the Sabbath its true theological meaning. In its origins the Sabbath was a social institution, not one of cult: its aim was to give the hired labourer and the slave rest, and the basis was sought (as was frequent in many prescriptions of the old world) in the "sacredness" of the holiday in which God rested from God's creation (Gen 2,2). It can be deduced from this that God's rest is precisely the relief of the needy. And this is why Jesus understood that by giving relief to the sick person he was in no way breaking the Sabbath. On the contrary, he was fulfilling its deeper intention that this is what is meant by the Sabbath being made for human beings. And this is how the fourth gospel understands it when it makes Jesus say, against the literal interpretation of the Bible: "My Father keeps working" (Jn 5,17)... as long as there is a sick man to be cured.

          The objection was made that it would have been better to wait for another day of the week, since it was not a question of urgent cures. This objection was not a valid argument for Jesus even though it discredited his cures precisely because they were done transgressing the Law ("this man does not come from God because he does not keep the Sabbath"). By rejecting this way of arguing, Jesus seems to make clear that the importance of his healings lay not in the working of miracles but in the person of the sick man.

          Finally, by attributing the cure to the faith of the sick person, and not to his own powers, Jesus removes the concept "sickness-cure" from the field of the supernatural and the magical and returns it to the field of creation, that is in the hands of human beings. Hence the commentary of the fathers of the church: Jesus healed not for us to see how much power he had, but for us to know that we too can cure.

3. From The Margins

          Together with "exousia", the other word that the gospels use most to describe Jesus is that of the "bowels moved with compassion". Before the sick, before the thousands of suffering humans, before personal situations, before the multitudes, the gospels repeat a well-known Greek word which means that "his bowels were moved" (14). So with "Abba", the Kingdom, the authority of his freedom and the bowels moved with compassion, one can conjure up a quick impressionist picture that can be validated by historical criticism.

3.1 Social Marginalization...

          The term "bowels moved with compassion" denotes in a clear way that Jesus' life did not move in the centre or from the centre, but from the margins -- from all those nuclei of people that the drive for individual affirmation keeps casting along the roadsides. Very reliable is the text in which Jesus declares that he  is being sent only for the "lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Mt 15,24). Probably, we should not look for an ambition of universal mission in him right from the start. This in no way is contrary to the attitude Jesus adopted later resulting from the explicit exclusion that the Jewish religion made of non-Jewish people. Jesus made a thousand gestures of welcome to the pagans -- the basis for the primitive church's welcome to the whole world. 

          His "bowels moved with compassion" placed a long-range bomb in the heart of the individualistic Jewish concept of being the chosen people. And perhaps it is of use to us in these times when so much is spoken of universalism and of "globalization". The empires of this earth should know that globalization does not consist in closing one's own doors and imposing their own products and own culture. There cannot be true globalization, if one does not begin by "globalizing one's own house", and by integrating all the lost sheep, before trying to conquer other worlds and markets.

          "Bowels moved with compassion" enables Matthew to overcome the problem of the relation between the Old and New Testament with a sentence from the prophet Hosea which shows how the former survives all ruptures: what God wants is "mercy and not cult" (Mt 9,13 and 12,7). And, given that this is what God wants, in the last judgement what will really matter  is not what one has wanted to do directly to God but what one has done directly to the hungry or to the sick (15). In this way, the sentence of James on true religion, quoted earlier, is reformulated by Matthew with a sentence of Jesus: "When you go to present your offering at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave the altar and go first to be reconciled" (5,22-24). Even if these were not the literal words of Jesus but proceeded from the evangelist we could not discredit them saying that they refer to the cult of the Old Testament. Given the fact that when the evangelists modify the words of Jesus, they usually made them softer, one is staggered by the intensity of the experience of Jesus that Matthew put in those words. Not even in twenty centuries have we Christians been able to explore their full meaning.

3.2 .... Grounded on a Religious Basis

          This law of gravity towards marginalized people can be symbolized in a graph that consists of two crossed arrows (vertical and horizontal), the ends of which point out four dynamics of exclusion and marginalization: upwards, downwards and sideways in both directions: the sick, the poor, women and foreigners. In a society that one confesses is founded by God and declares that it has God in its centre, these centrifugal lines will appear as coming from God and sanctioned by God. And so it occurred in the world of Jesus.

• Sinners were the sick and this often justified their social marginalization, closing a vicious cycle that made healing them a difficult task; "impure" were the lepers and on this account it was necessary to stand apart from them; and before the person born blind the apostles asked Jesus who had sinned, he or his parents, that he should be in this condition. Jesus, on the other hand, healed people not to show his divinity but the strength of the Kingdom in the human being ("your faith has saved you"). Traditional apologetics was quite blind on this point.
• Sinners were also the poor -- "that mass that did not know the Law and were under a curse" (Jn 7,49) -- because all they could do was get themselves deeper in debt until their very debt ended up forcing them to hand themselves over as slaves, or flee to the mountains, or make them part of the zealot movement (16). If in the words of Jesus there appear banquets and debts, it is not by coincidence but is a reflection of the condition of his society. The only peculiarity is that Jesus inverts the terms: in the banquet of the Kingdom, the lead actors are those who have never attended any of those big Sadducee feasts. And all are forgiven their debts except those who do not forgive their own debtors.
• Sinners were the foreigners and the pagans, about whom we have already spoken in the previous chapter. But that pious Jew did not hesitate to call at the house of a pagan who was suffering (17). And he, who valued faith so much and who so often reproached his own for their "little faith", publicly praised the faith of someone only in two passages. On both occasions the recipients of his praise were pagans (the Roman centurion and the Syro-Phoenician woman). 
• And if not sinners, women were considered inferior beings both in the Greek as well as Jewish society, unauthorized by these societies to be witnesses or to study the Law. This point deserves a further explanation because today it is very difficult for us to perceive the subversiveness of Jesus' conduct. Apart from some accounts that have already been mentioned, it was strange to see him walking by the side of women in a society in which even the wife was supposed to walk behind her husband when both were out in the street. Whoever he was, he knew well the Jewish world when he wrote that (even his apostles) "were surprised to see him talking to a woman" in public (Jn 4,27). This was how the Galilean walked: teaching the Law of God to women too and making it clear that also for them this was "the better part" (Lk 10,24). He established with many women a deep egalitarian friendship. 

         There, in the margins of society that marginalized and free Jew found God. This made him exult with joy and bless God (Mt 11, 25ff). From the margins of society Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom and from those margins he invited all to prepare his Kingdom. On account of this many were not able to understand him. And for this reason, he died "outside the gates of the city" (Heb 13,12).
 
 
 

8 Simple but very heterogeneous: simple fishermen of the lake, some disciple of John, a tax collector ("publican"), some supporters of what later would evolve into the zealot movement.

9 For reasons too long to explain here, history critics prefer the chronology of John regarding the supper to that of the synoptics. The former does not consider it the paschal supper whereas the latter do consider it so.

10 Papyrus found in Egypt in 1897. To judge by other already well known fragments of that same papyrus, the quoted text could be apocryphal called the Gospel of the Hebrews.

11 The Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican, the lost sheep, the Prodigal Son...

12 With respect to the topic of God which does not fit in here, I refer the reader to my chapter ("Jesus and God") in the book Ten Words about Jesus of Nazareth, Estella 1999, pg. 189-248.

13 Jesus does not speak about divorce (or separation by common agreement before an intolerable situation which did not exist in his world, given the inferiority of women), but of repudiation or "letter of dismissal" which that male society conceded to men for very small reasons and which left the woman totally unprotected. The verb "apollyomai" (Mt 5,32; 19,3; Mk 10,2ff; Lk 16,18) does not mean reciprocal action (separate themselves) but a unilateral action (let go). Here the matter at stake is the defence of women and not a norm of conjugal morals.

14 Besides describing a normal human reaction, there could be in that verb an allusion to Jer 31,20.

15 Compare Mt 7,22-23 or Lk 13,26-27 with Mt 25,31ff)

16 This, contrary to the usual presentation, was not only a movement against the external pagan empire but also against internal religious injustice. The first action of the zealots when they attacked in the year 66 was to burn all the existing debt files in Jerusalem.

17 The priests and Pharisees did not enter the atrium of the pagan Pilate "so as not to defile themselves" (Jn 18,28). Jesus decides to go to the house of the Roman centurion -- knowing well the Jewish mentality -- and of this centurion he asks only one favour at a distance.