The Pharisees looked down on Jesus because Jesus kept company with gutter scum. There’s a saying today: "You can’t soar with eagles if you hang out with turkeys." "Exactly", the Pharisees would say. And they were the eagles.
Jesus explained himself this way:
"Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." [Mark 2:17 (NRSV).]
In the Bible, both priests and physicians had a role as to disease. The difference between Jesus and the Pharisees was which of those roles they took.
1. Physicians.
In a way, Jesus’s choice of metaphor is odd. From the beginning to the end of the Bible, no physician cures anyone. Their only success was when they acted as embalmers. In Genesis, Joseph gave the body of his father Israel to Egyptian physicians for embalming. They also embalmed Joseph. Thus, physicians earn their only hits in the first inning.
Physicians don’t heal the army-commander Naaman’s leprosy. Physicians aren’t even mentioned. God heals him through the prophet Elisha. (2 Kings 5.)
King Asa of Judah was a godly king. (There’s some biblical controversy about this – which is not my subject now.) Two years before he died, his feet became diseased. In Second Chronicles, he sought cure from physicians instead of from God, and they failed.
Then there’s Job. Buried under serial catastrophes, Job suffers his friends. His friends are great men, righteous men, men of understanding, even prophets in their way. And they accuse him.
They demand that he blame himself for his own loss of all comfort and happiness. Job refuses. He calls his accusers "worthless physicians." (Job 13:4.) They are giving him the shaming cure, and he won’t drink that medicine.
Job uses physician as a metaphor for a spiritual healer. Like Job and Jesus, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah used physicians to stand for spiritual healers:
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people
not been restored? [Jeremiah 8:22 (NRSV).]
Physicians appear in the New Testament in four ways. In addition to Jesus using them as a metaphor for his ministry, there was the woman who had bled for many years. Over the years, she poured out her purse to physicians, but they failed to stop her bleeding. She became worse. But she touched Jesus’s robe, and she was healed. (Mark 5.)
And there was Luke the physician. His occupation seems incidental.
Finally, Jesus spoke to men and women that he grew up among. He said, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’" (Luke 4:23 (NRSV).) I suspect that he is using doctor in the same way that Job, Jeremiah, and he himself used physician.
2. Priests.
Not only physicians dealt with disease. So did priests. Leviticus 13 & 14 describe the priestly duty to diagnose leprosy. (Leprosy, as used in the Bible, covered a number of skin diseases.)
A leprous person was an outcast. He could wear only torn clothes. When he walked, he had to cover his lip with his hand and call out "Unclean! Unclean!" He had to live outside the camp. (Leviticus 13:45-46.)
Priests declared when a person was cured. That’s why Jesus told the man he cured of leprosy to show himself to a priest. (Matthew 8:4.)
The casting out of lepers was real, and it had real consequences to the outcasts and their loved ones and friends.
3. Physicians, priests, Jesus, and the Pharisees.
Approaching sin like priests approach disease, the Pharisees gripped a thicker biblical strand than Jesus did in comparing himself to a physician. Like Levitical priests diagnosed leprosy, they diagnosed sin. And then they shunned the sinner, as lepers were shunned. They offered no help to the shunned, except their hard-hearted example.
I do not sit with the worthless,
nor do I consort with hypocrites;
I hate the company of evildoers,
and will not sit with the wicked. [Psalm 26:4-5 (NRSV).]
Psalm 26 was a diamond-tipped proof-text that the Pharisees could judge Jesus with.
Jesus was the highest of high priests, but he saw himself as a physician. He was the healer of sin. He believed that sinners could be made good.
And physicians don’t heal from a distance.
4. The Great Healer.
The priestly Pharisees of gospel telling self-certified their own perfect spiritual health. Maybe we Christians shake our heads at them for that reason. Maybe we put ourselves above them, because we know our own sinfulness. But maybe we know our own sinfulness so glibly that we really don’t know it at all. If so, that would make us just like them.
So we might go to the Great Healer, and we might ask him to show us our need of healing. Personally, I go to my doctor only when I have a worry. Some people go regularly for a check-up. They don’t want a problem to go un-known until healing is hard or not possible. Those people are wiser about their bodies than I am about mine.
I heard of a physician who poured mineral oil into a patient’s ear and instantly dissolved an earwax build-up that had kept the patient from hearing. I heard of a drunk wastrel who cried out to God in drunken desperation, and he instantly became sober, and he never touched alcohol again. Maybe the Great Healer will lay hands on us and cure a problem instantly.
Maybe he’ll tell us to cut out the cigarettes-of-the-spirit, or the suggary-treats of the soul. And maybe we’ll be wise enough to hear him. (Hopefully, he’ll treat the earwax build-up first.) Maybe he’ll give us spiritual exercises to do.
It would be nice if he said that we were stressed out and sent us on vacation.
But we have to wait and see what he says. If we knew all that a doctor knows, we wouldn’t need a doctor. We don’t know, and we do need.
5. Prayer.
Lord, show me my sin. Speak of my condition. Teach me how I should live, and make me wise and brave and hopeful to live as you direct me to. Speak soundness to my bones and flesh, and health to my spirit. If you choose, you can do these things. Amen.
A single case dictates my opinion about the death penalty.
The victim was a devout Christian, a faithful church leader. He was killed for preaching.
One of the murderers did not directly participate in the killing. But he had a role in the killing, and he approved of it. That’s the very definition of aiding and abetting. As an aider and abettor, he was as guilty in the killing as the men who crushed the victim’s skull.
The victim’s name was Stephen. He was the first Christian martyr. You can read about him in the Book of Acts. The man who was keeping the coats of the men who killed Stephen and approved of the killing was named Saul. Now he is better known as the Apostle Paul.
After the killing of Stephen, Paul was on the road to Damascus to imprison Christians. Jesus appeared to him as a voice and as a literally-blinding light. Paul spent the rest of his life spreading Christianity.
God could have destroyed Paul. Instead, he changed his heart.
1. Barabbas freed.
The murderer Barabbas was a notorious renegade who was released instead of Jesus by Pontius Pilate. Pilate had given the crowd the choice to release Jesus instead.
Barabbas’s name means "son of the father". He is the subject of a short novel by Swedish writer Par Lagerkvist. In that novel, Barabbas is curious about Jesus. He seeks out Jesus’s disciples. But though he wants to, he cannot understand, and he cannot believe. He is crucified in Rome.
I have heard that Barabbas is a moving novel. Maybe its story is true. We cannot know because history has swallowed up Barabbas, and his real fate is known only to God.
It offends no Christian notion to see the hand of God in the release of Barabbas in the place of Jesus. His release is a metaphor for Jesus suffering judgment in our place. But that metaphor exists only because Barabbas was released in a living act of clemency brought about by the death of Jesus. And clemency is what this essay is about.
2. Paul killed.
The fate of Paul is better known. After spending his life after his conversion planting and nurturing churches and writing much of the New Testament, he was falsely accused, he appealed to the emperor, and he was sent to Rome in chains. Tradition has it that he was beheaded there. His Christian walk in this world began and ended with killings: the killing of Stephen at the beginning and his own death by the Romans as a supposed lawbreaker at the end.
3. The death penalty abused.
The accounts of Stephen and Paul are the stories of innocent men killed. Innocent me are killed by the state today. For all of the procedural safeguard, for all of the due process, innocent people still are sent to death row. DNA testing has proved hundreds of men on death row were innocent.
And those are just the cases in which there were DNA samples to examine. There were and are cases where the DNA was destroyed, or where there never was DNA to examine. I assume that innocense occurs in non-DNA cases at the same rate as in DNA cases. Among the innocent in non-DNA cases, the criminal justice system has buried its mistakes, or it will likely do so.
4. The killing of Jesus.
Nor are the wrongful executions of Paul and Stephen the only accounts of wrongful executions in the Christian tradition. The epicenter of Christianity is the execution of the one truly innocent man, the one perfect person. As he died on the cross, he did not judge his executioners; he said "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."
5. Meaning in this.
It is our fortune that the Father favors mercy over justice.
And mercy makes demands on us. Like many Christians, I believe that we are called to struggle, with God’s help, to walk as Jesus did. That means that, like him, our bias must be towards mercy.
The stories of Paul and Barabbas show God’s mercy toward those who commit grave crimes; our God is the God who delights in the death of no sinner. He has often been called the God of second chances. One of the harsher laws in California is known as "Three strikes and you’re out". That is not the motto of our God. And those of us who are not perfect can be relieved at that.
As a lawyer, I have represented prisoners under life sentences for murder who are trying to win release on parole. Some of them, for now, seem to belong in prison. Many, many of them have turned themselves around after decades in prison. Many I would be confident to have as next door neighbors. If the law scrupulously demanded eye-for-an-eye justice, these reformed men might not today have turned around.
Do we need to put murderers in prison? Absolutely. No inclination to mercy should put the innocent, or the relatively innocent, in danger. We cannot have unrepentant murderers free among us.
Do we need to hope in the redemption of those who do wrong? Do we need to make prisons places where souls can be reformed? If Jesus from the cross can plead for this enemies to be forgiven, how can we be like him unless we hold open to prisoners, even murderers, the chance to turn around?
It takes decades to execute a prisoner in California. That gives time for a prisoner to turn around. But this period of potential reformation is not a deliberate part of the system; it is the by-product of a broken system. In November, California voters can vote to repeal the death penalty by voting for Proposition 34. Proposition 34 makes deliberate that which now is accidental.
Two questions. What did Jesus look like? Why don’t we know?
1. Jesus described.
There is one physical description of Jesus in the Bible. It occurs in the Book of Revelation. Revelation is the record of the apostle John’s visions that he had on the island of Patmos. John was exiled there long after Jesus had died, rose, and ascended into heaven. This is that description:
His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. [Revelation 1:14-16 (KJV).]
This describes Jesus in his glorified state. It is the description of a holy vision, not the description of a man as his disciples passed time with him.
The Bible elsewhere contains the idea of Jesus transformed from his natural, earthly appearance. He prayed with three of his disciples, and as he prayed his appearance changed. This is what Luke 9:29 says about the change in his appearance:
And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. [KJV.]
These passages do not reveal the appearance of Jesus day-by-day in Galilee.
2. Jesus un-recognized.
After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples, but they did not always recognize him.
He appeared to Mary Magdalene when she came to his tomb, but she thought at first that he was a gardener. (John 20:15.)
Seven disciples were fishing but catching no fish. Jesus stood on the shore and spoke to them, but they did not recognize him. He told them to cast their net on the right side of the boat. They did, and suddenly they had a haul of many fish. Then they knew it was Jesus. (John 21:1-9.) The Book of John suggests that the disciples recognized him by his miracle, not by his appearance or voice. It says that they dared not ask him who he was, because they knew it was Jesus. (John 21:12.) This would make no sense if he were otherwise recognizable.
Jesus walked with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. But they did not know who he was until he broke bread. Then he disappeared from their view. (Luke 24:1-31.)
3. Did Jesus have short hair?
Jesus is not described as he appeared in the time of his ministry, but there is one hint about what he looked like. Against traditional depictions of him, Jesus probably had short hair. The apostle Paul did not meet Jesus in his earthly state, but he knew people who knew him, and he knew the traditions of the time. And based on that tradition, he said in 1st Corinthians:
Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? [1 Corinthians 11:14.]
How odd it would be if Paul indirectly criticized Jesus’s appearance or chided men for having hair like him.
I suppose that the long-haired Jesus tradition is handed down from Medieval and Renaissance paintings. These depicted Jesus in the custom of those times.
4. The Passion of the Christ.
I watched the beginning of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. It is interesting that director Gibson had his actors speak Jesus’s language Aramaic, but he had Jesus wear his hair long, even though that was not the tradition of Jesus’s time.
And Gibson’s Jesus was European-looking. This was even though Jesus was born in the Middle East to a Middle-Eastern mother. Of course, we don’t know that Jesus did not look European, but we have no reason to think that he did.
I don't mean to say that The Passion of the Christ was a bad movie. Many people found it deeply stirring. It's just that a movie director must make a choice about the appearance of his central character. And there is no way to know that this director's choice was right.
5. Disguise as parable.
What does this mean? I suspect it means many things, and I suspect that I’m missing most of them.
But I suspect that one clue to one meaning reposes in Hebrews 13:2: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." (KJV.) Therefore it is true in a literal sense and in a metaphorical sense: if you cannot know the appearance with which Jesus might come, any needy stranger might be Jesus.
