Read Online Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill - Free Book Online
Authors: Thomas Cahill
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centuries. For all its problems, the high Christology of the Johannine community gave its theology a profundity and piercing clarity that other churches lacked; and its Spirit-based social ambience encouragedequal participation by all, especially women, in its common enterprises of charity and prayer.
TheJohannine church, indeed, sheltered unusual seedlings that would flower in succeeding centuries. If its individualist orientation and its insistence on personal encounter with the Lord remind us of the spirit of the modern Reformation churches, its unique reverence for the holiness of the physical (Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus curing the blind man with a mixture of mud and his own spit) can only recall the later sacramentalism of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. But its insistence on there being but one way of thinking makes uneasy anyone who has ever had an unorthodox thought. It comes as no surprise that John is often the favorite evangelist of the uptight and unrelenting; and his rigidity can call to mind contemporary churchpeople of several unfortunate varieties. The difficulties of John’s Gospel are extreme enough that to this day Christian churches use its passages sparingly in their lectionaries, whereas the other gospels are proclaimed in full.
For all this, the most characteristic passages of the Johannine literature bid fair to be the most beautiful of the New Testament:
“For God so loved the world
that he gave away his only Son.”
“I give you a new commandment:
love one another.”
“I am—the Vine
,
you are the branches.
Whoever abides in me, and I in him
,
bears fruit a-plenty.…
As the Father has loved me
,
I have loved you.
Abide in my love.”
God is love
,
and he who abides in love
abides in God
,
and God in him.
The first three quotations are words of Jesus from John’s Gospel; the last are the words ofJohn the Elder from his First Letter. Cut off from its Jewish roots, confronting theological controversy, and finally overwhelmed by disunity within its own ranks, the church of the Beloved Disciple, which placed such high value on love but could not resolve the arguments that continued to tear it apart, opted at last to reconnect itself to the mainland, to join in communion with the then-emergingGreat Church. We know this from the coda that the final editor appended to John’s Gospel after the death of John the Elder. In this epilogue, the risen Jesus appears on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, as if in a dream, and asks Peter three times: “Do you love me?” To each question Peter responds with an increasingly emotional affirmation; and to each answer of Peter’s Jesus gives a pointed instruction: “Feed my lambs.” “Care for my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”
The church of the Beloved Disciple had finally admitted that it could no longer go it alone, defending itself from attack only by means of its own informal intuitions and pentecostal resources, but had to accept some mechanism of human authority.It needed more than the teaching of Jesus and the example of its Beloved Disciple. It needed the protection of theGreat Church and its shepherds, the nurturing
pastores
of whom Peter was representative.
There was a trade-off here. TheJohannine church, in accepting the protection of the Great Church, accepted its structures of authority and lost much of its freewheeling, Spirit-based pentecostalism. The Great Church, never so interested in theory as in practice, accepted the elaborate Christology and, after much debate, accepted alongside its own growing library of apostolic writings the peculiar literature of the church of the Beloved Disciple.
O F THE MANY ENIGMAS of John’s Gospel nothing is more mysterious than the story that does not belong there. It interrupts the flow of John’s tightly stitched scheme of narration,
TheJohannine church, indeed, sheltered unusual seedlings that would flower in succeeding centuries. If its individualist orientation and its insistence on personal encounter with the Lord remind us of the spirit of the modern Reformation churches, its unique reverence for the holiness of the physical (Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus curing the blind man with a mixture of mud and his own spit) can only recall the later sacramentalism of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. But its insistence on there being but one way of thinking makes uneasy anyone who has ever had an unorthodox thought. It comes as no surprise that John is often the favorite evangelist of the uptight and unrelenting; and his rigidity can call to mind contemporary churchpeople of several unfortunate varieties. The difficulties of John’s Gospel are extreme enough that to this day Christian churches use its passages sparingly in their lectionaries, whereas the other gospels are proclaimed in full.
For all this, the most characteristic passages of the Johannine literature bid fair to be the most beautiful of the New Testament:
“For God so loved the world
that he gave away his only Son.”
“I give you a new commandment:
love one another.”
“I am—the Vine
,
you are the branches.
Whoever abides in me, and I in him
,
bears fruit a-plenty.…
As the Father has loved me
,
I have loved you.
Abide in my love.”
God is love
,
and he who abides in love
abides in God
,
and God in him.
The first three quotations are words of Jesus from John’s Gospel; the last are the words ofJohn the Elder from his First Letter. Cut off from its Jewish roots, confronting theological controversy, and finally overwhelmed by disunity within its own ranks, the church of the Beloved Disciple, which placed such high value on love but could not resolve the arguments that continued to tear it apart, opted at last to reconnect itself to the mainland, to join in communion with the then-emergingGreat Church. We know this from the coda that the final editor appended to John’s Gospel after the death of John the Elder. In this epilogue, the risen Jesus appears on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, as if in a dream, and asks Peter three times: “Do you love me?” To each question Peter responds with an increasingly emotional affirmation; and to each answer of Peter’s Jesus gives a pointed instruction: “Feed my lambs.” “Care for my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”
The church of the Beloved Disciple had finally admitted that it could no longer go it alone, defending itself from attack only by means of its own informal intuitions and pentecostal resources, but had to accept some mechanism of human authority.It needed more than the teaching of Jesus and the example of its Beloved Disciple. It needed the protection of theGreat Church and its shepherds, the nurturing
pastores
of whom Peter was representative.
There was a trade-off here. TheJohannine church, in accepting the protection of the Great Church, accepted its structures of authority and lost much of its freewheeling, Spirit-based pentecostalism. The Great Church, never so interested in theory as in practice, accepted the elaborate Christology and, after much debate, accepted alongside its own growing library of apostolic writings the peculiar literature of the church of the Beloved Disciple.
O F THE MANY ENIGMAS of John’s Gospel nothing is more mysterious than the story that does not belong there. It interrupts the flow of John’s tightly stitched scheme of narration,
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