Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (32 page)

At the
Last Supper, where the other evangelists place the institution of the
Eucharist, John (who makes the institution
of the Eucharist part of the multiplication of loaves and fish) sets his own singular ceremony:

After he has taken his place at table once more, Jesus gives a long Johannine speech, the gist of which is “If I, the Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you must wash one another’s feet.” Even though the inflated rhetoric can only be the work of a later sensibility, the action itself, as well as its essential meaning, may well stem from an authentic memory.

Only John’s Gospel offers a clear explanation of why the Jewish leaders had to resort to Pilate, the Roman procurator of
Judea, to get a judgment on Jesus, for as they retort to Pilate: “We are not permitted to put a man to death.” Only John explains why the reluctant Pilate, knowing Jesus to be innocent, renders the death sentence: “If you set him free,” shout the Jews, “you are no ‘Friend of Caesar.’ Whoever makes himself king is the Emperor’s rival.” Only John mentions that Jesus’s trial before Pilate took place outside Pilate’s praetorium in a courtyard known as Lithostroton, or “Pavement of Stone.” Outside the
Antonia Fortress, probable site of Jerusalem’s praetorium,
there has been excavated a courtyard of some 2,300 square yards that was paved with massive stones more than a yard square and a foot thick. It is likely that upon this Lithostroton Jesus of Nazareth once stood and faced the Roman official who held life and death in his hands. Did the Beloved Disciple, pictured in John’s Gospel as the only male disciple to follow Jesus all the way to crucifixion, loiter at the edges of the Lithostroton and overhear the frantic dialogue set down in John?

The pleasures of John’s Gospel tend to be more veiled than those of the other evangelists. In John, the delightful parables of the Synoptics are nowhere to be found, replaced by dignified but boring speeches that sometimes run to several pages. The author, determined not to let us forget who Jesus is, can overwhelm us with airless solemnity that leaves us begging for the
sinewy, down-to-earth Jesus of the Synoptics. John’s Jesus is always in control. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus dies on the cross in unspeakable pain, inarticulately, with “a loud cry,” almost a terrifying shriek. In Luke, having forgiven everyone and promised Paradise to the Good Thief, he speaks his last, elegant words to his Father, quoting Psalm 31: “Father,
into your hands do I commit my spirit.”
Luke is already halfway toward the Johannine theology of the God-Messiah. But in John, Jesus at the point of death remains in control of everything. “All is fulfilled,” says the Johannine Jesus. “And bowing his head,” writes John, “he gave up his spirit”—which henceforth belongs to the whole world.

J
OHN’S
J
ESUS
is the
gravitas
-encrusted Christ of the ancient creeds, of tasteless religious art, of German passion plays and Hollywood movies. He is the immobile icon loved by ecclesiasts and theologians. It is as if John’s symbolic reverence has made an icon too awesome to be touched by the soiled and unconsecrated hands of ordinary humans—even though it is in John’s Gospel that
Thomas the Doubter is invited by Christ, crucified, lanced, and now risen, to “put your finger here and feel my hands. Give me your hand; put it into my side.” The weight of the human and fleshly, the sweaty and smudged is finally overcome in John by the weightless illumination of the divine. This is the same process of iconization that will in later centuries lift
Mary of Nazareth out of the Galilean hills and enthrone her amid the celestial constellations as
theotokos
, god-bearer,
Mother of God, fresh incarnation of the Great Mother of Eurasia, replacement for the dethroned Diana of the Ephesians.

Like all religious innovations, John’s theology grew out of
a culture and must be seen as part of a developing cultural process if it is to be understood. This culture was one of Hellenized, even Asiatic pomp and rhetorical exaggeration that began in Alexander’s appreciation of Eastern ceremony. The cynical Roman senators, forever declaring one Caesar or another to be god, didn’t take their own decrees literally; but they approved of the awe-inspiring marble statues and the overpowering clouds of incense, the shining vessels and the smartly togaed devotees, all bowing in unison: these were standard methods for creating political stability, based in part on popular gullibility. In the centuries following John’s presentation of his high Christology, poetic and liturgical hyperbole will sometimes calcify into rigid dogma till everything the Church possesses—from consecrated priests to consecrated bread, from sacred books and vessels to Paschal candle, lauded in extravagant, ecstatic song on Easter night—will seem to glow in the light of its own divinization.

Many who are comfortable with the
Synoptic tradition and even with Paul feel that here at the threshold of John’s Gospel they must part company with the
New Testament. They may be believers or half-believers, Jews, humanitarians, agnostics—all of whom may cheer the insights and advances of Paul and the Synoptic evangelists but find themselves abashed and compassless once they come into the field of John’s unearthly glow. Nor is it only the exaggerated God-Man that renders them uneasy. For it is in John that we can locate not only the sure source of the exalted doctrines of later Christianity (not all of which even every Christian can assent to) but also a spirit of touchy exclusivity that will surface repeatedly and with increasingly devastating results throughout the course of Western history.

In John, “the Jews” are enemies, often (though not always) designated with contempt, the lost people who “have no king but Caesar.” This attitude cannot have stemmed from the time of Jesus, when he and all his followers were Jewish. Nor can it be located in the mid-century controversies of the early Jesus Movement, when all the leaders—men like
James, Peter, and
Paul (that self-described “Jew of Jews”)—were deeply aware of their Jewish roots and thought of themselves only as preachers of a fulfilled Judaism. The anti-Judaism of John is traceable rather to the last decades of the first century, when the tug-of-war between rabbis and
Messianists had heated to the boiling point, and Messianists were being forcibly ejected from Eurasian synagogues and formally cursed in Jewish liturgies. The sense of loss that resulted from this hateful ostracism should not be minimized—though we cannot but be mindful of it, for it still throbs in the hurt feelings of the Fourth Gospel, retrojected into its account of the life of Jesus by a mixed community of Jews and gentiles of the 90s, probably now removed from
Palestine to
Ephesus but still smarting over the wounds of their final rejection. Unlike, for instance, Paul’s gentile churches, the Johannine community had retained—through the presence of the
Beloved Disciple and, after his death, through its reverence for his very Palestinian, very Jewish memories—a keen appreciation of its Jewish identity, so the final breakdown of
koinonia
between Jews and Christians may have been far more painful for the Johannine than for many other Christian churches.

But if it may be said that the rabbinical Jews won this first-century tug-of-war and continued to hold the upper hand for the next two centuries, the tide will turn in the early fourth century with the emperor
Constantine’s induction as a
Christian catechumen, after which Christians will spend the next sixteen and a half centuries rounding up Jews, hunting them down, depriving them of civil rights, torturing, massacring, and ridiculing to their heart’s content. This centuries-long pogrom is the lasting shame of Christianity, even more of a blot than its centuries of crusades against the Muslim “infidels.” If John, writing in the heat of controversy, can no more be blamed for the subsequent history of European
anti-Semitism than can the
Birkat ha-minim
, the Jewish ritual curse on the heretical Christians, his gospel is still capable of leaving Jewish readers purple with rage and Christians red with embarrassment.

It may even be the rejection by Judaism that lit the furnace of the Johannine community’s high Christology. As has so often been the case in religious history, the very thing that one is rejected for becomes the treasure one must never give up—a treasure that is emphasized, exaggerated, and made into one’s badge of honor. It is just such a psychological process that creates obsessive positions that can bear no compromise—and that finally makes dialogue (between Jews and Christians, as well as among varieties of Christians) impossible.

B
Y
THE
TIME
the First Letter of John was written, however, in the first decade of the second century, the Jewish-Christian schism that has left its traces in John’s Gospel was already fading into history, and the Johannine community had found new enemies.
Gnostics were giving John’s Gospel an interpretive spin that horrified more “orthodox” believers, for the Gnostics completely ignored Jesus’s human dimension and reveled excessively in John’s repeated emphasis on his divinity.
The
Gnostics preferred to believe that Jesus had never been human anyway, just a spirit who appeared to be human (like a Greek god temporarily assuming a fleshly body). Though John’s was much more to their taste than were the other gospels,
John the Elder was appalled by their attachment.

His response to this theological challenge, however, was brittle, captious, and unforgiving: the Gnostics and other opponents are all “
antichrists” and “children of the devil,” and none of the good people are to have anything to do with them. C. H. Dodd, one of the greatest modern exegetes of the
Johannine literature, once asked thoughtfully: “Does truth prevail more if we are not on speaking terms with those whose view of truth differs from ours?” It is a question that people like John the Elder seem never to consider.

The church of the
Beloved Disciple had become like a species on an island that geological changes have cut off from the mainland. For many years, it developed separately—from Jews, from “heretics,” even from other “orthodox” Christians. Without permanent offices of administration and authority, like the bishops and deacons of other Christian communities, it was wholly dependent on individual, prophetic inspiration—from “the Spirit”—and it rejected the notion that anyone but Jesus could be
pastor
, that is, their shepherd. Jesus was, as he had said, “the Good Shepherd,” and we were all his sheep without distinction. Like John’s Gospel itself, this church possessed intellectual and social treasures unknown in the other Christian communities, which were growing together slowly into the
Great Church of succeeding centuries. For all its problems, the high Christology of the Johannine community gave its theology a profundity and piercing clarity that other churches lacked; and its Spirit-based social ambience encouraged
equal participation by all, especially women, in its common enterprises of charity and prayer.

The
Johannine church, indeed, sheltered unusual seedlings that would flower in succeeding centuries. If its individualist orientation and its insistence on personal encounter with the Lord remind us of the spirit of the modern Reformation churches, its unique reverence for the holiness of the physical (Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus curing the blind man with a mixture of mud and his own spit) can only recall the later sacramentalism of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. But its insistence on there being but one way of thinking makes uneasy anyone who has ever had an unorthodox thought. It comes as no surprise that John is often the favorite evangelist of the uptight and unrelenting; and his rigidity can call to mind contemporary churchpeople of several unfortunate varieties. The difficulties of John’s Gospel are extreme enough that to this day Christian churches use its passages sparingly in their lectionaries, whereas the other gospels are proclaimed in full.

For all this, the most characteristic passages of the Johannine literature bid fair to be the most beautiful of the New Testament:

The first three quotations are words of Jesus from John’s Gospel; the last are the words of
John the Elder from his First Letter. Cut off from its Jewish roots, confronting theological controversy, and finally overwhelmed by disunity within its own ranks, the church of the Beloved Disciple, which placed such high value on love but could not resolve the arguments that continued to tear it apart, opted at last to reconnect itself to the mainland, to join in communion with the then-emerging
Great Church. We know this from the coda that the final editor appended to John’s Gospel after the death of John the Elder. In this epilogue, the risen Jesus appears on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, as if in a dream, and asks Peter three times: “Do you love me?” To each question Peter responds with an increasingly emotional affirmation; and to each answer of Peter’s Jesus gives a pointed instruction: “Feed my lambs.” “Care for my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”