My previous contention that "John is many gospels" relies, of course, on an untypical use of the term "gospel." In this I am scarcely unique, as it is one of the staple aspects of theologians to use "gospel" variously. Perhaps most striking of these uses is the radio-preacher type of insistence that the "full gospel" consists of the entire Bible--the entire Bible, that is, as it is taken to include at every pivotal juncture some one or another reference (usually a reference that has escaped unaccountably the "Jews," or the "Roman Church," or whoever) and this reference is elucidated by the preacher as being yet another part of the "gospel." This is where we get unsubstantial contentions of the sort that Jesus' foot pressed against the Cross is foreshadowed (for the properly discerning) in the snake's target being the heel of Eve's offspring.
This "gospel" does not suffer limitations even to the text of the Bible. Preachers will preach to Jews about how various aspects of Judaism's written and unwritten heritages contain "gospel" truths that Jews have forgotten even as they have clung to mystifying traditions, and if a person so desires he or she might might subscribe to preachers' resources that find the essence of the gospel in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
And then there is the unedifying derivation of "gospel" from "good news" in the Greek (or, rather, in a simplistic reading of the Greek.) Suffice to say that "the gospel" in its largest and easiest application is a phrase taken to mean "the message of Christian salvation"--though this will not obviate the difficulty of a rejoinder that is pregnant in all the talk about how Judaism has misunderstood the Old Testament message that--surely--told the few "saints" of the centuries B.C. how to be saved. This rejoinder is of such a type as, "If the elements of the gospel are present in the Old Testament, and were presented thereby to the Jews, what then did they lack as far as conceptual resources (and moral obligations) regarding salvation when the Baptist appeared from the wilderness? What was the ostensibly revolutionary teaching of Jesus all about?"
The essence of the institutional manifestation of Jesus' teaching--the "Church" described as variously and conveniently as is the "gospel"--is as a custodian of the covenant that Jesus describes as "new." Unfortunately (if one is looking for a rationale for an earthly institution), Jesus does not hew to a conception of time that is either linear or consistent. Abraham lives always; Elijah arrives always and departs always; Abiathar lives in the person of his father; a Jew who owns being a descendant of a people who killed the prophets is a prophet-killer himself.
"New," as a term applied to the covenant, is as if to describe a covenant that is always new, and that never appeared but from the first--the pouring out of Jesus' blood being one with his suffering for the Creation of a world that, being not God, is ever an evanescence of virtue suspended over an abyss of damnation. And, of course, Jesus suffers for this damnation as surely as he suffers the pain of all of his creation. This is a conception of "good news" that--held by mere mortals--must surely fall short, but at least it does not embrace limitations held as matters of misdirected faith.
It is important to note that the Last Supper and the sacrifice of Jesus' body and blood is not described by him as separate from a larger scope of time. When Jesus tells the crowds that they must eat of his flesh, his is confronting them with the conceptuality then and there--he is not announcing some prayer meeting or convocation in which he will fulfill some promise to make the teaching henceforth applicable (to say nothing of comprehensible.) When Jesus breaks the bread and passes the cup at the Last supper, his somber pronouncement that each of the elements "is" a manifestation of the covenant has great literary resonance--and it also does not include the conventionally expected (and ecclesiastically supplied) presumption that the giving of flesh and surrendering of blood is to happen on the paving stones and on the Cross. Jesus' sacrifice for Creation is represented by him as occurring in time, and is actualized out of time.
For the purposes of our understanding here, it must be held, not that the term "gospel" is stretched out of shape by the preachers, but rather that the very application of the idea of the gospel is inherent in the breadth of the Creation to which it ministers. This is an idea--the idea of human confrontation with the realities of existence as being of one cloth with the idea of the gospel--that I must attend to soon (along with my promised presentation of the remaining many "gospels of John.") That gospels can be both momentary and timeless ought to be one of the foundation-stones of our understanding.
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