Читать книгу The Book of Unknowing - David S. Herrstrom - Страница 14

Our desire is appeased only by feeding on Thee, bread of immortality.

—Miguel de Unamuno

The seed in Jesus’ metaphor, sacrificed to the mill and ground up, is transformed into bread. The fruit of the vine, crushed, becomes wine. Bread and wine presume sacrifice, but more than this they come into being by metamorphosis. The vegetable is literally transformed to animal.

Bread & wine were married long before John wrote his book. They are a perfect symmetry, an ancient expression for eating and drinking. Ever since, as in the verses of Omar Kayyam’s Rubaiyat or in the space of Picasso’s still lifes, their marriage has been reaffirmed. Bread & wine have become part of the furniture of our mind. John, however, breaks this symmetry.

He is explicit in more than one place about the flesh of Jesus being bread. Yet despite Jesus’ radical invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood (6:56), nowhere does John explicitly equate blood with wine. His readers fill in. Having experienced the magic of the marriage at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, they complete the implied equation. John, however, refuses to make the obvious move. While he lets the marriage at Cana revolve in our minds without interpretation, he quotes Jesus at length in two increasingly demanding interpretive discourses on the miracle of feeding 5000 people with “five barley loaves” and “two small fishes.”

By not allowing us the complement of bread-equals-flesh, refusing to complete the wine-equals equation, John carves out space for a redefinition of bread. And, as we would expect, his anxiety fills this space. Because he is obsessed with the body as a destined sacrifice to mortality, he desires nothing short of an “everlasting life,” immortality, as do we all in health and prosperity. Bread by being flesh brings life. John desires above all to possess a transformed body, one that will be a true sacrifice and “live forever” (6:58).

The Language of Bread

Bread redefined fulfills this promise. Simply stated, if you eat this new kind of bread, you will “not die,” possessing what Jesus calls “eternal life” (6:50, 54). This is the most difficult redefinition that any of Jesus’ hearers and John’s readers will be asked to accept. For it demands a radical reassessment of where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we’re going. Our accustomed vocabulary crumbles. Patterned on Elisha the prophet’s feeding the multitude with 20 loaves of barley and some ears of corn (2 Kgs 42), John uses the simplest of stories. Jesus’ feeding the 5000 has very much the feel of a folktale in its attention to two of these and five of those, yet it is the fulcrum for his onslaught of redefinition on that simplest of commodities—bread.

“Now there was much grass in the place” (6:10), John tells us at the beginning of his story. A curious and charming detail, but we’re puzzled, not knowing why he would include such a seemingly irrelevant, even trivial fact. Not until the end of the story when Jesus is about to lay out his radical redefinition of bread, does John satisfy our curiosity. He sets “grass” in opposition to “desert.”

Grass, we discover, is the scene of Jesus’ new vocabulary of bread, while the “desert” is the scene of the conventional language of bread. The miraculous bread of the past, the manna that saved the wandering Israelites in the desert, is not the bread he’s interested in. The people themselves make the point that Jesus’ miracle of the loaves has precedent in the miracle of the manna in the wilderness. This gives Jesus an opportunity to interpret his own act. John frames Jesus’ double discourses with references to manna (6:31, 58), exploding within this space the people’s conventional understanding of bread.

First, bread is political. Second, bread is literal, always and insistently literal. The people satisfied their hunger with barley loaves, not figurative but fragrant bread with texture and color. Barley, moreover, is the bread of the poor who cannot afford wheat. Just as literally, and these two meanings of bread are in the end one, bread takes the political stage. For after eating, the multitude wants to make Jesus king (6:15).

But Jesus retreats to a mountain. The people understand fully that breaking bread can mean breaking the present political order. In our own century the Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo, gives powerful expression to the people’s understanding in these lines from his poem “Our Daily Bread”:

You want to knock on all the doors

and ask for anyone; and then

see the poor, and crying quietly,

give bits of fresh bread to everyone

and to strip the rich of their vineyards

with the two blessed hands

that with a blow of light

flew from the nails on the cross!

Completing what John resists, Vallejo senses the necessity and follows up on the bread/flesh equation, subtly linking wine with blood. The new wine-blood gift of Jesus to the poor subversively replaces the old blood-wine extracted from the poor by the rich. John resolutely holds this bread/wine symmetry in abeyance, just as Jesus holds open the past theological understanding of bread (manna) to the present, and its present political meaning to the future. In doing this he opens up a field for planting new meanings. The new bread of Jesus is like manna from heaven. But unlike manna it is his flesh.

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Jesus makes two forays in creating this radical redefinition of bread. His first discourse (6:35–48) expands the meaning of “manna from heaven” in order to call the past into question and include Jesus himself. This monologue, in which Jesus promises action, leaves the Jews, who know his humble origins, murmuring, incredulous at his claims. Moving from belief to touch, from the eye to the tongue, his second discourse (6:51–58) ratchets up from the first. With this radical reassessment of eating bread, the future is called into question and his listeners both repelled and transfixed. This monologue, in which Jesus demands that his listeners take action, leaves even his disciples murmuring, confused by Jesus’ “hard saying.” It is a watershed.

“I am the bread of life” (6:35, 48), Jesus asserts at the beginning and the end of his first discourse. The same words, but they are by the end of this first monologue transformed into a different statement. John opens up the discourse for this possibility by having Jesus tease us with a hinted closure of symmetry, saying “he that comes to me shall never hunger; and he that believes on me shall never thirst.” Hunger and thirst, eating and drinking, naturally bread & wine, yet John withholds the second term as we’ve seen in order to create space in his discourse for expansion of the meaning of bread. The “bread” at the beginning of the discourse, then, is not the same “bread” at the end. It is transformed from the manna of God into the body of Jesus.

If manna in the desert is not the “true bread” (6:32), nor the bread collected from the grass in bits, what is the “true bread”? This bread is not in the past, as traditionally believed; and it is not in the present, as the people who would make Jesus king concluded. Instead, Jesus answers, it is belief in himself, a decision to share the immortality of Jesus, who came down from heaven and who will raise up believers. In this downward and upward movement, John echoes the angels on the ladder in Jacob’s vision, which he alludes to early on in his book (1:51), descending and ascending between heaven and earth.

This dynamic of coming “down” and raising “up” creates a fine tension. The Jews are very familiar with the coming “down” from God, as did the manna, but uneasy with Jesus’ claim to be such a person. The second term of the pair is also a familiar one, the Jews being accustomed to going “up” into God’s presence but uneasy with Jesus’ claim to be in such a place. Without his coming into the world and raising up in belief, Jesus asserts that his listeners cannot have what he calls “everlasting life” (6:40, 47). He is “the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die” (6:50).

Deftly, Jesus creates here a node of meaning where up and down are resolved. And he exploits this, saying that “No man can come to me, unless the Father which has sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day” (6:44). Jesus has come down to draw up. Belief, which is essential to identifying with Jesus as the bread of immortality, comes only by reciprocal motion. Isolating this critical node in his discourse, then, Jesus initiates the Jews into a new dynamic of meaning, “bread” now being a body accessible by belief. Moreover, meaning itself requires their participation. They must believe in order to accept Jesus’ new vocabulary which is the ground of belief. No wonder they “murmur.”

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Despite their resentment of his declarations, Jesus has succeeded in his first discourse in leading them down the path of redefinition. At the end of this monologue the Jews are left asking how Jesus could come down from heaven (6:42). Now he ratchets up his claims. By the end of the second discourse they are left with a harder question, one arising directly out of his redefinition: How is it possible to eat of Jesus’ body (6:52)? Jesus collapses the spiritual (manna of a miracle) and political (barley loaf of the poor) meaning of bread into literal “flesh,” a word he repeats in this discourse, along with “eat,” until it becomes a chant.

Using the strategy of the first discourse on bread, John has Jesus make the same statement at its beginning and end (6:51, 58). A move he uses to dramatize its transformation. Jesus promises that “if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever,” radically redefining “bread” in the space of the discourse, wrenching it from the metaphoric into the literal.

Though each of the old meanings was rooted in the literal—manna fallen on the desert and bits of bread scattered on the grass—the new meaning in the future, which Jesus has pulled into the present, can only be literal. Calling himself the “bread of life” invites a metaphoric interpretation, just as when he later calls himself the “vine” (15:1). In this context, John does not link blood and wine because he wants to extend the metaphor of the vine. However, in the present context he refuses the link and eschews metaphor because he wants to open up space for the new language of bread. Jesus’ insisting that “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (6:53), makes a new invitation. One so unequivocally literal, some Roman contemporaries who grasped its fullest import accused Christians of cannibalism. It is an invitation that demands just such a radical interpretation. John pushes the literal to its breaking point: from the real loaf of bread to the real flesh.

His insistence on the literal here is shocking. Just when everyone had got comfortable with the metaphoric force of bread in the first discourse, Jesus turns the tables and insists that it’s not a metaphor. A shock made greater when he has been so dismissive of the people as being distracted by literal bread (6:26).

Jesus’ chant on the word “flesh” drives home the literal force of his command to “eat,” destroying any vestige of the metaphoric that the incredulous Jews may be clinging to. Nothing in Jewish tradition enables them to assimilate Jesus’ complete transformation of their own vocabulary, which he had inherited as well. As a result, his new way of talking can only be shocking, and we sympathize with the Jews in rejecting what can only seem to them a blasphemous invitation to practice the abhorrent rites of some alien cult.

The Swerve from the Word

Who would not agree with the disciples that Jesus’ insistence on eating his flesh and drinking his blood is a “hard saying”? John has already shifted our sympathy to the Jews in their reaction. We are not surprised, then, that at this juncture a number of the disciples leave Jesus (6:66). Likewise, even his own brothers refuse to believe (7:5). They all steer clear of what appears to be madness, something the Jews suspect, maintaining their distrust of Jesus throughout his discourses.

On the one hand, this eating-and-drinking-the-Jesus-body conundrum engages all our powers of knowing before understanding. On the other, it strains the timbers of our mental house. Pressure builds either to shore up or open up meaning, nailing it down into a single, more manageable interpretation or adding doors and escaping its literal force, as generations have done since. Or meaning can be suspended, as John ultimately does in coming to terms with the hardest saying of Jesus.

This swerve away from Jesus’ demand to eat his body and drink his blood has defined the understanding of his character ever since. The magma of Jesus’ language in these discourses on bread has solidified. Uncomfortably hot words about actual flesh and actual eating have cooled over the centuries. Conventions of their interpretation have hardened. His outrageous demand simply could not stand. Trying to live with this intractable word is like having Grendel at the supper table. So it was necessary to domesticate Jesus’ words in order to make his new vocabulary safe for society. And yet the Jews’ question, which assumes Jesus’ literal intention, their question about how to “eat” the “flesh” of Jesus (6:52), remains.

Such a hard question that even John blinks. He is, no doubt, briefly in the company of those disciples which he records as being offended by Jesus’ demand (6:61). This reaction causes Jesus to attempt a softening of his own words. He retreats and blunts their literal edge by introducing the categories of “spirit” and “flesh,” opening the possibility of a metaphoric interpretation of the words. And, as if he didn’t quite believe this tack himself, he concludes with a sigh, “But there are some of you that believe not” (6:64).

The spirit/flesh opposition rings hollow in face of Jesus’ insistent command to “eat,” given even greater weight by the oracular “Verily, verily” still pounding in his listeners’ ears. Four times, we remember, he demanded that they eat his flesh and drink his blood (6:53–56). And the sigh, merely admitting the obvious, is at best a plea for sympathy. At worst, in his follow up, “No man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father” (6:65), it is sour grapes. Jesus is desperate. Experiencing the loss of “many” disciples as well as his own brothers, he asserts that he knew many in his audience would never believe anyway. We hear the dry throat-clearing of rationalization here and shuffling feet in the background of disciples leaving. Unable to convince all his disciples, let alone his fellow Jews, he throws the argument for eating his flesh back in their face, saying it’s a given that they will not believe, and he knew this would be the result anyway.

Having felt the assault of Jesus’ words, we are not convinced by this back pedaling. His discourses still whirl in our head like swords.

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Some of the disciples continue to follow unflinchingly; others take offense and desert Jesus. But John blazes a third path. Rocked by the full force of the new language that Jesus has unloosed in his monologues, John chooses to live on its edge. He suspends its meaning, not grasping after certainty. Familiar territory because it bears the mark of prophecy, an obscurity that “rouzes the faculties to act,” in William Blake’s phrase. Jesus’ outrageous demand to feast on himself, masquerading as an invitation, leaves John exhilarated and uneasy. Given the strangeness of this invitation—to participate in a feast in which the eater and the eaten literally become one—it couldn’t be otherwise. Even in expressing its strangeness with great power, John cannot escape a nagging sense of its absurdity.

This allows John commitment and distance simultaneously. He achieves a suspension of meaning, in short, evidenced by his parodying the feast of Jesus. The supper in the upper room with his disciples just before his crucifixion is not the feast itself but the traditional Passover meal. Its expanded meaning now includes the new lamb and new bread, of course, but their literal outworking must wait until after the crucifixion and resurrection. The true feast of Jesus, that is, held in abeyance. In this suspended moment, John uses Judas, whom Jesus had earlier fingered in his discourse on bread (6:64), to turn the supper into a parody. Referring again to the betrayal of Judas, Jesus now says to his disciples, “He that eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me” (13:18). Rather than becoming one with Jesus, that is, the act of eating effects the opposite. Because it releases pressure in his own mind, John welcomes the irony that the bread in this context, which alludes to the “true” bread of immortality according to Jesus’ redefinition, brings death.

Yet the question of how to “eat” Jesus’ “flesh” continues to haunt John. For in the last scene of his book he echoes the earlier scene on the grass by the sea with the 5000, the occasion of Jesus’ redefining “bread.” On the shore of Tiberias Jesus invites his disciples to join him in a meal of bread and fish. Given the charge that “bread” has acquired in Jesus’ discourse, his invitation here is disarmingly casual, “Come and dine” (21:12). This is the true last supper. John admits no irony, and we’re moved by the compassionate and extraordinarily vivid scene. Simple and beautiful, their meal seems to promise resolution. Yet it neither answers nor dismisses the question.

Serving bread and exhorting Peter in turn to “feed” others (“lambs” and “sheep”) is Jesus’ definitive showing of himself. Breaking bread is his signature, and John rightfully insists that in this lies the recognition scene (21:12), despite the miracle that the disciples had just witnessed of Jesus multiplying the fish in their net (a variation on the earlier miracle with the 5000). The meal is wonderfully self-contained, then, begging the very question that John knows it raises. Because swirling around the scene is the identity of Jesus being bread. Separated from breaking bread but integral to the scene, his being bread remains present in the air like an electric field. John chooses suspension without demanding resolution, just as he never demands closure of language itself. Bread & . . . ? Bread & fish? Hardly. John leaves the symmetry broken, the doors of meaning wide open, allowing other voices to drift through.