As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus In The Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 12- Written That You May Believe chapter 12.
The Gospel of John #12 – Seeing and Believing 08.12.10
This study is of the passage found in Jn 20:1-10 –the account of Peter and the Beloved Disciple at the empty tomb. Mary discovers the empty tomb and runs to tell Peter and the Beloved Disciple. The Beloved Disciple outruns Peter, reaching the tomb first. Peter enters the tomb and sees the linen wrappings lying there with the head cloth rolled up in a place by itself.The Beloved Disciple enters, sees and believes.
The Beloved Disciple is never named. He (or she) is a literary construct that allows the reader to enter into the narrative by associating with the figure. The Beloved Disciple represents the Christians of the Johannine community – the model Christian. The Beloved Disciple reaches the tomb ahead of Peter. This is mentioned three times. The text acknowledges that there is a rivalry between Peter and the Beloved Disciple (which is also evident in chapter 21). While Peter enters the tomb first, the Beloved Disciple reaches the tomb first and is the first to believe.
The Beloved Disciple has looked inside and seen the linen cloths, but when he enters the tomb the head cloth is also visible. What is it about the head cloth that promotes this belief?
Schneiders makes a connection between the face cloth and the veil that Moses puts aside after coming down the mountain, having seen God. In the same way Jesus puts aside the veil of his flesh in the resurrection. He puts aside the world to go to his Father. The head cloth symbolically represents this. However this seems to buy into a dualist theology that is not Johannine. Here Schneiders reverts to an old metaphysics that is incongruent with the rest of the Gospel. For Schneiders the face cloth is a sign, a sign that creates belief. However if this is so, it is not an effective one because it points outside this world. Jesus’ other signs in John (for example water, healing, bread and light) are immediate, physical and take place in the world. Here (according to Schneiders) the sign points to an Old Testament textural reference to suggest a metaphysical reality.
So what is the significance of the head cloth? Often it is depicted as a flat piece of cloth placed over the face of Jesus (like a smaller version of the shroud of Turin). In the Lazarus story in Jn 11:44 there is mention of a similar cloth: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘unbind him, and let him go.’” This cloth (and the head cloth of Jesus) was likely a cloth wrapped around the face and jaw to stop the jaw dropping and staying fixed that way because of rigor mortis. This practice is still used today when laying out a corpse to make the corpse more presentable for viewing by the family.
This head cloth was not just dropped with the rest of the linen cloths but “rolled up (or around) in a place by itself”. This implies that it was deliberately wrapped up and placed by someone. Or, it could mean it retained its form from the head and was simply taken off and set aside. In any case it suggests Jesus took the wrapping off himself. Someone removing the body would surely not have taken the time to remove his linen cloths – or if they had (in order to create the illusion of resurrection) would not have thought to have carefully placed the face cloth in a separate place. In other words this seems simply another Johannine realist detail that goes with faith in a transformed human world. And in this case the belief of the Beloved Disciple comes simply because he has come to a position where he is required to make a leap of faith. Circumstantial evidence can bring you to a certain point, but belief cannot be arrived at through logic or reason alone. It is his personal relationship with and knowledge of Jesus that tips the balance.
Nevertheless it happens in a real world. For the Beloved Disciple the head cloth is the phenomenological sign that leads him to believe. For Thomas it is touching Jesus’ wounds, for Mary Magdalene it is hearing Jesus call her by name. Each person has a different process of relating to the new reality which is the resurrection.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
John #11
Find below the next Bible Study summary - a reminder that older summaries can now be found using the Present Study tab on the home page. - Linda
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus In The Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 11- Written that you may believe chapter 10.
The Gospel of John #10 – The Community of Eternal Life (Part 2) 07/29/10
In John’s gospel the raising of Lazarus is the event that precipitates the arrest of Jesus. In the Synoptics this event is the clearing of the Temple (Mk 11:15-33). Jesus has just entered Jerusalem in triumph, enters the sacred space, drives out the money changers and stops the sacrifices. He demonstrates his charismatic and political power. He holds the people spellbound.
In Mk 11: 25-26 Jesus says “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses”. He says this in the context of the temple – the place where people go to make themselves right with God. It becomes his rationale for shutting the temple down. There is no need for sacrifice or offerings – it is in forgiving your enemies that your offences against God will be forgiven.
In John this same event is placed at the beginning of the Gospel. (Jn 2:13-23). In v. 18 the authorities ask him for a sign that proves his right to clear the temple. Jesus replies, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”. John is signaling that the key sign of the Gospel is going to be the resurrection. From the very start of his ministry John indicates that the new life that Jesus brings replaces the need for the temple and sacrifice.
The raising of Lazarus is the last act of Jesus’ ministry in John’s Gospel. It holds the same place as the clearing of the temple in the Synoptics and is linked in the gospel of John to the clearing of the temple passage in chapter 2. Both take place at the time of Passover. In both cases (2:23 and 11: 45) many come to believe in Jesus because of his signs/what had been seen. Both passages are concerned with resurrection and life.
In Jn 11:25 Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”. Jesus substitutes himself for the temple because he offers the endless life of forgiveness. When in chapter 2 he talks of destroying this temple and the comment says he is talking of his body– he does not mean the temple of his body in the modern moral sense of this phrase. He means that in his person he has replaced the temple, through forgiveness. The sign that he gives for this will be resurrection – endless life.
Forgiveness makes you vulnerable. To forgive means to open oneself to violence. Humanly speaking it is almost impossible to overcome our instinct for survival. If someone is really threatening my life I cannot let them do it unless I am convinced that my life is somehow secure. Jesus combines forgiveness and life through the promise of resurrection. We are set free to forgive and live.
Jesus is the resurrection and the life because of forgiveness. Fundamentalists, zealots and extremists are OK with dying for their cause, without having to forgive. They are looking to escape this life for a martyr’s paradise. Resurrection is about a belief in renewed life here in this life. Lazarus is the sign of this resurrection. Resurrection implies forgiveness and vice versa. Unless Jesus had forgiven he would not have risen. And without his trust in the Father and his hope in resurrection, he could not have forgiven so completely. Without the resurrection, Jesus’ project would have failed.
Jesus also changes our relationship with God through forgiveness. There is no more need for sacrifice. Temples are human constructs where negotiation takes the place of forgiveness. It is a place where the holy can be contained and controlled. In abolishing the temple we no longer have control.
Lazarus was dead for four days, Jesus was raised after three. The early Christians associated themselves with Lazarus – like him we will follow Jesus’ resurrection and be raised on “the fourth day”. Resurrection allows Christians to see death differently. It is no longer the definitive end of life. Nor is it the separation of spirit to another realm. Rather it is like a long exhale – while we wait to inhale again. It is like we do not actually die - “everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”. It is a negation of death. A Christian doesn’t expect to die. Forgiveness brings us fullness of life. Resurrection is therefore not a reward, but the natural consequence of forgiveness.
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus In The Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 11- Written that you may believe chapter 10.
The Gospel of John #10 – The Community of Eternal Life (Part 2) 07/29/10
In John’s gospel the raising of Lazarus is the event that precipitates the arrest of Jesus. In the Synoptics this event is the clearing of the Temple (Mk 11:15-33). Jesus has just entered Jerusalem in triumph, enters the sacred space, drives out the money changers and stops the sacrifices. He demonstrates his charismatic and political power. He holds the people spellbound.
In Mk 11: 25-26 Jesus says “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses”. He says this in the context of the temple – the place where people go to make themselves right with God. It becomes his rationale for shutting the temple down. There is no need for sacrifice or offerings – it is in forgiving your enemies that your offences against God will be forgiven.
In John this same event is placed at the beginning of the Gospel. (Jn 2:13-23). In v. 18 the authorities ask him for a sign that proves his right to clear the temple. Jesus replies, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”. John is signaling that the key sign of the Gospel is going to be the resurrection. From the very start of his ministry John indicates that the new life that Jesus brings replaces the need for the temple and sacrifice.
The raising of Lazarus is the last act of Jesus’ ministry in John’s Gospel. It holds the same place as the clearing of the temple in the Synoptics and is linked in the gospel of John to the clearing of the temple passage in chapter 2. Both take place at the time of Passover. In both cases (2:23 and 11: 45) many come to believe in Jesus because of his signs/what had been seen. Both passages are concerned with resurrection and life.
In Jn 11:25 Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”. Jesus substitutes himself for the temple because he offers the endless life of forgiveness. When in chapter 2 he talks of destroying this temple and the comment says he is talking of his body– he does not mean the temple of his body in the modern moral sense of this phrase. He means that in his person he has replaced the temple, through forgiveness. The sign that he gives for this will be resurrection – endless life.
Forgiveness makes you vulnerable. To forgive means to open oneself to violence. Humanly speaking it is almost impossible to overcome our instinct for survival. If someone is really threatening my life I cannot let them do it unless I am convinced that my life is somehow secure. Jesus combines forgiveness and life through the promise of resurrection. We are set free to forgive and live.
Jesus is the resurrection and the life because of forgiveness. Fundamentalists, zealots and extremists are OK with dying for their cause, without having to forgive. They are looking to escape this life for a martyr’s paradise. Resurrection is about a belief in renewed life here in this life. Lazarus is the sign of this resurrection. Resurrection implies forgiveness and vice versa. Unless Jesus had forgiven he would not have risen. And without his trust in the Father and his hope in resurrection, he could not have forgiven so completely. Without the resurrection, Jesus’ project would have failed.
Jesus also changes our relationship with God through forgiveness. There is no more need for sacrifice. Temples are human constructs where negotiation takes the place of forgiveness. It is a place where the holy can be contained and controlled. In abolishing the temple we no longer have control.
Lazarus was dead for four days, Jesus was raised after three. The early Christians associated themselves with Lazarus – like him we will follow Jesus’ resurrection and be raised on “the fourth day”. Resurrection allows Christians to see death differently. It is no longer the definitive end of life. Nor is it the separation of spirit to another realm. Rather it is like a long exhale – while we wait to inhale again. It is like we do not actually die - “everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”. It is a negation of death. A Christian doesn’t expect to die. Forgiveness brings us fullness of life. Resurrection is therefore not a reward, but the natural consequence of forgiveness.
America!
I began writing the following piece before this latest item of news hit our screens, and when it did I went back and finished it: Gainesville, Florida, the Dove World Outreach Center has announced a Burn Quran Day, planning the burning of the Quran to commemorate the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks…
America, fearful freaking America. A great big beautiful country occupied by a beautiful people occupied in turn by an ideology of absolute selfhood and absolute violence to defend it.
America, named after Amerigo who circumnavigated the twin continents, wrapping them in a single act of imagination, and now that imagination, or its northern half, grips the earth like a fearful vice.
America, America, when will you see that you are the most Christian of nations, the most Christianly sick, the most full up with half-cooked, failed and poisoned Christianity? You had no Middle Ages, no chorus of cathedrals, no network of monasteries, no begging bowls of friars. Of course, yes, there were abuses in all that, we know that and have heard it many times. But there was also mutuality, community, an experiencing of the self as stand-in for the other. The self in its deepest self as already the other, as simply (an)other other…the precondition for love. From where did the American absolute self come from?
And now we have a church burning the Quran, the most absolute of gestures against the other, to erase their words. And not just any words but words which belong to a billion and a half people, a huge communal other whose voice this “Dove World” church wishes to erase. For those for whom the bible is an authoritative book there may even be a verse that might seem to encourage the burning of the scriptures of others. But what I do know is that the founder of Christianity, Jesus who told us actually how to read our bible, said this: “Woe to the world because of scandals [i.e. violent behaviors that cause mental or emotional falling down in others—the mimetic contagion of violence]. Scandals are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the scandal comes” (Matt. 18: 7); “If anyone compels you to go one mile [read military forces with power of empressment, i.e. any violent force which constrains us] go two miles with him” (Matt. 5:41); “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say to you, love your enemies” (Matt. 5: 43-44).
In fact Jesus is the one who has made the absolute self impossible, again and again making the hidden, despised, hated other return to view, and thereby hangs the deep sickness of Christianity, its deep internal self-hatred and anger. The only way the Christian self can uphold itself in absolute terms is through the backing of an ultimate Absolute Self, God, the One who crushes the other with absolute impunity, Jesus included. Where did this so-called Christian God come from? It came from the dark side of the Middle Ages which constructed its theology out of metaphysics and feudal violence and which North American Christianity has no problem inheriting. God, the Father of Jesus, needed some place to put his terminal violence in response to sin, so he put it on his Son. Even so is absolute violence toward the other built in to the Christian thought of things. Even so does the Christian God crush its Jesus!
But no matter how we kill the other to establish the self, the other returns to challenge it. And, again, it does so expressly because of Jesus—patiently, subversively, irresistibly working to overturn formal Christianity—through his teaching and above all rising from the dead and vindicating every victim of our violence. All violence is bad faith (i.e. just as much our own issue as to do with the one we’re attacking) because Jesus has shown it to be so. But it is worst faith when it is Christian violence.
American Christians will never be happy and America itself will never be happy unless it accepts a God who is as profoundly accepting and loving of the other as Jesus was. A God who gives and forgives out of the well of his/her own self-for-other (the Trinity!), not out of any supposed objective order of justice and compensation. After all what would a truly just God do, settle accounts with sin by an answering violence, or change the roots of our humanity so sin, and violence, may no longer exist?
America, fearful freaky America, crammed out with bombs and guns and people itching to employ them, let it all go! Surrender your famous super self, your righteousness and private salvation. Hand yourself over to your brother, your sister, without reserve, without fear!
America, named after Amerigo who circumnavigated the twin continents, wrapping them in a single act of imagination, you are always talking about Jesus, now is the time to let your imagination be his!
Tony
America, fearful freaking America. A great big beautiful country occupied by a beautiful people occupied in turn by an ideology of absolute selfhood and absolute violence to defend it.
America, named after Amerigo who circumnavigated the twin continents, wrapping them in a single act of imagination, and now that imagination, or its northern half, grips the earth like a fearful vice.
America, America, when will you see that you are the most Christian of nations, the most Christianly sick, the most full up with half-cooked, failed and poisoned Christianity? You had no Middle Ages, no chorus of cathedrals, no network of monasteries, no begging bowls of friars. Of course, yes, there were abuses in all that, we know that and have heard it many times. But there was also mutuality, community, an experiencing of the self as stand-in for the other. The self in its deepest self as already the other, as simply (an)other other…the precondition for love. From where did the American absolute self come from?
And now we have a church burning the Quran, the most absolute of gestures against the other, to erase their words. And not just any words but words which belong to a billion and a half people, a huge communal other whose voice this “Dove World” church wishes to erase. For those for whom the bible is an authoritative book there may even be a verse that might seem to encourage the burning of the scriptures of others. But what I do know is that the founder of Christianity, Jesus who told us actually how to read our bible, said this: “Woe to the world because of scandals [i.e. violent behaviors that cause mental or emotional falling down in others—the mimetic contagion of violence]. Scandals are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the scandal comes” (Matt. 18: 7); “If anyone compels you to go one mile [read military forces with power of empressment, i.e. any violent force which constrains us] go two miles with him” (Matt. 5:41); “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say to you, love your enemies” (Matt. 5: 43-44).
In fact Jesus is the one who has made the absolute self impossible, again and again making the hidden, despised, hated other return to view, and thereby hangs the deep sickness of Christianity, its deep internal self-hatred and anger. The only way the Christian self can uphold itself in absolute terms is through the backing of an ultimate Absolute Self, God, the One who crushes the other with absolute impunity, Jesus included. Where did this so-called Christian God come from? It came from the dark side of the Middle Ages which constructed its theology out of metaphysics and feudal violence and which North American Christianity has no problem inheriting. God, the Father of Jesus, needed some place to put his terminal violence in response to sin, so he put it on his Son. Even so is absolute violence toward the other built in to the Christian thought of things. Even so does the Christian God crush its Jesus!
But no matter how we kill the other to establish the self, the other returns to challenge it. And, again, it does so expressly because of Jesus—patiently, subversively, irresistibly working to overturn formal Christianity—through his teaching and above all rising from the dead and vindicating every victim of our violence. All violence is bad faith (i.e. just as much our own issue as to do with the one we’re attacking) because Jesus has shown it to be so. But it is worst faith when it is Christian violence.
American Christians will never be happy and America itself will never be happy unless it accepts a God who is as profoundly accepting and loving of the other as Jesus was. A God who gives and forgives out of the well of his/her own self-for-other (the Trinity!), not out of any supposed objective order of justice and compensation. After all what would a truly just God do, settle accounts with sin by an answering violence, or change the roots of our humanity so sin, and violence, may no longer exist?
America, fearful freaky America, crammed out with bombs and guns and people itching to employ them, let it all go! Surrender your famous super self, your righteousness and private salvation. Hand yourself over to your brother, your sister, without reserve, without fear!
America, named after Amerigo who circumnavigated the twin continents, wrapping them in a single act of imagination, you are always talking about Jesus, now is the time to let your imagination be his!
Tony
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
John #10
Here is the next Bible Study Summary. Tony presents the material each week. I take notes during the study and of the related group discussion. This summary is my interpretation and ordering of those notes. All but the most recently posted study are now located together under the new "Present Study" tab located on the home page. I will continue to post the most current study here on the blog page. Peace, Linda
This week’s study includes a general look at the women in the Gospels. It does not bear directly on the Lazarus story, but is made up in large part of the evening’s conversation. Our Lazarus study continues next week…
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus In The Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 10- Written that you may believe chapter 10.
The Gospel of John #10 – The Community of eternal life (Part 1) 07.22.10
We have been using Schneider’s book to provide a framework for understanding John’s Gospel. Her process is to first explore the text as literature, then historically, theologically and finally spiritually. Like in much of the Gospel, she sees the author as having constructed most of the narrative in Chapter 11. While there seems to be a traditional oral source for the story of the raising of Lazarus, it is also clearly marked by Johannine theology and concerns. It is the highly constructed culmination of the Book of Signs. It marks the turning point in the Gospel that leads to Jesus’ arrest. In the Synoptics this event is the (historically more likely) closing down of the temple sacrifices. For John, the raising of Lazarus is the event that makes Jesus untenable for the Jewish authorities. Chapter 12 is a bridging chapter that leads to the Book of Glory. There the anointing by Mary points to Jesus’ death, and the triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his resurrection. The Book of Glory begins in Chapter 13 with the events leading up to the Passover.
At John 11:2 there is a reference to an event that has not yet happened (Mary’s anointing of Jesus). This implies a strong familiarity with the oral tradition within the Johannine community. Jesus travels to Bethany after hearing that Lazarus is ill. Lazarus is the brother of Martha and Mary. Martha is not a proper name rather it is a word that means “mistress of the home” or “Lady”. It is the feminine of maran (as in maranatha “come Lord”). Mary could be Mary Magdalene – who was named for a place “Mary of Magdala” rather than the more usual “daughter of x” (bath). The Mary in John 11 could have lived as a “sister” to the lady of the house in Bethany. Mary of Magdala is mentioned first by name in Jn 19:25 and then appears in the resurrection accounts. The logic is that it is highly unlikely there would be two Marys of such critical intimacy to Jesus, one to anoint him prior to his passion, the other to be first witness of the resurrection.
Mary is Jesus’ disciple – she sits at the feet of Jesus (Lk 10:38-42). Jesus defends Mary’s decision in a society that excluded women from taking this role. In John 12:1-8 it is Mary who anoints Jesus as Messiah – again breaking the rules. In Jn 11:17 it is Martha who meets Jesus on the road to Bethany. She says, “Lord if you had been here…,” and then goes on to say “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him”. She instigates a conversation (like the Samaritan woman at the well) that leads to one of Jesus’ crucial “I am” sayings: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (v.25-26).
At the time of the Gospel’s composition Christians were dying. A lot of the original witnesses had also died. It was a contemporary concern – the meaning of death in a post-resurrection world. They had expected Jesus to return soon, had not expected to have to deal with death. This passage helps understand the meaning of death – that even if you die, you don’t die.
Martha declared Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world. This is equivalent to the declaration by Peter at Caesarea Philippi in Matthew. It is the most developed confession in the fourth Gospel. Again it gives pivotal status to a woman.
Martha goes home and calls Mary using the words “the teacher is here” (v.28) underscoring Mary’s role as disciple. When Mary Magdalene greets Jesus in the Garden after his resurrection she calls him “Rabbouni” which means “beloved teacher”. This might be another indication that Mary of Bethany is in fact Mary Magdalene. Mary goes quickly to greet Jesus repeating Martha’s words “Lord if you had been here…” She kneels at his feet (reminiscent of sitting at his feet). Unlike Martha who makes a powerful theological statement, Mary weeps. Jesus is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (v.33). It is at this point, rather than after the big doctrinal statement, that he is moved to raise Lazarus.
Mary models human anguish and Jesus enters into her pain. The raising of Lazarus is not just the story of overcoming death, but of human anguish, the catastrophe of death and separation. Mary is the representative figure who brings Jesus into this space, in the same way that she appropriates the role of anointer. Her tears anoint him into the human condition and his role within it.
The Gospel Women
It is not easy to get all of the women (especially the Marys) in the Gospels straight. Mary was a prestigious, and therefore common name - Miriam being the sister of Moses. At the cross Mary of Bethany is not mentioned, however, Mary Magdalene is. In Jn 19:25 standing at the cross are “his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene”. Mary the wife of Clopas could be the other of the two disciples mentioned in the post-resurrection account found in Luke 24:18 (the walk to Emmaus), one of whom is called Cleopas. “The one of them whose name was Cleopas, answered him…” It is possible, even likely, that the second disciple was his wife – Mary.
Luke does not mention the women around the cross – but after the resurrection they are listed as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and other women. (Lk 24:10). Joanna is the wife of Herod’s steward (Luke 8:1-3) and Mary the mother of James refers to Jesus’ mother, Mary. James was known as the “brother of the Lord” by the early church. Mary is not named as Jesus’ mother by Luke because Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptic Gospels was so fiercely against giving any prestige to his birth family, both because of the character of the kingdom and possibly as a way of deflecting any attempts at building a family dynasty. Mary is also named as the mother of Jesus’ brothers in Mark 15:40 “Mary the mother of James the younger and Joses”. Compare also Mk 6:3 “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” Only in John’s Gospel is Mary clearly named as Jesus’ mother. John uses Mary to illustrate the crucial importance of women to Jesus, making use of the natural role and prestige of a woman close to him, his mother. However, for John she is a powerfully symbolic figure, representing “woman”, i.e. the earth, wisdom, femininity. This is signaled by Jesus calling her “woman” rather than “mother”.
Jesus’ mother Mary became prominent in the 4th and 5th centuries. This was related to the theological arguments that were occurring at that time – was Jesus considered to be God after his baptism (when the spirit alighted upon him – “adoptionism”) or from the womb? Orthodox Christianity concluded that his divinity was integral to his humanity – that it was not an added layer – and must therefore have been present from the beginning. Mary therefore began to be known as the “Mother of God”. It was a doctrinal decision that attempted to uphold the true divinity of Jesus connected to his humanity– but it had the effect of making Mary less human and more divine. The later doctrine of the Immaculate Conception cemented this.
In John 8: 2-11 there is the account of the woman caught in adultery. The earliest Greek manuscripts do not include the story. It appeared to have been a free-floating account that was eventually placed at this point in John’s Gospel (probably because of John’s sympathy for women) in the 5th century. It has a different writing style, however, and may actually fit better in Luke 21. Traditionally the woman has been associated with Mary Magdalene (from whom “seven demons had gone out” Lk 8:2) but there is no scriptural evidence for this.
This week’s study includes a general look at the women in the Gospels. It does not bear directly on the Lazarus story, but is made up in large part of the evening’s conversation. Our Lazarus study continues next week…
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus In The Fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 10- Written that you may believe chapter 10.
The Gospel of John #10 – The Community of eternal life (Part 1) 07.22.10
We have been using Schneider’s book to provide a framework for understanding John’s Gospel. Her process is to first explore the text as literature, then historically, theologically and finally spiritually. Like in much of the Gospel, she sees the author as having constructed most of the narrative in Chapter 11. While there seems to be a traditional oral source for the story of the raising of Lazarus, it is also clearly marked by Johannine theology and concerns. It is the highly constructed culmination of the Book of Signs. It marks the turning point in the Gospel that leads to Jesus’ arrest. In the Synoptics this event is the (historically more likely) closing down of the temple sacrifices. For John, the raising of Lazarus is the event that makes Jesus untenable for the Jewish authorities. Chapter 12 is a bridging chapter that leads to the Book of Glory. There the anointing by Mary points to Jesus’ death, and the triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his resurrection. The Book of Glory begins in Chapter 13 with the events leading up to the Passover.
At John 11:2 there is a reference to an event that has not yet happened (Mary’s anointing of Jesus). This implies a strong familiarity with the oral tradition within the Johannine community. Jesus travels to Bethany after hearing that Lazarus is ill. Lazarus is the brother of Martha and Mary. Martha is not a proper name rather it is a word that means “mistress of the home” or “Lady”. It is the feminine of maran (as in maranatha “come Lord”). Mary could be Mary Magdalene – who was named for a place “Mary of Magdala” rather than the more usual “daughter of x” (bath). The Mary in John 11 could have lived as a “sister” to the lady of the house in Bethany. Mary of Magdala is mentioned first by name in Jn 19:25 and then appears in the resurrection accounts. The logic is that it is highly unlikely there would be two Marys of such critical intimacy to Jesus, one to anoint him prior to his passion, the other to be first witness of the resurrection.
Mary is Jesus’ disciple – she sits at the feet of Jesus (Lk 10:38-42). Jesus defends Mary’s decision in a society that excluded women from taking this role. In John 12:1-8 it is Mary who anoints Jesus as Messiah – again breaking the rules. In Jn 11:17 it is Martha who meets Jesus on the road to Bethany. She says, “Lord if you had been here…,” and then goes on to say “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him”. She instigates a conversation (like the Samaritan woman at the well) that leads to one of Jesus’ crucial “I am” sayings: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (v.25-26).
At the time of the Gospel’s composition Christians were dying. A lot of the original witnesses had also died. It was a contemporary concern – the meaning of death in a post-resurrection world. They had expected Jesus to return soon, had not expected to have to deal with death. This passage helps understand the meaning of death – that even if you die, you don’t die.
Martha declared Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world. This is equivalent to the declaration by Peter at Caesarea Philippi in Matthew. It is the most developed confession in the fourth Gospel. Again it gives pivotal status to a woman.
Martha goes home and calls Mary using the words “the teacher is here” (v.28) underscoring Mary’s role as disciple. When Mary Magdalene greets Jesus in the Garden after his resurrection she calls him “Rabbouni” which means “beloved teacher”. This might be another indication that Mary of Bethany is in fact Mary Magdalene. Mary goes quickly to greet Jesus repeating Martha’s words “Lord if you had been here…” She kneels at his feet (reminiscent of sitting at his feet). Unlike Martha who makes a powerful theological statement, Mary weeps. Jesus is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (v.33). It is at this point, rather than after the big doctrinal statement, that he is moved to raise Lazarus.
Mary models human anguish and Jesus enters into her pain. The raising of Lazarus is not just the story of overcoming death, but of human anguish, the catastrophe of death and separation. Mary is the representative figure who brings Jesus into this space, in the same way that she appropriates the role of anointer. Her tears anoint him into the human condition and his role within it.
The Gospel Women
It is not easy to get all of the women (especially the Marys) in the Gospels straight. Mary was a prestigious, and therefore common name - Miriam being the sister of Moses. At the cross Mary of Bethany is not mentioned, however, Mary Magdalene is. In Jn 19:25 standing at the cross are “his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene”. Mary the wife of Clopas could be the other of the two disciples mentioned in the post-resurrection account found in Luke 24:18 (the walk to Emmaus), one of whom is called Cleopas. “The one of them whose name was Cleopas, answered him…” It is possible, even likely, that the second disciple was his wife – Mary.
Luke does not mention the women around the cross – but after the resurrection they are listed as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and other women. (Lk 24:10). Joanna is the wife of Herod’s steward (Luke 8:1-3) and Mary the mother of James refers to Jesus’ mother, Mary. James was known as the “brother of the Lord” by the early church. Mary is not named as Jesus’ mother by Luke because Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptic Gospels was so fiercely against giving any prestige to his birth family, both because of the character of the kingdom and possibly as a way of deflecting any attempts at building a family dynasty. Mary is also named as the mother of Jesus’ brothers in Mark 15:40 “Mary the mother of James the younger and Joses”. Compare also Mk 6:3 “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” Only in John’s Gospel is Mary clearly named as Jesus’ mother. John uses Mary to illustrate the crucial importance of women to Jesus, making use of the natural role and prestige of a woman close to him, his mother. However, for John she is a powerfully symbolic figure, representing “woman”, i.e. the earth, wisdom, femininity. This is signaled by Jesus calling her “woman” rather than “mother”.
Jesus’ mother Mary became prominent in the 4th and 5th centuries. This was related to the theological arguments that were occurring at that time – was Jesus considered to be God after his baptism (when the spirit alighted upon him – “adoptionism”) or from the womb? Orthodox Christianity concluded that his divinity was integral to his humanity – that it was not an added layer – and must therefore have been present from the beginning. Mary therefore began to be known as the “Mother of God”. It was a doctrinal decision that attempted to uphold the true divinity of Jesus connected to his humanity– but it had the effect of making Mary less human and more divine. The later doctrine of the Immaculate Conception cemented this.
In John 8: 2-11 there is the account of the woman caught in adultery. The earliest Greek manuscripts do not include the story. It appeared to have been a free-floating account that was eventually placed at this point in John’s Gospel (probably because of John’s sympathy for women) in the 5th century. It has a different writing style, however, and may actually fit better in Luke 21. Traditionally the woman has been associated with Mary Magdalene (from whom “seven demons had gone out” Lk 8:2) but there is no scriptural evidence for this.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Hot Love
The earth is cooking and no one can turn down the gas. That seems the necessary conclusion from this sizzling summer. 2010 is on track to be the hottest year on record, measuring average temperatures of both land and ocean.
Temperatures to date are 1.22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th-century average (figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association). In June the temperature map for the continents showed hot weather pretty much everywhere, which is unusual. Moscow is experiencing a prolonged heatwave with temperatures constantly in the nineties, while smoke from wildfires in the surrounding countryside create an apocalyptic event, obscuring the sun and making the air unbreathable. Carbon monoxide levels have been six times above safe concentrations. Elsewhere a giant ice sheet broke away from a major glacier in Greenland, an enormous frozen pizza four times the size of Manhattan and over sixty stories thick. As it floats south its melt water is adding volume to the ocean equivalent to the annual outflow of a major river.
Here in upstate New York it has been hot but there is also another geophysical feature that grabs attention and underlines the significance of all this. The landscape here is marked dramatically by the last ice age, with deep long gouges in the earth indicating the paths of the great glaciers. The neighborhood in Syracuse known as “The Valley” is actually the physical product of an enormous glacier, and you can follow its spectacular path miles farther to the south along Route 81. The great ice rivers melted and retreated roughly ten thousand years ago, a mere blink-of-an-eye on the geological timeline but of immense importance to humankind. It was during this brief breathing space that agriculture and civilization developed and virtually all established culture defining who we now are and how we live as a race. Our current human experiment emerges in an astonishingly narrow frame of time, and seeing it in this way means three things.
First, time truly time is of the essence. Everything for us has always happened in an accelerated manner and the biblical urgency that “now is the favorable moment” and “walk while you have the light” is founded in anthropological fact. We have relatively very little time in which to find our meaning and peace as an intelligent life form. Second, geophysical factors strongly shape this narrow frame of time. Jesus himself used meteorological examples when he told the Pharisees to read the signs of the times (“You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky...", Matt.15:3), as if he already connected the weather and the general human crisis he was confronting. Third—and against the first two—it is now an absolutely typical arrogance of our dominant culture almost completely to ignore this intimate connection and instead see itself in divine and metaphysical terms separated from the earth and from time itself.
Even as they jacked up the AC in their paneled rooms the Senate blocked any form of climate legislation this session. Meanwhile down in the Gulf if there ever was a sign for the times here was one. The venting of 4.9 million barrels of oil from the broken stack was run continually on national TV, like some horrible sci.fi. spigot of grease for basting and roasting our planet in its own built-in oven dish. Surely it should have impressed our body-souls with how borderline our situation truly is. But no, the metaphysics of greed and wealth have trumped all realism and truth. What can possibly restore good sense?
Only love. You can argue the facts of climate change until you’re sweating and superheated yourself but that only fuels the reactive vigor of metaphysics. We are beyond justice and good sense. But, in deeper truth, care for the planet is rooted in love, in Jesus’ loving wisdom of flowers-more-glorious-than-Solomon and birds cared for by the Father. A Christian community living intentionally in the Holy Spirit will restore the planet each and every time it loves. Only love overcomes metaphysics. Only love contains its own built-in environment in which everything can live and is already fully alive. Therefore, the rising red in the thermometer requires an equally rising vein of charity. For every degree of heat the planet goes up we are inspired to create a new angle of love, an added degree of love for each person, for our enemies, for ourselves. We cannot know how this will affect things, how it will redeem the planet from its present crisis. But we can be sure that love hopes and believes all things. And, in addition, love from the Holy Spirit is a prism in which we can already see the earth green and crystalline as in the eye of God, as God created it to be. We can be sure that this earth will one day exist, that this is how the actual earth will be, because the eye of love never blinks.
Temperatures to date are 1.22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th-century average (figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association). In June the temperature map for the continents showed hot weather pretty much everywhere, which is unusual. Moscow is experiencing a prolonged heatwave with temperatures constantly in the nineties, while smoke from wildfires in the surrounding countryside create an apocalyptic event, obscuring the sun and making the air unbreathable. Carbon monoxide levels have been six times above safe concentrations. Elsewhere a giant ice sheet broke away from a major glacier in Greenland, an enormous frozen pizza four times the size of Manhattan and over sixty stories thick. As it floats south its melt water is adding volume to the ocean equivalent to the annual outflow of a major river.
Here in upstate New York it has been hot but there is also another geophysical feature that grabs attention and underlines the significance of all this. The landscape here is marked dramatically by the last ice age, with deep long gouges in the earth indicating the paths of the great glaciers. The neighborhood in Syracuse known as “The Valley” is actually the physical product of an enormous glacier, and you can follow its spectacular path miles farther to the south along Route 81. The great ice rivers melted and retreated roughly ten thousand years ago, a mere blink-of-an-eye on the geological timeline but of immense importance to humankind. It was during this brief breathing space that agriculture and civilization developed and virtually all established culture defining who we now are and how we live as a race. Our current human experiment emerges in an astonishingly narrow frame of time, and seeing it in this way means three things.
First, time truly time is of the essence. Everything for us has always happened in an accelerated manner and the biblical urgency that “now is the favorable moment” and “walk while you have the light” is founded in anthropological fact. We have relatively very little time in which to find our meaning and peace as an intelligent life form. Second, geophysical factors strongly shape this narrow frame of time. Jesus himself used meteorological examples when he told the Pharisees to read the signs of the times (“You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky...", Matt.15:3), as if he already connected the weather and the general human crisis he was confronting. Third—and against the first two—it is now an absolutely typical arrogance of our dominant culture almost completely to ignore this intimate connection and instead see itself in divine and metaphysical terms separated from the earth and from time itself.
Even as they jacked up the AC in their paneled rooms the Senate blocked any form of climate legislation this session. Meanwhile down in the Gulf if there ever was a sign for the times here was one. The venting of 4.9 million barrels of oil from the broken stack was run continually on national TV, like some horrible sci.fi. spigot of grease for basting and roasting our planet in its own built-in oven dish. Surely it should have impressed our body-souls with how borderline our situation truly is. But no, the metaphysics of greed and wealth have trumped all realism and truth. What can possibly restore good sense?
Only love. You can argue the facts of climate change until you’re sweating and superheated yourself but that only fuels the reactive vigor of metaphysics. We are beyond justice and good sense. But, in deeper truth, care for the planet is rooted in love, in Jesus’ loving wisdom of flowers-more-glorious-than-Solomon and birds cared for by the Father. A Christian community living intentionally in the Holy Spirit will restore the planet each and every time it loves. Only love overcomes metaphysics. Only love contains its own built-in environment in which everything can live and is already fully alive. Therefore, the rising red in the thermometer requires an equally rising vein of charity. For every degree of heat the planet goes up we are inspired to create a new angle of love, an added degree of love for each person, for our enemies, for ourselves. We cannot know how this will affect things, how it will redeem the planet from its present crisis. But we can be sure that love hopes and believes all things. And, in addition, love from the Holy Spirit is a prism in which we can already see the earth green and crystalline as in the eye of God, as God created it to be. We can be sure that this earth will one day exist, that this is how the actual earth will be, because the eye of love never blinks.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Of Pears, Peers, Spit and Tears
Jim Warren, my Christian magician friend, sent me a piece he’d written, on a passage in Augustine’s Confessions. He’s commenting on the famous episode where the coming giant of Western theology is telling how as a sixteen-year-old, he once robbed a pear orchard. From the vantage point of his now forty-plus years and evolving Christian consciousness, Augustine is musing painfully on why and how this shameful act was possible. He did not do it for the pleasure of eating the pears for, as he says, he threw most of the “enormous quantity” to the pigs. The picture he paints is rather of a gang of boys spurring each other on and, as Jim relates it, clearly an instance of the power of mimetic or imitative desire. Here is a key passage which Jim quotes:
It is true that if the pears which I stole had been to my taste, and if I had wanted to get them for myself, I might have committed the crime on my own…(and) I should have had no need to kindle my glowing desire by rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices. But as it was not the fruit that gave me pleasure, I must have got it from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin. (II.8) Jim then comments: “So Augustine penetrates to a much more profound level of insight than the typical romantic idea that the thief steals because of the intrinsic desirability of the object. Desire was certainly at work, but in a way different from how we typically frame it. He describes himself possessed that night by a “glowing desire,” kindled from “rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices.” (II.9) The image is one of kindling a fire by the friction of rubbing wood against wood. The desire thus kindled does not have an independent existence; it does not originate within Augustine himself, in isolation, as a function of his relation to the pears. Rather, this desire springs into being as a function of his relation to his cohorts.”
In other words, it’s not the pears but the peers… Jim says that Augustine’s psychological analysis brought him very near to the insights of Rene Girard about the imitative character of desire, including its frequently violent outcome, as in the theft and destruction of a harvest of pears. What then struck me was the following. 1) Yes, Augustine has incredible powers of introspection and is right on the track of mimetic desire, and 2) he completely misses it as a structural principle! The reason he was so close to this anthropological principle and yet did not identify it is because he subsumes the whole thing within the Platonic metaphysics of the immortal soul and a doctrine of original sin. And this led me in turn to reflect on how profoundly the whole Augustinian framework has affected Christianity and how it is now at last all changing. I can’t believe how plain it all now seems, and I hope I can make it just as plain in the next couple of paragraphs!
Augustine is one heck of a smart guy. He is called by his contemporary Jerome (the same Jerome who translated the Greek bible into Latin) “the founder anew of the ancient faith” (Epistola 195). When I first came across this remark I thought it outrageous but I feel now it was no exaggeration. The first thing you need to know about Augustine is that he was a rhetorician, the most brilliant of his generation (and perhaps a thousand years after that as well). Today we would be more likely to call him a writer (his literary output was truly amazing) because he is so absolutely good with words, phrases and composition. So, thinking about Jerome’s remark, the first flag is that he is the producer of texts and a complete master of his craft.
Secondly if you read the Confessions you will see that Augustine’s path to conversion to Christianity came via a prior conversion to Neoplatonism (actually he calls it Platonism and in terms of the basic derivation of the philosophical viewpoint he is correct). Without going into any kind of detail—which is unnecessary because we are all so profoundly affected by the spirit of Platonic thought—we may say that what Augustine got from Plato was the intellectual conviction of a heavenly otherworld made available by the immortal intellectual soul which carries in itself the light of that world. Here he is, talking about his encounter with “the books of the Platonists”: These books served to remind me to return to my own self. Under your guidance I entered into the depths of my soul… I entered, and with the eyes of my soul, such as it was, I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of the soul, over my mind…. What I saw was something quite, quite different from any light we know on earth. It shone above my mind…. It was above me because it was itself the Light that makes me, and I was below because I was made by it. All who know the truth know this Light, and all who know this Light know eternity. It is the light that charity knows. (vii, 10)
Cutting to the chase, I would say that what Augustine is doing here, and throughout the Confessions, is constructing the Christian God out of Platonic thought, just as Plato constructed the true otherworld out of the intellectual soul and the death of the body. Plato goes round and round in a circle from innate ideas (like math) to the immortal soul which remembers them, to the return to the heavenly realm by the soul after death of the body. It’s very important to underline that effective construction of any circle of thought involves the casting out or elimination of the element that disturbs it—in Plato’s case the body. Deconstruction in its contemporary sense is the path of reflection which brings to light the cast out or eliminated element in the construction of any circle of thought. In Augustine’s case what is cast out—on top of Plato’s casting out of the body—is historical or earthly salvation, the very thing that the gospel proclamation of God’s kingdom seems to be urgently proposing! And so Augustine crossed a line, refounding Christianity on eternal principles derived from human cultural violence, i.e. the casting out of something (the body and the earth). Ever since Christians have gone round and round in an eternal circle, from the God beyond this world, to the soul intended to live with this God, to the almost complete devaluing of the earth and history, and back again to the God beyond.
It is true of course that Augustine is too much of a Christian and biblical scholar to get rid of history and historical salvation completely. When he’s commenting on the books of the Platonists he says he learnt so much about God and the Son of God in them, but he also says that what he didn’t learn of was Christ’s self-emptying and his redemptive death and the coming of charity or love by these means. (vii, 9 & 20) Nevertheless, these elements are included at a subordinate rhetorical moment after he’s laid out what he’s learned from the books, and so the essential framework is maintained. He even says: If I had not come across these books until after I had been formed in the mould of your Holy Scriptures and had learnt to love you through familiarity with them, the Platonist teaching might have swept me away from my foothold on the solid ground of piety, and even if I had held firm to the spirit in which the Scriptures had imbued me for salvation, I might have thought it possible for a man who read nothing but the Platonist books to derive the same spirit from them alone. (vii 20) In other words the final intellectual and aesthetic reference remains these books and nothing he has learned in the scriptures has provided an alternative intellectual principle. Later in his career Augustine did add what he considered a biblical notion to his thought of God—predestination of souls for heaven or hell. But this simply made things worse. By adding historical initiative to an eternal concept—a changeless divine will beyond the world—he ended up with the absolute inverse of a God of history: a God who has made up his mind for ever and always about the saved and the damned and nothing on earth—including the incarnation of the Word itself—will make any difference. In other words the casting out of history is even more absolute, and the construction of the dogmatic circle ever more fixed.
But now—and this is where all this has been leading—we have the emergence of an intellectual framework not borrowed from Plato, one arising directly from the scriptures themselves, and able to provide a rigorous meaning related directly to humanity and its history. This is what Jim was talking about, what Augustine guessed but then saw in terms only of the soul and original sin. Through the work of Rene Girard we are beginning to see that imitative or mimetic desire is not just a chaotic effect of some mythic sin by our first parents but it is the principle itself of humanity. It is what produces human beings, through their intense ability to imitate, through the violence and group victims this produces, and through the consequent birth of ritual, language and law: the emergence of human culture. But then, and of astonishing importance, it is the bible which is the singular narrative which has revealed all this to a self-deceiving world and at the very same time the possibility of a new human way. Deconstruction itself has to be part of this pulling away of the veils and it means we are now in a completely new situation.
What, therefore, is the goal toward which the gospel is leading, if not a new anthropology, a new way of being human? Rather than the immortal soul as the final point of reference we have a new humanity of love, shown us in Jesus, rising up against the world of violence and beyond all deconstruction because it does not exclude or eliminate anything. All this of course demands a whole lot more treatment, but let me give a quick illustration of what I’m saying. Instead of an eternal principle somewhere off the earth we are offered a new anthropological principle very much on the earth, the dramatically new humanity of Jesus.
In recent bible studies we have been reading the gospel of John and in that context I was struck by the mention of bodily fluids! Nothing in John’s gospel is there by accident. It all has a sign value or what also might be called the character of a signal. It’s meant to lead you deeper into the new thing that is so hard to sense at first. If the gospel talks about Jesus’ spit mixed with mud (9:6) or about his tears (11:35) these are signals to lead us deeper into Jesus’ new humanity. They are not there just to satisfy curiosity. And what is this humanity? It is the absolute handing over his self, his body, to others in love. Spit and tears join with the water and the blood which flow out at 19:34. They are all signals of endless self-giving, of expenditure without reserve, and it is endless or without reserve both at the moral level of Jesus’ character and person, and at the ontological level of how this character and person are raised up as deathless after they have given themselves to the last. In other words, spit and tears become grace: a grace lodged within spit and tears, as spit and tears, not as some ethereal, otherworldly immortal soul. Or, to carry the deconstruction all the way (and in admittedly a challenging image), the only immortal soul we now know is spit and tears condensed, evaporated and raised up for ever, as love.
Tony
It is true that if the pears which I stole had been to my taste, and if I had wanted to get them for myself, I might have committed the crime on my own…(and) I should have had no need to kindle my glowing desire by rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices. But as it was not the fruit that gave me pleasure, I must have got it from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin. (II.8) Jim then comments: “So Augustine penetrates to a much more profound level of insight than the typical romantic idea that the thief steals because of the intrinsic desirability of the object. Desire was certainly at work, but in a way different from how we typically frame it. He describes himself possessed that night by a “glowing desire,” kindled from “rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices.” (II.9) The image is one of kindling a fire by the friction of rubbing wood against wood. The desire thus kindled does not have an independent existence; it does not originate within Augustine himself, in isolation, as a function of his relation to the pears. Rather, this desire springs into being as a function of his relation to his cohorts.”
In other words, it’s not the pears but the peers… Jim says that Augustine’s psychological analysis brought him very near to the insights of Rene Girard about the imitative character of desire, including its frequently violent outcome, as in the theft and destruction of a harvest of pears. What then struck me was the following. 1) Yes, Augustine has incredible powers of introspection and is right on the track of mimetic desire, and 2) he completely misses it as a structural principle! The reason he was so close to this anthropological principle and yet did not identify it is because he subsumes the whole thing within the Platonic metaphysics of the immortal soul and a doctrine of original sin. And this led me in turn to reflect on how profoundly the whole Augustinian framework has affected Christianity and how it is now at last all changing. I can’t believe how plain it all now seems, and I hope I can make it just as plain in the next couple of paragraphs!
Augustine is one heck of a smart guy. He is called by his contemporary Jerome (the same Jerome who translated the Greek bible into Latin) “the founder anew of the ancient faith” (Epistola 195). When I first came across this remark I thought it outrageous but I feel now it was no exaggeration. The first thing you need to know about Augustine is that he was a rhetorician, the most brilliant of his generation (and perhaps a thousand years after that as well). Today we would be more likely to call him a writer (his literary output was truly amazing) because he is so absolutely good with words, phrases and composition. So, thinking about Jerome’s remark, the first flag is that he is the producer of texts and a complete master of his craft.
Secondly if you read the Confessions you will see that Augustine’s path to conversion to Christianity came via a prior conversion to Neoplatonism (actually he calls it Platonism and in terms of the basic derivation of the philosophical viewpoint he is correct). Without going into any kind of detail—which is unnecessary because we are all so profoundly affected by the spirit of Platonic thought—we may say that what Augustine got from Plato was the intellectual conviction of a heavenly otherworld made available by the immortal intellectual soul which carries in itself the light of that world. Here he is, talking about his encounter with “the books of the Platonists”: These books served to remind me to return to my own self. Under your guidance I entered into the depths of my soul… I entered, and with the eyes of my soul, such as it was, I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of the soul, over my mind…. What I saw was something quite, quite different from any light we know on earth. It shone above my mind…. It was above me because it was itself the Light that makes me, and I was below because I was made by it. All who know the truth know this Light, and all who know this Light know eternity. It is the light that charity knows. (vii, 10)
Cutting to the chase, I would say that what Augustine is doing here, and throughout the Confessions, is constructing the Christian God out of Platonic thought, just as Plato constructed the true otherworld out of the intellectual soul and the death of the body. Plato goes round and round in a circle from innate ideas (like math) to the immortal soul which remembers them, to the return to the heavenly realm by the soul after death of the body. It’s very important to underline that effective construction of any circle of thought involves the casting out or elimination of the element that disturbs it—in Plato’s case the body. Deconstruction in its contemporary sense is the path of reflection which brings to light the cast out or eliminated element in the construction of any circle of thought. In Augustine’s case what is cast out—on top of Plato’s casting out of the body—is historical or earthly salvation, the very thing that the gospel proclamation of God’s kingdom seems to be urgently proposing! And so Augustine crossed a line, refounding Christianity on eternal principles derived from human cultural violence, i.e. the casting out of something (the body and the earth). Ever since Christians have gone round and round in an eternal circle, from the God beyond this world, to the soul intended to live with this God, to the almost complete devaluing of the earth and history, and back again to the God beyond.
It is true of course that Augustine is too much of a Christian and biblical scholar to get rid of history and historical salvation completely. When he’s commenting on the books of the Platonists he says he learnt so much about God and the Son of God in them, but he also says that what he didn’t learn of was Christ’s self-emptying and his redemptive death and the coming of charity or love by these means. (vii, 9 & 20) Nevertheless, these elements are included at a subordinate rhetorical moment after he’s laid out what he’s learned from the books, and so the essential framework is maintained. He even says: If I had not come across these books until after I had been formed in the mould of your Holy Scriptures and had learnt to love you through familiarity with them, the Platonist teaching might have swept me away from my foothold on the solid ground of piety, and even if I had held firm to the spirit in which the Scriptures had imbued me for salvation, I might have thought it possible for a man who read nothing but the Platonist books to derive the same spirit from them alone. (vii 20) In other words the final intellectual and aesthetic reference remains these books and nothing he has learned in the scriptures has provided an alternative intellectual principle. Later in his career Augustine did add what he considered a biblical notion to his thought of God—predestination of souls for heaven or hell. But this simply made things worse. By adding historical initiative to an eternal concept—a changeless divine will beyond the world—he ended up with the absolute inverse of a God of history: a God who has made up his mind for ever and always about the saved and the damned and nothing on earth—including the incarnation of the Word itself—will make any difference. In other words the casting out of history is even more absolute, and the construction of the dogmatic circle ever more fixed.
But now—and this is where all this has been leading—we have the emergence of an intellectual framework not borrowed from Plato, one arising directly from the scriptures themselves, and able to provide a rigorous meaning related directly to humanity and its history. This is what Jim was talking about, what Augustine guessed but then saw in terms only of the soul and original sin. Through the work of Rene Girard we are beginning to see that imitative or mimetic desire is not just a chaotic effect of some mythic sin by our first parents but it is the principle itself of humanity. It is what produces human beings, through their intense ability to imitate, through the violence and group victims this produces, and through the consequent birth of ritual, language and law: the emergence of human culture. But then, and of astonishing importance, it is the bible which is the singular narrative which has revealed all this to a self-deceiving world and at the very same time the possibility of a new human way. Deconstruction itself has to be part of this pulling away of the veils and it means we are now in a completely new situation.
What, therefore, is the goal toward which the gospel is leading, if not a new anthropology, a new way of being human? Rather than the immortal soul as the final point of reference we have a new humanity of love, shown us in Jesus, rising up against the world of violence and beyond all deconstruction because it does not exclude or eliminate anything. All this of course demands a whole lot more treatment, but let me give a quick illustration of what I’m saying. Instead of an eternal principle somewhere off the earth we are offered a new anthropological principle very much on the earth, the dramatically new humanity of Jesus.
In recent bible studies we have been reading the gospel of John and in that context I was struck by the mention of bodily fluids! Nothing in John’s gospel is there by accident. It all has a sign value or what also might be called the character of a signal. It’s meant to lead you deeper into the new thing that is so hard to sense at first. If the gospel talks about Jesus’ spit mixed with mud (9:6) or about his tears (11:35) these are signals to lead us deeper into Jesus’ new humanity. They are not there just to satisfy curiosity. And what is this humanity? It is the absolute handing over his self, his body, to others in love. Spit and tears join with the water and the blood which flow out at 19:34. They are all signals of endless self-giving, of expenditure without reserve, and it is endless or without reserve both at the moral level of Jesus’ character and person, and at the ontological level of how this character and person are raised up as deathless after they have given themselves to the last. In other words, spit and tears become grace: a grace lodged within spit and tears, as spit and tears, not as some ethereal, otherworldly immortal soul. Or, to carry the deconstruction all the way (and in admittedly a challenging image), the only immortal soul we now know is spit and tears condensed, evaporated and raised up for ever, as love.
Tony
Monday, July 19, 2010
John # 9
Here is the latest Bible Study in our series on John's Gospel.
Peace, Linda
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 9- Written that you may believe, chapter 9.
The Gospel of John #9 – The man born blind 07/15/10
The story of the healing of the man born blind in John chapter 9 is probably a Johannine literary creation. It draws from stories of Jesus’ healing ministry (like the one found at Mk 8:22ff.) but, because the account is so highly constructed, it is unlikely to have been an identifiable event in Jesus’ life. It does have a vividness however that makes it seem authentic if not actually historical. John has given the story many layers of meaning and it tells something true on each of these levels.
For example, the “cast of characters” is highly significant. Each character represents a group affecting the Johannine community @ 90CE. The man born blind is “everychristian”, i.e. those in John’s community, who began in the dark, were brought into the light, and then become witnesses to this light. The man does not have a name but is called “the man” (anthropos in Greek). This is the generic word for human being – as opposed to the specific word for male, aner. Anthropos, for example, can be applied to women if a feminine article is used.
The disciples who asked the first question are also Christians – but agonizing over life’s mysteries. The neighbors who ask questions about the man are inquirers, those attracted to the Christian message but not yet committed to it. The Pharisees (who later in story become “the Jews”) represent the officialdom of Judaism persecuting the early church. The parents are crypto-Christians – those fearful of persecution. Jesus in the story is a transcendent figure who incorporates the earthly, historical Jesus, the Easter Jesus and the Jesus worshipped in the early church.
The story has the structure of a trial scene (one of many found in the Gospel). The man born blind is the defendant – but judgment when it comes falls on the reader. The reader is placed in a situation of spiritual crisis and asked to make a choice.
The story begins with a discussion about sin. The disciples ask who sinned – the man or his parents. Jesus replies that human disability is not the result of sin – rather it is an opportunity for God’s work to be revealed. Bad things happen that much greater good can be done. But God’s work must be done “while it is still day” - an announcement of the coming crisis.
Jesus makes mud from earth and saliva and places it on the man’s eyes. The mud is mentioned four times in the story – underscoring its significance. There are different layers of meaning here. Mud on a person’s eyes is counterintuitive as a means for curing blindness. It is as if we have to obscure our vision, make our blindness obvious, in order to see with new eyes. Humans cannot see. It is this blindness (not original sin—a legal penal concept) that we have been born into. Just as the man born blind does not ask for healing, so we have been unaware of our blindness. The mud also evokes the original clay from which human beings were formed by God in Genesis 2:7. Jesus adds his saliva, his “DNA”, to create a new humanity. Generic man is recreated as the new human by Jesus. This newness is recognized by the man’s neighbors who question whether this is the same man. The old and new humanity look the same but there is something different. The healed man asserts that “I am the man”. He uses the Jesus terminology “I am” – the new human takes on the role of Jesus.
Jesus sends the man to the pool of Siloam (a name that means “sent”). The man obeys and is healed. Healing can only come through obeying, through surrender. You cannot see your way to healing – you must surrender to it.
After his healing the man is subjected to a series of interrogations. The neighbors ask how to find Jesus. The man replies that he does not know. Unlike the crippled man healed in chapter 5 who when questioned does not know who his healer is, the man born blind acknowledges Jesus and gradually comes to know him as the story unfolds. The crippled man remains in darkness, while the man born blind begins to see. The man is then questioned by the Pharisees. They accuse Jesus of not being from God because he healed on the Sabbath. The man defends Jesus, saying that he is a prophet.
The Jews question the man’s parents – implying that they lied about their son’s blindness. The parents deflect the questions back to the healed man. Like some would-be Christians at the end of the 1st century they are afraid of being put out of the synagogue.
The man is then questioned by the Jews. They demand that the man “give glory to God” by declaring Jesus a sinner. This is often religion’s way of glorifying God – categorizing sinners and rejecting the evil ones. This is what the disciples were seeking to do at the beginning of the story (“who sinned?”) This is an example of Johannine irony. The Jewish authorities fail to understand the true way of giving glory to God. Jesus heals the man born blind so that “God’s work might be revealed in him” – to reveal God’s glory. God’s glory is revealed when his work is carried out through us and that work is to end the human system based on violent differences and exclusion. In contrast the authorities want to label Jesus as a sinner. They accuse Jesus of being a sinner and demand to know how he opened the man’s eyes.
The Jews revile the healed man by saying that he is Jesus’ disciple while they are disciples of Moses. Jesus has no authority because no one knows where he comes from. (This contrasts with Jn 7:40-52 where Jesus is rejected because he is known to have come from Galilee). The man responds by saying that never since the world began has someone opened the eyes of a man born blind, yet they do not know where he comes from. Such an unprecedented, singular event in human history has to come from God. Jesus cannot be a sinner because God listens to him. The Jews accuse the man of being born in sin, therefore judged by God, and as such has no grounds for argument. He is excluded by the thought of a God who excludes. They drive him away.
It is at this moment, after his persecution and rejection that Jesus seeks him out. Jesus asks him “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” This is the peak moment of the story. The words “Son of Man” have more importance in terms of power and impact than the term “Messiah” in John’s Gospel. Jesus is asking in effect “Do you believe in the child of human beings?”: i.e. the new humanity. Other mentions of the Son of Man in John are found in Ch 3:14 (“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”); 8:28 (“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he”) and 12:32-36 (“‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, ‘We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’ Jesus said to them ‘The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light’”).
The Son of Man is the decisive figure of human transformation and judgment. In John 5:26 authority to execute judgment comes through the Son of Man. This authority comes from his having been “lifted up” – through his crucifixion as the end of all systems of violent difference and exclusion. Judgment is understood, not in terms of sin, but in the rejection of this transformation Jesus brings. In Jn 9:41 Jesus says that “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say ‘we see’, your sin remains”. We return here to the true nature of sin. It is not about human disability or original sin. Paul’s assertion that “Sin came into the world through one man (Adam)” has been interpreted legalistically. In contrast John’s gospel is not talking of original sin, rather our human condition –we are stupid and blind. It is not our fault unless we choose to remain that way when offered enlightenment in the new humanity of Jesus. The sin consists not in the original blindness, but in claiming to see. It is related to our response to Jesus’ call to enlightenment. We can accept or reject. We are called to accept that we need new eyes and receive our new sight from Jesus. We are called from blindness to sight.
This acceptance of a new way of being human leads us to a new understanding of Jesus’ divinity. At the end of John’s Gospel Pilate says “Behold the Man” (Jn 19:5). Jesus is the prototype of the new human. But through his passion and crucifixion the Son of Man is revealed also as the Son of God. Only the Son of God could bring a completely new way of being human which overcomes the generative power of violence. That is why Jesus is God and worthy of worship. The man born blind worships Jesus when he reveals himself to him as the Son of Man. Thus he completes the full trajectory of Christian conversion. Like the Christians in the Johannine community the man born blind believes in Jesus, despite adversity and persecution, and acknowledges him as Lord.
Peace, Linda
As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.
Background reading to study # 9- Written that you may believe, chapter 9.
The Gospel of John #9 – The man born blind 07/15/10
The story of the healing of the man born blind in John chapter 9 is probably a Johannine literary creation. It draws from stories of Jesus’ healing ministry (like the one found at Mk 8:22ff.) but, because the account is so highly constructed, it is unlikely to have been an identifiable event in Jesus’ life. It does have a vividness however that makes it seem authentic if not actually historical. John has given the story many layers of meaning and it tells something true on each of these levels.
For example, the “cast of characters” is highly significant. Each character represents a group affecting the Johannine community @ 90CE. The man born blind is “everychristian”, i.e. those in John’s community, who began in the dark, were brought into the light, and then become witnesses to this light. The man does not have a name but is called “the man” (anthropos in Greek). This is the generic word for human being – as opposed to the specific word for male, aner. Anthropos, for example, can be applied to women if a feminine article is used.
The disciples who asked the first question are also Christians – but agonizing over life’s mysteries. The neighbors who ask questions about the man are inquirers, those attracted to the Christian message but not yet committed to it. The Pharisees (who later in story become “the Jews”) represent the officialdom of Judaism persecuting the early church. The parents are crypto-Christians – those fearful of persecution. Jesus in the story is a transcendent figure who incorporates the earthly, historical Jesus, the Easter Jesus and the Jesus worshipped in the early church.
The story has the structure of a trial scene (one of many found in the Gospel). The man born blind is the defendant – but judgment when it comes falls on the reader. The reader is placed in a situation of spiritual crisis and asked to make a choice.
The story begins with a discussion about sin. The disciples ask who sinned – the man or his parents. Jesus replies that human disability is not the result of sin – rather it is an opportunity for God’s work to be revealed. Bad things happen that much greater good can be done. But God’s work must be done “while it is still day” - an announcement of the coming crisis.
Jesus makes mud from earth and saliva and places it on the man’s eyes. The mud is mentioned four times in the story – underscoring its significance. There are different layers of meaning here. Mud on a person’s eyes is counterintuitive as a means for curing blindness. It is as if we have to obscure our vision, make our blindness obvious, in order to see with new eyes. Humans cannot see. It is this blindness (not original sin—a legal penal concept) that we have been born into. Just as the man born blind does not ask for healing, so we have been unaware of our blindness. The mud also evokes the original clay from which human beings were formed by God in Genesis 2:7. Jesus adds his saliva, his “DNA”, to create a new humanity. Generic man is recreated as the new human by Jesus. This newness is recognized by the man’s neighbors who question whether this is the same man. The old and new humanity look the same but there is something different. The healed man asserts that “I am the man”. He uses the Jesus terminology “I am” – the new human takes on the role of Jesus.
Jesus sends the man to the pool of Siloam (a name that means “sent”). The man obeys and is healed. Healing can only come through obeying, through surrender. You cannot see your way to healing – you must surrender to it.
After his healing the man is subjected to a series of interrogations. The neighbors ask how to find Jesus. The man replies that he does not know. Unlike the crippled man healed in chapter 5 who when questioned does not know who his healer is, the man born blind acknowledges Jesus and gradually comes to know him as the story unfolds. The crippled man remains in darkness, while the man born blind begins to see. The man is then questioned by the Pharisees. They accuse Jesus of not being from God because he healed on the Sabbath. The man defends Jesus, saying that he is a prophet.
The Jews question the man’s parents – implying that they lied about their son’s blindness. The parents deflect the questions back to the healed man. Like some would-be Christians at the end of the 1st century they are afraid of being put out of the synagogue.
The man is then questioned by the Jews. They demand that the man “give glory to God” by declaring Jesus a sinner. This is often religion’s way of glorifying God – categorizing sinners and rejecting the evil ones. This is what the disciples were seeking to do at the beginning of the story (“who sinned?”) This is an example of Johannine irony. The Jewish authorities fail to understand the true way of giving glory to God. Jesus heals the man born blind so that “God’s work might be revealed in him” – to reveal God’s glory. God’s glory is revealed when his work is carried out through us and that work is to end the human system based on violent differences and exclusion. In contrast the authorities want to label Jesus as a sinner. They accuse Jesus of being a sinner and demand to know how he opened the man’s eyes.
The Jews revile the healed man by saying that he is Jesus’ disciple while they are disciples of Moses. Jesus has no authority because no one knows where he comes from. (This contrasts with Jn 7:40-52 where Jesus is rejected because he is known to have come from Galilee). The man responds by saying that never since the world began has someone opened the eyes of a man born blind, yet they do not know where he comes from. Such an unprecedented, singular event in human history has to come from God. Jesus cannot be a sinner because God listens to him. The Jews accuse the man of being born in sin, therefore judged by God, and as such has no grounds for argument. He is excluded by the thought of a God who excludes. They drive him away.
It is at this moment, after his persecution and rejection that Jesus seeks him out. Jesus asks him “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” This is the peak moment of the story. The words “Son of Man” have more importance in terms of power and impact than the term “Messiah” in John’s Gospel. Jesus is asking in effect “Do you believe in the child of human beings?”: i.e. the new humanity. Other mentions of the Son of Man in John are found in Ch 3:14 (“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”); 8:28 (“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he”) and 12:32-36 (“‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, ‘We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’ Jesus said to them ‘The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light’”).
The Son of Man is the decisive figure of human transformation and judgment. In John 5:26 authority to execute judgment comes through the Son of Man. This authority comes from his having been “lifted up” – through his crucifixion as the end of all systems of violent difference and exclusion. Judgment is understood, not in terms of sin, but in the rejection of this transformation Jesus brings. In Jn 9:41 Jesus says that “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say ‘we see’, your sin remains”. We return here to the true nature of sin. It is not about human disability or original sin. Paul’s assertion that “Sin came into the world through one man (Adam)” has been interpreted legalistically. In contrast John’s gospel is not talking of original sin, rather our human condition –we are stupid and blind. It is not our fault unless we choose to remain that way when offered enlightenment in the new humanity of Jesus. The sin consists not in the original blindness, but in claiming to see. It is related to our response to Jesus’ call to enlightenment. We can accept or reject. We are called to accept that we need new eyes and receive our new sight from Jesus. We are called from blindness to sight.
This acceptance of a new way of being human leads us to a new understanding of Jesus’ divinity. At the end of John’s Gospel Pilate says “Behold the Man” (Jn 19:5). Jesus is the prototype of the new human. But through his passion and crucifixion the Son of Man is revealed also as the Son of God. Only the Son of God could bring a completely new way of being human which overcomes the generative power of violence. That is why Jesus is God and worthy of worship. The man born blind worships Jesus when he reveals himself to him as the Son of Man. Thus he completes the full trajectory of Christian conversion. Like the Christians in the Johannine community the man born blind believes in Jesus, despite adversity and persecution, and acknowledges him as Lord.
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