FINDINGS II
Proper
29 - November 22, 2009
John 18: 33-37
(Daniel
7: 9-10; Psalm 93; Revelation 1: 4b-8)
 By Harry T. Cook
11/16/09
RUBRIC
We are to be awash in regal imagery on this Sunday next
before Advent, as the die-hard monarchist theologians trumpet the theme of
"Christ as king." Crown him with many crowns. One isn't enough. The words
"king," "kings," "kingdom" and "kingship" appear in all three readings and in
the psalm.
Make a list of the really good and benevolent monarchs --
kings or queens -- you can remember from your study of history. America's last
close-up experience with a king (George III of England) erupted in a
revolution. Good thing, too, as it turns out.
Widen the idea of monarchy to dictator or despot, and you
have power-sodden figures all the way from Napoleon Bonaparte to Kaiser Wilhelm
to Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot to Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein, and so on and so
on.
Power as apportioned to kings and like characters has proven
itself dangerous and undesirable. Furthermore, the Jesus who appears variously
in the canonical gospels and in the Gospel According to Thomas, possibly
representing a very early account of Jesus, is anything but a royal figure. The
depictions of "Jesus" in the synoptic gospels are largely of a peasant of great
natural intelligence /1 living out an asceticism common among itinerant public
intellectuals of the era.
So it will be necessary for us to receive and deal with the
king-speak of the readings in a metaphorical way, taking care not to impute to
the Galilean peasant more or different than he apparently was, or to models on
which his possibly composite character was founded were.
WORKSHOP
Where using "king" and "Jesus" in the same sentence is
concerned, the reading from John assigned to this day may be the best choice
because he skirted the issue of kingship. The word "king" is used just four
times in According to John until today's reading begins: John 1: 49: attributed
to Nathanael and his over-the-top surprise at being known by Jesus: "Rabbi, you
are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel;" 6:15: attributed to Jesus'
inner musing after the feeding of the multitude: "When Jesus realized that they
were about to come and take him by force to make him king . . .;" 12:13, 15:
the entry into Jerusalem scene, an allusion to Zechariah 9:9.
At no time does John's Jesus claim identity as the king of
anything and, in fact, is shown at 6:15 trying to avoid having to reject it
publicly. Of course, why would
John care? He had at 1:1-14 already "identified" Jesus as the deity in human
form.
Supposing there had been a kind of populist surge to make
Jesus "king," such a surge would have been made up of peasants with a few
zealots mixed in. Anybody who knew anything would have realized such a movement
could only end in disaster. The "Palm Sunday" scene is suspect in that it is derived
directly from Zechariah and, as John and the synoptic writers used it, might
have been a literary mocking of the processions of conquering Casesars.
In any event, the colloquy John creates between the proconsul
Pilate and John's Jesus skirts the royalty issue. They spar:
Pilate: "Are you the King of the Jews?" (That must surely
have been a curled-lip taunt.)
Jesus: "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you
about me?" (Tell him what, we might wonder?)
Pilate: "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and chief
priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?"
Jesus: "My kingdom [the word can mean 'rule' or 'domain'] is
not from (does not belong, is not of) this world. If my kingdom were from (of) this
world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the
Jews. But, as it is, my kingdom is not from here."
Pilate: "So you are a king?"
Jesus: "You say that I am a king. For this [not being a
king] I was born, and for this I came into the world to testify to the
truth . . ."
Pilate: "What is truth?"
John is more interested in "truth" αλήθεια -- unveiling or
disclosure. Kings live behind veils of one kind and another to keep secret their
various schemes and doings. Kings are not required to disclose or unveil
anything. As a type, they are not interested in truth at least in the New Testament
sense of the word. As an official in the Administration of George W. Bush once
said, "The truth is what we say it is."
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
In a parting shot to Pilate, John's Jesus says: "Everyone
who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Just as Jesus' rule is not of, or
does not belong to, this world (κόσμος - originally "ornament" or "adornment,"
later "the visible world"), so only those who do not "belong" to this world,
but rather to the truth, can hear (άκούει) or understand his voice, i.e., get
the meaning of what he is saying.
What is that meaning? An attempt to make an honest answer to
that question will be the purpose of any individual or group study of this
passage and of any homily or of any sermon prepared by and for rational people
at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
What is the "voice?" According to John the voice was saying
such things as "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up"
(2:19b); "I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from
above/again: (3:3); "I am he [the messiah]" (4:25); "I am the bread of life"
(6:35); "Before Abraham was, I am" (8:59; "I am the gate for the sheep" (10:7);
"I am the resurrection and the life: (11:25); "I am the way, and the truth, and
the life. No one comes to the father except through me" (14:6); "I am the true
vine, and my father is the vinegrower" (15:1); "This is my commandment, that
you love one another as I have loved you" (15:12); "I still have many things to
say to you, but you cannot bear them now" (16:12).
How does one "hear" such fantastical things? And how can
reason process them so they become useful?
Of course, it is the fourth evangelist speaking, not Jesus -
or not any of the Jesuses we have met in the synoptic gospels and in Thomas.
The "voice" is the voice of the one we call "John" who identity is pretty much
lost to history, though an emerging consensus is that the author was a Gentile
convert to Judaism, or had been an outlier in Judaism until attracted to the
emerging Jesus movement and knew that, to survive, it had to be fashioned along
the lines of Greek philosophical terms (e.g.,
"logos") and partake in the kind mythological language and concept that Paul
had used in speaking of the one he called "Christ Jesus:"
"Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did
not count equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself .
. . being born in human likeness . . ." (Philippians 2: 5b-7a -- thought by
some to be a quotation from an early liturgical text).
My esteemed colleague in online publication,
John S. Spong, recently wrote in his series on the New Testament: "Assume that the life of Jesus was lived between 4 B.C.E.
and 30 C.E. We face the fact that from the years 30 C.E. to about 50 C.E.,
there is not a single word preserved of anything Jesus said or did. A tunnel of
total silence exists, into which only speculation is possible."
With all due respect, I
disagree with Spong. The collection of sayings attributed to Jesus -- which sayings
are found mostly in According to Thomas, According Matthew and According to
Luke -- have been identified as a major source (called in the trade "Q" for the
German term Quelle, meaning "source") of some of the earliest utterances
credited to a Jesus. My working hypothesis for many years of research has been
that it was those sayings that formed the working texts for the people I call
"Jesus Jews" in the years between 30 C.E. and the appearance of According to
Mark some time after 70 C.E.
I am backed up to some
degree by Burton L. Mack in his The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian
Origins and by Elaine Pagels in her Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel
of Thomas. Mack's research led him to think that the actual Jesus was
considered a "Cynic sage," not a prophet and that perhaps already in Jesus'
lifetime (even before +/- 30 C.E.) a movement had formed around him.
Furthermore, Mack said, "The people of Q did not think of Jesus as a messiah,
did not recognize a special group of trained disciples as their leaders, did
not imagine that Jesus had marched to Jerusalem in order to cleanse the temple
or reform Jewish religion, did not regard his death as an unusual divine event, and
did not follow his teachings to be 'saved' or transformed people."/2
Pagels came to see that
According to John was written at least in part to blunt what must have been the
considerable effect of According to Thomas./3 She notes the out-sized role Thomas plays in the Johannine
narrative, the kvetcher, the doubter at critical stages - 14:5 (after Jesus
says "You know the way to the place I am going") "Lord, we do not know where
you are going. How can we know the way?" whine, whine, whine. And again at
20:24-29 as the disciples are depicted as rejoicing that their resurrected Lord
walked through a locked door and showed them proof of his abuse. Told of that,
Thomas is made to say, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and
put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not
believe."
John gives Thomas his
comeuppance four verses later when Thomas is made to see and, upon confessing
belief because he has seen, is whacked with: "Blessed are those who have not
seen but come to believe."
So the "voice" that those who "belong to the
truth" hear must be the echoes of those earlier words we find in Q and Thomas --
words that have to do with human behavior and an ethical appreciation of life, e.g., "Turn the other cheek," "walk the
second mile," "give up your shirt as well as your coat," "love your neighbor,"
"love your enemy," "forgive as often as necessary" and "treat others as you
wish to be treated yourself." May that not be "the truth" about how human
beings can live in peace and security with one another and discover in so doing
that there is a moral core at least to that part of the universe in which they
live?
/1 Crossan, J.D., The Historical
Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, 1991, HarperSanFranciso,
1991, pp. xi-xvi
/2 Mack, Burton L., The Lost
Gospel, 1993, Harper Collins, pp. 47-48
/3 Pagels, Beyond Belief,
2003, Random House, pp. 50-75
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