The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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Jesus in his parable of the sheepfold (10:1–4) continues his redefinition of sacrifice, wresting it from the purely traditional Jewish context. He knows the power of figurative language, which he admits to using (16:25), including puns (e.g., “wind,” 3:8) and parables, to create new language from old. John’s abrupt transition from urban to pastoral with this move to the parable of the shepherd is a shock, a way of calling our attention to the project of redefinition. And he is keenly aware of his role in this, self-consciously interpreting (2:21) and selecting (20:30). The shock of the change in imagery reinforces the shock in change of vocabulary, the redefining and reinterpreting that is so important to Jesus.
Yet this doesn’t wholly explain our uneasiness. The strangeness of Jesus’ shepherd/sheep imagery goes beyond John’s shift here to the metaphoric, where he had been resolutely literal with the lamb. The lamb begins as a figure of speech and ends as the literal, slaughtered body.
Jesus invites us at first in his parable to see literal sheep but ultimately turns them into metaphor. Shepherd and sheep lie uneasily in John’s book. Mainly taking place in the city, the book does not readily admit them. Because of this his imagery seems almost nostalgic. True to his bent, he transforms the innocence of the lamb into the experience of blood. But the sheep restore some of their innocence, associations of a past place and future time. They retain their aura of innocence by remaining a figure of speech.
In the countryside Jesus is the shepherd. In the city he is the lamb destined for slaughter. The pastoral seems to call the urban into question. Jesus’ journeying to the country or retreating to a mountain is movement toward life. Throughout the book Jesus oscillates between the country and the city, between the periphery and the center. John exploits this tension by subtly informing us that in the center, in the city is death. When Jesus retreats to the periphery, he is holding death off. The closer to the city, the closer to a celebration and feast, the closer Jesus is to becoming himself the feast.
John expands the pastoral arena of sacrifice, however, deepening its significance. Jesus’ metaphor of the seed dramatically shifts our new vocabulary of sacrifice from the animal to the vegetable world, as if ultimately rooting it in the rich tradition of fertility religions, which the prophets like Isaiah abhorred (Isa. 17:8–11). More important, the parable intensifies while completing Jesus’ program of redefining sacrifice: “And Jesus answered them, saying, the hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, Verily, I say unto you, unless a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone: but if it die, it brings forth much fruit. He that loves his life shall lose it; and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (12:23–25).
The central paradox—lose one’s life in order to save it—is impossible. This new vocabulary of sacrifice is frighteningly literal. We instinctively turn away.
But John insists. He puts these words at the center of his book, just as they are at the center of Jesus’ life. Their great aphoristic force resounds down through the centuries. Yet they’re also repellent with overtones of hatred for the world. Do they allow room for Jesus’ love of wine at Cana? The sensuous caress of Mary’s hair brushing his feet? Friendship for Martha and Lazarus that moves him to tears? Or the spirited even joyous dialog with friends like Peter, and Zen exchange with strangers like Nicodemus? Jesus loves the world one moment and despises it the next. We are returned to the paradox of the slaughtered lamb.
The notion of sacrifice now extends beyond the Jews. Jesus subverts their religious understanding of sacrifice and expands it to a grain of wheat, encompassing the whole living world. This constitutes a new vocabulary. It is no longer limited to a specific religious context, nor can we take refuge in the lamb or the seed as metaphor. And uneasiness with the pastoral as a protective space accompanies this, dispelling any whiff of nostalgia. The program of redefinition is radical. John keeps returning us to the literal, sacrificial body. And he moves relentlessly forward, increasing the pressure on his audience’s old understanding of life, as he redefines bread.
Bread &
Our desire is appeased only by feeding on Thee, bread of immortality.
—Miguel de Unamuno
The seed in Jesus’ metaphor, sacrificed to the mill and ground up, is transformed into bread. The fruit of the vine, crushed, becomes wine. Bread and wine presume sacrifice, but more than this they come into being by metamorphosis. The vegetable is literally transformed to animal.
Bread & wine were married long before John wrote his book. They are a perfect symmetry, an ancient expression for eating and drinking. Ever since, as in the verses of Omar Kayyam’s Rubaiyat or in the space of Picasso’s still lifes, their marriage has been reaffirmed. Bread & wine have become part of the furniture of our mind. John, however, breaks this symmetry.
He is explicit in more than one place about the flesh of Jesus being bread. Yet despite Jesus’ radical invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood (6:56), nowhere does John explicitly equate blood with wine. His readers fill in. Having experienced the magic of the marriage at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, they complete the implied equation. John, however, refuses to make the obvious move. While he lets the marriage at Cana revolve in our minds without interpretation, he quotes Jesus at length in two increasingly demanding interpretive discourses on the miracle of feeding 5000 people with “five barley loaves” and “two small fishes.”
By not allowing us the complement of bread-equals-flesh, refusing to complete the wine-equals equation, John carves out space for a redefinition of bread. And, as we would expect, his anxiety fills this space. Because he is obsessed with the body as a destined sacrifice to mortality, he desires nothing short of an “everlasting life,” immortality, as do we all in health and prosperity. Bread by being flesh brings life. John desires above all to possess a transformed body, one that will be a true sacrifice and “live forever” (6:58).
The Language of Bread
Bread redefined fulfills this promise. Simply stated, if you eat this new kind of bread, you will “not die,” possessing what Jesus calls “eternal life” (6:50, 54). This is the most difficult redefinition that any of Jesus’ hearers and John’s readers will be asked to accept. For it demands a radical reassessment of where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we’re going. Our accustomed vocabulary crumbles. Patterned on Elisha the prophet’s feeding the multitude with 20 loaves of barley and some ears of corn (2 Kgs 42), John uses the simplest of stories. Jesus’ feeding the 5000 has very much the feel of a folktale in its attention to two of these and five of those, yet it is the fulcrum for his onslaught of redefinition on that simplest of commodities—bread.
“Now there was much grass in the place” (6:10), John tells us at the beginning of his story. A curious and charming detail, but we’re puzzled, not knowing why he would include such a seemingly irrelevant, even trivial fact. Not until the end of the story when Jesus is about to lay out his radical redefinition of bread, does John satisfy our curiosity. He sets “grass” in opposition to “desert.”
Grass, we discover, is the scene of Jesus’ new vocabulary of bread, while the “desert” is the scene of the conventional language of bread. The miraculous bread of the past, the manna that saved the wandering Israelites in the desert, is not the bread he’s interested in. The people themselves make the point that Jesus’ miracle of the loaves has precedent in the miracle of the manna in the wilderness. This gives Jesus an opportunity to interpret his own act. John frames Jesus’ double discourses with references to manna (6:31, 58), exploding within this space the people’s conventional understanding of bread.
First, bread is political. Second, bread is literal, always and insistently literal. The people satisfied their hunger with barley loaves, not figurative but fragrant bread with texture and color. Barley, moreover, is the bread of the poor who cannot afford wheat. Just as literally, and these two meanings of bread are in the end one, bread takes the political stage. For after eating, the multitude wants to make Jesus king (6:15).
But Jesus retreats to a mountain. The people understand fully that breaking bread can mean breaking the present political order. In