The Ones Who Went Away One by One

A few more things happened along the way. Some of them were small. One of them was a morning in the temple that nobody who stood there ever forgot.

He had spent the night out on the hill where the olive trees grow, and he came back into the temple early, while the light was still new. People came to him straight away, so he sat down on the stone and began to teach them. Then there was a noise at the edge of the crowd. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees came pushing through, bringing a woman with them. She had been caught doing wrong. They stood her up in the middle of everybody, where every face in the temple court could turn and look at her, and then they spoke to him over the top of her head. “Teacher, this woman was caught doing wrong. In the law, Moses told us to throw stones at a woman like this until she dies. So — what do you say?” They were not asking because they wanted to know. They wanted him to say something they could use against him. If he said let her go, he had thrown out the law of Moses in front of witnesses. If he said stone her, then all that talk of his about mercy was finished. Either way they had him, and the woman was only the thing they were using to do it.

He did not answer them at all. He bent down instead, and began writing in the dust of the temple floor with his finger, as though he had not heard a word. They kept on asking. They would not leave it. So he straightened up and said one line to them. “Let the one among you who has never sinned throw the first stone at her.” And he bent down again, and went on writing in the dust.

Nobody answered that. After a while one of them turned round and walked away — the oldest of them went first — and then another one went, and then another, out through the gate and into the street, one by one by one, until the whole crowd of accusers had gone and the court was quiet. He straightened up. There was nobody standing there but the woman. “Where did they all go? Has nobody condemned you?” “Nobody, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I. Go — and from now on do not sin any more.”

Another time, a long way back, some of the teachers came at him wanting proof. They had watched him make sick people well all day long, and they still wanted something else: something big, done to order, so that they could stand there and judge it. “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.” The crowds were packing in tighter round him while they asked it, and he answered so that all of them heard. “This is an evil generation. It asks for a sign, and no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah. Because just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment beside the people of this generation, and they will say this generation was wrong — because Nineveh changed its mind when Jonah preached to it. And look: something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the south will be raised at the judgment beside the people of this generation, and she will say they were wrong — because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon being wise. And look: something greater than Solomon is here.” Jonah had been three days shut up inside a fish and had come out again alive, and a whole foreign city had listened to him afterwards. Nineveh was not even Israel. Neither was the queen who traveled all that way to hear Solomon. That was the sign he gave them, and he did not give them another one.

While he was still talking, one of the Pharisees asked him home for the midday meal, and he went in and sat down at the table. The man was surprised, and it showed on his face: his guest had sat straight down without washing first, the careful way they always washed before eating. Jesus saw what he was thinking, and said it out loud in front of the whole table. “You Pharisees wash the outside of the cup and the outside of the dish, and inside you are full of what you have taken from people and of what you cannot say no to. Fools — did the one who made the outside not make the inside as well? Give away what is inside to somebody who needs it, and look: everything is clean for you. How terrible for you Pharisees. You count out a tenth of your mint and your rue and every little herb in the garden, and you walk straight past being fair, and past the love of God. Those are the ones you had to do, and you should not have left the others undone. How terrible for you Pharisees, because you love the front seat in the meeting house, and being greeted in the marketplace.”

One of the lawyers was at the table too — the men who knew the law best of anybody — and he did not like the way this was going. “Teacher, when you talk like that, you are insulting us as well.” “How terrible for you lawyers too. You load people up with loads too heavy to carry, and you will not put one finger under the load yourselves. And you took away the key that opens the door to knowing God. You did not go in yourselves, and you stood in the way of the ones who were going in.” It was not a comfortable dinner. When he came out of the house they came after him down the road, pressing him hard, asking him question after question, waiting for one wrong word to fall out of his mouth.

There were Pharisees who loved money, and they were listening one day while he was talking about money, and they laughed at him. Not out loud, exactly. The kind of laughing that is meant to be seen. He turned round to them. “You are the ones who make yourselves look right in front of people. But God knows your hearts. What people think is important, God knows all about — and it is a detestable thing in his sight. The law and the prophets were until John. From then on the kingdom of God is being told out as good news, and everybody is pushing to get in. But it would be easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one little stroke of one letter of the law to fall.”

Once, after he had said that a husband and wife whom God has joined together must not be pulled apart, his disciples said to him, “If that is how it is between a man and his wife, then it is better not to marry at all.” And he said to them, “Not everybody can take in what I am saying — only the ones it has been given to. There are some men who can never marry, because they were born that way. There are some who can never marry, because other men made them that way. And there are some who have chosen it for themselves, for the sake of the kingdom of the heavens. Let the one who is able to take it in, take it in.”

He said one small thing more than once, in more than one place. “Nobody lights a lamp and then covers it over with a pot, or shoves it underneath the bed. You put it up on the lampstand, so that the people coming in can see by the light of it. Nothing is hidden that will not be seen, and nothing is covered over that will not be known and come out into the open. So take care how you listen.” And once, when his mother and his brothers came looking for him and could not get through the crowd to reach him, and somebody passed the message up to the front, he looked round at the people sitting there and said, “My mother and my brothers are the ones who hear the word of God and do it.”

In Jerusalem, in the last week, the city was packed full for the feast. Among all the pilgrims who had come up to bow down at the feast there were some Greeks — foreigners, from a long way off, who had come all that distance to worship the God of Israel. They picked out Philip, because he came from Bethsaida up in Galilee and had a Greek name himself, and they asked him for something. “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Philip did not know what to do with that, so he went and found Andrew, and the two of them went together and told him.

And he answered as though they had asked him the largest question in the world. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it stays one grain, all on its own. But if it dies, it comes up and bears much fruit. The one who loves his life loses it, and the one who thinks nothing of his life in this world will keep it for the life of the age that is coming. If anybody serves me, let him follow me; and where I am, my servant will be there too. If anybody serves me, my Father will honor him.”

And then his voice changed. “Now my soul is troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No — it was for this that I came to this hour. Father — glorify your name.” And a voice came out of the sky. “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The people standing round heard it, and could not agree about what they had heard. Some of them said it had thundered. Others said something else. “A messenger has spoken to him.” “That voice did not come for my sake,” he said. “It came for yours. Now this world is being judged. Now the ruler of this world is going to be thrown out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw everybody to myself.” He said that about the kind of death he was going to die.

The crowd could not follow him there. “We have heard out of the law that the Christ stays for ever. So how can you say the Son of Man has to be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” “The light is with you only a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the dark does not catch you — the one who walks in the dark does not know where he is going. While you have the light, trust the light, and become sons of light.” And when he had said that, he went away, and hid himself from them.

But before that he had called out loud, where anybody in the temple could hear it. “Whoever trusts me is not trusting me but the one who sent me; and whoever sees me sees the one who sent me. I have come as light into the world, so that nobody who trusts me has to stay in the dark. And if anybody hears my words and does not keep them, I am not the one who judges him. I did not come to judge the world. I came to save the world. Because I have not spoken out of myself. The Father who sent me told me what to say and how to say it, and I know that what he commands is life for ever. So whatever I say, I say it just the way the Father told it to me.”

And that was nearly the end of it. He had done sign after sign in front of them — the water turned to wine at the wedding, the officer’s boy at Capernaum, the man who had lain thirty-eight years by the pool, the bread on the grass for five thousand, the man born blind washing his eyes in Siloam, Lazarus walking out of a tomb in his grave clothes — and after all of it, most of them would not trust him. It went the way Isaiah had written it long before, when he asked who had believed what they were told, and who the Lord’s arm had ever been shown to. And Isaiah said a harder thing as well: that their eyes had been blinded and their heart made hard, so that they would not see with their eyes, or understand with their heart, and turn round, and be healed.

And yet, even so, a great many people did trust him — and not only poor people and country people. Many of the leaders trusted him too, men who sat on the council and wore good clothes and knew exactly what was being planned. They only would not say it out loud. They were afraid of the Pharisees, in case they were put out of the meeting house for it. They loved being thought well of by people more than being thought well of by God.