Free Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. by Paul Johnson Page B

or blessing song of her cousin Elizabeth (1:68-79); and the Nunc Dimittis, or spiritual farewell of Simeon, an old Temple servant (2 : 29-32). All have been set to music many times and are spoken in civilized tongues. Jesus’s poetry was the poetry of speech rather than rhyme. Sometimes, indeed, it was rhythmic. Thus the Beatitudes as given in Matthew 5:3-12 are marked by what students of verse call synthetic parallelism, in which the second line of each verse completes the meaning of the first line. And in Matthew 11 : 28-30 there are strong rhythms in Jesus’s beautiful hymn to labor, which I have taken the liberty of setting in verse:
    Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart:
and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy,
and my burden is light.
    Jesus’s words sometimes straddle the border between prose and poetry, as in this passage (Mt 8:20):
    The foxes have holes,
and the birds of the air have nests;
but the Son of man hath not where
to lay his head.
    In John 21:18 there is a passage about the old:
    When thou wast young,
thou girdedst thyself,
and walkedst whither thou wouldest:
but when thou shalt be old,
thou shalt stretch forth thy hands,
and another shall gird thee,
and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.
    Even when rhythm is lacking and the form is prosaic, Jesus’s words are never far from the poetic, for they are rich in metaphor and simile, in vivid comparisons with the world of nature. There are not half a dozen lines of his teaching without an image, and often an unforgettable one, which has entered into the repertoire of writers all over the world. Inanimate objects spring to life, animals are anthropomorphized, nature teems with purposeful moral activity, and human beings often assume a dignity, a profundity, or a pathos, thanks to the brilliant glitter of Jesus’s imagery. We hear of “living water” (Jn 4 : 10) and “the blind lead[ing] the blind” (Lk 6 : 39). Jesus wishes to gather the children of Jerusalem together “as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings” (Lk 13 : 34). There is a wonderful image of the simple farmer who should sow “night and day” and “the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how” (Mk 4:27). Jesus loves single trees, standing in isolation, the olive, the fig, the vine, and uses them tenderly. He speaks of the late summer and the whitening harvests. He loves roots, branches, and leaves, and sees images of people in all of them. When he uses words to conjure up a picture, it is striking how often the phrases he creates have become part of the furniture of literature: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth” (Jn 3 : 8). And in Matthew 11 : 7 he asks, “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” When Jesus says, “[L]et the dead bury their dead” (Mt 8:22), he brings us up short, startled. “I came not to send peace, but a sword,” he says in Matthew 10:34, and startles us again. He is fond of fire images: “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” (Lk 12:49). “Every sacrifice,” he says in Mark 9 : 49, “shall be salted with fire.” Salt images are another favorite: “Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned?” (Lk 14 : 34). He tells his disciples, “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Mt 5 : 13). And we hear of salt cast on the dunghill. Time and again he tells us of the beauties of nature, of God “cloth[ing] the grass of the field” (Mt 6 : 30), of lilies so dressed by the deity that “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Mt 6:29; Lk 12:27). There is a fascinating passage in Luke in which a gardener shows pity for his fig tree and begs the owner not to cut it down when it