The story of Riccardo Bacchelli’s classic novel “The Gaze of Jesus” is seen through the eyes of one man who had suffered the gaze of Jesus and had suffered its consequences. The man in question is Ithamar, who is better known to readers of Scripture as the Gerasene demoniac, from whom Christ had exorcized the Legion of devils.
He healed the sick. He blessed the meek. He called for the little children to come to him. He condemned the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites. He whipped the moneychangers from the temple. He was a loving Son and a brother to men but he was not a tame lion.
And what do we think of him? We revere and revile him. We throw palms before his feet, and we nail his hands and feet to the cross. He promises to cure us of the wickedness that possesses us and we curse him for it.
This tension, so evident in the Gospel and in every century since then, is the tautness and tightness which strains on every page of Riccardo Bacchelli’s classic novel, The Gaze of Jesus, newly translated by Anthony Esolen and published by Ignatius Press.
In turning the pages of this excruciatingly gripping book, we gaze on Jesus and allow his gaze to fall on us. Doing so is not always comfortable. Before we do so, however, we should know a little about the author of this modern masterpiece, who will be unknown to most of us.
Riccardo Bacchelli is indubitably one of the greatest Italian novelists of the twentieth century and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature no fewer than eight times. His most celebrated work is The Mill on the Po, a three-volume novel written on an epic scale, weighing in at two thousand pages, which recounts the trials of one rural family amidst the political turmoil and social upheaval of nineteenth and early twentieth century Italy.
The Gaze of Jesus is altogether lighter fare in terms of length and also in terms of the scope of the historical landscape which serves as the narrative backdrop to the story. Whereas The Mill on the Po sweeps across a century of history from Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 to the outbreak of the First World War, The Gaze of Jesus is constrained within the few short years of Jesus’ ministry and is seen through the eyes of one man who had suffered the gaze of Jesus and had suffered its consequences. The man in question is Ithamar, who is better known to readers of Scripture as the Gerasene demoniac, from whom Christ had exorcized the Legion of devils.
The novel begins moments after the miracle has been performed. Ithamar, purged of the demonic possession, emerges from the manic darkness to find himself staring into the gaze of Jesus. Astonished by his cleansing and by the miraculous healing power that had brought it about, Ithamar begs Jesus to let him become a disciple. “Take me with you,” he pleads. “Let me be with you!”
The gaze of Jesus is unmoved. “Go back home to your people,” Christ says to him, “and tell them about this great thing that the Lord God has done for you, how he has had mercy upon you.”
Bemused by this unwelcome response, Ithamar watches in stunned silence as Christ and the apostles return to their boat and sail off into the distance, leaving him to the loneliness of his thoughts and the prospect of returning home to the family he had not seen through all his years of diabolical darkness. He had been transformed in an instant from a possessed pariah into an exiled stranger. Commanded by Jesus to return to a home that is no longer home, and a family which largely resents his sudden reappearance, he begins to wonder whether Christ had merely cured him in order to curse him. Such thoughts are exacerbated by the discovery that his mother had died of a broken heart, lamenting his absence, and that the woman whom he loved had married another. He had done what Jesus had commanded. He had gone back home to his people and had discovered that he had no home and that his people were no longer his own. He was a stranger among strangers: “I see that a man can’t return from a journey like mine without having to set off on another one and dwell among strangers, an unknown among the unknown.”
There are many twists and turns in Ithamar’s journey, which takes him to the corrupt heart of Herod’s decadent court and to the political intrigues associated with it. At all times he is accompanied incessantly and unceasingly by the gaze of Jesus, which haunts him like a ghost, almost as though he had exchanged one form of spiritual possession for another.
The novel ends, inevitably perhaps, with the Passion of the Christ. Ithamar is there, of course, experiencing the curses of the mob as the healer is hounded to his death. As Christ hangs from the Cross, the story hangs in the balance. The final twist, like the turning of a knife, cuts Ithamar to the quick, piercing his broken heart and healing it.
Putting the book down upon reading its passion-filled final pages, we are aware that we have been in the presence of a great sinner whose troubled relationship with Christ reflects our own troubled relationship with him. We are also aware that we have been in the presence of Christ himself as we turned the pages. Like Ithamar, we have experienced the gaze of Jesus.
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The featured image is “The Swine Driven into the Sea” (between 1886 and 1896) by James Tissot, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.