Jesus of Nazareth Read online

  The threat and promise that the vineyard will be handed over to other servants is followed, though, by a promise of a much more fundamental nature. The Lord cites Psalm 118:22f: "The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." The death of the son is not the last word. He is killed, but he does not remain in death, he does not remain "rejected." He becomes a new beginning. Jesus gives his audience to understand that he himself will be the Son who is killed; he foretells his Cross and Resurrection and prophesies that upon him, when he has been killed and has risen, God will erect a new building, a new Temple in the world.

  The image of the vine is abandoned and replaced by the image of God's living building. The Cross is not an end, but a new beginning. The song of the vineyard does not end with the killing of the son. It opens the prospect that God will do something new. The affinity with John 2, which speaks of the destruction of the Temple and its reconstruction, is impossible to overlook. God does not fail; we may be unfaithful, but he is always faithful (cf. 2 Tim 2:13). He finds new and greater ways for his love. The indirect Christology of the early parables is transcended here into a fully open Christological statement.

  The parable of the vine in Jesus' Farewell Discourses continues the whole history of biblical thought and language on the subject of the vine and discloses its ultimate depth. "I am the true vine," the Lord says (Jn 15:1). The word true is the first important thing to notice about this saying. Barrett makes the excellent observation that "fragments of meaning, obscurely hinted at by other vines, are gathered up and made explicit by him. He is the true vine" (Gospel, p. 473). But the really important thing about this saying is the opening: "I am." The Son identifies himself with the vine; he himself has become the vine. He has let himself be planted in the earth. He has entered into the vine: The mystery of the Incarnation, which John spoke of in the prologue to his Gospel, is taken up again here in a surprising new way. The vine is no longer merely a creature that God looks upon with love, but that he can still uproot and reject. In the Son, he himself has become the vine; he has forever identified himself, his very being, with the vine.

  This vine can never again be uprooted or handed over to be plundered. It belongs once and for all to God; through the Son God himself lives in it. The promise has become irrevocable, the unity indestructible. God has taken this great new step within history, and this constitutes the deepest content of the parable. Incarnation, death, and Resurrection come to be seen in their full breadth: "For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you...was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him" (2 Cor 1:19f.), as Saint Paul puts it.

  The idea that through Christ the vine has become the Son himself is a new one, and yet the ground for it has been prepared in biblical tradition. Psalm 80:18 closely associates the "Son of Man" with the vine. Conversely: Although the Son has now himself become the vine, this is precisely his method for remaining one with his own, with all the scattered children of God whom he has come to gather (cf. Jn 11:52). The vine is a Christological title that as such embodies a whole ecclesiology. The vine signifies Jesus' inseparable oneness with his own, who through him and with him are all "vine," and whose calling is to "remain" in the vine. John does not make use of the Pauline image of the "Body of Christ." But the parable of the vine expresses substantially the same idea: the fact that Jesus is inseparable from his own, and that they are one with him and in him. In this sense, the discourse about the vine indicates the irrevocability of the gift God has given, never to take it back again. In becoming incarnate, God has bound himself. At the same time, though, the discourse speaks of the demands that this gift places upon us in ever new ways.

  The vine, we said, can no longer be uprooted or handed over to be plundered. It does, however, constantly need purification. Purification, fruit, remaining, commandment, love, unity--these are the key words for this drama of being in and with the Son in the vine that the Lord's words place before our soul. Purification--the Church and the individual need constant purification. Processes of purification, which are as necessary as they are painful, run through the whole of history, the whole life of those who have dedicated themselves to Christ. The mystery of death and resurrection is ever present in these purifications. When man and his institutions climb too high, they need to be cut back; what has become too big must be brought back to the simplicity and poverty of the Lord himself. It is only by undergoing such processes of dying away that fruitfulness endures and renews itself.

  The goal of purification is fruit, the Lord tells us. What sort of fruit is it that he expects? Let us begin by looking at the fruit that he himself has borne by dying and rising. Isaiah and the whole prophetic tradition spoke of how God expected grapes, and thus choice wine, from his vine. This was an image of the righteousness, the rectitude that consists in living within the Word and will of God. The same tradition says that what God finds instead are useless, small, sour grapes that he can only throw away. This was an image of life lived away from God's righteousness amid injustice, corruption, and violence. The vine is meant to bear choice grapes that through the process of picking, pressing, and fermentation will produce excellent wine.

  Let us recall that the parable of the vine occurs in the context of Jesus' Last Supper. After the multiplication of the loaves he had spoken of the true bread from heaven that he would give, and thus he left us with a profound interpretation of the eucharistic bread that was to come. It is hard to believe that in his discourse on the vine he is not tacitly alluding to the new wine that had already been prefigured at Cana and which he now gives to us--the wine that would flow from his Passion, from his "love to the end" (Jn 13:1). In this sense, the parable of the vine has a thoroughly eucharistic background. It refers to the fruit that Jesus brings forth: his love, which pours itself out for us on the Cross and which is the choice new wine destined for God's marriage feast with man. Thus we come to understand the full depth and grandeur of the Eucharist, even though it is not explicitly mentioned here. The Eucharist points us toward the fruit that we, as branches of the vine, can and must bear with Christ and by virtue of Christ. The fruit the Lord expects of us is love--a love that accepts with him the mystery of the Cross, and becomes a participation in his self-giving--and hence the true justice that prepares the world for the Kingdom of God.

  Purification and fruit belong together; only by undergoing God's purifications can we bear the fruit that flows into the eucharistic mystery and so leads to the marriage feast that is the goal toward which God directs history. Fruit and love belong together: The true fruit is the love that has passed through the Cross, through God's purifications. "Remaining" is an essential part of all this. In verses 1-10 the word remain (in Greek menein) occurs ten times. What the Church Fathers call perseverantia--patient steadfastness in communion with the Lord amid all the vicissitudes of life--is placed center stage here. Initial enthusiasm is easy. Afterward, though, it is time to stand firm, even along the monotonous desert paths that we are called upon to traverse in this life--with the patience it takes to tread evenly, a patience in which the romanticism of the initial awakening subsides, so that only the deep, pure Yes of faith remains. This is the way to produce good wine. After the brilliant illuminations of the initial moment of his conversion, Augustine had a profound experience of this toilsome patience, and that is how he learned to love the Lord and to rejoice deeply at having found him.

  If the fruit we are to bear is love, its prerequisite is this "remaining," which is profoundly connected with the kind of faith that holds on to the Lord and does not let go. Verse 7 speaks of prayer as an essential element of this remaining: Those who pray are promised that they will surely be heard. Of course, to pray in the name of Jesus is not to make an ordinary petition, but to ask for the essential gift that Jesus characterizes as "joy" in the Farewell Discourses, while Luke calls it the Holy Spirit (cf. Lk 11:13)--the two being ultimately the same. Jesus' words about remaining in his love already po
int ahead to the last verse of his high-priestly prayer (cf. Jn 17:26) and thus connect the vine discourse with the great theme of unity, for which the Lord prays to the Father at the Last Supper.

  Bread

  We have already dealt extensively with the bread motif in connection with Jesus' temptations. We have seen that the temptation to turn the desert rocks into bread raises the whole question of the Messiah's mission, and that through the devil's distortion of this mission Jesus' positive answer can already be glimpsed; this answer then becomes explicit once and for all in the gift of his body as bread for the life of the world on the eve of his Passion. We have also encountered the bread motif in our exposition of the fourth petition of the Our Father, where we tried to survey the different dimensions of this petition, and thus to explore the full range of the bread theme. At the end of Jesus' activity in Galilee, he performs the multiplication of the loaves; on one hand, it is an unmistakable sign of Jesus' messianic mission, while on the other, it is also the crossroads of his public ministry, which from this point leads clearly to the Cross. All three Synoptic Gospels tell of a miraculous feeding of five thousand men (cf. Mt 14:13-21; Mk 6:32-44; Lk 9:10b-17); Matthew and Mark tell of an additional feeding of four thousand (cf. Mt 15:32-38; Mk 8:1-9).

  The two stories have a rich theological content that we cannot enter into here. I will restrict myself to John's story of the multiplication of the loaves (cf. Jn 6:1-15), not in order to study it in depth, but rather to focus upon the interpretation that Jesus gives of this event in his great bread of life discourse the following day in the synagogue on the other side of the lake. One more qualification is in order: We cannot consider the details of this discourse, which the exegetes have discussed at length and analyzed thoroughly. I would merely like to draw out its principal message and, above all, to situate it in the context of the whole tradition to which it belongs and in terms of which it has to be understood.

  The fundamental context in which the entire chapter belongs is centered upon the contrast between Moses and Jesus. Jesus is the definitive, greater Moses--the "prophet" whom Moses foretold in his discourse at the border of the Holy Land and concerning whom God said, "I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him" (Deut 18:18). It is no accident, then, that the following statement occurs between the multiplication of the loaves and the attempt to make Jesus king: "This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!" (Jn 6:14). In a very similar vein, after the saying about the water of life on the Feast of Tabernacles, the people say: "This is really the prophet" (Jn 7:40). The Mosaic background provides the context for the claim that Jesus makes. Moses struck the rock in the desert and out flowed water; Jesus promises the water of life, as we have seen. The great gift, though, which stood out in the people's memory, was the manna. Moses gave bread from heaven; God himself fed the wandering people of Israel with heavenly bread. For a people who often went hungry and struggled to earn their daily bread, this was the promise of promises, which somehow said everything there was to say: relief of every want--a gift that satisfied hunger for all and forever.

  Before we take up this idea, which is the key to understanding chapter 6 of John's Gospel, we must first complete the picture of Moses, because this is the only way to focus upon John's picture of Jesus. The central point from which we started in this book, and to which we keep returning, is that Moses spoke face-to-face with God, "as a man speaks to his friend" (Ex 33:11; cf. Deut 34:10). It was only because he spoke with God himself that Moses could bring God's word to men. But, although this immediate relationship with God is the heart and inner foundation of Moses' mission, a shadow lies over it. For when Moses says, "I pray thee, show me thy glory," at the very moment when the text affirms that he is God's friend who has direct access to him, he receives this answer: "While my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen" (Ex 33:18, 22f.). Even Moses sees only God's back--his face "shall not be seen." The limits to which even Moses is subject now become clear.

  The saying at the end of the prologue is the decisive key to the image of Jesus in John's Gospel: "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). Only the one who is God sees God--Jesus. He truly speaks from his vision of the Father, from unceasing dialogue with the Father, a dialogue that is his life. If Moses only showed us, and could only show us, God's back, Jesus, by contrast, is the Word that comes from God, from a living vision of him, from unity with him. Connected with this are two further gifts to Moses that attain their final form in Christ. First, God communicated his name to Moses, thereby making possible a relationship between himself and human beings; by handing on the name revealed to him, Moses acts as mediator of a real relationship between men and the living God. We have already reflected on this point in our consideration of the first petition of the Our Father. Now, in his high-priestly prayer Jesus stresses that he has revealed God's name, that he has brought to completion this aspect too of the work begun by Moses. When we consider the high-priestly prayer, we will have to investigate this claim more closely: In what sense has Jesus gone beyond Moses in revealing God's "name"?

  The other gift to Moses--which is closely connected with the vision of God and the communication of his name, as well as with the manna--is the gift that gives Israel its identity as God's people in the first place: the Torah, the word of God that points out the way and leads to life. Israel realized with increasing clarity that this was Moses' fundamental and enduring gift, that what really set Israel apart was this knowledge of God's will and so of the right path of life. The great Psalm 119 is a single outburst of joy and gratitude for this gift. A one-sided view of the Law, arising from a one-sided interpretation of Pauline theology, prevents us from seeing this joy of Israel: the joy of knowing God's will, and so of being privileged to live in accordance with God's will.

  This observation brings us back to the bread of life discourse, surprising as that may seem. For as Jewish thought developed inwardly, it became increasingly plain that the real bread from heaven that fed and feeds Israel is precisely the Law--the word of God. The Wisdom Literature presents the wisdom that is substantially accessible and present in the Law as "bread" (Prov 9:5); the rabbinic literature went on to develop this idea further (Barrett, Gospel, p. 290). This is the perspective from which we need to understand Jesus' dispute with the Jews assembled in the synagogue at Capernaum. Jesus begins by pointing out that they have failed to understand the multiplication of the loaves as a "sign," which is its true meaning. Rather, what interested them was eating and having their fill (cf. Jn 6:26). They have been looking at salvation in purely material terms, as a matter of universal well-being, and they have therefore reduced man, leaving God out altogether. But if they see the manna only as a means of satisfying their hunger, they need to realize that even the manna was not heavenly bread, but only earthly bread. Even though it came from "heaven," it was earthly food--or rather a food substitute that would necessarily cease when Israel emerged from the desert back into inhabited country.

  But man hungers for more. He needs more. The gift that feeds man as man must be greater, must be on a wholly different level. Is the Torah this other food? It is in some sense true that in and through the Torah, man can make God's will his food (cf. Jn 4:34). So the Torah is "bread" from God, then. And yet it shows us only God's back, so to speak. It is a "shadow." "For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world" (Jn 6:33). As the audience still does not understand, Jesus repeats himself even more unambiguously: "I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst" (Jn 6:35).

  The Law has become a person. When we encounter Jesus, we feed on the living God himself, so to speak; we truly eat "bread from heaven." By the same token, Jesus has already made it clear
that the only work God demands is the work of believing in him. Jesus' audience had asked him: "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?" (Jn 6:28). The text uses here the Greek word ergazesthai, which means "to perform a work" (Barrett, Gospel, p. 287). Jesus' listeners are ready to work, to do something, to perform "works," in order to receive this bread. But it cannot be "earned" by human work, by one's own achievement. It can only come to us as a gift from God, as God's work. The whole of Pauline theology is present in this dialogue. The highest things, the things that really matter, we cannot achieve on our own; we have to accept them as gifts and enter into the dynamic of the gift, so to speak. This happens in the context of faith in Jesus, who is dialogue--a living relationship with the Father--and who wants to become Word and love in us as well.

  But the question as to how we can "feed" on God, live on God, in such a way that he himself becomes our bread--this question is not yet fully answered by what has just been said. God becomes "bread" for us first of all in the Incarnation of the Logos: The Word takes on flesh. The Logos becomes one of us and so comes down to our level, comes into the sphere of what is accessible to us. Yet a further step is still needed beyond even the Incarnation of the Word. Jesus names this step in the concluding words of his discourse: His flesh is life "for" the world (Jn 6:51). Beyond the act of the Incarnation, this points to its intrinsic goal and ultimate realization: Jesus' act of giving himself up to death and the mystery of the Cross.