FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

5/6/13

The passage at hand is part of John's exit strategy for Jesus. As we observed in the analysis of 14: 25-29, John arranges for Jesus to depart and to return, and, indeed, he will never really leave. That was a theological tactic of the late first century Jesus communities, i.e. to craft and tell stories about his presence, however conceived. He certainly could not very well be the true messiah from his moldering grave, neither λογος  incarnate. So John meant it to be understood that those who come to believe that the dead Jesus was alive in the communities gathered around his memory and his wisdom could experience his living presence.
 
John's effort does not quite produce the body, as a habeas corpus order would provide, but it is as close as it can get to it. Any religion worth a person's time has to be about something that is living rather than dead, that is dynamic rather than static, that is of the present and future, not just of the past.
 
The genius of early Christianity -- or late Jesus Judaism -- is to be found in such passages as we have under consideration in this essay. It is just such passages as caused the late John A.T. Robinson to speak of "the primacy of John." Withal, it is too bad that Thomas is given such a drubbing by John in ch. 20: 24-29). Elaine Pagels* thinks the drubbing was crafted to blunt the existence of the Gospel of Thomas, the text of which pointedly omits any such spiritual language about Jesus. For Thomas (the gospel) Jesus was an edgy, somewhat ornery speaker of often baffling sayings and clearly of the earth, earthy.
 
In the end, though, that which is of the earth, earthy does not have a long shelf life, and what late first century Jesus Judaism-early Christianity needed was non-perishable. They found it in such concepts as John spins out in these final chapters of the gospel.

John 17: 20-26 is the valedictory of the great high priestly prayer and comes in the gospel immediately prior to the beginning of the passion narrative. Heretofore since 17:1, Jesus has been depicted as praying for his disciples, "those whom you gave me from the world" (17:6) Now the prayer is for the next generation, viz. "those who are to believe . . . through their (the disciples') word."
 
"Those who will believe in me" (v. 20) are not unlike those for whom Paul accounts in Ephesians 2: 13ff, those "who were once far off." It is an organic unity not a mechanical or bureaucratic one that is here envisioned. And it is for the "far off" that Jesus now turns the intention of his prayer: "that they all may be one, even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may be in us" (v. 21a). The oneness here is at the most fundamental level as between father and son, virtually biological in nature. Several of the Qumran documents speak of such unity. Was John aware of the Qumran and like traditions: tightly woven monastic communities united in a singular purpose and separated from "the world?"
 
Even as the world (or "all") will know that the disciples belong to the way of Jesus (13:35), so the oneness of the community will inspire and support belief in Jesus' historic legitimacy as one sent by the Father (v. 21b). V. 24 introduces re-introduces a spatial-temporal conundrum that appears earlier in 7:34 and again at 8:21: Jesus saying to the Pharisees, the chief priests and the crowd at 7:34 that "where I am you cannot come" and at 8:21 it is repeated. Where and what is that "where" and why is it in the present tense? It may be that the verb form ειμι can be translated here as "where I will be."  That would help matters a great deal.
 
It is clear why John's Jesus would say to his detractors that they could not get to where he is going. Such was the bitter nature of the conflict between the Jesus Jews and synagogue Jews at the end of the first century CE. But the disciples about whom John depicts Jesus as praying in ch. 17 are to be with him (lit. "where I am") so they may see for themselves his glory, i.e. the revealed and essential nature or favorable public opinion about him, which has been his as a divine gift from before the foundations of the world.
 
If we are attentive to the incarnational theme that underlies this gospel beginning with its prologue at 1: 1-18, we see why Jesus' fully realized nature can only be disclosed when his union with the Father is complete. That is, John says, the "where" and the "what" to which he is going. And those who love him by keeping his teachings may be with him in that glory -- that is, in the esteem of the living and in memory.
 
One thinks of how to state that proposition in twenty-first century language. One way, perhaps, is to say that in the intentional living out of the ethical teaching of Jesus (admittedly not much of a part of John's gospel), one bears that attitude of self-giving love (see 13:34, which is perhaps as much as John cared to convey of that ethic) and so makes Jesus present while disclosing who and what he was/is.
 
In a world in which rational people pretty much have to acknowledge that the space and time we know are the only space and time we're likely to know, where Jesus "is going" is where his followers, if they are true to their commitment, are going, i.e. toward the realization of the rule of goodness, which elsewhere Jesus is quoted as saying is within us.

The final words of the high priestly prayer (vv. 25-26) reiterate the idea that the "world" (κοσμος) does not know the deity, and that John's Jesus has made his/its "name" (or nature) known. Note that the text does not say Jesus was the only source of that knowledge. Yet no other source is named. The dread words of Acts 4:12 spring to mind here: "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved." On the flimsy basis of such texts has been built an imperial and imperious structure whose builders and keepers flaunt an unwarranted superiority and a claim upon a non-existent truth, paradoxically made all the more powerful by it non-existence, as Paul Tillich might say.
 
That is not what John meant by putting words on Jesus' lips to the effect that the κοσμος does not know the Father. The world can't know anything unless it is told. "How shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed? And shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without some one to tell them?" (Romans 11:14)
 
The first thought of ones who have internalized the ethical wisdom attributed to Jesus will not be to undertake a preaching mission. That first thought and all subsequent thoughts will be devoted to putting that wisdom into practice by seeking justice and peace, by loving enemy as well as neighbor, by cheek-turning, by second mile-walking, by coat and cloak-sharing and by debtor-forgiving.
 
Those anywhere in the κοσμος who witness such behavior will have had made known to them "the Father," that is the whole purpose of human beings having evolved from unicellular bits of matter to Homo sapiens. In humanity at its best we have the best chance of glimpsing what some call God.