Moving along to the
seventh chapter and to the next use of “miraculous signs” in this Gospel
narrative, one finds “Whenever the Christ comes, he won’t perform more
miraculous signs than this man did, will he?” (John 7:31b) The immediate
context is provided by “Yet many of the crowd believed in Him and said…”
(7:31a) So again, “miraculous signs” is linked with “belief.”
Thus one must again consider the overall movement of this presentation of
Jesus, in that the Creator God’s love for the world (John 3:16) is bound up
with belief in Jesus.
By this, additional
credence is lent to the link between the repetitious appearance of “miraculous
signs” here in John (the only Gospel where such are to be found, save one usage
in Luke), and the obvious Johannine predilection towards love, clearly rooted
in the covenant God’s love for the world, as the operative Christian
ethic. The words of the thirty-first verse also forces a consideration of
the wider context of the statement, which are questions about Jesus’ identity
as the messiah. As an observer situates himself
within the original and intended audience for the narrative, such is done with
the pre-supposition that Jesus is the Messiah (the Christ), and the development
of the Gospel presentation will be heard from that position.
Whereas Jesus’
feeding of the five thousand, His walking on water, and His discourse about
Himself as the bread of life took place in Galilee, these words from the
seventh chapter are lifted from His being situated in Jerusalem.
Presumably then, Jesus has a new audience, differing quite significantly from
the audience that He has had in the region of Galilee. The season of the
year is the Feast of Tabernacles, which is one of the fall feasts of
Judaism. The setting is presented in the fourteenth verse of the seventh
chapter, where the author writes “When the feast was half over, Jesus went up
to the Temple courts and began to teach.”
A back and forth
between the Jewish leaders and Jesus stems from the commencement of the
aforementioned teaching. As should be expected by now, at least according
to the structure at play, Jesus brings a reference to Moses into play.
Eventually, the back and forth leads to what is reported to be an open discussion
on the part of the residents of Jerusalem as to whether or not Jesus could
actually be the Christ (7:25-26), which also results in some words from Jesus
that lead to an unsuccessful attempt seize Jesus.
In all of the back
and forth, and in all of the reports within this Gospel about what Jesus has
done since venturing back into Judea and Jerusalem, the reader does not stumble
upon anything that seems like it would prompt the people of Jerusalem to
mention Jesus in the same breath as “miraculous signs.” Nevertheless, this
is the very thing that is reported to have taken place. In fact, though it
can be reasonably presumed that word of the large-scale feeding has made its
way around the countryside, the only miraculous signs that Jesus has performed
to this point in the Johannine narrative are the turning of water into wine in
Cana and the healing of the royal official’s son in Capernaum.
The latter two of
those three, which could be supplemented by the walking on water, would not be
prone to massive dissemination. To this point, the only miraculous sign
that Jesus has performed in Jerusalem itself is the healing of the paralytic at
the Pool of Bethesda. In this Gospel story, the remainder of Jesus’
activity in Jerusalem so far, is confined to teaching and speaking about
Himself. There is little reason to wonder, then, that the story demonstrates
that there is not an outright acceptance of Jesus’ claims about Himself.
At the same time, one is left to wonder at the paucity of miraculous
occurrences to be found in the very Gospel that is loaded with references to
miraculous signs. However, one must never forget the
over-arching/underlying context of love and the love of the Creator God for the
world as it is being expressed through Jesus, that seems to inform every aspect
of this presentation of the life of Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment