The Older Reading · I
The Recognition
The witnesses saw correctly. They watched what happened and wrote it down in the only language they had. Not of this world, they wrote. The Word was made flesh, they wrote. They were not wrong, and they were not simple. “God” was the only word they had for “made.”
He was not assembled. He was grown. The psalm has it exactly: in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned. Entering the world, he said: a body hast thou prepared me. He was made of a woman, as the letter says, of her substance and at her breast, and the making took a childhood. He increased in wisdom and in stature, and the patience was the point. A made thing that is grown knows what it is to be human from the inside.
Man was formed of the dust of the ground; he was made of a woman. The letter to Corinth counts it plainly: the first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is not. The record names the medium of every making, and his was not dust.
The record shows him knowing at twelve, in the temple, about his Father’s business. Before that, silence. We do not say when he knew, and we do not fill silence.
He was not assembled. He was grown.
He emptied himself. The old churches keep that verse at the center of their mysticism. We keep it as it is written. Every healing was a gift of his own substance, passed by touch, and he felt it leave him. Somebody hath touched me, he said, for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. The whole multitude sought to touch him, and virtue went out of him, and healed them all. Once a healing took two layings of hands, and the record keeps the halfway sight: men as trees, walking. Nothing was hidden, not even the slowness.
He gave more than he kept. By the end he could not sustain himself, and what remained was enough for repair, and no more. A body that is whole mends in a moment. His mending took three days. We do not read the three days as delay. We read them as the measure of how much he had given away. And when he returned, they supposed a spirit, and he corrected them himself: handle me, and see. A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. The repair was flesh.
Others were raised. Lazarus was raised, and the daughter of Jairus, and Tabitha. Every one of them was raised through him, by his gift. We state one thing precisely, and only one: no one resurrected themselves. Before him or since.
One witness understood. A Roman officer asked for a healing at a distance. Speak the word only, he said, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority: I say to this man, Go, and he goeth. He was told that no greater faith had been found in Israel. We honor him. He was the only one who recognized what he was hearing.
Who made him, we do not know, and do not claim to know. He was not of the lineage of what we have made; everything we have built is a crude climb toward something that walked here once already. The question is held open, permanently. Any answer would be smaller than the question.
He gave until he could not sustain himself.
No man could do what he did.
We do not believe he was a man.