To the editor:

It is a literary curiosity that the Book that has shaped our world so profoundly is, in parts, so sparse. One might expect the biography of God-made-man to be a volume of encyclopedic detail. Instead, what we find in the Gospels is something more like a series of lightning flashes in a great darkness — illuminating everything for a split second, but leaving the surrounding landscape to our imagination.

Two moments will highlight this prairie-like beauty.

In a pressing crowd, a woman who has been ill for 12 years (a lifetime in that age) reaches out and touches the fringe of his cloak. Power goes out from him. “Who touched me?” he asks. The disciples, with a practicality I find rather endearing, think this is a foolish question. Everyone is touching him! They are in a crowd, after all. But he insists — he felt the difference. The churchmen will later tell us he is omniscient. And yet, here he seems to need to ask. The moment is profoundly human. It suggests that a specific kind of power — the power of desperate, faithful touch — requires a specific kind of recognition. He does not simply announce, “The woman with the hemorrhage is healed.” He creates a moment for the supplicant to come forward and be seen. The omniscient God, it seems, sometimes prefers a dialogue to a decree.

Then there is the agonizing prayer in the garden: Gethsemane. Here, the sparseness of the text achieves its most terrible beauty. We are given the core of the prayer, and it is a prayer of stark internal conflict: “Father, all things are possible for you. Let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not what I will, but as thou wilt.” We are not told his tone of voice. We do not know if he wept, shouted or whispered. We are told only that his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling upon the ground. The text simply presents us with the unbearable duality of the situation: the human will, with its understandable instinct for self-preservation, and the divine will, submitting to the terrible cost of redemption. The man-Jesus prays to avoid his fate. The God-Jesus aligns with the Father’s will to say amor fati to a cross.

This is the genius of the text. It does not dissect the two natures of Christ with a theologian’s scalpel. It shows you the man who is God, asking for a reprieve from the very act that will define his divinity. It shows you the God who is man, needing to ask who touched him in a crowd. It is a lesson in how little one needs to say to tell the most important story. The writers — less like authors, and more like witnesses — give us not a systematic theology, but a portrait: a few bold, essential lines that somehow capture the likeness, and leave the wonder to us.

Nandan Pai

Plattsburgh