Читать книгу The Book of Unknowing - David S. Herrstrom - Страница 13

Painfully aware that his body is death in life, John desires a life-in-death body. This exalted conviction that one can possess life greater than life—“eternal life”—is the wellspring of his book. An encounter with Jesus is the source of this conviction, his book its lyrical expression. So powerful is his experience that he wants to inhabit the body of the man Jesus, the sacrificial lamb, who is alive to the degree that death is a presence.

Jesus is called the Lamb at the beginning of John’s book, but becomes a shepherd by the end (10:11). How can Jesus be both the shepherd and the sheep? Though he never refers to himself directly as the lamb, Jesus’ understanding of himself as a sacrificial lamb pervades John’s book. And he reinforces his role as shepherd at the end of the book by his injunction to Peter, “Feed my sheep.”

Jesus as sacrificial lamb is one of the book’s great ironies. His life given to the proclamation of eternal life is bent on death. To be obsessed with life is to be obsessed with death because Jesus’ life is incomplete without death. John sets this up in the beginning by having John the Baptist hail Jesus twice as the “Lamb” (1:29, 36). Clearly, John wants us to identify his body with the sacrificial lamb, haunting us throughout the book with Jesus’ words about his “hour” of death “not yet come.” To this end John deftly arranges events, counter to the other accounts of Jesus’ life, so that his sacrifice on the cross coincides with the Passover sacrifice of lambs in the Temple.

The metaphoric lamb at the beginning foreshadows this literal sacrifice on the cross. We are not in the end allowed the comfort of metaphor. Jesus becomes the real lamb slain. Always John insists on the reality of the body sacrificed, a stubborn insistence designed to make us uncomfortable.

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Because Jesus’ life can be completed only when his body is given to death, he provokes all around him in an effort to achieve death. At one point or another, every group he speaks to wants to stone him, and he must go by another path or into another country to escape. Even his brothers and disciples cannot dissuade him from inciting the powers that be to murder. Jesus has a knack for offending everyone.

More than Socrates even, Jesus is bent on death. His entire life in John’s account carries within it death, while Socrates in Plato’s account provokes one jury in a single climactic incident. Jesus is the master of extended provocation. We understand W. H. Auden’s visceral reaction: the difference between Jesus and Socrates or Buddha or Confucius or Mohammed is that “None of the other arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him.’”

Jesus the provocateur is hard to take. But by this he teaches a new language of sacrifice that allows both his disciples and enemies to reconcile within life his stubborn insistence on the body of death, which is at the heart of Jesus’ character.

We can’t get around this, and John shows us the way through. He presents Jesus as systematically carrying out a program to inculcate a new vocabulary of sacrifice, subverting the traditional term. His aim is to bring the Jews into a new understanding, and so become new people—believers. At the same time, Jesus wishes to bring his followers into a new understanding of the body. He must convince them that his body can be eaten but not consumed. The new body of the believer can be sustained by the one Jesus, not as a substitute but as the very body itself. In short, the believer can eat the body of Jesus and have it too.

John accomplishes this by expanding Jesus’ sacrificial role to include the scapegoat of Jewish tradition (Lev 16:8). The scapegoat is an appropriately ambiguous figure, for he disappears, dying to the community, yet lives in exile. Moreover, John employs the clever strategy of having the high priest Caiaphas introduce the notion of the scapegoat. He says to the Jews, “You know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (11:49–50). We savor the irony that the Jews themselves make Jesus’ identity as sacrifice explicit, articulating what Jesus’ disciples failed to see, who continue their efforts to prevent Jesus from being stoned. Nonetheless, Jesus’ purpose and the Jews’ intent finally converge on the trajectory of death (11:53).

The Jews and his disciples may not all have accepted Jesus’ new vocabulary, assimilating his redefinition of sacrifice, but Jesus manages to get them to support him with action. We can only marvel at his powers of manipulation, just as we admire John the writer’s powers in leading us to accept the new terms of sacrifice.

As scapegoat Jesus can have it both ways, being sacrifice and survivor, lamb and shepherd. At the beginning Jesus is the powerless lamb; in the end it is his listeners who become helpless sheep as he becomes the shepherd. They accept, that is, his language and concomitant power. Calling his followers “sheep” (10:11) emphasizes his authoritative role. But, paradoxically, this is why they come to accept him as a lamb, a new kind of sacrifice, a literal self-sacrifice. The sacrifice of the lamb is no longer the promise of an action as in Passover (Exod 12:13) but the act itself.

As shepherd Jesus is both a political subject within the community and not. He is both the quick (to the new community) and the dead (to a past community). John is no doubt familiar with the long tradition of the Greek phrase “shepherd of the people,” which appears in the Iliad as the title for a king or feudal lord. Yet Jesus’ self-understanding, of course, goes beyond the political. Jesus can say with Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, “I never kept sheep,” but “My soul is like a shepherd.” More important, Jesus’ language makes this private conviction publicly compelling.

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Jesus in his parable of the sheepfold (10:1–4) continues his redefinition of sacrifice, wresting it from the purely traditional Jewish context. He knows the power of figurative language, which he admits to using (16:25), including puns (e.g., “wind,” 3:8) and parables, to create new language from old. John’s abrupt transition from urban to pastoral with this move to the parable of the shepherd is a shock, a way of calling our attention to the project of redefinition. And he is keenly aware of his role in this, self-consciously interpreting (2:21) and selecting (20:30). The shock of the change in imagery reinforces the shock in change of vocabulary, the redefining and reinterpreting that is so important to Jesus.

Yet this doesn’t wholly explain our uneasiness. The strangeness of Jesus’ shepherd/sheep imagery goes beyond John’s shift here to the metaphoric, where he had been resolutely literal with the lamb. The lamb begins as a figure of speech and ends as the literal, slaughtered body.

Jesus invites us at first in his parable to see literal sheep but ultimately turns them into metaphor. Shepherd and sheep lie uneasily in John’s book. Mainly taking place in the city, the book does not readily admit them. Because of this his imagery seems almost nostalgic. True to his bent, he transforms the innocence of the lamb into the experience of blood. But the sheep restore some of their innocence, associations of a past place and future time. They retain their aura of innocence by remaining a figure of speech.

In the countryside Jesus is the shepherd. In the city he is the lamb destined for slaughter. The pastoral seems to call the urban into question. Jesus’ journeying to the country or retreating to a mountain is movement toward life. Throughout the book Jesus oscillates between the country and the city, between the periphery and the center. John exploits this tension by subtly informing us that in the center, in the city is death. When Jesus retreats to the periphery, he is holding death off. The closer to the city, the closer to a celebration and feast, the closer Jesus is to becoming himself the feast.

John expands the pastoral arena of sacrifice, however, deepening its significance. Jesus’ metaphor of the seed dramatically shifts our new vocabulary of sacrifice from the animal to the vegetable world, as if ultimately rooting it in the rich tradition of fertility religions, which the prophets like Isaiah abhorred (Isa. 17:8–11). More important, the parable intensifies while completing Jesus’ program of redefining sacrifice: “And Jesus answered them, saying, the hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, Verily, I say unto you, unless a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone: but if it die, it brings forth much fruit. He that loves his life shall lose it; and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (12:23–25).

The central paradox—lose one’s life in order to save it—is impossible. This new vocabulary of sacrifice is frighteningly literal. We instinctively turn away.

But John insists. He puts these words at the center of his book, just as they are at the center of Jesus’ life. Their great aphoristic force resounds down through the centuries. Yet they’re also repellent with overtones of hatred for the world. Do they allow room for Jesus’ love of wine at Cana? The sensuous caress of Mary’s hair brushing his feet? Friendship for Martha and Lazarus that moves him to tears? Or the spirited even joyous dialog with friends like Peter, and Zen exchange with strangers like Nicodemus? Jesus loves the world one moment and despises it the next. We are returned to the paradox of the slaughtered lamb.

The notion of sacrifice now extends beyond the Jews. Jesus subverts their religious understanding of sacrifice and expands it to a grain of wheat, encompassing the whole living world. This constitutes a new vocabulary. It is no longer limited to a specific religious context, nor can we take refuge in the lamb or the seed as metaphor. And uneasiness with the pastoral as a protective space accompanies this, dispelling any whiff of nostalgia. The program of redefinition is radical. John keeps returning us to the literal, sacrificial body. And he moves relentlessly forward, increasing the pressure on his audience’s old understanding of life, as he redefines bread.