I finished reading the Gospel of John, all twenty-one chapters.  Unlike the other three gospels this is not a copy and paste, vignettes of Jesus’s sayings and deeds.  This is an esoteric interpretation of Jesus.  He is human, but in a manner that defies the term ordinary.  He has insight, access to the deep structure of the mundane world of cause and effect.  Early on in John’s writing when Jesus is gathering his band of interns, designated disciples, one of them comments that nobody of note has ever come from Jesus’ neighborhood.  Jesus, looks Nathan in the eye and says, “Yeah, I saw you when you were sitting under that fig tree awhile ago.”  The statement is taken as a demonstration of raw prescience.  Nathaniel signs on for the course.  (John 1:45-51)   No further questions asked.

Jesus is presented by the author as the equivalent of a Zen adept.  He knows stuff that others have not thought, and can do what others could never do.  He has the ability to reverse the course of chronic disease.  All of this was a big deal perhaps more than we can imagine. Medicine has removed us from the waking nightmare of being disabled or prematurely killed by disease, or common illness.  To be sound of mind and body in late antiquity was due to extreme good fortune.

A friend who when told that I was attempting to reassess Christmas in terms of a reading of the Gospel of John said, “…and what about the miracles?”  I understood his point.  For us 21st century, post-moderns,– the base line of our self-awareness, our world awareness is whether something actually happened as described to us.  Reality is fundamentally an empirical matter, subject to measurement.  If an event cannot be described in terms of measurement in extended space, and duration of time,–its unlikely to be real.  This being the case for us. “a miracle” is almost ruled out by definition.  We do not expect a miracle, and use the term only as a metaphor.  I am no exception.  What we recognize as cause and effect must be definable by direct or indirect measurement by instruments–that is our assumption or prejudice.

Like my friend, I am quite unable to jump outside of this mindset.  I am inextricably a person of my time.  Jesus in John’s writing performs miracles.  The first such demonstration happened by chance.  Jesus and his band were attending a local wedding when the wine ran low.  To have wine run out at a wedding celebration would hardly be a catastrophe, but certainly an embarrassment.  Upon request of his mother, Jesus orders up some containers filled with water, and transforms all of that into wine, really good quality wine.  WTF you are surely thinking.  Yep, this is certainly an offhand serendipitous exercise of good taste and unaccountable ability.  At least one can interpret the tale in that manner.  Why would you let host and guests run out of libation if you could solve the problem?

Miracles are a big deal in John’s Gospel.  I am reminded that for a very long time the exercise of power in miraculous form was a hallmark of divinity.  The exercise of beneficial power was understood to lend ultimate authenticity to an individual, and to whatever he has to say.  That certainly is the way it worked according to John’s story.  In chapter five Jesus goes to a center for severely disabled individuals (the pool at Bathesda) and encounters a male who has not walked for thirty eight years.  Jesus restores his physical ability to walk and tells him to pickup his bedroll and leave.  There’s the nagging thought, “How could he know how to walk after all that time had passed?’  But never mind, that is overthinking the story.

There are a several such spectacular miraculous demonstrations and the result is that Jesus becomes something of a rock-star in popularity. He is known to be able to reverse incurable illness and to conjure up enough food to feed thousands.

The popularity was a unintended side effect, a distraction from the central point that Jesus took pains to make.  He was offering, promoting, advocating a very different mode of interpersonal relationship.  This different way of engaging others and the world is presented as something that will “just happen” if one desires it, and the source of the transformation is divine.  At least that is how I understand the story of Jesus encounter with Nicodemus in the third chapter.  Jesus is approached by an individual of status and intellectual accomplishment.  Nicodemus is interested in hearing an explanation of this gestalt shift, this new-birth that Jesus is promoting.  I doubt that Jesus explanation was what he wanted to hear.  You can read it.

I’ve gone on and on, longer than is suitable for text on a screen medium.  There are many commentaries on John’s Gospel.  Why write one more?

Does all of this have any “legs” today, in our present circumstances?  After all that has been done with the Jesus-tradition, what we know as Christianity, –can this have any cash value?  Or has religious hyper inflation rendered the matter irrelevant, of no use-value at all to us today?

I will write as I am able about that tomorrow…………………..

---

The Tyger

By William Blake