The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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to be our common lot. So great is his certainty that he is willing to sacrifice his present body for a promised body.
11. Thus John orchestrates a radical redefinition of the body. He begins with flesh.
12. John probes the double nature of flesh as sacrifice and sustenance, the lamb as well as bread, redefining them both. The body is also breath, and John redefines the wind that blows through our body carrying its chorus of voices.
13. He must effect a radical change in our accustomed vocabulary. The whole of John’s book is dedicated to precisely this change. From the outset he renames the essentials of everyday life—bread and water.
14. As Jesus gives them a new context and resonance, they gradually become for his listeners new things in the world. It is a brilliant strategy because as we come to use his new names, we internalize Jesus’ claims for “Eternal life.” Jesus’ dying into a living life, that is, exemplified in the transformation of his own body.
15. Material becomes immaterial becomes both and neither, an everlasting body that passes through solid walls but acquiesces to the touch of a human hand. Thus by the life he portrays, John redefines the body as immortal.
16. Jesus is not simply the model of this body, but is in himself the body shared, inviting his followers to partake of it (6:53). In the act of eating is achieved total identity with Jesus. By this John does not merely put on the body of Jesus, like Thomas, but becomes the body of Jesus.
17. Mortal/immortal, all is contained in this new body. In Jesus is identified the real. “The Word was made flesh” (1:14), encompassing the cosmos as well as all the words of John’s book.
18. Thus in the body of Jesus exists the entire world—animal (lamb), vegetable (bread), and mineral (temple). Jesus declares himself to be each of these. Self-generated and generating, he comprises all the elements of the world, including language itself, outside of whom nothing can be known.
19. All words are one word, and that one word is new. John’s book is the dictionary of these words that are the one Word.
20. The Jews assumed that “sacrifice” was their own word, but by becoming the sacrificial lamb Jesus makes it his own. The disciples and the people assumed that they understood the word “bread,” and the Samaritan woman the word “water,” but they all discover differently. Nicodemus knew the word “wind,” but Jesus renames it for him.
21. Going against the grain, Jesus’ stark invitation to eat his bread-flesh remains. John forces a redefinition that effects transformation. And thereby accomplishes his ultimate aim that the “you” in his fervent wish “that you might believe,” his listeners and readers, be transformed.
The Lamb
Painfully aware that his body is death in life, John desires a life-in-death body. This exalted conviction that one can possess life greater than life—“eternal life”—is the wellspring of his book. An encounter with Jesus is the source of this conviction, his book its lyrical expression. So powerful is his experience that he wants to inhabit the body of the man Jesus, the sacrificial lamb, who is alive to the degree that death is a presence.
Jesus is called the Lamb at the beginning of John’s book, but becomes a shepherd by the end (10:11). How can Jesus be both the shepherd and the sheep? Though he never refers to himself directly as the lamb, Jesus’ understanding of himself as a sacrificial lamb pervades John’s book. And he reinforces his role as shepherd at the end of the book by his injunction to Peter, “Feed my sheep.”
Jesus as sacrificial lamb is one of the book’s great ironies. His life given to the proclamation of eternal life is bent on death. To be obsessed with life is to be obsessed with death because Jesus’ life is incomplete without death. John sets this up in the beginning by having John the Baptist hail Jesus twice as the “Lamb” (1:29, 36). Clearly, John wants us to identify his body with the sacrificial lamb, haunting us throughout the book with Jesus’ words about his “hour” of death “not yet come.” To this end John deftly arranges events, counter to the other accounts of Jesus’ life, so that his sacrifice on the cross coincides with the Passover sacrifice of lambs in the Temple.
The metaphoric lamb at the beginning foreshadows this literal sacrifice on the cross. We are not in the end allowed the comfort of metaphor. Jesus becomes the real lamb slain. Always John insists on the reality of the body sacrificed, a stubborn insistence designed to make us uncomfortable.
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Because Jesus’ life can be completed only when his body is given to death, he provokes all around him in an effort to achieve death. At one point or another, every group he speaks to wants to stone him, and he must go by another path or into another country to escape. Even his brothers and disciples cannot dissuade him from inciting the powers that be to murder. Jesus has a knack for offending everyone.
More than Socrates even, Jesus is bent on death. His entire life in John’s account carries within it death, while Socrates in Plato’s account provokes one jury in a single climactic incident. Jesus is the master of extended provocation. We understand W. H. Auden’s visceral reaction: the difference between Jesus and Socrates or Buddha or Confucius or Mohammed is that “None of the other arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him.’”
Jesus the provocateur is hard to take. But by this he teaches a new language of sacrifice that allows both his disciples and enemies to reconcile within life his stubborn insistence on the body of death, which is at the heart of Jesus’ character.
We can’t get around this, and John shows us the way through. He presents Jesus as systematically carrying out a program to inculcate a new vocabulary of sacrifice, subverting the traditional term. His aim is to bring the Jews into a new understanding, and so become new people—believers. At the same time, Jesus wishes to bring his followers into a new understanding of the body. He must convince them that his body can be eaten but not consumed. The new body of the believer can be sustained by the one Jesus, not as a substitute but as the very body itself. In short, the believer can eat the body of Jesus and have it too.
John accomplishes this by expanding Jesus’ sacrificial role to include the scapegoat of Jewish tradition (Lev 16:8). The scapegoat is an appropriately ambiguous figure, for he disappears, dying to the community, yet lives in exile. Moreover, John employs the clever strategy of having the high priest Caiaphas introduce the notion of the scapegoat. He says to the Jews, “You know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (11:49–50). We savor the irony that the Jews themselves make Jesus’ identity as sacrifice explicit, articulating what Jesus’ disciples failed to see, who continue their efforts to prevent Jesus from being stoned. Nonetheless, Jesus’ purpose and the Jews’ intent finally converge on the trajectory of death (11:53).
The Jews and his disciples may not all have accepted Jesus’ new vocabulary, assimilating his redefinition of sacrifice, but Jesus manages to get them to support him with action. We can only marvel at his powers of manipulation, just as we admire John the writer’s powers in leading us to accept the new terms of sacrifice.
As scapegoat Jesus can have it both ways, being sacrifice and survivor, lamb and shepherd. At the beginning Jesus is the powerless lamb; in the end it is his listeners who become helpless sheep as he becomes the shepherd. They accept, that is, his language and concomitant power. Calling his followers “sheep” (10:11) emphasizes his authoritative role. But, paradoxically, this is why they come to accept him as a lamb, a new kind of sacrifice, a literal self-sacrifice. The sacrifice of the lamb is no longer the promise of an action as in Passover (Exod 12:13) but the act itself.
As shepherd Jesus is both a political subject within the community and not. He is both the quick (to the new community) and the dead (to a past community). John is no doubt familiar with the long tradition of the Greek phrase “shepherd of the people,” which appears in the Iliad as the title for a king or feudal lord. Yet Jesus’ self-understanding, of course, goes beyond the political. Jesus can say with Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, “I never kept sheep,” but “My soul is like a shepherd.”