After the startlingly anti-imperial proclamation by the Samaritans of Jesus as "Savior of the world," Jesus returns to Cana in Galilee, site of the water-into-wine episode. The healing of a royal official's child and the coming to faith of the "whole household" (John 4:53) mark the high-water mark of Jesus' first tour of Palestine. He has joined Samaritans and Jewish officials in Galilee as a believing community.
Having initiated the construction of a new covenant community, Jesus systematically challenges his hearers' loyalty to the prevailing Judean ideology. The escalating confrontation centers around this question: What does it mean to be "children of God"?
Having completed the cycle from Cana to Jerusalem and back to Cana via Samaria, Jesus returns to the capital for an unnamed Judean feast. Jesus will confront many obstacles as he travels to Jerusalem in chapter five, back to Capernaum in Galilee in chapter six, and once more to Jerusalem in chapters seven through 10. All the while, the conspiracy by the Judean officials to kill him will grow in determination. It will be up to readers to take sides in this life-or-death struggle for the hearts and minds of the "people of God."
Chapter five opens with the pathetic plaint of a man suffering for 38 years by the poolside in Jerusalem, waiting for someone to perform the magic trick that will heal him. According to local legend, if a person is placed in the pool when the water moves, that person will be healed. But the indifference of other sick people is so extreme that the man has been lying by the pool without assistance for as long as Israel wandered in the desert!
The poolside scene is described as populated by a "multitude of sick, blind, lame, and withered." This is the underside of the temple-Torah state: Beside all the wealth and gold of the temple lie hundreds of destitute persons, like street people sleeping on the heat grates of Washington, D.C. The precious law -- intended as balm for the weakest links in the chain of the covenant community -- has utterly failed to offer relief.
Jesus enters the scene and ignores the sick man's recital of the prevailing ideology. He states simply that healing lies in the sick man's own power: "Rise, pick up your mat, and walk" (5:8). As the man does so, the narrator tells us, "It was the Sabbath."
With the blunt bureaucratic buffoonery of Kafka-esque thugs, the Judeans announce to the cured man, "It is the Sabbath! It is against the law for you to lift up your mat" (5:10). The frightened man blames the illegality on "the one who healed me," not knowing who Jesus is. The issue is engaged. What is more important -- the keeping of "God's law" or an act of healing?
Jesus' violation of the Sabbath leads the Judeans to "persecute" him (5:16). And when he explains his action with, "My Father is working now and so am I working," we are told, "Because of this, the Judeans were seeking to kill him, not only because he was breaking the Sabbath, but because he said that God was his own Father, making himself equal to God" (5:18).
GOD AS FATHER. It's an image properly criticized by feminists when used as a legitimation for patriarchy. But in the context of the fourth gospel, it is not used to justify male priesthood or the subjugation of women but to undermine directly the foundation of the entire temple-Torah state.
The temple system -- destroyed by the time of the Johannine community but still operating as powerful ideology -- developed because of a theology that painted God as a distant and powerful monarch seated on a heavenly throne. Tribal people naturally find divinity present in the inscrutable and dangerous forces of nature, which seem to operate from the sky. Of course, a complementary aspect of divinity's power is that of the fruitful and nurturing earth, which gives and sustains life in the face of storm and parching heat.
From the time of the Exodus, however, what became Judaism emphasized the sky-father Yahweh and repressed the image of earth-mother worshiped by most neighboring peoples. It was a matter both of maintaining tribal identity and providing divine legitimation for a patriarchal culture.
By the time of the Israelite monarchy founded by David and expanded under Solomon, the royalty of Yahweh was seen as mirrored in the royalty of Israel's king, as proclaimed in numerous psalms. Ironically for those of our day who claim the Hebrew prophets' tirades against "idolatry" as precedent for modern campaigns against the worship of weapons, wealth, or oppressive institutional structures, the primary target of the prophets was the worship of earth-mother goddesses. In order to maintain the monotheistic worship of Yahweh, Israel largely suppressed the feminine aspect of God.
This resulted not only in a patriarchal religious culture, but also in a pervasive belief in the immeasurable distance of Yahweh. Such a God required mediation through persons willing to risk their lives to encounter that power. The archetype of this priestly mediation is Moses on Mt. Sinai, enveloped in clouds and thunder as he brings back the law from the sky-God.
After centuries of institutionally established and maintained temple rituals for placating this distant God, Israelites had largely lost the notion of Yahweh as loving father. Instead, like the sick man at the pool, they found themselves spiritually oppressed and economically strapped, captives of the temple-Torah ideology that put all power in the hands of those who controlled the instruments of mediation.
In this context, Jesus' claim of God's fatherhood was not made to reinforce patriarchy, but to claim the ancient religious insight that had been systematically repressed by the religious powers: God was not a distant monarch but a loving and intimate Parent whose power was immediately available to all who had faith. So threatening to the Judeans was this claim that it led to the plot not simply to persecute Jesus but to kill him.
The next four chapters unfold with these twin trajectories simultaneously moving along their courses. Jesus continues to do his Father's work of healing and empowering others to believe in God's available power, and his opponents continue their efforts to kill him. In the first part of the "trial" in which Jesus defends his claim, he brings forth four witnesses on his behalf: John (the Baptist), the works that Jesus performs, the Father, and the scriptures (5:31-42). He concludes his opening speech with a shocking charge: The Judeans think their obedience to the law is obedience to Moses (and hence to God), but in fact it is Moses who is their accuser (5:45-46).
This startling statement undermines the entire basis of the Judean ideology. Moses brought the law (which "not one of you is doing," 7:19), but "grace and truth" came through Jesus Christ. The fourth gospel will now proceed to show Jesus' superiority to Moses, as well as how false are the religious officials' claims to base their actions in either Moses or the patriarchs who preceded him.
Chapter six is loaded with Exodus imagery. It begins with Jesus, like Moses, on a mountain. The familiar wilderness feeding finds its place here, but with a special Johannine interpretation. Where Mark uses the feeding stories as a metaphor for the call to a unified community, the fourth gospel's emphasis is on the response of the crowd. "When they saw the signs which he did, they were saying, 'This is truly the prophet, the One coming into the world.' Jesus, knowing they were about to come to seize him and make him king, withdrew into the mountain alone" (6:14-15).
The remainder of chapter six offers a Johannine explanation of the meaning of the loaves. As the Samaritan woman in chapter four wanted water to end her trips to the well, the crowd in chapter six wants bread (6:26, 34). And as Jesus offered the woman "living water," he proclaims to the crowd, "I am the bread of life" (6:35, 48). The crowd harkens back to Moses' provision of manna in the wilderness as a basis for demanding that Jesus prove himself with a similar sign (6:31). But Jesus challenges their theology by attributing the manna not to Moses, but to "my Father" (6:32). This leads these Galileans-become-"Judeans," like their predecessors in the wilderness, first to "murmur" (6:41), then to fight among themselves (6:52).
In this context of argument and grumbling, Jesus offers the second "gate" into the Johannine community: "Amen, amen, I say to you: Unless you munch the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves" (6:53). What appears at first to be another ambiguous term that cannot be taken literally takes on startlingly concrete implications as the conversation proceeds. As the Judeans naturally object to the cannibalistic overtones of Jesus' command, Jesus insists even more firmly on its literal aspect.
EVEN JESUS' DISCIPLES find this "a hard word" (6:60), and some leave him to "go off into the things behind" (6:66). The meaning of the command to "munch" leads us into the heart of the Johannine community's social struggle.
By the time of the fourth gospel, Christian communities had been breaking bread together in memory of Jesus for at least 40 years. As we learn from Acts, some communities attempted to maintain double loyalty to the synagogue and to Jesus by participating in public Jewish worship and private Christian agape feasts (Acts 2:46). However, hostility between the synagogue and the Jesus movement intensified as claims about the importance of Jesus grew more threatening to priests and Pharisees.
After the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E., the hostility grew to the point that known Jesus-confessors would be excommunicated from the synagogue (John 9:22). Apart from the act of verbal confession -- which the fourth gospel tells us many would-be disciples were unwilling to do (12:42) -- the primary ritual act that marked Christians was participation in the Eucharist.
For the crowd listening to Jesus' speech in chapter six and for his murmuring disciples, this is the "hard word": to join the community in Eucharist and risk excommunication from the synagogue. The Greek verb that I have rendered "munch" is much stronger than the synoptic and Pauline verb translated as "eat." It removes the possibility that the Eucharist is a mere metaphor for "remembering" Jesus and emphasizes the physical act of consuming bread/flesh. To be disciples -- to have life -- believers must risk social ostracism and institutional religious rejection and link themselves with the Johannine community.
The return of many of the disciples to "the things behind" brings Jesus into direct encounter with "the twelve" for the first time in the gospel. Simon Peter offers a "confession" with ominous overtones: He names Jesus as "the Holy One of God," a title given to Jesus in the synoptics by demons (Mark 1:24). Jesus refuses to confirm or deny the title, but immediately turns to the topic of betrayal (6:70-71). It is clear that to follow Jesus, one must know who he is and where he is from. Whether Peter and the 12 -- symbolic of the apostolic churches with whom the Johannine community is in tension -- do understand is left open until the very end.
Chapters seven and eight bring us into the context of the feast of Tabernacles, the ancient fall harvest celebration that remembered the wilderness sojourn in tents. The extended drama brings forth several objections to Jesus that must have been current in the Johannine community's day. "He misleads the crowd" (7:12); he "has not studied" with the official teachers (7:15); "we know where he is from, but when the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from" (7:27); "when the Christ comes will he perform signs like this one?" (7:31); "the Christ is not coming from Galilee, is he?" (7:41). Jesus refutes each of these aspects of Pharisaic ideology and popular ideology with the same basic argument: The One from God does what God wants, but those speaking on their own are "seeking their own glory" (7:18). The necessary implications of this dichotomy reach the limits of mutual accusation. The Judeans accuse Jesus of being possessed (7:20), and Jesus accuses them of having the devil for a father (8:44).
Throughout these chapters, Jesus brings forth imagery from the Tabernacles celebration and uses it to describe his own mission, continuing the Johannine agenda of narrating Jesus' replacement of the Judean religious institutional power with his own God-given authority. Tabernacles rituals included a procession by priests from the temple to Siloam and back, where water was poured to symbolize the water from the rock that Moses released in the wilderness (Exodus 17:1-7). In the fourth gospel, Jesus stands up on the last day of Tabernacles and proclaims, "If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me," to which some of the crowd responds, "This is truly the Prophet!" (7:37, 40).
Similarly, the Tabernacles celebration included a light ritual, in which gigantic candelabra were lit in the temple to symbolize God's presence there. In contrast, Jesus announces, "I am the light of the world" (8:12).
By the end of chapter eight, the mutual trials have reached their conclusions. Jesus has proven that the Judeans are like their father, the devil, who "was a murderer from the beginning" and "a liar" (8:44), while they have in turn condemned Jesus as a blasphemer and demonic usurper of their Moses-given authority. As they pick up stones to kill him in prosecution of their imposition of the death sentence for his "crimes," they ironically prove his charge of "murderer."
When this article appeared, Wes Howard-Brook was program director of the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center in Seattle and taught adult scripture education as a member of Galilee Circle, a Christian resistance community.
This article is the third of a series of three. Parts one and two appeared in the January and February/March 1993 issues of Sojourners.
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