Quarantine 
by 

Jim Crace

 

Alone But Never Lonely

Quarantine is Crace’s very appropriate term for Jesus’s forty days seclusion in the wilderness shortly after his baptism in the Jordan River. According to all of the synoptic gospels, he is ‘approved’ by God in his earthly mission at that ceremony. Forty days in the life of an individual (or forty years in the life of a people) is an important biblical poetical trope, which Crace appreciates as exactly what it is: a period of fundamental transformation in the nature of one’s being. The literary context of the forty days is important in order to understand Crace’s interpretation of the story.

Forty days as a spiritually significant period first appears in the book of Genesis. It is the period of persistent rain which wipes out the creation that has disappointed YHWH. It appears that YHWH was banking on a bit of high-speed natural selection. Noah’s family were spared his (later regretted) purge but had to undergo a double dose of purification - forty days of rain and forty days of drying out. One can only speculate about the ethical quality of human beings if the original gene pool had survived intact.

Although several of the patriarchs only marry at forty years of age, suggesting a period of maturation rather than purification, the cultural significance of forty years is established clearly by Israel’s wandering in the desert of Sinai after their escape from Egypt. During this period they are fed on the miraculously provided ‘manna,’ perhaps signifying the necessity for preparing to enter the promised land. Noah’s purification affected all of humanity; the desert wandering was an entirely Jewish affair.

While the Jewish nation was being held captive in Egypt, Moses spends forty days on the mountain of Horeb conferring with YHWH, the results of which are freedom and the tablets of the law. There may have been some spiritual purification or preparation involved but this is not reported in the biblical text. Rather Moses’s experience is purely revelatory. Legends suggest some sort of conference with the divine presence but its character is unknown. One further reference to forty days, also at the mountain of Horeb, is made regarding the time of penance by the prophet Elijah.

Finally there are three more uses of the period of forty years - the first for the time required to purify pagan lands before they can be settled by Israel; the second is the period of captivity of the Israelites by the Philistines as a punishment for disobedience; the last is as a period of punishment declared by the prophet Ezekiel on the land of Egypt.

So, as in much of biblical literature, Jesus’s sojourn in the wilderness doesn’t have an historically fixed significance. It is open to a variety of interpretations, of which Crace’s seems as informed and valid as many others. The New Testament story is clearly important and transmitted with variations through at least several of the Christ-following traditions. But it’s connotations run from radical purging, to spiritual renewal, to preparation for divine revelation, to the imposition of suffering as punishment. 

It’s safe to assume that all these possibilities were known to the early transmitters of Christian tradition, and used to establish Jesus as the new Noah, the new ‘bread of life’, the new Moses, the prophet announcing a new Israel, and the messiah who was to undergo sacrificial punishment for the sins of Israel and the rest of the world. The forty days, therefore, designating a time of transformation, is of central importance in Christianity.

The use of the term ‘quarantine’ adds a new dimension to the forty days experience. While you’re in a state of disease, you are prevented from infecting others; but you may not make it out alive yourself. Quarantine represents a kind of existential threat which Crace’s Jesus is aware of: “He'd put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it. That's why he'd come.” Whatever happened at the Jordan was enough to inspire this idealistic and potentially deadly pilgrimage, but it wasn’t enough to convince Jesus that he knew what he was doing.

Jesus shares his quarantine with six others, four volunteers like himself and a hapless couple, she heavily pregnant and he an abusive monster. This group doesn’t conform with biblical prototypes which apply either to individuals or national groups. The randomness of this small collective is noteworthy as an innovative departure by Crace. It allows a social interaction among strangers into the depths of the forty days experience, whatever that experience entails.

Each member of the quarantined party has a unique issue: a Jewish matron, possibly infertile; an elderly Jewish stonemason hoping for a miracle cancer-cure; a Bedouin shepherd, apparently mad; a handsome blond foreigner seeking holy wisdom rather than god; the couple which had been abandoned by their caravanserai, she longing for freedom, he for wealth and power; and of course Jesus, whose encounter with god was dependent in his mind on the endurance of physical punishment. For him “Triumph over hardship was their proof of holiness.”

Crace creates an interesting spiritual logic for Jesus’s presence in the wilderness. For Jesus, god is the creator and guarantor of orderliness in the universe. His choice is to believe in cosmic-order rather than pandemonium. The wilderness with its harsh climate, its absence of edible plant-life and its general inhospitableness to life is God’s work yet to be completed. He just hasn’t got to it yet. It is “the edge of god's unfinished universe.” There Jesus could observe the divine creative process in action. This would be the sign he was looking for - his participation in the new creation. He wanted his god tangible.

Jesus’s intention is to isolate himself even within the isolation ward of his companions. He, like Moses and Elijah, wants alone-time with god. But his colleagues have different ideas. None of them has any interest in this tangible divinity nonsense. All they want are improvements in their situations not any sort of Sinaitic epiphany. So they annoy him, meddle in his solitude, harass him with trivial concerns, and interrupt his planned ritual. 

In short, Crace’s Jesus is a religious snob who has no time for the worries and mundane concerns of the hoi pilloi, a type that would later be ridiculed as Pharasaic simply because they were punctilious in their observance of the law. But this is how he had been raised in a traditional Jewish household. These are the things that made him what he was - a devout servant of the Almighty who was keen to attract his favour - and what he hoped to become - a renowned preacher and interpreter of the law. Something considerably more than a village tradesman’s son.

They were a superstitious lot, Jesus forty days companions. When it suited, they had an eye for miracles and ‘angel births’ of unmarried mothers, the potency of dreams to shape reality, the demonic source of illness. He learns these things from them. But these are incidental to his real transformation, which has principally to do with his discovery that god, to the extent he exists, is present in them; that they are the source of his own re-creation; that without them his beliefs and ritual practices are useless, merely distracting self-delusions.

I think Crace’s intuition about the forty days is correct: Its power is profoundly transformative. In particular, its outcome cannot be anticipated. What is changed is an appreciation of what it means to exist as a person. The combination of isolation, physical hardship and an attitude of openness to change in the status quo produces not just change but changed expectations - about ourselves as well as about the world in general. 

It is Jesus’s acceptance of the experiences of the others who are part of his forty days experience that is the catalyst for his new life in public. He ultimately knows himself, not the wilderness, to be the object of continuing creation; and the means of that continuing creation is other people, even the bad, crazy, and troubled ones, especially the bad, crazy, and troubled ones. This conclusion and the religious life it implies is as much a surprise to him as it is to his family and acquaintances. His forty days includes all previous biblical experiences as well - from Noah to Ezekiel, from purification to penance. In this sense at least Crace’s Jesus has become the entirety of the law and the prophets.