In the Beginning Was the Word

THE EXPERIENCE is a familiar one. A small, struggling community of believers searching for truth and justice finds the Spirit present in its midst. They are set aflame with the joy and peace of deep insight into God's call for them and for the church as a whole. They rush to their sisters and brothers in the larger church, offering the gift of their new revelation. But instead of open acceptance, they hit the brick wall of institutional rejection. Rather than being embraced, they are ignored.

If they insist on their version of truth, the reaction stiffens into anger, hatred, persecution. Eventually, they must decide: Do we in turn reject the institutional church in favor of our own Spirit-filled vision of justice and peace? Or do we continue to witness to the religious powers, no matter what the price?

THIS SCENARIO, familiar to modern-day Christians who often find the institutional church hard-hearted to Jesus' message of nonviolence and love, describes the situation of that ancient community of Christians who grounded themselves in the story of Jesus known to us as the gospel of John.

Frequently, "spiritualized" interpretations of the fourth gospel ignore the social crucible of love and hostility in which the text was formed. A reading of the text sensitive to political and social reality reveals a Johannine community in a life-or-death struggle with "the powers" over a Jesus who loved the world enough to die for it and to send his disciples out on a mission like his own.

The fourth gospel arose a generation after the most shocking and disorienting event for Israel in 600 years: the utter destruction of the Jerusalem temple—the house of Yahweh—by the Romans in the year 70 C.E. Judaism emerged as a religion of the book, although the mythic power of the temple survived—as it does to this day in the shrine of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the last remaining segment of the symbolic center of the world for Jews.

The "new" Judaism of post-70 evolved into a religion of synagogue and Torah, with Pharisaic rabbis as primary interpreters. The royal priesthood and Sadducean elite were destroyed, their power largely absorbed by the Pharisees. In the absence of the manifest power of the physical temple, this new Judaism relied for sustenance upon a revitalized commitment to the Torah, translated in the gospel into the Greek nomos, "law," the other place where God might be found.

The Johannine community found itself in terrible tension with this new Jewish establishment. The gospel refers to this establishment group with the Greek term Ioudaoi, best translated as "Judeans." The issue was not with "Jews," but with those identified with the political, economic, and religious system of Jerusalem, located in the southern province of Judea.

The more the Johannine community proclaimed Jesus to the Judeans as a true "son of God"—a title that might be applied to any faithful Israelite (for example, in Wisdom 5:5)—the more they were vilified as heretics and traitors. The louder they proclaimed the power of God's Spirit as true authority, the more they were hated by those whose loyalty remained affixed to the Torah. They were forced to see, as were other fledgling Christian communities, that commitment to Jesus meant a complete break from the Judean system, and yet that commitment continued to require "witness" to the very authorities who had rejected and killed Jesus 60 years before.

At the same time, the Johannine Christians were faced with other Christian communities who seemed to them to be in great danger of reproducing in the name of Jesus the very system of hierarchy and institutional rigidity that Jesus had railed against. Peter, the rock upon whom Matthew's gospel built its church, had become a "universal" symbol within the church of apostolic, hierarchical authority.

For the Johannine group, this creeping authoritarianism threatened to betray Jesus' vision of egalitarian community based on the presence of the Paraclete. Did faithfulness to the Johannine version of Jesus' message require a break from other Christian communities as it did from synagogue, or could the apostolic churches learn to hear what the synagogue Jews could not?

This familiar struggle between the power of institution-based religious tradition and authority on the one hand, and fresh, community-based insights into God's call on the other was the battleground in which the fourth gospel became and remains a nonviolent weapon of the Spirit.

Fidelity to God
Central to commitment to the Johannine community was a willingness to witness publicly before the religious powers, even if it meant ostracism, rejection, or death. The community developed a set of three "boundary rituals" out of a mixture of common Christian tradition and its own stories about Jesus. The episodes that proclaim the importance of these rituals stand as "gates" within the gospel: the dialogue with Nicodemus in chapter 3 about being born of water and spirit, the discussion in chapter 6 about "munching" Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood, and the encounter with the disciples in chapter 13 about washing one another's feet to share in Jesus' heritage.

Willingness to undergo these three publicly known rituals led one into complete membership in the Johannine community, and committed a person to following that community's understanding of Jesus' supreme command: to love one another so completely as to be willing to lay down one's life for one's friends (John 15:12-14). This supreme test of love, given by example through Jesus' own road to the cross and to his "Father," is the climax of the gospel and the ultimate challenge it offers to institutional religion, whether Jewish, Christian, or otherwise.

From the first verse, the fourth gospel claims not the authority of mere apostolic succession, but that of the abiding presence of a Jesus who speaks God's Word. En arche en ho logos. "In the beginning was the Word."

This logos is no Greek abstraction, but the light of God offered to human beings, which is not overpowered by the darkness in which death and evil thrive. The logos issues a challenge to all that has been established in the name of God. The test is not obedience to the law, but fidelity to the "grace and truth" that come through Jesus Christ (1:17), the logos enfleshed as a human being (1:14).

"Grace and truth" translates the Greek substitution for the Hebrew phrase, hesed v'emet—the covenant love and fidelity that lay at the root of the bond between God and creation. The fourth gospel begins with a renewal of the ancient choice: to claim power-over (the way of death/the world "from below") or power-with-and-for (the way of life/heaven/"from above"). This theme echoes through all of Jesus' encounters in the gospel.

AS THE PROLOGUE UNFOLDS, it signals the entrance of the story's first witness: "a person sent forth from God" named John. His commissioner is set in stark contrast with that of his inquisitors: "priests and Levites sent forth from Jerusalem" (1:19). God vs. Jerusalem—a shocking contrast for a Jewish people whose God lived in the Jerusalem temple! In the fourth gospel, though, Jerusalem and more generally Judea are the home of those economically and politically dependent on the law, those who consistently reject Jesus in favor of the power they receive from "the world."

That is, we are not dealing with a religious identity as much as a socioeconomic one. "Judeans" in the gospel are those whose loyalty is to the temple system, in marked contrast with Galileans, who benefit little from the wealth and power concentrated in the south. The Galileans in the text are also Jews, but they are not "Judeans"! John, sent from God (he is never called "the Baptist" in the text), is in contrast with those sent from Jerusalem, from Judea. Readers are immediately challenged to choose sides—with those from God or those from the religious establishment.

The initial inquisition is not unlike FBI agents poking around in Juarez. "Across the Jordan," where John is baptizing, is outside Jerusalem's jurisdiction; it is across the border in a land of apparent safety. And yet, that is where Jesus makes his first appearance in the story, allowing John to fulfill his mission as witness. To the many who thought John was the Messiah, this must have been quite confusing: We've been out here in the desert all this time, and now you're sending us after this one!

John is from God, but his baptizing ministry is not sufficient: Jesus will lead John's former followers (those who take the risk of changing leaders) into direct confrontation with the world. No longer is it enough to live safely in the desert. Jerusalem is wise to the danger; the time has come to confront the "den of thieves" with God's logos.

As the first disciples are called to follow, we might notice a curious omission. Among the new community gathering around Jesus, Simon is named Peter by Jesus but is not called to follow! Simon's eagerness will be tempered by his eventual nighttime firelight trial and betrayal. His following will not begin until after the resurrection, when Jesus, predicting Peter's own martyrdom, calls him to follow (21:18-19).

Throughout the story, Peter is symbolic of the Johannine community's struggle with the emerging apostolic churches, communities based on the privilege of firsthand witness to the to the resurrection rather than on the presence of the Spirit and the living out of the love command. John's community does not break away completely from these churches, but instead calls them (through the character of Peter) to a deeper commitment and witness. If Peter is to be a leader, it will be on the basis of his loving shepherding, not his official authority or apostolic status (21:15-19).

In the gospel of John , most of the characters exhibiting faith and discipleship go unnamed: Jesus' mother, the Samaritan woman at the well, the man born blind, the so-called "beloved disciple." By their anonymity, the story allows them to be open models for the reader, unhinged from particular historical details and limitations. Although there must certainly have been a strong tradition known to the Johannine community of Jesus' mother being named "Mary," her status is raised from that of the wife of Joseph to that of mother of disciples (19:27). In Jesus' first public action she initiates a sequence of events which, though ambiguous and fraught with mystery, announce the dawning of the messianic age (John 2).

The setting is Cana in Galilee, an obscure town far from Jerusalem. The mother's concern is the paucity of wine, which she remarks on simply and declaratively. Jesus' response is strange. Literally he asks her, "What has this to do with you and me, woman? My hour has not yet come." Jesus' hour: The moment of final confrontation, final revelation of God's glory, introduced here amidst a wedding running short of wine.

Alert readers will pay attention as the hours unfold. At the well with the Samaritan woman in John 4, it is the sixth hour, halfway through the 12-hour day. When the royal official's son is healed at the end of chapter 4, it is the seventh hour. Time is passing; night, when no one can work (9:4), is approaching. When Jesus and the disciples reach the tomb of Lazarus, with death and murder in the air (chapter 11), Jesus insists that the 12 hours have not yet expired; there is still work to do. But when the final passover arrives in chapter 13, the narrator tells us that "his hour had come." Jesus' hour is the time of both glory and death, a simultaneous reality invisible to those busy trying to save their lives in "this world." Here in Cana of Galilee, the hour has not come, but Jesus acts anyway, in what the narrator calls "the beginning of his signs."

Signs
"Signs, not "miracles," are the challenge to Jesus' observers, to the "jury" who must judge where Jesus is "from." Signs are ambiguous; they provoke a krisis, a judgment, among their witnesses. Jesus does not trust those who believe because of the signs (2:23-24, 4:48), but performs them in order to challenge the power of the status quo. This first sign is not so much a miracle of water made wine, but of Jewish purification rituals made obsolete by the power of God's presence.

The text tells us (2:6) that the jars to be filled with water revealed as wine were "required by the purification rules of the Judeans." The feast master "did not know what the source" of the wine was: The purification jars had run out of the power to cause celebration! But, the story tells us, the "servants" knew. Already, the lines are drawn between those who are prevented by their status from seeing the "source" of Jesus' power and those whose lowliness makes it easy to see the truth.

From Cana, Jesus proceeds directly to Jerusalem. While the synoptics reserve Jesus' confrontation with the corrupt temple system until the final climactic moment, the fourth gospel presents it in immediate succession to the water-made-wine. The mission is not simply to make up for a particular feast's joylessness, but to go to the root of the problem. John's Jesus is not content with "Band-Aid" solutions—structural change is necessary!

Jesus presents himself to the temple system as a direct threat and is confronted in return by the Judeans with a demand for "a sign" (2:18). Here we experience the first instance of what becomes a basic Johannine teaching device: a statement by Jesus that requires interpretation, either at an "earthly" or "heavenly" level.

Jesus offers as authority for his action the conundrum, "Break down this temple and in three days I will raise it up." The Judeans, fixed as they are on the power of the Jerusalem legal system, take the obvious (but wrong) path: How can Jesus dare to challenge a temple that took 46 years to build? But the narrator gives readers the proper alternative. It is Jesus' own body that is the temple—that is where God lives.

The first section of the gospel concludes with the narrator's observation that many people gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover believed in Jesus because of the signs, but Jesus did not believe in them because he "knew them all." Readers are left to wonder: But isn't the purpose of the signs to provoke belief? If we are not supposed to believe because of the signs, what is the basis for faith? The next section addresses this question, as we see the faith struggle of a Jerusalem official who visits Jesus "at night" contrasted with that of a lowly Samaritan woman.

Wes Howard-Brook was program director of the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center in Seattle when this article appeared.