The Israelite Heals—That's All You Need to Know

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

Otto Dix Christus 1957

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

1. God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)

2. He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)

3. God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

4. What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)

5. He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)

6. Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)

Convinced by what I said at the very end of the previous post in this series, I’ve decided I need to share passages from novels and poems, as well as theological essays and sermons. So, this selection is from Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (pp. 322-323). If you’ve not read McCarthy, or heard me talk about why I love him, you might start with this post.

All you really need to know to make sense of the exchange below is that Bobby Western, the man at the center of the mystery of this novel and its companion, Stella Maris, has come for a last visit to the psychiatric facility where, roughly a decade earlier, his sister, Alicia, a math prodigy and (wrongly?) diagnosed schizophrenic, had received care before taking her own life. Bobby is talking with Jeffrey, a long-term patient, who had been unusually close to Alicia:

Did she ever talk to you about the little friends that used to visit her? 
Sure. I asked her how come she could believe in them but she couldnt believe in Jesus. 
What did she say? 
She said that she’d never seen Jesus. 
But you have. If I remember. 
Yes. 
What did he look like? 
He doesnt look like something. What would he look like? There’s not something for him to look like. 
Then how did you know it was Jesus? 
Are you jacking with me? Do you really think that you could see Jesus and not know who the hell it was? 
Did he say anything? 
No. He didnt say anything. 
Did you ever see him again? 
No. 
But you never lost faith in him. 
No. The Israelite heals. That’s all you need to know. Let me quote Thomas Barefoot to you. His truth is not going to come back to him void. It’s going to do what he wants it to do. You might want to think about that. 
Who is Thomas Barefoot? 
A convicted murderer. Waiting to be executed by the State of Texas...

A few reflections:

1. Irrespective of what this exchange means for the characters in the story, what Jeffrey says about the recognizability of Jesus is absolutely essential. As the resurrection narratives in the Gospels make clear: Jesus cannot be recognized except as he wants to be. When he does want to be recognized, he cannot not be known. We might say that one of the essential marks of his “being there” is that he’s obviously not anyone else. He is recognizable precisely by this unlikeness.

2. It’s helpfully provocative, I think, to consider how faith is related to mental health/illness. Our assumptions are so rarely brought into question, almost never in ways that actually make good change possible, and this passage does that masterfully. Years ago, I was forced by one of my student’s question (in a theology of healing class) to consider whether Jesus, his apostles, and Israel’s prophets were healthy and “mentally stable.” It’s a question we need to take seriously and help others see why it matters.

3. “The Israelite heals. That’s all you need to know.” I can’t imagine a truer confession.

4. Placing this confession into the mouth of a psychiatric patient, who not only claims to have seen Jesus but appeals to the words of a convicted murderer as his authoritative witness, is brilliant, not only artistically but also theologically. In the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel McCarthy seems to favor, the demon-possessed are the first to recognize Jesus. Why might that be? Could it be that those who are the most desperately in need, most cut off from what we know as normal life, are the first to come to know who Jesus really is, although their knowing is of course strange if not outright unintelligible for us? If we were to take that possibility seriously, without in any way sentimentalizing or romanticizing disease, how might it change the ways we feel and think about “craziness"?