Christ
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But who are his people? In this history-transcending, cosmic vision, where does historical Israel fit in? Jesus’ hearers call him a Samaritan, challenging his ethnic legitimacy for a reason: He must be a Samaritan, for no true Jew would demonize them as he does; even worse, “Are we not right to say that you are a Samaritan and possessed of a devil?” (8:48). Replying to them, Jesus completes the provocation that, at this point, he has only half-made. He has defined the Devil’s mission as murder and death. He now defines his own:
Truly I tell you,
whoever keeps my word
will never see death.
(8:51)
Rome may win, but what will that matter if death loses? And if Rome is the last thing on his hearers’ angry minds, then he has only succeeded the more. Their anger consolidates his success in establishing life and death—rather than victory or defeat on the battlefield—as the future terms of God’s relationship with them. His outrageous new claim quite effectively obliterates that embarrassing old failure. They are outraged, but by their very outrage they confirm his success in changing the subject:
Now we know that you are possessed. Abraham is dead, and the prophets as well, and yet you say, “Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.” Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? The prophets are dead too. Who are you claiming to be? (8:52–53, italics added)
This is the climax. They have asked, in the Temple itself, the question that Jesus must answer if God is to shed his old military identity as conqueror of Egypt and Canaan and robe himself in his new identity as bringer of eternal life. Jesus responds provocatively, as if defying them to tell him that he is their God in person:
Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day.
He saw it and was glad.
They reply derisively, “You are not fifty yet, and you have seen Abraham!”
He counters, climactically:
Truly I tell you:
Before Abraham was,
I AM.
(8:56–58)
As we noted earlier, what matters about the Crucifixion is not what is suffered—the Romans crucified Jews by the thousands—but who suffers it. By applying to himself the sacred, unspeakable name of God—the I AM that Moses heard from the burning bush (Exod. 3:14)—Jesus gives an intolerable answer to their objection and reveals at last his own identity. Speaking this way, in public, on the Temple grounds, to an audience that cannot fail to take his point, Jesus leaves them only two choices: They must either accept him as God Incarnate or execute him as a blasphemer in obedience to God’s commandment at Leviticus 24:16: “He who utters the name of the Lord shall be put to death: All the congregation shall stone him. Whether resident alien or native, the penalty for uttering the Name shall be death.” The crowd chooses to obey Torah rather than humble themselves to this stranger: “At this they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself and left the Temple” (John 8:59).
In intellectual history, when a question is left unanswered long enough, it tends to be abandoned. In Jewish intellectual history, the question of when the Lord would come again to restore Israel to sovereign greatness would become such a question. A tradition born in the Lord’s seeming victory over the army of Pharaoh, the god-king of Egypt, would come to its climax, its death cry, in the disastrous uprisings of 66–70 and 132–135 C.E. of Judea against Rome. There were many in this climactic period who thought they could calculate the date of the Lord’s coming intervention, among them the great Rabbi Akiba, who acclaimed Bar Kokhba, the leader of the second uprising, as messiah. Had either of those uprisings succeeded, the identity of the God of Israel as a war god would have come through its crisis in a different way. But the uprisings failed, and God’s identity only went deeper into crisis. Most of the large literature announcing that God would come again in power, and soon, was excluded from the Jewish and the Christian scriptural canon alike. Though Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were both significantly affected by apocalypticism, each, in the end, was more profoundly affected by its separate repudiation of it. Those repudiations left the question of imminent national restoration under an army led by God effectively abandoned by both traditions. Each in its own way went on to other questions, other concerns, other hopes, and other ambitions. Each went on, as well, to a new spiritual space replacing the physical space of the razed Temple. For Judaism, this was the mystical space of Torah; for Christianity, the mystical body of Christ.
How can a process of identity revision like this one be given dramatic expression? How can it be turned into a story with characters and interpersonal conflicts and a resolution that allows its central character to live on in some way? In the Gospels, the dynamic of the unanswered, then abandoned, then replaced question shines forth every time Jesus talks about what he wants to talk about rather than about what his disciples or his questioners, friendly or hostile, want him to talk about. He is like a savvy politician who, when asked an embarrassingly unanswerable question, changes the subject and eloquently answers the question he would prefer to have been asked. The Incarnation creates the condition for this dramatization of a political moment in the life of God. By bringing the Lord God face-to-human-face with his “constituency”—the people for whom the embarrassing question When will the Lord come again in power to free us from bondage? is so omnipresent that it scarcely needs to be asked at all—the Gospels force him either to answer it directly or to change the subject. Because the true answer to the question When? is Never, he has no choice but to change the subject. But if his change of subject is to have any chance of succeeding, then the new subject must be so engaging, so shocking, so controversial, and yet so exciting and promising that the old question, compelling as it is, will simply fade from the mind. Moreover, as he changes the subject, the Lord must make it clear that it is he who is changing the subject.
This is a feat that, in its entirety, is only accomplished in the New Testament as a whole through the gradual assimilation of the meaning and promise of the Resurrection. It is complete in outline, however, by the end of the fourth Gospel (John); and within that Gospel, the outline is visible with particular clarity—with scandalous clarity—in John 8, the chapter that we have been examining. Here, by the tactical use of three inherently gripping subjects—adultery, suicide, and slavery—John distracts his Jewish readers’ attention from God’s traditional obligations and Israel’s traditional expectations and redirects it to a new set of obligations and expectations that reflect a profound transformation in the identity of God.
The first of these distractions-to-a-point is adultery. The woman dragged before Jesus at John 8:2–11 has been captured in the act of illicit copulation, and her sentence is to be death by stoning. Jesus saves her life by rescuing her from the punishment that, under the law, she may well deserve. “Has no one condemned you?” he asks her. “No one, sir,” she replies. “Neither do I condemn you,” he says, suggesting, to riveting effect, that there is no longer any sin—in particular, any sexual sin—from which God cannot, at will, rescue the sinner. At this point, the scene, with its promise of a more abundant mercy, becomes not just gripping in itself but consoling in its implications, and yet God seems no longer the same god.
The second subject is suicide. Jesus, who has repeatedly claimed that he is threatened by murderers, may in fact be on the verge of killing himself, a possibility that makes the scene compelling in quite a different way. Though John 8:12–30 deals with other subjects en route, it crests at the Jews’ question “Is he going to kill himself, that he says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?” When God is in constant danger of being killed or, possibly, of killing himself, his aura of military invincibility vanishes.
The third subject is slavery. Jesus, still facing the crowd that (he insists) wants to kill him, broaches at long last the unmentionable divine embarrassment: the bondage from which, after half a millennium, the Lord has not freed the Jews. He speaks of bondage only to redefine it immediately as bondage to sin. But if bondage is no
w bondage to sin rather than to Rome, then liberation is liberation from sin rather than from Rome. And what liberation now leads to is not the unencumbered, uncolonized, free possession of a promised land but eternal life. This is the boon by which God now defines himself.
The core objection to all this redefinition of God—namely, that only God can define God—is, positively, the core requirement for it. The quintessential Gospel scene, the scene enacted again and again with different subject matter for different audiences, is the scene in which Jesus and his audience clash over who he is and what he must do. As the Messiah, he might be expected to accept the classic terms for divine intervention, merely making an obvious set of contemporary substitutions. Thus,
for Pharaoh, Caesar;
for bondage in Egypt, oppression by Rome;
for the conquest of Canaan, the reconquest of Judea;
for Moses and David, the Messiah as prophet and king.
Instead, he proposes new terms for divine intervention in a way that would exceed the authority of anyone but God himself. Thus,
for Caesar, the Devil;
for oppression by Rome, bondage to sin;
for the reconquest of Judea, eternal life;
for the Messiah as prophet and king, the Messiah as God Incarnate.
True, the subject of Rome does not come up, but then the subject ought not come up when the very point is to change the subject. The kind of engagement by which the Lord had once so centrally defined both his own identity and that of Israel, his covenant partner, is here swept aside. And as if to authorize the sweeping transformation and place the new terms of engagement beyond question, there comes the climactic, all-silencing line “Before Abraham was, I AM.”
It is by this scandalous line that Jesus of Nazareth—the all-forgiving murder target, the could-be suicide who promises eternal life to those who receive him as “the light of the world” (John 8:12)—claims to be none other than the Lord himself in person. Let those who still care about the old battlefield games play them. The Lord is playing for higher stakes. In this passage he makes plain what he meant on an earlier occasion when he said of Caesar, the god-king of the latest empire, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (RSV; Luke 20:25). The monumental central subject of all Israelite history has been successfully changed. The unanswerable question has been deliberately abandoned. Though the full price is yet to be paid, the crisis in the life of God has been resolved.
HIS NEW COMMANDMENT: KINDNESS TO STRANGERS
Adultery, suicide, and death are not conventionally ethnic or political subjects, but as Jesus takes them up in turn in the chapter just discussed, each acquires a distinct ethnic and political coloration. It must be so, for the Lord is in the process of redefining his own political responsibilities to a distinct ethnic group and, in the same process, redefining his own identity. These are two sides of the same coin. Israel is Israel because of him, and he is himself because of Israel.
When the Lord refuses to condemn the adulteress, violating his own law, he carries his mercy to such an extreme that it would be reasonable to infer that he must not be the Lord. He has done something clearly out of character—unless his character has changed. But the rescue of the adulteress is simultaneously a story about Israel as a people defined by its covenant relationship with him. If his character as God is changing, then theirs as the people of God cannot remain untouched. The preservation of the identity of Israel as a distinct endogamous group with a unique relationship to God requires the close monitoring of pregnancies. This is why adultery is understood not simply as a violation of an Israelite husband’s marital rights but also, and more importantly, as an offense against God. But can occupied Israel impose its own adultery law upon occupying Rome? If the answer is no, then no is also the answer to the background question of whether the divine warrior will ever end the Roman occupation that is so inimical to his own intentions. When Jesus spares the adulteress, his mercy toward her allows Torah, the code of his own covenant with Israel, to be defeated by the law of the foreign oppressor. Israel, under Roman law, may not execute such a woman. God Incarnate declines to intervene. He says, in effect, that if Israel is under foreign rule, so be it; and his jealous prior claim on the firstborn from every Israelite womb expires at that moment.
It is as if the calendar has been turned back to the sixth day of creation. Once again, the first couple have been told to “be fruitful and multiply,” and God, once again, enters no claim of ownership on their offspring. He is once again like the sun, shining indiscriminately on the sexual reproduction of the wicked and the good.
As for Jesus’ impending suicide-by-execution, it too has a surprising ethnic or geopolitical dimension. Recall that the words “Where I am going, you cannot come” or the equivalent are spoken twice. On the second occasion (John 8:21–22), the crowd asks, not inappropriately, “Is he going to kill himself?” But on the first occasion (7:34–35), they ask, “Does he intend to go into the diaspora and teach the Greeks?” There is, in fact, an inescapable connection between the suicide of the shepherd of Israel and the merger of his flock with the “other sheep [I have] / That are not of this fold” (10:16). This is so because once God has excused himself from defending any one portion of the flock against oppression by any other portion (he will die for his sheep but not kill for them), his relationship to all portions cannot fail to become the same. But this is a cataclysmic change; for if God will not fight to maintain the distinction between Israel and other nations, then there cannot be a distinction. His national covenant with Israel, given his universal military neutrality, must either lapse or become a world covenant by default of the divine action necessary to maintain it as national.
Finally, once God defines freedom not as freedom from bondage to an Egypt or a Rome but rather as freedom from bondage to sin and death, he removes the most important bar to the extension of his covenant to all mankind. All men cannot live in Canaan; Canaan cannot hold them. But all are equally prey to sin and equally subject to death; and the land of the living has room for them all. The leveling character of God’s new promise explains why in the third section of John 8, two apparently unrelated topics—death and descent from Abraham—intertwine so strangely. By linking bondage to sin and death with genealogical illegitimacy, God Incarnate spiritualizes the meaning of genealogical legitimacy and thereby of nationality to the point that he need never again go forth to do battle for any actual, physical nation.
The ancient debate over “supersessionism”—that is, over whether any new spiritual Israel can or should “supersede” the old ethnic Israel in God’s plan—has one meaning with reference to the two historically related communities and another with reference to God. The shift of perspective that occurs when attention is redirected from God’s covenant, as restricted or not, to his character, as dictating or precluding restriction, is analogous to the shift that occurs when one says that neither the Jews nor the Romans killed Jesus but, rather, that God killed himself. Taking this view, we may see God expanding membership in his covenant simply because he cannot do otherwise. But if he cannot do otherwise, then it is not the Jews who have failed him but he who has failed the Jews. By the terms of the new covenant, God is excused from the old responsibilities that he has failed to meet, while assuming new responsibilities that, terrible as their cost may be to him, he seems confident he can meet. On the terms by which, starting at his victory over Pharaoh, he himself has defined his divinity, he has failed. Unless some adjustment of those terms can be made, then he cannot continue to be God. The adjustment he makes, his own disarmament, entails an expansion of membership in his covenant. But he brings about this expansion not, first, out of love for the Gentiles, much less out of hatred for the Jews, but, rather, to reconstitute his own identity.
Though this resolution of God’s crisis may seem complex, it was anticipated in a very simple story that Jesus told in Galilee when his popularity was at its peak. In it, the theme
s of death, life, and ethnic conflict intertwine just as they do more intricately in John 8.
Now a lawyer stood up and, to test him, asked, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? What is your reading of it?” He replied [quoting a mix of Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18; italics added], “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and life will be yours.”
The man had a point to make, however, and he said to Jesus, “But who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him, and then made off, leaving him half-dead. Now a priest happened to be traveling on the same road, but when he saw the man, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. In the same way a Levite who came to the spot saw him, crossed to the other side, and passed him by. But a Samaritan traveler was moved with pity when he saw him. He went up to him and bandaged his wounds, bathing them with oil and wine. He then hoisted him onto his own mount and bore him to an inn, where he looked after him. The next day, he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, ‘Look after him, and on my way back I will compensate you for any extra expense you have.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved himself a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers’ hands?” [The lawyer] answered, “The one who took pity on him.” Jesus said to him, “Go, and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25–37)
What is the ethnicity of the waylaid traveler? Jesus does not say; and even if Jesus knows, the Samaritan of the story cannot in the nature of things know whether he is saving another Samaritan or a Jew or even a Roman. The traveler, after all, is not just unconscious, beaten nearly to death, but also stripped of his clothing and the identification that they might provide. Though Jesus provocatively tells his Jewish questioner a story in which a Samaritan performs well and two Jews—in fact, two Jewish religious officials—perform badly, the message of the story goes far beyond any suggestion that Jews should have more respect for Samaritans than they do.