Scholars
often refer to The Gospel of John as the most theological gospel. It is
full of high theology, big concepts and big ideas about Jesus. In John,
Jesus gets wordy. He uses no parables and lots of philosophy. You can
see this from the beginning of John’s Gospel. The Word and God are said
to be the same. But you can certainly see high theology here also, in
Jesus’s conversation with Jewish authorities. John groups the Jews
simplistically and refers to them unsympathetically and sometimes
unkindly. John’s Jews just don’t get it. They don’t understand who Jesus
is, neither his importance for their local community nor his importance
for the wider, ongoing drama of human history.
John uses phrases, concepts and terms from familiar Jewish scripture to articulate Jesus’s emerging self-understanding. The conflict
depicted here between Jesus and “the Jews” hinges on the relationship
between Jesus and God alleged by Jesus. The Jews think Jesus is crazy
and suggest he is possessed by demons. They refuse to identify a
specific human being with the God of their prophetic tradition.
Admittedly, it is a hard sell. Jesus is a young man, indeed, he never
lives to old age, so it seems impossible for him to be personally
familiar with, for example, Abraham. God is perfect, eternal, and
unchanging; humans, no matter how kind or good or special, are none of
these things.
It
will take hundreds of years of careful theological reflection before
Christians come to understand Jesus as a hypostatic union, as a single
person with two natures. Today, technical formulations like this one and
others can get in the way of understanding for ourselves, disabling
rather than enabling insight by making us feel like the biggest
questions have already been definitively addressed by earlier
generations. In John, Jesus has come to know himself and his mission. We
see Jesus insist on the point, invoking Exodus’s divine name I am.
John’s Jews are offended to the point of violence. Jesus flees their
temple.
Departing
from conventional practice is risky business. Those who challenge
conventional understanding are often met with resistance. Nevertheless,
confronting religious authorities of his own day, Jesus makes God known.
Clayton Shoppa, PhD
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
No comments:
Post a Comment