John is Many Gospels

I have explored recently two notions about our experience-lives and our relationship to God.  One has been about the progress of our existences as imaged in terms of seed-pods bursting forth.  The other has been about the implications of our very existence--indeed, the very existence of anything that is not God--as being an existence described most aptly in terms of the negative, that is, in terms of everything being bad that is not God.

The overall implication of "existence" as applying to that which is not God is the inescapable conclusion that any "progress" we might experience is only the pressing forward in time of ourselves through states of change--and any change must be assumed to be for ill rather than good.  As we move beyond the first infantile experience, we must deal first and foremost with our propensity to lose our way--"aware, away, awry."  As the seedpod hangs from the plant--and diminishes the plant in terms of the expenditure of resources--we are as total creatures diminished, and the most we can hope for in our "burstings-forth" is a greater-or-lesser recapturing of our original states.  We can grow in knowledge of God, even in experience of God (and we can even do some service to God), but we cannot become more than we were at the first.

We are then, in the most general proposition, always in the process of dying, and the only life we can possess is drawn from beyond ourselves, as God infuses us with life to the extent to which we allow our own possession of life to slip from us.  Life and death are not opposites, then, but rather complementary arrays of threads that interweave the fabric of our existences.  First one or the other--life or death--predominates in any experience-arc, and then the remaining other (its inevitable complement) surges forth.  Most typically, of course, we see ourselves as becoming "alive" to some scenario, and then collecting the set of experiences that flesh out the arc, and then we understand the arc as reaching its fruition (or its decay--often the difference matters little.)  We are "roused, readied, reaped."  The most important thing is that we yield to the hand of God--that we "die" to ourselves, so as gain the benefit of experience that--without God--would always diminish us in what matters.

Adam was created into communion with God, and then Adam yearned for more, and his needs demanded a more and more refined stipulation of a proper "help meet," and then Adam became part of a couple who, on balance, could not help each other.  Cain made a presentation of himself to God, and then Cain was confronted by a rejection, and then Cain drew apart from his Creator, and then Cain slew one of God's precious creatures, bringing upon himself the notorious curse.  Noah made a sacrifice to his God, followed by a pressing of the vine into drink and imbibing it profusely, followed by an estrangement from certain of his offspring--and history knows how horrid were the results of letting human beings make slaves of each other.

In each of these instances is present a horrifying cycle of celebration, confrontation, alienation, and culmination.  The reason I use the term "horrifying cycle" is because any arc of human experience--absent an ineffable, merciful blessing of God--is always more or less horrible (the more so as we do not see the horror present.)  For us to be is for us to be less than God, and therefore in the general balance bad.  It is not for nothing that Jesus says that our optimal state is that of the innocent, experience-free infant, and it is not for nothing that--in the extremity of distress--the Old Testament found the greatest of imaginable reliefs would be in the imagined conception of the stillborn, hidden away in the earth and hidden away from the travails of the earth.

Celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination--such is the architecture of our experiences, and within this framework is presented to us the ministry of Jesus.  Of course, the content of the teachings Jesus presents is at least as important as the structuring of those teachings, but when we misunderstand the structures, we can be led to direct our attentions to the wrong things.  Of unsurpassed importance in those misunderstandings is the insistence we display in trying to make a "story" of the ministry of Jesus.

We imagine we can understand the teachings of Jesus all the more as we pound into our minds the "gospel story," but--if anything--the proceeding gospel narrative is about people learning how to not understand.  Jesus starts the Gospel of John making fun of the first disciples' credulous nature, and on the very eve of his betrayal he responds to their claim of understanding him plainly,

Do ye now believe?  Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone . . . .

And then in a few verses we read, not how the disciples have come to understand Jesus, but how they have come to embrace him as being of God, and coming from God--a collection of insights that date back with them at least as far as Peter's confession.  If they do not gather that Jesus is God--and all of us will have always some manner of difficulty in understanding that totality--Jesus does not phrase that totality as being the essential point:

I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word.  Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee.  For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

Jesus says that his disciples understand that he speaks the words of God.  Jesus does not say that his disciples understand the words of God--the disciples' understanding of the essential points is not, apparently, different in any fundamental way from the "Syrophenician" woman's "Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David."

As the gospel narratives are spread before us, we can see--in a manner neither unsurprising nor unduly upsetting--how the persons who experienced Jesus went through episodes and cycles of greater and lesser engagement with his teaching.  This is how religion impacts us, and this is how we might expect religion to impact the disciples, yet the prevailing focus on the "gospel story" obscures that reality in favor of a notion that Jesus is packaging a theology for us.  There must be a story, a biography, even a history, of Jesus in the gospels (or so maintain the denominations), and in this contention the denominations will be scarcely shaken.  This is where we obtain such silly notions as the multiple "cleansings of the temple" necessitated by the different chronologies of the Synoptics versus John.

Each of the "celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination" cycles (which I described above in reference to Genesis) in the Gospels is a gospel in itself.  I have described in earlier posts my contention that it is indeed entirely possible that there were multiple "cleansings of the temple," but this contention makes sense only in a larger context of the possibility that Jesus presented himself on numerous occasions in a manner more or less approximate to his final, precipitous engagement with the authorities.  Jesus told his mother that his time had not yet come, and yet he acceded to her insistence that he perform a miracle that might indeed have hastened the end of his ministry.

In short, the Gospel of John is many gospels.

The introduction celebrates creation, then describes Jesus coming to his own, being rejected, and bestowing his "fulness" on the world.  Celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination.

John the Baptist celebrates the advent of Jesus, and then in the role of messenger not only confronts the authorities, but describes Jesus as both his greater and as a timeless being--John's presentation itself being probably as close as any mere mortal might come to encapsulating a gospel.

John the Baptist celebrates the sighting of Jesus, and then Jesus gently confronts the first disciples with their amateurish understanding of the messiah, and then hits he them almost immediately with the most profound of culminations: "Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man."

Jesus celebrates at a wedding, is confronted in a momentary struggle over the timing of his public appearing, and "manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him"--which differs little from how they are (in the general theologies) thought to have believed so profoundly at the Last Supper.

Jesus goes up to a Passover celebration, cleanses the temple (with all of the attendant confrontations and alienations), and is described already as prophesying his resurrection.

Nicodemus comes to praise Jesus, Jesus confronts him with the disturbing demand that he must be "born again," and then Jesus hits Nicodemus with a gospel-concluding statement: "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already" and moreover, "this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world"--a gospel with neither a crucifixion nor a resurrection.

Jesus and his followers go to celebrate baptism with John and his followers, there is a confrontation between John's disciples and some Jews, and the episode ends with John saying, "The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand.  He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."

Celebration, confrontation, alienation, culmination--the pattern (as we shall see) continues through the Gospel of John.  The rather striking, almost continual, initiating theme of "celebration" seems surprising, although not so much so if we remember that the beginning state of any arc of human experience is, at best, a relatively stable state.  For us imperfect beings, change is properly understood as degradation, or at least the potential evil of degradation.  Only the mercy and help of God can place us again at such state for which we might reasonably hope--with also such gains and lessons as we might reasonably hope for.