‘Now my soul is in turmoil, and what am I to say? “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it was for this that I came to this hour.  Father, glorify your name.’ A voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing by said it was thunder they heard, while others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus replied, ‘This voice spoke for your sake, not mine.’ (John 12:27 – 30, REB)

Jesus looks over his audience. Philip and Andrew have just introduced him to the first large contingent of Greeks he has run into during his three-year ministry. These pilgrims have come for Passover but also to see Jesus. There they are, standing together.

Just behind them in the west, the sky begins to darken.

Jesus draws his audience in, as a hen might her chicks from an approaching storm, with his confidential reflections. “What am I to say?” he booms. Looking straight into the darkening sky, he concludes: “Father, glorify your name.” He stares upwards for a minute, then he climbs off the rock, which was serving as an informal dais.

(more…)

‘Now my soul is in turmoil, and what am I to say? “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it was for this that I came to this hour.  Father, glorify your name.’ A voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing by said it was thunder they heard, while others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus replied, ‘This voice spoke for your sake, not mine.’ (John 12:27 – 30, REB)

Jesus looks over his audience. Philip and Andrew have just introduced him to the first large contingent of Greeks he has run into during his three-year ministry. These pilgrims have come for Passover but also to see Jesus. There they are, standing together.

Just behind them in the west, the sky begins to darken.

Jesus draws his audience in, as a hen might her chicks from an approaching storm, with his confidential reflections. “What am I to say?” he booms. Looking straight into the darkening sky, he concludes: “Father, glorify your name.” He stares upwards for a minute, then he climbs off the rock, which was serving as an informal dais.

(more…)

‘Now my soul is in turmoil, and what am I to say? “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it was for this that I came to this hour.  Father, glorify your name.’ A voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing by said it was thunder they heard, while others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus replied, ‘This voice spoke for your sake, not mine.’ (John 12:27 – 30, REB)

Jesus confides in his disciples, shares his inner turmoil with them. Then he sighs, wonders out loud how he should pray, and resolves on a resigned, ejaculatory prayer: “Father, glorify your name.” Just then it thunders.

To encourage him, some of Jesus’ disciples suggest the thunder answers his prayer. “God must be saying, ‘I will,’” Peter says.

“The thunder rolled on too long,” Matthew counters, brightening. He hopes the group’s new mood, brought on by the fortuitous empyrean event, will continue. “I think God is saying, ‘I have glorified it.’”

(more…)

‘Now my soul is in turmoil, and what am I to say? “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it was for this that I came to this hour.  Father, glorify your name.’ A voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing by said it was thunder they heard, while others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus replied, ‘This voice spoke for your sake, not mine.’ (John 12:27 – 30, REB)

Jesus confides in his disciples, shares his inner turmoil with them. Then he sighs, wonders out loud how he should pray, and resolves on a resigned, ejaculatory prayer: “Father, glorify your name.” Just then it thunders.

To encourage him, some of Jesus’ disciples suggest the thunder answers his prayer. “God must be saying, ‘I will,’” Peter says.

“The thunder rolled on too long,” Matthew counters, brightening. He hopes the group’s new mood, brought on by the fortuitous empyrean event, will continue. “I think God is saying, ‘I have glorified it.’”

(more…)

Six random observations about this Holy Week incident:

Among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Gentiles. They approached Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we should like to see Jesus.’ Philip went and told Andrew, and the two of them went to tell Jesus. Jesus replied: ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. In very truth I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains that and nothing more; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest. Whoever loves himself is lost, but he who hates himself in this world will be kept safe for eternal life. If anyone is to serve me, he must follow me; where I am, there will my servant be. Whoever serves me will be honoured by the Father. (John 12:20 – 26, REB)

1. This elaborate description of how some Gentiles were introduced to Jesus (assuming they were!) reflects the outer and inner circles surrounding Jesus in John chapter 2. The circles aren’t impenetrable, and they don’t seem to circumscribe different levels of understanding and relationship to the same extent as they do in chapter 2. But they seem to connect the time just before Jesus’ crucifixion (John 12) with the beginning of his ministry (John 2). Circles as echoes: it’s as if another stone has been thrown into the pond, and the ripples overlap.

(more…)

“For I am going to prepare a place for you.” Is Jesus getting around to answering Peter’s question in John 13:36 – “Lord, where are you going?” It took me a number of readings before I considered this possibility. In my own defense, the question and the answer are separated by a change in tone, and almost a change in mode. Only the question and answer seem to hold the text together, it seems to me now. But John uses the tension between the dialog and the changes in tone and mode to communicate meaning beyond what the words alone carry. So here’s the text:

Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Jesus replied, ‘I am going where you cannot follow me now, but one day you will.’  Peter said, ‘Lord, why cannot I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’  Jesus answered, ‘Will you really lay down your life for me? In very truth I tell you, before the cock crows you will have denied me three times.

‘Set your troubled hearts at rest. Trust in God always; trust also in me.  There are many dwelling-places in my Father’s house; if it were not so I should have told you; for I am going to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I shall come again and take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also. [John 13:36 - 14:3, REB]

The chapter break, a long-after-the-fact construct that I have designated above with a paragraph break, seems appropriate here. Chapter 14 breaks away in tone, and seemingly in subject matter, from the drama of Peter’s protestations and Jesus’ dire prediction that end chapter 13. Jesus shifts from addressing Peter alone to addressing all of the apostles. We move also from the Passover Seder interaction — more of a narrative mode — to something like instruction, applicable to all people at all times, and we stay chiefly in this mode through chapter 16 with only brief interruptions by the questioning apostles, Greek style, to remind us that Jesus’ disquisitions are also dialogs.

(more…)

The sop as prophecy. Matthew, Mark, and Luke use the sop at the Last Supper to show how a disciple’s betrayal fulfills Scriptural prophecy. And John has Jesus use the same sop as a means of prophesying that Judas will be that betrayer.

Shakespeare foresaw the melting of the polar ice caps:

. . . the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe

(From Act 1, Scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida.)

Interesting, though, that like the gospel writers, Shakespeare prophesies with a sop.

Every Seder table I’ve sat down to since childhood has had place tags. Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s don’t, though. In the Synoptic Gospels’ Last Suppers, everyone hears everything said by anyone. But John restores my place tags.

John brings his layers of proximity to the Last Supper, which for John also means layers of intimacy and understanding. Just as John assigns the master of the feast, the servants, the reader, and Mary to different circles when Jesus turns the water into wine, he assigns the disciples to different positions at the Seder table, and therefore to different levels of relationship and intimacy.

John places his own personae (always “the disciple whom Jesus loved”) next to Jesus. John even uses the Seder tradition of reclining at table — the perogative of a free man, thanks to the exodus from Egypt — to suggest John’s inner-circle status. The Revised English Bible has John “reclining close beside Jesus,” but the King James declares that John was “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.” Peter, who is not next to Jesus or John, has to signal John to have him ask Jesus a question. Judas is within arm’s length of Jesus, presumably: Jesus gives him a sop after he dips it in the wine.

John’s Seder is more like a real Seder or like any meal with a dozen or more people present. Not everyone hears everything. The volume goes up and down. Conversations happen simultaneously at times. John’s Last Supper is therefore more like modern theater than the Synoptic Gospels’ Last Supper, but it’s still John’s theater. The stage directions, the intimacy, even the dramatic conversations itself point to layers of relationship and understanding.

John’s drama centers on the sop. The Synoptic Gospels use the sop as a generalization, a means of turning a specific question into an indication that Scripture is being fulfilled. Here’s Mark’s version:

They began to be grieved and to say to Him one by one, “Surely not I?”  And He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who dips with Me in the bowl. (Mark 14:19-20)

The New American Standard notes suggest that “one” may also be read “the one.” This ambiguity is as close as the three gospels come to using the sop as the means of identifying Jesus’ betrayer. Jesus doesn’t answer the disciples’ question directly in the Synoptic Gospels; that is, he doesn’t make the sop a means of identifying Judas. He simply paraphrases Psalms, making the verse prophetic of their last meal together. Here’s the verse Jesus alludes to:

Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me. (Psalm 41:9, NNAS)

But John transforms the sop into the means of identifying the betrayer. How? Here’s the King James Version of the text:

When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. Then the disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom he spake.  Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.  Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake.  He then lying on Jesus’ breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it?  Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.  And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly. Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto him.  For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus had said unto him, Buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor.  He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night. (John 13:21-30, KJV)

First, Jesus here doesn’t use the sop as an allusion to Scripture. It simply is a means of designating to one of his closest disciples who is betrayer is: “He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it.”

Second, Jesus’ remark about the sop isn’t spoken to everyone at table but only to John. Peter’s need to signal John suggests that not everyone can hear everything. Peter’s signaling also suggests that, if Peter has his way, only he and John will know who the betrayer is. We know that no one but John hears the sop remark since “no man at the table knew” why Jesus says, “That thou doest, do quickly.” The sop remark would have made the meaning of Jesus’ remark to Judas evident. It’s not clear if Peter learns the significance of Jesus’ remark to Judas, but I like to think John makes it clear to him after supper.

Peter and John have a special role with respect to the Seder in Mark’s and Luke’s gospels, too. Mark says that Jesus sent “two of his disciples” to secure a room for the Seder (Mark 14:13). Luke makes clear that the two disciples sent are Peter and John (Luke 22:8). Mark and Luke therefore designate Peter and John as intimates by what they do. Consistent with the rest of his gospel, however, John designates Peter and John as intimates by what they know.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post concerning John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

In the latter part of John 5, John’s earlier undercurrent of legal language (testimony, evidence, witness) flows to the surface.  John 5:30 – 47 is a virtual hornbook on John’s law of evidence. Here are some of its rules:

Rule 1: Jesus’ testimony about himself would be invalid if unaccompanied by other evidence (John 5:31).

His language suggests, however, that his testimony about himself is invalid, period: “If I testify on my own behalf, that testimony is not valid” (Id., REB). Later, the Pharisees use this strict reading of Jesus’ rule against him:

The Pharisees said to him, ‘You are witness in your own cause; your testimony is not valid.’ (John 8:13, REB)

Jesus seems to reverse himself but argues in the alternative that Deuteronomy 19:15 applies:

In your own law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid. (John 8:17, REB)

The second witness, of course, is God the Father.

Rule 2: Human testimony is not essential but is provided as a concession.

Jesus reminds his listeners of John the Baptist’s testimony, and he points out that they sent messengers to John and “rejoiced in his light” for a little while (John 5:33 – 35). Jesus suggests, then, that the Jews implicitly recognized John’s authority as a witness.

Jesus seems to have an ambivalent attitude towards John’s testimony.  He validates it for a reason similar to the one he says Moses permitted divorce: “because of the hardness of your hearts” (Matthew 19:7-9, KJV).

Rule 3: God the Father testifies about Jesus through the work he has Jesus do (John 5:36).

This “work,” we learn elsewhere in John, includes the signs (miracles) Jesus performs as well as his crucifixion.

Rule 4: God the Father’s other means of witness are unavailable to his listeners because of the nature of God (invisible form, inaudible voice) and the state of his listeners’ hearts (unwilling to accept the scripture’s testimony about Jesus) (John 5:36-40).

Rule 5: A juror will remain unpersuaded of any evidence if he wants honor from others instead of from God (John 5:41-544).

Rule 6: Belief in what Moses said about Jesus is a precondition to belief in what Jesus says about himself (John 5:45-47).

There are two more aspects to John’s gospel’s courtroom underpinnings I’ll explore in later notes. One is the separate, later trial Jesus frequently alludes to. Jesus accepts that he’s being judged by his listeners; in fact, most of the legal language in John involves that trial. But he suggests that the tables will be turned one day, and that the subsequent trial will turn on how his listeners judge him during the first trial.

The second aspect I’d like to explore is how John’s gospel ranks the different forms of evidence it addresses. And why it does: sometimes (as one would expect) as a guide to the strength of various forms of evidence, but more often to suggest the relative receptivity of different people to different forms of evidence and, through it, the relative merit they deserve.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post concerning John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

In John, the speakers sometimes bleed into one another as if possessed by the same spirit.  It’s the Greek chorus or the long, amazed monologues towards the end of many Faulkner novels, monologues that blend with the narration and almost break character.

For the space of six verses at the end of John 3, for instance, the English translations can’t agree on who’s talking.

The New American Standard thinks that in verses 31 through 36 the speaker is John the Baptist, but the New Revised Standard and the Revised English Bible think the text has switched from John the Baptist to John the narrator.  But even the New Revised Standard acknowledges in a note that “some interpreters hold that the quotation continues through verse 36,” making the speaker John the Baptist.

Here’s the exact intersection of John the Baptist’s words (first sentence) with what might be John the narrator’s words (second sentence):

He must increase, but I must decrease. He who comes from above is above all, he who is of the earth is from the earth and speaks of the earth. (John 3:30-31, NNAS)

Things that don’t matter in John the way they need to matter in other books, even other gospels: where, when, and now who. The words at the end of John chapter 3 could have come from Jesus, John the Baptist, or John the narrator. The porous borders certainly highlight the message but, oddly, not at the expense of characterization, at least in a deeper (or John would say, higher) sense because the words point back to identity. Who is behind words is a central concern in John. Even in the contested six verses, the central issue is the words’ sources:

He who comes from above is above all others; he who is from the earth belongs to the earth and uses earthly speech. He who comes from heaven bears witness to what he has seen and heard, even though no one accepts his witness. To accept his witness is to affirm that God speaks the truth;  for he whom God sent utters the words of God, so measureless is God’s gift of the Spirit. (John 3:31-34, REB)

While the reader is trying to figure out who’s speaking, John is telling us how to tell who’s really speaking. My inquiry (i.e., who is speaking) belongs to the earth, but John uses the terms of my inquiry to point to a higher level. He has done this to me earlier in the book, just as he has done it to the Jews and to Nicodemus.

In John, the reader as unspoken character never evanesces for long.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. (John 13:3-4, KJV)

Periodic sentences are usually dramatic, but John employs that syntax here to create a kind of dramatic irony.  The immediate irony, of course, is the grandeur of the phrases followed by the servility of the clause. Jesus’ grand knowledge followed by his servile act. Luke achieves the same immediate irony in a periodic sentence:

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. (Luke 3:1-2, KJV)

Luke’s periodic sentence sets John the Baptist’s humble introduction in a time defined by all of the grand layers of government to which John was subject. John’s very introduction, then, foreshadows his later problems with the authorities. Anyway, Luke’s periodic sentence, like John’s, leads us from grandeur to humility.  And as in John, the phrases are the clause’s foil.

I like this definition of dramatic irony:

I was looking for Reynolds Price‘s email address at Duke to ask him for any written instructions or rubrics he gives his students for their gospels, and I found this.

What a loss.

Luke and John said why they wrote; Matthew and Mark didn’t.

Some later wrote them to harmonize these four.

Jefferson wrote a gospel with a razor. Reynolds Price wrote one, too, using Mark as a tree and material from the other gospels and elsewhere and his own informed imagination as leaves.  (Price is part harmonizer, part inventor, and part Jefferson.) Each term, Price even makes his students write gospels.

Why write anything? I think it’s push and pull, attraction and revulsion. And the need to add our own testimony, even if only as editors, commentators, or (like me) marginalists.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

Hearsay to avoid heresy:

“You yourselves are my witnesses that I said, ‘I am not the Christ,’ but, ‘I have been sent ahead of Him.’ (John 3:28, NNAS)

John is sketchy in certain ways — the private settings, the unclear referents. And Reynolds Price describes the gospel’s “relentlessly limited battery of words” — Greek wasn’t John’s first language, after all. But, according to Price, John’s patois is “homemade”: John’s struggle with Greek is like Nabokov’s struggle with English:

For a modern reader of his Koine original, John seems like nothing so much as a highly skilled and intelligent expatriate (which early tradition in fact claims he was) — an Einstein or a Thomas Mann, a Conrad or a Nabokov: one who is able to express himself readily and powerfully on most of the difficult matters he encounters but in a homemade and eccentric patois.  No one can for a moment believe that Vladimir Nabokov was born writing English; but the English of his later novels is, to say the least, imposing in the bizarre strength with which it insists in oaring upstream against the whole natural flow of English. John likewise is always pushing hard uphill in what is clearly an acquired vehicle, a medium that requires him often to work outside and against the thought processes of his native tongue, which scholars can tell us is Aramaic. (Price, Three Gospels 18 – 19)

Anyway, funny that the characters and even the narrator in such a sketchy book can be so punctilious about what is said. What is said is referred to as witness and testimony.  (John the Baptist here says, “You can testify that I testified.”) The contrast leads to how I describe John’s tone this time through: John’s brief anecdotes and early dialogues play above a plainchant of legal references (testimony, witness) that adds a kind of tension to the anecdotes’ and dialogues’ unclear referents, private settings, and extended and repeating metaphors. John is a mesmerizing and disturbing organum.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

After the birth & the wind:

Nicodemus answered “How can such things be?”

Jesus answered “You’re the teacher of Israel and you don’t know these things? Amen amen I tell you what we know we tell and what we’ve seen we witness to.  You don’t accept our witness. If I tell you earthly things and you don’t trust, how will you trust if I tell you heavenly things? (John 3:9 – 12, Reynolds Price’s Three Gospels)

What are the earthly things?  Maybe:

John’s implied and extended metaphors act as the synoptic gospels’ parables.  Jesus’s “If I tell you earthly things” is the synoptic gospels’ “The disciples came to him and asked, ‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ He replied, ‘To you it has been granted to know the secrets of the kingdom of Heaven, but not to them.’” (Matthew 13:10 – 11, REB)

Maybe:

The earthly things / heavenly things dichotomy is John’s version of Luke’s least / much, unrighteous mammon / true riches, another man’s / own:

“Anyone who can be trusted in small matters can be trusted also in great; and anyone who is dishonest in small matters is dishonest also in great.  If, then, you have not proved trustworthy with the wealth of this world, who will trust you with the wealth that is real?  And if you have proved untrustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you anything of your own?” (Luke 16:10 – 12, REB)

Maybe:

John doesn’t see itself as a “polyphony of private settings and unclear referents playing above a plainchant of trial-court language (testimony and witnesses),” as I describe it in field note 2d.  Instead, private settings, unclear referents, and, now, implied and extended metaphors are the testimony — the earthly means by which Jesus testifies. (So, like, if that’s earthly, what’s heavenly?)

Maybe:

We Westerners need a book like John, which doesn’t give things away too easily.  Reading the synoptic gospels, I tend to shuck the parables like shellfish and tread the pearls Jesus later offers to his disciples alone. I rend rather than render the text.

But John makes me sweat.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

There’s blindness, half-blindness, and sight:

[Elisha] offered this prayer: ‘Lord, open his eyes and let him see.’ The Lord opened the young man’s eyes, and he saw the hills covered with horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.  As the Aramaeans came down towards him, Elisha prayed to the Lord: ‘Strike this host, I pray, with blindness’; and they were struck blind as Elisha had asked. Elisha said to them, ‘You are on the wrong road; this is not the town. Follow me and I will lead you to the man you are looking for.’ And he led them to Samaria. (1 Kings 6:17 – 19, REB)

The reader of 1Kings is in sight’s middle kingdom, an interregnum of half-light. Only through prayer do we see what Elisha sees.

We’re also in sight’s middle kingdom in John, seeing more than some and less than others.  We are the servants at the wedding, privy to the miracle (unlike the wedding’s officer) but not privy to what Mary and Jesus’ conversation points to.

John’s reader sees men as trees, walking.  Indeed, the reader exists between Jesus’ two prayers as much as between Elisha’s:

And they brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him.

Taking the blind man’s hand he led him out of the village and spitting in his eyes and laying hands on him he questioned him “Do you see anything?”

Looking up he said “I see men that look like trees walking.”

So again he put his hands on his eyes.

Then he looked hard, was restored and saw everything clearly. (Mark 8:22 – 25, Reynolds Price, Three Gospels)

I’m heartened that Elisha’s and Jesus’ prayers are answered. It’s not the men’s influence, however, but their creativity that gets me.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

They said therefore unto him, What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? (John 6:30, KJV)

Signs blind. If you really want to see, Jesus suggests to Nicodemus, you have to lose everything, deny your birth, start over:

“Rabbi, we know that you’ve come from God a teacher since none could do these signs you do unless God is with you.”

“Jesus answered “Amen amen I tell you unless a person is born from above he can’t see the reign of God.” (Reynolds Price, Three Gospels)

Earlier in John, Jesus turns the Jews’ request for a sign into confusion, demonstrating what seeing (understanding, walking) by signs leads to.  Here with Nicodemus he implies that signs will (help) keep one from seeing the way Jesus sees.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

This morning, “You must be born again” brings to mind Pittsburgh.

“By night” is the Allegheny. “We” is the Monongahela. One of those rivers should win out at their confluence.

But Jesus’s response is the Ohio.  A new river.

He addresses neither the loaded setting (Nicodemus’s coming by night) nor Nicodemus’s words (“We know you are a teacher come from God”) nor the tension the setting and words create.

“By night” / “we” is a minor chord that instead of resolving becomes the playground for Jesus’ notes on birth. “You must be born again” only adds to the ”by night” / “we” tension.

“You must be born again” may not be a koan plastered over with Protestant doctrine, after all.  Maybe the junction of “by night” and “we” at “born again” is the koan. They say the Ohio starts in Pittsburgh. But how can a river start? It’s the sound of one hand clapping.

Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about birth; he spoke to Nathanael about a fig tree. We don’t pull the fruit of doctrine from Nathanael’s tree. Should we take doctrine home from Nicodemus’s delivery room?

Maybe it’s John’s tenuous hold on narrative that lets us pick doctrine from it like a fruit tree. The setting is the husk or the root and branch, easily discarded.

“You must be born again” coming amid the tension of “by night” and “we” feels like Jacob’s wrestling with the man at night amid the tension of (at the junction of) Laban and Esau. It feels also like “neither,” the reset button the Lord’s captain pushes in the overwrought Joshua at the junction of “us” and “them”:

When Joshua was near Jericho he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua approached him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’

The man replied, ‘Neither! I am here as captain of the army of the Lord.’

Joshua prostrated himself in homage, and said, ‘What have you to say to your servant, my lord?’

The captain of the Lord’s army answered, ‘Remove your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy’; and Joshua did so. (Joshua 5:13-15, REB)

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, comes to Jesus “by night.” (John 3:1-2)

Not “that night,” which would have made the detail another instance of John’s treating setting at first glance as mere overlay. It’s not that way here, even at first glance.

The place-and-time overlay in John is often loose fitting and follows the event, flapping like a cloak behind the event’s rush. (E.g., chapter 1′s “This took place at Bethany” and “It was about four in the afternoon.”)

Not here (or now).

“By night” makes the setting as significant as he earlier makes ambiguity and the unsaid. “By night” feels like “under cover of darkness” (speaking of a cloak). It suggests something about Nicodemus.

In fact, Nicodemus’s two later, briefer appearances in John come with “by night” as an identifier: “the same came to Jesus by night.” (See John 7:50 and 19:39.)

In the later references that include “the same came to Jesus by night,” I expect the reader to react, “Oh, yeah, the coward.”

“Rabbi,” he said, “we know that you are a teacher sent by God.” (John 3:2, REB)

But Nicodemus’s first statement here prevents me from concluding that he’s a coward. Nicodemus begins, “we.” Not “I/they.”  Not, “Look, I know you’re a teacher sent from God, but they don’t.” In the visible-brushstroke, impressionistic world of John’s writing, “we” contradicts the “by night” and thereby sets up a tension with “by night.” It’s all we need, or all we should need, or all we’re going to get, to explain the contradictions in Nicodemus and the contradictions we feel in fathoming him. Everything we later learn about Nicodemus, except for his need for time to process (okay, maybe that, too), is in the “at night” vs. “We.”

“Rabbi,” he said, “we know that you are a teacher sent by God.”

“We”: Does Nicodemus come as the Pharisee’s representative? Come by night because the Pharisees don’t want the people to know they wish to dialog with Jesus in a less confrontational way? Come by night because he’s not come as a representative and doesn’t want the Pharisees to know he’s come? Is Nicodemus conflicted? Or just busy?

The “by night”/”we” tension makes him rounder, makes him human, makes him more than torn, more than tentative. He chooses to associate himself with the Pharisees to Jesus, maybe even apologizes for them (“they realize more than you may realize they do”) or betrays them (“they realize you’re a legitimate prophet”), but it’s “we,” not “they,” as if he didn’t come by night.

Maybe three brushstrokes, and we have a character as round as any in literature. But the roundness, like the other important information in John, develops in the reader’s mind from what isn’t said.

John builds spaces like a poet.  Or like an architect conscious of the visitor’s movement more than he is of his building or landscape.

Figure-ground theory states that the space that results from placing figures should be considered as carefully as the figures themselves. Space is called negative space if it is unshaped after the placement of figures. It is positive space if it has a shape.

Matthew Frederick, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (Thing #3). In John, space (the lack of information) feels negative, but I swear it’s positive. If creation argues that God exists, then John’s gospel argues that John exists. Just don’t assume John’s existence too quickly: you’ll miss out.

With “by night”/”we,” the tension and the space that adds to the tension don’t initially create a relationship, as it does with Nathaniel and Jesus and then with Jesus’ mother and Jesus (though we learn about all three from the relationships), but a character. With Nicodemus, John creates character development first and relationship second. And assuming John is not changing his literary ways, what does that say about Nicodemus?

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

In a certain way, John’s centuries-later chapter divisions work, and the underlying tension in chapters 1 and 2 — the disturbing polyphony of private settings and unclear referents playing above a plainchant of trial-court language (testimony and witnesses) — resolves in a single, diatonic chord: a juxtaposition between Jesus and his new followers:

While he was in Jerusalem for Passover many put their trust in him when they saw the signs that he performed. But Jesus for his part would not trust himself to them. He knew them all, and had no need of evidence from others about anyone, for he himself could tell what was in people. (John 2:23 – 25, REB)

The many needed evidence; Jesus didn’t.  The many put their trust in Jesus, but Jesus would not trust himself to them.

John’s Jesus’ mission is an introvert’s outreach, roughly speaking. Field note speaking.

Each stop in Jesus’ campaign so far has sorted people in unexpected ways: by what one knew (Nathanael and the reader), by how one understood an ambiguity (the Jews and disciples), by what room one was in (the wedding). The wedding in Cana alone involves four circles of intimacy: the master of the feast who celebrates Jesus’ miracle without knowing that a miracle has occurred, the servants who know of the miracle but not of Jesus’ conversation with his mother, and his mother, whose sketchy colloquy with Jesus demonstrates she knows all.  I am in a fourth circle, closer to the center than the master of the feast and the servants but less intimate than Mary since the text’s first read shuts me out. I inhabit an uneasy ring between the inner and outer rings.

And now, at the end of chapter 2, this policy of concealment is revealed. When Jesus is direct in the other gospels, it’s often only by a disciple’s request. The requesting disciple also risked a reproof for his lack of understanding. Likewise this text of John’s, which describes itself as testimony, feels most reluctant when that testimony is clear. And what does that say about me, the reader?

John 2 feels like the melismatic high Middle Ages resolving into the vocal articulation of the Renaissance.  It feels like the isorhythmic novels of Sterne and Fielding resolving into the thick-plotted Victorian novel.  It feels like a concession — something that must be said to move on.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

How much John packs into a short, sketchy interaction.  Here’s the first of Jesus’ many discourses with the Jews:

The Jews challenged Jesus: ‘What sign can you show to justify your action?’

‘Destroy this temple,’ Jesus replied, ‘and in three days I will raise it up again.’

The Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple. Are you going to raise it up again in three days?’

But the temple he was speaking of was his body.

After his resurrection his disciples recalled what he had said, and they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. (John 2:18 – 22, REB)

The discourse turns on a misapprehension.  What are we to understand about the Jews who misunderstand Jesus’ reference to “this temple”?  What are we to understand about Jesus who doesn’t clear up the ambiguity?  About the disciples and what they might have understood of the interaction before Jesus’ death and resurrection? Why does the text feel free to jump briefly ahead to a time after Jesus’ resurrection? Why did the disciples’ understanding, apparently three years in coming, have such a strong effect on them then?  Is the book itself — is community itself — in part a kind of collective memory? And so on.

Acclimated by my own conjectures and misapprehension through Jesus’ interactions with Nathanael and then with his mother, I can sympathize with the Jews here.  That sympathy feels uncomfortable.

John’s revelations are evanescent.  I feel as if I’m asked to skate on ice always forming just ahead of me and melting just where I lift my back foot.

How different is a similar story in Matthew:

At this some of the scribes and the Pharisees said, ‘Teacher, we would like you to show us a sign.’  He answered: ‘It is a wicked, godless generation that asks for a sign, and the only sign that will be given it is the sign of the prophet Jonah.  Just as Jonah was in the sea monster’s belly for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the bowels of the earth. (Matthew 12:38 – 40, REB)

As he does in John, Jesus responds here to a request for a sign with a veiled reference to his death and resurrection.  Matthew likes to show how Jesus fulfills scripture readers may not otherwise realize is prophetic of anything, and John likes to do this as well. (At the end of his conversation with Nathanael, for instance, Jesus tells him he will see “angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man” — a clear suggestion that Jesus is the ladder from earth to heaven in Jacob’s famous dream.) But Matthew houses none of the quick, playful complication among Jesus, the Jews, and the disciples that John dwells in.  Nothing of the never said.

In the world of John’s gospel, insight is a precious and fleeting gift, and misunderstandings and unclear referents are quick ways to size up who gets it and who doesn’t. John’s brief anecdotes play above a plainchant of legal references (testimony, witness) that adds a kind of tension to the anecdotes’ unclear referents.  John is a mesmerizing and disturbing organum.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post about something in John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

Or maybe “I saw you” outweighs “under the fig tree” for Nathanael (John 1:48-51). Maybe it outweighs the subsequent “you will see”‘s for Nathaniel, too, though probably not in the long run.

Evangelicals put such emphasis on knowing the Lord.  Yet

No longer need they teach one another, neighbour or brother, to know the Lord; all of them, high and low alike, will know me, says the Lord, for I shall forgive their wrongdoing, and their sin I shall call to mind no more.  (Jeremiah 31:34, REB)

The Bible seems to put a bigger emphasis on God seeing or knowing us:

O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. (Psalm 139:1-3, NNAS)

When the day comes, many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, drive out demons in your name, and in your name perform many miracles?” Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you. Out of my sight; your deeds are evil!” (Matthew 7:22-23 – REB)

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God… (Galatians 4:9 – NNAS)

Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:12 – KJV)

If anyone fancies that he has some kind of knowledge, he does not yet know in the true sense of knowing. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God. (1 Corinthians 8:3 – REB)

Maybe, like Nathanael, I must be seen so I can see or even start to want to see. Perhaps I must be known so I can know.

My evidence:

1. Mary (Jesus’ mother) and John (Jesus’ disciple and the gospel’s author) make only brief appearances in John’s gospel.
2. When Mary and John do appear, they seem quite intimate with Jesus.  Mary knows Jesus is about to perform a miracle though he has never done so before and vehemently denies he will now.  John leans on Jesus’ breast at the last supper and hears Jesus say things that others there miss.
3. Neither Mary nor John is named in John’s gospel.  Mary is only “Jesus’ mother.” John is only “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” John’s and Mary’s names are used only for others. The only John in John is John the Baptist.  John never even bothers to say “John the Baptist” or “John Baptist” to distinguish him from himself as the other gospels do.  In fact, the word “Baptist” isn’t found in John at all.  And the Marys in John are always Mary Magdala, Mary wife of Clopas, Mary of Mary and Martha, etc. Never Mother Mary.
4. Hanging on the cross, Jesus puts Mary and John together: “Seeing his mother, with the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, Jesus said to her, ‘Mother, there is your son’;  and to the disciple, ‘There is your mother’; and from that moment the disciple took her into his home.” (John 19:26 – 27, REB)

Just saying.  She could have helped him write it.

John is as arid and sketchy in its way as Genesis.  To me, the wedding at Cana-of-galilee feels like Abraham and God negotiating over Sodom:

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee and Jesus’ mother was there.  Jesus and his disciples had been invited to the wedding too and when wine ran short Jesus’ mother said to him “They’re out of wine.”

Jesus said to her “What’s that to me and you, woman?  My hour hasn’t come.”

His mother said to the servants “Just do what he tells you.”

Now six stone jars for the Jews’ washing cutom were standing there.  Each could hold twenty or thirty gallons.

Jesus said to them “Fill the jars with water.”

The filled them to the top.

He said to them “Now draw some and take it to the head servant.”

They took it.

When the head servant tasted the water turned to wine, not knowing where it came from — though the servants knew, the ones who’d drawn the water — the head servant called the bridegroom and said to him “Everybody brings out the good wine first and once the guests are drunk brings out the poor stuff. You’ve kept the good wine till now.”

Jesus did this the start of his signs in Cana in Galilee and showed his glory. (John 2:1-11, Reynolds Price, Three Gospels.)

Just as with Nathaniel and Jesus in the preceding conversation, we hear the words, but we don’t have the history.  The when and where are only here and now for Jesus and his mother, and not for us. Jesus, you might say, tests his mother  (“My hour hasn’t come”) just as he tests, say, the Canaanite woman (“It is not right to take the children’s bread and to throw it to the dogs.” Matthew 15:26).  But how does she know?  Jesus’ vociferous response to her simple statement suggests also that he knew she knew, too. And how does he know she knows?

So much depends upon an Hebrew idiom translated into Greek and then (for me) into English.  The New American Standard translates it literally as “What to me and to you?” What is Jesus’ and his mother’s me and you? Jesus and his mother’s short conversation suggests much about them and their relationship, and it also says little.

I know as much as the servants who draw the water, no more.

John to me, again: get yours.

John’s first discourse, and John the Baptist’s I-am-ness:

This is the testimony John gave when the Jews of Jerusalem sent a deputation of priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He readily acknowledged, ‘I am not the Messiah.’

‘What then? Are you Elijah?’

‘I am not,’ he replied.

‘Are you the Prophet?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Then who are you?’ they asked. ‘We must give an answer to those who sent us. What account do you give of yourself?’

He answered in the words of the prophet Isaiah: ‘I am a voice crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the way for the Lord.”’ (John 1:19 – 23, REB)

When the deputation asked John the Baptist who he was, he answered who he was not.

Three times.

When they changed the question, he answered who he was: a voice.

The first three questions went to his essence, the Orthodox might say, so he answered in an apophatic manner: I am not, I am not, No.

Then the deputation changed the question slightly: What do you say about yourself? The new question emphasized John’s energies instead of his essence. What is your account of yourself? What is your story?

Now, he answers, I am (a voice).

One can see this same distinction between essence and energies widen into two gods in early gnosticism:

Some early Gnostic sects spoke of two Gods, “a God beyond the cosmos and a lesser, creator God, the Demiurge, who has fashioned this world and who rules over it.  The highest God, the supreme reality, is variously characterized as the “Fore-Beginning,” the “Inconceivable,” the “Beyond-Being,” etc.  The Demiurge, on the other hand, is a working principle. (Needleman, Lost Christianity 196)

I find the Orthodox view helpful: God is both negative and positive, essence and energy, dwelling in darkness and light. And I am essence and energies: I am not, I am not, No. I am.

Does John posit then and there on the text as an afterthought? I read a book years ago that overlaid place and time on a sermon in an effort to make it more palatable.  Bits of narrative breaks in: He sipped his tea, he smiled, etc. Awful.

John may seem a bit like that.  Or like the Gospel of Thomas — a discourse set outside of place and time.

Or maybe John makes place and time a private matter, available to the book’s characters but not to its readers.

When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said, ‘Here is an Israelite worthy of the name; there is nothing false in him.’

Nathanael asked him, ‘How is it you know me?’

Jesus replied, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip spoke to you.’

‘Rabbi,’ said Nathanael, ‘you are the Son of God; you are king of Israel.’

Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe this because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than that.’  (John 1:47-50, REB)

What happened then and there, under the fig tree? I can read the text, but I can’t intrude.  I am not Nathaniel.  I am not Jesus.  I can’t relate.  Not enough to matter.

Funny to hear L. share from her book this morning: Claim your own I-am-ness.

My kind of story.

Field notes are high risk, high reward.  When George Washington first returned from the French, England published his field notes, and Washington became famous.  When Washington next returned from the French, France published his confiscated field notes, and Washington became infamous.

John’s not like the other gospels or like most stories or novels you read.  They start somewhere and sometime.

Even Genesis starts sometime.  In the beginning God created.

John starts before the beginning: In the beginning the Word already was (REB). Or it starts at the beginning about somewhere before.

Genesis starts transitive: God created.  Its beginning is the settings of settings.

John starts intransitive. Weak verb, teachers say: was.

No setting at all.

The first time John the Baptist appears, he does so outside of time and place.

There was

a man sent from God

whose name was John (1:6, KJV).

There was [or, came into being] (NNAS)

There appeared

a man named John (REB).

John pivots from John the Baptist to Jesus so fast you have to track the “light” motif to know whom he’s talking about:

He was sent from God, and came as a witness to testify to the light, so that through him all might become believers. He was not himself the light; he came to bear witness to the light. The true light which gives light to everyone was even then coming into the world. (1:6-9 REB)

Outside of time and place, motifs lift more.

Jesus was coming even then!

Even when? When John was born? Jesus was in the womb then, Luke says (elsewhere).

Or even when John was witnessing and testifying?

Even then.

When John the Baptist appears again, he speaks (1:15). Echoes of the first verse: Before I was born, he already was (REB).

Was even then coming

and already was.

Now (when? verse 19) we learn where we are not: Jerusalem.  John is responding to a deputation sent by the Jews of Jerusalem.

Everyone there is sent. Jesus was even then coming and already was is not there, and the Jews in Jerusalem are not there.  Just the sent there – John and the deputation – are there.  Where?

John concludes, I am [weak verb] a voice, and we believe it. John’s not there because there is [weak verb] no there.

And John pivots to Jesus a second time.  The deputation is confused. They take John for the Messiah.  But John is not the Messiah.  The Messiah stands among you.

When the first discourse ends, place and time begin:

This took place at Bethany beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing.  The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him. (1:28 – 29, REB)

This is the third pivot from John to Jesus.  The first pivot was. The second said. And the evening and the morning: the first day: The third happens the first next day.  Jesus was even then coming and already was and stands among you is coming towards him.