Love On John's Terms (part 30 of 30)

With that said, and at risk of being redundant, one cannot allow himself to drift too far from awareness of the fact that Jesus’ hearers, along with those for whom the account recorded in John is prepared (again, relying on both oral and written components of the Jesus tradition that became relatively fixed at a very early stage), would have been thoroughly immersed in a worldview that had the entire history of Israel that stretched back to Abraham (including the creation narrative in which Israel’s God orders the cosmos) in view, as the story was told and re-told (much like can be seen in the book of Acts).  This would have been true even of Gentile members of the church, as the story of Jesus would not have been presented without instruction related to proper background, lest the Jesus story become void of any real meaning. 

Without this immersion, and without this critical historical framework, Jesus would not have been able to be understood by His contemporaries.  If every attempt is not made to become immersed in much the same way, so as to be able to hear Jesus and the stories of Jesus with the same mental construct as that which was possessed by first century Jews and those who made up the early Christian communities, hearing the story of God’s redemptive plan as presented through Israel, there will be a failure to understand Jesus.  If there is a failure to understand Jesus, then there is a failure to understand the God whom Jesus shows forth; and, at least for the purposes of this author, if one fails in those things, then one fails to understand what is truly meant by love.     

So, getting back to miraculous signs and the Moses/exodus motif that is prevalent in this Gospel, consider the previously referenced signs provided by Moses before Pharaoh.  In the second chapter of John, after Jesus performs an action in the Temple, “the Jewish leaders responded, ‘What sign can you show us, since you are doing these things?’” (2:18)  In the sixth chapter, after Jesus feeds the multitude, walks on water, and speaks about Himself as the bread of life, there one finds the inquiry of “what miraculous sign will your perform, so that we may see it and believe you?  What will you do?” (6:30)  What can be seen in Exodus?  In the seventh chapter, when the Creator God commands Moses to go before Pharaoh to demand the release of His people, He tells Moses that Pharaoh will say “Do a miracle” (7:9).  The miraculous signs come forth, but Pharaoh’s heart is hardened.  This same type of thing can be seen being played out in John, with Jesus obviously playing the role of Moses. 

Early on, Moses signs are mildly effective, but they are said to be matched by Pharaoh’s servants that are practiced in the secret arts.  Indeed, the signs aren’t quite good enough, which is also reflected in John.  Moses begins with the signs for Pharaoh, but then come the plagues.  Though these are meant to convince Pharaoh to set Israel free while also demonstrating the supremacy of Israel’s God and the impotency of Egypt’s gods (much like the creation narrative in Genesis is meant to, among other things, show forth the supremacy of Israel’s God over the gods of the other nations, answering their various creation mythologies with that which is presented as the creative action of the one true God), they have the greater role of proving to Israel that Moses is the deliverer that their God has provided, and that their God is acting on their behalf in faithfulness to His covenant. 

It is not difficult to imagine that faith in this fact---in Moses as God’s appointed deliverer---grew over time as the miraculous signs came forth.  With the signs, there is a growing tension between Moses and Pharaoh, and the final plague results in the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh in which the freedom of the people is finally granted.  The people are given their freedom, though Pharaoh quickly attempts to rise up and re-assert himself to no avail, and even in the freedom there will be a long and difficult journey to their land of promise.  In John, the author indicates that Jesus signs are mildly effective, gaining him a following in which people begin to express their loyalty to him.  He even has John the Baptist as something of a mouthpiece, just as Moses had Aaron.  Within John’s narrative world, these miraculous signs culminate in the raising of Lazarus from the dead.  In that story, it is Jesus’ love for Lazarus and his family that prompts Him to act to raise him---to give him an exodus from the exile of death. 

This point does not go un-noticed in an attempt to comprehend the Johannine conception of love.  In the end, the author suggests that “the chief priests and the Pharisees,” quite alarmed by what has happened, “called the council together and said, “What are we doing?  For this man is performing many miraculous signs.  If we allow him to go on in this way, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away our sanctuary and our nation” (11:47-48).  In this, does one not hear echoes of Exodus and of Pharaoh’s decision to pursue Israel?  There it was said, “What in the world have we done?  For we have released the people of Israel from serving us!” (14:6b) 

For the author of John (and the Johannine corpus), who appears to have a specific notion concerning love, this miraculous sign of raising Lazarus from the dead is a dramatic turning point, as it is said to be that which was responsible for the crowds gathering to hail Jesus in His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, “because they had heard that Jesus had performed this miraculous sign, the crowd when out to meet Him” (12:18).  It is what ultimately leads to Jesus’ death on the cross, which was ultimately the supreme act of self-sacrificial love (going down into death to bear the curse of an entire people) to which the entire narrative points and upon which the fate of the cosmos rests.  This, of course, leads to the Resurrection, which, following His paramount act of love (endured in suffering and shame), is Jesus’ exodus to the long-awaited promised land of the redeemed creation of the Creator God, there to be joined by those that cast their lot with Him and share in a world now re-shaped and re-formed by the supreme ethic of love.  

Presentations Of Jesus (part 1)

As Jesus “grew and became strong,” being “filled with wisdom, and as “the favor of God was upon Him” (Luke 2:40), and as He began to live out the life of the Messiah within a community that generally believed that the Messiah would be the fleshly embodiment of their covenant making, creative, and providential God, He would undoubtedly have searched (or at least asked for assistance in searching) the collected Hebrew Scriptures for guidance in living according to messianic expectations.  Naturally, Jesus was concerned with how to go about revealing the Creator God to His covenant people. 

That said, it is quite right to here contemplate the “suffering servant” of Isaiah (despised, rejected, suffering pain, held in low esteem/honor, stricken, afflicted, pierced, crushed, punished, wounded, etc…).  With knowledge of the way in which Jesus lived, the way He performed His ministry, the people with whom He surrounded Himself, the subversive challenge that He offered to the powers-that-be of the day (politically, religiously, socially, and culturally), and the way in which His choice of messianic presentation would lead to the way in which He would come to meet what was His presumed demise, it seems to be rather clear that He took the notion of Isaiah’s suffering servant as rather foundational for His mission. 

Likewise, the authors of the Gospels, as they lived in the early days of the church that was growing and serving humanity and enduring threats and persecutions in the wake of Jesus’ Resurrection and ascension and the telling of that story, and as they did so in a time in which oral traditions (possibly informed by smaller written collections of Jesus’ words or deeds) concerning Jesus were circulating, sought to tell Jesus’ story within the framework of messianic (king of Israel/God in the flesh) conceptions (the suffering servant being one mode of telling) that were on offer within the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Just as Jesus, to whom believers are able to look as the Creator God in the flesh, was concerned with properly revealing His God to His people, so too would His biographers be concerned with structuring their stories of Jesus with an eye and an ear to the very same thing.  This notion is not necessarily talking about making Jesus fit within a certain mold, or telling His story so as to make it appear that He is the fulfillment of centuries-old prophecies, but rather, utilizing certain portions of the accepted Scriptures (and the self-understanding that shaped, was shaped by, and governed the reading of those Scriptures) that served to inform the people about the nature of their God, Jesus’ biographers, who believed themselves to be telling the story of the Lord and Master of the whole of the cosmos, shaped their presentations of the stories of Jesus so as to align with the nature-of-God-revealing statements that were part and parcel of the writings of Israel’s prophets, poets, and historians. 

Surely, it is not at all difficult to understand that the Gospels offer an exceedingly small glimpse into the life of Jesus, so one does well to consider why it is that what was selected for recounting to and for the church communities, was in fact selected.  Most likely, the structure of the presentation of events in the life of Jesus is taken for granted, with believers enjoying the narrative on offer without ever wondering why certain events follow one another within the Gospel presentation. 

If one takes seriously the fact that Jesus lived as part of a community that took its story very seriously and understood itself according to the story recorded in its Scriptures, while also understanding themselves as the covenant people of the Creator God that routinely and often dramatically enters into history to act for or towards His people as they looked towards a great and seemingly final intervention, then this notion must be brought to a reading of the Gospels which then shapes the way that the remainder of the New Testament is read (though the Gospels and Acts would have been composed and circulated in written form after almost all of the rest of what would come to comprise the New Testament has been composed, though certainly the stories recorded in the Gospels and Acts circulated in what was likely a moderately controlled oral form before the written records were produced).

Only Son (part 2)

The brief answer to that important question is found in chapter twelve of Genesis.  There, the Creator God instructs Abraham (Abram) to “Go out from your country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you.  Then I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, so that you will exemplify divine blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, but the one who treats you lightly I must curse, and all the families of the earth will bless one another by your name” (12:1-3). 

So yes, the covenant God is demonstrated to have chosen Abraham so that through Abraham the nations and families and the whole of the earth could be blessed.  This becomes, for all time, the explicit charge of the covenant people.  Naturally, a person that is recognized as a “teacher of Israel” would have been quite familiar with the answer to this question.  This, however, it should be recognized, is not a sufficient answer. 

The Creator God’s words to Abraham merely beg the question as to “why.”  Why did the sovereign God of the cosmos need to choose Abraham?  Why did this God have a need or desire to make Abraham into a great nation?  Why did the one who, as indicated in the story of Scripture, repeatedly showed Himself as the God of covenants want to bless him?  Why make Abraham’s name great?  Why was there what seems to be a pressing need to exemplify divine blessing through Abraham?  Why is there all this talk of blessing and cursing in association with Abraham?  Why indeed? 

The reason for all of these things is to be found in what comes before the introduction of Abraham.  In the narrative structure, what comes before, of course, is the presentation of the ordering of the creation as the Creator’s cosmic temple, the pronouncement at every stage that this ordering was “very good,” and the placement of man, created as the divine-image, into that creation-as-cosmic-temple so as to steward it, to be a reflection of the glory of its Creator into it, and to stand as a constant reminder to the whole of the creation of its Ruler, that being the Creator God of Israel (Genesis 1 & 2). 

This record of the ordering of creation is quickly followed by the report of the divine image-bearers’ first act of idolatry, rebellion, and violation of their God’s commandment.  This is swiftly followed by the exile of the now marred image-bearers from the role to which they had been assigned by the Creator.  What accompanied this, as pointedly and painfully indicated by Scripture, is the exile of the creation from the condition and state in which it had been created (very good, perfection), as it came to share in the cursing brought about by the one appointed to its rule and stewardship (Genesis 3). 

Subsequent to that the first murders are to be found (Genesis 4), along the fathering of a son in the likeness of the fallen image-bearer rather than in the image of the Creator God (Genesis 5), the growing wickedness of the collectively fallen image-bearers (Genesis 6), a worldwide flood of judgment (Genesis 7), the curse of Canaan (Genesis 9), and the culmination of man’s self-idolatry, rebellion, and defiance of the Creator, which was the construction of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). 

It is at this point that the Creator God is said to have reached down into His creation for the purpose of choosing and appointing Abraham, as something of a project manager charged with the task of the restoration of the fallen creation.  Undoubtedly, accurately and purposefully communicating this definitive story would be part and parcel of being a “teacher of Israel,” and it would have to in such a context that Jesus delivers the words of what have come to be the most famous words in the whole of Scripture.   

My Enemies (part 2)

The Apostle Paul would latch on to this theme of kneeling, echoed elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, and include in his letter to the believers in Philippi “that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow---in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (2:10).  Not only could Jesus come to believe that, if He was correct in His assessment of the messianic vocation, His enemy would kneel and bow before Him, but Jesus could also look to this Psalm and go to the cross with the confident declaration that “You make My enemies retreat” (18:40a).  With the power of the faithful, covenant-making-and-keeping God at His back, Jesus could make the assertion that “I destroy those who hate Me” (18:40b).  Surely, the powers of death and destruction could be understood to hate the bringers of life, renewal, restoration, and re-creation. 

His enemies would not go down without a battle, nor without an assertion of their rights.  In fact, those enemies would cry out.  The Psalmist would write, “they cry out, but there is no one to help them” (18:41a).  More than that, His enemies, death and the grave, would even “cry out to the Lord, but He does not answer them” (18:41b).  Wait a minute.  How could death cry out to the Lord?  Why would death cry out to the sovereign Lord of the cosmos? 

In crying out to the Lord, if in its own death throes as the power of resurrection life was about to be unleashed into the world, death would be doing nothing more than asserting its rightful claim against all of mankind.  According to the narrative by which Jesus would have ordered and defined His own life, and by which His thinking would be shaped, that rightful claim began with Adam.  More specifically, death would be asserting its rightful claim against Israel (of which Jesus was part), which had been in constant violation of their God’s commandments to them, as evidenced by their ongoing experience of His promised curses and their continual state of exile, being oppressed and subjugated while in their own land 

Among a number of reasons, it was this failure of Israel that would make it necessary, because the covenant God is faithful to His promises, for their King to undergo that which was seen as the greatest curse, the cross, going there as the representative of His people, to undergo the curses of suffering and death.  Though death was certainly a usurper and an interloper in the God of Israel’s good creation, it was not an unlawful usurpation, as death had only entered because of mankind’s failure, and remained through the divine image-bearer’s (whether Adam or Israel) relinquishing of his God-given dominion over all things.  Though death and its associates cry out, the Creator God’s answer would come through His anointed King’s power to “grind them as fine windblown dust” (18:42a), and His strength to “beat them underfoot like clay in the streets” (18:42b).  This would be accomplished by a Resurrection, as God would brook no bargains with death in the process of setting His world to rights (and right standing with Him) through His Christ.  

As one ponders what has been accomplished by the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and as one continues to imagine the strength and confidence for His mission that Jesus would have gained through His study and exploration of the Scriptures, one is able to go on to read “You rescue Me from a hostile army” (Psalm 18:43a).  For Jesus, this involves a two-fold application.  Though in the natural He was not rescued from a hostile army---that being the Roman army---by being raised up from His grave (which actually does indicate something of a rescue from Rome’s military might), He was rescued from death and its vengeful hordes.  By going into the curse of death on a cross as the singular representative of His people Israel, it can be seen that Jesus took yet another aspect of the Deuteronomic curse upon Himself.