Jesus – who was he?
Jill Allum ponders the question
Recently, I have been reading A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. It is the weirdest book I have ever read. Rebecca West calls it: ‘A hot draught of mad, primal fantasy and poetry’. One experience is of children witnessing an adult showing his anger and the comment is: ‘In exact opposition to the witnesses at the transfiguration, they felt it would have been good for them to be almost anywhere but here.’ Like TS Eliot, it is presumed that everyone understands references to the transfiguration or the annunciation. These are in our archetypal unconscious, a deep part of our corporateness.
Our Bible study group has just looked at Matthew 14:13-22 on Jesus walking on the water. Most said: ‘Of course, it didn’t really happen.’ I said: ‘I think it did. I believe in ghosts.’ Whether it did or not doesn’t really matter. It’s part of our psyche. Jokes can be made about it.
Jesus won’t go away. He has lasted 2,010 years. He still comes to us, sometimes as we are dying. Someone I know saw him standing at the end of her deathbed. How cruel if someone had said it wasn’t him? My unbelieving mother died at fifty. Her last words were: ‘Where is Jesus now?’ What would you have answered?
He is far more than the stories in the Gospels. My Muslim friend in our inter-faith group speaks the name of Jesus and says: ‘Peace be upon him’, giving him equal weight as he does the name of Mohammed. Many of Jesus’s sayings are very similar to verses in the Koran. He even does miracles there.
Artists, poets and musicians will never cease to be intrigued by ‘Christ’ and to inspire or horrify us with their creations. The names are powerful and we use them as swear words or incantations when we need some magic. They will never go away.
Quakers may say we don’t believe this sort of talk but the people we mix with will. Something of Jesus is in every ‘man’.
