The Mother Standing Outside

That certain wealthy women attached themselves to Christ and “provided for him out of their own resources” — one of them the wife of the king’s steward — was itself a matter of prophecy. Through Isaiah the Lord called out to these rich ladies: “Get up, you rich women, and hear my voice” — so as to show them first as disciples and then as helpers and supporters. “Daughters, listen to my words in hope; make remembrance of a day of the year, in distress, with hope.” For it was “in distress” that they followed him, and “with hope” that they provided for him. [a]

As for parables, it is enough that we have shown once and for all that this manner of speaking was promised just as plainly by the Creator. But there is also that plain announcement of his to the people — “You will hear with your ears and not understand” — and it deserves attention here, because it is what supplied Christ with the appeal he made so often: “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” Not that Christ, moved by some different spirit, was allowing a hearing that the Creator had refused. It is that the encouragement came after the threat. First: “You will hear with your ears and not understand.” Then, after it: “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” They had ears, and refused to hear on purpose. What he was teaching them was that the ears they needed were the ears of the heart — and it was with those, the Creator had said, that they would not hear. That is why through his Christ he adds, “Take care how you hear” — and how you fail to hear — meaning, of course, the hearing of the heart and not of the ear.

Give the Creator’s announcement its proper weight, the weight belonging to one who was rousing the people to hear when he said, “Take care how you hear,” and it comes to a threat against anyone who would not hear. So it turns out that this exceedingly kind god of yours, who never judges and is never angry, makes threats. The sentence that follows immediately proves it: “Whoever has, to him it will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken away from him.” What is given? An increase of faith, or of understanding, or even salvation. What is taken away? Whatever it is that gets given. And by whom is the giving and the taking done? If the Creator does the taking, then the Creator does the giving too. If Marcion’s god does the giving, then Marcion’s god will do the taking as well. And whatever his reason for threatening to take away, it will not be the work of a god who does not know how to threaten because he is incapable of anger. I am astonished, besides, when he says “nobody hides a lamp” — he who had hidden himself, a greater light and a more necessary one, for so long a stretch of time; and when he promises “everything will be brought out of hiding and made plain” — he who up to now has kept his own god in the dark, waiting, I suppose, for Marcion to be born.

Now we come to the argument worked hardest of all by the people who dispute the Lord’s birth. They say he testifies himself that he was never born, when he asks, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” This is how heretics operate. Either they twist plain, straightforward words into any sense they like by their own guesswork, or else they force a flat literal reading onto words that call for reasoning and cannot be settled straightforwardly — as here. Our answer, for our part, is first of all that it could not possibly have been reported to him that his mother and his brothers were standing outside and wanted to see him, if he had had no mother and no brothers. They must have been known to the man who announced them — either from some time before, or at that very moment, when they wanted to see him or sent him their message.

The usual reply to this first point of ours is: But suppose they sent him the message in order to test him? Well, Scripture does not say so. And since it is Scripture’s habit to flag what is done as a test — “Look, a certain lawyer stood up and put him to the test”; and again, when the question about the tax came, the Pharisees approached him to test him — then where it mentions no testing, it does not admit testing as a reading. Still, though I do not grant that sense, let me ask — by way of an answer I do not even need — for the reasons behind this alleged test. What could they have been testing by naming his mother and his brothers? To establish whether he had been born or not? And when was that ever in question, so that they would have to settle it by a test of this kind? Who could doubt that he had been born, when they had him in front of them as a genuine man? When they had heard him call himself “Son of man”? When what they doubted about him was whether he was God, or the Son of God, since they saw him in the full dress of human nature — and took him instead for a prophet, a great one, granted, but one who had been born a man?

Even supposing he did have to be tried on the question of his birth, any other proof would have served the trial better than one drawn from naming relatives whom it was perfectly possible for him not to have had at that moment, true birth or no. Tell me: does a mother in every case outlive her sons? Are brothers born for every son? May a man not rather have a father and sisters living, or even no relatives at all? Besides, it is on record that at that very time a census had been taken in Judea by Sentius Saturninus, and that could have satisfied their inquiry about Christ’s family and descent. So there was no coherence whatever in a test of that sort — and the ones “standing outside” really were “his mother and his brothers.”

It remains for us to examine what he meant when he fell back on words not to be taken flatly: “Who is my mother, or my brothers?” It looks as though his language amounted to a denial of his family and his birth. In fact it came from the sheer force of the situation, and from the reasoned sense in which his words were to be explained. He was rightly indignant that people so very close to him were “standing outside” while strangers were inside hanging on his words — all the more since they wanted to call him away from the solemn business he had in hand. He did not so much deny them as disown them. And so, when to the question he had just asked — “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” — he added the answer “None but those who hear my words and do them,” he transferred the names of blood kinship to others, whom he judged more closely related to him because of their faith. Now nobody transfers a thing except away from the person who owns the thing being transferred. So if he made people “his mother and his brothers” who were not, how could he have denied those relationships to the people who really held them? Only on the terms of what they deserved, surely, and not by disowning his own near relatives — teaching them by his own case that “whoever preferred father or mother or brothers to the word of God was not a disciple worthy of him.”

In fact his acknowledgment of his mother and his brothers was all the more explicit for his being unwilling to acknowledge them. By adopting others he only confirmed in their relationship to him the ones he was refusing — refusing them for the offense they had given, and putting the others in their place, not as truer relatives but as worthier ones. After all, it was no great matter if he did prefer to his kindred a faith that they did not have.

But — “what sort of man is this? He gives orders even to the winds and the water!” Of course: he is the new lord and owner of the elements, now that the Creator has been deposed and shut out of his property! Nothing of the kind. The elements recognized their own Maker, just as they had been in the habit of obeying his servants too. Look hard at the Exodus, Marcion. Look at the staff of Moses as it waves his command at the Red Sea, a body of water larger than all the lakes of Judea. See how the sea gapes open from its very depths, then sets itself in two hardened masses, rigid alike on either side of the divide, and out of the gap between them makes a road for the people to cross dry-shod; how the same staff swings again, the sea comes back in full strength, and Egypt’s cavalry is swallowed in the rush of its waters. And the winds themselves served that ending. Read, too, how the Jordan was like a drawn sword to bar the exiled nation from crossing its stream; how its waters upstream stood still and its current below stopped running altogether at the word of Joshua, when his priests began to go over. What will you say to that? If the one meant above is your Christ, then he is no more powerful than the Creator’s servants. But I would have been content with the examples I have brought forward and nothing else, if a prediction of this very voyage of his on the water had not gone ahead of Christ’s coming. In fact a psalm is fulfilled by this crossing of the lake. “The Lord,” says the psalm, “is upon many waters.” When he scatters its waves, Habakkuk’s words come true, where he says, “Scattering the waters as he passes.” When at his rebuke the sea falls calm, Nahum is borne out as well: “He rebukes the sea and dries it up” — winds and all, since it was the winds that had disturbed it. [r]

By what evidence do you want my Christ vindicated? Is it to come from the Creator’s precedents, or from the Creator’s prophecies? You suppose he was foretold as a soldier under arms, rather than as one who was to wage — in a figurative and allegorical sense — a spiritual war, against spiritual enemies, in spiritual campaigns and with spiritual weapons. Come, then: when in a single man you find a crowd of demons calling itself Legion, made up of spirits of course, you ought to learn that Christ too has to be understood as an exterminator of spiritual foes, who handles spiritual arms and fights in spiritual combat — and that it was he, and nobody else, who now had even a legion of demons to contend with. So it is plainly a war of this kind that the psalm may have spoken of: “The Lord is strong, the Lord is mighty in battle.” For it was with the last enemy, death, that he fought, and through the trophy of the cross that he triumphed.

Now, of what God did the Legion testify that Jesus was the Son? Of that God, surely, whose torments and whose abyss they knew and dreaded. It seems impossible that they had gone on until then in ignorance of what the power of this recent and unknown god was working in the world, because it is highly unlikely that the Creator did not know of it. Even if there was some time when he did not know there was another god above him, by now at any rate he had discovered there was one at work below his own heaven. And what their Lord had discovered had by now become common knowledge to his entire household, inside the same world and the same circuit of heaven in which the foreign deity was living and acting. So since both the Creator and the beings he made — these demons among them — must have known him if he existed, then, seeing that he did not exist, the demons in fact knew no Christ but the Christ of their own God. They do not ask of the strange god what they remembered they had to beg of the Creator: not to be plunged into the Creator’s abyss. And in the end they had their request granted. On what ground? Because they had lied? Because they had proclaimed him to be the Son of a ruthless God? And what sort of god will that be, who obliged liars and propped up the men slandering him? But in fact there is no need of that thought. Since they had not lied, and since they had acknowledged that the God of the abyss was their God as well, he himself confirmed that he was the very one those demons acknowledged: Jesus, the Judge and Son of the avenging God.

Now look at a trace of the Creator’s smallnesses and weaknesses in Christ — for I mean, on my side, to charge him with ignorance. Allow me a little license in my campaign against the heretic. Jesus is touched by the woman who had a flow of blood, and does not know by whom. “Who touched me?” he asks, when his disciples offered their excuse. He even sticks to his claim of not knowing: “Somebody touched me,” he says, and produces a proof of it: “I felt power go out of me.” What does our heretic say? Could Christ have known the person? Then why did he speak as though he did not know? Why? To call out her faith, surely, and to test her fear — exactly as he had once questioned Adam, as though in ignorance: “Adam, where are you?” So you have the Creator excused on the same terms as Christ, and Christ behaving on a level with the Creator.

But in this case he was acting as an enemy of the law: since the law forbids contact with a woman who has a flow of blood, he wanted not only that this woman should touch him, but that he should heal her. Here, then, is a God who is not merciful by nature but out of hostility! And yet, if we find that this woman’s faith so deserved it that he said to her, “Your faith has saved you” — who are you to detect hostility to the law in an act which the Lord himself shows us was done as a reward for faith? Or will you have it that this faith of the woman’s consisted in a contempt for the law that she had picked up somewhere? Who can suppose that a woman who was until then unaware of any God, and had not yet been let into any new law, would violently break the law that had bound her up to that moment? On what faith was such a breach risked? Believing in which God? Despising which? The Creator? Her touch, at any rate, was an act of faith. And if it was faith in the Creator, how could she have broken his law, when she knew of no other God? Whatever her breach of the law amounted to, it came from her faith in the Creator and was measured by it. But how can those two things go together — that she broke the law, and broke it out of a faith that ought to have held her back from breaking it?

I will tell you what her faith was, first and above all. It made her believe that her God preferred mercy even to sacrifice. She was certain that her God was at work in Christ. So she touched him — not simply as a holy man, and not as a prophet, whom she knew could be contaminated by reason of his human nature, but as God himself, whom she took to be beyond any possibility of being polluted by any uncleanness. And so, not without reason, she read the law for herself as meaning this: that the things capable of defilement do get defiled, but not God, whom she knew for certain to be in Christ. She remembered this as well — that what the law placed under its ban was that ordinary, regular flow of blood which comes from the body’s natural working every month, and in childbirth, and not the kind that comes from disordered health. Her own case was one of long-standing ill health running over, and she knew it needed the help of God’s mercy and not the natural relief of time. And so she can plainly be regarded as having drawn a distinction within the law rather than broken it. This will turn out to be the faith that was to confer understanding as well. “If you will not believe,” says the prophet, “you will not understand.” When Christ approved this woman’s faith — a faith that rested simply on the Creator — he declared by his answer to her that he was himself the divine object of the faith he approved.

Nor can I overlook the fact that his clothing, by being touched, also demonstrated that his body was real; for of course it was a body, and not a phantom, that the clothing covered. That is not our point just now, but the observation has a natural bearing on the question we are handling. For if it were not a genuine body but only an imaginary one, it certainly could not have taken on any contamination, being a thing with nothing in it. So a man who could not be contaminated, because of that emptiness of substance — how could he possibly have wanted this touch? As an enemy of the law his conduct was a fraud, since he was not liable to any real pollution.