The uniqueness of the
miraculous signs in John does not simply lie in the fact of the occurrence of
the miraculous. It could also be seen that Jesus gained a following, with
people believing in Him, His message, and His movement, through the witnessing
and reporting of miraculous signs. Others before Jesus (and after Him)
had and would gain substantial followings as well. However, in contrast
to Jesus, their followings often grew with reports of their rebellious and
subversive activities (Jesus was shown to be subversive, but in a more subtle
manner), their incitement to violence against their oppressors, or their
military exploits against the vaunted Roman military machine. Jesus’
following achieved no growth along such lines. He certainly did not go
about achieving His popular support in the usual or largely expected way.
Though John the
Baptist is reported to have been caustic in his speech (though not in John’s
Gospel), what was said of his cousin (Jesus) could also be said to be true of
him, as he did not gain his following along the lines of the usual or expected means.
How could he? Had he engaged in overtly revolutionary activities, he
certainly could not have heralded himself or have been heralded as preparing
the path for the type of messiah that Jesus presents Himself to be, nor would
Jesus have aligned Himself and identified Himself with John’s movement (the
signaling of a new exodus for Israel, and through Israel for the world) by
undergoing a baptism at John’s hands.
The regular
references to Moses in the Gospel of John, whether those references be explicit
or implicit, are both an adjunct to the mentioning of miraculous signs and a
reminder of the way in which Moses went about proving that he was charged with
representing the covenant God to His people. It must be said that Moses
gained a following, though the following was not gained (as he may have hoped
or expected), when he raised his hand to kill an Egyptian that was abusing one
of his fellow Israelites. That action merely sent Moses into his own
period of exile, possibly delaying the Creator God’s plan to deliver Israel
from their Egyptian bondage.
Initially, Moses
gained his following through performing miraculous signs, which is what he was
instructed to do by the Creator God when he returned to Egypt with the demand
to “let My people go.” When Moses had questioned God as to how he was
going to convince Pharaoh and Israel that he spoke for the God of Israel and
that he was the vessel through which that God was bringing about the
deliverance of His people, Moses was provided with a series of miraculous signs
to perform. The book of Exodus records the performance of these various
signs. This point shall be taken up again shortly.
Returning to the text
then, the author seems to take pains to hammer home a point previously and
repeatedly made (this would have been second nature for his audience, but not
so much for members of a modern Christian culture which has a tendency to
separate, divide, and pluck passages and stories from their setting and examine
them in isolation), which is that the Gospel narrative must be heard as a
unified presentation, rather than presented through selected portions of the
narrative.
While it is certainly
possible and appropriate to elaborate on circumstances, situations, and
statements, such things demand to be considered within their wider
context. Any statement by Jesus, or the author for that matter, that is
pulled out of the text and examined on its own without being placed in its
appropriate theological, soteriological, sociological, cultural, political, and
eschatological framework (at the very least), will end up as nothing more than
an ingredient in a recipe for fallacious and anachronistic exegesis.
No comments:
Post a Comment