What follows is my latest attempt at an Ignatian contemplation, which the Jesuit author James Martin defines as “using your imagination to place yourself in a scene from Scripture, or with Jesus.” In this one I imagine myself in an F2F conversation today with Jesus. Certain culinary details (among others) are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, people or restaurants is purely coincidental.
***
I’ve been reading a lot of historical Jesus research lately, and I was a little disappointed to learn no less an authority than theologian John P. Meier of Notre Dame didn’t think Jesus was born in Bethlehem. He doesn’t rule it out, but in A Marginal Jew, arguably today’s most authoritative study, he concludes Jesus was born “perhaps in Bethlehem of Judea but more likely in Nazareth of Galilee — at any rate, in a small town somewhere within the confines of Herod’s kingdom” (229). I can’t say I’m surprised, since that’s the scholarly consensus, but I was kinda disappointed.
I liked Bethlehem when I visited Israel and the occupied territories, and I was blown away by the Church of the Nativity. It dates back to 330 CE or thereabouts, and according to Wikipedia (my personal summa theologica), it contains “the oldest site continuously used as a place of worship in Christianity.” It was noisy, crowded, gaudy and bewildering when we visited, but I thought there was something magical, even holy about the place.
So I set Meier’s book down and thought, oh no, why not Bethlehem? Have all those pilgrims been wrong the last 1,700 years? Can someone help me straighten this out?
A couple of minutes later, I checked my email. And there was a message from jesus@3in1.org.
Did he mean Jesús? A Latino? I didn’t recognize the name and address. But the subject line said “Re: Church of Nativity.” That’s odd, I thought. I didn’t even Google it — their algorithms must be on steroids today! But here it was in my inbox, and it got my curiosity up. So I opened it. Sure enough, it said, “I understand you’ve been inquiring about the Church of the Nativity. I may be able to help you out. Why don’t we meet for lunch Monday after next at Taste of Mumbai?”
Nice restaurant, one of my favorites. Algorithms at work again. But I checked my calendar, and Monday after next was Dec. 25. OK by me, I emailed back, but that’s Christmas. Do you have the right date?
Ping. A minute or two later, I get an email back from the Latino guy. “That’s right. Dec. 25 is a good day for me. I’ll be resting up after the Christmas eve services. Besides, the Indian restaurants are open, and they lay on an extra nice noon buffet for Diwali and Christmas.”
***
Came Christmas day, I was running late and arrived at Taste of Mumbai a few minutes past noon. It’s a typical Indian restaurant, a former fast-food burger joint redecorated with prints of the Taj Mahal and a couple of landscapes I don’t recognize on the walls. About half the tables filled, mostly with young Indian families. I tell the manager, who doubles as cashier and wait staff, I’m meeting a party, and she points out a guy in one the booths along the wall, under a picture of the Red Fort in Delhi.
Must be Jesús, I’m thinking — looks kind of Hispanic, but he could just as well be Middle Eastern. Dark complexion, nappy hair, neatly trimmed beard. In fact, he looks for all the world like that hypothetical computer model of Jesus’ face a first-century Palestinian peasant a forensic anthropologist developed for Popular Mechanics.
You don’t look like I expected, I tell him.
“Well, when you’re omniscient, ubiquitous and omnipresent, you can pop up just about anywhere,” says Jesus. “It depends on the believer’s image of you. A lot of people see me in the face of their neighbor, especially their neighbor in need.”
We shake hands and introduce ourselves. He hands me his business card. It identifies him as Jesus Christ, of God & Son Inc., 3in1.org, with a motto: “Our Work, Your Hands,” and it lists addresses in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and New York.
We chit-chat for a minute or two, getting to know each other a little, and get up and go to the steam table. There I load up on chicken biryani, naan bread and vegetable korma. After we eat lunch, Jesus asks me about the nativity stories and the church in Bethlehem.
I reply that I’d like for the stories to be true, but the historical evidence weighs against them. Caesar Augustus and Alexander the Great claimed virgin births, along with about half the great rulers in antiquity; no Roman census would have required Galileans like Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem; yada yada yada.
All we have to go on, I say, is stories. The conversation continued:
JESUS. What’s wrong with stories? I always liked a good story when I was preaching. A sower went out to sow. There was a man who had two sons. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Who was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? Go and do likewise. They make you think.
ME. Well, yes. But … are they historically accurate? Are they true?
JESUS. Hmm, that reminds me of a story. There’s a prince in Denmark who learns his father was murdered. He doesn’t know what to do, and he agonizes about it. When he makes up his mind, he decides he has to avenge his father. But there’s a twist — the guy who murdered his father is now the king, and he married Hamlet’s mother. But the prince goes ahead with his revenge, and by the end of the story, the prince, his fiance and her father, his best friend, his mother and the new king are dead. Is it true?
ME. That sounds like Hamlet. It’s fiction. It’s a story.
JESUS. Of course it is. But is it true? Is there any truth in it?
ME. Well … you’ve got me there. Of course it’s true. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t be making Hamlet movies 400 years later and I wouldn’t have read it in high school junior English.
JESUS. Here’s another story. Two of Hamlet’s college buddies come to the castle to cheer him. They’re totally clueless, and they stand around and chat about existentialist philosophy. Think Waiting for Godot with swords and daggers. They wind up dead, too, and their deaths are absurd. True?
ME (chuckling). Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I didn’t see the movie, but I read the play in grad school. I loved it.
JESUS. Here’s another one. True or false? In the beginning, all the world was water and the animals were camped out in the sky world. They sent the water beetle down, and he scooped up mud to build an island. Then when the mud was still soft, the animals sent out the buzzard. He was tired when he flew over the mountains in what is now North Carolina, and his wings flapped down into the mud. Where they hit the mud became valleys, and in between were mountains. Finally, people came into the world and moved into the Carolina hill country. True or false?
ME. Depends on who’s talking, I’d say. It was certainly true to the Cherokee people.
JESUS: Absolutely. Here’s another one. When First Man and First Woman were created, they fell to arguing. First Woman got mad and stormed off into the woods. First Man got worried and went after her, but she was going too fast. So the sun took pity on him and placed a strawberry patch in her path. She stopped and ate one. She’d never tasted anything so good. She ate another, and felt her anger fading away. All of a sudden she missed her husband, and thought it would be really cool to share them. So she gathered all the strawberries she could carry and started back to their lodge. She met First Man on the way, they shared some of the berries and headed home hand-in-hand. True or false?
ME. Y’know, sometimes a good story can tell you more than a series of sociological surveys on communication in marriage. And I think that’s one of those stories.
JESUS. Tell me more.
ME. Well, it reminds me of another story. Well, not actually a story. Several years after I left the Quad-Cities, Debi and I would go to the Mississippi Valley Writers Conference in Rock Island. There I took a fiction writing workshop from a guy named Max Allan Collins. Max was a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he wrote mostly mystery novels. Did the continuity for the Dick Tracy comic strip, too. He didn’t take himself too seriously, and he was like a breath of fresh air after getting a PhD in English. Anyway, he once said if you’re writing fiction, you make a bargain with your reader. And it goes like this — I’m gonna tell you something that’s not true, and if you agree to believe it, it’s going to show you a greater truth.
JESUS: I like that. Let me tell you another story. And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. This census took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. So all went to be taxed, each to his own city. […] You get the drift?
***
I don’t think there’s anything I can add to that.
Links
Max Allan Collins, website http://www.maxallancollins.com/max/.
Grace Lapointe, “8 of the Best Hamlet Movie Adaptations, Ranked,” Book Riot, July 18, 2022 https://bookriot.com/best-hamlet-movie-adaptations/.
Luke 2:1-20 [Authorized (King James) Version (AKJV)], Bible Gateway.
James Martin, “An introduction to Ignatian contemplation,” interview by Sean Salai, America, Sept. 21, 2006 https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/easing-contemplation.
__________, “How two scholars introduced me to the ‘historical Jesus’—and sent me on a lifelong quest to know more,” America, Oct. 21, 2022 https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2022/10/21/historical-jesus-martin-meier-nolan-243993.
James Mooney, “The Cherokee’s World Origin Story,” 1900, rpt. Anchor, NC Digital History, North Carolina State Library, Raleigh https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/cherokees-world-origin-storyhttps://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/cherokees-world-origin-story.
Henri Neuendorf, “Medical Artist Reveals What Jesus Christ Looked Like Using Forensic Science,” Artnet, Dec. 16, 2015 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jesus-face-forensic-anthropology-art-392823.
Dave Tabler, “How the strawberry came to the Cherokee people,” Appalachian History.net, May 4, 2016 https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2016/05/how-strawberry-came-to-cherokee-people.html.
Wikipedia articles on Census of Quirinius, Church of the Nativity, Diwali, Marburg Colloquy, Miraculous births, Omnipresence, Omnisience, Red Fort and Summa Theologica.
[Uplinked Dec. 7, 2023]
Ordinary Time 
These contemplations are fun.
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