CHRIST: A CRISIS IN THE LIFE OF GOD (Alfred A. Knopf), an
audacious new book that is at once a fresh interpretation
of the classic Christian belief that Jesus is God and a
moving meditation on the problem of evil. Miles reads the
New Testament as the continuation of God's life story, in
which He becomes a man and dies on a Roman cross, and begins
his new book by asking the startlingly simple question,
"What was God thinking?"Miles spoke recently in Washington, D.C. with RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY.
Q: After so many years away from biblical scholarship, what drew you back to writing two books on the Bible?
JM: I hadn't really thought that I would write on the Bible, and then one evening I listened to a recording of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," in which the images of the bridegroom and the lamb are juxtaposed. Jesus never married, so in some conventional sense Jesus cannot be a bridegroom. The bridegroom then must be God, the bridegroom of Israel. And the lamb is that bridegroom reduced to the condition of a sacrificial animal.
The horror of this transformation hit me with new force, and something close to horror is what I hear in the opening strains of that music. It certainly is a blend of grief and fear -- that deep-held note [in the opening chorus] bespeaks something close to fear or terror, as would be expected if you understand yourself in the condition of Israel -- losing its great protector, its champion, the God who had destroyed the army of Pharaoh and who was the ultimate guarantor of the safety and survival of the nation. If He could be reduced to this condition, then what hope was there for His people? As Jesus himself says to the weeping women who see him being led off to die, "Weep not for me, weep rather for your children. Blessed is the womb that hath never borne and the breast that has never suckled. If this is done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?" Jesus is speaking what have to be their own thoughts, and if they didn't see him as God Incarnate, subsequent Christian tradition has.
I'm making this far, far more articulate than it was for me as the music washed over me. The words, which are so very brief, simply say, "Look at him. Look at who? Look at the bridegroom. How is he? He is like a lamb." That's it. But that in its starkness is so affecting.
Then it became a matter of approaching the character of God Incarnate as you would approach any human character who surprises you by doing something that seems wholly out of character. You look into his past life. You say, "There must be something about him I didn't know." In this case, that meant looking into the Hebrew scriptures, which are [about] God's early and middle life. I intended to go on from that exercise to talk about the story told in the Gospels, but I made the fateful decision to read the Hebrew scriptures in the Jewish order, and realized that there was here an editorial hand that was bringing the collection to a close, so I had to stop.
Q: So the two books were really one book?
JM: They are two books reflecting the two editions in which we in the West have our sacred scripture. We have a Jewish edition, and we all have it. The Jews don't just have it. They may once have been the only ones who had it, but Christians now have it, too. They all know about it. And we have the Christian edition, which once seemed to be the only edition -- to Christians. Jews always knew about it, too. There's been a kind of double life all along. Jews and Christians have created western culture together, and so there are definitely two books here, but the two had a single genesis.
Q: You were inspired by listening to the Passion according to St. Matthew, yet you wrote a book that's very dependent on the Gospel according to St. John.
JM: Well, that's true. Though the Passion narrative proper comes from St. Matthew, there's very much in the oratorio that does not come from Matthew. And that is true of all of Bach's other passion compositions. The bridegroom and lamb images come straight from John. In fact, they also come straight from John the Baptist. It is he who speaks of Jesus as bridegroom on one occasion and as lamb on another.
I gave a lecture at the Getty Museum in which I joined the St. Matthew Passion to another German masterpiece of religious art, Matthias Grünewald's crucifixion -- the "Eisenheim Altarpiece." In that scene, you have Mary and John and Mary Magdalene grieving on one side of the cross, and then on the other side you have John the Baptist pointing triumphantly at the cross. He is not grieving. (John the Baptist, of course, did not attend the crucifixion. He was dead by that time. He had been beheaded.) And there's a little lamb at the bottom bleeding into a chalice and holding a staff -- obviously a highly interpreted, syncretistic picture of the Crucifixion, in which one Gospel is used to interpret another.
Q: Why is Christ a crisis in the life of God?
JM: The crisis in God's life is that He has broken his promise. He said that what appeared to be Babylon's victory over Jerusalem was really God punishing Jerusalem for the sins of the Jews, but that this punishment would not last. Soon Babylon would fall, and then Jerusalem would rise again in glory as under King David.
But it didn't happen. A temple was rebuilt, but it was a paltry thing. At its dedication, as many people wept as cheered. And the Persians didn't last very long. They were succeeded by the Greeks, who were much more oppressive, and by the Romans, who were the most oppressive of all. And God knows, because He knows the future, that a few decades hence there will come the great Roman Shoah -- the slaughter of the Jews and the attempt to end national Jewish life -- whose equal never came again until Hitler. And God is not going to do anything about it.
How can He continue to be God under those circumstances? Breaking His own promise. Not defending His own people. He had already said repeatedly that they had suffered enough. It was time for them to be comforted. But He is not comforting them. This is a crisis.
Q: God made an enormous mistake; God failed; God is only human. Isn't there a long tradition of understanding God this way in ancient biblical commentary? Aren't there many places in the Talmud, for example, where the rabbis speak about God changing His mind, failing, repenting, exhibiting the kinds of fallible human qualities you talk about?
JM: I do think that there could be assembled quite a remarkable collection of statements from places like the Midrash to Lamentations and other rabbinic texts. … But I decided I wasn't going to do that. My claim has been that I'm writing about God, and now about God Incarnate, as literary characters, and that my warrant for doing this is that these works have already achieved that position. They are in the literary canon of the West. The rabbinic literature, brilliant as it is and astounding as it can be in its daring, does not have that status, and it is certainly not in any dialogue with the New Testament, interesting as that could be.
You could find [these observations]. What I sometimes think occupies the place of the Talmud in Christianity is, in fact, the canon of literary and artistic works inspired by the New Testament. You can find it in Milton, in Matthias Grünewald, in Bach.
What does the average child think, looking at this man Jesus being tortured? "What did he do? He must have been very bad." I begin the book speaking of a Japanese artist who expressed her shock at seeing a corpse displayed as a religious icon. Jesus appears to be suffering punishment. And in some way that spectacle leaps past all theological and philosophical rationalizations of it and says to your most basic imaginative stratum, "He is being punished. He did do something wrong." Then you look for what it might be and what he might be doing about it.
I'm really quite astonished at the thought that Jesus undergoes a ritual of repentance, but he does. He's baptized at the Jordan River, going through what for everyone else who went through it was an admission of sin and a promise to reform. What sin had he committed? As Jesus, perhaps none that we can point to, but as God there was His having blighted all of His own creation with the curse of death.


