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  One of the most penetrating texts concerning this struggle is Psalm 73, which we may regard as in some sense the intellectual backdrop of our parable. There we see the figure of the rich glutton before our very eyes and we hear the complaint of the praying Psalmist--Lazarus: "For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs; their bodies are sound and sleek. They are not in trouble as other men are; they are not stricken like other men. Therefore pride is their necklace.... Their eyes swell out with fatness.... They set their mouths against the heavens.... Therefore the people turn and praise them; and find no fault in them. And they say, 'How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?'" (Ps 73:3-11).

  The suffering just man who sees all this is in danger of doubting his faith. Does God really not see? Does he not hear? Does he not care about men's fate? "All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken, and chastened every morning. My heart was embittered" (Ps 73:13ff.). The turning point comes when the suffering just man in the Sanctuary looks toward God and, as he does so, his perspective becomes broader. Now he sees that the seeming cleverness of the successful cynics is stupidity when viewed against the light. To be wise in that way is to be "stupid and ignorant...like a beast" (Ps 73:22). They remain within the perspective of animals and have lost the human perspective that transcends the material realm--toward God and toward eternal life.

  We may be reminded here of another Psalm in which a persecuted man says at the end: "May their belly be filled with good things; may their children have more than enough.... As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding thy form" (Ps 77:14f.). Two sorts of satisfaction are contrasted here: being satiated with material goods, and satisfaction with beholding "thy form"--the heart becoming sated by the encounter with infinite love. The words "when I awake" are at the deepest level a reference to the awakening into new and eternal life, but they also speak of a deeper "awakening" here in this world: Man wakes up to the truth in a way that gives him a new satisfaction here and now.

  It is of this awakening in prayer that Psalm 73 speaks. For now the psalmist sees that the happiness of the cynics that he had envied so much is only "like a dream that fades when one awakes, on awaking one forgets their phantoms" (Ps 73:20). And now he recognizes real happiness: "Nevertheless I am continually with thee; thou dost hold my right hand.... Whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides thee.... But for me it is good to be near God" (Ps 73:23, 25, 28). This is not an encouragement to place our hope in the afterlife, but rather an awakening to the true stature of man's being--which does, of course, include the call to eternal life.

  This has been only an apparent digression from our parable. In reality, the Lord is using this story in order to initiate us into the very process of "awakening" that is reflected in the Psalms. This has nothing to do with a cheap condemnation of riches and of the rich begotten of envy. In the Psalms that we have briefly considered all envy is left behind. The psalmist has come to see just how foolish it is to envy this sort of wealth because he has recognized what is truly good. After Jesus' Crucifixion two wealthy men make their appearance, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who had discovered the Lord and were in the process of "awakening." The Lord wants to lead us from foolish cleverness toward true wisdom; he wants to teach us to discern the real good. And so we have good grounds, even though it is not there in the text, to say that, from the perspective of the Psalms, the rich glutton was already an empty-hearted man in this world, and that his carousing was only an attempt to smother this interior emptiness of his. The next life only brings to light the truth already present in this life. Of course, this parable, by awakening us, at the same time summons us to the love and responsibility that we owe now to our poor brothers and sisters--both on the large scale of world society and on the small scale of our everyday life.

  In the description of the next life that now follows in the parable, Jesus uses ideas that were current in the Judaism of his time. Hence we must not force our interpretation of this part of the text. Jesus adopts existing images, without formally incorporating them into his teaching about the next life. Nevertheless, he does unequivocally affirm the substance of the images. In this sense, it is important to note that Jesus invokes here the idea of the intermediate state between death and the resurrection, which by then had become part of the universal patrimony of Jewish faith. The rich man is in Hades, conceived here as a temporary place, and not in "Gehenna" (hell), which is the name of the final state (Jeremias, p. 185). Jesus says nothing about a "resurrection in death" here. But as we saw earlier, this is not the principal message that the Lord wants to convey in this parable. Rather, as Jeremias has convincingly shown, the main point--which comes in the second part of the parable--is the rich man's request for a sign.

  The rich man, looking up to Abraham from Hades, says what so many people, both then and now, say or would like to say to God: "If you really want us to believe in you and organize our lives in accord with the revealed word of the Bible, you'll have to make yourself clearer. Send us someone from the next world who can tell us that it is really so." The demand for signs, the demand for more evidence of Revelation, is an issue that runs through the entire Gospel. Abraham's answer--like Jesus' answer to his contemporaries' demand for signs in other contexts--is clear: If people do not believe the word of Scripture, then they will not believe someone coming from the next world either. The highest truths cannot be forced into the type of empirical evidence that only applies to material reality.

  Abraham cannot send Lazarus to the rich man's father's house. But at this point something strikes us. We are reminded of the resurrection of Lazarus of Bethany, recounted to us in John's Gospel. What happens there? The Evangelist tells us, "Many of the Jews...believed in him" (Jn 11:45). They go to the Pharisees and report on what has happened, whereupon the Sanhedrin gathers to take counsel. They see the affair in a political light: If this leads to a popular movement, it might force the Romans to intervene, leading to a dangerous situation. So they decide to kill Jesus. The miracle leads not to faith, but to hardening of hearts (Jn 11:45-53).

  But our thoughts go even further. Do we not recognize in the figure of Lazarus--lying at the rich man's door covered in sores--the mystery of Jesus, who "suffered outside the city walls" (Heb 13:12) and, stretched naked on the Cross, was delivered over to the mockery and contempt of the mob, his body "full of blood and wounds"? "But I am a worm, and no man; scorned by men, and despised by the people" (Ps 22:7).

  He, the true Lazarus, has risen from the dead--and he has come to tell us so. If we see in the story of Lazarus Jesus' answer to his generation's demand for a sign, we find ourselves in harmony with the principal answer that Jesus gave to that demand. In Matthew, it reads thus: "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the Prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Mt 12:39f.). In Luke we read: "This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the men of Nineveh, so will the Son of man be to this generation" (Lk 11:29f.).

  We do not need to analyze here the differences between these two versions. One thing is clear: God's sign for men is the Son of Man; it is Jesus himself. And at the deepest level, he is this sign in his Paschal Mystery, in the mystery of his death and Resurrection. He himself is "the sign of Jonah." He, crucified and risen, is the true Lazarus. The parable is inviting us to believe and follow him, God's great sign. But it is more than a parable. It speaks of reality, of the most decisive reality in all history.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Principal Images of John's Gospel

  INTRODUCTION: THE JOHANNINE QUESTION

  Thus far
, in our attempt to listen to Jesus and thereby to get to know him, we have limited ourselves for the most part to the witness of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), while only occasionally glancing at John. It is therefore time to turn our attention to the image of Jesus presented by the Fourth Evangelist, an image that in many respects seems quite different from that of the other Gospels.

  Listening to the Synoptics, we have realized that the mystery of Jesus' oneness with the Father is ever present and determines everything, even though it remains hidden beneath his humanity. On one hand, it was perceived by his sharp-eyed opponents. On the other hand, the disciples, who experienced Jesus at prayer and were privileged to know him intimately from the inside, were beginning--step by step, at key moments with great immediacy, and despite all their misunderstandings--to recognize this absolutely new reality. In John, Jesus' divinity appears unveiled. His disputes with the Jewish Temple authorities, taken together, could be said to anticipate his trial before the Sanhedrin, which John, unlike the Synoptics, does not mention specifically.

  John's Gospel is different: Instead of parables, we hear extended discourses built around images, and the main theater of Jesus' activity shifts from Galilee to Jerusalem. These differences caused modern critical scholarship to deny the historicity of the text--with the exception of the Passion narrative and a few details--and to regard it as a later theological reconstruction. It was said to express a highly developed Christology, but not to constitute a reliable source for knowledge of the historical Jesus. The radically late datings of John's Gospel to which this view gave rise have had to be abandoned because papyri from Egypt dating back to the beginning of the second century have been discovered; this made it clear that the Gospel must have been written in the first century, if only during the closing years. Denial of the Gospel's historical character, however, continued unabated.

  Interpretation of John's Gospel in the second half of the twentieth century was largely shaped by Rudolf Bultmann's commentary on John, the first edition of which appeared in 1941. Bultmann is convinced that the main influences on the Gospel of John are to be sought not in the Old Testament and the Judaism of the time, but in Gnosticism. This sentence typifies Bultmann's approach: "That is not to say that the idea of the incarnation of the redeemer has in some way penetrated Gnosticism from Christianity; it is itself originally Gnostic, and was taken over at a very early stage by Christianity, and made fruitful for Christology" (The Gospel of John, p. 26). Here is another in the same vein: "Gnosticism is the only possible source of the idea of absolute Logos" (RGG, 3rd ed., III, p. 846).

  The reader asks: How does Bultmann know that? Bultmann's answer is breathtaking: "Even if the reconstruction of this kind of thinking has to be carried out in the main from sources which are later than John, nevertheless its greater age remains firmly established" (The Gospel of John, p. 27). On this decisive point Bultmann is wrong. In his inaugural lecture as professor at Tubingen, published in expanded form as The Son of God in 1975 (English translation 1976), Martin Hengel characterized "the hypothetical Gnostic myth of the sending of the Son of God into the world" as a "pseudo-scientific development of a myth." He then went on to remark: "In reality there is no Gnostic redeemer myth in the sources which can be demonstrated chronologically to be pre-Christian" (p. 33). "Gnosticism itself is first visible as a spiritual movement at the end of the first century A.D. at the earliest, and only develops fully in the second century" (p. 34).

  Johannine scholarship in the generation after Bultmann took a radically different direction; the results have been thoroughly explored and discussed in Martin Hengel's book The Johannine Question (1989). If we look back from the vantage point of current scholarship to Bultmann's interpretation of John, we see how little protection the highly scientific approach can offer against fundamental mistakes. But what does today's scholarship tell us?

  It has definitively confirmed and elaborated something that even Bultmann basically already knew: The Fourth Gospel rests on extraordinarily precise knowledge of times and places, and so can only have been produced by someone who had an excellent firsthand knowledge of Palestine at the time of Jesus. A further point that has become clear is that the Gospel thinks and argues entirely in terms of the Old Testament--of the Torah (Rudolf Pesch)--and that its whole way of arguing is deeply rooted in the Judaism of Jesus' time. The language of the Gospel, which Bultmann regarded as "Gnostic," actually bears unmistakable signs of the book's intimate association with this milieu. "The work was written in simple unliterary koine Greek, steeped in the language of Jewish piety. This Greek was also spoken by the upper classes in Jerusalem...[where] Scripture was read in Hebrew and Greek, and prayer and discussion went on in both languages" (Hengel, The Johannine Question, p. 113).

  Hengel also points out that "in Herodian times a special Hellenized Jewish upper class with its own culture developed in Jerusalem" (ibid., p. 114) and he accordingly locates the origin of the Gospel in the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem (ibid., pp. 124-35). We can perhaps regard a brief reference in John 18:15f as corroboration for this thesis. There it is recounted that after his arrest Jesus is brought to the high priests for interrogation and that in the meantime Simon Peter and "another disciple" follow Jesus in order to find out what is going to happen next. Regarding this "other disciple," it is then said that "as this disciple was known to the high priest, he entered the court of the high priest along with Jesus." His connections with the household of the high priest were such that he was able to secure Peter's entry, thereby engineering the situation that led to Peter's denial. The circle of the disciples, then, extended as far as the high-priestly aristocracy, in whose language the Gospel is largely written.

  This brings, us, however, to two decisive questions that are ultimately at stake in the "Johannine" question: Who is the author of this Gospel? How reliable is it historically? Let us try to approach the first question. The Gospel itself makes a clear statement about it in the context of the Passion story. It is reported that one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a lance "and at once there came out blood and water" (Jn 19:34). These weighty words immediately follow: "He who saw it has borne witness--his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth--that you also may believe" (Jn 19:35). The Gospel traces its origins to an eyewitness, and it is clear that this eyewitness is none other than the disciple who, as we have just been told, was standing under the Cross and was the disciple whom Jesus loved (cf. Jn 19:26). This disciple is once again named as the author of the Gospel in John 21:24. In addition, we meet this figure in John 13:23, 20:2-10, and 21:7 and probably in Jn 1:35, 40 and 18:15-16 as well.

  These statements concerning the external origin of the Gospel take on a deeper dimension in the story of the washing of the feet, which points to its inward source. Here it is said that this disciple reclined at Jesus' side during the meal and that, when he asked who the betrayer was, he "leaned back on Jesus' breast" (Jn 13:25). These words are intended to parallel the end of the prologue of John's Gospel, where it is said apropos of Jesus: "No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father's heart, who has made him known" (Jn 1:18). Just as Jesus, the Son, knows about the mystery of the Father from resting in his heart, so too the Evangelist has gained his intimate knowledge from his inward repose in Jesus' heart.

  But who is this disciple? The Gospel never directly identifies him by name. In connection with the calling of Peter, as well as of other disciples, it points toward John, the son of Zebedee, but it never explicitly identifies the two figures. The intention is evidently to leave the matter shrouded in mystery. The Book of Revelation does, admittedly, specify John as its author (cf. Rev 1:1, 4), but despite the close connection between this book and the Gospel and Letters of John, it remains an open question whether the author is one and the same person.

  The Lutheran exegete Ulrich Wilckens, in his extensive Theologie des Neuen Testaments, has recently presented new arguments for the thesis that the "beloved d
isciple" should be thought of not as a historical figure, but as a symbol for a basic structure of the faith: "Scriptura sola is impossible without the 'living voice' of the Gospel and that is impossible without the personal witness of a Christian in the function and authority of the 'beloved disciple,' in whom office and spirit unite and support each other" (Theologie, I, 4, p. 158). However correct this may be as a structural claim, it remains insufficient. If the favorite disciple in the Gospel expressly assumes the function of a witness to the truth of the events he recounts, he is presenting himself as a living person. He intends to vouch for historical events as a witness and he thus claims for himself the status of a historical figure. Otherwise the statements we have examined, which are decisive for the intention and the quality of the entire Gospel, would be emptied of meaning.

  Since the time of Irenaeus of Lyon (d. ca. 202), Church tradition has unanimously regarded John, the son of Zebedee, as the beloved disciple and the author of the Gospel. This fits with the identification markers provided by the Gospel, which in any case point toward the hand of an Apostle and companion of Jesus from the time of the Baptism in the Jordan to the Last Supper, Cross, and Resurrection.

  In modern times, it is true, increasingly strong doubts have been voiced concerning this identification. Can the fisherman from the Lake of Genesareth have written this sublime Gospel full of visions that peer into the deepest depths of God's mystery? Can he, the Galilean fisherman, have been as closely connected with the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem, its language, and its mentality as the Evangelist evidently is? Can he have been related to the family of the high priest, as the text hints (cf. Jn 18:15)?