(Simon) Peter (Cephas) Philip Nathanael
Andrew Matthew Jude (Thaddeus)
James Thomas James
John Judas Iscariot Simon (Zealot)
Who were the twelve disciples that Jesus chose to begin and fulfill His mission throughout Galilee and eventually Jerusalem? What were these men like and how did they attempt to understand Him, particularly His seemingly divine nature? Why did they ultimately deny, betray and abandon Jesus before His crucifixion and struggle to make sense of His resurrection? How were His disciples both a reflection of the Jewish religious elite as well as our own difficulty in ascertaining the nature of the divine?
In truth, beyond occasional statements by some of these disciples and glimpses of their dealings with Jesus in the four Gospels, we know very little about them. Four of them were fishermen and one a tax collector, but the others’ occupations are unclear. We presume most or all of them were not well educated, nor do we know how intelligent they were, at least in spiritual matters. Peter and Nathanael declared Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah (Mashiach), though Thomas remained skeptical until after His resurrection in an understandable need for physical proof. Philip, like Moses, asked Jesus to be shown at least God’s face, yet John seemed to understand what he was holding in finding (what we call) the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oveido in the tomb. Many of these disciples never said anything in the Gospels, and so we know them only by their scattering in the face of collapsing faith after Jesus was arrested. We only know that all of them witnessed the super-natural repeatedly, but like us, could not easily accept its meaning and purpose. These disciples have too often been disparaged by both the clergy and scholars alike for failing to fully understand Jesus as “the face of God on earth,” with one pastor calling them “buffoonish,” which strikes me as foolishly arrogant, as though we ourselves have done so much better than those who lived with and survived Jesus. They lived the life of Jesus one day at a time, while we have always known “the rest of the story.” We can only be envious of their daily experiences and struggles to even tell each other who Jesus was. Why did they hang around until “after the end?”
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As has been speculated by scholars, it seems likely that some or most of the disciples had an ongoing familiarity with Jesus beforehand. A few had been involved with John the Baptist, as had Jesus Himself for at least a short while. Presumably Jesus saw a spiritual inclination in all of these men, despite their lack of formal religious training. He knew them to be actively involved in their synagogues, and that they were not religiously disinterested or hostile to His ministry. Whether the disciples actually gave up living with their own families so easily we can not know, since we are reading interpretive stories rather than having any first-hand corroboration. We can know that these men wanted something more than to only be fishermen. They wanted to find God, and Jesus, unlike other false prophets, did not seem deceptive, manipulative or merely fanciful. He was genuine, and they somehow knew this. It is not clear that Jesus performed any miracles to sway their involvement and allegiance, rather it was a sort of intrinsic trust that could be reciprocated and sometimes challenged by Jesus. We do not know how long it took to gather the twelve disciples, whether there were others who were deemed unsuitable, or yet others who “tried Jesus out” and left Him behind. Church tradition describes martyrdom for all but John, though again, there is no historical path to be sure. We do feel certain these disciples largely went their separate ways to further Jesus’ work, even amongst the Gentiles.
His disciples agreed to follow Jesus, probably with some mixture of curiosity, uncertainty and a bit of conviction that they had, after some 1,800 years, “found their man.” They began with a hunger to know that God exists, that He could be influential in a world where slavery and persecution occur, that idolatry was a too-poor substitute for a viable spiritual Father, and that the Jews in particular had not been forgotten, despite being chosen by God. Jesus seemed like “the right guy,” the One sent by God in human form to render His likeness visible to we who can not so easily sight Heaven on our own. What then comes is both the beginning of their spiritual journeys as well as the confusion that will forever mark these disciples as those guys who “dropped the ball,” who “ran away at crunch time,” and whose faith frayed and withered once events during the Passion quickly out-ran their simpler sense of how God and men work. We are all told to believe that the disciples failed both Jesus and ourselves, that is how the story unfolds on what is strangely called “Good Friday.” All of their recurring doubts gelled into the need to be relieved of what no longer made enough sense, yet they could not go so far away. They had to linger to see if anything could become of Jesus’ death, or had they also been duped like so many others, false prophets and all?
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There are so many unknowables in this Jewish and Christian faith. What does God look like, and will we see Him in Heaven? How are any of us to understand the divine realm, even when we witness a miracle ourselves? Was the tomb filled with radiation, as some physicists think, when Jesus was resurrected? Another unknowable is how the disciples talked to and about Jesus amongst themselves on a daily basis. Did they have ongoing conversations about what He said and did, or was confusion the only common emotional language? We know that Jesus had to recurringly explain Himself in clarifying terms for their benefit, and that He sometimes became exasperated in having to do so. I don’t think we should presume that there was a predictable level of spiritual understanding about Jesus that any or all of these disciples had that allowed them to be certain of anything beyond the basics of His mission, and that this led to a chronic sense of inferiority and even fear at times, hence the use of “terrified” in describing their reactions to Jesus on occasion. How could Peter expect to walk on water as a mere mortal, since none of us would? Particularly in John’s Gospel, Jesus often spoke in a symbolically ambiguous manner, which confused both His disciples as well as the interrogating Pharisees. They were constantly working to make better sense of what He said and did, that the Old Testament (Tanakh) (which He presumes they had read more than once) was not enough help, and so they too-often floundered at the level of keeping up with what Jesus meant and wanted from them. They were the students who needed tutoring, but for whom the only tutor was the Master who confused them. There must have been days when one or more of the disciples wanted to quit and go home, go back to their families and lives that could more easily prosper and make sense. I do think Jesus asked too much of His disciples too often, and they retaliated on Good Friday. How could they play hooky with God’s Son?
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Since, as I write, we are again in the midst of Lent, let us blend our own questions, doubts and devotion to Jesus with that of His disciples. Jesus’ ministry apparently lasted either one year (the Synoptics) or for at least three Passovers (John’s Gospel), and it was for this length of time that the disciples walked, thought and acted in accordance with both their desire to do Jesus’ work as well as to soothe the weariness of their own preoccupations about how to render Him sensible to themselves. I don’t think they ever did so well enough, since Jesus kept pecking at their heads about the Kingdom of God, about mercy and forgiveness, about social status and the wealth of the divine in the lives of the poor and unfortunate, and, eventually, that too soon, He would have to die. What were they to do with a dead Mashiach? Are any of us “buffoonish” when we are told someone we love is going to die? As in any enterprise where things do not always run sensibly or smoothly, the disciples’ doubts festered and firmed into the beginnings of a rejection posture: why all of this time and work for seemingly nothing? The urge to bail on Jesus would become acute, like a party that suddenly goes sour. At Gethsemane, the “inner circle” of Peter, James and John (who had become “terrified” upon witnessing the spectacle of the Transfiguration), repeatedly went to sleep as do children who have heard and seen enough. Peter denied Jesus because this “lost cause” meant that he himself had wasted so much time not catching fish to feed his family. Why were there exactly 153 fish (a sort of inexplicable perfect number) on the beach at the end of John’s Gospel? Jesus in effect says that He could catch more fish in less time than spiritually wayward Peter did in the usual fashion, sarcastically so. Three times of “Do you love me?” was a sort of communal humiliation for Peter’s denial and abandonment of Jesus. Why is this scene never discussed in church? It is not something that God Himself would do, and it colors Jesus to be vindictively human.
Our witnessing a miracle provokes a particular and peculiar psychology in its wake, and the disciples experienced multiple miracles over a span of time, leaving them startled yet confirmed that Jesus must surely be no false prophet. Peter, James and John saw Jairus’ daughter raised, witnessed the Transfiguration, and yet had to abandon Jesus because Judaism did not allow for a crucified Mashiach. As the Beatles once sang, it was “All Too Much.” Jesus stretched and stretched His disciples akin to human taffy and expected them to want to stay awake for the last act because, well, they deserved a sort of happy ending for their efforts. But they couldn’t, it was all too much, being spiritually jerked around for how many months away from home, these younger men in love with their women. But they could not go home, Jesus nagged at their love for Him, their devotion to His ministry, so none of them could yet quite give up on Him, seemingly dead forever. Holy Saturday was their awful purgatory for the living followers left behind. It is not as bad as women who can not give up on their adulterous or abusive husbands, but the Passion was horrendous for these exhausted disciples nonetheless. They could only sleep at the wrong time and grieve for He who had abandoned them. In a strange twist, the disciples, along with the Pharisees and Sadducees, melded together in a sort of “circle of disbelief” around Jesus, wondering who He really was—-all of them Jews, asking What do we do with and about this guy, who walks His own path, surely Jewish but what else?
I praise these disciples—-no “buffoons” but surely brave beyond our own willingness to walk with Him day after day, not conscripted into some holy army, but rather privileged to bear witness to a Godly emptiness in the tomb, making their martyrdom necessary unto a God who had granted them the realm of the miraculous again and again, human men gifted to drink at the well of the inviolable.
13 March 2021
Every Day Easter 