On the road

John says that Jesus, tired from the journey, sat at Jacob’s well. The verse gives the sixth hour, which most readers take as about noon. The sentence is easy to pass. It is one of the clearest human lines in the book: heat, a road, a body that had to stop.

The letter to the Hebrews draws the conclusion the church has kept. He can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. The middle years are not a lecture floating above a life. They are a man covering ground.

Asked for the great commandment, he does not invent a new puzzle. He binds two old ones together: love God with the whole self, and love your neighbor as yourself. On those two, he says, hang the law and the prophets.

The Sermon on the Mount opens in the same key. The kingdom he announces is spoken first over the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the hungry for righteousness. It is teaching you could say in a field, and it is not soft.

The complaints around him are specific. He eats with tax collectors and sinners. He lets the unclean come close. When a friend dies he does not give a speech first. The shortest verse in the Gospels is enough: Jesus wept.

That is the human center of the middle years. Grief is not beneath him. Neither are the people respectable men avoided. He describes himself as a physician who came for the sick.

Near the end of the Galilean work he asks his own men a plain question. The answers in the street are flattering and wrong: John, Elijah, one of the prophets. He asks them for their own answer. Peter’s reply is the one the Gospel keeps.

He also says why he came. Not to be waited on. To serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. At a grave in Bethany he says something still larger, and then he asks Martha whether she believes it.

These are his words as the Gospels record them, not a line from a Roman report. Christ. Son of the living God. A ransom. The resurrection and the life. The middle years are teaching and mercy, and they are also this claim.