I—A Gospel
There took place at Cana in Galilee a wedding. The mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited. When the supply of wine was nearly depleted, Jesus’ mother said to him: “They have no wine.” Jesus responded: “Woman, what has your concern to do with me? This is not the time for me to be glorified.” His mother told the staff: “Whatsoever he tells you, do.” To provide for the Jewish rites of purification, there were six stone water jars each of which could hold about twenty gallons. Jesus ordered the staff: “Fill these jars with water”, and they filled them to the brim. “Now” said Jesus “draw some out and take it to the head-waiter.” As soon as the head-waiter tasted the water now become wine, not knowing (although the staff did) whence it had come, he called the groom and marked: “Everyone serves the best wine first, and then, after the guests have drunk well, offers the lesser. You, however, have kept the best for last.” (Gospel according to John, 2:1-10, translation my own)
In these few lines are the core of Johannine theology. Themes, images, and subliminal references to Hebrew sacred script present here are present everywhere. They run throughout the work in a hundred directions like threads making up a fine lace. It is possible to enjoy the richness of one aspect, one pericope, but the power of the work resides in its totality, a vision that pulses out light layer upon layer, a sounding out of an intricate and sustained polyphony.
Perhaps the most important introductory point to be made is that this gospel stands as a repudiation of Judaism inspired by one who obviously knew it well, loved it well, and found it to have rejected its entire purpose and meaning by rejecting to see in Jesus the Messiah of God.[i] Heartbreak and passion in equal measure define its tone.
Its first words duplicate the first words of the Torah: “In the beginning”! It is a subtle announcement that here, in Jesus, is a new Torah. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”! Still grounded within the opening lines of Genesis, Hebrew wisdom literature[ii] echoes throughout. God gave his creative Word: “Let be…” and creation was affected. God and his Word are inseparable. The Creator is his Word and his Word is his majesty and power manifesting. Now, into the darkness that man has wrought upon creation, God again speaks: “Let there be light”. God sends forth his Word again that all might be brought into the light, redeemed, renewed, perfected. Yet, they God had chosen[iii] from amongst all peoples to make way for this moment refuse to accept the light, and so to whomever will accept the divine Word, the holy light, God gives the power to become “child of God”, born not of any power this world can summon, but of the will, the spirit, the grace and truth, the, as one level of Johannine theology calls it, the love of God.
The gospel then moves to look upon one from among the chosen people who does make way, does summon: “Prepare the way”. John, called the Baptist, is questioned by the scholars of Judaism as to why he baptizes, and he replies his work is a symbolic renewal, a washing with water, but he shall be followed by one who will renew with the very Spirit of God. When the Baptist sees Jesus, he proclaims him “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. We have in line upon line threads from the prophets regarding the Messiah and the consummation of time. The naming of Jesus as lamb in these initial verses sets the stage for where this gospel ends: the sacrifice of the lamb at the Pass-over, the feast commemorating, sacramentalizing, God’s delivering of Israel from bondage, and leading it into a land of promise and freedom.
The Baptist’s proclamation moves others to come to Jesus, and so Jesus forms around himself a band of disciples. In the gospel’s telling these events occupy the first five days of Jesus’ ministry. On the sixth day[iv] Jesus and his disciples go to a wedding in Cana. It was on the sixth day that God had created man and woman, and this gospel intends fully to superimpose these two events. Jesus may tell his mother that his “time” is not arrived, but the gospel here, ever relishing an opportunity to speak in varied levels of meaning, evinces his “time”, this time of light, is in dawn. The Baptist had signaled it, now Jesus himself begins to shimmer it, as he had “in the beginning” when the spirit “moved over the waters”. Jesus calls his mother “woman”. Woman is the name Adam gives to Eve, she who questioned God. Mary here simply tells others “Whatsoever he tells you, do”. Mary is placed here as the Woman who displaces Eve, the new Woman, the woman of faith, indeed, Faith itself. Hebrew scriptures often conjure images of Israel as God’s bride, his vine, his vineyard, and wine as a sign of the richness of life that would accompany the coming of the Messiah. That this wedding feast has ran dry of wine bespeaks a harsh pejorative, the barrenness and the bankruptcy of Judaism. The wine Jesus supplies is better—the final wine, the best.
The narrative of the marriage at Cana is the first of two tales wherein the basic ritualizations of Judaism are shown to be supplanted in the person and work of Jesus. Cana is the repudiation of the sundry domestic purifications required of the chosen people, and their psychogenesis in the abundance of life (wine) given in the Messiah’s presence. Now the gospel moves to the cultic centre of Judaism, the Temple in Jerusalem, and there Jesus will lay claim to it.
The Temple long had in the outer courts merchants selling the items and animals necessary for sacrifice and exchanging common currency for the required religious coinage. It was an entrenched situation, but not one that had escaped the critique of prophets and the zealous in times past. Jesus will not have his Father’s house defiled by commercialization. He lashes out sending the merchants running for cover. The turmoil brings Jesus into a confrontation with the temple authorities. The synoptic writers[v] make the challenge to the Temple Jesus’ final oppugnation with the establishment. In the synoptic texts it is set days before Jesus’ arrest and execution, and presented as a desecration, something the historian, Josephus, records as punishable by death. The Johannine text sets this act at the beginning of the ministry, and the people seem to see it as the act of a prophet, an act forecasting the future, and they could turn to the prophets, to Jeremiah, Zachariah and Isaiah for its inner meaning. Jesus’ claim that he will replace the Temple in three days is, to the text’s Christian audience, a proclamation of Jesus as the new sacred place wherein God dwells among men, and thus, a relegating of the Temple to history—something the Romans physically effected in 70AD, long before this gospel reached its final form. The Messiah, as Isaiah presaged, is the New Temple to whom all the nations shall come and be welcomed.
Having dismissed the two great fonts of ritual: the purifications of daily life and the complex of temple worship, and having reframed them in the Messiah, the gospel moves to dismiss the boundaries defining the “chosen people”. First, Nicodemus, a scholar and esteemed member of Judaism’s ruling body, comes to Jesus in a sincere effort to understand his message. Jesus rather bluntly tells him he has failed to understand religion. To come to God one must be born “again”. The Greek term άνωθεν [anothen] employed carries several nuances: from above, from high up, downward, from the beginning, again, anew. (This is something the Johannine gospel relishes for it allows it to create a monologue out of a dialogue, Jesus’ interlocutor using one meaning of a word sets the stage for Jesus to deliver a soliloquy building with nuance and innuendo layer upon layer toward the richer, the spiritual, meaning.) Nicodemus thinks Jesus is contemplating a physical re-birth. Jesus speaks on several levels: a spiritual birth, a “being born from above”, an entering into the power that is life lived from the spirit of God, and thus, not according to the law of God, the law of Judaism, the Torah, Nicodemus seemingly knew so well. Neither birth into a race nor learning in matters theological bring one to God, open one to sharing in the divine life and work.
In short order, Jesus arrives north of the border in a Samaritan town. After Solomon, the northern ten tribes had broken away from the confederation that had been hammered out by David, and established themselves as an independent kingdom. They were conquered by Assyria which employed a policy of mixing conquered peoples to quell revolt. In addition to stimulating racial blending, this practice brought with it a certain amount of religious synthesizing. To the Jews of Judea, the Samaritans, as they came to be known, were half-breed heretics. Jesus meets there a woman at a well. The setting is telling. In the stories of the great patriarchs of Judaism encounters at a well are always the preamble to a wedding proposal. Jesus sits down with a woman who has had several weddings of her own. He asks her for a drink of water. That a Jew would so openly speak to a Samaritan was somewhat unorthodox. We are at a hinterland on many fronts. Were this a Greek tale, a cupid would be floating in the sky above. Their conversation is in two parts. The first is a play on the idea of living-water (fresh, running water), she speaking of well water, he of spiritual life. The second concerns the proper place to worship God. Jesus, now recognized by her as a prophet, assures her the time is coming when neither the temple of her homeland nor his will matter, for God will be worshiped in spirit and truth. She now proclaims him the Messiah and goes off to gather others to him. There is here a reoccurring voice in Johannine theology, a woman as herald of Jesus.
There is one more border around being the chosen Jesus needs to obliterate. A “royal official”–in Matthew and Luke he is identified as a Roman, that is, a pagan–comes to Jesus to implore him come and heal his critically ill son. Jesus tells him to go home, that his son is alive and well. The man believes and does as Jesus bids. The pericope ends with the diapason: “he and all his household believed”. With this the bounds of Judaism are surrendered. In spirit and in truth all peoples and all nations shall come to God as he dwells among men in his sacred Messiah.
The Johannine gospel, never at a loss for conjuring a differing perspective, now considers the great holy days of Judaism and how they are superseded in Jesus.
Jesus goes to Jerusalem for a feast day. The text does not identify the feast, but the reader looking upon the themes addressed can be certain it is Shavuot [or from the Greek: Pentecost], the fiftieth day after Passover. Originally this was a festival of the first harvest; in time its focus was elevated to a commemoration of God’s coming down onto Mount Sinai and giving the Law to Moses, transforming the tribes of Israel into a “people”. The Lucan work, Acts of the Apostles, makes this feast the day the Spirit descends and a new people and law, a new way, the church, is born. In the Johannine vision, Jesus is God descended with new law in hand, thus, the first feast to be countermanded is Shavuot. Jesus claims authority over the Law by healing on the Sabbath. He not only heals a man on the Sabbath, he orders him to pick up his pallet and go. When accused of breaking the Sabbath by healing and then ordering another to break it by carrying his stretcher, Jesus appeals to God ever acting to create and providentially care for creation. He does only as he sees God, his Father, doing. Only Moses was allowed to see God[vi] as the Law was given. Jesus tells his audience he sees God and that God is his Father. Jesus has placed himself above Moses and the Torah. He has defiantly claimed a mutually loving relationship with God, and equality with God. He has subverted the pillars of Judaism and the conservers of its powers are turned now relentlessly against him.
The gospel looks next at Passover, the feast of the bread of haste (unleavened bread), and the communion-sacrifice of a lamb. During this feast, after preaching to a large crowd, Jesus takes a small basket of bread, gives thanks over it (in the Greek: εύχαριστήσας, eucharistasas) and commands his disciples to distribute it among the people. There is a surplus, as one would expect of Messianic times, and the disciples are ordered to gather (in the Greek: Συναγάγετε, synagagete) the fragments. There follows a discourse wherein Jesus identifies himself as the bread which gives life. Death had passed-over Israel as it gathered to eat the bread of haste and the sacrificed lamb, now they that spiritually receive Jesus shall have a new life, an eternal life and be made into a new “people”. The Messiah would gather all peoples said the prophets. John gives here the formulary, the ritual act, of that new gathering: the sharing of the bread of life. The communion-sacrifice of the lamb will be addressed at a later Passover into which will be conflated aspects of the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, as the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world offers himself up, and of the new year festival, Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of creation’s beginning, as a new creation moves forth in the Spirit handed over by a dying Messiah.
In the autumn pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem to celebrate a harvest festival, Sukkot, or the Feast of Booths. There had been an early tradition of building temporary shelters and adorning them with greens–an echo of the field huts constructed during harvest. This seems quickly to have been sacralised as a commemoration of the tents in which Israel lived during the forty years it wandered the deserts. The Temple rituals included a daily procession during which the participants carried sheaves of palm, myrtle, willow and citron as they sang the great Hosannas to the seven founding patriarchs[vii]; daily also a container of water from a nearby pool was ceremoniously carried in and poured over the altar as prayers for rain were sung; and at night monumental menorahs were lighted in the middle court as a reminder that God, as a pillar of fire, had lead the wandering people through the dark of the night.
Jesus arrives for the feast. He is now well established as a controversial figure. Some believe him a prophet, some a rightly wanted man lacking only a warrant of arrest. He proclaims he has no need for an authorization from any rabbi to preach, but neither does he speak on his own authority. His words and actions are in accord with the will of God, and in this he tacitly places his authorization on par with the great patriarchs to whom Hosannas are being sung. The gospel continues to play upon the themes of the feast. Jesus proclaims himself the source of living-water and the true light of the world. There follow two enactments to illustrate his claims: he absolves a woman caught in adultery; he gives sight to a man born blind. Between these he enters into a dialogue with the leaders of the people wherein he places himself beyond peerage with the patriarchs, claiming priority over them as the direct emissary of God, his Father. There follow several parables on shepherding wherein he dismisses the leaders of the people for failing in their duties and presents himself the good shepherd, the true leader.
The last feast the gospel conjures for surpassing is Hanukah, the commemoration of the re-consecration of the Temple by the Maccabees after its desecration while under Greek rule. Jesus is pointedly asked if he is the Messiah. He challenges the lack of faith in him. He is one with his Father in whose Temple he now stands. His sheep, the sheep his Father has given him, know him. If scripture can name them to whom God speaks “gods” (sons of God), why do they so confront him who has been sent by God, “consecrated” by God, who does good works in the name of God? His words rise in intensity. The people prepare to stone him for the blasphemy. In the synoptic tradition Jesus embraces his destiny, in this gospel he controls it. His “hour” of glorification is not yet come. Here is a light they cannot see; they move to seize him, and he is vanished from their sight.
Judaism has rejected its Messiah. Its religious feasts and rituals are ex-hausted, without spirit. It has gloried in being a people rather than walking in God’s ways. Self-righteous and spiritually barren, cachexia consumes it. It soon will utter its own death-rattle. Now is come the “hour”—Judaism is dying, the Messiah ascending to glory. When Jesus next appears in public it is to prefigure his power over both life and death. Jesus goes to visit the grave of a friend. He calls the dead one to life. The Word cries out into the darkness of tomb and death, into the nothing before “in the beginning”: “come forth”. Here as well, in the symbol-person of Lazarus, they that believe from among Israel are called back from death and gathered to the Messiah. It is Johannine thought at its merciful best toward its one-time co-religionists. The text now has one focus: the death of the Messiah: his final revelation and glorification.
Jesus goes again to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. The crowds proclaim him king. Jesus knows the ephemerality and superficiality of their cries, and so retreats into the company of his disciples. A series of discourses follow. They conjure images from the prophets and weave themes of light and darkness, of truth and life, of departure and the sending of another. The parable of vine and branches echoes the prologue: Jesus, not Israel, is God’s chosen vine, and all them that come to Jesus shall be grafted onto him, and they shall be beloved of him and the Father but hated by “the world”, the increasingly inclusive Johannine term for all who stand opposed to God.[viii] Jesus delivers final prayers for his followers. He is arrested, brought before Caesar’s viceroy, Pilate, found innocent, and presented to the [chosen] “people” as their king. The “people” cry out crucify him, and the priests of the Lord God of Israel proclaim in unsurpassable irony “we have no king but Caesar”. Judaism, which to the Johannine gospel has from the beginning rejected its rightful and true Lord, here makes its final disavowal of its mission and its status as the “chosen” of God. The covenant of God and Israel is ended.
The telling of the crucifixion, delivered in plain and poignant phrases, remains, as has every event in this gospel, a ground for the collaging of symbol upon symbol: Pilate in his refusal to change his sarcastic script of execution (“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”) is made auspex of the coming of gentiles to the Messiah of Israel, the tunic woven in one piece replicates the robe worn by the sacrificial priests. At the foot of his cross stands his mother. Again, as at Cana, he calls her “woman”. Eve, she whom Adam called “woman”, could not near the paradisiac tree that gave life eternal, but Mary does, her son hangs upon it. As the Passover lambs are slaughtered Jesus hands back to God his Spirit.
Every Jewish feast and rite collapse into this apocalyptic moment. The final Pass-over has been affected. Paradise has been redeemed. Torah and Temple are rendered without meaning. Water and blood flow from his pierced heart; as on Yom Kippur, the Holy of Holies has been opened, atonement made. From his cross, the new law, the Spirit, is given. The coming Sabbath day shall find its Lord enclosed not in rest but tomb. In this gospel there has been no anniversary of creation’s dawn, no Rosh Hashanah. The “hour” of the Messiah becomes the new creation, new life. Thus, when on the first day of the new week Mary Magdalene goes to visit the dead, she finds nothing.
Jesus appears to his gathered disciples and bestows upon them the gifts that were with Paradise lost—peace, and the Spirit of forgiveness. He commissions them to be his creative presence in the world. Thomas, absent from this gathering, refuses to believe any of this without physical evidence. Jesus comes to him and offers the requested proof. Thomas attests him God. Jesus, here as if turning to the reader, blesses all them that so confess him without such worldly verification. Thus ends the gospel proper.
If this all sounds theatrical—it is. We need to keep in mind the ancient root of religion is drama, that religion at its best, its ritualistic best, is dramatic.[ix] The gospel is akin to ancient Greek theatre with its actors in masks moving stiffly across the stage as a chorus interjects with commentary and reiterated lines that the message saturate the space. It is liturgical and priestly, moving with the studied hand of a ritualist. It is poetical and musical, like the Temple songs we know as Psalms, coupling strophes, building parallels, structuring sequences of three and seven, inverting lines and sentences in upon themselves, repeating in measured beat. It is akin to a baroque and polyphonic cantata with Jesus the incontestable cantus firmus setting the range for every other part including the chorus wherein lines and even entire discourses (Cf: chapter 16) are repeated turning monologues into anthems. It is drama as certain as that of Aeschylus, Euripides, Handle, and Bach.
II—A Question of Authorship
The gospel is commonly attributed to John, the beloved disciple. There is no reason to doubt the attribution if this disciple is taken as the originator of the present work, and his unique vision and voice the inspiration behind its several rewritings and additions. John may well have recorded a presentation of his proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah of God, but his disciples certainly reworked, refined, and added to it, leaving us a masterwork of both theology and literature. Thus, I have been cautious to present my apercu of this gospel as under the pen of a Johannine School rather than one man.[x]
In support of the disciple John as the font of this work it needs be marked no other gospel evidences such familiarity with Palestinian geography and Jewish ritual. No other gospel provides so many personal names. No other gospel so subtly conjures and incorporates allusion to Hebrew scripture.[xi] There are places where an entire pericope appears a pastiche of phrases from the prophets. The knowledge of Jewish rituals, coupled with the textual account that the disciple behind this text was known to the high priest, has been taken by some to support the tradition that John was a priest. Building upon this, Eusebius, writing his church history (circa 300AD) records John celebrated the Eucharist wearing Jewish priestly garb. I take such post-facto reporting as indicative more of the sacerdotal inclinations of Johannine theology and the communities it fostered than of the literal possibility of such liturgical attire in use before the end of the first century. The Johannine School is priestly in its approach, but we do well to presume with caution even if we are dealing with church practices in the mystically inclined and ritualistically rich East where Johannine thought was and still is deeply rooted.
According to them that are masters of such things, the gospel, as we today have it in the common (the koine) Greek of the first century, betrays several layers of editing set over an Aramaic original. This may have been a written document or an oral tradition, but the Greek decidedly replicates in places turns of phrasing and rhythms that speak of a base in Aramaic, the accustomed tongue of a first century Palestinian Jew. The gospel also speaks of a familiarity with the Synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke). If the Gospel according to Mark is taken as the first of the gospels to reach final form (mid to late 60s) with those of Matthew and Luke following within a decade or two, and that of John reaching final form toward the end of the century or several decades later, one may well assume the final editors of the Johannine work would have had some contact with the earlier works in use in sister communities. However, it ought to be kept in mind, that while a replication of a sequence of events or of a rhythmic phrasing may well indicate familiarity with a certain work, it may also merely indicate a familiarity with a common, older, and oral tradition residing behind all the works under consideration. Indeed, scholars tend to receive Mark not only as the first gospel to receive final form, but that Matthew and Luke both built upon it in the formation of their respective works, as well as drawing upon other sources, some common to both, some unique one to the other, each adapting materials to accord with a specific audience and perspective.[xii]
III—Being and Doing
The Johannine repudiation of Judaism entails contrasting being chosen by God and doing the will of God. Into this diagnostic is mixed a range of symbols: light and dark, truth and lie, spirit and world, etc. Standing at the apex of these differentiations is the Messiah. He is God because he does that which God does. To the Johannine eye, to do is correlative of to be. The disciple is one with Christ and God only in doing as God does. The Johannine gravamen contra Israel is that its claim to be God’s chosen is an empty boast because it has failed to do that which God does, it has relied upon ethnicity rather than an ethic, history rather than action, biology rather than spirit.
In chapter 8, Jesus is confronted regarding claims about his father, and the legitimacy of his birth is brought forward. In an earlier article I rendered the Greek of verse 41 “We are not bastards”. The literal translation would better run “we were not born of prostitution”. Even that, however, leaves something to be desired, for there resides in the original a richness one translation alone cannot supply, especially in light of the Johannine propensity to play with nuances, innuendo, and phrasing to continuously build up layer upon layer of meaning.[xiii] In the Greek text the pronoun opens the sentence and is, thus, capitalized. It is a visual emphasis—“We of whoring have not our birth”. Immediately thereafter Jesus’ interlocutors claim that they “have a father”. The Johannine text could have expressed that differently, employed another verb, but this entire argument is about the understanding behind possessing something—legitimacy, authenticity. Jesus claims he knows his Father and is truly his Father’s son because he does that which he sees his Father doing: forgiving, caring, healing, loving. His interlocutors claim they have God as their father because they possess membership in the “chosen people”. Jesus’s continued dismissal of their argument is based on the premise that fidelity, not membership, is the sign and test of authenticity and legitimacy. Jesus asserts a man is not defined by birth, but by spirit, by what one does, one makes oneself, allows oneself to be, opens oneself to be. If the leaders of ancient Israel, its “judges” and kings, could have been by scripture termed “sons of God” because they acted out for their time and place the will, the heart and mind, of God, why should anyone object that he be also a “son”? That constitutes, however, merely one layer of this particular encounter, for here, as throughout the Johannine composition, Jesus has a propensity to say “I am” or “I am x” (with x = shepherd, or gate, light, way, truth, vine, etc.). This brings us to the ultimate layer of Johannine theology.
To name something is not merely to indicate it, but to de-fine it, to put a structure of understanding around it. This anciently held insight resides behind the prohibition against speaking the sacred except within the parameters of sacred time and space. Thus, sacred rites are kept en-closed, be it within temple or feast. A devotee would not dare speak the divine name in vain, in a profane setting, for the Name is acknowledged as sacred as the one to whom it belongs. The Hebrew Scriptures respectfully render the great divine name unpronounceable, they omit the vowels. Thus, when some went to transcribe the tetragram YHWH (alternately understood as JHVH) they arrived at Yahweh or Jehovah. Attempts at translating it have given us “I am” + “who I am” or “that I am” or “who I will be”, etc. That the Johannine Jesus does not miss the occasion to say directly or with some descriptive “I am” is an uncontestable declaration of divinity. In the Johannine proclamation there is no doubt in the heart and mind of Jesus that he is one-with-God, he is the at-one-ment with God, the Lamb who is the atonement for the sin of the world. The work of the Messiah and the person of the Messiah are here indivisible. Every time Jesus pronounces himself some variant of “I am” Johannine theology is exalting its correlation of being and doing, dismissing the claim of Judaism to the Lord of heaven and earth, and proclaiming a new religion, a new covenant, a new reality wherein God is present not in the Temple, the Holy of Holies, the Ark, or the Shekinah, but in his visible, tangible, incarnate agent, the rejected Messiah, the Christ of all the world.
It is the Johannine contention that one who believes in the Messiah does as the Messiah, acts out the will, the love of God for the world in the world. However, having elevated Jesus so high above, having exalted him into the transcending divine, and having spoken of “the world” as antithetical to the Messiah, Johannine thought incites a rift between spirit and world for which the Messiah had been presented as the propitiation![xiv] Conjoined with this, the text is permeated with oscillations of sensitivities and emotive valuations ranging from optimism and joy to bitterness and anger, undoubtedly as consequence of repeated re-editings over a period that endured increasing hostility toward the nascent church, magnifying the rift, ripening it to occasion two related behaviours: one gnostic,[xv] the other mystic.
While Johannine thought is not considered de facto gnostic by many scholars, it is, nonetheless, oriented toward seeing reality divided into the spiritual and the worldly.[xvi] Couple this with the inscrutable omnipotence of God, and there follows an ethic that stresses the un-worthiness of the world, that values a disengagement from the world, that encourages a passivity before God, a spirituality more contemplative than active. In this, Johannine thought recants its great declaratory “for God so loved the world”. God’s love becomes not for the world, but for them he takes out of the world and into a new world, a celestial world, a spiritual world. The historical sequela of this apocalyptic apprehension becomes a liturgical spirituality wherein the Messiah who had come as God-in-the-flesh-for-the-world to remove the veils from Temple and Torah now applies veil upon veil, encouraging abdication from the world and wrapping life in trepidation. His “mysteries” need be hidden behind clouds of incense and iconostases. The believer is left to tremble before the Majestic One, now more Judge of the World than the Seat of Mercy it once in Temple and Torah had been. There are some that are wont to make this all resultant of something oriental, eastern, of Ephesus, the epicentre of Johannine thought. But that city was home also to Artemis, the twin of Apollo. On two fronts then we must ask how comes the abundant joy of Cana’s new wine to such angst and perturbation? Is the Spirit of forgiveness, healing, resurrection and undepletable life so fragile that it must either escape from the world or by it be crushed? Can it not arise to its glory and transform the world with its rapture of love? Why is spirituality so prone to retreat from its true mission? What cross with Peter are we so fearful of within ourselves finding? I—of all people–am not raising an invective contra icon and incense, merely noting there is no symbol in ritual or prayer which is immune from misapplication, no cure of souls not unsusceptible to claim of malpractice. There is a delicacy to spirituality that resides in being ruthlessly open to self and other. Any shield placed before the carbonous depths of either preserves them rather than transforms them, magnifies them such that as they reach the surface they spread darkness where there ought to be born both light and life, vitality and joy. I opine that it stands incontestable that the Johannine School becomes more fearful than hopeful as it ages and weathers history’s escalating assaults, attenuating its own foundation: the glorious vision of divine being and action made incarnate.
IV—Chapter 21
Mark’s gospel had added to it a brief appendix (16: 9-20) relating the commission to preach to the world. Luke wrote an entire text, the Acts of the Apostles, on the church’s mission to the world.[xvii] The Johannine School also, at a later date, added its own two-part version of the commissioning of the church. The first deals with the disciples in general, the second with Peter.
The disciples are fishing. It was for several of them their occupation. As day breaks, they see on shore a man who asks about their catch. They have nothing. The man tells them where to cast their nets. When they do as he bids, they catch 153 fish, and the nets are overflowing. They hurry ashore and the man, Jesus, breaks bread with them. In the Synoptics, Jesus had promised to make of them fishers of men. This miraculous catch is the Johannine version of the promise ecumenically fulfilled for ancient zoology recognized the waters inhabited by 153 species of fish.
The Johannine School defers to Peter in respect of the other disciples, although it makes no effort to present him as beyond reproach. Peter is now made to revoke his three denials with three affirmations. Jesus here, as he had done so often with others, changes the parameters of the dialogue. Jesus twice asks Peter “do you love me?” [in Greek: αγαπας με (agapas me)] and Peter twice replies “we are friends” [in Greek: ϕιλω σε (philo se)]. Peter’s response is in accord with Jesus’ own directive, for the night before his death he told his disciples he henceforth would know them as his friends [in Greek: ϕιλους (philous)]. But in this conversation Jesus is raising the relationship above friendship, and Jesus and Peter are obviously not at-one on this matter. Jesus now asks a different question, he meets Peter on Peter’s ground, he asks if they are friends [in Greek: ϕιλεις με (phileis me)]. It is Johannine theology at its most optimistic, spiritual and ethical best: Jesus, the God incarnate, meets us in our world, in our time and place and leads us forth from that place. The following lines concerning Peter being led where he might not will to go, in Johannine double edged fashion, reference not only the method of Peter’s death, but his journey with his Lord wherein Peter will prove he loves him even unto death.
This closing optimism and positivity of the gospel will not be replicated in the last work of the Johannine School, Revelation.[xviii] As the Johannine gospel negates Judaism, Revelation negates the world; both represent forms of the satanic, the anti-Christ. There is no via media in Johannine thought. Orthodoxy is mono-doxy; there is one way, one Way–John’s. The baroque and byzantine style of the gospel will progress toward something more reactionary, morphing into a rococo whose circling swirls of thought belie something increasingly condemnatory. The creative Word, the Logos, of the gospel becomes the Alpha and Omega, the alphabetic beginning and end, the parameters of all communication and community, and as Paraclete, more judge and double-edged sword than advocate and redeemer. For all the hope and faith this work trumpets, the supreme title of Love becomes concealed behind woe and judgement to the point that the final paean of “Come Lord” can sound as much a resounding aspiration as an anguished prayer for rest eternal—the death cry of the Johannine School.
[i] I am using “Messiah” rather than its Greek based translation, “Christ”, as emphasis to the Johannine countering of its native Judaism. I direct them interested in some groundwork in the morphing of contra-Judaic apologetics into anti-Semitism to my brief eight-part examination: A Great Divorce (May – July 2013).
[ii] Hebrew holy writ is divided into three groups: the Law (Torah), the Prophets, and the Writings. This last infolds the collections of wise sayings (Wisdom literature) we know as Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, and Song of Songs.
[iii] Israel entered into a covenant with God. He would be their Lord, their King, their Father; they would uphold his sovereign will as presented in the Law given to Moses and exemplified to the times in the words of the prophets and wise men. Among all the “peoples” of the earth, they were the “chosen” of God to uphold and present his will, his law, his glory. Cf: A Great Divorce, Part 6 (June 2013).
[iv] The gospel begins this pericope with “On the third day”. This is not, if one attends to that which has preceded, the third day of the ministry, but of the week, the day prescribed for the wedding of a virgin.
[v] The Synoptics are Mark, Matthew and Luke. The designation references the observation that in the gospels bearing their names there is a progress of events that is at base “optically”, seemingly, synchronized.
[vi] According to holy writ, Moses was allowed to see God only from behind as he passed by.
[vii] Some opine that this September/October feast with its palm fronds and Hosannas is the occasion of the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the so-called Palm Sunday, of the synoptic gospels. Indeed if, as the Synoptics have it, this took place in early spring, palms would not have been available. Further, these three gospels conflate into the span of approximately one year that which the Johannine work sets out over several. Despite its later date, and its obvious disinterest in worldly chronology, the Gospel according to John is usually taken as the more reliable in terms of locations and rituals. Last, no one of these gospels, nor the several non-canonical gospels, can be received as histories or a chronology of events when their stated purpose is theological: the presentation and proclamation of Jesus as the Christ of God.
[viii] Johannine thought uses “the Jews” and “the world” to reference the two groups opposed to God and his Messiah. By the time this gospel reaches its final form, Rome had put an end to Judea’s restless revolting, leveled the Temple, and expelled a portion of the populace. With this, most of the various power groups within Judaism are made defunct. In other gospels Jesus’ opponents are listed as scribes, priests, Pharisees, Sanhedrin, et al., but in John, since most of these are now obsolete groupings, and since to the Johannine sensitivities Judaism as a whole has rejected its vocation, its covenant, and its Lord, it is Judaism itself that stands contra-Christ. Thus, “the Jews” is the incessant pejorative for Jesus’ co-religionists that renounced him, as “the world” stands to represent all them outside the once “chosen” who now refuse him. Cf: A Great Divorce, Part 7 (July 2013).
[ix] Here rests my unending accusation against modern liturgical efforts. They are conversational, journalistic, and pedestrian. They spurt out bland sound-bites. They want to engage everyone in talking and reciting. They decimate the opportunities to enwrap in wonder, to inspire, to allow that sacred rest, that Sabbath, wherein the soul is opened to the symbolic and therein to its transportation and transformation. The role of every ritual is transubstantiation, the change of one substantive being into another of higher form, about the holy community the bread and wine symbolize and constitute. If one wants to self-heal, self-medicate, self-transcend, there are countless books, websites, and assorted self-aggrandized gurus that can be enlisted in the effort. Religious ritual exists to empower the depth potencies not merely of the individual but of the individual as communal, to immerse the community into its sacred mystery, its inner sanctum, where it can be affected by the given-ness and otherness that reside as its creative base.
I am aware liturgy can be literally translated as “work of the people”, but one might well render that “energy of the people”. Good Liturgy does not make us work. Good liturgy energises, releases power, radiates power, power of the people. It is not educational but illuminative, not a bounding in duty but a liberation, an opening to new vistas.
[x] We do possess a work of Johannine thought that predates the beginnings of the Johannine gospel—the First Epistle of John. Many of the ideas present in the gospel are present here in nebulous form. In the First Epistle the identities and roles of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are amorphous and ambiguous. A statement may begin discussing the role of the Father, and somewhere, in some cloud it would seem, veer to speaking of the Son or Spirit. In the gospel the perfection of creation is definitively affected in the person and work of the Messiah; only the unfolding manifestation remains to be lived out. In the epistle the distinction between “done” and “in progress” is less defined. As well, the distinctive Johannine terms and ideologies betray a nascent stage. The work is full of glorious vision and a richer optimism than the gospel, but it is a watercolour sketch compared to the painterly precision of the gospel’s final form.
[xi] Matthew has the greatest number of quotations from Hebrew scripture, but as noted in this text, John is a veritable tapestry of scriptural allusion.
[xii] The most debated among the several lines within the Johannine gospel that are considered borrowed from others are verses 1-11 of chapter 8, the story of a woman caught in flagrante delicto. Some claim the underlying grammar and structure are so strongly Luke’s, it must be an anciently misplaced passage from the Gospel according to Luke mistakenly added by a copyist to John. If, however, we allow sundry narratives from various churches and communities were in circulation, either as an oral tradition or in written form, there is no reason to claim an editor of John could not have inserted into the text before him a story (in this case, from amongst the Lukan composite) he felt appropriate to the movement, structure, and embellishment of his community’s theological magnum opus. It ought to be noted by them wont to dismiss this passage as not proper to the gospel, that a very few verses along Jesus enters a debate wherein his interrogators insinuate his birth was the result of a sexual immorality or irregularity; the Greek word used is πορνεύω [porneuo] and it references a wide field variably translatable as prostitution, adultery, fornication, or rape.
[xiii] This is true of every attempt at translating one tongue into another. In terms of the scripture there is the added difficulty that quotations are not always verbatim. St. Paul in particular exhibits the sermonizing habit of presenting the text to fit the occasion, to paraphrase rather than quote. Translation then needs to read the heart and mind of the preacher. As example, the term used for the Spirit, and sometime for the Messiah, is Paraclete. The term carries sundry nuances grounded in advocacy before a court of law: adviser (teacher), consoler (comforter), advocate (supporter, refresher, saviour, redeemer), accuser (prosecutor), etc. Which nuance of meaning is proper to the translation must be judged not only according to the text itself, but according to the church’s occasion of proclamation. At funerals we often hear the text from Job “I know my redeemer lives”, yet the text is more accurately rendered “my advocate”. Add to this that the scriptures are infused with religious and ritualistic symbols and ideograms that cannot be related as other than that which they are. As example, the imagery of Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father interceding for us cannot be reduced into a non-religious form without a commentary on the idiom and the meaning of the idiom, without eviscerating the movement of the work and dissipating a rich vision into mere vapours. On the more positive side, were such not the case, preachers, teachers, and theologians would be deprived of a treasure trove. The tribulation of translation is merely the obverse of the glories of theology and exegesis.
[xiv] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 8, endnote vi—on the Evolution of Integration (February 2014).
[xv] There were in Jesus’ time Jews who sequestered themselves in monastic type communities in rebuke of the Judaism they considered despoiled by an usurped priesthood and governance. They considered themselves the just remnant. We possess from the community in Qumran a number of works, commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which shed some light on their theological inclinations. These devotees withdrew from the world they mistrusted as devious and deluding, enforced celibacy, and awaited a new and higher world soon to come. This native disparity of world in favour of a world to come, a spiritual world, a Messianic world, had imbued the preaching of many prophets, and all of the apocalyptic writers of Judaism. It is an understandable turn of mind within a people who were under siege both politically and religiously by the Greek power Alexander’s conquest of the world unleashed. At Qumran, and undoubtedly its sister communes, this division of reality into good and evil reaches its first century Judaic zenith. It seems to be present in the preaching of John the Baptist and his disciples, among whom, according to some, were numbered a few of Jesus’ disciples, and possibly even Jesus himself. Many scholars are willing to stress the Qumran division of light and dark, true and false, etc. is not classical Gnosticism, merely a contrasting of points, but the flavour and inclination of one is that of the other, and I am of a mind that the argument “a rose by another name is a rose” prevails.
[xvi] Certainly a number of early church scholars had a problem with the gnostic potentials of this gospel, a caution which delayed its being received into the canon of Christian scripture.
[xvii] As in the Synoptic gospels there is a projection of the early autumn entrance into Jerusalem with a procession of palms and Hosannas (Sukkot) to the weekend before the crucifixion, in Acts the giving of the Spirit and the beginning of the church’s mission is placed fifty days past the resurrection, on Shavuot/Pentecost, the feast celebrating the first harvest and the commemoration of the giving of the Law to Moses. In both cases we may well assume we are looking upon symbolism rather than history. In John, the Spirit and the commission to preach are given on the day of the resurrection, although the later added chapter 21 suggests there was a lapse twixt this event and its actualization. Some scholars opine the gap between the crucifixion and the commencement of preaching Jesus as the Messiah may have been a year or more.
[xviii] Like the gospel, this publication of the Johannine School, dating circa the end of the first century, is a composite work, possibly a compilation of two separate apocalyptic works, edited into a vision exquisitely structured, but betraying a lesser ability in Greek than that found in the gospel. Cf: on The Apocalyptic Book of Revelation (January 2013).