“Perhaps,” I suggested, “what you feel is what King Lear felt when he exclaimed, ‘Oh, question not the need! Our poorest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, man’s life is cheap as beasts.’ At least, one may say that human life needs something more than what seems to be strictly necessary. But what is that something?”
“Then, too,” added Hiroshi, disregarding my question, “such an ideal may be all right in ideal circumstances. Morality may come easily to people like Mariko, living within their warm family circle. But it doesn’t come so easily when one is living alone, surrounded by all the influences and temptations of the outside world. Then it seems the only function of morality is to remind us of what we should have done but didn’t. Then, so far from confronting us with a bright ideal, it only accuses us and makes us feel uncomfortable. It even seems to drive us into the sins we commit, by making us run away from its accusing finger.”
“That may be true,” I commented, “of the Ten Commandments and the law in general. I don’t mean only Jewish law but all human law, in that it proposes to all citizens a standard of decent behaviour, with penalties for non-compliance. But it isn’t quite true of the Sermon on the Mount. There Jesus isn’t merely speaking of an ethical ideal or appealing to the inner conscience of his hearers. He is speaking, above all, of a kingdom he has come to establish and the people who are to belong to it. This is why he begins his Sermon by saying, not ‘This is what you must do’, or ‘how you must behave’, but ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Later on he speaks of ‘my kingdom’, and he claims to be king, under his heavenly Father. He doesn’t just point, like a Greek philosopher, to a moral ideal and say, ‘That is the way of goodness, which you have to follow.’ He points to himself and says, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ He knows that most people are like Iwao. What they need isn’t an abstract moral teaching, but a personal example to follow.”
“Yes,” admitted Iwao, “that was just what I meant, though I couldn’t put it into words. What I need isn’t a teaching in the abstract but a teacher in the concrete. Even the Sermon on the Mount isn’t enough for me. I want to know more about the preacher of that Sermon, what kind of a man he was, and how people responded to his personality. I want to make sure he really practised what he preached. Otherwise, I may suspect his preaching to be a fake, not a true way of life. In other words, I want to see him as his first disciples saw him, by living with him as well as listening to him.”
“That’s just what the gospels are about,” I assured him. “That’s why they begin with his birth in Bethlehem and end with his death on Calvary, or rather with his resurrection from the dead. The sermons and other words of Jesus seem almost incidental to the events of his life. Or rather, the events themselves are words to us, even as they are narrated in words. They are, as Augustine says, words of the incarnate Word of God, from the time he was unable to utter a word in the stable of Bethlehem till the time he was no longer able to utter any more words on the cross of Calvary. He isn’t like those philosophers who say, ‘Follow my teaching’, but he simply says, ‘Follow me’.”
“Yes,” said Mariko, “that’s what I find so charming in the gospels and Christian art. It isn’t so much the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, though that’s poetical and impressive in its own way, as the example of his birth in a manger and his death on the cross. The words of his that speak most effectively to my heart are words that make no sound in my ears. I mean the simple scenes of his coming into the world and his going out of it, or his entrance upon and his exit from the stage of this life. What most impresses me in Western art, especially in that of the Renaissance, is the way these two scenes recur again and again. Some artists delight in representing the joy of the birth of Jesus, and others in representing the sorrow of his death.”
“And of all the Italian artists,” added Chieko, “my favourite is Michelangelo. And the work of his I like most is his Pieta in San Pietro. It’s such a tender expression of maternal sorrow, as Mary holds the dead body of her son Jesus. There isn’t any grief in her features, but only deep sorrow, while the body of Jesus is utterly limp and lifeless in her arms. I only wonder why Michelangelo didn’t go on and carve a corresponding statue of the birth of Jesus, showing the baby alive in his happy mother’s arms. Instead, he went on to carve other figures of the suffering Christ and other Pietas, in addition to his impressive paintings in the Sistine Chapel. I think he missed a wonderful opportunity in not choosing the simple scene of Christmas. I’m sure, if he’d presented it as a companion piece to his Pieta, it would have been altogether unique.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I agreed. “What a pity you weren’t living in Italy in the time of Michelangelo! But now it’s too late to tell him. Anyhow, the point of all this Christian art is to reinforce the main lesson of the gospels, which is to show us not only what Jesus said and did in his life on earth, but also who he was from the time he was born till the time he died. This is, moreover, crystallized for us in the glory of his resurrection. In him as king we have an example to follow in our daily lives, both for ourselves and for others.”
“Still, I feel there’s something abstract about it all,” complained Iwao. “It’s very beautiful, but only beautiful like a fairy tale. But is it really true? In any case, how does it apply to us in the twenty-first century? After all, it happened such a long time ago, just in the way fairy tales begin, “Long long ago”. May we not interpret it, as you interpreted the story of Adam and Eve, as a psychological allegory about Man and Woman? As that was about the fall of Man and Woman and the subsequent prevalence of sin in the world, so this is about the salvation of Man and Woman and their hope of new life in the world to come. Is that right?”
“It is, and it isn’t,” I answered, somewhat paradoxically. “You can interpret the story of Jesus as a psychological allegory, if you like. But if you think of it as no more than an allegory, if you deny that it has any basis in historical fact, you run up against many difficulties. On the one hand, the story of Adam and Eve couldn’t have been based on any historical records, still less on personal knowledge. Rather, it looks as if the author of Genesis looked into himself as a human being and expressed in the form of a story or parable what he found in himself. On the other hand, the story of Jesus has been written down either by his own disciples, as in the cases of Matthew and John, or by their disciples, as in the cases of Mark and Luke. These authors have abundant means of checking their facts and amplifying their personal memories with accounts provided by other eye-witnesses, including Mary the mother of Jesus. They even insist on the factual truth of what they say, and their readers are in a position to confirm their words for themselves.”
“In that case,” remarked Hiroshi, “if the gospels are as historical as you say, or as they claim, doesn’t that remove them all the more effectively from the present day, by placing them all the more firmly in their own day? What I want to know, and what I think Iwao wants to know, is how the personal example of Jesus can be of as much inspiration to us today as it was for his disciples in their day. In other words, what we need isn’t just a personal example from the records of a distant past, no matter how inspiring it may have been, but a living example in the present.”
“I see what you mean,” I said, “and I quite agree with you. Paul himself agrees with you when he tells the Corinthians, ‘Even if some of you have known Jesus in the flesh, you know him so no longer. All is now spiritual.’ What he preaches in his sermons and letters isn’t the historical Jesus, whom he’s probably never met in his life, but the risen Jesus, whom he sees in heaven sitting at the right hand of his Father. This is the Jesus he describes in another letter as ‘yesterday, today and the same forever’.”
“Do you mean to say,” asked Nobuo in surprise, “that there are two people called Jesus, one on earth and the other in heaven? I’ve never heard that before.”
“What