FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

 

  

Easter VII - B May 20, 2012    

John 17: 6-19     

 

 

 

   

  

  

Harry T. Cook
Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
5/14/12 

 

 

Twenty-first century persons can deal realistically with such a passage as John 17: 6-19 only by acknowledging that the words in it were attributed to a Jesus who, by the time the Gospel according to John was written, had been dead for 60 or more years. This must surely mean that those words proceeded from the gospel writer's informed imagination.

Whoever John was, he was in effect writing the script of a drama about the mythical Christ figure, presenting that figure as John wished him to be regarded, i.e. in line with how he envisioned the anointed one in the first 18 verses of John chapter 1, viz., as the logos (or intelligent force of the universe) expressed in human form.

Much of John chapter 17 depicts that derivative character in an intense conversation with its inner self to which John's readers are admitted as eavesdroppers. The words are addressed to "Father," but keep in mind the words from Ch. 10:30, viz.: "I and the Father are one."  It is not unlike a rhetorical prayer offered by the celebrant on behalf and in the presence of the community whose members know every word of it -- a familiar audio-visual scene in millions of churches.

The New Testament scholar Alfred Loisy in his study of the fourth gospel (Le Quatri�me Evangile, p. 353) says "The Johannine Christ prays to expound the theses of the [gospel writer]. In appearance he would be praying to the gallery ..."

Envision that in a theater setting, and you have a reasonable way to deal with today's gospel portion and others like it.

The church has just celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, and so in traditional terms it has been thinking of the absence of Jesus. The text validates that at v. 11b, words John gives Jesus to speak: "And now I am no more in (or of) this world." This is part of what is known as Jesus' "High Priestly Prayer." In the temporal scheme of things, Jesus is on the point of making that fateful walk across the valley of the Kidron (see 18:1) to a garden -- that garden to which Judas, a character right out of anti-Semitic fiction, will be depicted as coming to connect the authorities with Jesus.

The Greek word παραδίδωμι is usually translated as "to betray," but more accurately means "to hand over." If Paula Fredriksen is right (see her From Jesus to Christ, 2nd edition, pp. xxi-xxiv) there would have been no need for a "Judas" to hand over Jesus. He (Jesus) would already have been well known to the authorities. Why, then, does John follow the Judas trajectory variously represented in Mark, Matthew and Luke? Is it that by John's time, a bright line had appeared or been drawn between what may have been his Diaspora community and the post-Temple synagogue Judaism, and that Jews (especially Judeans) were perceived as the enemy? Remember that, as depicted, Judas Iscariot was the only Judean among the disciples. A purposeful distinction?

What transpires in the final oratorical prayer is the acknowledgement that Jesus is on his way back whence he came (see 1:14) and that he feels the compulsion to knit his community ever closer to the source of his own being ("Holy Father, protect them in your name ... so they may become one as we are one.")

The idea seems to be that the Johannine community was trying to model its life on along the lines of what was imagined to have been the life of the earliest apostolic community - a life ideally characterized by agaph.

 

V. 14 suggests that this second- or third-generation community is "not of this world" but certainly "in" it. If, indeed, its members are in it but not of it, their charitable behavior towards one another and the world will surely be taken advantage of. For this situation, John's Jesus asks the Father to "protect them from the evil one." The question we ask in 2012 is, "Where and what is that 'evil one?'" William Golding in his Pincher Martin says pretty convincingly that the evil one is the serpent coiled within.

To keep "the evil one" at bay (or the inner serpent dormant), the community needs to be "sanctified in the truth," the truth being the Father's word. In John, "the truth" is generally "that which is disclosed" or the act of disclosure itself. What, then, is "the truth" and how can one know when the truth process is going on? (By no means is "the truth process" to be confused with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness"!)

"The truth" must, in the end, be the individual and collective authentic self-revelation of a community that governs itself and is governed by the spirit of love. That will be "the peace that passeth understanding" of which Paul wrote to his Philippian flock (see 4:7).

As the Christ figure is depicted as have taken flesh and become one with the world , so the community is to locate its place in the same world, i.e., the venue of natural and human affairs -- there to make the difference only agaph can make.

The Christian church now stands at the division of its liturgical year and is about to enter into what it calls "ordinary time." Its major festivals are by and large over for now, save next week's celebration of Pentecost. Its focus through bible readings, hymns, anthems and sermons has been directly or indirectly on the legendary figure of Jesus -- not so much as the peasant sage from the Galilean outback as on the mythic figure made of him by Paul and later by the author and editors of the Gospel according to John.

The church now settles into that summer-fall cycle punctuated only by the occasional saint's day or events in the life of individual parishes such as an anniversary of founding or a bishop's visitation. It's time for the church to look as best it can at the real human being or beings that stand in history behind the myth.

The gospel readings for the Sundays after Pentecost -- from mid-June through the end of November 2012 will be almost in their entirety from the Gospel according to Mark -- a literary venue in which we will meet yet again a Jesus who seldom met a tradition he didn't scrutinize for relevance and justice, and set aside if it didn't measure up.

The reading from the Gospel of John for this coming Sunday (analyzed above) is a blueprint for the formation and equipping of a community composed of just such persons as Mark's Jesus. One of the abiding and compelling stories in the gospels is that which depicts Jesus gathering a following -- or community.

I think it was not a recruiter signing up soldiers to go out and do battle. I think it was a person who needed the support of a community around him to be able to say and do what he would have to say and do to be true to his self-appointed mission.

Though certain passages in the gospels make clear that the apostolic following didn't always resemble an unruffled group of soft-spoken, perpetually smiling Quakers, there must have been a bond created sufficient in strength to enable and empower the leader and his friends to do their work. The work was no less a thing than the initiation and maintenance of that "process of truth" spoken of above -- in particular the uncovering of usually hidden facts about injustice and unjust judges, about oppression, oppressors and oppressive institutions and traditions.

Unlike the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, the Gospel of John depicts the community of disciples making three treks up to Jerusalem for the appointed feasts, but always the fellowship returned to its work.

The church is now about to go back to work, as it were, with its major holy-day celebrations over for the time being -- back to Capernaum, to Gennesaret's shore, to the country of the Gerasenes, to Tyre and Sidon and Bethsaida, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, to the mount of the transfiguration, to Judea and on to Jerusalem by way of Bethphage and Bethany and finally to Gethsemane and Calvary.

The church will be of none effect in such places speaking truth to power if it does not abide in community with that ready-and-willing-to-sacrifice love as its foundation, warp and woof. It will have to go again and again to its own Gethsemane and Calvary, because that's where the essential work of truth discovery, truth telling and truth itself is done.

The good news is that knowing the truth sets one free (John 8:32).

 


� Copyright 2012, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


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