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Historicity and Images in John's
Gospel
From Josef Ratzinger (Benedict XVI),
Jesus of Nazareth, chapter 8 (pp.218-286) (sub-headings and links added by PR)
Thus
far, in our attempt to listen to Jesus and thereby to get to know him,
we have limited ourselves for the most part to the witness of the Synoptic
Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), while only occasionally glancing
at John. It is therefore time to turn our attention to the image of
Jesus presented by the Fourth Evangelist, an image that in many respects
seems quite different from that of the other Gospels.
Listening to the Synoptics, we have
realized that the mystery of Jesus' oneness with the Father is ever-present
and determines everything, even though it remains hidden beneath his
humanity. On one hand, it was perceived by his sharp-eyed opponents.
On the other hand, the disciples, who experienced Jesus at prayer and
were privileged to know him intimately from the inside, were beginning—step
by step, at key moments with great immediacy, and despite all their
misunderstandings—to recognize this absolutely new reality. In John,
Jesus' divinity appears unveiled. His disputes with the Jewish Temple
authorities, taken together, could be said to anticipate his trial before
the Sanhedrin, which John, unlike the Synoptics, does not mention specifically.
John's Gospel is different: Instead
of parables, we hear extended discourses built around images, and the
main theater of Jesus' activity shifts from Galilee to Jerusalem. These
differences caused modern critical scholarship to deny the historicity
of the text—with the exception of the Passion narrative and a few details—and
to regard it as a later theological reconstruction. It was said to
express a highly developed Christology, but not to constitute a reliable
source for knowledge of the historical Jesus. The radically late datings
of John's Gospel to which this view gave rise have had to be abandoned
because papyri from Egypt dating back to the beginning of the second
century have been discovered; this made it clear that the Gospel must
have been written in the first century, if only during the closing years.
Denial of the Gospel's historical character, however, continued unabated.
Interpretation of John's Gospel in the
second half of the twentieth century was largely shaped by Rudolf Bultmann's
commentary on John, the first edition of which appeared in 1941. Bultmann
is convinced that the main influences on the Gospel of John are to be
sought not in the Old Testament and the Judaism of the time, but in
Gnosticism. This sentence typifies Bultmann's approach: "That is
not to say that the idea of the incarnation of the redeemer has in some
way penetrated Gnosticism from Christianity; it is itself originally
Gnostic, and was taken over at a very early stage by Christianity, and
made fruitful for Christology" (The Gospel of John, p. 26).
Here is another in the same vein: "Gnosticism is the only possible
source of the idea of absolute Logos" (RGG, 3rd ed., III,
p. 846).
The reader asks: "How does know
that?" Bultmann's answer is breathtaking: "Even if the reconstruction
of this kind of thinking has to be carried out in the main from sources
which are later than John, nevertheless its greater age remains
firmly established" (The Gospel of John, p. 27). On this
decisive point Bultmann is wrong. In his inaugural lecture as professor
at Tubingen, published in expanded form as The Son of God
in 1975 (English translation 1976), Martin Hengel characterized
"the hypothetical Gnostic myth of the sending of the Son of God
into the world" as a "pseudo-scientific development of a
myth." He then went on to remark: "In reality there is no
Gnostic redeemer myth in the sources which can be demonstrated chronologically
to be pre-Christian" (p. 33). "Gnosticism itself is first
visible as a spiritual movement at the end of the first century A.D.
at the earliest, and only develops fully in the second century"
(p. 34).
Johannine scholarship
in the generation after Bultmann took a radically different direction;
the results have been thoroughly explored and discussed in Martin Hengel's
book The Johannine Question (1989). If we look back from the
vantage point of current scholarship to Bultmann's interpretation of
John, we see how little protection the highly scientific approach can
offer against fundamental mistakes. But what does today's scholarship
tell us?
It has definitively
confirmed and elaborated something that even Bultmann basically already
knew: The Fourth Gospel rests
on extraordinarily precise knowledge of times and places, and so can
only have been produced by someone who had an excellent first-hand knowledge
of Palestine at the time of Jesus. A further point that has become clear
is that the Gospel thinks and argues entirely in terms of the Old Testament—of
the Torah (Rudolf Pesch)—and that its whole way of arguing is deeply
rooted in the Judaism of Jesus' time. The language of the Gospel, which
Bultmann regarded as "Gnostic," actually bears unmistakable
signs of the book's intimate association with this milieu. "The
work was written in simple unliterary koine Greek, steeped in
the language of Jewish piety. This Greek was also spoken by the upper
classes in Jerusalem . . . [where] Scripture was read in Hebrew and
Greek, and prayer and discussion went on in both languages" (Hengel,
The Johannine Question, p. 113).
Hengel also points out that "in
Herodian times a special Hellenized Jewish upper class with its own
culture developed in Jerusalem" (ibid., p. 114) and he accordingly
locates the origin of the Gospel in the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem
(ibid., pp. 124-35). We can perhaps regard a brief reference in John
18:15f as corroboration for this thesis. There it is recounted that
after his arrest Jesus is brought to the high priests for interrogation
and that in the meantime Simon Peter and "another disciple"
follow Jesus in order to find out what is going to happen next. Regarding
this "other disciple," it is then said that "as this
disciple was known to the high priest, he entered the court of the high
priest along with Jesus." His connections with the household of
the high priest were such that he was able to secure Peters entry, thereby
engineering the situation that led to Peter's denial. The circle of
the disciples, then, extended as far as the high-priestly aristocracy,
in whose language the Gospel is largely written.
This brings, us, however, to two decisive
questions that are ultimately at stake in the "Johannine"
question: Who is the author of this Gospel? How reliable is it historically?
Let us try to approach the first question. The Gospel itself makes a
clear statement about it in the context of the Passion story. It is
reported that one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a lance "and
at once there came out blood and water" (Jn 19:34). These weighty
words immediately follow: "He who saw it has borne witness—his
testimony is true, and he knows that he tells die truth—that you also
may believe" (Jn 19:35). The Gospel traces its origins to an eyewitness,
and it is clear that this eyewitness is none other than the disciple
who, as we have just been told, was standing under the Cross and was
the disciple whom Jesus loved (cf. Jn 19:26). This disciple is once
again named as the author of the Gospel in John 21:24. In addition,
we meet this figure in John 13:23, 20:2-10, and 21:7 and
probably in Jn 1:35, 40 and 18:15-16 as well.
These statements
concerning the external origin of the Gospel take on a deeper dimension
in the story of the washing of the feet, which points to its inward
source. Here it is said that this disciple reclined at Jesus' side during
the meal and diat, when he asked who die betrayer was, he "leaned
back on Jesus' breast" (Jn 13:25). These words are intended to
parallel the end of the prologue of John's Gospel, where it is said
apropos of Jesus: "No one has ever seen God; it is the only
Son, who is nearest to the Father's heart, who has made him known"
(Jn 1:18). Just as Jesus, the Son, knows about the mystery of the Fadier
from resting in his heart, so too the
Evangelist has gained his intimate knowledge from his inward repose
in Jesus' heart.
But who is this disciple? The Gospel
never directly identifies him by name. In connection with the calling
of Peter, as well as of other disciples, it points toward John, the
son of Zebedee, but it never explicitly identifies the two figures.
The intention is evidently to leave the matter shrouded in mystery.
The Book of Revelation does, admittedly, specify John as its author
(cf. Rev 1:1, 4), but despite the close connection between this book
and the Gospel and Letters of John, it remains an open question whether
the author is one and the same person.
The Lutheran exegete Ulrich Wilckens,
in his extensive Theologie des
Neuen Testaments, has
recently presented new arguments for the thesis that the "beloved
disciple" should be thought of not as a historical figure, but
as a symbol for a basic structure of the faith: "Scriptura sola
is impossible without the 'living voice' of the Gospel and that is
impossible without the personal witness of a Christian in the function
and authority of the 'beloved disciple,' in whom office and spirit unite
and support each other" (Theologie, I, 4, p. 158). However
correct this may be as a structural claim, it remains insufficient.
If the favorite disciple in the Gospel expressly assumes the function
of a witness to the truth of the events he recounts, he is presenting
himself as a living person. He intends to vouch for historical events
as a witness and he thus claims for himself the status of a historical
figure. Otherwise the statements we have examined, which are decisive
for the intention and the quality of the entire Gospel, would be emptied
of meaning.
Since the time of Irenaeus of Lyon (d.
ca. 202), Church tradition has unanimously regarded John, the son of
Zebedee, as the beloved disciple and the author of the Gospel. This
fits with the identification markers provided by the Gospel, which in
any case point toward the hand of an Apostle and companion of Jesus
from the time of the Baptism in the Jordan to the Last Supper, Cross,
and Resurrection.
In modern times, it is true, increasingly
strong doubts have been voiced concerning this identification. Can the
fisherman from the Lake of Genesareth have written this sublime Gospel
full of visions that peer into the deepest depths of God's mystery?
Can he, the Galilean fisherman, have been as closely connected with
the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem, its language, and its mentality
as the Evangelist evidently is? Can he have been related to the family
of the high priest, as the text hints (cf. Jn 18:15)?
Now, the French exegete Henri Cazelles,
drawing on studies by J. Colson, J. Winandy, and M.-E. Boismard, has
shown in a sociological study of the Temple priesthood before its destruction
("Johannes") that such an identification is actually quite
possible. The priests discharged their ministry on a rotating basis
twice a year. The ministry itself lasted a week each time. After the
completion of the ministry, the priest returned to his home, and it
was not at all unusual for him also to exercise a profession to earn
his livelihood. Furthermore, the Gospel makes clear that Zebedee was
no simple fisherman, but employed several day laborers, which also explains
why it was possible for his sons to leave him. "It is thus quite
possible that Zebedee is a priest, but that at the same time he has
his property in Galilee, while the fishing business on the lake helps
him makes ends meet. He probably has a kind of pied-a-terre in
or near the Jerusalem neighborhood where the Essenes lived" ("Johannes,"
p. 481). "The very meal during which this disciple rested on Jesus'
breast took place in a room that in all probability was located in the
Essene neighborhood of the city"—in the "pied-a-terre"
of the priest Zebedee, who "lent the upper room to Jesus and the
Twelve" (ibid., pp. 480, 481). Another observation Cazelles makes
in his article is interesting in this connection: According to the Jewish
custom, the host or, in his absence, as would have been the case here,
"his firstborn son sat to the right of the guest, his head leaning
on the latter's chest" (ibid., p. 480).
If in light of current scholarship,
then, it is quite possible to see Zebedee's son John as the bystander
who solemnly asserts his claim to be an eyewitness (cf. Jn 19:35) and
thereby identifies himself as the true author of the Gospel, nevertheless,
the complexity of the Gospel's redaction raises further questions.
The Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea
(d. ca. 338) gives us a piece of information that is important in this
context. Eusebius tells us about a five-volume work of the bishop of
Hierapolis, Papias, who died around 220. Papias mentions there that
he had not known or seen the holy Apostles himself, but that he had
received the teaching of the faith from people who had been close to
the Apostles. He also speaks of others who were likewise disciples of
the Lord, and he mentions the names Aristion and "Presbyter John."
Now, the important point is that he distinguishes between the Apostle
and Evangelist John, on one hand, and "Presbyter John," on
the other. Although he had not personally known the former, he had met
the latter (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, III, 39).
This information is very remarkable
indeed: When combined with related pieces of evidence, it suggests that
in Ephesus there was somedimg like a Johannme school, which traced its
origins to Jesus' favorite disciple himself, but in which a certain
"Presbyter John" presided as the ultimate authority. This
"presbyter" John appears as the sender and author of the Second
and Third Letters of John (in each case in the first verse of the first,
chapter) simply under the title "the presbyter" (without reference
to the name John). He is evidently not the same as the Apostle, which
means that here in the canonical text we encounter expressly the mysterious
figure of the presbyter. He must have been closely connected with the
Apostle; perhaps he had even been acquainted with Jesus himself. After
the death of the Apostle, he was identified wholly as the bearer of
the latter's heritage, and in the collective memory, the two figures
were increasingly fused. At any rate, there seem to be grounds for ascribing
to "Presbyter John" an essential role in the definitive shaping
of the Gospel, though he must always have regarded himself as the trustee
of the tradition he had received from the son of Zebedee.
I entirely concur with the conclusion
that Peter Stuhlmacher has drawn from the above data. He holds "that,
the contents of the Gospel go back to the disciple whom Jesus (especially)
loved. The presbyter understood himself as his transmitter and mouthpiece" (Biblische Tbeologie, II, p.
206). In a similar vein Stuhlmacher cites E. Ruckstuhl and P. Dschullnigg
to the effect that "the author of the Gospel of John is, as it
were, the literary executor of the favorite disciple" (ibid., p.
207).
With these observations, we have already
taken a decisive step toward answering the question of the historical
credibility of the Fourth Gospel. This Gospel ultimately goes back
to an eyewitness, and even the actual redaction of the text was substantially
the work of one of his closest followers within the living circle of
his disciples.
Thinking along similar lines, Peter
Stuhlmacher writes that there are grounds for the conjecture "that
the Johannine school carried on the style of thinking and teaching that
before Easter set the tone of Jesus' internal didactic discourses with
Peter, James, and John (as well as with the whole group of the Twelve)
. . . While the Synoptic tradition reflects the way in which the apostles
and their disciples spoke about Jesus as they were teaching on Church
missions or in Church communities, the Johannine circle took this instruction
as the basis and premise for further thinking about, and discussion
of, the mystery of revelation, of God's self-disclosure in the Son"
(Biblische Theologie, II, p. 207). Against this, though, it could
be argued that according to the text of the Gospel itself, what we find
are not so much internal didactic discourses but rather Jesus' dispute
with the Temple aristocracy, in which we are given a kind of preview
of his trial. In this context, the question "Are you the Christ,
the Son of the Blessed?" (Mk 14:61), in its different forms, increasingly
adopts center stage in the whole dispute, so that Jesus' claim to Sonship
inevitably takes on more and more dramatic forms.
It is surprising that Martin Hengel,
from whom we have learned so much about the historical rooting of the
Gospel in the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem—and so in the real context
of Jesus' life—nonetheless offers an astonishingly negative, or (to
put it more gently) extremely cautious, judgment of the historical character
of the text. He says: "The Fourth Gospel is not a completely free
'Jesus poem'. . . Here we must distinguish between those traits which
are historically plausible and others which remain chiefly suppositions.
An inability to prove the historicity of something does not mean that
it is pure unhistorical fiction. Certainly the evangelist is not narrating
historical, banal recollections of the past but the rigorously interpretative
spirit-paraclete leading into truth, which has the last word throughout
the work" (p. 132). This raises an objection: What does this contrast
mean? What makes historical recollection banal? Is the truth of what
is recollected important or not? And what sort of truth can the Paraclete
guide into if he leaves behind the historical because it is too banal?
The diagnosis of the exegete Ingo Broer
reveals even more sharply the problem with these sorts of contrasts:
"The Gospel of John thus stands before us as a literary
work that bears witness to faith and is intended to strengthen faith,
and not as a historical account" (Einleitung, p. 197). What
faith does it "testify" to if, so to speak, it has left history
behind? How does it strengthen faith if it presents itself as a historical
testimony—and does so quite emphatically—but then does not report history?
I think that we are dealing here with a false concept of the historical,
as well as with a false concept of faith and of the Paraclete. A faith
that discards history in this manner really turns into "Gnosticism."
It leaves behind the flesh, incarnation—just what true history is.
If "historical" is understood
to mean that the discourses of Jesus transmitted to us have to be something
like a recorded transcript in order to be acknowledged as "historically"
authentic, then the discourses of John's Gospel are not "historical."
But the fact that they make no claim to literal accuracy of this sort
by no means implies that they are merely "Jesus poems" that
the members of the Johannine school gradually put together, claiming
to be acting under the guidance of the Paraclete. What the Gospel is
really claiming is that it has correctly rendered the substance of the
discourses, of Jesus' self-attestation in the great Jerusalem disputes,
so that the readers really do encounter the decisive content of this
message and, therein, the authentic figure of Jesus.
We can take a further step toward defining
more precisely the particular sort of historicity that is present in
the Fourth Gospel if we attend to the mutual ordering of the various
elements that Hengel regards as decisive for the composition of the
text. Hengel begins by naming four of the essential elements of this
Gospel: "the theological concern of the author . . . his
personal recollections . . . church tradition and with
them historical reality." Astonishingly, Hengel says that
the Evangelist "altered, indeed we might even say violated"
this history. Finally, as we have just seen, it is not "the recollections
of the past but the rigorously interpretative spirit-paraclete leading
into truth which has the last word" (The Johannine Question,
p. 132).
Meaningful
synthesis of the elements
Given the way that Hengel
juxtaposes, and in a certain respect contraposes, these five elements,
they cannot be brought into any meaningful synthesis. For how is the
Paraclete supposed to have the last word if the Evangelist has already
violated the actual history? What sort of relation is there between
the redactional concern of the Evangelist, his personal message, and
Church tradition? Is redactional concern more decisive than recollection,
so that in its name reality may be violated? What, then, establishes
the legitimacy of this redactional concern? How does it interact with
the Paraclete?
I think that the five elements listed by Hengel are indeed the
essential forces that shaped the composition of the Gospel, but they
have to be seen in a different mutual relation, and the individual elements
have to be differently understood.
First of all, the second and fourth
elements—personal recollection and historical reality—form
a pair. Together they constitute what the Fathers of the Church call
the factum historicum that determines the literal sense of the
text: the exterior side of the event, which the Evangelist knows partly
from personal recollection and partly from Church tradition (no doubt
he was familiar with the Synoptic Gospels in one or another version).
His intention is to act as a "witness" reporting the things
that happened. No one has emphasized this particular dimension of what
actually happened—the "flesh" of history—to such an extent
as John. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched
with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest,
and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life
which was with the Father and was made manifest to us" (1 Jn 1:1f).
Before we turn to the
great Johanmne figurative discourses, two further general observations
about the distinctive character of John's Gospel may be helpful. Whereas
Bultmann thought the Fourth Gospel was rooted in Gnosticism and was
therefore alien to the soil of the Old Testament and of Judaism, recent
scholarship has given us a new and clearer appreciation of the fact
that John stands squarely on the foundation of the Old Testament. "Moses
. . . wrote of me" (Jn 5:46), Jesus says to his adversaries. But
already at the beginning—when John recounts the calling of the disciples—Philip
had said to Nathanael: "We have found him of whom Moses in the
law and also the prophets wrote" (Jn 1: 45). Providing an explanation
and a basis for this claim is ultimately the aim of Jesus' discourses.
He does not break the Torah, but brings its whole meaning to light and
wholly fulfills it. But the connection between Jesus and Moses appears
most prominently, one might say programmatically, at the end of the
prologue; this passage gives us the key to understanding the Fourth
Gospel: "And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon
grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through
Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest
to the Father's heart, who has made him known" (Jn 1:16-18).
These two factors—historical reality
and recollection—lead by their inner dynamic, however, to the third
and fifth elements that Hengel lists: Church tradition and the guidance
of the Holy Spirit. For, on one hand, the author of the Fourth Gospel
gives a very personal accent to his own remembrance, as we see from
his observation at the end of the Crucifixion scene (cf. Jn 19:35);
on the other hand, it is never a merely private remembering,
but a remembering in and with the "we" of the
Church: "that which ... we have heard, which we have seen
with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands."
With John, the subject who remembers is always the "we"—he
remembers in and with the community of the disciples, in and with the
Church. However much the author stands out as an individual witness,
the remembering subject that speaks here is always the "we"
of the community of disciples, the "we" of the Church. Because
the personal recollection that provides the foundation of the Gospel
is purified and deepened by being inserted into the memory of the Church,
it does indeed transcend the banal recollection of facts.
There are three important passages in
his Gospel where John uses the word remember and so gives us
the key to understanding what he means by "memory." In John's
account of the cleansing of the Temple, we read: "His disciples
remembered that it was written, 'Zeal for thy house will consume me'
[Ps 69:10]" (Jn 2:17). The event that is taking place calls to
mind a passage of Scripture and so the event becomes intelligible at
a level beyond the merely factual. Memory sheds light on the sense of
the act, which then acquires a deeper meaning. It appears as an act
in which Logos is present, an act that comes from the Logos and leads
into it. The link connecting Jesus' acting and suffering with God's
word comes into view, and so the mystery of Jesus himself becomes intelligible.
The word remember occurs once
again, this time in the description of the events of Palm Sunday. John
recounts that Jesus found a young ass and sat down on it: "As it
is written, 'Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming,
sitting on an ass's colt!'" (Jn 12:14-15; cf. Zach 9:9). The Evangelist
then observes: "His disciples did not understand this at first;
but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that this had been
written of him and had been done to him" (Jn 12:16). Once again
an event is reported that at first seems simply factual. And once again
the Evangelist tells us that after the Resurrection the disciples' eyes
were opened and they were able to understand what had happened. Now
they "remember." A scriptural text that had previously meant
nothing to them now becomes intelligible, in the sense foreseen by God,
which gives the external action its meaning.
The Resurrection teaches us a new way
of seeing; it uncovers the connection between the words of the Prophets
and the destiny of Jesus. It evokes "remembrance," that is,
it makes it possible to enter into the interiority of the events, into
the intrinsic coherence of God's speaking and acting.
By means of these texts the Evangelist
himself gives us the decisive indications as to how his Gospel is composed
and what sort of vision lies behind it. It rests upon the remembering
of the disciple, which, however, is a co-remembering in the "we"
of the Church. This remembering is an understanding under the guidance
of the Holy Spirit; by remembering, the believer enters into the depth
of the event and sees what could not be seen on an immediate and merely
superficial level. But in so doing he does not move away from the reality;
rather, he comes to know it more deeply and thus sees the truth concealed
in the outward act. The remembering of the Church is the context where
what the Lord prophesied to his followers at the Last Supper actually
happens: "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into
all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever
he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are
to come" (Jn 16:13).
What John says in his Gospel about how
remembering becomes understanding and the path "into all the truth"
comes very close to what Luke recounts about remembering on the part
of Jesus' mother. In three passages of the infancy narrative Luke depicts
this process of "remembering" for us. The first passage occurs
in the account of the annunciation of Jesus' conception by the Archangel
Gabriel. There Luke tells us that Mary took fright at the angel's greeting
and entered into an interior "dialogue" about what the greeting
might mean. The most important passages figure in the account of the
adoration of the shepherds. The Evangelist comments: "Mary kept
all these tilings, pondering them in her heart" (Lk 2:19). At the
conclusion of the narrative of the twelve-year-old Jesus we read once
again: "His mother kept all these things in her heart" (Lk
2:51). Mary's memory is first of all a retention of the events in remembrance,
but it is more than that: It is an interior conversation with all that
has happened. Thanks to this conversation, she penetrates into the
interior dimension, she sees the events in their inter-connectedness,
and she learns to understand them.
It is on just this sort of "recollection"
that the Gospel of John is based, even as the Gospel takes the concept
of memory to a new depth by conceiving it as the memory of the "we"
of the disciples, of the Church. This remembering is no mere psychological
or intellectual process; it is a pneumatic event [i.e., an event imbued
with the Pneuma, or the Holy Spirit]. The Church's remembering is not
merely a private affair; it transcends the sphere of our own human understanding
and knowing. It is a being-led by the Holy Spirit, who shows us the
connectedness of Scripture, the connection between word and reality,
and, in doing that, leads us "into all the truth."
This also has some fundamental implications
for the concept of inspiration. The Gospel emerges from human remembering
and presupposes the communion of those who remember, in this case very
concretely the school of John and, before that, the community of disciples.
But because the author thinks and writes with the memory of the Church,
the "we" to which he belongs opens beyond the personal and
is guided in its depths by the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of truth.
In this sense, the Gospel itself opens up a path of understanding, which
always remains bound to the scriptural word, and yet from generation
to generation can lead, and is meant to lead, ever anew into the depth
of all the truth.
This means that the Gospel of John,
because it is a "pneumatic Gospel," does not simply transmit
a stenographic transcript of Jesus' words and ways; it escorts us, in
virtue of understanding-through-remembering, beyond the external into
the depth of words and events that come from God and lead back to him.
As such, the Gospel is "remembering," which means that it
remains faithful to what really happened and is not a "Jesus poem,"
not a violation of the historical events. Rather, it truly shows us
who Jesus was, and thereby it shows us someone who not only was, but
is; who can always say "I am" in the present tense. "Before
Abraham was, I am" Qn 8: 58). It shows us the real Jesus,
and we can confidently make use of it as a source of information about
him.
We began this book with Moses' prophecy:
"The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from
among you, from your brethren—him you shall heed" (Deut 18:15).
We saw that the Book of Deuteronomy, which contains this prophecy, ends
with the observation: "and there has not arisen a prophet since
in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deut 34:10).
Until that hour, the great promise had remained unfulfilled. Now He
is here, the one who is truly close to the Father's heart, the only
one who has seen him, who sees him and who speaks out of this seeing—the
one of whom it is therefore fittingly said: "him you shall heed"
(Mk 9:7; Deut 18:15). The promise to Moses is fulfilled superabundantly,
in the overflowmgly lavish way in which God is accustomed to bestow
his gifts. The One who has come is more than Moses, more than a prophet.
He is the Son. And that is why grace and truth now come to light, not
in order to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it.
The second observation concerns the
liturgical character of John's Gospel. It has a rhythm dictated by Israel's
calendar of religious festivals. The major feasts of the People of God
articulate the inner structure of Jesus' path and at the same time display
the foundation on which the edifice of his message rises.
Right at the beginning of Jesus' activity
we read of the "Passover of the Jews," which suggests the
motif of the true Temple, and thus of the Cross and Resurrection (cf.
Jn 2:13-25). The healing of the paralytic, which occasions Jesus' first
major public discourse in Jerusalem, is once again connected with a
"feast of the Jews" (Jn 5:1)—probably the "Feast of Weeks,"
or Pentecost. The multiplication of the loaves and its interpretation
in the "bread of life" discourse, which is the great eucharistic
discourse in John's Gospel, occur in the context of Passover (cf. Jn
6:4). Jesus' next major discourse, where he promises "rivers of
living water" (Jn 7:38c), is set at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles.
Finally, we meet Jesus again in Jerusalem in wintertime at the Feast
of the Dedication of the Temple (Hanukkah) (cf. Jn 10:22). Jesus' path
is brought to completion during his last Passover (cf. Jn 12:1), when
he himself becomes the true Paschal Lamb who pours out his blood on
the Cross. We shall see, moreover, that Jesus' high-priestly prayer,
which contains a subtle eucharistic theology in the form of a theology
of his sacrifice on the Cross, is built up entirely in terms of the
theological content of the Feast of the Atonement. This fundamentally
important feast of Israel thus also feeds crucially into the crafting
of Jesus' words and works. In the next chapter, furthermore, we shall
see that the event of Jesus' Transfiguration recounted by the Synoptics
is set in the framework of the Feast of the Atonement and the Feast
of Tabernacles and therefore reflects the same theological background.
Only if we constantly keep in mind the liturgical context of Jesus'
discourses, indeed of the whole structure of John's Gospel, will
we be able to understand its vitality and depth.
All Jewish festivals, as we shall see
below in greater detail, have a triple basis. The initial stratum is
composed of feasts of nature religion, which connect with creation and
with man's search for God through creation; this then develops into
feasts of remembrance, of the recollection and making-present of God's
saving deeds; finally, remembering increasingly takes on the form of
hope for the coming definitive saving deed that is still awaited. Clearly,
then, Jesus' discourses in John's Gospel are not disputes occasioned
by metaphysical questions, but they contain the whole dynamic of salvation
history and, at the same time, they are rooted in creation. They are
ultimately pointers to the One who can simply say of himself: "I
am." It is evident that Jesus' discourses direct us toward worship
and in this sense toward "sacrament," at the same time embracing
the questioning and seeking of all peoples.
After these introductory considerations,
it is time to take a somewhat closer look at some of the principal images
that we find in the Fourth Gospel.
Water
Water is the primordial element of life
and is therefore also one of the primordial symbols of humanity. It
appears to man in various forms and hence with various meanings.
The first form is the spring, water
that bursts forth fresh from the womb of the earth. The spring is origin,
beginning, in its as yet unclouded and unspent purity. The spring thus
figures as a truly creative element, as well as being a symbol of fruitfulness,
of maternity.
A second form is flowing water. The
great rivers—the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris—are the major,
seemingly almost godlike sources of life in the vast lands surrounding
Israel. In Israel it is the Jordan River that bestows life on the land.
In connection with Jesus' Baptism, though, we saw that river symbolism
shows another side as well: A river is deep, and so embodies danger;
descent into the deep can therefore signify descent into death, just
as ascent from it can signify rebirth.
The final form is the sea. It is a power
that evokes admiration; its majesty calls forth amazement. Above all,
though, it is feared in its guise as the counterpart to the earth, the
domain of human life. The Creator has assigned the sea its limits, which
it may not transgress: It is not permitted to swallow up the earth.
The crossing of the Red Sea was above all a symbol of salvation for
Israel, but of course it also points to the danger that proved to be
the destiny of the Egyptians. If Christians consider the crossing of
the Red Sea as a prefiguring of Baptism, there in the immediate foreground
is the symbolism of death: It becomes an image of the mystery of the
Cross. In order to be reborn, man must first enter with Christ into
the "Red Sea," plunge with him down into death, in order thus
to attain new life with the risen Lord.
But let us now turn from these general
remarks about water symbolism in religious history to the Gospel of
John. Water symbolism pervades the Gospel from beginning to end. We
meet it for the first time in Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus in
chapter 3. In order to be able to enter the Kingdom of God, man must
be made new, he must become another person—he must be born again of
water and the Spirit (cf. Jn 3:5). What does this mean?
Baptism, the gateway into communion
with Christ, is being interpreted for us here as rebirth. This rebirth—by
analogy with natural birth from the begetting of the man and the conception
of the woman—involves a double principle: God's spirit and "water,
the 'universal mother' of natural life—which grace raises up in the
sacrament to be a sister-image of the virginal Theotokos"
(Rech, Inbild, II, p. 303).
Rebirth—to put it another way—involves
the creative power of God's Spirit, but it also requires the sacrament
of the maternal womb of the receiving and welcoming Church. Photina
Rech cites Tertullian: "Never was Christ without water" (Tertullian,
De baptismo, IX, 4). She then gives this somewhat enigmatic saying
of the early Church writer its correct interpretation: "Christ
never was, and never is, without the Ekklesia" (Rech, Inbild,
II, p. 304). Spirit and water, heaven and earth, Christ and the Church,
belong together. And that is how "rebirth" happens. In the
sacrament, water stands for the maternal earth, the holy Church, which
welcomes creation into herself and stands in place of it.
Immediately after the conversation with
Nicodemus, we meet Jesus at Jacob's well in chapter 4. The Lord promises
the Samaritan woman water that becomes in the one who drinks it a source
springing up into eternal life (cf. Jn 4:14), so that whoever drinks
it will never be thirsty again. In this scene, the symbolism of the
well is associated with Israel's salvation history. Earlier, at the
calling of Nathanael, Jesus had already revealed himself as the new
and greater Jacob. In a nocturnal vision Jacob had seen the angels of
God ascending and descending above the stone he was using for a pillow.
Jesus prophesies to Nathanael that his disciples will see heaven open
and the angels of God ascending and descending above him (cf. Jn 1:51).
Here, at Jacob's well, we encounter Jacob as the great patriarch who
by means of this well had provided water, the basic element of life.
But there is a greater thirst in man—it extends beyond the water from
the well, because it seeks a life that reaches out beyond the biological
sphere.
We will come across this same inner
tension in man once more when we come to the section on bread. Moses
gave manna, bread from heaven. But it was still just earthly "bread."
The manna is a promise: The new Moses is also expected to give bread.
Once again, however, something greater than manna has to be given. Once
again we see man reaching out into the infinite, toward another "bread"
that will truly be "bread from heaven."
The promise of new water and the promise
of new bread thus mirror each other. They both reflect the other dimension
of life, for which man can only yearn. John distinguishes between bios
and zoe—between biological life (bios) and the fullness
of life (zoe) that is itself a source and so is not subject to
the dying and becoming that mark the whole of creation. In the conversation
with the Samaritan woman, then, water once again—though now in a different
way—functions as the symbol of the Pneuma, the real life-force, which
quenches man's deeper thirst and gives him plenitude of life, for which
he is waiting without knowing it.
In the next chapter, chapter 5, water
appears more or less in passing. It makes its appearance in the story
of the man who has lain sick for thirty-eight years. He hopes to be
healed by wading into the pool of Bethzatha, but there is no one to
help him into the water. Jesus heals the man by his supreme authority;
he accomplishes for the sick man the very thing the man had hoped to
receive from the healing water. In chapter 7, which, according to a
convincing hypothesis of modern exegesis, in all likelihood originally
followed directly after chapter 5, we find Jesus attending the Feast
of Tabernacles, which involves a solemn ritual of water libation. We
will have to treat this in detail presently.
We come across water symbolism again
in chapter 9, where Jesus heals the man born blind. The process of healing
involves the sick man, on Jesus' instructions, washing in the Pool of
Siloam. In this way he obtains his sight. "Siloam means, being
translated: the One Sent" (Jn 9:7), as the Evangelist notes for
the reader who knows no Hebrew. But this is more than a philological
observation. It is a way of identifying the real cause of the miracle.
For "the One Sent" is Jesus. When all is said and done, Jesus
is the one through whom and in whom the blind man is cleansed so that
he can gain his sight. The whole chapter turns out to be an interpretation
of Baptism, which enables us to see. Christ is the giver of light, and
he opens our eyes through the mediation of the sacrament.
Water appears with a similar, yet further
shade of meaning in chapter 13—at the hour of the Last Supper—in connection
with the washing of the feet. Jesus gets up from the table, takes off
his upper garment, girds himself with a linen cloth, pours water into
a bowl, and begins to wash the feet of the disciples (cf. Jn ij^E).
The humility of Jesus, in making himself his followers' slave, is the
purifying foot washing that renders us fit to take our places at God's
table.
Finally, water appears before us again
with a mysterious grandeur at the end of the Passion. Since Jesus is
dead, his bones are not broken (Jn 19:31), but one of the soldiers "pierced
his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water"
(Jn 19:34). There is no doubt that John means to refer here to the two
main sacraments of the Church—Baptism and the Eucharist—which spring
forth from Jesus' opened heart and thus give birth to the Church from
his side.
Now, John later goes back to the motif
of blood and water in his First Letter and there gives it a new twist:
"This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with
the water only but with the water and the blood. . . . There are three
witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three are
one" (1 Jn 5:6-8). Here John very obviously gives the motif a polemical
turn against a form of Christianity that acknowledges Jesus' Baptism
as a saving event but does not acknowledge his death on the Cross in
the same way. He is responding to a form of Christianity that, so to
speak, wants only the word, but not flesh and blood. Jesus' body and
his death ultimately play no role. So all that is left of Christianity
is mere "water"—without Jesus' bodilmess the word loses its
power. Christianity becomes mere doctrine, mere moralism, an intellectual
affair, but it lacks any flesh and blood. The redemptive character of
Jesus' blood is no longer accepted. It disturbs the intellectual harmony.
Who could fail to recognize here certain
temptations threatening Christianity in our own times? Water and blood
belong together; Incarnation and Cross, Baptism, word, and sacrament
are inseparable from one another. Not only that, but the Pneuma
is needed to complete this triple testimony. Schnackenburg rightly points
out that what is intended here is "the witness of the Spirit in
the church and through the church, as in John 15:26, 16:10" (Johannine
Epistles, p. 234).
Let us turn now to Jesus' words of revelation
in the context of the Feast of Tabernacles that John transmits to us
at 7:37-39. On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood
up and proclaimed, 'If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink.
He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, Out of his heart
shall flow rivers of living water.' In the background is the ritual
of the feast, which prescribed that participants should draw water from
the spring at Siloam in order to offer a water libation in the Temple
on each of the seven days of the feast. On the seventh day, the priests
processed seven times around the altar holding a golden water vessel
before ritually pouring out its contents. These water rituals are in
the first place indications of the origin of the feast in the nature
religions: The feast began as an invocatory petition for rain, which
was so vitally necessary in a land chronically threatened by drought.
But the ritual was then transformed into a remembrance of a piece of
salvation history, of the water from the rock that, in spite of all
their doubts and fears, God gave the Jews as they wandered in the desert
(cf.. Num 20:1-13).
Finally, the gift of water from the
rock increasingly became a motif of messianic hope. Moses had given
Israel bread from heaven and water from the rock as the people wandered
in the desert. On this pattern, the new Moses, the Messiah, was expected
to give these two essential gifts of life as well. This messianic interpretation
of the gift of water is reflected in Saint Paul's First Letter to the
Corinthians: "All ate the same spiritual food and all drank the
same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that went
with them. But the rock was Christ" (1 Cor l0:f).
In the words that Jesus speaks during
the water ritual, he responds to this hope: He is the new Moses. He
himself is the life-giving rock. Just as in the bread discourse he reveals
himself as the true bread that comes from heaven, he shows himself here—just
as he had done with the Samaritan woman—as the living water that is
the goal of man's deeper thirst, the thirst for life, for "life
in abundance" (Jn 10:10): This life is no longer conditioned by
need that must constantly be satisfied, but it springs up from within,
from deep inside itself. Jesus also answers the questions as to how
one drinks this living water, how one gets to the well and draws from
it, by saying, "He who believes in me . . ." Faith in Jesus
is the way we drink the living water, the way we drink life that is
no longer threatened by death.
But now we must listen more carefully
to the text. It continues: "As the Scripture has said, Out of
his body shall flow rivers of living water" (Jn 7:38). Out
of whose body? Since the earliest times there have been two different
answers to this question. The tradition started by Origen, which is
associated with Alexandria, though the great Latin Fathers Jerome and
Augustine also subscribe to it, reads the text thus: "He who believes
. .. out of his body . . ." The believer himself becomes a spring,
an oasis out of which bubbles up fresh, uncontami-nated water, the life-giving
power of the Creator Spirit. Alongside this tradition there is another,
albeit much less widespread, from Asia Minor, which is closer to John
in its origins. It is documented by Justin (d. 165), Irenaeus, Hippolytus,
Cyprian, and Ephraim of Syria. It punctuates the text differently: "He
who thirsts, let him come to me, and let him who believes in me drink
it. As the Scripture says: out of his body rivers will flow." "His
body" is now applied to Christ: He is the source, the living rock,
from which the new water comes.
From the purely linguistic point of
view, the first interpretation is more convincing. It has accordingly
been adopted by the majority of modern exegetes—along with the great
Church Fathers. In terms of the content, though, there is more to be
said for the second, "Asia Minor" interpretation, to which
Schnackenburg, for example, subscribes, though it need not be considered
to exclude the "Alexandrian" reading. An important key to
the interpretation of this passage lies in the phrase "as the Scripture
says." Jesus attaches great importance to being in continuity
with the Scripture, in continuity with God's history with men. The whole
Gospel of John, as well as the Synoptic Gospels and the entirety of
the New Testament writings, justify faith in Jesus by showing that all
the currents of Scripture come together in him, that he is the focal
point in terms of which the overall coherence of Scripture comes to
light—everything is waiting for him, everything is moving toward him.
A thematic vision of the Scriptures
But where does Scripture speak of this
living spring? John is obviously not thinking of any one particular
passage, but precisely of "the Scripture," of a vision that
runs through its texts. We have just come across one of the principal
clues: The story of the water issuing from the rock, a story that became
an image of hope in Israel. Ezekiel 47:1-12 furnishes us with the second
major clue, the vision of the new Temple: "And behold, water was
issuing from below the threshold of the Temple toward the east"
(Ezek 47:1). A good fifty years later Zechariah returned to this image:
"On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of
David and the inhabitantsof Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness"
(Zech 13:1), "On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem"
(Zech 14:8). The final chapter of the Bible reinterprets these images
and at the same time manifests their full greatness for the first time:
"Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal,
flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb" (Rev 22:1).
Our brief consideration of the cleansing
of the Temple has already shown us that John sees the risen Lord, his
body, as the new Temple, which is awaited not just by the Old Testament,
but by all peoples (cf. Jn 2:21). We thus have good reason to hear a
reference to the new Temple echoing through Jesus' words about the streams
of living waters: Yes, this Temple exists. The promised river of life
that decontaminates the briny soil and allows the fullness of life to
ripen and bear fruit really does exist. It is He who, in "loving
to the end," endured the Cross and now lives with a life that can
never again be threatened by death. It is the living Christ. Accordingly,
Jesus' words during the Feast of Tabernacles not only point forward
to the new Jerusalem where God himself lives and is the fountain of
life, but also point immediately ahead to the body of the Crucified,
out of which blood and water flow (cf. Jn 19:34). It shows the body
of Jesus to be the real Temple, built not of stone nor by human hands;
hence—because it signifies the living indwelling of God in the world—it
is, and will remain, the source of life for all ages.
A river flowing through the ages
If one looks at history with a keen
eye, one can see this river flowing through the ages from Golgotha,
from Jesus crucified and risen. One can see that, wherever this river
reaches, the earth is decontaminated and fruit-bearing trees grow up;
one can see that life, real life, flows from this spring of love that
has given itself and continues to give itself.
The application of this passage primarily
to Christ—as we saw earlier—does not have to exclude a secondary interpretation
referring to the believer. A saying from the apocryphal Gospel of
Thomas (108) points in a direction compatible with John's Gospel:
"Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become as I am" (Barrett,
Gospel, p. 328). The believer becomes one with Christ and participates
in his fruitfulness. The man who believes and loves with Christ becomes
a well that gives life. That, too, is something that is wonderfully
illustrated in history: The saints are oases around which life sprouts
up and something of the lost paradise returns. And ultimately, Christ
himself is always the well-spring who pours himself forth in such abundance.
Vine and Wine
Whereas water is a basic element of
life for all creatures on earth, wheat bread, wine, and olive oil are
gifts typical of Mediterranean culture. The creation Psalm 104 first
of all mentions the grass that God has appointed for the cattle and
then goes on to speak of the gifts God gives to men through the earth:
the bread that man produces from the earth, the wine that gladdens his
heart, and finally the oil that makes his face shine. It then returns
to speak of the bread that strengthens man's heart (cf. Ps 104:14^.
Along with water, the three great gifts of the earth subsequently became
the basic elements of the Church's sacraments, in which the fruits of
creation are transformed into bearers of God's historical action, into
"signs," in which he bestows upon us his special closeness.
Each of the three gifts has a special
character that sets it apart from the others, so that each one functions
as a sign in its own way. Bread, in its simplest form prepared from
water and ground wheat—though the element of fire and human work clearly
have a part to play—is the basic foodstuff. It belongs to the poor and
the rich alike, but especially to the poor. It represents the goodness
of creation and of the Creator, even as it stands for the humble simplicity
of daily life. Wine, on the other hand, represents feasting. It gives
man a taste of the glory of creation. In this sense, it forms part of
the rituals of the Sabbath, of Passover, of marriage feasts. And it
allows us to glimpse something of the definitive feast God will celebrate
with man, the goal of all Israel's expectations: "On this mountain
the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a
feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on
the lees well refined" (Is 25:6). Finally, oil gives man
strength and beauty; it has the power to heal and nourish. It signifies
a higher calling in the anointing of prophets, kings, and priests.
As far as I can see, olive oil does
not figure in John's Gospel. The precious "oil of nard" that
Mary of Bethany uses to anoint the Lord before he enters upon his Passion
(cf. Jn 12:3) was thought to be of Oriental origin. In this scene, it
appears, first, as a sign of the sacred extravagance of love and, second,
as a reference to death and Resurrection. We come across bread in the
scene of the multiplication of the loaves, which the Synoptics also
document in great detail, and immediately after that in the great eucharistic
discourse in John's Gospel. The gift of new wine occupies a central
place in the wedding at Cana (cf. Jn 2:1-12), while in his Farewell
Discourses Jesus presents himself to us as the true vine (cf. Jn 15:1-10).
Let us focus on these two texts. The
miracle of Cana seems at first sight to be out of step with the other
signs that Jesus performs. What are we supposed to make of the fact
that Jesus produces a huge surplus of wine—about 520 liters—for a private
party? We need to look more closely to realize that this is not at all
about a private luxury, but about something much greater. The first
important detail is the timing. "On the third day there was a marriage
at Cana in Galilee" (Jn 2:1). It is not quite clear what previous
date this "third day" is related to—which shows all the more
plainly that what matters to the Evangelist is precisely the symbolic
time reference, which he gives us as a key to understanding the event.
Cana as theophany
In the Old Testament, the third day
is the time for theophany, as, for example, in the central account of
the meeting between God and Israel on Sinai: "On the morning of
the third day there were thunders and lightnings. . . . The Lord descended
upon it in fire" (Ex 19:16-18). At the same time what we have here
is a prefiguring of history's final and decisive theophany: the Resurrection
of Christ on the third day, when God's former encounters with man become
his definitive irruption upon earth, when the earth is torn open once
and for all and drawn into God's own life. What John is hinting at
here, then, is that at Cana God first reveals himself in a way that
carries forward the events of the Old Testament, all of which have the
character of a promise and are now straining toward their definitive
fulfillment. The exegetes have reckoned up the number of the preceding
days in John's Gospel that are taken up with the calling of the disciples
(e.g., Barrett, Gospel, p. 190). The conclusion is that this
"third day" would be the sixth or seventh day since Jesus
began calling the disciples. If it were the seventh day, then it would
be, so to speak, the day of God's feast for humanity, an anticipation
of the definitive Sabbath as described, for example, in the prophecy
of Isaiah cited above.
Jesus' hour
There is another basic element of the
narrative linked to this timing. Jesus says to Mary that his hour has
not yet come. On an immediate level, this means that he does not simply
act and decide by his own lights, but always in harmony with the Father's
will and always in terms of the Father's plan. More particularly, the
"hour" designates his "glorification," which brings
together his Cross, his Resurrection, and his presence throughout the
world in word and sacrament. Jesus' hour, the hour of his "glory,"
begins at the moment of the Cross, and its historical setting is the
moment when the Passover lambs are slaughtered—it is just then that
Jesus, the true lamb, pours out his blood. His hour comes from God,
but it is solidly situated in a precise historical context tied to
a liturgical date—and just so it is the beginning of the new liturgy
in "spirit and truth." When at this juncture Jesus speaks
to Mary of his hour, he is connecting the present moment with the mystery
of the Cross interpreted as his glorification. This hour is not yet
come; that was the first thing that had to be said. And yet Jesus has
the power to anticipate this "hour" in a mysterious sign.
This stamps the miracle of Cana as an anticipation of the hour, tying
the two together intrinsically.
How could we forget that this thrilling
mystery of the anticipated hour continues to occur again and again?
Just as at his mother's request Jesus gives a sign that anticipates
his hour, and at the same time directs our gaze toward it, so too he
does the same thing ever anew in the Eucharist. Here, in response to
the Church's prayer, the Lord anticipates his return; he comes already
now; he celebrates the marriage feast with us here and now. In so doing,
he lifts us out of our own time toward the coming "hour."
We thus begin to understand the event
of Cana. The sign of God is overflowing generosity. We see it in the
multiplication of the loaves; we see it again and again—most of all,
though, at the center of salvation history, in the fact that he lavishly
spends himself for the lowly creature, man. This abundant giving is
his "glory." The superabundance of Cana is therefore a sign
that God's feast with humanity, his self-giving for men, has begun.
The framework of the event, the wedding, thus becomes an image that
points beyond itself to the messianic hour: The hour of God's marriage
feast with his people has begun in the coming of Jesus. The promise
of the last days enters into the Now.
"Bridegroom" of his people
This links the story of Cana with Saint
Mark's account of the question posed to Jesus by the disciples of John
the Baptist and the Pharisees: Why don't your disciples fast? Jesus
answers: "Can the wedding guests fast so long as the bride-groom
is among them?" (Mk 2:18f.). Jesus identifies himself here as the
"bridegroom" of God's promised marriage with his people and,
by doing so, he mysteriously places his own existence, himself, within
the mystery of God. In him, in an unexpected way, God and man become
one, become a "marriage," though this marriage—as Jesus subsequently
points out—passes through the Cross, through the "taking away"
of the bridegroom.
There remain two aspects of the Cana
story for us to ponder if we wish in some sense to explore its Christological
depth—the self-revelation of Jesus and his "glory" that we
encounter in the narrative. Water, set aside for the purpose of ritual
purification, is turned into wine, into a sign and a gift of nuptial
joy. This brings to light something of the fulfillment of the Law that
is accomplished in Jesus' being and doing.
The Law is not denied, it is not thrust
aside. Rather, its inner expectation is brought to fulfillment. Ritual
purification in the end is just ritual, a gesture of hope. It remains
"water," just as everything man does on his own remains "water"
before God. Ritual purification is in the end never sufficient to make
man capable of God, to make him really "pure" for God. Water
becomes wine. Man's own efforts now encounter the gift of God, who gives
himself and thereby creates the feast of joy that can only be instituted
by the presence of God and his gift.
The Dionysus story
The historical study of comparative
religion likes to claim the myth of Dionysus as a pre-Christian parallel
to the story of Cana. Dionysus was the god who was supposed to have
discovered the vine and also to have changed water into wine—a mythical
event that was also celebrated liturgically. The great Jewish theologian
Philo of Alexandria (ca. 13 B.C.—A.D. 45/50) gave this story a demythologizing
reinterpretation: The true giver of wine, Philo says, is the divine
Logos; he is the one who gives us the joy, the sweetness, and the cheerfulness
of true wine. Philo then goes on to anchor his Logos theology onto a
figure from salvation history, onto Melchisedek, who offered bread and
wine. In Melchisedek it is the Logos who is acting and giving us the
gifts that are essential for human living. By the same token, the Logos
appears as the priest of a cosmic liturgy (Barrett, Gospel, p.
188).
Whether John had such a background in
mind is doubtful, to say the least. But since Jesus himself in interpreting
his mission referred to Psalm no, which features the priesthood of Melchisedek
(cf. Mk 12:35—37); since the Letter to the Hebrews, which is theologically
akin to the Gospel of John, explicitly develops a theology of Melchisedek;
since John presents Jesus as the Logos of God and as God himself; since,
finally, the Lord gave bread and wine as the bearers of the New Covenant,
it is certainly not forbidden to think in terms of such connections
and so to see shining through the Cana story the mystery of the Logos
and of his cosmic liturgy, which fundamentally transforms the myth of
Dionysus, and yet also brings it to its hidden truth.
The Lord's Vineyard
While the Cana story deals with the
fruit of the vine and the rich symbolism that goes with it, in
chapter 15—in the context of the Farewell Discourses—John takes up once
more the ancient traditional image of the vine itself, and brings to
fulfillment the vision that is presented there. In order to understand
this discourse of Jesus, it is necessary to consider at least one
foundational Old Testament text based on the vine motif and to ponder
briefly a related parable in the Synoptics that takes up and refashions
the Old Testament text.
Isaiah 5:1—7 presents us with a song
about a vineyard. The Prophet probably sang it in the context of the
Feast of Tabernacles, in the context of the cheerful atmosphere characteristic
of this eight-day feast (cf. Deut 16:14). It 's easy
to imagine many different sorts of performances going on
in the areas between the booths built of leaves and branches, and the
Prophet himself mingling with the celebrating people and announcing
a love song about his friend and his vineyard.
Everyone knew that "vineyard"
was an image for a bride (cf. Song 2:15, 7:12f), so they were expecting
some entertainment suited to the festive atmosphere. And the song does
start off on a good note: The friend had a vineyard on rich soil, planted
choice grapes on it, and did everything he could to make them flourish.
But then the mood suddenly changes: The vineyard is a disappointment,
and instead of choice fruit, it produces nothing but inedible sour grapes,
small and hard. The audience understands what that means: The bride
was unfaithful, disappointing the trust and hope, disappointing the
love that the friend had expected. How will the story continue? The
friend hands over his vineyard to be plundered—he repudiates the bride,
leaving her in the dishonor for which she has no one but herself to
blame.
It suddenly becomes clear that the vineyard,
the bride, is Israel—it is the very people who are present. God gave
them the way of justice in the Torah, he loved them, he did everything
for them, and they have answered him with unjust action and a regime
of injustice. The love song has become a threat of judgment. It finishes
with a gloomy prospect—that of God's abandonment of Israel, with no
sign at this stage of any further promise. Isaiah points to the situation
that the Psalmist later describes in a lament before God in deep anguish
at its having come to pass: "Thou didst bring a vine out of Egypt;
thou didst drive out the nations and plant it. Thou didst clear the
ground for it. ... Why then hast thou broken down its walls, so that
all who pass along the way plunder its fruit?" (Ps 80:9-13). In
the Psalm, lament leads into petition: "Have regard for this vine,
the stock which thy right hand planted. . . . Restore us, O Lord God
of hosts! let thy face shine, that we may be saved!" (Ps 80:16-20).
Despite everything that had happened
to Israel since the Exile, it found itself again in essentially the
same situation at the time when Jesus lived and spoke to the heart of
his people. In a late parable, told on the eve of his Passion, he takes
up the song of Isaiah in a modified form (cf. Mk 12:1-12). His discourse
no longer uses the vine as the image of Israel, however. Rather, Israel
is now represented by the tenants of a vineyard whose owner has gone
on a journey and from a far country demands the fruits owed him. The
history of God's constantly renewed struggle for and with Israel is
depicted in a succession of "servants" who come at the owners
behest to collect the rent, the agreed-on portion of the fruits, from
the tenants. The history of the Prophets, their sufferings, and the
futility of their efforts appear through the narrative, which tells
that the servants are manhandled, even killed.
Finally, the owner makes a last-ditch
effort: He sends his "beloved son," who, being the heir, can
also enforce the owners claim to the rent in court and for that reason
is entitled to hope for respect. Just the opposite happens. The tenants
kill the son, precisely because he is the heir; his death, they think,
will pave the way for them to take possession of the vineyard once and
for all. Jesus continues the parable thus: "What will the owner
of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the
vineyard to others" (Mk 12:9).
At this point, as in Isaiah s song,
the parable that seemed to be just a story about the past crosses over
into the situation of the audience. History suddenly enters the present.
The audience knows he is saying to them: Just as the Prophets were abused
and killed, so now you want to kill me: I'in talking about you
and about me (cf. verse 12).
The modern interpretation ends at this
point. It thus relegates the parable to the past again; the parable,
it seems, speaks only of what happened back then, of the rejection of
Jesus' message by his contemporaries, of his death on the Cross. But
the Lord always speaks in the present and with an eye to the future.
He is also speaking with us and about us. If we open our eyes, isn't
what is said in the parable actually a description of our present world?
Isn't this precisely the logic of the modern age, of our age? Let us
declare that God is dead, then we ourselves will be God. At last we
no longer belong to anyone else; rather, we are simply the owners of
ourselves and of the world. At last we can do what we please. We get
rid of God; there is no measuring rod above us; we ourselves are our
only measure. The "vineyard" belongs to us. What happens to
man and the world next? We are already beginning to see it. ...
Let us return to the text of the parable.
When Isaiah arrived at this point, there was no promise in sight; in
the Psalm, just as the threat was being fulfilled, suffering turned
to prayer. This, again and again, is the situation of Israel, of the
Church, and of humanity. Again and again we find ourselves in the darkness
of trial and have no recourse but to call upon God: Raise us up again!
But Jesus' words contain a promise—the beginning of an answer to the
prayer: "take care of this vineyard." The Kingdom is handed
over to other servants—this statement is both a threat of judgment and
a promise. It means that the Lord stands by his vineyard, without being
bound to its present servants. This threat-promise applies not only
to the ruling classes, about whom and with whom Jesus is speaking. It
continues to apply among the new People of God as well—not, of course,
to the whole Church, but repeatedly to the particular churches, as the
Risen Lord's words to the Church at Ephesus show: "Repent and do
the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your
lampstand from its place" (Rev 2:5).
The threat and promise that the vineyard
will be handed over to other servants is followed, though, by a promise
of a much more fundamental nature. The Lord cites Psalm 118:226 "The
stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone."
The death of the son is not the last word. He is killed, but he does
not remain in death, he does not remain "rejected." He becomes
a new beginning. Jesus gives his audience to understand that he himself
will be the Son who is killed; he foretells his Cross and Resurrection
and prophesies that upon him, when he has been killed and has risen,
God will erect a new building, a new Temple in the world.
God's new Temple
The image of the vine is abandoned and
replaced by the image of God's living building. The Cross is not an
end, but a new beginning. The song of the vineyard does not end with
the killing of the son. It opens the prospect that God will do something
new. The affinity with John 2, which speaks of the destruction of the
Temple and its reconstruction, is impossible to overlook. God does
not fail; we may be unfaithful, but he is always faithful (cf. 2 Tim
2:13). He finds new and greater ways for his love. The indirect Christology
of the early parables is transcended here into a fully open Christological
statement.
The parable of the vine in Jesus' Farewell
Discourses continues the whole history of biblical thought and language
on the subject of the vine and discloses its ultimate depth. "I
am the true vine," the Lord says (Jn 15:1). The word true
is the first important thing to notice about this saying. Barrett makes
the excellent observation that "fragments of meaning, obscurely
hinted at by other vines, are gathered up and made explicit by him.
He is the true vine" (Gospel, p. 473). But the really
important thing about this saying is the opening: "I am."
The Son identifies himself with the vine; he himself has become the
vine. He has let himself be planted in the earth. He has entered into
the vine: The mystery of the Incarnation, which John spoke of in the
prologue to his Gospel, is taken up again here in a surprising new way.
The vine is no longer merely a creature that God looks upon with love,
but that he can still uproot and reject. In the Son, he himself has
become the vine; he has forever identified himself, his very being,
with the vine.
This vine can never again be uprooted
or handed over to be plundered. It belongs once and for all to God;
through the Son God himself lives in it. The promise has become irrevocable,
the unity indestructible. God has taken this great new step withm history,
and this constitutes the deepest content of the parable. Incarnation,
death, and Resurrection come to be seen in their full breadth: "For
the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you . . . was not
Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God
find their Yes in him" (2 Cor 1:19f), as Saint Paul puts it.
The idea that through Christ the vine
has become the Son himself is a new one, and yet the ground for it has
been prepared in biblical tradition. Psalm 80:18 closely associates
the "Son of Man" with the vine. Conversely: Although the Son
has now himself become the vine, this is precisely his method for remaining
one with his own, with all the scattered children of God whom he has
come to gather (cf. Jn 11:52). The vine is a Christological title that
as such embodies a whole ecclesiology. The vine signifies Jesus' inseparable
oneness with his own, who through him and with him are all "vine,"
and whose calling is to "remain" in the vine. John does not
make use of the Pauline image of the "Body of Christ." But
the parable of the vine expresses substantially the same idea: the fact
that Jesus is inseparable from his own, and that they are one with him
and in him. In this sense, the discourse about the vine indicates the
irrevocability of the gift God has given, never to take it back again.
In becoming incarnate, God has bound himself. At the same time, though,
the discourse speaks of the demands that this gift places upon us in
ever new ways.
Purification to produce Fruit
The vine, we said, can no longer be
uprooted or handed over to be plundered. It does, however, constantly
need purification. Purification, fruit, remaining, commandment, love,
unity—these are the key words for this drama of being in and with the
Son in the vine that the Lord's words place before our soul. Purification—the
Church and the individual need constant purification. Processes of purification,
which are as necessary as they are painful, run through the whole of
history, the whole life of those who have dedicated themselves to Christ.
The mystery of death and resurrection is ever present in these purifications.
When man and his institutions climb too high, they need to be cut back;
what has become too big must be brought back to the simplicity and poverty
of the Lord himself. It is only by undergoing such processes of dying
away that fruitfulness endures and renews itself.
The goal of purification is fruit, the
Lord tells us. What sort of fruit is it that he expects? Let us begin
by looking at the fruit that he himself has borne by dying and rising.
Isaiah and the whole prophetic tradition spoke of how God expected grapes,
and thus choice wine, from his vine. This was an image of the righteousness,
the rectitude that consists in living within the Word and will of God.
The same tradition says that what God finds instead are useless, small,
sour grapes that he can only throw away. This was an image of life lived
away from God's righteousness amid injustice, corruption, and violence.
The vine is meant to bear choice grapes that through the process of
picking, pressing, and fermentation will produce excellent wine.
The Vine and the Eucharist
Let us recall that the parable of the
vine occurs in the context of Jesus' Last Supper. After the multiplication
of the loaves he had spoken of the true bread from heaven that he would
give, and thus he left us with a profound interpretation of the eucharistic
bread that was to come. It is hard to believe that in his discourse
on the vine he is not tacitly alluding to the new wine that had already
been prefigured at Cana and which he now gives to us—the wine that would
flow from his Passion, from his "love to the end" (Jn 13:1).
In this sense, the parable of the vine has a thoroughly eucharistic
background. It refers to the fruit that Jesus brings forth: his love,
which pours itself out for us on the Cross and which is the choice new
wine destined for God's marriage feast with man. Thus we come to understand
the full depth and grandeur of the Eucharist, even though it is not
explicitly mentioned here. The Eucharist points us toward the fruit
that we, as branches of the vine, can and must bear with Christ and
by virtue of Christ. The fruit the Lord expects of us is love—a love
that accepts with him the mystery of the Cross, and becomes a participation
in his self-giving—and hence the true justice that prepares the world
for the Kingdom of God.
Purification and fruit belong together;
only by undergoing God's purifications can we bear the fruit that flows
into the eucharistic mystery and so leads to the marriage feast that
is the goal toward which God directs history. Fruit and love belong
together: The true fruit is the love that has passed through the Cross,
through God's purifications. "Remaining" is an essential part
of all this. In verses i-10 the word remain (in Greek meneiri)
occurs ten times. What the Church Fathers call perseverantia—patient
steadfastness in communion with the Lord amid all the vicissitudes of
life—is placed center stage here. Initial enthusiasm is easy. Afterward,
though, it is time to stand firm, even along the monotonous desert paths
that we are called upon to traverse in this life—with the patience it
takes to tread evenly, a patience in which the romanticism of the initial
awakening subsides, so that only the deep, pure Yes of faith remains.
This is the way to produce good wine. After the brilliant illuminations
of the initial moment of his conversion, Augustine had a profound experience
of this toilsome patience, and that is how he learned to love the Lord
and to rejoice deeply at having found him.
If the fruit we
are to bear is love, its prerequisite is this "remaining,"
which is profoundly connected with the kind of faith that holds on to
the Lord and does not let go. Verse 7 speaks of prayer as an essential
element of this remaining:
Those who
pray are promised that they will surely be heard. Of course, to pray
in the name of Jesus is not to make an ordinary petition, but to ask
for the essential gift that Jesus characterizes as "joy" in
the Farewell Discourses, while Luke calls it the Holy Spirit (cf. Lk
11:13)—tne two being ultimately the same. Jesus'
words about remaining in his love already point ahead to the last verse
of his high-priestly prayer (cf. Jn 17:26) and thus connect the vine
discourse with the great theme of unity, for which the Lord prays to
the Father at the Last Supper.
Bread
We have already dealt extensively with
the bread motif in connection with Jesus' temptations. We have seen
that the temptation to turn the desert rocks into bread raises the whole
question of the Messiah's mission, and that through the devil's distortion
of this mission Jesus' positive answer can already be glimpsed; this
answer then becomes explicit once and for all in the gift of his body
as bread for the life of the world on the eve of his Passion. We have
also encountered the bread motif in our exposition of the fourth petition
of the Our Father, where we tried to survey the different dimensions
of this petition, and thus to explore the full range of the bread theme.
At the end of Jesus' activity in Galilee, he performs the multiplication
of the loaves; on one hand, it is an unmistakable sign of Jesus' messianic
mission, while on the other, it is also the crossroads of his public
ministry, which from this point leads clearly to the Cross. All three
Synoptic Gospels tell of a miraculous feeding of five thousand men (cf.
Mt 14:13—21; Mk 6:32—44; Lk 9:10b-17); Matthew and Mark tell of an additional
feeding of four thousand (cf. Mt 15:32-38; Mk 8:1-9).
The two stories have a rich theological content that we cannot enter
into here. I will restrict myself to John's story of the multiplication
of the loaves (cf. Jn 6:1-15), not in order to study it in depth, but
rather to focus upon the interpretation that Jesus gives of this event
in his great bread of life discourse the following day in the synagogue
on the other side of the lake. One more qualification is in order: We
cannot consider the details of this discourse, which the exegetes have
discussed at length and analyzed thoroughly. I would merely like to
draw out its principal message and, above all, to situate it in the
context of the whole tradition to which it belongs and in terms
of which it has to be understood.
The fundamental context in which the
entire chapter belongs is centered upon the contrast between Moses and
Jesus. Jesus is the definitive, greater Moses—the "prophet"
whom Moses foretold in his discourse at the border of the Holy Land
and concerning whom God said, "I will put my words in his mouth,
and he shall speak to them all that I command him" (Deut 18:18).
It is no accident, then, that the following statement occurs between
die multiplication of the loaves and the attempt to make Jesus king:
"This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!"
(Jn 6:14). In a very similar vein, after the saving about the water
of life on the Feast of Tabernacles, the people say: "This is really
the prophet" (Jn 7:40). The Mosaic background provides the context
for the claim that Jesus makes. Moses struck the rock in the desert
and out flowed water; Jesus promises the water of life, as we have seen.
The great gift, though, which stood out in the people's memory, was
the manna. Moses gave bread from heaven; God himself fed the wandering
people of Israel with heavenly bread. For a people who often went hungry
and struggled to earn their daily bread, this was the promise of promises,
which somehow said everything there was to say: relief of every want—a
gift that satisfied hunger for all and forever.
Before we take up this idea, which is
the key to understanding chapter 6 of John's Gospel, we must first complete
the picture of Moses, because this is the only way to focus upon John's
picture of Jesus. The central point from which we started in this book,
and to which we keep returning, is that Moses spoke face-to-face with
God, "as a man speaks to his friend" (Ex 33:11; cf. Deut 34:10).
It was only because he spoke with God himself that Moses could bring
God's word to men. But, although this immediate relationship with God
is the heart and inner foundation of Moses' mission, a shadow lies over
it. For when Moses says, "I beg you, show me thy glory," at
the very moment when the text affirms that he is God's friend who has
direct access to him, he receives this answer: "While my glory
passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you
with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand,
and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen" (Ex 33:18,
22f). Even Moses sees only God's back—his face "shall not be seen."
The limits to which even Moses is subject now become clear.
Revealing God
The saying at the end of the prologue
is the decisive key to the image of Jesus in John's Gospel: "No
one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father's
heart, who has made him known" (Jn 1:18). Only the one who is God
sees God—Jesus. He truly speaks from his vision of theFather, from unceasing
dialogue with the Father, a dialogue that is his life. If Moses only
showed us, and could only show us, God's back, Jesus, by contrast, is
the Word that comes from God, from a living vision of him, from unity
with him. Connected with this are two further gifts to Moses that attain
their final form in Christ. First, God communicated his name to Moses,
thereby making possible a relationship between himself and human beings;
by handing on the name revealed to him, Moses acts as mediator of a
real relationship between men and the living God. We have already reflected
on this point in our consideration of the first petition of the Our
Father. Now, in his high-priestly prayer Jesus stresses that he has
revealed God's name, that he has brought to completion this aspect
too of the work begun by Moses. When we consider the high-priestly prayer,
we will have to investigate this claim more closely: In what sense
has Jesus gone beyond Moses in revealing God's "name"?
The other gift to Moses—which is closely
connected with the vision of God and the communication of his name,
as well as with the manna—is the gift that gives Israel its identity
as God's people in the first place: the Torah, the word of God that
points out the way and leads to life. Israel realized with increasing
clarity that this was Moses' fundamental and enduring gift, that what
really set Israel apart was this knowledge of God's will and so of the
right path of life. The great Psalm 119 is a single outburst of joy
and gratitude for this gift. A one-sided view of the Law, arising from
a one-sided interpretation of Pauline theology, prevents us from seeing
this joy of Israel: the joy of knowing God's will, and so of being privileged
to live in accordance with God's will.
The Bread as Sign
This observation brings us back to the
bread of life discourse, surprising as that may seem. For as Jewish
thought developed inwardly, it became increasingly plain that the real
bread from heaven that fed and feeds Israel is precisely the Law—the
word of God. The Wisdom Literature presents the wisdom that is substantially
accessible and present in the Law as "bread" (Prov 9:5); the
rabbinic literature went on to develop this idea further (Barrett, Cospel,
p. 290). This is the perspective from which we need to understand Jesus'
dispute with the Jews assembled in the synagogue at Capernaum. Jesus
begins by pointing out that they have failed to understand the multiplication
of the loaves as a "sign," which is its true meaning. Rather,
what interested them was eating and having their fill (cf. Jn 6:26).
They have been looking at salvation in purely material terms, as a
matter of universal well-being, and they have therefore reduced man,
leaving God out altogether. But if they see the manna only as a means
of satisfying their hunger, they need to realize that even the manna
was not heavenly bread, but only earthly bread. Even though it came
from "heaven," it was earthly food—or rather a food substitute
that would necessarily cease when Israel emerged from the desert back
into inhabited country.
But man hungers for more. He needs more.
The gift that feeds man as man must be greater, must be on a wholly
different level. Is the Torah this other food? It is in some sense
true that in and through the Torah, man can make God's will his food
(cf. Jn 4:34). So the Torah is "bread" from God, then. And
yet it shows us only God's back, so to speak. It is a "shadow."
"For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and
gives life to the world" (Jn 6:33). As the audience still does
not understand, Jesus repeats himself even more unambiguously: "I
am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who
believes in me shall never thirst" (Jn 6:35).
The Law has become a person
The Law has become a person.
When we encounter Jesus, we feed on the living God himself, so to speak;
we truly eat "bread from heaven." By the same token, Jesus
has already made it clear that the only work God demands is the work
of believing in him. Jesus' audience had asked him: "What must
we do, to be doing the works of God?" (Jn 6:28). The text uses
here the Greek word ergdzesthai, which means "to perform
a work" (Barrett, Gospel, p. 287). Jesus' listeners are
ready to work, to do something, to perform "works," in order
to receive this bread. But it cannot be "earned" by human
work, by one's own achievement. It can only come to us as a gift from
God, as God's work. The whole of Pauline theology is present
in this dialogue. The highest things, the things that really matter,
we cannot achieve on our own; we have to accept them as gifts and enter
into the dynamic of the gift, so to speak. This happens in the context
of faith in Jesus, who is dialogue—a living relationship with the Father—and
who wants to become Word and love in us as well.
Nourished on God
But the question as to how we can "feed"
on God, live on God, in such a way that he himself becomes our bread—-this
question is not yet fully answered by what has just been said. God becomes
"bread" for us first of all in the Incarnation of the Logos:
The Word takes on flesh. The Logos becomes one of us and so comes down
to our level, comes into the sphere of what is accessible to us. Yet
a further step is still needed beyond even the Incarnation of the Word.
Jesus names this step in the concluding words of his discourse: His
flesh is life "for" the world (Jn 6:51). Beyond the act of
the Incarnation, this points to its intrinsic goal and ultimate realization:
Jesus' act of giving himself up to death and the mystery of the Cross.
This is made even clearer in verse 53,
where the Lord adds that he will give us his blood to "drink."
These words are not only a manifest allusion to the Eucharist. Above
all they point to what underlies the Eucharist: the sacrifice of Jesus,
who sheds his blood for us, and in so doing steps out of himself, so
to speak, pours himself out, and gives himself to us.
In this chapter, then, the theology
of the Incarnation and the theology of the Cross come together: the
two cannot be separated. There are thus no grounds for setting up an
opposition between the Easter theology of the Synoptics and Saint Paul,
on one hand, and Saint John's supposedly purely incarnational theology,
on the other. For the goal of the Word's becoming-flesh spoken of by
the prologue is precisely the offering of his body on the Cross, which
the sacrament makes accessible to us. John is following here the same
line of thinking that the Letter to the Hebrews develops on the basis
of Psalm 40:6-8: "Sacrifices and offerings you did refuse—you have
prepared a body for me" (Heb 10:5). Jesus becomes man in order
to give himself and to take the place of the animal sacrifices, which
could only be a gesture of longing, but not an answer.
Eucharist as unceasing encounter
Jesus' bread discourse, on one hand,
points the main movement of the Incarnation and of the Paschal journey
toward the sacrament, in which Incarnation and Easter are permanently
present, but conversely, this has the effect of integrating the sacrament,
the Holy Eucharist, into the larger context of God's descent to us and
for us. On one hand, then, the Eucharist emphatically moves right to
the center of Christian existence; here God does indeed give us the
manna that humanity is waiting for, the true "bread of heaven"—the
nourishment we can most deeply live upon as human beings. At the same
time, however, the Eucharist is revealed as man's unceasing great encounter
with God, in which the Lord gives himself as "flesh," so that
in him, and by participating in his way, we may become "spirit."
Just as he was transformed through the Cross into a new manner of bodili-ness
and of being-human pervaded by God's own being, so too for us this food
must become an opening out of our exis-tence, a passing through the
Cross, and an anticipation of the new life in God and with God.
This is why at the conclusion of the
discourse, which places such emphasis on Jesus' becoming flesh and our
eating and drinking the "flesh and blood of the Lord," Jesus
says: "it is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail"
(Jn 6:63). This may remind us of Saint Paul's words: "The first
man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit"
(1 Cor 15:45). This in no way diminishes the realism of "becoming-flesh."
Yet the Paschal perspective of the sacrament is underlined: Only through
the Cross and through the transformation that it effects does this flesh
become accessible to us, drawing us up into the process of transformation.
Eucharistic piety needs to be constantly learning from this great Christological—indeed,
cosmic—dynamism.
The grain of wheat
In order to understand the full depth
of Jesus' bread discourse, we must finally take a brief look at one
of the key sayings of John's Gospel. Jesus pronounces it on Palm Sunday
as he looks ahead to the universal Church that will embrace Jews and
Greeks—all the peoples of the world: "Unless a grain of wheat falls
into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears
much fruit" (Jn 12:24). What we call "bread" contains
the mystery of the Passion. Before there can be bread, the seed—the
grain of wheat—first has to be placed in the earth, it has to "die,"
and then the new ear can grow out of this death. Earthly bread can become
the bearer of Christ's presence because it contains in itself the mystery
of the Passion, because it unites in itself death and resurrection.
This is why the world's religions used bread as the basis for myths
of death and resurrection of the godhead, in which man expressed his
hope for life out of death.
In this connection, Cardinal Christoph
Schonborn reminds us of the conversion of the great British writer C.
S. Lewis; Lewis, having read a twelve-volume work about these myths,
came to the conclusion that this Jesus who took bread in his hands and
said, "This is my body," was just "another corn divinity,
a corn king who lays down his life for the life of the world."
One day, however, he overheard a firm atheist remarking to a colleague
that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was actually surprisingly
good. The atheist then paused thoughtfully and said: "About the
dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once"
(Schonborn, Weihnacht, pp. 23f).
Jesus is no myth
Yes, it really did happen. Jesus is
no myth. He is a man of flesh and blood and he stands as a fully real
part of history. We can go to the very places where he himself went.
We can hear his words through his witnesses. He died and he is risen.
It is as if the mysterious Passion contained in bread had waited for
him, had stretched out its arms toward him; it is as if the myths had
waited for him, because in him what they long for came to pass. The
same is true of wine. It too con-tains the Passion in itself, for the
grape had to be pressed in order to become wine. The Fathers gave this
hidden language of the eucharistic gifts an even deeper interpretation.
I would like to add just one example here. In the early Christian text
called the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, also known as the Didache
(probably composed around the year ioo), the following prayer is
recited over the bread intended for the Eucharist: "As the bread
was scattered on the mountains and brought into unity, so may the Church
be gathered from the ends of the earth into your Kingdom" (IX,
4).
The
Shepherd
The image of the shepherd, which Jesus
uses to explain his mission both in the Synoptics and in the Gospel
of John, has a long history behind it. In the ancient Near East, in
royal inscriptions from both Sumer and the area of Babylonia and Assyria,
the king refers to himself as the shepherd instituted by God. "Pasturing
sheep" is an image of his task as a ruler. This image implies that
caring for the weak is one of the tasks of the just ruler. One could
therefore say that, in view of its origins, this image of Christ the
Good Shepherd is a Gospel of Christ the King, an image that sheds light
upon the kingship of Christ.
Of course, the immediate precedents
for Jesus' use of this image are found in the Old Testament, where God
himself appears as the Shepherd of Israel. This image deeply shaped
Israel's piety, and it was especially in times of need that Israel found
a word of consolation and confidence in it. Probably the most beautiful
expression of this trustful devotion is Psalm 23: "The Lord is
my shepherd . .. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me" (Ps 23:1, 4). The
image of God as Shepherd is more fully developed in chapters 34-37 of
Ezekiel, whose vision is brought into the present and interpreted as
a prophecy of Jesus' ministry both in the Synoptic shepherd parables
and in the Johannine shepherd discourse. ' Faced with the self-seeking
shepherds of his own day, whom he challenges and accuses, Ezekiel proclaims
the promise that God himself will seek out his sheep and care for them.
"And I will bring them out from the peoples, and gather them from
the countries, and will bring them into their own land. ... I myself
will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says
the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed,
and I will bind up the crippled, and I will strengthen the weak, and
the fat and the strong I will watch over" (Ezek 34:13, 15-16).
The lost sheep
Faced with the murmuring of the Pharisees
and scribes over Jesus' table fellowship with sinners, the Lord tells
the parable of the ninety-nine sheep who remained in the fold and the
one lost sheep. The shepherd goes after the lost sheep, lifts it joyfully
upon his shoulders, and brings it home. Jesus puts this parable as a
question to his adversaries: Have you not read God's word in Ezekiel?
I am only doing what God, the true Shepherd, foretold: I wish to seek
out the sheep that are lost and bring the strayed back home.
The slain Shepherd
At a late stage in Old Testament prophecy,
the portrayal of the shepherd image takes yet another surprising and
thought-provoking turn that leads directly to the mystery of Jesus Christ.
Matthew recounts to us that on the way to the Mount of Olives after
the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples that the prophecy foretold
in Zechariah 13:7 is about to be fulfilled: "I will strike the
shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered" (Mt 26:31).
Zechariah does in fact present in this passage the vision of a Shepherd
"who by God's will patiently suffers death and in so doing initiates
the final turn of events" (Jeremias, TDNT, VI, pp. 500-1).
This surprising vision of the slain
Shepherd, who through his death becomes the Savior, is closely linked
to another image from the Book of Zechariah: "And I will pour out
on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion
and supplication. And they will look on him whom they have pierced.
They shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep
bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. . . . On that day
the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-Rimmon
in the plain of Megiddo.... On that day there shall be a fountain opened
for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them
from sin and uncleanness" (Zech 12:10, 11; 13:1). Hadad-Rimmon
was one of the dying and rising vegetation deities whom we encountered
earlier when we were explaining that bread presupposes the death and
resurrection of the grain. The death of the god, which is then followed
by resurrection, was celebrated with wild ritual laments; these rituals
impressed themselves upon those who witnessed them—as the Prophet and
his audience evidently did—as the absolute archetype of grief and lamentation.
For Zechariah, Hadad-Rimmon is one of the nonexistent divinities that
Israel despises and unmasks as mythical dreams. And yet, through the
ritual lamentation over him, he mysteriously prefigures someone who
really does exist.
An inner connection with the Servant
of God in Deutero-Isaiah is discernible here. In the writings of the
later Prophets, we see the figure of the suffering and dying Redeemer,
the Shepherd who becomes the lamb, even if some of the details are yet
to be filled in. K. Elliger comments apropos of this: "On the other
hand, however, his [Zechariah's] gaze penetrates with remarkable accuracy
into a new distance and circles around the figure of the one who was
pierced on the Cross at Golgotha. Admittedly, he does not clearly discern
the figure of Christ, although the allusion to Hadad-Rimmon does come
remarkably close to the mystery of the Resurrection, albeit no more
than close . . . and above all without clearly seeing the real connection
between the Cross and the fountain that cleanses sin and impurity"
("Das Buch," AID, 25, p. 172). While in Matthew's Gospel,
Jesus himself cites Zechariah 13:7-the image of the slain Shepherd—at
the beginning of the Passion narrative, John, by contrast, concludes
his account of the Lord's Crucifixion with an allusion to Zechariah
12:10: "They shall look on him whom they have pierced" (Jn
19:37). Now it becomes clear: the one who is slain and the Savior is
Jesus Christ, the crucified one.
Blood and water flow
John associates this with Zechariah's
prophetic vision of the fountain that purifies from sin and impurity:
Blood and water flow forth from Jesus' wounded side (cf. Jn 19:34).
Jesus himself, the one pierced on the Cross, is the fountain of purification
and healing for the whole world. John connects this further with the
image of the Paschal Lamb, whose blood has purifying power: "Not
a bone of him shall be broken" (Jn 19:36; cf. Ex 12:46). With that,
the circle is closed, joining the end to the beginning of the Gospel,
where the Baptist—catching sight of Jesus—said: "Behold, the Lamb
of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (Jn 1:29). The image
of the lamb, which in a different way plays a decisive role in the Book
of Revelation, thus encompasses the entire Gospel. It also points to
the deepest meaning of the shepherd discourse, whose center is precisely
Jesus' act of laying down his life.
Door of the sheep
Surprisingly, the shepherd discourse
does not begin with the words: "I am the Good Shepherd" (Jn
10:11), but with another image: "Truly, truly, I say to you, I
am the door of the sheep" (Jn 10:7). Jesus has already said: "Truly,
truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheep-fold by the door
but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber; but
he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep" (Jn 10:1f).
This can only really mean that Jesus is establishing the criterion for
those who will shepherd his flock after his ascension to the Father.
The proof of a true shepherd is that he enters through Jesus as the
door. For in this way it is ultimately Jesus who is the Shepherd—the
flock "belongs" to him alone.
"Feed my lambs" and "Follow me"
In practice, the way to enter through
Jesus as the door becomes apparent in the appendix to the Gospel in
chapter 21—when Peter is entrusted with Jesus' own office as Shepherd.
Three times the Lord says to Peter: "Feed my lambs" (or sheep—cf.
Jn 21:15-17). Peter is very clearly being appointed as the shepherd
of Jesus' sheep and established in Jesus' office as shepherd. For this
to be possible, however, Peter has to enter through the "door."
Jesus speaks of this entry—or, better, this being allowed to enter through
the door (cf. Jn 10:3)—when he asks Peter three times: Simon, son of
John, do you love me? Notice first the utterly personal aspect of this
calling: Simon is called by name—both by his own personal name, Simon,
and by a name referring to his ancestry. And he is asked about the love
that makes him one with Jesus. This is how he comes to the sheep "through
Jesus": He takes them not as his own—Simon Peter's—but as Jesus'
"flock." It is because he comes through the "door,"
Jesus, it is because he comes to them united with Jesus in love, that
the sheep listen to his voice, the voice of Jesus himself—they are following
not Simon, but Jesus, from whom and through whom Simon comes to them,
so that when he leads them it is Jesus himself who leads.
The whole investiture scene closes with
Jesus saying to Peter, "Follow me" (Jn 21:19). It recalls
the scene after Peter's first confession, where Peter tries to dissuade
the Lord from the way of Cross, and the Lord says to him, "Get
behind me," and then goes on to invite everyone to take up his
cross and "follow him" (cf. Mk 8:33ff.). Even the disciple
who now goes ahead of the others as shepherd must "follow"
Jesus. And as the Lord declares to Peter after conferring upon him the
office of shepherd, this includes accepting the cross, being prepared
to give his life. This is what it means in practice when Jesus says:
"I am the door." This is how Jesus himself remains the shepherd.
Good Shepherd: Four essential points
Let us return to the shepherd discourse
in chapter 10 of John's Gospel. It is only in the second part that Jesus
declares: "I am the Good Shepherd" (Jn 10:11). He takes upon
himself all the historical associations of the shepherd image, which
he then purifies, and brings to its full meaning. Four essential points
receive particular emphasis. First, the thief "comes only to steal
and kill and destroy" (Jn 10:10). He regards the sheep as part
of his property, which he owns and exploits for himself. All he cares
about is himself; he thinks the world revolves around him. The real
Shepherd does just the opposite. He does not take life, but gives it:
"I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (Jn
10:10).
This is Jesus' great promise: to give
life in abundance. Everyone wants life in abundance. But what is it?
What does life consist in? Where do we find it? When and how do we have
"life in abundance"? When we live like the prodigal son, squandering
the whole portion God has given us? When we live like the thief and
the robber, taking everything for ourselves alone? Jesus promises that
he will show the sheep where to find "pasture"—something they
can live on—and that he will truly lead them to the springs of life.
We are right to hear echoes of Psalm 23 in this: "He makes me lie
down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. . . . Thou
preparest a table before me in the presence. . . . Surely goodness and
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life" (Ps 23:2, 5fi).
There is an even more immediate echo of the shepherd discourse from
Ezekiel: "I will feed them with good pasture, and upon the mountain
country of Israel shall be their pasture" (Ezek 34:14).
But what does all this mean? We know
what sheep live on, but what does man live on? The Fathers saw Ezekiel's
reference to the mountain country of Israel and the shady and well-watered
pastures on its uplands as an image of the heights of Holy Scripture,
of the life-giving food of God's word. Although this is not the historical
sense of the text, in the end the Fathers saw correctly and, above all,
they understood Jesus himself correctly. Man lives on truth and on
being loved: on being loved by the truth. He needs God, the God who
draws close to him, interprets for him the meaning of life, and thus
points him toward the path of life. Of course, man needs bread, he needs
food for the body, but ultimately what he needs most is the Word, love,
God himself. Whoever gives him that gives him "life in abundance,"
and also releases the energies man needs to shape the earth intelligently
and to find for himself and for others the goods that we can have only
in common with others.
In this sense, there is an inner connection
between the bread discourse in chapter 6 and the shepherd discourse:
In both cases the issue is what man lives on. Philo, the great Jewish
philosopher of religion and contemporary of Jesus, said that God, the
true Shepherd of his people, had appointed his "firstborn Son,"
the Logos, to the office of Shepherd (Barrett, Gospel, p. 374).
The Johanmne shepherd discourse is not immediately connected with the
understanding of Jesus as Logos, and yet—in the specific context of
the Gospel of John—the point the discourse is making is that Jesus,
being the incarnate Word of God himself, is not just the Shepherd, but
also the food, the true "pasture." He gives life by giving
himself, for he is life (cf. Jn 1:4, 3:36, 11:25).
Knowing the Shepherd
This brings us to the second motif in
the shepherd discourse. It reveals the novelty that leads us beyond
Philo—not by means of new ideas, but by means of a new event, the Incarnation
and Passion of the Son: "The Good Shepherd lays down his life for
the sheep" (Jn 10:n). Just as the bread discourse does not merely
allude to the word, but goes on to speak of the Word that became flesh
and also gift "for the life of the world" (Jn 6:51), so too
the shepherd discourse revolves completely around the idea of Jesus
laying down his life for the "sheep." The Cross is at the
center of the shepherd discourse. And it is portrayed not as an act
of violence that takes Jesus unawares and attacks him from the outside,
but as a free gift of his very self: "I lay down my life, that
I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my
own accord" (Jn ionyf). Here Jesus interprets for us what happens
at the institution of the Eucharist: He transforms the outward violence
of the act of crucifixion into an act of freely giving his life for
others. Jesus does not give something, but rather he gives himself.
And that is how he gives life. We will have to return to these ideas
and explore them more deeply when we speak of the Eucharist and the
Paschal event. A third essential motif of the Shepherd discourse is
the idea that the shepherd and his flock know each other: "He calls
his own sheep by name and leads them out. . . . The sheep follow him,
for they know his voice" (Jn 10:4f). "I am the Good Shepherd;
I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know
the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep" (Jn 10:14f.).
These verses present two striking sets of interrelated ideas that we
need to consider if we are to understand what is meant by "knowing."
First of all, knowing and belonging are interrelated. The Shepherd knows
the sheep because they belong to him, and they know him precisely because
they are his. Knowing and belonging (the Greek text speaks of the sheep
as the shepherd's "own," ta tdia) are actually one
and the same thing. The true shepherd does not "possess" the
sheep as if they were a thing to be used and consumed; rather, they
"belong" to him, in the context of their knowing each other,
and this "knowing" is an inner acceptance. It signifies an
inner belonging that goes much deeper than the possession of things.
Let us illustrate this with an example
from our own lives. No human being "belongs" to another in
the way that a thing does. Children are not their parents' "property";
spouses are not each other's "property." Yet they do "belong"
to each other in a much deeper way than, for example, a piece of wood
or a plot of land, or whatever else we call "property." Children
"belong" to their parents, yet they are free creatures of
God in their own right, each with his own calling and his own newness
and uniqueness before God. They belong to each other, not as property,
but in mutual responsibility. They belong to each other precisely by
accepting one another's freedom and by supporting one another in love
and knowledge—and in this communion they are simultaneously free and
one for all eternity.
In the same way, the "sheep,"
who after all are people created by God, images of God, do not belong
to the shepherd as if they were things—though that is what the
thief and robber thinks when he takes possession of them. Herein lies
the distinction between the owner, the true Shepherd, and the robber.
For the robber, for the ideologues and the dictators, human beings are
merely a thing that they possess. For the true Shepherd, however, they
are free in relation to truth and love; the Shepherd proves that they
belong to him precisely by knowing and loving them, by wishing them
to be in the freedom of the truth. They belong to him through the oneness
of "knowing," through the communion in the truth that the
Shepherd himself is. This is why he does not use them, but gives
his life for them. Just as Logos and Incarnation, Logos and Passion
belong together, so too knowing and self-giving are ultimately one.
Let us listen once more to these decisive
words: "I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me,
as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life
for the sheep" (Jn 10:14f). This statement contains a second set
of interrelated ideas that we need to consider. The mutual knowing of
shepherd and sheep is interwoven with the mutual knowing of Father and
Son. The knowing that links Jesus with "his own" exists within
the space opened up by his "knowing" oneness with the Father.
Jesus' "own" are woven into the Trinitarian dialogue; we will
see this again when we consider the high-priestly prayer. This will
help us to see that Church and Trinity are mutually interwoven. This
mterpenetration of two levels of knowing is crucial for understanding
the essence of the "knowing" of which John's Gospel speaks.
Beyond the empirical and the tangible
Applying all of the above to the world
in which we live, we can say this: It is only in God and in light of
God that we rightly know man. Any "self-knowledge" that restricts
man to the empirical and the tangible fails to engage with man's true
depth. Man knows himself only when he learns to understand himself in
light of God, and he knows othersonly when he sees the mystery of God
in them. For the shepherd in Jesus' service, this means that he has
no right to bind men to himself to his own little "I." The
mutual knowing that binds him to the "sheep" entrusted to
his care must have a different goal: It must enable them to lead one
another into God, toward God; it must enable them to encounter each
other in the communion formed around knowing and loving God. The shepherd
in Jesus' service must always lead beyond himself in order to enable
others to find their full freedom; and therefore he must always go beyond
himself into unity with Jesus and with the Trinitarian God.
Jesus' own "I" is always opened
into "being with" the Father; he is never alone, but is forever
receiving himself from and giving himself back to the Father. "My
teaching is not mine"; his "I" is opened up into the
Trinity. Those who come to know him "see" the Father; they
enter into this communion of his with the Father. It is precisely this
transcendent dialogue, which encounter with Jesus involves, that once
more reveals to us the true Shepherd, who does not take possession of
us, but leads us to the freedom of our being by leading us into communion
with God and by giving his own life.
The motif of unity
Let us turn to the last principal motif
of the shepherd discourse: the motif of unity. The shepherd discourse
in Ezekiel emphasizes this motif: "The word of the Lord came to
me: 'Son of Man, take a stick and write on it, "For Judah, and
the children of Israel associated with him"; then take another
stick and write upon it, "For Joseph (the stick of Ephraim) and
all the house of Israel associated with him"; and join them together
into one stick, that they may become one in your hand. . . . "Thus
says the Lord God: Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the
nations .. . and I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains
of Israel . . . And they shall be no longer two nations, and no longer
divided into two kingdoms'"" (Ezek 37:15-17, 2if). God is
the Shepherd who reunites divided and scattered Israel into a single
people.
Jesus' shepherd discourse takes up this
vision, while very decidedly enlarging the scope of the promise: "I
have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also,
and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one Shepherd"
(Jn 10:16). Jesus the Shepherd is sent not only to gather the scattered
sheep of the house of Israel, but to gather together all "the children
of God who are scattered abroad" (Jn 11:52). In this sense, Jesus'
promise that there will be one Shepherd and one flock is equivalent
to the risen Lord's missionary command in Matthew's Gospel: "Go
therefore and make all nations my disciples" (Mt 28:19); tne
same idea appears again in the Acts of the Apostles, where the
risen Lord says: "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in
all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8).
This brings to light the inner reason
for this universal mission: There is only one Shepherd. The Logos who
became man in Jesus is the Shepherd of all men, for all have been created
through the one Word; however scattered they may be, yet as coming from
him and bound toward him they are one. However widely scattered they
are, all people can become one through the true Shepherd, the Logos
who became man in order to lay down his life and so to give life in
abundance (cf. Jn 10:10).
Shepherd: typical image for the Christian world
From very early on—the evidence goes
back to the third century—the vision of the shepherd became a typical
image of the Christian world. In the surrounding culture, the Christian
people encountered the figure of a man carrying a sheep, which to an
overstressed urban society expressed the popular dream of the simple
life. But the Christian people were immediately able to reinterpret
this figure in light of Scripture. Psalm 23 is an example that comes
to mind directly: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he
makes me lie down in green pastures. . . . Even though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil... . Surely goodness
and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell
in the house of the Lord for ever." They recognized Christ as the
Good Shepherd who leads us through life's dark valleys; the Shepherd
who himself walked through the valley of the shadow of death; the Shepherd
who also knows the way through the night of death and does not abandon
me in this final solitude, but leads me out of this valley of death
into the green pastures of life, to the place of "light, happiness
and peace" (Roman Canon). Clement of Alexandria expressed this
trust in the Shepherd's guidance in verses that convey something of
the hope and confidence felt by the early Church in the midst of frequent
sufferings and constant persecutions: "Lead, holy Shepherd, your
spiritual sheep: Lead, king, your pure children. Christ's footsteps
are the way to heaven" (Paedogogus, III, 12, 101; Van der
Meer, Menschensohn, p. 23).
But naturally, Christians were also
reminded of the parable of the shepherd who follows after the lost sheep,
lifts it onto his shoulders, and brings it home, as well as the shepherd
discourse of John's Gospel. For the Church Fathers, the two texts flowed
into each other. The Shepherd who sets off to seek the lost sheep is
the eternal Word himself, and the sheep that he lovingly carries home
on his shoulders is humanity, the human existence that he took upon
himself. In his Incarnation and Cross he brings home the stray sheep,
humanity; he brings me home, too. The incarnate Logos is the true "sheep-bearer"—the
Shepherd who follows after us through the thorns and deserts of our
life. Carried on his shoulders, we come home. He gave his life for us.
He himself is life.
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