The Book of Unknowing. David S. Herrstrom
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Jesus’ words in order to make his new vocabulary safe for society. And yet the Jews’ question, which assumes Jesus’ literal intention, their question about how to “eat” the “flesh” of Jesus (6:52), remains.
Such a hard question that even John blinks. He is, no doubt, briefly in the company of those disciples which he records as being offended by Jesus’ demand (6:61). This reaction causes Jesus to attempt a softening of his own words. He retreats and blunts their literal edge by introducing the categories of “spirit” and “flesh,” opening the possibility of a metaphoric interpretation of the words. And, as if he didn’t quite believe this tack himself, he concludes with a sigh, “But there are some of you that believe not” (6:64).
The spirit/flesh opposition rings hollow in face of Jesus’ insistent command to “eat,” given even greater weight by the oracular “Verily, verily” still pounding in his listeners’ ears. Four times, we remember, he demanded that they eat his flesh and drink his blood (6:53–56). And the sigh, merely admitting the obvious, is at best a plea for sympathy. At worst, in his follow up, “No man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father” (6:65), it is sour grapes. Jesus is desperate. Experiencing the loss of “many” disciples as well as his own brothers, he asserts that he knew many in his audience would never believe anyway. We hear the dry throat-clearing of rationalization here and shuffling feet in the background of disciples leaving. Unable to convince all his disciples, let alone his fellow Jews, he throws the argument for eating his flesh back in their face, saying it’s a given that they will not believe, and he knew this would be the result anyway.
Having felt the assault of Jesus’ words, we are not convinced by this back pedaling. His discourses still whirl in our head like swords.
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Some of the disciples continue to follow unflinchingly; others take offense and desert Jesus. But John blazes a third path. Rocked by the full force of the new language that Jesus has unloosed in his monologues, John chooses to live on its edge. He suspends its meaning, not grasping after certainty. Familiar territory because it bears the mark of prophecy, an obscurity that “rouzes the faculties to act,” in William Blake’s phrase. Jesus’ outrageous demand to feast on himself, masquerading as an invitation, leaves John exhilarated and uneasy. Given the strangeness of this invitation—to participate in a feast in which the eater and the eaten literally become one—it couldn’t be otherwise. Even in expressing its strangeness with great power, John cannot escape a nagging sense of its absurdity.
This allows John commitment and distance simultaneously. He achieves a suspension of meaning, in short, evidenced by his parodying the feast of Jesus. The supper in the upper room with his disciples just before his crucifixion is not the feast itself but the traditional Passover meal. Its expanded meaning now includes the new lamb and new bread, of course, but their literal outworking must wait until after the crucifixion and resurrection. The true feast of Jesus, that is, held in abeyance. In this suspended moment, John uses Judas, whom Jesus had earlier fingered in his discourse on bread (6:64), to turn the supper into a parody. Referring again to the betrayal of Judas, Jesus now says to his disciples, “He that eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me” (13:18). Rather than becoming one with Jesus, that is, the act of eating effects the opposite. Because it releases pressure in his own mind, John welcomes the irony that the bread in this context, which alludes to the “true” bread of immortality according to Jesus’ redefinition, brings death.
Yet the question of how to “eat” Jesus’ “flesh” continues to haunt John. For in the last scene of his book he echoes the earlier scene on the grass by the sea with the 5000, the occasion of Jesus’ redefining “bread.” On the shore of Tiberias Jesus invites his disciples to join him in a meal of bread and fish. Given the charge that “bread” has acquired in Jesus’ discourse, his invitation here is disarmingly casual, “Come and dine” (21:12). This is the true last supper. John admits no irony, and we’re moved by the compassionate and extraordinarily vivid scene. Simple and beautiful, their meal seems to promise resolution. Yet it neither answers nor dismisses the question.
Serving bread and exhorting Peter in turn to “feed” others (“lambs” and “sheep”) is Jesus’ definitive showing of himself. Breaking bread is his signature, and John rightfully insists that in this lies the recognition scene (21:12), despite the miracle that the disciples had just witnessed of Jesus multiplying the fish in their net (a variation on the earlier miracle with the 5000). The meal is wonderfully self-contained, then, begging the very question that John knows it raises. Because swirling around the scene is the identity of Jesus being bread. Separated from breaking bread but integral to the scene, his being bread remains present in the air like an electric field. John chooses suspension without demanding resolution, just as he never demands closure of language itself. Bread & . . . ? Bread & fish? Hardly. John leaves the symmetry broken, the doors of meaning wide open, allowing other voices to drift through.
Voices
“Mary,” Jesus says, and she turns and says “Rabboni,” which as John explains means “Master” (20:16). Until he utters her name, Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. It is not the sight of Jesus, but the sound of his voice that identifies him. A recognition scene so delicious (nothing like it until Shakespeare) that the hairs lift on the back of my neck.
John isolates and orchestrates the tender drama beautifully. He has the men leave Mary who then converses with angels in the place where Jesus was buried, which sets up her mistaking Jesus for the gardener. Mary is distraught, imagining angels who perhaps can offer hope in the face of despair (their highest function), and thus doesn’t recognize Jesus whom she has known for years.
The climax in Jesus’ speaking her name carries great power. We know the immediate recognition that comes with the sound of a person’s voice, the tone more powerful than the sight when, for example, we’re so surprised at the presence before our very eyes of a person we did not expect to see that we don’t see them but instantly know them by their voice.
From the outset of his book John makes this signature power of the voice clear. John the Baptist “stands and hears” Jesus, not seeing him so much as “rejoicing” in his voice (3:29). The emphasis is on Jesus speaking and his audience hearing, not on their visually recognizing him. His essential being is in his voice.
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We are our voice. More than our physical features or characteristic gestures we are most essentially individuals in our voice—sighs, words, laughter—our self made public. The voice carries the inside over to the outside. It is the revelation of the inner body. Conversely, moving from flesh to voice is to push more deeply into the body, probe further, approach the life itself. For the power of the speaking voice is in its embodiment of life.
The grand opening of John’s book is a hymn to this power. “In the beginning was the Speaking, and the Speaking was with God, and the Speaking was God.” John’s logos, commonly translated “Word,” is not the word on the page but the word spoken. This is the source of power throughout John’s book.
Now hear this voice, John’s hymn of invocation to the word uttered, the origin of what is:
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him;
and outside him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shines in darkness;
and the darkness comprehended it not (1:1–5).
The spectacular conceit of a poet: the whole world created from the word. And who is not moved by John’s grand speaking in this cosmic opening. We are mesmerized by his repetition of the “Word” and stirred by his exalted correspondences: word = life, word = light. The word so potent it baffles the dark. John announces the light/darkness theme in a sublimely sweeping way, at the same time his